Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  3

  THEY SET OFF for the Pyrenees on 9 September 1891, which was rather late in the year, but he was determined to leave, saying that he needed a holiday after the battle of writing La Débâcle. She stopped in the middle of packing to write to her cousin:

  Where are we going? You can probably guess. Where I least want to go, of course. It’s the story of my life–never having what I want, or getting it only when I no longer want it.

  They took the train to Lourdes and saw cripples throwing away their crutches and falling over in the crowd, and consumptives being plunged into water that even the sloppiest laundress would have poured away. They saw the chilly spa towns and the jagged curtain of the Pyrenees. When they crossed the border to San-Sebastián, it poured with rain, and all the time they both felt that they should have been somewhere else.

  On the beach at Biarritz, where they stayed at the Grand Hôtel, she realized that they looked like an ill-matched couple, which was normal at their age, but it made her feel sad, and also faintly apprehensive, but mostly sad. É mile was beginning to resemble the portrait that Manet had painted of him twenty years before. The defiant curl of his mouth was almost mischievous. He wore white flannel suits and struck jaunty poses. All that developing of photographs–an art that she herself had never quite mastered–was making him behave as though he was always about to be photographed. He looked like a man who knew how to take a holiday, even in late September. He might almost be described as thin. The bicycle had something to do with it, of course, but this was also his reward for spurning their shared indulgences.

  He folded the newspaper and pushed himself out of the deckchair. He was going to take an energetic walk. She saw that his face was slightly flushed. She might ask him later on, and he would probably say that it was a symptom of his ‘malaises nerveux’, which he attributed to his relentless work.

  When he had gone, she picked up the newspaper. There was a long editorial on the Jews. It was the centenary of their emancipation by the Revolution, but now, said the writer, ‘things have gone too far the other way’. Several articles were devoted to ‘the future war’ with Germany, and to the fact that French citizens were to be allowed to enter Alsace-Lorraine without a passport. Footmen and printers were on strike, and the union of café garçons had asserted its right to wear facial hair: every garçon in Paris was now growing a moustache in a show of solidarity. A penniless Austrian tailor who had had himself delivered to the Exhibition in a crate had become a ‘café-concert phenomenon’ and was touring Europe as ‘the Human Parcel’.

  None of this was likely to have altered É mile’s mood or to have brought a flush to his face. There was nothing in the paper about É mile Zola, and nothing about any of his literary rivals. In fact, the news was as uninteresting as it usually was in the holidays. The movements of grand duchesses and princes were assiduously reported. A courtesan wrote to deny the malicious rumours of marriage that had been printed in the gossip column, and blamed them on ‘feminine vengeance’. Various violent crimes had been committed in the provinces, and the new tramlines in the Avenue de la Grande Armée were causing accidents. There was rain over the Channel, and cloud over Paris.

  Page three and the back page were always the same. Even sitting in a deckchair, with the gulls wheeling overhead and the bunting flapping in the Atlantic breeze, it was easy to imagine oneself in Paris. Lohengrin was at the Opéra, Cinderella at the Châtelet, ‘eccentric clowns’ at the Folies-Bergères, and La Demoiselle du téléphone at the Nouveautés. The Eiffel Tower would be closing for the winter on 2 November, but there were still concerts every evening in the restaurant on the first platform.

  She read on, through the advertisements for false teeth, hair-restorer and soap–soap was everywhere, even among the serious news, disguised as editorial comment. ‘The exquisite, persistent perfume of Savon Ixora makes the skin silky, white and delicate.’ Mme Baldini of 3 Rue de la Banque gave daily lessons on the art of remaining forever young. É mile had no need of such lessons, even if they had been offered to gentlemen. Perhaps something in the ‘Correspondances personnelles’ had given him an idea for a novel.

  She was not a storyteller–she could never have pieced together the million details that went to make a novel–but she found those telegrammatic messages as evocative as the first page of a serial. Some of them suggested the happy continuation of a normal life. Some of them were sad, though it was hard to say why. She wondered whether the people to whom they were addressed would see the messages, and she thought it ironic that things that had to be kept secret from a husband or a wife were printed where everyone could see them.

  Diane. Écriv. proj. fer. t. m. pos…. Dés. v. voir. Amit.

  243 imp vs vr vs svz pquoi att avc imp esp btot att depuis merc ts ls jrs mme hre écvz.

  C21. Gw xoaowg qsg zwubsg hcapsbh gcig hsg msil goqvs eis xs h’owas sh h’owasfow hcixcifg.*

  A. B. 70. Faisan bien arrivé superbe 25. Duval.

  The Duval household would be celebrating the arrival of the ‘superb’ pheasant by eating it, she imagined, with oysters and a nice bouillon. It was the meal that she and É mile had always shared when they returned to Médan, though with a partridge instead of a pheasant. It reminded her that they would soon be home. She scanned the advertisements on the back page, which, apart from the ‘very fetching and curious photographs’ from a Dutch publisher, were all addressed to women. There was a carpet sale at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, and the new winter collection was about to be unveiled at the Samaritaine. That, too, had been one of their shared pleasures–the orgies of shopping in the big department stores, and all the research for Au Bonheur des Dames, the ravenous accumulation of facts, the desire to know everything that went on in the basements and the attics. He had been like a little boy, wallowing in the lingerie, blushing at the buxom dummies, ‘turning pink with pleasure’ like the man in his novel. She preferred to make her own jackets and dresses, but there might be something to buy for the new maid that she couldn’t have worn herself.

  When he returned from his walk, Émile still felt slightly out of sorts, and suggested that they bring the holiday to an end. While Alexandrine organized the packing, he wrote some letters. He seemed pleased to be returning, but also reluctant to leave. It was the first time that either of them had been abroad. Perhaps he was sorry that the adventure was over. Soon, when his sequence of novels was complete, there would be more time for holidays and more time to enjoy the house.

  4

  THE LETTER ARRIVED on Tuesday 10 November, forty days after their return. Her own post was usually quite humdrum: family correspondence, begging letters, bills for food, clothes and work on the house. But she also read his correspondence and told him how to reply to people who wanted articles or translation rights. She wrote to editors of supposedly impecunious magazines who owed him money. Sometimes she felt that the person least able to defend the fortune and reputation of É mile Zola was her husband. There was the time, for instance, when he gave away the manuscript of Nana to a journalist, who promptly sold it to an American collector for twelve thousand francs!

  This letter was addressed to her, Madame É mile Zola. She did not recognize the hand, and the letter was unsigned. It was as short and orderly as an invoice. She read it in an instant: ‘Mlle Jeanne Rozerot…66, Rue Saint-Lazare…has had two children by your husband.’

  LATER THAT DAY, the clerk at the telegraph office was presented with a terrific piece of gossip, a nugget of scandal in the bland stream of greetings and condolences. M. É mile Zola wished to send an urgent message to his friend in Paris, M. Henry Céard–or, as he was sometimes known, for the purposes of private communication, M. Duval:

  My wife is going absolutely mad. I fear a calamity. Could you go to the Rue Saint-Lazare and take the necessary steps? Forgive me.

  IN THE TWENTY-SIX YEARS they had lived together, she had often been able to follow a plot as it developed in his mind. A story, she knew, could begin almost anywhere. It mig
ht start with a short railway journey and a woman in a compartment, clutching a small package. The window, in which her face is reflected, shows scenes from the past and the present, like slides from a magic lantern: a house by the railway, a sail on the river, the telegraph poles ticking past, the coal smoke over the northern suburbs.

  Next, a slate-grey autumn evening in the city: the crowd, cowering under the drizzle in the Rue Saint-Lazare, between the station and the fish-food restaurants; the endless funeral procession of black suits and umbrellas.

  A woman in a dark dress stops on the pavement and stares up at a soot-streaked window. Behind the window, a tableau in the style of Mary Cassatt: a young mother putting her child and her baby to bed. The woman in the dark dress climbs the stairs with the steady trudge of a rent collector. Outside, the evening sky above the Gare Saint-Lazare floods the street with red. Over the traffic, the shunting engines can be heard shrieking and bellowing like great beasts in their wrought-iron cage.

  The Rue Saint-Lazare met the Rue Blanche a few yards from the south-eastern corner of the station. It was the opening scene of La Bête humaine–the fifth-floor room with the view of the railway lines disappearing into the Batignolles tunnel, and a piano banging away downstairs. It was curious how often her spirit seemed to inhabit one of his male characters.

  ‘Admit that you slept with her or, by God, I’ll cut you open!’

  He would have killed her. She could see it clearly in his eyes. As she fell, she noticed the knife, which lay open on the table…. She was overcome with a feeling of cowardice, an abandonment of herself and everything, a need to get it all over with…

  ‘All right, it’s true. Now let me go.’

  What happened next was abominable. The confession he had wrung from her with such force struck him in the face like something monstrous and impossible. He could never have imagined such infamy. He grabbed her head and banged it against a foot of the table. As she struggled, he pulled her across the room by her hair, knocking over the chairs. Each time she tried to get up, he punched her again and sent her sprawling back onto the floor. The table was pushed and nearly knocked over the stove. Some hair and some blood clung to a corner of the dresser…

  The music continued downstairs, with loud laughter and the sounds of young people.

  A FEW DAYS AFTER the letter arrived, an upholsterer came to Médan. The walls and door of the bedroom were to be padded in case the servants, who were so hard to replace, were frightened away by the shouting and screaming.

  5

  SHE HAD GONE TO number 66 and broken the lock and found the apartment empty. She had found a room full of someone else’s life: homemade curtains, flowers in a vase, some plates and cutlery, the sweetish smell of breast-milk. She found two cots that must have come from the Samaritaine. There were framed photographs–riding his bicycle in the Bois de Boulogne, standing on a beach somewhere. She did not know who had taken the photographs. There was a writing desk, which she easily broke open, and enough letters inside to make a novel, which she began to read and then burned to ashes.

  She might have stayed in the room for a few minutes or for more than an hour. She walked back past the house at number 16 where she was born. Because of the station, the area was always crowded. It was the best place to buy fresh seafood. She passed the fishmongers’ stalls across from the station but the smell of the apartment stayed with her.

  Until she decided what to do, they would both stay indoors. She went to the kitchen, which she had practically abandoned those last few years. The recipe called for a fire that could roast a sheep in a few minutes, though the only meat was fish. A bottle of oil, one tomato, garlic, a fistful of pepper. Everyone must have known–the men, of course, and probably Marguerite Charpentier and Julia Daudet, who each had three children of their own.

  Every afternoon at four o’clock, tea was served with a plate of pastries, which had to be finished.

  NINE MONTHS LATER, in 1892, they went on holiday together, just the two of them, to Provence and Italy, for seven weeks. He published the last novel of his great sequence, which had taken twenty-five years to complete. The main character was a man, Dr Pascal, who, having ‘forgotten to live’, tries to make up for lost time by falling in love with his niece: ‘All that solitary passion had given birth to nothing but books.’ He dedicated it to the memory of his Mother and his dear Wife. Since his wife no longer had herself placed next to journalists at dinners and told them what to write, the novel was not well reviewed.

  She did, however, attend the celebration lunch on the island in the Bois de Boulogne. Two hundred people were rowed across the lake and sat under a marquee, eating truite saumonée, noix de veau aux pointes d’asperge, galantine truffée de perdreaux and bombe panachée, to mark the completion of Les Rougon-Macquart and the Master’s imminent promotion to the rank of officer in the Légion d’Honneur. According to the newspaper, when Charpentier mentioned Mme É mile Zola in his speech, ‘she had to fight back her tears’.

  Six weeks later, she attended one of those intimate dinners whose principal purpose had always been to allow everyone to see how much older everyone looked. They dined at Goncourt’s house in Auteuil with the Daudets and some other friends. The men talked about their difficult profession, and asked each other how much they were paid by newspapers. Alexandrine sat in the corner with Julia Daudet, and told her all about her life at Médan. É mile, on the other side of the room, looked nervous and tried to hear what she was saying. Now and then, he asked, ‘Is everything all right, ma petite chérie?’

  ‘…Then he walks about the garden, waiting for two o’clock, which is when the papers are delivered. He hardly says anything, except that I ought to go and do something about the cow, which I know absolutely nothing about. That’s a job for the gardening woman. Then he goes up to read the papers and has his snooze…’

  They ate dinner by the windows and saw a dark cloud in the sky. It was certain to rain. She brightened the conversation by telling them how terrified É mile had been of lightning when he was a little boy. His mother had had to take him down to the cellar and wrap him in blankets. Even now, when there was a thunderstorm, they had to sit in the billiards room beneath the laundry with the curtains drawn and all the lights on, so that she had to wear dark glasses, and he would take out his handkerchief and use it as a blindfold, which was especially funny because of all the scientific rationalism in his novels–the thought of É mile Zola quivering at electrical discharges like some biblical sinner under an angry sky…

  She knew that, when they had gone home, Goncourt would write it all down in his diary, and when future generations came to study the works of the great novelist, his life would have no secrets.

  PART TWO

  6

  THE AUTUMN OF 1895 was miserable in Paris. When the drizzle finally stopped, raindrops sprang from the trees along the boulevards. The pavements were always slippery, and the top of the Eiffel Tower was lost in cloud.

  In Italy, the sun lingered late into the season. The sky was an intense blue, like some impossibly perfect memory of childhood. Every day, she wore summer dresses, and organized her afternoons around the sites where she might find some shade and a cool drink.

  She wrote to him every day–from the Royal Hotel in Naples and the Grand Hotel in Rome–because he had been unsettled by her departure. In thirty years, they had never spent more than a day or two apart. She told her sister’s child, Elina, that she had fallen in love with Italy: ‘There are so many things that one knows only from history books–but how much more interesting they are when one can walk about in these historic places!’ She learned enough Italian for shopping; she even wrote some thank-you letters in Italian; but everyone was so welcoming that she was able to speak French whenever she liked.

  She was fêted by the French ambassador at the Vatican, and her movements were reported in the society column of the Figaro, along with those of princes and duchesses. Count Edoardo Bertolelli, who had published some of É mile’s n
ovels in La Tribuna, insisted on seeing her every day. She was fourteen years older than the count, but he called her his ‘ray of sunshine’. When she dressed for dinner, she tied a bunch of violets to her belt. He took her fox-hunting, and she saw the Sistine Chapel, the Villa Borghese, the Villa Medici, the Forum and the Catacombs. She felt the earthquake that shook Rome one night in mid-November. The count was so charming that he ordered her portrait from a painter, for which she wore a silk dress and some feathers in her hair, and in one hand she held the bouquet the count had given her.

  Sometimes, when she was alone at the hotel, she remembered the foundling hospital and the baby with the white paper attached to its bonnet. She thought of the young woman alone with two small children, and the father who was hardly ever there, and terrified that his wife would leave him. As ever, she had faced up to the inevitable. He was allowed to take tea with them every afternoon, but it was a strange life for Denise, who was six, and Jacques, who was four. She saw them only occasionally, like a visiting grandmother, but she already knew them better than É mile. She would have to tell him how to treat the children, and how different they were from each other. In Rome, she bought them presents and looked forward to their next walk together in the Tuileries. If Denise asked for news of ‘the Lady’ while she was away, he was to say that ‘the Lady’ sent kisses to them both.