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EMILE Z'LA.


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16283
ÉMILE ZOLA
(1840-)
BY ROBERT VALLIER
W
HOEVER wishes to study Émile Zola and his work impartially
is immediately impressed with one fact, that of their im-
mense notoriety. It defies all comparison. Unquestionably
the most resounding name of French literature at the present hour
is the name — in reality Italian — of the author of L'Assommoir. '
His books have found admission and readers everywhere. Consider-
ing their diffusion alone, it might be supposed that the spirit of the
country of Châteaubriand and Lamartine, of Mérimée and Octave
Feuillet, is especially represented in the eyes of the world by the
talent least corresponding to the established conception of its essen-
tial traditions and its genius.
It is not an Émile Zola who deigns to inquire whether the great
majority of the public accepts him.
He is swift to seize upon the
fact of success, and he invokes it as the sovereign judgment of uni-
versal opinion which posterity will ratify. This confidence is not
surprising in the case of an author, who, one day taking it into his
head to draw up a list of his brother novelists in the order of their
merit, adopted as his basis of criticism the sum total of their sales.
One might prefer another method of appreciation. But one cannot
ignore a result not wholly explained by the trickery of constant self-
advertising, by the aggressiveness of a blustering polemic, by his
expert hunt after the seductions of actual life, nor even by the cyni-
cism that springs from a constant dwelling upon the lowest instincts.
This result proclaims a power. One would willingly find this in
an undeniable talent which rests on an astonishing obstinacy of labor
and conviction. But the author does not leave us free to separate
his work from the doctrine on which he flatters himself he has
established it. He constrains us to consider the artist only after we
measure the theorist, - a position fraught with trouble and perplexity.
A work of art cannot be conceived as beautiful and fruitful except as
it proceeds from an emotion. Emotion alone creates its life. What
becomes of it if it must be adapted, subordinated to a system?
Now it is evident that all the production, all the literary develop-
ment of Émile Zola, are characterized by methodical systematization.
Even his vocation of authorship seems not to have revealed itself


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16284
ÉMILE ZOLA
spontaneously. At least the hardships of life were the determining
cause which engaged him in the profession of letters.
His origins were complex. His father was an engineer, - an in-
ventor, of Venetian stock, who had become somewhat cosmopolitan.
His mother was French, the descendant of a Chartrain family. He
may be considered as having inherited from his father his exuber-
ance of hyperbolical imagination; and from his mother his intellect
and taste for the realities.
For a long time he allowed himself to be supposed a southerner.
In reality he was born at Paris, April 2d, 1840. But about the same
time, circumstances obliged his family to move to Aix in Provence.
It was there that he passed his infancy and adolescence. He re-
turned to Paris at seventeen. His youth was shaped in the midst of
the privations and rancors of poverty. Twice refused at the exami-
nation for the baccalaureate, it was only after hard experiences and
painful seekings for the way that he finally found suitable employ-
ment in the large publishing-house of Hachette. His beginnings
there were modest. Soon, however, a place was made for him which
brought him before the public. Little by little, ambition had awak-
ened within him. Secretly, in his days of enforced idleness and
destitution, he had accumulated a stock of mediocre verses which
betrayed an ingenuous taste for Musset. Among these manifold at-
tempts, in which the drama had its place, be began the Contes à
Ninon' which soon appeared. In this initial volume, with its rather
affected fancy and sentimentality, none of the distinctive character-
istics of his future talent are revealed. However, several journals
were now opened to his nimble wits; while, thanks to his duties, he
had facilities for reading by which he profited. Above all, he found
himself in contact with several distinguished men, and more espe-
cially with Hippolyte Taine.
This is the first name to remember in explaining his development.
Deprived of serious instruction and of philosophical education, natur-
ally inclined toward materialistic rationalism, Émile Zola found him-
self already prepared to submit to the influence of this robust spirit;
an influence indeed scarcely recognizable except through the medium
of the master's works. They doubtless inspired in large measure the
partiality, vehement but vigorous, of his artistic and literary polemics;
which, like the daring and pessimistic narrations, Thérèse Raquin
or Madeleine Férat,' attached a certain notoriety to his name. They
contributed to determine his taste, among modern authors, for Bal-
zac, Stendhal, and Flaubert, in whom successively he thought to have
discovered himself. Balzac amazed him as a Michel Angelo, who, as
it were, recreates in his brain a world more striking and in a sense
truer than the actual world. Stendhal showed him, he thought, how


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ÉMILE ZOLA
16285
«to see clearly what is. ” Flaubert stood to him for minute observa-
tion, contemptuous individuality in a cold impersonality. The Gon-
courts initiated him into those refinements of style that correspond
with the nervous exaltation in which the perturbation of our epoch
expresses itself.
At the same time, he ventured, mistakenly self-
taught, into the half-explored regions of sociology and physiology
with the Auguste Comtes, the Darwins, the Claude Bernards, the Spen-
cers, and the Ribots. Thus he improvised a determinism of his own,
according to which he came to consider the science of life, individ-
ual or social, as he would have considered chemistry or physics, which
depend upon a single kind of study and investigation, the experi-
mental method, the one touchstone of all truth. The experimental
method! In his fervor as a neophyte, Émile Zola saw in this, not
only the revivification of certain kinds of knowledge, but he antici-
pated a revolution of human intellect. It was to have its equivalent
and prolongation in literature. Idealism, romanticism, realism even,
had had their day. To naturalism fell the glorious mission of rejuve-
nating the old form of the novel, and of adapting it to the definitive
conception of the universe, in order to make it the supreme form of
the art of the future! Moreover, the question was no longer that
of giving, with more or less talent, a transcript of reality more or
less æsthetic but simply picturesque. The innovator proclaimed
an ambition certainly unforeseen. He assumed to continue «the busi-
ness of the physiologist. ” Henceforth the novel would not be merely
« an observation, showing the combinations of life”; it would becoine
“an experience which seeks to bring forth facts and to disengage a
law. ” How could this unheard-of prodigy be possible ? Émile Zola
does his best to show this by example as well as by theory. Thus
was first conceived the project of a natural and social history of a
family under the Second Empire ); thus from year to year, according
to the needs of his cause, appear the warlike manifestoes which pro-
claim the title of the Roman Experimental (experimental novel) to
final supremacy.
It was in 1869 that Émile Zola determined the plan of a cycle
of studies in which he would have the life of the Second Empire
“recounted by its personages with the aid of their individual dramas. ”
For this purpose he imagined a family, the family of the Rougon-
Macquarts. He began by making it spring from diseased physical
conditions; and basing his work upon studies that pushed to their
extreme consequences the doctrines of heredity, he proposed to de-
velop “the slow succession of nervous and sanguineous accidents
which declare themselves in a race after a first organic lesion. ” In
one single family, then, he would show all the physiological states;
he would show there at the same time all the social conditions. In


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16286
ÉMILE ZOLA
this way too he would retrace the Origines de la France Contem-
poraine' [of Taine).
To this end, while retaining the means of inquiry proposed by
Taine, he would seek from Claude Bernard the processes for extract-
ing the laws of life and codifying them into formulas which are con-
stantly being added, one by one, to the ever-growing catalogue of
the inalienable acquisitions of science. The race, the environment.
the moment, completed by the action of the dominant inherited
instinct, should furnish him with the elements of a true experiment-
ation as admissible, as well proved, as that of the physiologist in his
laboratory. At least so he imagined. And here is his manner of
effecting it:- Let it be well understood in the first place that all
the functions of life are due to simple organic phenomena, to a sim-
ple continuity of reflex action. Easily then, all free-will being sup-
pressed, may you “undo and put together, piece by piece, the
mechanism of the human machine; make it work under the influ-
ence of environment”; seek, in short, “from the point of view of the
individual and of society, what such a passion, in such an environ-
ment and in such given circumstances, will produce. ” Will not these
results be really experiences in the rigorous sense of the word ?
As a fact, science proceeds only upon tangible realities; upon
given phenomena, which, always identical, she reproduces at will.
She questions nature; she does not dictate the responses. The novel-
ist, on the contrary, has before him only imaginary creatures whom
he maneuvres by entirely arbitrary conceptions. But Émile Zola
has never been willing to admit that his pretended experiences limit
themselves to pure hypotheses, having neither existence nor consist-
ency outside of his brain. He says that he verifies these hypotheses
outside of himself. While directing the phenomena, he piques him-
self upon maintaining in them a character of absolute necessity, upon
preserving their proportions and their relations. He will not allow
himself to see the impossibilities, the contradictions. Up to the end
of his Histoire Naturelle et Sociale des Rougon-Macquart, he persists
in an attitude in which he believes his highest glory involved. In
(Le Docteur Pascal,' the last narrative of the famous series, by the
mouth of the hero of the book, his own proxy, he solemnly bears
witness to himself: “Is this not fine,” he exclaims, – "such a whole,
a document so definite, so complete, in which there is not one gap? »
And he says elsewhere: "I do not know work nobler or of larger
application. To be master of good and ill, to rule society, to resolve
in time all the problems of socialism; above all, to furnish solid
foundations for justice by furnishing answers through experience, to
the questions of criminality — is not this to be among the most use-
ful and most moral workers in the human workshop ? »
>
»


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ÉMILE ZOLA
16287
»
Here and there, however, one surprises in him, as it were, a pru-
dent reserve, almost a confession. Apropos of “those new sciences
– in which hypothesis stammers,” he is not far from confessing that
the role of the “poet” is a rôle of divination. But is it not in the
foregleams of emotion only that this divination can be sought and
found ? And emotion makes things more true to human nature only
as it makes them less exacting. In reproducing them, it re-shapes
them according to the genius of the artist. Zola himself, interpret-
ing the old definition of Bacon, has written this express phrase: “Art
is a corner of nature seen through a temperament. ” There is then,
according to his own statement, an artistic truth which is not the
scientific truth. The two do not contradict each other: it is even
indispensable that the first should ask direction from the second.
But in no respect are they one.
Thus in the application of his system, Émile Zola can only show
himself continually inconsequential with himself. Not only, indeed,
does he fail — and with reason - to obey the rules of scientific
experimentation, but he does not always trouble himself to conform
to the precepts of literary observation. He has been reproached,
and justly, with having undertaken many a subject after insufficient
preparation. That he might describe and narrate, he has often
contented himself with superficial impressions. He has frequently
employed mere second-hand documents; thus demonstrating that the
truth he thought to discover and reveal, he sought chiefly in himself.
Moreover, the vast programme which the inventor of the Rougon-
Macquart scheme undertook to fill, involved inevitably the obligation
of working in great measure upon borrowed material. The first
novels exhausted his stock of recollections of his childhood and
youth, which for example so vivify several Provençal descriptions in
La Fortune des Rougons,' or certain pictures of suburban customs
in L'Assommoir. Consequently the scruples of Zola the observer
grew more and more feeble.
On the other hand, a kind of enormous
lyricism developed and blossomed in him. Already in copying the
real from nature, he had exhibited a tendency toward amplification
and excess. He had exaggerated the proportions, over-emphasized
contours, accentuated colors. Now he abandoned himself more and
more to this kind of transposition. It is what he would define as
“adding the personal expression to the sense of the real. ”
Unhappily, in him the personal expression does not assert itself
alone in the necessity of enlarging things according to the traditions
of the romantic school, to which in part he belongs in spite of him-
self. It is still further manifested in a surprising and abnormal
predilection for the ugly, the trivial, the hideous; for the odious and
horrible. He seems usually to estimate the truth in proportion to the
turpitude. It is not in the least a choice for conscience's sake, but
(


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16288
ÉMILE ZOLA
a choice by vocation. He frankly glorifies himself for having estab-
lished ignominy in literature, as for having made us receive a billings-
gate vocabulary. He has opened his work wide to «the human
brute let loose. ” For man — according to his doctrine, at the mercy
of heredity, of collectivity, of environment, of interests, and of pas-
sions — man appears to him habitually an ape of a particularly ma-
levolent species. So that he has presented to us as average products
of French society under the Second Empire, a most astonishing col-
lection of brute beasts, of criminals, of madmen, and of sick people.
With such a predetermination, what becomes of noble virtues, of
delicate qualities? What becomes of all that makes the honor and
value of life ? Everywhere and in everything Zola sees only states of
matter. Therefore he has not thus far succeeded in drama, which
must exhibit action controlled by will. A bad habit, a mania, a
physical defect, are not enough to constitute a type on the stage.
Now, exactly these are the only attributes by which Zola ordinarily
portrays and characterizes his personages. The sign once chosen,
the novelist applies himself to giving it the effect of an obsession, of
a fixed idea; he recalls it ceaselessly; he shows it on all occasions,
under all lights: and this simplification of description usually pro-
duces a kind of puppets who are much more symbolic than real. As
to that highest form of nature which is mind, as to that intelligence
by which all action, even instinctive action, is, as it were, kneaded,
the author of the “Ventre de Paris' perceives no appreciable traces
in the combination of blind forces which to him represents the
world.
The unity of his narrations, then, is wholly external. They have
no soul, and they lack love. For he has no right to degrade the
name of love to describe that fierce desire whose aberrations and
eccentricities he especially delights in describing. It is mere brute
instinct, an abettor of miseries and crimes, a fatal scourge; and not
that “collaboration to the ends of the universe » of which Renan
spoke. In Zola's work, love does not lose its malice to become nor-
mal, except in a few healthy, well-poised beings. For to him, vir-
tue is physical health, and moral imperfection is only a resultant
of organic imperfection. There is no other ruling principle than
a tranquil belief in the energies of life. ” Moreover, he evidently
prefers brute nature to human nature. The beauty in which he
delights is a beauty of the beast. ” He has not hesitated to degrade
woman in her most august functions to animality. As to simple
faults against taste, they are innumerable; and unpardonable ones
might be cited. But he assures us that under his pen, licentious or
repugnant pictures become austere clinical studies. He asserts that
in discovering the evil he renders it wholesome. And he sees evil
everywhere. There is in fact nothing less consolatory, nothing more
a


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ÉMILE ZOLA
16289
(
discouraging, than this nightmarish work all stained with corruption,
dripping blood from frightful, tragic deaths. In art there is nothing
vivifying, as there is nothing living, nothing true, except the beauti-
ful. Yet this sense of the beautiful is what he lacks.
Does his work afford us in return that documentary value which
the author claims for it? Rather, the whole is vitiated by the spirit
of the system, and the detail is deformed by the temperament of the
writer. Moreover, upon many points even his relative exactness is
more than doubtful. The greater part of his work is devoted to a
historical period, from which the march of events has suddenly and
completely separated us in all respects. The fall of the Second Em-
pire, coming just as Zola was beginning the series of the Rougon-
Macquart, condemned him to a labor henceforth as arduous as it was
fruitless. In order to paint society before 1870, it happened that
he was forced to utilize more recent notes and events; so that he
ends by giving a true account neither of the epoch in which he was
interested, nor of the subsequent years.
It were wearisome to enumerate the flagrant errors, which, among
landscapes vigorously brushed in, and full of charm, and among
scenes exhibited in intense relief, swarm across the pages of La
Curée, La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret,' Son Excellence, Eugène
Rougon,' and Nana. ' Pot Bouille) proclaims the ambition to pre-
sent to the bourgeois world a faithful image of the bourgeoisie. The
artifice of the composition, and the dissimilitude of many of its epi-
sodes, are constantly emphasized by a crudity of language as far as
possible removed from the hypocritically decent habits of his models.
Nor is he more veracious in La Terre,' when he attributes to the
peasants of Beauce, speech of an exaggerated obscenity little in keep-
ing with their customary crafty discretion. Moreover, he has scarcely
been conscious of their simple dignity. He has regarded them with
a gaze clouded by reading the judgments of criminal courts. He
sets forth to discover in the atmosphere of their farms and stables
a strange ferment of overflowing lubricity. This he imports into his
book with a tranquil wantonness which provokes universal disgust,
and which drove many of his chief disciples away from him. When,
forcing his talent, a little later he attempted to show himself capa-
ble of a flight in the serene regions of purity,- in Le Rêve,' – he
succeeded only in involving himself in childish improbabilities. In
La Bête Humaine,' Lombroso, one of the masters of whom he thinks
himself emulous, pointed out the weakness of his portraits of crimi-
nals; 'Le Docteur Pascal' completely established the nothingness
of his initial assertions. The Histoire Naturelle et Sociale d'une
Famille sous le Second Empire' represented in fact a something dead
which had never lived.
XXVII-1019


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16290
ÉMILE ZOLA
So.
For some time indeed the novelist had evinced premonitory symp-
toms of a certain evolution. In the new cycle of Trois Villes'
(Three Cities), he does not show himself in absolute contradiction
with himself. But it seems as if a kind of candid optimism had
attenuated his former black pessimism, as if some vague belated
sensibility had come to him. «Perhaps,” he murmurs, “all is right! »
At least he does not seem far from the belief that all will become
“Let nature work,” he counsels, «let us live! ) And henceforth
he seems to wish to apply himself to disengaging the factors of
a better future. Lourdes) is the cry of eternal suffering, wringing
(
from the heart of ignorant man a pitiful appeal to hopes hidden in
mystery: it is the phase of superstition. Rome' is the appeal to the
supernatural, the second state of human evolution; the age of faith
hardened into routine, into convention, under the administrative genius
of a pontificate which seems to have inherited from ancient Rome
the dream of a universal empire. This dream will never be realized.
The future will not belong to a church. To scientific investigation
only is assured the promise of indefinite duration, and to Zola that
remains the sole guardian and sole mistress of all truth. (Paris,'
the third novel of the series, will be the proclamation of the arrival
of the positive and universal reign of science. In the “Trois Villes,'
as in the Rougon-Macquarts,' the usual faults of the author are seen
side by side with his least disputed merits. Into the mass of hastily
gathered technical details, into the confusion of notions generated by
a superficial vulgarization of knowledge, he has known how to put
order and movement. He sketches with an alert touch; and above
all he succeeds in giving wing to his hyperbolical imagination, bound-
less and eager for the abnormal and fantastic.
The whole is massively but firmly established in this same spirit
of simplification which inspires him in composing an action or in
delineating a type. To a vast and ample outline, usually in sombre
atmosphere, where are thrown up distorted silhouettes, he contributes
numerous reiterated touches, often heavy additions. Accumulation,
repetition — therein lies his whole method. Unlike the Goncourts,
he has not the word or epithet for overruling preoccupation. His
style, at the beginning rather hesitating, afterward surer and richer,
is now both vigorous and careless, often monotonous, — with a fre-
quent mixture of trivial locutions and sonorous adjectives. In short,
the heavy rhythm of the sentences, the crude violence of the colors,
correspond with the inspiration of his great melodramatic frescoes,
of his swarming dioramas. At a distance, the falseness of detail
appears less; the exaggeration less shocking. There is visible a
mass animated with a dense collective life, like a monstrous organ-
ism. The masses, the crowd, have always found in Zola an almost


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EMILE ZOLA
16291
Homeric singer of their tumults and furies. Their elementary and
quite instinctive psychology puts him at ease. The unacknowledged
romanticism within him evokes them with a sombre lyricism. He
contemplates them with a visionary eye, he makes them stir and
move in compact phalanxes with their outcries and their way of
behavior. In Germinal,' the novel of the proletariat and of social-
ism, and in 'La Débâcle,' the novel of the army and of war, he
has in this respect exercised a powerful mastery. Elements, natural
forces, even material objects, receive from him an obscure and mys-
terious vitality. Under his pen the Sea, the Tavern, the Cathedral,
the Store, the Machine, become real and redoubtable existences.
They rule the creatures of flesh, they devour them in their anger or
break them in their catastrophes.
Thus one is brought back to the
pure personification of savages.
And we return at the same time to that diminution of man, to
that degradation of the reasonable and reflecting being, which haunts
all Zola's work. He has often found a way to degrade even his
humblest heroes still more by calumniating them. Under pretext of
a new civilization, he denies violently all the past, destroys all that
is most precious in the human patrimony. Under color of science, he
persists in outraging those inseparable allies, the True, the Good, and
the Beautiful. « Woe,” exclainned Bossuet, woe to the science which
does not turn to love. " One may apply the same sentence with still
more justice to literature and art. Certainly it would not be just not
to render homage to the persevering and courageous patience which
attests a work ample and vast in its barbarity. The more bitterly
must one deplore the too common application of this faith, this ardor,
this force, to sickly exceptions, to unjustifiable vulgarities, to a con-
ception so arbitrary, and when all is said, so insignificant.
«The victory of the idea kills the sect which propagates it,”
Zola has written. We can bear witness that the naturalistic sect is
dead; but the idea it advanced has not conquered. Hatched in a
period of crisis and transition, it responded to an abasement of taste
and morals! Hence the reason of its vogue. As a whole, the work of
its inventor and prophet remains isolated. Instead of showing ency-
clopædic and definitive, like a majestic synthesis of modern times,
it appears only as a factitious edifice both apocalyptic and sordid;
valuable only for some merits of imagination and composition,
superficial merits which will preserve but a few fragments of it, and
those discredited by the recollection of a still-echoing scandal.
.
»
Robert Vallier,


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16292
EMILE ZOLA
GLIMPSES OF NAPOLEON III.
From (La Débâcle) (The Downfall). Copyright 1892, by Cassell Publishing
Company
"no more than sat
T" burning to" relieve himself of the subject that filled his
((
mind, began to relate his experiences of the day before.
“You know I saw the Emperor at Baybel. ”
He was fairly started, and nothing could stop him. He began
by describing the farm-house; a large structure with an interior
court, surrounded by an iron railing, and situated on a gentle
eminence overlooking Mouzon, to the left of the Carignan road.
Then he came back to the Twelfth Corps, whom he had visited
in their camp among the vines on the hillsides; splendid troops
they were, with their equipments brightly shining in the sunlight,
and the sight of them had caused his heart to beat with patriotic
ardor.
"And there I was, sir, when the Emperor, who had alighted
to breakfast and rest himself a bit, came out of the farm-house.
He wore a general's uniform and carried an overcoat across
his arm, although the sun was very hot. He was followed by a
servant bearing a camp-stool. He did not look to me like a well
man; ah no, far from it: his stooping form, the sallowness of his
complexion, the feebleness of his movements, all indicated him to
be in a very bad way. I was not surprised; for the druggist at
Mouzon, when he recommended me to drive on to Baybel, told
me that an aide-de-camp had just been in his shop to get some
medicine — you understand what I mean - medicine for — »
I -
The
presence of his wife and mother prevented him from alluding
more explicitly to the nature of the Emperor's complaint, which
was an obstinate diarrhæa that he had contracted at Chêne, and
which compelled him to make those frequent halts at houses
along the road. "Well, then the attendant opened the camp-
stool and placed it in the shade of a clump of trees at the edge
of a field of wheat, and the Emperor sat down on it. Sitting
there in a limp, dejected attitude, perfectly still, he looked for
all the world like a small shopkeeper taking a sun-bath for his
rheumatism. His dull eyes wandered over the wide horizon,
the Meuse coursing through the valley at his feet, before him the
range of wooded heights whose summits recede and are lost in
the distance, on the left the waving tree-tops of Dieulet forest,


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ÉMILE ZOLA
16293
on the right the verdure-clad eminence of Sommanthe.
He was
surrounded by his military family, aides and officers of rank; and
a colonel of dragoons, who had already applied to me for infor-
mation about the country, had just motioned me not to go away,
when all at once — ” Delaherche rose from his chair, for he had
reached the point where the dramatic interest of his story culmi-
nated, and it became necessary to reinforce words by gestures.
"All at once there was a succession of sharp reports; and right
in front of us, over the wood of Dieulet, shells are seen circling
through the air. It produced on me no more effect than a dis-
play of fireworks in broad daylight, sir, upon my word it didn't!
The people about the Emperor, of course, showed a good deal
of agitation and uneasiness. The colonel of dragoons comes run-
ning up again to ask if I can give them an idea whence the
firing proceeds. I answer him off-hand: 'It is at Beaumont;
there is not the slightest doubt about it. He returns to the Em-
peror, on whose knees an aide-de-camp was unfolding a map.
The Emperor was evidently of opinion that the fighting was
not at Beaumont, for he sent the colonel back to me a third time.
But I couldn't well do otherwise than stick to what I had said
before, could I, now ? - the more that the shells kept flying
through the air, nearer and nearer, following the line of the Mou-
zon road.
And then, sir, as sure as I see you standing there,
,
I saw the Emperor turn his pale face toward me. Yes, sir, he
looked at me a moment with those dim eyes of his, that were
filled with an expression of melancholy and distrust. And then
his face declined upon his map again, and he made no further
movement. »
Delaherche, although he was an ardent Bonapartist at the
time of the plébiscite, had admitted after our early defeats that
the government was responsible for some mistakes; but he stood
up for the dynasty, compassionating and excusing Napoleon III. ,
deceived and betrayed as he was by every one. It was his firm
opinion that the men at whose door should be laid the responsi-
bility for all our disasters, were none other than those Repub-
lican deputies of the Opposition who had stood in the way of
voting the necessary men and money.
"And did the Emperor return to the farm-house ? ” asked
Captain Beaudoin.
“That's more than I can say, my dear sir: I left him sitting
on his stool. It was midday, the battle was drawing nearer, and


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16294
ÉMILE ZOLA
- SO
»
it occurred to me that it was time to be thinking of my own
return. All that I can tell you besides is, that a general to whom
I pointed out the position of Carignan in the distance, in the
plain to our rear, appeared greatly surprised to learn that the
Belgian frontier lay in that direction, and was only a few miles
away. Ah, that the poor Emperor should have to rely on such
servants ! »
While Delaherche was raising himself on tiptoe, and trying to
peer through the windows of the rez-de-chaussée, an old woman at
his side, some poor day-worker of the neighborhood, with shape-
less form, and hands calloused and distorted by many years of
toil, was mumbling between her teeth:-
"An emperor — I should like to see one once — just once
I could say I had seen him. ”
Suddenly Delaherche exclaimed, seizing Maurice by the arm:-
“See, there he is! at the window to the left. I had a good
view of him yesterday; I can't be mistaken. There, he has just
raised the curtain; see, that pale face, close to the glass. ”
The old woman had overheard him, and stood staring with
wide-open mouth and eyes; for there, full in the window, was an
apparition that resembled a corpse more than a living being: its
eyes were lifeless, its features distorted; even the mustache had
assumed a ghastly whiteness in the final agony. The old woman
was dumbfounded; forthwith she turned her back and marched off
with a look of supreme contempt.
« That thing an emperor! a likely story. ”
A zouave was standing near,- one of those fugitive soldiers
who were in no haste to rejoin their commands. Brandishing
his chassepot and expectorating threats and maledictions, he said
to his companion :-
“Wait! see me put a bullet in his head! ”
Delaherche remonstrated angrily; but by that time the Em-
peror had disappeared. The hoarse murmur of the Meuse con-
tinued uninterruptedly; a wailing lament, inexpressibly mournful,
seemed to pass above them through the air, where the darkness
was gathering intensity. Other sounds rose in the distance, like
the hollow muttering of the rising storm: were they the March!
march! » — that terrible order from Paris which had driven that
ill-starred man onward day by day, dragging behind him along
the roads of his defeat the irony of his imperial escort, until now
he was brought face to face with the ruin he had foreseen and


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.
-
come forth to meet ? What multitudes of brave men were to lay
down their lives for his mistakes; and how complete the wreck,
in all his being, of that sick man,- that sentimental dreamer,
awaiting in gloomy silence the fulfillment of his destiny!
“O M. Delaherche! isn't this dreadful! Here, quick! this
way, if you would like to see the Emperor. ”
On the left of the corridor a door stood ajar; and through the
narrow opening a glimpse could be had of the sovereign, who
had resumed his weary, anguished tramp between the fireplace
and the window. Back and forth he shuffled with heavy, drag-
ging steps, and ceased not, despite his unendurable suffering.
An aide-de-camp had just entered the room, - it was he who had
-
failed to close the door behind him,- and Delaherche heard the
Emperor ask him in a sorrowfully reproachful voice:-
«What is the reason of this continued firing, sir, after I gave
orders to hoist the white flag ? »
The torture to him had become greater than he could bear,-
this never-ceasing cannonade, that seemed to grow more furious
with every minute. Every time he approached the window it
pierced him to the heart. More spilling of blood, more useless
squandering of human life! At every moment the piles of
corpses were rising higher on the battle-field, and his was the re-
sponsibility. The compassionate instincts that entered so largely
into his nature revolted at it, and more than ten times already
he had asked that question of those who approached him.
"I gave orders to raise the white flag: tell me, why do they
continue firing ?
The aide-de-camp made answer in a voice so low that Dela-
herche failed to catch its purport. The Emperor, moreover,
seemed not to pause to listen, drawn by some irresistible attrac-
tion to that window; at which, each time he approached it, he
was greeted by that terrible salvo of artillery that rent and tore
his being. His pallor was greater even than it had been before;
his poor, pinched, wan face, on which were still visible traces
of the rouge which had been applied that morning, bore witness
to his anguish.
At that moment a short, quick-motioned man in dust-soiled
uniform, whom Delaherche recognized as General Lebrun, hur-
riedly crossed the corridor and pushed open the door, without
waiting to be announced. And scarcely was he in the room
when again was heard the Emperor's so oft repeated question:


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“Why do they continue to fire, General, when I have given
orders to hoist the white flag? ”
The aide-de-camp left the apartment, shutting the door behind
him, and Delaherche never knew what was the general's answer.
The vision had faded from his sight.
THE ATTACK ON THE MILL
Reprinted by permission of Copeland & Day, publishers
I
LD Merlier's mill was in high feather that fine summer even-
-
to end, ready for the guests. All the country knew that
on that day Merlier's daughter Françoise was to be betrothed
to Dominique, - a fellow who had the name of being an idle
loafer, but whom the women for eight miles round looked at
with glistening eyes, so well-favored was he.
This mill of old Merlier's was a real delight. It stood just in
the middle of Rocreuse, at the point where the highway makes
a sharp turn. The village has only one street, -two rows of
hovels, one row on each side of the road: but there at the corner
the fields spread out wide; great trees, following the course of the
Morelle, cover the depths of the valley with a magnificent shade.
There is not in all Lorraine a more lovely bit of nature. To the
right and left, thick woods of century-old trees rise up the gentle
slopes, filling the horizon with a sea of verdure; while towards
the south the plain stretches out marvelously fertile, unfolding
without end its plots of land divided by live hedges. But what
above all else gives Rocreuse its charm, is the coolness of this
green nook in the hottest days of July and August. The Mo-
relle comes down from the Gagny woods, and it seems as if it
brought with it the coolness of the foliage beneath which it flows
for miles: it brings the murmuring sounds, the icy and seques-
tered shade, of the forests. And it is not the only source of
coolness: all sorts of running water babble beneath the trees;
at every step, springs gush forth; you feel, while following the
narrow paths, as if subterranean lakes were forcing their way
through the moss, and taking advantage of the smallest fissures,
at the foot of the trees, between rocks, to overflow in crystal-
line fountains. The whispering voices of these brooks rise so


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multitudinous and high that they drown the bullfinches' song.
You would think yourself in some enchanted park, with water-
falls on every hand.
Below, the meadows are soaking wet. Gigantic chestnuts cast
their black shadows. Along the edge of the fields, long lines of
poplars spread out their rustling drapery. There are two avenues
of huge sycamore maples rising across the fields, up toward the
old château of Gagny, now in ruins. In this perpetually watered
soil the weeds grow rank. It is like a flower-garden lying be-
tween two wooded hillsides; but a natural garden, in which the
lawns are fields, and giant trees trace out colossal flower-beds.
When the sun at noon casts its rays straight down, the shadows
turn blue, the scorched weeds slumber in the heat, while an icy
shudder runs along beneath the foliage.
It was there that old Merlier's mill enlivened a nook of rank
green growth with its clacking. The building, of planks and
mortar, seemed as old as the world. Half of it dipped into the
Morelle, which at this point widens out into a clear, rounded
basin. A dam was contrived to let the water fall from a height
of several metres upon the mill-wheel, which turned creaking
with the asthmatic cough of a faithful servant grown old in the
household. When people advised old Merlier to change it for a
new one, he would shake his head, saying that a young wheel
would be lazier and not so well up in its business; and he
mended the old one with everything that came to hand, - staves
of casks, bits of rusty iron, zinc, lead. The wheel seemed all the
gayer for it, - its outline grown strange, all beplumed with weeds
and moss. When the water beat against it with its silver stream,
it would cover itself with beads; you saw it deck out its strange
carcass with a sparkling bedizenment of mother-of-pearl necklaces.
The part of the mill that thus dipped into the Morelle looked
like a barbarous ark stranded there. A good half of the struct-
ure was built on piles. The water ran in under the board floor;
there too were holes, well known in the country for the eels and
enormous crawfish caught there. Above the fall, the basin was
as clear as a mirror; and when the wheel did not cloud it with
its foam, you could see shoals of large fish swimming there with
the deliberateness of a naval squadron. A broken flight of steps
led down to the river, near a stake to which a boat was moored.
A wooden balcony ran above the wheel. Windows opened upon


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ÉMILE ZOLA
it, cut at irregular distances. This pellmell of corners, little
walls, L's added as an afterthought, beams and bits of roof, gave
the mill the appearance of an old dismantled citadel.
But ivy
had grown there; all sorts of climbing vines had stopped up the
too wide cracks and thrown a cloak of green over the old dwell-
ing. Young ladies who passed by would sketch old Merlier's
mill in their albums.
Toward the road the house was stouter. A stone gateway
opened upon the main court-yard, which was bordered on the
right by sheds and stables. Near a well a huge elm covered
half the court-yard with its shade. At the farther end, the house
showed the line of its four first-story windows, surmounted by a
pigeon-house. Old Merlier's only bit of dandyism was to have
its wall whitewashed every ten years. It had just been whitened,
and dazzled the village when the sun lighted it up in the middle
of the day.
For twenty years old Merlier had been mayor of Rocreuse.
He was esteemed for the fortune he had managed to make. He
was supposed to be worth something like eighty thousand francs,
laid up sou by sou. When he married Madeleine Guillard, who
brought him the mill as her dowry, he hardly possessed anything
but his two arms; but Madeleine never repented her choice, so
well did he manage the affairs of the household. Now that his
wife was dead, he remained a widower with his daughter Fran-
çoise. No doubt he might have taken a rest, left his mill to
sleep in the moss; but he would have been too much bored, and
the house would seem dead to him. He kept on working for the
fun of it.
Old Merlier was then a tall old man, with a long, silent face,
never laughing, but very jolly internally nevertheless. He had
been chosen for mayor on account of his money; and also for
the fine air he knew how to assume when he married a couple.
Françoise Merlier was just eighteen. She did not pass for
one of the beauties of the country-side: she was too puny. Up
to the age of eleven, she was, even ugly. No one in Rocreuse
could understand how the daughter of father and mother Merlier
-- both of them ruggedly built -- could grow up so ill, and, so to
speak, grudgingly. But at fifteen, although still delicate, she had
the prettiest little face in the world. She had black hair, black
eyes, and at the same time was all rosy; a mouth that laughed


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EMILE ZOLA
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all the time, dimpled cheeks, a clear brow on which there seemed
to rest a crown of sunshine. Although puny for the neighbor-
hood, she was not thin— far from it; people only meant that she
could not shoulder a sack of grain: but she grew very plump
with time, and stood a good chance of ending by being round and
dainty as a quail. Only her father's long spells of speechlessness
had made her thoughtful at an early age. If she was always
laughing, it was to give others pleasure. At bottom she was
serious.
Naturally all the country-side courted her,- even more for her
dollars than for her niceness. And at last she made a choice
that had just scandalized the country. On the other side of
the Morelle lived a young fellow named Dominique Penquer. He
did not belong in Rocreuse. Ten years before, he had come
there from Belgium, to take possession of a legacy from an
uncle of his who owned a little piece of property on the very
outskirts of the Gagny forest, just opposite the mill, within a
few gunshots. He came to sell this property, he said, and go
home again. But the country fascinated him, it seems, for he
did not stir. He was seen tilling his bit of field, — picking a
few vegetables, on which he lived. He fished, he went shooting;
several times the gamekeepers just missed catching him and
reporting him to the authorities. This free life, the material
resources of which the peasants could not well account for, had
at last given him a bad name. He was vaguely spoken of as
a poacher. At all events he was lazy, for he was often found
asleep in the grass at times when he ought to have been at work.
The hut in which he lived, under the first trees of the forest,
did not look like an honest fellow's dwelling either.
had business with the wolves of the old ruins of Gagny it would
not have surprised the old women. Yet the girls would, now
and then, have the audacity to stand up for him; for this suspi-
cious man was a superb fellow, tall and supple as a poplar, with
a very white skin, fair beard, and hair that shone like gold in
the sun.
So one fine morning, Françoise declared to her father
that she loved Dominique, and that she would never consent to
marry any one else.
You can imagine what a blow old Merlier received that day.
He said nothing, as usual. He always looked thoughtful in the
face; only his internal jollity stopped sparkling in his eyes. The
two did not speak for a week. Françoise too was very grave.


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What bothered old Merlier was to make out how in the world
that rascal of a poacher could have bewitched his daughter.
Dominique had never come to the mill. The miller began to
watch him, and espied the gallant on the other side of the Mo-
relle, lying in the grass and pretending to be asleep. The thing
was clear: they must have fallen in love, making sheep's-eyes at
each other across the mill-wheel.
Meanwhile another week passed by. Françoise looked more
and more solemn. Old Merlier still said nothing. Then one
evening he brought Dominique home with him, without a word.
Françoise was just setting the table. She did not seem aston-
ished; she only added another plate and knife and fork: but
the little dimples appeared once more in her cheeks, and her
laugh came back again. That morning old Merlier had gone
after Dominique to his hut on the outskirts of the wood. There
the two men had talked for three hours, with closed doors and
windows.
No one
ever knew what they found to say to each
other. What was certain was, that on coming out, old Merlier
already treated Dominique like his own son. No doubt the old
man had found the man he was after a fine fellow - in this
lazybones who lay in the grass to make the girls fall in love
with him.
All Rocreuse gossiped. The women in the doorways did not
run dry of tittle-tattle about old Merlier's folly in taking a scape-
grace into his household.