For anyone looking at this novel as a historical source, the most striking thing about Zola's confrontation of the Gras with the Maigres is that it is founded on a kind of poverty unknown to us today in the West. Nowadays it is the poor who tend to be fat, while the rich are so slim. To be sure, it is still an assembly of "marginals" that collects by the Fontaine des Innocents, former site of the medieval charnel house and now Paris's equivalent of Piccadilly Circus. Many of the drug addicts there today are immigrants: in Zola's day they had travelled from the provinces. Hang around for a while and you are bound to see the police arrest someone, just as Zola would have witnessed 150 years ago. The neighbouring pavilion of butter, egg and cheeses has disappeared, as has the crooked Restaurant de Barratte, which so fascinated Zola. So, more importantly, has the gnawing poverty which Zola described in such detail. On two sides of the Square des Innocents there was a long, semicircular row of benches placed end to end. To escape their stifling hovels on the narrow neighbouring streets, the poor gathered here. Shivery old women with crumpled bonnets repaired rags that they pulled out of little baskets; the bareheaded younger women, their skirts poorly tied up, chattered with their neighbours— Zola had thin Mademoiselle Saget here receiving and spreading gossip. There were suspicious men wearing worn-out black hats. In the neighbouring alleys and along the Rue Saint-Denis hordes of ragged brats dragged cars without wheels that were filled with sand. There was worse to be seen in the Pavilion de Beurre, close by. On the side of Rue Berger, behind the inspectors' bureaux, were what were politely called the bancs of cooked meats. Every morning little closed cars, looking like boxes lined with zinc and with closed, cellar-like windows, drove up to the pavilion, having collected the leftovers of the preceding evening's feasts in the city's restaurants, embassies and ministries. Dishes of greasy meat, mangled fillets of game, the heads and tails of fish, along with cold fried vegetables were prepared in the cellars and then sold upstairs at the stands for three and five sous. Queues of small wage earners and down-and-outs —the meurts-de-faim of Paris— formed in the morning chill to sniff at the greasy plates which had the odour of an unwashed kitchen sink.
Such poverty endured. Old people remember it. Talk to some of the elderly residents sitting in the cafés and brasseries of pretty Rue Montorgueil. The pavilions were pulled down by people who wanted to say good-bye to all that and let the new generations live. That is why there is no historical heartland in Paris; the local residents had had enough of it. In its place has grown up pretty Rue Montorgueil.
ZOLA AND HIS wife died, asphyxiated by an open fireplace in their home in Médan, on the night of 28-29 September 1902. It is possible that they were murdered. In the early 1950s a businessman is said to have admitted to a journalist that he had stuffed the chimney Over the last years of his life Zola had received a number of death threats.
The Rougon-Macquart novels had become increasingly popular, and increasingly contested, too. Like his artist hero Claude Lantier, Zola had kept his distance from politics, simply painting with words the poverty he saw in the streets of Paris, in the coal mines of the north, in the flat rural landscape of the Beauce. But his story of a refugee from Devil's Island, victim of injustice, came back to haunt him in the last years of his life. He learned, in the winter of 1897-98, that a certain Captain Alfred Dreyfus had been the victim of a miscarriage of justice. A righteous fury, which he had never known before, took hold of Émile Zola; in January 1898 he published in Georges Clemenceau's Aurore his article "J'accuse." Why should a famous writer put at risk his fortune and his reputation for the sake of a Jewish officer accused of treason? "I would not have been able to live," he said.
It is remarkable how the language Zola employed to counter the anti-Semitic campaign of the anti-Dreyfusards so resembled the language of Zola in his Ventre de Paris. If there were a single ideal behind his article "J'accuse"—which would spark off the whole Dreyfus Affair—it was not one of class or of race: it was the struggle of life against the forces of death. It was the ideal Florent realized when out in rural Nanterre. "Death to the Jews! Death to Dreyfus! Death to Zola!" cried the dockers at Nantes, the workers of Rennes and of Marseille; effigies of Zola were hanged in Moulins, Montpellier, Marmande and Angoulême. "France saved from death by education," scribbled Zola on a piece of paper a few days before he died.
8
PORJE DE LA VILLETTE
NO MOVIE DIRECTOR has yet been tempted to make a film of Zola's Ventre de Paris, which is surprising; it is one of the founding legends of Parisian identity and the novel easily passes David Lean's minimum test of twenty good scenes. The dreamlike colours and shades created by Baltard's glass and ironwork pavilions have, nevertheless, been the scene of many works for the cinema, the most memorable perhaps being Marcel EHerbier's haunting wartime film, La Nuitfantastique. After they pulled down the butcher's pavilion in 1973, Marco Ferreri used the heaps of dirt left in le Trou as a setting for his Touchepas lafemme blanche, a film about Custer's last stand. Cameras and crews descended into the controversial "hole," Marcello Mastroianni was given the role of General Custer, while Michel Piccoli, Alain Cuny and Serge Reggiani played the role of the Indians. The film was a great success: Parisians love Westerns—many drive down to the Camargue, near Marseille, to play at cowboys and Indians; the richer ones will spend a season in Wyoming riding the range. The metrostopper fortunately doesn't have to go this far. Just take Line 7 out to Porte de la Villette, where the most extraordinary Parisian cowboy story awaits him.
Where did all that meat, piled so grotesquely high in Les Halles, come from? The slaughterhouses of La Villette. In the nineteenth century the cattle were brought here in droves and the men who slaughtered them were as cruel and tough as any cowhand in the Far West. Their greatest hero had been, before he turned up in their pavilions, "the most celebrated and most shot-at man in the history of Dakota Territory," as his American biographer has put it; in the U.S. press of the 1880s he was known as the "Emperor of the Bad Lands." But he was also a Parisian, an aristocrat of royal lineage at that—and he would end his life as an uncompromising racist. When the Marquis de Morés came back to Paris he dressed up those rough butchers of La Villette in purple shirts and ten-gallon hats: " Morés and Friends" were, for a brief and disquieting moment in French history, a political force that mattered.
When they knocked down the old slaughterhouses in the 1960s President Charles de Gaulle ordered the creation of new ones; they would be the largest, the cleanest and the most efficient abattoirs in the world, the pride of la Grande Nation, something to compare with the passenger liner Le France or the supersonic passenger jet La Concorde. But the project got lost in a jungle of big deals and corruption and, instead, the powers-that-be decided—as they frequently do when confronted with a large hole in an urban space—to create a "cultural centre." Amazingly it works. It is one of the most popular corners of Paris. It was late in June 1896, when news spread through the pavilions that the Marquis de Morés had been killed; he had been felled by a bullet in the side and another in the neck after facing off, with his Colt .45, fifty desert bandits of the Tuareg and Chambaa tribes in southern Algeria. One Sunday, the following July, the Friends of Morés in cowboy outfits marched down from La Villette to the Gare de Lyon, where they were joined by the coach drivers of Grenelle, Paul Déroulède 's League of Patriots, the Napoleonic Imperialist Committee, the Union of Socialist and Revisionist Patriots and a host of other small-time employees and workers of the eastern faubourgs in a procession to Notre Dame Cathedral, draped for the occasion in black cloth. Representatives of the Republican government were also present at the funeral ceremony Beethoven's Sanctus and Fauré 's Piejesu were sung by a large chorus to the accompaniment of the cathedral's grand organ. Then the coffin was carried across the Pont Saint-Martin to the Montmartre Cemetery, where a crowd of over 100,000 had gathered—one of the largest funerals of the nineteenth century Many in the crowd wore the blue carnations of the Royalists; it was the butcher Friends who f
ormed the long guard of honour. "One word sums up this life: Devotion. One word explains this death: the need for Sacrifice," said Édouard Drumont, editor of La Libre Parole. "His love of France, his elan—the highest of French virtues—and his chivalry were the qualities of de Morés, for which we loved him," said Maurice Barrès of the Académie Française. Devotion, sacrifice, élan and chivalry neatly summed up the values espoused by this thirty-eight-year-old Parisian cowboy, gunned down in the Algerian desert.
Just as at Les Halles, it is extraordinary how much of the Marquis de Morés 's nineteenth-century world one can uncover at La Villette. That octagonal stone building to your right, as you emerge from the metro, is where the slaughterhouses' veterinarians used to have their office in the 1890s. The scientific-musical park is scattered with "madnesses" or folies—folies du theatre, folie café, folie du canal, even an éclat defolie. The first you will notice is the folie horloge, an ugly contemporary red iron structure on top of which is a nineteenth-century stone clock: that clock used to chime out the opening and closing hours of Paris's slaughterhouses. In the concrete wall opposite you will find the list of over a hundred butchers mortspour la France in 1914-18; and a long list of those tortured and who died for France under the Nazis. Stop for a while on the Boulevard Macdonald—named after one of Napoleon's generals, not the fast food chain—and look at the line of eating palaces on the opposite side of the street: the beef restaurants were there in de Morés 's day. To the north you can see the périphérique on stilts: the cars rush by today where, in the 1890s, the steam trains for Strasbourg shunted out. Just to the north were the fortifications—and you can get a very good idea of what they looked like in the nearby Fort d'Aubervil-liers. Aubervilliers, beyond thepériph', is another Communist fiefdom, which, like Saint-Denis, Saint-Ouen, Clichy and Courbevoie, houses people from the Third and Fourth Worlds: you lock car doors when you pass through here.
Yet pass through you must. There is something special about neighbouring Aubervilliers which points to the cause of violence in the cowboy slaughterhouses of La Villette a hundred years ago. Between Avenue Victor Hugo and Rue de la Haie-Coq, on the west side of the suburb, are rows and rows of what look like warehouses selling wholesale textiles, clocks, toys, shoes, underwear, jewellery—anything you can think of. They are the solderies of France, an industry which developed in the 1970s and turned this part of Aubervilliers into what may justly be described as the dustbin of the world. The products of virtually every failed industry in Western Europe and beyond, of every unwanted surplus, end up here. The principal dealers, known as soldeurs, buy up these rejected goods—if today it is leather boots, tomorrow it could be computers—at something less than ten per cent of the wholesale price and flog them off to whatever big buyer they can find. The soldeurs never commit themselves to a written contract; all their deals are made by word of mouth and a handshake.
In the 1970s the majority of soldeurs were Jewish immigrants from North Africa; today they are being replaced by the Chinese. As always in Paris, an old historical continuity is working its way through here, in this violent little suburban corner; though the solderies may be a new industry, they did not spring from nothing. This was the site of the Entrepôts Généraux de Paris, which, at the head of the Canal de l'Ourcq, used to buy up as cheaply as they could the factory produce of Paris and the provinces and then sell it off as expensively as they could to the big department stores in the capital. Good fast deals could be made with the neighbouring slaughterers, who began to resent the low prices that the commissionnaires, or middle men, of Aubervilliers paid. Those deals were always struck by word of mouth and a handshake; no contract was ever signed. De Morés became the hero of the meat slaughterers of La Villette by promising to undercut the undercutters, the commissionnaires, the vast majority of whom were Jews.
It was a whole theory, a whole programme, that had evolved out of de Morés 's short but extraordinary life. Nothing had ever been typical about it. He was not even a typical French aristocrat. His Spanish ancestors, knights of the realm, had participated in the conquest of Sardinia in 1322 and, in return for their gallantry, received the Sardinian marquisates of Montemaggiore and Morés. In the 1820s de Morés 's grandfather had participated in a failed Sardinian coup d'etat and lost all his properties, so he left for France, where he married a descendant of the first French Bourbon king, Henri IV Their son made another brilliant marriage, with a family that had conquered Algeria for France, and it was from this noble union that there was born, on 14 June 1858 in the exclusive faubourg de Saint-Germain, the boy who could claim to have royalty in his blood in addition to a very long name: Antoine Amedee Marie Vincent Manca de Villombrosa, the Marquis de Morés et de Mon-temaggiore. His friends called him Antoine. A childhood photograph shows him with a gun in his hand.
A turbulent child, his parents entrusted him to one of the toughest tutors of the French Riviera, where they had taken up residence in the 1860s. The Abbé Raquin had Antoine speaking English, German and Italian before he was ten, and infused him at the same time with a love of the main tenets of Catholic Christianity. At the College Stanislas in Cannes he defended the weak and was the terror of the strong, over whom he towered. He graduated from the officer training school of Saint-Cyr when twenty-one—a handsome man of six foot with curly black hair, dark eyes and slightly hooded, Asiatic eyes. He already wore what would be his signature in the Far West and the pavilions of La Villette, a black moustache with upward turning, needle-point waxed tips.
Saint-Cyr's class of 1879 included Philippe Petain, the future hero of Verdun, the future anti-hero of Nazi-occupied France—but at the time too poor to be the Marquis' intimate friend. That friend was Charles de Foucauld, a bit of a dandy at the time. It was not an image that stuck. De Foucauld would become one of France's uncanonized saints, a master theologian, who took his vows as a Trappist monk in Syria in 1891 to become "the hermit of the Sahara"; for twenty years he lived among the Bedouin Arabs of southern Morocco, who murdered him in 1917. One may justly speculate as to whether or not there was some element in de Morés 's complex personality—which led him to the same terrible end as his friend—that, in different circumstances, would have taken him along a similarly devout route. "You know me, you know my affection for you," wrote de Foucauld to de Morés the day before he made his vows. "Poor monk, I pray from afar for all those I love. I ptay for you." After the years at Saint-Cyr de Morés, like his Christian friend, he would on many an occasion face the sun and his God alone.
Life in the barracks of the French Army, following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, was anything but an adventure. To satisfy the ancient cravings for honour and chivalry aristocratic officers used to resort to hunting with horses and duelling with swords. It was not enough for an elegant, royal marquis. Having slain two men with his sabre, de Morés resigned his commission in 1881 and turned his talents to the world of high finance.
Many of the big capitalists of the nineteenth century were men of blue blood; the door that opened on these two worlds was marriage. De Morés 's eye fell on a small German-American lady with a huge fortune, Medora von Hoffmann, whom he married in the Church of the Stained Glass Windows, Notre Dame de l'Espérance, in Cannes in February 1882. After a few idyllic months in Provence, the young couple took a steamer for New York and the banking enterprise of Louis von Hoffmann, de Morés 's new father-in-law. Von Hoffmann had built up an empire of international trading, buying and selling currencies and securities in the foreign exchanges at the right time; he pioneered the system of arbitrage, as it came to be known. For de Morés it provided a practical lesson on how wealth could be generated from narrow margins on a large capital base—watch those margins and cut out the waste. It would become a moral imperative for this Catholic French businessman: "My birth confers no privileges on me," he used to repeat; "it gives me great responsibilities." Cutting the waste was soon translated into a battle to rid the market of the army of middlemen de Morés saw growing around him—rich bour
geois parasites who added nothing to the production process save their commissions and obstruction of trading forces. De Morés spent the rest of his life attempting to put the poor, honest producer directly in contact with the poor, honest consumer: it was the economics of Billy the Kid.
This is a point worth emphasizing. De Morés 's initial struggle in business was with the middleman. Nothing in his behaviour or in the many interviews he granted in America gave a hint of the rabid anti-Semitism he later came to espouse. De Morés 's particular interest in the cattle business began when he met Commander Henry Gorringe, a land promoter, who had brought one of Cleopatra's needles to New York during his service in the U.S. Navy. After passing through the Bad Lands of Dakota Territory one summer Gorringe had set up the Little Missouri Land and Cattle Company with a tough local Scotsman, Gregor Lang, settling a small herd of cattle on a plot of land to prove his ownership. De Morés bought an option in Gorringe's property. Little did he know that the only property to which Gorringe's title laid claim was a set of cantonment buildings the U.S. Army had used during the Indian wars. Nor did he know that Gregor Lang was a spokesman for commercial hunters of buffalo, bear and deer—the natural enemies of cattle herdsmen.
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