The party left at ten in the morning, with the house-guest, M. Triouleyre, carrying the case. They took a detour through the woods of Verneuil where people of ill-repute were known to hang out. Triouleyre nursed a revolver. If anyone asked, the children were to say that their father was in Russia. They stayed the night with the Triouleyres. The next day, they arrived in Calais. On the boat, the children were tired and sick, and had no idea where they were. They weren’t used to travel. Victoria Station was frightening; they felt as if they were being pushed about by the crowd and deafened by the shouting. A porter seized their heavy case along with Jeanne’s personal bag, shouting things that none of the three of them understood. And where was Vizetelly? He was supposed to have been there to meet them. Jeanne tried to keep hold of the bags. For a moment, it was all confusion. Someone tried to help them by translating for them, but then Vizetelly appeared at the end of the platform. He took the little party to Weybridge.
‘I can still see Penn, the white door of the house opening and my father holding out his arms to us, with Violette Vizetelly smiling at us,’ Denise would write some thirty years or so later.
Violette was Vizetelly’s nearly sixteen-year-old daughter who would act as maid and interpreter for the family. One of Zola’s photos shows Jacques sitting on the front gate at ‘Penn’, with Denise on one side and Violette on the other, Jacques in a sailor’s hat, Denise in a straw one and Violette in a boater. It has all the air of a holiday picture.
In the morning Zola told Desmoulin that the children had slept well, and were now as happy as larks (in French, it’s chaffinches). They would be, Zola told him, a great consolation – exactly the same word that Alexandrine had used – as his poor heart still felt torn apart. A day or so later, he put Alexandrine in the picture too, filling her in with details of the children’s journey, their trip from the station where the man used to play the tin-whistle, and the children’s sea-sickness. As expected they were cheering him up and he hoped that they wouldn’t get too bored – after all there weren’t any toys for them. There was no mention of Jeanne or ‘Jean’, the French man’s name, as Zola’s followers had asked him to call her in all his letters. In true literary fashion, the weather got better with the arrival of the children. The sun was doing what it did in England, full on during the day, thick mist evening and morning. He was suffering with the heat. Nevertheless, he was turning out his five pages a day; he hoped to finish the second chapter by the next day.
Back in Paris, Alexandrine was now handling the Dreyfus case, the Zola case, and the libel suit against Judet, who had defamed Zola’s father.
5
The Haunted House
The next few weeks in Zola’s life tested him with great contrasts. For the very first time in his life, he lived twenty-four hours a day with Jeanne and the children. With full permission and blessing from Alexandrine, he could take on the role of being the type of husband who was at the same time a father. In the mornings, undisturbed, he could pursue his other great love, writing. In the afternoons, he and Jeanne could go out on their bikes exploring the villages of Norwood, Weybridge, Walton-on-Thames and beyond, experimenting with photography. He captured the summer sunlight falling on the still water of the River Wey and Virginia Water. He captured the local churches, bridges over the Thames, deserted lanes and the landscape of Chatham Heath. From the outside, it looks idyllic.
In his diary and letters, Zola struck a different note. The core feelings are rage and despair: France has turned on him while descending to a shameful level of existence; he was being persecuted. It was announced that his Légion d’Honneur was to be taken from him and the three ‘experts’, who had determined that the bordereau incriminating Dreyfus was indeed written by Dreyfus, successfully sued Zola for libel costing him, he predicted, 40,000 francs. ‘They think I’m rich,’ he wailed in his notes, ‘I’m financially ruined.’
He knew that as a result of his stand on the Dreyfus case and of the anti-semites’ campaign against him, his sales had plummeted. In Paris, Alexandrine had to arrange for a sale of furniture and effects. There was also the nagging anxiety of being spotted. One of the papers revealed that he was staying at the Oatlands Park Hotel under the name ‘Beauchamp’. This confirmed his sense of being a fugitive from the country that he loved: ‘My whole being protests furiously against this ferocious, idiotic persecution.’ If necessary, he would take himself off somewhere else, to some quiet corner of the world where he would continue to work and serve a country which was being dishonoured by a bunch of despicable rogues.
One way he could distract himself from these thoughts was to read novels – though he was beginning to find Stendhal irritating – and then, just as we might expect, English food irritated him even more. Why didn’t they put any salt in the food? The vegetables were cooked without any butter or oil; the cutlets and steaks were uneatable; the sauces were so bad they had to be avoided altogether; English bread was like a sponge. Plain, boiled, watery potato and greens were abominations. He found the roasts palatable, and these could be supplemented with ham, eggs and salad. Plum tart was bearable but why did the English insist on eating it hot, when everyone knew that tarte should be served cold? Apple pudding was a disgusting invention and who could have thought up the appalling idea of making ‘gravy’ by pouring water on steak instead of garnishing it with butter and parsley? A small pleasure could be found making visits to the fishmonger where he discovered the delights of the British kipper and bloater.
The summer of 1898 was particularly hot, and Zola fulminated against the English habit of building houses without shutters, but he still managed to fit in his afternoon siesta. Thinking ahead to his next novel, Work, and of Charles Fourier’s phalanstery, Zola spent time observing and making notes on housing. Even as he was doing this, a huge report on housing and poverty (Life and Labour of the People in London, 1889–1903) conducted by the philanthropist Charles Booth was coming to fruition. In the time Zola was living in England, Booth was publishing the most graphic and accessible part of the report, ‘Maps Descriptive of London Poverty’, each with colour-coding showing the various levels of prosperity and want. Though poor people quite obviously know that they are poor and that usually they are surrounded by other poor people, for some, especially the professional classes, Booth ‘discovered’ something important and it was a shock. Even the left-wing movement, which was agitating for a new society that would end poverty, put poverty levels in London at this time at around 20 per cent. Booth – no radical himself – showed that they were nearer to 35 per cent.
Zola, who was almost certainly unaware of Booth, but who had spent his literary life reading, absorbing and recycling modern research and analysis such as Booth’s, was conducting his own impressionistic studies. As we’ve seen, he had identified some London housing as a phalanstery come to life and he carried on comparing London housing with Parisian.
This drew him back to looking closely at ‘Penn’ itself. He was surprised by the fact that the rooms were painted in light colours – soft green, pink and yellow – while the woodwork was painted much more brightly. It seemed odd that the place was fully carpeted, even the stairs, while the furniture, he thought, was disgraceful and the ornaments ugly and childish. The engravings on the walls – mostly of animals – were sentimental. Though he loved dogs, there was no need to overdo it: dog with child, dog with grandfather, dog with beggarwoman … And horses expressing human feelings! Squirrels nibbling hazelnuts, sparrows in the snow, butterflies on roses – all sentimental. The children, meanwhile, were amazed and delighted that in one of the drawers in their bedroom was a collection of butterflies.
In his letters to Alexandrine, he spent a few moments describing the children’s state of mind and health: Jacques was a little homesick. ‘I think of you when I kiss the children’, he added (did he forget for a moment that Alexandrine wasn’t their mother?). In reply, Alexandrine said that she wasn’t surprised that ‘Ma’ (her nickname for Jacques) was feeling like this a
s he was by nature more reflective than ‘Poulet’ (‘chicken’, for Denise). Alexandrine told him that she was happy that he had the children close to him, as this must certainly be making the exile easier.
Occasionally, she painted a picture of her existence. In one striking piece, with the qualities of a prose poem, she wrote:
Nothing here has been disturbed. The moment you come back you would have the illusion that your absence had only been a dream. I have put flowers in the jardinières in your study, I have put flowers on your desk in your green vase and I go up there each day to see that everything is in place just as you left it. Letters, magazines, everything that is addressed to you is placed on the table by your chair downstairs; in the evening, before I go up to bed, I arrange them, I put them in order, I put the paper knives on top.
A further distraction came from a derelict house close to ‘Penn’. Zola became interested in this old neo-Georgian mansion called ‘The Castle’, situated in the midst of deserted grounds, overrun with weeds. It was a mournful-looking place, with a broken iron gate at the front which he liked to peep through, looking in to the ground-floor windows. Violette Vizetelly started to make enquiries while Zola took pictures of the house, with its rather grand ‘pepper-pot’ tower on one side.
Violette discovered that a story surrounded it: a murder had been committed there, many years earlier. A little girl had been killed by her stepmother and her remains buried beneath the scullery floor. There was also talk of the child’s father, who at night drove up to the house in a phantom carriage drawn by ghostly horses and hammered at the door of the mansion, shouting aloud for his dead child. The story was well-known in the area and not a girl from Chertsey to Esher, or from Walton to Byfleet, dared to pass the house after nightfall, when terrible voices rang out through the trees and the shadowy horses of the ghostly carriage trotted silently over the gravel.
Violette told the story to Zola and it aroused his interest. Vizetelly questioned neighbours and put together another account. The house had been built some forty years earlier by a retired pawnbroker who was, of course, a ‘gaunt, shrivelled old man’. In his old age, he rode a white mare and was well-known for appearing on the roads round about. He furnished the house with unredeemed articles from his pawnshop so that nothing matched anything else. He filled the rooms with tables, sideboards and sofas and covered the walls with supposed Old Masters and assorted Wardour Street bric-a-brac.
The old man had three daughters, whom he kept more or less imprisoned in the house. Three army officers staying in the area had tried courting them but, in response, he simply made their confinement even more strict. Eventually, the officers were successful and three weddings all took place on the same day. The old pawnbroker then married again but after his death his will was contested and an interminable lawsuit followed. As a result, the property was left unoccupied and before long would probably be cut up into building plots.
Zola heard these local stories during the hot, light evenings in ‘Penn’ and Vizetelly coaxed him to set a short story in ‘The Castle’, but before he did so, his attention was taken up with several other matters. The lease expired on ‘Penn’, so on 27 August the little household transferred to a house called ‘Summerfield’ in Addlestone, which he described as ‘taking refuge further from the capital’. Here, he was pleased that the garden was much bigger so the children had more space to play and hide in. He wrote of it being ‘half-wild’, with a big disused sandpit in it, which had been turned into a flower bed.
Denise recalled a scene of her mother sitting in the garden reading or doing her embroidery; from his table, Zola would watch, keeping an eye on them, preventing them from getting too close to the windows, making a noise or disturbing his work. For hours on end the children played on a hammock, in the sandpit or ‘hole’ as they called it, with the long grass, oak and acacia trees giving shade. You could imagine you were a hundred miles from the next house, Zola thought. Nearly every day, he sat in a wicker chair on the old tennis court struggling, with the help of the English grammar book that Vizetelly gave him, to read the Daily Telegraph or the Standard. At first the news looked bad with the anti-Dreyfusards consolidating their power at the helm of French government. Protracted, long-distance, much delayed, and occasionally quite irritated correspondence with Alexandrine dwelled on when Zola thought he could return (October?), or where Alexandrine might go (Genoa?) to sit out his exile.
At the very end of August came the seemingly wonderful news that one of the leading anti-Dreyfusards had been arrested, confessed that he had forged key documents, and then committed suicide. The news arrived in suitably coded form as a telegram: ‘Tell Beauchamp immediately victory’. Now, surely, Dreyfus would be brought back from the hell of Devil’s Island where he was wasting away, have his case reviewed and be found innocent. Surprisingly, oddly, and tragically for Dreyfus and his supporters – and equally for Zola stuck in Addlestone – no such swift conclusion was in the offing. France did not rise up and demand justice. Again, Zola felt isolated and lost in this strange place with hardly anyone to talk to. In his notes, he returned yet again to cursing France’s ruling regime. They were guilty of backward-looking royalism and militarism and suffering from the incurable cancer of defeat (referring all the way back to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1). People were still fixed on the image of the French flag flying over all Europe, when shouldn’t it be enough for them to be part of a generous and just nation? At exactly the same moment in France that the police were, in Zola’s eyes, attacking the populace, he witnessed a scene on the road in front of ‘Summerfield’ where a man broke his leg and a policeman bandaged it by the light of a lantern. The heavy sliding door to the room where he worked made a terrible rumbling noise in its grooves as if, he wrote, he were shut away in the bottom of a dungeon, over which someone had pulled a slab, forever.
On 18 and 25 September the Sunday Observer printed several important stories: they had interviewed Esterhazy, who was in London at the time. He admitted that, yes, he had written the bordereau; he had done so in order to incriminate Dreyfus. Esterhazy’s justification for having written a false document, though, was that Dreyfus was guilty anyway! Even so, these developments seemed to present the pro-Dreyfus camp with fresh possibilities.
But then disaster struck. Anyone who has loved and lost a pet will sympathise, even if it’s a little excruciating to read in great detail spread out over many letters. Back in Médan, little Pinpin, or Monsieur Pin, the couple’s favourite dog, sickened and died. No amount of Alexandrine’s cuddling and soothing could save him. There is no doubting their depth of feeling about this matter. In the midst of the crisis, Denise recalled Zola struggling to open a heavy door on a day he felt ill, her mother anxiously rushing towards him to help. It seemed to Denise that he felt the loss of his little dog as if it were a very dear friend.
He had indeed lost a dear friend – several, in fact. He had lost France, lost money, lost the comforts of his own home, lost seeing his friends, colleagues and political companions and lost the daily routine of seeing both of the women in his life. The death of Pinpin, we might guess, must have represented the sacrifices that Zola had made in pursuit of what he had thought was a right and proper fight for truth and justice.
To divert him further, Vizetelly bought him a set of Nelson’s ‘Royal Readers’ for children, which Zola himself followed up by buying an illustrated edition of The Vicar of Wakefield. This further acquaintance with English had him questioning Vizetelly about why the English ‘I’ merits a capital letter. He deemed it a triumph of egotism – ‘tall, commanding, and so brief!’ More seriously, amongst the many real conflicts or the shadow-boxing between the Great Powers, the imperialist squabbling known as the ‘Fashoda Incident’ loomed large for a brief moment, giving the impression that war was possible between Britain and France. Zola told Vizetelly that if matters between the two countries became too hostile, he would have to return to France. Briefly put, the ‘incident’ or ‘crisis’ w
as the outcome of long-standing imperial territorial disputes between Britain and France in eastern Africa. A French expedition went to Fashoda on the White Nile, with a view to controlling the area and excluding Britain from Sudan. After a war of words the French withdrew, leaving the area under Anglo-Egyptian control. Zola did not become an enemy alien and the foundations of the Entente Cordiale that has lasted since that time were laid.
In the last weeks of Jeanne’s and the children’s stay, Zola became bolder and more public in his ramblings. He removed his Légion d’Honneur from his jacket, swapped his white French hat for an English straw hat and on occasions even wore an English bowler. Vizetelly himself was regularly plied with requests for information about Zola in order to hear what Zola thought about the events unfolding in France. One reporter tried bribing Vizetelly’s wife to see if she could give more information. Unmentioned by Zola, Vizetelly or Denise in any of their writings is the fact that the very newspapers that they were reading advertised the fact that a tourist in London could take a spin down to ‘MADAME TUSSAUD’S EXHIBITION. Baker-street Station.’ and see alongside a scene of ‘GORDON’S LAST STAND AT KHARTOUM’, ‘All the most NOTORIOUS CRIMINALS of the CENTURY’ and ‘DR. W. G. GRACE’, a ‘PORTRAIT MODEL of ÉMILE ZOLA’.
Throughout this whole period, we have to remember that the person we tend to think of today as an inspired novelist and campaigner was at the same time an international celebrity.
Zola’s place alongside Gordon of Khartoum also reminds us that at the very moment Zola was in England, on 2 September at the Battle of Omdurman (like Khartoum, in the Sudan), one of the worst massacres of British imperial rule took place: around 10,000 Sudanese soldiers were killed, 13,000 wounded, 5,000 taken prisoner; the British force, under Kitchener lost 47, with 382 wounded. To explain this mismatch in deaths and casualties, we have to bear in mind that this conflict marks one of the first uses of the machine gun in a major battle. The British army at Omdurman had forty Maxim machine guns, each capable of firing up to 600 rounds a minute. Zola, the great believer in the virtues of science and technology, straddled the precise moment when modernity was experimenting with new instruments of mass death.
The Disappearance of Émile Zola Page 7