after consultation with his friends, decided to make another attempt
to secure the diploma which would prove an "open sesame" to regular
employment. But he did not care to face the Paris examiners again, he
preferred to try those of Marseilles, thinking, perhaps, that they
might prove more indulgent. So, taking up his books to refresh his
memory, he lingered in Provence till November. At Marseilles, however,
even his comparative success in Paris was denied him. He failed with
his preliminary papers and was not even summoned for the _vivâ-voce_
examination. That defeat was decisive. When he returned to Paris he
found his mother cast down by it; the friends who helped her had lost
all faith in his ability. It was useless for him to return to the
Lycée. In another four months he would be twenty years of age, he must
no longer remain a burden on others, it was time for him to earn his
own living. But how was he to do so? The outlook was gloomy indeed.
[1] "Le Père d'Émile Zola," p. 212 _et seq._; "La Vérité en Marche," p.
295 _et seq._
[2] _Ibid._, p. 306.
[3] Société du Canal Zola: deeds drawn by Maître Baudier, Notary in
Paris.
[4] Paul Alexis' "Émile Zola: Notes d'un Ami," 2d edition, Paris, 1882,
p. 130. É. Zola's "Une Page d'Amour," Paris, 1878, pp. 20, 21.
[5] "La Vérité en Marche," p. 241.
[6] Among his works, which in the first instance generally appeared as
_feuilletons_ in Paris newspapers, were "Eugénie Lamour," "Francis et
Mariette," "Les Mariages Jaunes," and "Evariste Planchu, Mœurs vraies
du Quartier Latin," the last named being perhaps his best book.
[7] "Palmarès du Collège d'Aix," 1853 _et seq._
[8] P. Alexis, _l. c._, p. 21.
[9] An _accessit_ is a distinction conferred, in French colleges, on
the three pupils who come nearest to a prize winner.
[10] Zola's "L'Œuvre," Chap. II.
[11] "If it is good King René whom you seek, you will find him at
this time walking in his chimney ... the narrow parapet yonder; it
extends between these two towers, has an exposure to the south, and is
sheltered in every other direction. Yonder it is his pleasure to walk
and enjoy the beams of the sun on such cool mornings as the present.
It nurses, he says, his poetical vein."--Scott's "Anne of Geierstein,"
Chap. XXIX.
[12] Zola's "Le Docteur Pascal."
[13] "Le Docteur Pascal."
[14] _Ibid._
[15] "The Athenæum," No. 3686, June 18, 1898, p. 785.
[16] "Le Docteur Pascal."
[17] Zola's "Documents Littéraires," p. 88 (abbreviated).
[18] Zola's "L'Aérienne" (1860) in Alexis, _l. c._, p. 265 _et seq._
[19] Zola's "Nos Auteurs Dramatiques," p. 42.
[20] "Documents Littéraires," p. 90.
[21] "L'Œuvre," Chap. II.
[22] Zola's Verses, "À mes Amis" (Lycée St. Louis, 1858).
[23] Zola's first book, inspired largely by memories of Provence, and
issued in Paris in 1864.
[24] Zola's "Nina," 1859. Readers of "La Fortune des Rougon" (which
Zola wrote some ten years later) will remember that the old tombstone
figures also in that work, in which the inscription is given as "Here
lieth ... Marie ... died ...," the finger of time having effaced the
rest. There is, however, an evident connection between the names Nina
and Ninon, and perhaps they suggested Nana.
[25] From the mediæval Latin, _barrium_ (Ducange).
[26] See _ante_, p. 27.
[27] Alexis, _l. c._, pp. 40, 41.
[28] It seems probable that he had already spent his Easter holidays
there that year; for some of his verses, "Ce que je veux," are dated
Aix, May, 1859. See Alexis, _l. c._, p. 297.
III
BOHEMIA--DRUDGERY--FIRST BOOKS
1860-1866
A clerkship at the Docks Napoléon--Peregrinations through the
Quartier Latin--Zola joined there by Cézanne--He lives in a glass
cage--"L'Amoureuse Comédie"--Poetry and poverty--"Genesis"--Spring
rambles--The Quartier Latin in 1860--Love in a garret--"La Confession
de Claude," and the den in the Rue Soufflot--The fairy of one's
twentieth year--Terrible straits--"Playing the Arab"--"Good for
nothing"--Help from Dr. Boudet--Zola is engaged by M. Hachette
and emerges from Bohemia--Hachette's authors and Zola--Fresh
Peregrinations--Short stories--Zola's "band"--His correspondence
with Antony Valabrègue--"Contes à Ninon"--Zola weaned from idyl
and fable--"Madame Bovary"--Duality of Zola's nature--His improved
circumstances--Newspaper articles--The lesson of "Henriette
Maréchal"--"La Confession de Claude" published--Zola's opinion of
it--Barbey d'Aurévilly's attack and a threatened prosecution--Zola
quits Hachette's, and refuses to pander to fools.
After choosing a scientific career, and then aspiring to poetic fame as
great as that of Hugo or Musset, to sink even momentarily to a junior
clerkship, worth sixty francs a month,[1] at the "Docks" in the Rue de
la Douane, was hard indeed. Yet such became Zola's fate. Some who have
written of the episode have fallen into various errors. An American
account says that the young man became a dock labourer; an English
biographer has referred to his place of employment as a business house.
But on consulting any plan of Paris as it was in 1860 or thereabouts,
it will be seen that a great entrepôt, with offices for the collection
of the state customs and the municipal dues, then adjoined the "Docks
Napoléon," where goods, coming into Paris by the St. Martin Canal,
were landed. The establishment of this entrepôt and its adjuncts was
carried out between 1833 and 1840;[2] the adjoining Rue de la Douane
took its name from the enterprise, and it was there, then, that Zola,
after failing at his examinations, secured employment as a clerk, the
situation being found for him by his father's friend, Maître Labot, the
advocate.
But the salary was the barest pittance. How could a young man of
twenty live, in Paris, on two francs a day? Moreover, there was no
prospect whatever of any "rise." At the expiration, therefore, of
two months,--after trudging a couple of miles twice a day between
the "Docks" and the Quartier Latin, passing on the road the great
Central Markets, whose wondrous life he now began to observe,--Zola
threw up this employment; and from the beginning of March, 1860, till
the end of that year, then all through 1861, and the first three
months of 1862, he led a life of dire Bohemian poverty. On arriving
in Paris in February, 1858, he had lived with his mother at 63, Rue
Monsieur-le-Prince. Thence, in January, 1859, they had moved to 241,
Rue St. Jacques, a narrow and ancient thoroughfare, long one of the
main arteries of Paris, intimately associated, too, with the student
history of the original Quartier Latin. But in April, 1860, at the
time when Zola quitted the "Docks," he and his mother found a cheaper
lodging at 35, Rue St. Victor, another old street, on the slope of the
"Montagne Ste. Geneviève," towards the Halle aux Vins and the Jardin
des Plantes.
Here Zola's room was one of a few lightly built garrets, raised over
the house-roof proper, and constituting a seventh "floor"; the leads
in front forming a terrace whence the view embraced nearly all Paris.
While Zola was lodging here, living very precariously and trying by
fits and starts to secure some remunerative work, his friend Paul
Cézanne arrived from Aix with the hope of making his way in the art
world of the capital. Cézanne was more fortunately circumstanced
than Zola, having a small monthly allowance to depend upon; and
it was perhaps by way of helping his friend that he at first took
up his residence with him in that seventh-floor garret. Zola was
wonderfully cheered by the companionship; before long he again became
as enthusiastic as Cézanne, and the two friends dreamt of conquering
Paris, one as a poet, the other as a painter.
When the summer arrived they often laid a paillasse on the terrace
outside their attic, and spent the mild and starry night in discussing
art and literature. Moreover, while Cézanne began to paint, Zola wrote
another poem _à la_ Musset, which he entitled "Paolo"; as well as a
tale, "Le Carnet de Danse," which was subsequently included in "Les
Contes à Ninon." But there was no improvement in his position. Indeed,
things went from bad to worse; and in the autumn of the year, as he had
too much delicacy to sponge on Cézanne, whose allowance, moreover, was
only just sufficient for himself, they ceased to live together, though
they remained close friends.
About the same time Zola and his mother separated. She, over a term
of years, had now and again secured some trifling sum of money by
compromising one or another law-suit--sacrificing a considerable claim
for little more than a morsel of bread. For the rest, she was helped
by a few relatives of her own and by some friends of her deceased
husband. In October, 1860, as her son could not as yet provide for
her, she went to live at a _pension_ in the Quartier Latin, assisted
there, perhaps, by some friends, or else obtaining some employment in
the house, for she was skilful with her needle. At all events, her son
found himself for a time quite alone.
He now went to reside in the Rue Neuve St. Étienne du Mont, near
the ancient church of that name, and his lodging, as usual, was at
the very top of the house. This time it was a kind of belvedere or
glass cage in which Bernardin de St. Pierre, the author of "Paul and
Virginia," was said to have sought a refuge from the guillotine during
the Reign of Terror. It was there, then, amid all the breezes of
heaven, and inspired perhaps by the position of his retreat, that Zola
wrote another poem, called "L'Aérienne," which he added to the pieces
entitled "Rodolpho" and "Paolo," the first written at Aix, the second
in the Rue St. Victor. These three compositions formed, as it were, a
trilogy which he named "L'Amoureuse Comédie,"--"Rodolpho" representing
the hell, "L'Aérienne" the purgatory, and "Paolo" the paradise of
love.[3] This done, he sought a publisher, or, as Paul Alexis puts it,
he imagined he sought one.
As a matter of fact, this slim, pale-faced poet, in his twenty-first
year, with an incipient beard and long hair falling over his neck,
had become extremely timid in everything that pertained to ordinary
life. He was not deficient in will power, but misfortune--repeated
rebuffs of all sorts--had deprived him of the ordinary confidence of
youth in his intercourse with others. His circumstances were desperate
enough. Alexis, when telling us that he composed his poem "L'Aérienne"
in his glass cage near the sky, during the terribly severe winter of
1860-1861, shows him tireless, shivering in bed, with every garment he
possesses piled over his legs, and his fingers red with the cold while
he writes his verses with the stump of a pencil.
How does he live? it may be asked. He himself hardly knows. Everything
of the slightest value that he possesses goes to the Mont-de-Piété;
he timidly borrows trifling sums of a few friends and acquaintances,
he dines off a penn'orth of bread and a penn'orth of cheese, or a
penn'orth of bread and a penn'orth of apples, at times he has to
content himself with the bread alone. His one beverage is Adam's ale;
it is only at intervals that he can afford a pipeful of tobacco; his
great desire when he awakes of a morning is to procure that day, by
hook or crook, the princely sum of three _sous_ in order that he may
buy a candle for his next evening's work. At times he is in despair: he
is forced to commit his lines to memory during the long winter night,
for lack of the candle which would have enabled him to confide them to
paper.
Yet he is not discouraged. When "L'Aérienne" is finished, he plans
another poetic trilogy, which he intends to call "Genesis." He is still
at a loss for bread, but his chief concern is to beg, borrow, or, if
possible, buy the books which he desires to study before beginning
his new poems. At last he plunges into the perusal of scientific
works, consults Flourens on such subjects as longevity, instinct and
intelligence, genius and madness, dips into Zimmermann's account of
the origin of mankind and the marvels of human nature, reads Lucretius
and Montaigne again, and prepares a plan of his intended composition.
The first poem is to narrate "The Birth of the World" according to the
views of modern science; the second--to be called "Mankind"--is to form
a synthesis of universal history, while the third, the logical outcome
of the previous ones, is to be written in a prophetic strain showing
"The Man of the Future" rising ever higher and higher, mastering every
force of nature, and at last becoming godlike.
But though that stupendous composition is long meditated, only eight
lines of it are actually written. The long winter ends, the spring
comes, and Zola turns to enjoy the sun-rays--at times in the Jardin
des Plantes, which is near his lodging, at others along the quays of
the Seine, where he spends hours among the thousands of second-hand
books displayed for sale on the parapets. And all the life of the
river, the whole picturesque panorama of the quays as they were then,
becomes fixed in his mind, to supply, many years afterwards, the
admirable descriptive passages given in the fourth chapter of his novel
"L'Œuvre." There it is Claude Lantier who is shown walking the quays
with his sweetheart Christine. And Zola was certainly not alone every
time that he himself paced them. We know to what a young man's fancy
turns in springtime, and he was as human as others. He lived, moreover,
in the Quartier Latin, which still retained some of its old freedom of
life, in spite of the many changes it was undergoing.
Baron Haussmann had set pick and spade to work there, and many an
ancient tenement and court had been swept away in piercing the Rue
des Écoles and the Boulevard St. Michel, then called "Boulevard
Sebastopol, Rive Gauche." At that time the Chaumière was dead, the
Prado also had disappeared, and the Closerie des Lilas--afterwards
known as the Bal Bullier--had lately been renovated, in fact
transformed, as Privat d'Anglemont recorded in one of the last sketches
he wrote prior to his death in 1859. And with the disappearance
or alteration of the old dancing places and _tabagies_, with the
demolition of many an ancient den and haunt, the inhabitants of the
Quartier and their manners and customs were likewise altering. In fact,
there was a great crisis in _la vie de Bohême_. But though it was no
longer such as it had been pictured by Murger, such as it had appeared
to Théodore de Banville, who, recalling his youth, described it briefly
yet forcibly a few years later,[4] it would be a mistake to imagine
that it was altogether dead. Alphonse Daudet, who arrived in Paris from
Nîmes a few months before Zola entered the Lycée St. Louis, has shown
that many of the old habits and customs remained. Again, the writer of
these pages, who knew the Quartier Latin well in the last years of the
Second Empire, can recall that vestiges of its former life clung to it
even till the war of 1870. There were still a few tenth-year students,
still a few _rapins_, still a few _grisettes_, of a kind, lingering
within its precincts. But the war proved the final _coup de grâce_;
and the Quartier of the Third Republic with its _chic_ students, its
gambling hells, its _demi-monde_, its _filles de brasserie_, its garish
vulgarity, its mock propriety, has resembled the old one in little save
its studiousness, for, however much, for centuries past, its young men
may have amused themselves, whatever their eccentricities, whatever
their excesses, they have also studied, accumulated in that same
Quartier a rich store of scholarship and science, which has enabled
many of them to confer benefits on mankind.
Zola, then, knew the former Quartier in its last lingering hours, when
there were no longer any taverners who sold books for hard cash and
bought them back for a snack or a drink, but when old clo'men still
perambulated the streets, when La Californie and other _bibines_ still
existed on the confines, and when L'Académie, the grimy absinthe
den, still flourished in the Rue St. Jacques under the patronage
of _littérateurs_ who never wrote, painters who never painted, and
spurious students in law and medicine and what not besides. Those were
the men of whom one said: "When they are not talking they drink, when
they are not drinking they talk." How they lived nobody knew, but one
of them, a notorious character, who after a few glasses of absinthe
would improvise the most extraordinary comic songs with rattling tunes,
slept for some years in a stable. He was turned out of it one winter,
and a few days later was found frozen to death in the moat of the
fortifications near Montrouge.
Zola, for his part, indulged in no such bibulous dissipation, but
he elbowed it often enough. And in his distressful poverty, without
guide or support, it was fatal that he should turn to such consolation
as might be offered him. Thus he went the way of many another young
man dwelling in the Quartier, finding at last a companion for his
penury, not the ideal Ninon of whom he had dreamt in Provence, not the
Musette nor the Mimi whom Murger portrayed with the help rather of his
imagination than of his memory, but such a one as the Bohemia of the
time still had to offer.
A glimpse of his life at that moment is given in a few early newspaper
articles, and particularly in one of his first books, "La Confession
de Claude," which pictured the shameless immorality prevailing in
certain sets of the Quartier Latin, and the weakness that came upon
even a well-meaning young man when cast into such a sphere. At the same
time romance is blended with fact in the "Confession"; and it would be
quite a mistake to regard Claude's mistress, Laurence, as a portrait
of the young woman to whom Zola became attached. At the same time,
the aspirations of his nature are well revealed in that book, which
beneath some literary exaggeration remains instinct with the genuine
disappointment of one who has found the reality of love very different
from his dream of it.
Some passages are certainly autobiographical. The scene is a _maison
meublée_, which stood near the Pantheon, in the Rue Soufflot before
that street was widened and rebuilt. Zola betook himself thither
on being expelled from his glass cage near St. Étienne du Mont for
non-payment of rent. The house was tenanted by students, their
mistresses and other women, and the life led there was so riotous and
disorderly that more than once the police came down on the place and
removed some of the female tenants to the prison of St. Lazare. Here,
then, Zola gathered materials for "La Confession de Claude"; here he
elbowed his characters Jacques, Paquerette, Laurence, and Marie, while
sharing a life of the greatest privation with the companion who had
come to him. "Provence, the broad, sunlit country-side, the tears, the
laughter, the hopes, the dreams, the innocence and pride of the past
had all departed, only Paris with its mire, a garret and its misery,
remained."[5]
Again, real episodes find a place in the "Confession,"--memories of
early days, rambles in the valley of the Bièvre, amid the foetid stench
of that sewer-like stream and the acreous odour of its tanneries; the
first visit to the Closerie des Lilas, the disgust inspired there by
the sight of all the harlots with their paint, their cracked voices,
and their impudent gestures, and then the excursion through the waste
lands of Montrouge, the paths and fields of Arcueil and Bourg-la-Reine,
to Fontenay-aux-Roses, Sceaux, and the Bois de Verrières. But one
need not imagine that this trip was made with such a creature as the
callous, shameless, helpless Laurence, for, in recounting the episode
elsewhere, Zola expressed himself as follows:
"I thought of my last excursion to Fontenay-aux-Roses with the loved
one, the good fairy of my twentieth year. Springtime was budding into
birth, the path was bordered by large fields of violets.... _She_
leant on my arm, languishing with love from the sweet odour of the
flowers.... Deep silence fell from the heavens, and so faint was the
sound of our kisses that not a bird in all the hedges showed sign of
fear.... We ascended to the woods of Verrières, and there, in the grass
under the soft, fresh foliage, we discovered some tiny violets....
Directly I found a fresh one I carried it to her. She bought it of me,
and the price I exacted was a kiss.... And now amid the hubbub of the
Paris markets I thought of all those things, of all that happiness....
I remembered my good fairy, now dead and gone, and the little bouquet
of dry violets which I still preserve in a drawer. When I returned
home I counted their withered stems there were twenty, and over my lips
there passed the gentle warmth of my loved one's twenty kisses."[6]
The man who has lived with a Laurence--the creature who robs youth of
all its flame and degrades it to the mire--does not afterwards call her
his good fairy. But whatever the _liaison_, whatever its origin and its
ending, it was certainly marked by most distressful circumstances. As
the winter of 1861 approached, Zola's poverty became terrible. It was
then, as he afterwards told Guy de Maupassant,[7] that he lived for
days together on a little bread, which, in Provençal fashion, he dipped
in oil, that he set himself to catch sparrows from his window, roasting
them on a curtain rod; and that he "played the Arab," remaining indoors
for a week at a time, draped in a coverlet, because he had no garments
to wear. Not only did he himself starve, but the girl who shared his
poverty starved with him; and Paul Alexis and Maupassant and "Claude's
Confession" relate how, at one moment of desperation, on a bitter
winter evening, after an unbroken fast of thirty-six hours, he took off
his coat on the Place du Panthéon and bade his tearful companion carry
it to the pawnshop.
"It was freezing. I went home at the run, perspiring the while with
fear and anguish. Two days later my trousers followed my coat, and
I was bare. I wrapped myself in a blanket, covered myself as well as
possible, and took such exercise as I could in my room, to prevent my
limbs from stiffening. When anybody came to see me I jumped into bed,
pretending that I was indisposed."
Very little money can have been lent him on his few garments. He often
used to say in after-life that the only coat he possessed in that
year of misery ended by fading from black to a rusty green. Thus,
when he went hither and thither soliciting employment, he was very
badly received. "I gathered that people thought me too shabby. I was
told, too, that my handwriting was very bad; briefly, I was good for
nothing.... Good for nothing--that was the answer to my endeavours;
good for nothing--unless it were to suffer, to sob, to weep over my
youth and my heart. I had grown up dreaming of glory and fortune, I
awoke to find myself stranded in the mire."
But it is a long lane that has no turning. At the close of 1861, an
eminent medical man, Dr. Boudet of the Academy of Medicine, who had
either been connected with the Lycée St. Louis or had acted as one of
the examiners when Zola had attempted to secure a bachelor's degree,
gave the young man a letter of recommendation to M. Louis Hachette,
the founder of the well-known publishing business. Zola called at the
firm's offices, but, for the time, he could only obtain a promise of
the first suitable vacancy. Meantime, Dr. Boudet, moved by the sight
of his pitiable poverty, came to his help in an ingenious manner. On
the occasion of a new year the Parisians of the more prosperous classes
invariably exchange visiting cards, and the doctor asked Zola to
distribute those which he intended for his friends. At the same time
the worthy scientist slipped a twenty-franc piece into the young man's
hand as remuneration for his trouble. This discreetly veiled charity
at least saved Zola from actual starvation during the festive season;
but his heart remained heavy, and his feelings were not devoid of envy
when he found that several of the doctor's cards were addressed to the
prosperous parents of his former school-fellows at St. Louis.
However, a month later, February, 1862, he entered the "Bureau du
Matériel" at Hachette's establishment, his salary being fixed at a
hundred francs a month, an average of _2s. 8d._ per diem;[8] and his
duties, during the first few weeks, being confined to packing books for
delivery. A little later he was promoted to the advertising department,
with a slightly increased salary. He was now at least "assured of
daily bread. Naturally painstaking and conscientious, he had done with
Bohemia for ever; he had begun life, he was saved."[9]