In 1878, M. Zola, who had long been wishing for a place whither to
escape from the roar of Paris, bought a little property on the right
bank of the Seine, between Poissy and Meulan, where he built himself
the house which he still inhabits, and which he has made so famous.
Médan, the village in which this property is placed, is a very quiet
hamlet of less than two hundred inhabitants, absolutely unillustrious,
save that, according to tradition, Charles the Bold was baptised in
the font of its parish church. The river lies before it, with its rich
meadows, its poplars, its willow groves; a delicious and somnolent
air of peace hangs over it, though so close to Paris. Thither the
master’s particular friends and disciples soon began to gather: that
enthusiastic Boswell, M. Paul Aléxis; M. Guy de Maupassant, a stalwart
oarsman, in his skiff, from Rouen; others, whose names were soon to
come prominently forward in connection with that naturalistic school of
which M. Zola was the leader.
It was in 1880 that the little hamlet on the Poissy Road awoke to find
itself made famous by the publication of a volume which marks an epoch
in French literature, and still more in the history of the short story.
_Les Soirées de Médan_ was a manifesto by the naturalists, the most
definite and the most defiant which had up to that time been made. It
consisted of six short stories, several of which were of remarkable
excellence, and all of which awakened an amount of discussion almost
unprecedented. M. Zola came first with “L’Attaque du Moulin,” of which
a translation is here offered to the English public. The next story
was “Boule de Suif,” a veritable masterpiece in a new vein, by an
entirely new writer, a certain M. Guy de Maupassant, thirty years of
age, who had been presented to M. Zola, with warm recommendations,
by Gustave Flaubert. The other contributors were M. Henri Céard, who
also had as yet published nothing, a man who seems to have greatly
impressed all his associates, but who has done little or nothing to
justify their hopes. M. Joris Karel Huysmans, older than the rest, and
already somewhat distinguished for picturesque, malodorous novels; M.
Léon Hennique, a youth from Guadeloupe, who had attracted attention by
a very odd and powerful novel, _La Dévouée_, the story of an inventor
who murders his daughter that he may employ her fortune on perfecting
his machine; and finally, the faithful Paul Aléxis, a native, like
M. Zola himself, of Aix in Provence, and full of the perfervid
extravagance of the South. The thread on which the whole book is hung
is the supposition that these stories are brought to Médan to be read
of an evening to M. Zola, and that he leads off by telling a tale of
his own.
Nothing need be said here, however, of the works of those disciples
who placed themselves under the flag of Médan, and little of that
story in which, with his accustomed _bonhomie_ of a good giant, M.
Zola accepted their comradeship and consented to march with them. “The
Attack on the Windmill” is here offered to those who have not already
met with it in the original, and it is for our readers to estimate its
force and truth. Whenever M. Zola writes of war, he writes seriously
and well. Like the Julien of his late reminiscences, he has never
loved war for its own sake. He has little of the mad and pompous
chivalry of the typical Frenchman in his nature. He sees war as the
disturber, the annihilator; he recognises in it mainly a destructive,
stupid, unintelligible force, set in motion by those in power for the
discomfort of ordinary beings, of workers like himself. But in the
course of three European wars--those of his childhood, of his youth, of
his maturity--he has come to see beneath the surface, and in his latest
novel, _La Débâcle_, he almost agrees with our young Jacobin poets of
one hundred years ago, that Slaughter is God’s daughter.
In this connection, and as a commentary on “The Attack on the
Windmill,” we may commend the three short papers appended to this
story to the earnest attention of readers. Nothing on the subject has
been written more picturesque, nor, in its simple way, more poignant,
than the chain of reminiscences called “Three Wars.” Whether Louis and
Julien existed under those forms, or whether the episodes which they
illustrate are fictitious, matters little or nothing. The brothers are
natural enough, delightful enough, to belong to the world of fiction,
and if their story is, in the historical sense, true, it is one of
those rare instances in which fact is better than fancy. The crisis
under which the timid Julien, having learned the death of his spirited
martial brother, is not broken down, but merely frozen into a cold
soldierly passion, and spends the remainder of the campaign--he, the
poet, the nestler by the fireside, the timid club-man--in watching
behind hedges for Prussians to shoot or stab, is one of the most
extraordinary and most interesting that a novelist has ever tried
to describe. And the light that it throws on war as a disturber of
the moral nature, as a dynamitic force exploding in the midst of an
elaborately co-related society, is unsurpassed, even by the studies
which Count Lyof Tolstoi has made in a similar direction. It is
unsurpassed, because it is essentially without prejudice. It admits
the discomfort, the horrible vexation and shame of war, and it tears
aside the conventional purple and tinsel of it; but at the same time it
admits, not without a sigh, that even this clumsy artifice may be the
only one available for the cleansing of the people.