scheme--He is struck down by the "mistral" and dies--His obsequies and
his grave--Difficulties of his widow and son--Lawsuits--Aix, a city
of Philistines or of enlightenment?--Émile Zola, a spoilt child--His
first schooling and first chums--He plays the truant--Declining family
circumstances--Zola is sent to the Aix College--His many prizes,
and his first literary attempts--The college and its masters--Zola,
Baille, and Cézanne; their pranks and their rambles--The country
round Aix--Zola's lines on Provence--He is influenced by Hugo
and Musset--Ideal love: Gratienne and Ninon--Increasing family
penury--Madame Zola seeks help in Paris--She is joined there by her
son--Zola at the Lycée St. Louis--He is "ploughed" for a degree in
Paris--His vacations in Provence--Early poetry--He is "ploughed" at
Marseilles--His studies stopped--A gloomy outlook.
The infancy of Émile Zola was spent in Paris, his father's enterprises
compelling the family to remain there till 1843. Throughout 1840 the
engineer was preparing plans of his fortification scheme, issuing
pamphlets, corresponding with Thiers, and interviewing General
Despans-Cubières, Minister of War. He renewed his efforts when Thiers
fell from power and was succeeded by Marshal Soult; but he was unable
to overcome the stolid indifference of General Dode, the war-office
director of fortifications, who, without even examining his plans,
reported against them on the ground that the government and the defence
committee had made up their minds four years previously with respect
to what system should be adopted. As Soult accepted this view of the
matter, Zola's efforts again came to nothing. His only consolation was
that, early in 1841, when the Paris fortification bill was finally
discussed by the legislature, his ideas found supporters in General
Schneider and M. Dufaure, a subsequent prime minister of France.[1] A
better result attended Zola's invention of an appliance for removing
the masses of earth, which, he foresaw, would be thrown up in digging
the moat of the Paris rampart. He patented this invention in June,
1841, and after his appliance had been constructed at some works in
the Rue de Miromesnil in 1842, it was employed successfully in the
excavations at Clignancourt.[2]
A few months later the indomitable engineer again turned to his scheme
for providing Aix with water. Removing thither with his wife and child,
he signed, in April, 1843, a new agreement with the municipality,
followed in June by another with the mayor of Le Tholonet, for a
large dam was to be constructed near that village, at the entrance
of the Infernet gorges. But although Zola's earlier suggestions had
now prompted the neighbouring city of Marseilles to cut a canal from
Pertuis on the Durance,--an enterprise carried out by a distinguished
engineer named Montrichet between 1839 and 1849,--some of the good
people of Aix and its vicinity remained uninfluenced by the example,
and a long battle ensued.
The waters which Zola had finally decided to bring to Aix were
those of the little rivers Causse and Bayou, and the interested
villages were gradually won over, though, now and again, territorial
magnates like the Marquis de Galliffet, Prince de Martigues,--father
of the well-known general officer and owner of the château of Le
Tholonet,--remained hostile to the scheme. Fortunately Zola, besides
having a good friend in M. Aude, the mayor of Aix, obtained support in
Paris, notably from Thiers and Mignet, whose association with the old
Provençal city is well known; and thus, in May, 1844, he obtained a
royal declaration of the public utility of his project, with leave to
expropriate landowners, purchase land, and capture water on terms which
were to be arranged. The landowners, however, often set extravagant
prices on their property, bitter disputes arose over valuations, and
all sorts of authorities, with interests at stake, raised one and
another claim and difficulty, the Council of State at last having
to re-adjust Zola's agreements with municipalities and others, in
such wise that a final covenant was only signed in June, 1845. Zola
then returned to Paris with his wife and son, for, apart from all
municipal help, a considerable amount of money had to be raised for the
enterprise, and it was not until midsummer, 1846, that the Zola Canal
Company was at last constituted.[3]
Then the engineer went southward once more. One reads in contemporary
newspapers that the great struggle had affected his health, that he was
no longer so strong as formerly, but it is certain that he felt full of
confidence. His courageous efforts were about to yield fruit: the work
was begun, the first sod was cut, the first blasting operations were
carried out successfully. Zola stood, as it were, on the threshold of
the promised land. And then, all at once, destiny struck him down. One
morning, after three months' toil, while he was superintending his men,
the "mistral" wind, that scourge of southern France, descended upon the
valley where they were working. The icy blast laid its clutch upon
Zola, but, although he already felt its chill, he would not defer a
business visit to Marseilles. He repaired thither, installing himself,
as was his habit, at the Hôtel de la Méditerranée kept by one Moulet,
in the Rue de l'Arbre. That same night he was attacked by pleurisy, and
on the morrow it became necessary to summon his wife, who had remained
at Aix. All remedies proved unavailing, and within a week he expired in
her arms. Thirty years afterwards that sudden death, in a second-class
hotel, amid unpacked trunks and the coming and going of heedless
travellers, suggested to Zola's son the account of Charles Grandjean's
death given in "Une Page d'Amour."[4]
It was on Saturday, March 27,1847, that François Zola thus passed away.
His remains were embalmed, and the obsequies took place at Aix on the
ensuing Tuesday, when the clergy went in procession to the Place de
la Rotonde, beyond the walls, to receive the body on its arrival. The
pall-bearers were the sub-prefect, the mayor, the government district
engineer, and Maître Labot, an eminent advocate of the Council of
State and the Court of Cassation, who had been one of Zola's leading
supporters. The capitular clergy, headed by a Canon-bishop of St.
Denis, officiated at the rites in the cathedral; and, as chief mourner,
immediately behind the hearse, when escorted by the civil and military
authorities it took the road to the cemetery, between crowds of
spectators, there walked a pale-faced little boy, barely seven years
of age, who moved as in a dream. In after years he retained little
recollection of his father. He pictured him best, he was wont to say,
by the aid of all that his mother had related of his affectionate
tenderness, his unflagging energy, his high and noble views. Thus how
great was the son's amazement, indignation, and sorrow when, long years
afterwards, unscrupulous enemies tried to make the world believe that
his father had been a thief.
On that matter the reader will form his own opinion, and it is largely
to enable him to do so that the chief facts of François Zola's career
of honourable and untiring industry have been recapitulated in these
pages. But another purpose also has been served. As the narrative
of Émile Zola's life proceeds, it will be observed how truly he was
his father's son, evincing in manhood the same energy, industry, and
perseverance, the same passion to strive against obstacles, and, by
striving, overcome them. In his case, the prompting of inherited nature
is the more manifest as he was of such tender years when his father
died, and thus escaped the influence of companionship and example,
which so often increase the resemblance of father and son. Ah, that
poor contemned doctrine of heredity, as old as the world itself, how
could Émile Zola fail to believe in it when he himself was a striking
illustration of its workings?
François Zola's widow placed a modest slab upon her husband's grave
in the cemetery of Aix, in which she herself was to be laid three
and thirty years later. A cedar shades the tomb from the flaring sky
poised over that glowing field of death, whence the view spreads to
many a hill and mountain, clad in blue and purple. And on the slab,
which is protected by iron chains dangling from granite billets, one
reads: "François Zola, 1795-1847. Françoise Émilie Zola, _née_ Aubert,
1819-1880." Aix, however, does not need the presence of that tomb to
remind it of one of its most notable benefactors. Although François
Zola died when his work was only in its first stage, although a little
later his original scheme was foolishly cut down, in such wise as
to necessitate other subsequent costly undertakings, and although
thirty-one years elapsed before the water he had coveted at last
entered Aix, the enterprise he planned has always been known popularly
as the Zola Canal. Further, after its completion in 1868, the local
municipality then in office, to efface in a measure the inconsiderate
treatment of his widow and his son by previous municipalities, bestowed
the name of Boulevard François Zola on a thoroughfare till then called
the Boulevard du Chemin-neuf.[5]
The expression "inconsiderate treatment" is certainly not too severe a
one to be applied to the action of some of the authorities of Aix in
their dealings with Zola's widow, who, in her own name and her son's,
inherited her husband's interest in the canal scheme. But she had to
contend also with others associated with the work. It was virtually
a repetition, or rather a variation, of the familiar story of the
confiding inventor and the greedy capitalist. In this instance the
inventor was dead, and only his heirs remained. He had fully disclosed
his scheme, prepared his plans, and others were eager to profit by
them. Thus his widow and his little boy were gradually regarded as
incumbrances, nuisances. Why not set them aside? Why not rob them?
Are not the widow and the orphan robbed every day? Besides, it is
often easy to bamboozle a young and inexperienced woman in matters of
law. Already at this time Madame Zola's parents had come to live with
her at Aix; but her father was aged, and deficient, it would seem,
in business capacity; while her mother, however bright, active, and
thrifty, was not the woman to give unimpeachable advice on intricate
legal questions. As for little Émile, now seven years old, he did not
even know his letters; he spent happy, careless days in the sunshine,
blissfully ignorant that trouble was assailing the home, and would
some day destroy it. Yet it was he who, long years afterwards, avenged
his father and his mother, in the only manner possibly in which they
could be avenged. Perhaps it did not affect the despoilers personally;
many of them, indeed, must have been dead at the time, and those who
survived may have only sneered, for the gold was theirs. None the less
the pictures of Aix and its society, traced in four or five volumes of
the Rougon-Macquart novels, were instinct with retribution. Aix still
raises ineffectual protests whenever it hears that name of Plassans
which the novelist gave it, and which, though its origin was simple
enough,--for it was merely a modification of Plassans, the name of
a village near Brignoles, southeast of Aix,--acquired under Zola's
caustic pen an element of opprobrium.
The displeasure of Aix in this respect has been the more marked as
the city's past is not destitute of grandeur. One of the earliest
stations of the Romans in Gaul, it became the metropolis of the Second
Narbonensis, but its walls, porticoes, thermæ, arena, and temples were
largely destroyed when the Saracens sacked it in the eighth century,
and few memorials of its classic era now exist. As the capital of
Provence in the days of "good King René," whose court was described
by Scott in "Anne of Geierstein," Aix regained some lustre, followed
half a century later by a period of trouble, many of its mediæval
monuments being wrecked during the struggle between Francis I and
Charles V, who was crowned King of Arles in the fane of St. Sauveur.
Nevertheless, girdled by picturesque mountains, with its old town, new
town, and faubourg, rich in stately edifices, pleasant promenades, and
elegant fountains, Aix remains one of the notable cities of southern
France. And if, administratively, as the French say, it is now only a
sub-prefecture of the department of the Bouches-du-Rhône, it continues
to be an archbishop's see, and retains its courts of justice and its
faculties of theology, law, and letters. Its university is perhaps its
greatest boast, though it is also proud of its museum and its splendid
library, which is known to scholars all the world over. Thus Aix claims
to be a city of enlightenment, not a town of Philistines, as it was
largely pictured by Émile Zola; but one must remember that he described
things as they were in his time, and that if a new and more active
generation has arisen nowadays, it was preceded by others, somnolent
and neglectful.
Aix has given several distinguished sons to France: the elder Vanloo;
Vauvenargues, the moralist; Mignet, the historian; Brueys, the poet,
and Brueys, the admiral who fell at the battle of the Nile; Michel
Adanson and Piton de Tournefort, the eminent naturalists; François
Granet, who translated Newton into French, and François Marius Granet,
his nephew, who distinguished himself in art, and became one of the
city's benefactors. Again, Portalis, the great jurisconsult, who
prepared the Concordat which still binds France and the Papal See, was
for a time one of the shining lights of the city, and Thiers, though
born at Marseilles, completed his studies at Aix, took his degrees, and
was called to the bar there. Curiously enough, the house where Thiers
had lived in his student days was the first home of the Zolas at Aix.
It stood at the end of a strip of road, a "no thoroughfare," called
picturesquely the Impasse Sylvacanne. There was a large garden to the
house, and in that garden little Émile disported himself as he listed.
His mother and grandmother spoilt him, as the saying goes. His father's
death filled them with indulgence for his childish faults. He was a boy
to be petted and humoured, for the greatest of misfortunes had fallen
on him. Spending so much of his time in the open air, he was becoming
quite a sturdy little fellow, sun-tanned, with soft, thoughtful eyes
and a perky nose, and his incessant questions seemed to indicate the
possession of an intelligent and eager mind. But, as yet, no attempt
was made to educate him. His mother was already busy with her lawyers,
striving to enforce her claims, and endeavouring also to obtain
influential support. When Thiers came to Aix some four months after
François Zola's death, the widow presented her little son to the great
man in the hope of thereby arousing his sympathy. And Thiers certainly
responded with fair words, though whether he went further is doubtful.
At all events, lawsuits were started, and to the worry they entailed
one must ascribe the comparative neglect in which young Émile remained
a little longer.
At last, in the autumn of 1847, it was decided to send him to school.
Some doubt as to the result of the lawsuits was already arising in the
minds of Madame Zola and her parents, and they felt that they must at
least provide for the boy's future by giving him a sound education.
It was suggested that he should be sent immediately to the College of
Aix--now called the Lycée Mignet; but as he did not even know his
letters, Madame Aubert, his grandmother, sensibly decided to select
a preparatory school. One was found near the Notre Dame gate, from
which it derived its appellation of Pension Notre Dame. It was kept
by a worthy and indulgent pedagogue, named Isoard, who after infinite
trouble--for the boy was stubborn and bitterly regretted his careless
life in the open air--contrived to teach him to read the Fables of La
Fontaine. It was at this time that young Émile formed his earliest
life-friendships; he became attached to two of his school-fellows,
one of whom, Solari, a sculptor of distinguished talent, is still
alive, while the other, Marius Roux, acquired a passing reputation as
a "popular" novel writer.[6] These two were Zola's usual playmates at
marbles, tops, and leap-frog, his first companions also in the rambles
in which he began to indulge.
For some reason or other, Madame Zola and the Auberts moved from the
Impasse Sylvacanne to the Pont-de-Beraud, in the open country, on the
road to Toulon, and then young Émile had fields before him with a
picturesque stream, the Torse, so called on account of its capricious
windings--"a torrent in December, the most timid of rivulets in the
fine weather," as he called it afterwards in his "Contes à Ninon."
And the charms of the country, the inviting banks of the Torse, often
made a truant of him,--a truant who remained unpunished, for as his
grandparents generally said "It was not right to cross the poor
fatherless boy."
The position of the family was now, however, becoming difficult. The
widow's savings were dwindling away in legal and living expenses; and
some who had been willing to help her were at present unable to do so,
having lost authority, influence, and, at times, even means. France had
passed through a revolution, Louis Philippe had been overthrown; unrest
was widespread throughout the period of the Second Republic; and when
Louis Napoleon strangled that _régime_ in the night, Provence became
convulsed, there were risings, excesses, bloodshed, even as Émile Zola
subsequently depicted in the pages of "La Fortune des Rougon." The new
municipality of Aix, appointed after the Coup d'État, was not inclined
to effect any reasonable compromise with those Orléanist _protégés_,
the Zolas. One on whom they had largely relied, Thiers, was himself
virtually a fugitive. Again, in those days of trouble the law's delays
became greater than ever; apart from which it would seem that Madame
Zola's actions were altogether ill-conducted. Nevertheless, in the
summer of 1852, though her affairs were taking a very unfavourable
course, and it was becoming necessary to trench upon the investments
whence the Auberts derived their modest personal income, it was at
last decided to send Émile to the College of Aix as a boarder, and the
family, in order to be nearer to him, moved into the town, its new home
being in the Rue Bellegarde.
The boy could now see that the family resources were diminishing.
The last servant had been dismissed, and it was his grandmother, the
still lively and sturdy Beauceronne, who attended to most of the
housework. Moreover, she and her daughter had largely taken the lad
into their confidence, and he, precociously realising that his future
would most likely depend on his own exertions, resolved to turn over
a new leaf. Though his love for the open air in no wise diminished,
he studied profitably from the time of entering the College of Aix
in October, 1852. He was placed in the seventh class (the lowest but
one), and at the expiration of the school year, in August, 1853, he
was awarded first prizes for history and geography, recitation, and
the translation of Latin into French, and second prizes for grammar,
arithmetic, religious instruction, and the translation of French into
Latin.[7] In the following year, in the sixth class, he was less
successful, some antipathy, it is said, existing between him and one of
the professors.[8] Nevertheless, his name was inscribed on the _tableau
d'honneur_, and he obtained a first prize for history and geography, a
first _accessit_[9] in religious instruction, and third _accessits_ in
excellence and recitation.
Next, 1854-1855, he passed into the fifth class, in which he gained two
first prizes for Latin, translation and composition; a second prize for
the translation of Greek into French, a first _accessit_ in excellence,
and third _accessits_ in French, history, geography, and recitation. At
the end of the ensuing school year, when he joined the fourth class, he
secured four first prizes--excellence, Latin composition, Latin verse,
translation from Latin into French; and three second prizes--history
and geography, grammar, and Greek exercise. Finally, in 1856-1857
(his last completed year, spent in the third class) he was awarded:
the _tableau d'honneur_ prize, first prizes for excellence, French
composition, arithmetic, geometry, physics, chemistry, natural history,
and recitation; second prizes for religious instruction and translation
from the Latin; with a first _accessit_ in history and geography. He
was then in his eighteenth year, and if prize-winning might be taken
as a criterion, there was every likelihood that he would achieve a
distinguished career.
But one must now go back a little, for other matters marked those
school days at Aix. At first the boy boarded at the college, then he
became a half-boarder, and finally an _externe_, or day pupil, taking
his meals at home; these changes being necessitated by the gradually
declining position of his family. Already while he was a boarder, that
is, barely in his teens, his literary bent began to assert itself,
a perusal of Michaud's "Histoire des Croisades" inspiring him to
write a romance of the middle ages, copiously provided with knights,
Saracens, and fair damsels in distress. That boyish effort, though the
almost illegible manuscript was preserved through life by its author,
remained unprinted, and a like fate attended a three-act comedy in
verse, entitled "Enfoncé le Pion," or "The Usher Outwitted." However,
given these literary leanings, and a fervent admiration for some of
the poets, as will presently be shown, it may at first seem strange
that on entering the third class in 1856, and being called upon to
choose between letters and sciences, Zola, then over seventeen, should
have selected the latter. In this respect, as Paul Alexis says, he was
influenced in part by the fact that, however proficient he might be in
the dead languages, he had no real taste for them, whereas the natural
sciences interested him; but his choice was also partially governed
by the fact that he was the son of an engineer, and that a scientific
career would be in accordance with his parentage. In his studies he was
guided by one simple, self-imposed rule, a rule which he carried into
his after-life, and which largely proved the making of him. He did not
eschew play and other recreation, he did not spend interminable hours
in poring over books, there was nothing "goody-goody" about him; but he
invariably learnt his lessons, prepared his exercises, before he went
to play. And, all considered, no more golden rule can be offered to the
schoolboy.
Zola and his disciple Paul Alexis, who also studied at the Aix
College, have sketched it as it was at that time--a former convent,
old and dank, with a somewhat forbidding frontage, a dark chapel, and
grimly barred windows facing a quiet little square, on which still
stands the rococo fountain of the Four Dolphins. Within the gate were
two large yards, one planted with huge plane trees, and the other
reserved chiefly for gymnastic exercises, while all around were the
class-rooms, the lower ones dismal, damp, and stuffy, and the upper
ones more cheerful of aspect, with windows overlooking the greenery
of neighbouring gardens. The refectory again was quite a den, always
redolent of dish-water; but comparative comfort might be found in
the infirmary, managed by some "gentle sisters in black gowns and
white coifs." The masters, if Zola's subsequent account of them in
"L'Œuvre" may be trusted, were generally ridiculed by the boys, who
gave them opprobrious nicknames. One, never known to smile, was called
"Rhadamantus"; another, "who by the constant rubbing of his head had
left his mark on the wall behind every seat he occupied, was named,
plumply, 'Filth'"; and a third had his wife's repeated infidelity
openly cast in his face.