Emile Zola’s father, François Zola, was a Venetian engineer who came to Paris in 1830, when opportunity beckoned. France having gone some way toward recuperating from the economic devastation brought about by Napoleon’s far-flung campaigns, 1830 opened an era of rapid industrial development during which factories would multiply, markets would expand, railroad lines would radiate from the capital. There were huge prizes to be won exploiting the new technology and Zola soon found investors who liked his entrepreneurial zeal. Imaginative, versatile, and tenacious in the pursuit of wealth, he could as easily devise fortifications for Paris as turn out plans for a modern port at Marseille. But until 1838, no such large venture made it past the drawing board. Against an old-boy network of French engineers whose influence reached into the ministry that sanctioned public works, a foreigner fought at unequal odds.
In 1838, fortune finally smiled. Aix-en-Provence awarded him a contract to build a dam for collecting water in the Infernets gorge not far from Mont Sainte-Victoire and channeling it through the perenially drought-stricken countryside below. Several months later, at age forty-four, he married a nineteen-year-old Parisian girl of working-class background named Emilie Aubert, who, on April 2, 1840, bore him a son. It was 1843 before he felt sufficiently confident that the project would receive official authorization to lead his family south. In Aix they rented a large house just outside the city wail that had once been the domicile of Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers. There Zola spent several more years conducting geodetic surveys, placating impatient creditors, and battling landlords opposed to a canal running across their property.
Success eluded him again. On February 4, 1847, the day work began in the Infernets gorge, where winter winds knife down from the Massif Central, Zola caught cold and six weeks later died of what was diagnosed as pleurisy. Aix buried him with all the pomp and ceremony it could stage for a citizen on whom devolved something of the magical power that Provençaux formerly invested in rainmaking saints. “He fell on arriving at the goal,” declared one eulogist at the grave. “Just as he was about to crown his work, he succumbed in the prime of life, without having gathered the fruit of his long and painful labors.”
What Emilie Zola gathered was wormwood, for soon after Francois died the canal company went backrupt owing to the manipulations of a shareholder named Jules Migeon, and her stock, which should have made her a rich widow, made her an obstinate plaintiff instead. Debt-ridden, she initiated legal action against Migeon. The suit, with its unfavorable judgments and hopeless appeals, lasted so long that by 1854 even sympathizers looked at her askance. Rejecting as unworthy of her an estate more modest than the one she had come to anticipate, Emilie sought not only her just portion but redress of the greater wrong life had done her when she found herself widowed at twenty-seven, demoted from “respectable” society, and thrust once more upon her parents, who helped her run the household. Had she settled with Migeon, she could have settled with misfortune. She chose to fight it, and thus created a substitute for marriage in litigation that became her raison d’être. Why Emile Zola’s novels should often feature a young man enamored of some woman whom he could rescue from the ghost or demonic spirit to which she feels bound is not altogether mysterious. Rescue fantasies in which he figured as rescuer had been his daily fare long before books and theater acquainted him with the various forms they took as a convention of romantic literature. He found his decisive model at Aix, where Emilie held fast, like the old woman in Bleak House who lives near High Chancery Court with her caged birds, waiting for an end to the endless Jarndyce case.
Caged was how nineteenth-century witnesses often portray themselves in Aix. Indeed, a wall three kilometers long, overgrown with ivy and gillyflowers, ran around the town. It served no practical purpose of course, but when councilmen ridiculed it in 1848 as an excrescence, traditionalists rallied against those who would defile the city’s sacred past. To them it was all that stood between their dream life and reality, between an ancien régime they kept embalmed and forces astir in the world outside. “It is not love of work we lack, nor intelligence,” observed one Aixois in 1840. “What we lack is desire for material development, for the implementation of practical ideas.” Among the gentry, such unstriving had become a mark of honor that distinguished Aixois from vulgar Marseillais. As Marseille waxed into a great commercial hub, Aix waned into a backwater whose few, energetic citizens did their best to advance the unlikely proposition that, given some encouragement, it might yet be roused from sleep. Encouragement was not given. Every major railroad line across Provence skirted Aix, and its numerous hostelries, which reflected the position it once occupied at a nexus of trade routes in southeastern France, closed one by one, or survived on the clientele that came to its hot springs with circulatory ailments. This eclipse left it without the capacity to replenish itself, for its death rate rose in mid-century well above its birth rate. Had Napoleon I visited total war on another generation, the effect could not have been much more grievous. Country girls found employment in Aix’s rich households, but young men, unless they fancied working as tanners, or picking tobacco leaves and almonds, or skinning rabbits for felt, migrated south to Marseille. Monastic orders, every variety of which had its chapter there, did not lack initiates, and widows seeking out small lives abounded. A stillness hung over the city, an air of dereliction especially remarkable in the aristocratic neighborhood, where, midway through Louis Philippe’s reign, old, impoverished nobles still had themselves carried to one another’s town-houses in sedan chairs. On entering Aix, the visitor might feel that he had entered a kind of time warp. Turned in upon itself, it waited out each season much as it had the season before, under the immutable hulk of Mont Sainte-Victoire.
Emilie lived outside the wall until 1852. Soon after Francois died, she left her house on the impasse Silvacanne, which had become too expensive, and found another at the tiny hamlet called Pont-de Beraud, half a kilometer northeast of Aix, where Emile had fields to wander in. Stricken during the winter of 1846-47 by some undiagnosed illness grave enough to have required the application of vesicants, he looked a weakling, pale and slender, with one droopy eyelid. Madame Aubert and Emilie, who recognized this tic for what it was, tried to mitigate the effects of the terrible blow he had received in losing his father by cosseting him as much as possible. Their own isolation in a province that usually gave Northerners, or “Franciots,” short shrift, made them the more aware of abuse to which his Parisian accent and a slight speech defect (he pronounced “s” as “t”) might subject him at school, so they kept him out. He had turned eight and not yet learned even the rudiments of reading and writing before they could bring themselves to have him enrolled at the “pension Notre Dame,” a small boarding school presumably stronger in catechism than in other subjects, whose master, Monsieur Isoard, did, however, wean him on La Fontaine.
Of his term at Isoard’s establishment Zola recalled only how he often played truant to join two friends named Philippe Solari and Marius Roux on frolics through the countryside. In 1851, another dislocation occurred when Emilie had him accompany her to Paris, where they spent some months with her brother Adolphe Aubert, who was the concierge at 2, Place Saint-Michel. By now it had become obvious that Emile, for all his alertness, would vegetate unless taken firmly in hand, but proper schooling at a lycée or a collège required money, and the tuition that barred ninety-five percent of French children from higher education was beyond Madame Zola’s means, especially after the canal company discontinued her stipend. She therefore entered him at the College Bourbon in Aix with some hope of being able in due course to exploit the good will François Zola had stored up for her among influential men. “The mayor read a request from Madame Zola, widow of the engineer who . . . planned the canal that bears his name,” read the municipal council minutes of July 22, 1854. “She solicits a scholarship to secondary school on behalf of his son and hopes, she writes, that the council will show its benevolence by awarding it as posthumous compensation for services her husband rendered to the city of Aix.” Whatever pain it cost her to go begging, at least Zola would not have this experience to draw upon later in life for proof of his observation that “in the provinces people show fallen families no mercy.” Aix’s municipal council came through with a scholarship.
Emile entered the College Bourbon as an interne, or boarder. Madame Zola yielded him reluctantly to his new world (for, as she often told him, he was “her only consolation”) and took modest quarters on the rue Bellegarde, across town from the school, so that she could see him every day in a parlor reserved for such interviews. Having always had a room to himself, Emile was now cast among forty other boarders, each with his little iron bed and footlocker. As he soon discovered, the educational theory that held sheer discomfort to be a sine qua non of the tempering process whereby boys become young men had its exponents at the College Bourbon, which formerly housed nuns. In winter, his own body heat was all he had to keep him warm, and classroom recitations generated clouds of vapor. Nor did it promote a sense of well-being to study below street level in ill-lit rooms called salles d’étude, where humidity stripped whitewash off the walls. Worst of all for Emile, whose emotional balance would always hinge as much on what he ate as on what he wrote, the food dished out was so unpalatable that his fellow inmates occasionally ran amock over it. “Ah, what cuisine! Even now I feel nauseated to think of it,” he reminisced many years later. “To be sure, the quantity was sufficient, for one could have one’s fill of bread, but the quality left something to be desired. I remember horrible dishes, before which I stoicly munched my dry bread, and, among others, a strange codfish stew that poisoned the mould . . . . We made up for it with bread, we stuffed crusts in our pocket and ate them in class and on the playground. During the six years I remained there, I was hungry.”
Emile’s classmates, those who came from Aix, were likely to be the children of notaries or lawyers, since aristocratic families traditionally bound their young over to the Jesuit order or to the Frères Gris. They struck him as an indolent lot puffed with assurance that their fathers’ practices would one day devolve upon them, no matter how poorly they did at school. “On leaving school, they would graduate directly from our benches to the old family armchair and sit behind a desk where some ancestor had begun his fortune.” The greater number of pupils were country boys, typically the sons of rich farmers eager to have them acquire some polish, who arrived like Charles Bovary in hobnailed boots from the Var region or the Basses-Alpes wondering why, and never finding an answer. “Almost all of them had skulls harder than the rocks on which they had grown,” wrote Zola. “Many exhibited a true horror of books. I knew one in particular whose brain could not be made to hold three straight ideas. He spent days in the calm and ponderous attitude of an ox digesting food, with big, vacant eyes that would fix on the teacher as if he understood, when in fact his mind was absent. Not everyone was quite so stupid, but intelligent boys were the exception.” After several years at the Collège Bourbon, they would leave Aix imperceptibly less cloddish for having been invited to model themselves on the ideal of human excellence drawn by Plutarch and Corneille.
An honor roll posted in the room where she met with him told Madame Zola that her son regularly achieved distinction as one of the school’s best students. Having entered in the eighth form, somewhat behind his age group, he won high marks at the end of his first year and skipped a form. What hopes and expectations rested on this academic enterprise were made quite clear to Emile, who, though he was by no means bereft of humor, already mantled himself in the deep seriousness that became his usual demeanor. “My mother and grandmother had taken me more and more into their confidence as I grew up, acquainting me with their many worries; and besides, I could see for myself that the poverty of our home was always increasing, and that I should some day be entirely dependent on my own efforts.” While hardships at home nurtured in him the idea, even without Madame Zola having to articulate it (which she did), that he must shoulder his father’s dropped burden, at school a tacit bargain with his municipal benefactors required that he prove himself worthy of the dispensation they granted him because he was his father’s son. On other boys, who never questioned their inheritance, the past had conferred proprietary rights to a world that awaited them, like the armchair in the office. Where Emile was concerned, the past had receded, leaving him stranded in a harsh moral environment with nothing that was his except the wrack of debts for which he felt—and would indeed always feel—responsible.
We can imagine how frail Emile’s self-esteem must have been during childhood from the despair that engulfed him much later, following the death of a literary father-surrogate, Flaubert, when everything he himself had accomplished suddenly seemed inane. His predicament brought him little sympathy at school, however, and an abundant literature testifies to the unkind treatment scholarship boys received from classmates who were keenly aware of all social and economic insignia. To be sure, Zola, in his one consequential memoir on the College Bourbon, which appeared soon after the great success he had had with L’Assommoir, saw fit to remember life there as a kind of Darwinian free-for-all that toughened him for the contests Paris held in store. Social station, he wrote, was forgotten in a “democratic” melee where physical strength decided rank, and the brawny yokel rather than the young patrician ended up lording it over the playground. “Nothing can replace this communal education that transforms the child into a man. Let him beat and be beaten, let him suffer and mete out punishment, let him do what must be done to acquire solid limbs and a strong heart. . . . Boys raised at home in their mothers’ skirts remain girls . . . . The collège fortifies well-constituted natures.” But what the play ground democracy hid, if it hid anything at all, was a snobbish society that ragged the boursier for living on alms. Zola’s own friend, Marius Roux, made much of this in a novel entitled Eugénie Lamour and his knowledge came from Aix of course, where, in 1857, the inspector general, after visiting the College Bourbon, observed that “the regrettable facility with which parents place significant sums of money at the disposal of students” undermined the principal’s ability to exercise his moral custodianship.
At unguarded moments later, when Zola parted the curtain he had drawn, a different picture emerges, in which the virile initiation glorified above is seen to have been a psychological ordeal that scored deep wounds. More painful even than the undemocratic taunts hurled at him—“beggar,” “parasite”—were the assaults on his modesty by roughnecks who lost no time discovering how shy he was and making him the butt of jokes. “Let us remember how it was at secondary school. Vices had fertile ground, so that one lived in true Roman putrescence. Any cloistered association of people who belong to the same sex is morally reprehensible,” he wrote in 1870, and the Goncourts report him lamenting on one occasion that “I had a perverted youth in a wretched provincial school. Yes, a rotten childhood!”
Since the Collège Bourbon was surely neither Sparta in its glory nor Rome in its decline, an incident that took place long before Zola entered school will perhaps explain something of what compelled him to reflect upon his experience in such drastic terms. It is described in a report filed by the Marseille police on April 3, 1845: “We conducted to the Palace of Justice a person named Mustapha, 12 years old, a native of Algiers and a domestic in the service of Monsieur Zola, civil engineer, no. 4, rue de l’Arbre, who committed indecent assault (attentat à la pudeur) on the young Emile Zola, 5 years old.” Did this distressing event, which must have occurred on his birthday, brand him with a sense of punitive apparatus society was prepared to mobilize against sexual miscreants?[1] It would seem so. Zola’s moralistic outbursts later in life suggest that the guardian his father had been to him in life became, after death, the prosecutor from whose indignation Emile drew strength, even in turning that indignation against himself. Robbed as he was of masculine assurance when his father died, he found manliness in the rectitude that obliged him to stand aloof and incriminate all those feelings aroused by the hurly-burly, except violent ones. This conflict reached into every corner of his life. It shaped a paradoxical figured haunted by catastrophic visions of libido on the loose, who rejoiced in his power yet suffered from paralyzing stage fright, who created erotic cynosures only to destroy them, who kept himself hidden while craving love. But the outsider locked outside himself was already present at twelve. “My years in collège were a time of tears,” says the hero of his strongly autobiographical novel, La Confession de Claude. “I had in me the pride of loving natures. I was not loved because I was not known and I refused to make myself known.” One witness remembered him as “the stubbornly unsocial, melancholy sort other kids detest.”
What saved Emile from the plight of his tearful character, Claude, was the friendship that sprang up, soon after he arrived at the Collège Bourbon, between himself and a large, ungainly boy fourteen months older than he named Paul Cézanne, who was quick to detect a kindred spirit in the pariah everyone else thought ridiculous for speak: ing Parisian French. “Opposed by nature, but drawn to each other by secret affinities, by the throes of a common ambition, by the awakening in them of a superior intelligence for which the mob of dunces regularly thrashed them,” Zola would write in L’Oeuvre of two boys closely resembling Paul and himself, “they instantly formed a permanent bond.” This vulnerable pair became a less vulnerable threesome when in due course they won the allegiance of another schoolmate, Jean-Baptistin Bailie, whose parents ran a hotel on the Cours Sextius that catered to patrons of the bathing establishments next door.
Although all the afflictions that originated in Francois Zola’s death encouraged Emile to feel peculiarly the victim of malign fate, his friendship with Paul Cézanne taught him that having a father, and even a rich father, could prove as onerous as losing one. Louis-Auguste Cézanne, who came from a long line of Provencal artisans, began his fortune in the felt-hat trade at Aix, where rabbits were far more numerous than people. After apprenticing with a Parisian hatter during the early 1820s, he joined two Aixois in business and soon established his reputation as a shrewd merchant for whom Gui-zot’s commandment “Enrichissez-vous!” was worth the decalogue. Resentful of Aix’s privileged class, he saw to it that doors shut against him should be double-bolted by declaring himself a Republican, but this exclusion did not affect the firm of Martin, Coupin and Cézanne, which had made its partners rich when they bade one another farewell in 1845. Three years later history vindicated Louis-Auguste. The failure of Aix’s one bank in the economic debacle that attended the 1848 revolution gave him an opportunity to have his idle fortune work him up another fortune. With local entrepreneurs facing ruin for want of credit, the hat exporter became a financier and did inordinately well at it even before France’s resurgence under Napoleon III.
Because, as a typical crotchet, he wore untanned leather boots to spare himself the expense and trouble of having them polished, some contemporaries saw in him a Père Grandet, and indeed, Louis-Auguste, like Balzac’s character, held his family in a tight fist. Begrudging them title not only to his name and money but to civil dignity, he would not marry the woman by whom he had already sired two children until 1844, when Paul was five and his sister Marie was three. That this irregular menage isolated them in a town whose inhabitants piously clucked over it served at once to justify his aversion for society and to reinforce his authority in the household. Every transaction with the outside world was closely monitored by him, and marriage inspired no essential reform, as one gathers from what is generally taken to be a portrayal of the Cézanne household in Zola’s La Conquête de Plassans:
Marthe loved her husband with a sober un-impassioned love, but with her affection was mingled considerable fear of his jokes and pleasantries, his perpetual teasing. She was hurt, too, by his selfishness, and the loneliness in which he left her; she felt a vague grudge against him for the quietude in which she lived—that very manner of life she said made her happy. When she spoke of him, she said, “He is very good to us. You’ve heard him, I daresay, get angry at times, but that arises from his passion for seeing everything in order, which he often carries to an almost ridiculous extreme. He gets quite vexed if he sees a flowerpot a little out of place in the garden or a plaything lying about on the floor; but in other matters he does quite right in pleasing himself. I know he is not very popular, because he has managed to accumulate some money and still goes on doing a good stroke of business now and then; but he only laughs at what people say about him.”
With his passion for order, getting the goods on those around him whether kin or client, came naturally to Louis-Auguste, and intercepting letters was one of the strategies he would employ.
Paul’s delicate sensibility did not earn him high marks from Cézanne père. The earliest manifestations of it were greeted with such derision that he sought refuge near his mother, Elisabeth (born Aubert, curiously enough), a young woman capable of recognizing as worthwhile certain endeavors whose principal reward lay elsewhere than in the acquisition of money or power. Though she herself had not had any formal schooling, she nonetheless managed to blunt the edge of her husband’s aggressive materialism. Paul grew up betwixt and between. “A quiet and docile student, he worked hard; he had a good mind, but did not reveal any remarkable qualities,” his sister recalled. “He was criticized for his weakness of character; probably he allowed himself to be influenced too easily.” Being unable, on the one hand, to square his mind with the values his father promoted and, on the other, to stop craving legitimation, he could do nothing to avoid Louis-Auguste’s terrible barbs. Far more grievous than the social disrepute into which he found himself born was this sense of internecine failure, which would urge him before long to make repeated, foredoomed, and humiliating overtures to the Salon jury. Submission followed by rage then by self-doubt became his lifelong itinerary, so that every departure from Aix ended with him coming home again, like a prisoner travelling at the end of a rope, to collect his allowance and to lay his unsuccess before Louis-Auguste, as if in hostile tribute. “Cézanne has many spells of discouragement. Despite the scorn he affects for glory, I see that he desires to succeed. When he does badly, he speaks of nothing less than of returning to Aix and making himself a clerk in a commercial house,” Zola would observe in 1861, during Cézanne’s first such venture abroad. Zola would also have occasion to note, early in their friendship, how quickly the impressionable stuff of which Paul was made could harden under criticism, and form a shell. Indeed, around his “faults” he built his most durable defenses. His dishevelment, for example, brought him frequent reprimands, but unkempt he remained, and the mess a painter makes may have been for him a secretly compelling attraction of his trade.
Paul and Emile found little understanding among those men who taught them at the Collège Bourbon.
Paul and Emile found little understanding among those men who taught them at the Collège Bourbon. Both boys demonstrated enough facility within the classical curriculum, winning highest honors—Paul in Latin, Emile in French narration—that it would perhaps have required a sharp eye to see them as desperately wanting emotional support, and the typical high school teacher in Second Empire France was not recruited on the basis of his discernment. “[Masters] taught four hours a day and had no other relationship with the students,” wrote Zola. Whatever he thought and observed outside school, during those four hours, for which the state paid him meager wages, the master was to be as anachronistic as a Roman grammaticus, with the inevitable result that many of them, unless they could manage a double life, lost either their intellectual curiosity or their livelihood. “In the provinces the intellectual level of masters is rather low,” Zola went on to say in the late 1870s, when such issues were publicly discussed.
They drift along in the classical routine and know nothing beyond it. The machine functions and it works today because it worked yesterday. . . . [My masters] had gone grey repeating their own knowledge and they instructed us in much the same way I imagine our grandfathers had been taught. Wandering in their heads were three or four ideas on which they made do from October to July. Immured in their little town, they hardly knew what was happening outside . . . . For all that, the ones I recall were remarkable men who cannot be faulted for the narrowness of their horizon and their blind submission to programs.
Had blame been fairly apportioned, the major share would have fallen on a system that made them regard themselves as clocklike agents of central authority, for when they strayed from a curriculum devised by functionaries who seemed to believe that school should keep young minds ignorant of the modern world, and the teacher ignorant of young minds, an inspector called them to account. In consequence of this, wrote Zola, they acquired, especially in the provinces, the ponderous deportment of people who turn everlastingly in the same circle, “like horses at a riding academy.” Resentment at having been buried in a remote province or hypersensitivity born of the ingratitude children showed them for the task they performed gave a distinctive coloration to those whom Zola could recall. “[One master] nursed a mortal grudge against me because one day, when I hadn’t learned my Greek grammar lesson, I dared explain to him, with a schoolboy’s candor, that Greek served no purpose in life. I’m not sure where that came from, but our pedagogue was in high dudgeon and persecuted me all year long for my unfortunate reflection.”
Since his unfortunate reflection ran counter to dogma around which the bourgeoisie chose to groom its young, Emile received condign punishment. The more acquisitive and mobile French society became, the more anxiously did the haute-bourgeoisie insist on classical humanities as a prerequisite for admission to the cultural body politic. Thus we find Louis Napoleon’s minister of education, Hippolyte Fortoul, declaring in the early 1850s that “the explication of Latin and Greek authors, on which our literary studies are based, remains the essential part of classwork; to it must be devoted every moment one can shave off other exercises.” Never had it seemed more urgent than during the aftermath of revolution, when Bonapartist parvenus joined forces with an older establishment against “socialism,” to enforce this pedagogical strategy, whose raison d’être derived in some degree from its very hermeticism.
The inspector general—an unusually enlightened one—who wrote in the 1850s that a physics course given at the Collège Bourbon “sins on the experimental side, owing partly to the want of scientific collections” corroborated Zola’s memory of having been educated under a regime in which masters honored the precept that education would not deserve its name if it addressed material realities too familiarly. A wedge was driven there, and the same wedge that kept them aloof from nature served to discourage them from holding conversation with a baser or intimate self. Hence the importance of oratorical exercises modeled after the Roman progymnasmata, which had students imitate “great men” the better to have them recover from childhood, rather as in those courtly plays staged at insane asylums by eighteenth-century alienists the lunatic performed elevated roles on the theory that such mimetism could render him whole again. Ancient Rome furnished most of the exemplars, but even exemplars sometimes fell short of themselves, so that schoolmen had recourse to excerpta or skirted trouble altogether by producing texts such as De viris illustribus, which conveyed a certain ideal of classical virtue more exactly than the genuine literature. When they trained their high-minded-ness on French, what came of it was a syllabus containing no work written before the seventeenth century or since the eighteenth. For his baccalaureat examination Emile would need only Bossuet, Fénelon, Massillon, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, and La Fontaine, and nothing by these authors that the Ministry of Public Instruction deemed risqué. Thus, pious regard for the classics did not extend to Racine’s profane theater, to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, to Voltaire’s philosophical tales.
In Paris, a boy could hardly walk to the lycée (or, if he boarded there, escape for a day) without having images of the modern world imprinted on his mind. His counterpart found something quite different at Aix where, after Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, which had excited rebellion in villages throughout that region, a gerontocracy pettifogging under cover of civic idealism administered municipal business as if it were Latin class. How matters stood may be judged from the addres delivered by Mayor Rigaud in honor of Louis Napoleon, whose state visit on September 29, 1852, occasioned a one-hundred-and-one-gun salute, general cries of Vive l’empereur, and a spectacle of medieval pageantry that must have made some considerable impression on Emile, newly enrolled at the College Bourbon. “The city of Aix, which you deign to visit, was formerly the capital of Provence, the abode of a king, and the fatherland of valiant knights and troubadors,” Rigaud declared when a Provencal drum corps had finished taboring its rendition of Partant pour la Syrie.[2] “Having fallen from its former splendor, it consoled itself with scholarship and love for arts and letters. It remained all the while faithful to the ideas of order, of authority, and of power. Prince, today you are the representative of these ideas in France; the national will has on two solemn occasions summoned you to the government of the country. We are happy to have maintained these fine feelings in our heart so as to lay them at your feet in tribute.” The Mémorial d’Aix quoted this speech as evidence that Aix, if it could not rival Marseille in the opulence of its salutation, welcomed the Prince-President with greater “calm” and “dignity.”
Dignity prevented Mayor Rigaud from reminding his honored guest that Aix’s eclipse had been hastened during the regime of Napoleon I, when an ex-Jacobin prefect named Delacroix, who denounced Aix as “the Coblenz of the Midi” (i.e., a refuge for aristocrats) betook himself to Marseille, prefecture and all. But Rigaud was also mindful of the fact that in his aristocratic phase Napoleon curried favor with Aix by restoring to it the high court it lost after the dissolution of its Parlement in 1789. Sooner than risk another such loss—for rulers could take away what rulers gave, and the city relied on its judicial function as much as any company town on its mine or mill—Aixois made “order” a watchword. Louis Napoleon had nothing to fear from this quarter, which behaved so obsequiously that even the prudent Mémorial d’Aix called attention to it on February 3, 1856, in an article whose author lamented: “If one wished to depict with exactitude its spiritual state, our city could fairly be compared to a dead sea where the tide of public spirit flows quiet beneath a leaden atmosphere that constricts blood vessels and dampens the will.”
The poet Frédéric Mistral claimed that behind closed doors, in the great mansions they had bought from ruined nobles, Aix’s dynasts led a spirited social life, with balls and musicales and meetings of various “cercles” organized around professional interest or political persuasion; Those who did not belong, however, tended to feel about Aix as Guizot had in 1837, when he observed that patrons of the thermal establishment, while curing their physical ills, fell ill of boredom. Prévost-Paradol, the future academician whose distinguished career in letters included a brief stint at Aix’s Faculté des Lettres during the 1850s, after he graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, wrote to his friend Suckau in Paris: “You cannot imagine the forlorn aspect of this little town, its solitude, the decay of these great somber houses and these vast empty apartments.” Such was its Lethe-like influence that the rejection of a manuscript, which would formerly have made him distraught, left him indifferent, and he could imagine himself being led down a “mossy path to extinction” in perfect numbness. On his successor at the Faculté des Lettres, J. J. Weiss, the anesthesia did not take effect quite so easily. “I have been in many cities, I have never seen any as difficult to get used to as this one,” he wrote to Prevost-Paradol in 1857. “In your country house, on the pear tree where I am told you liked to perch, you were not, so to speak, in Aix. The real Aix is no. 20 rue Villeverte, and nowhere outside Mazas [a prison in Paris] can being be so dreary! I shall resign myself, but it will require mighty resignation or potent laziness.” Had it been some other city, Weiss might have forgiven Aix’s theater the dirty white walls that put Prévost-Paradol in mind of an assizes court and the “Choral Society of Apollo” its off-pitch crooning and the backwardness of an old dame who, to make ends meet, sold eggs from poultry in the garden of her eighteenth-century townhouse, where she lived among valuable antiques. As it was, they seemed so much of a piece with the general decrepitude that he could only wish himself gone from what he called “this mausoleum” of the ancient régime.
Zola’s recollections imply that during adolescence, in the shadow cast by Francois Zola’s tombstone, which stood on a rise just beyond his school, he, too, found Aix inhospitable to the living. Life went on, of course, and those recollections sometimes, almost apologetically, yield a vignette that shows Emile as a boy doing what normal boys did if they grew up in provincial France. But the images Zola drew in his fiction and essays are overwhelmingly images of confinement or exile. Grass pushing up between the cobblestones, guards double-locking the massive wooden gates at 10:00 P.M. in winter and at 11 in summer, barricaded mansions, parish bells stirring the drowsy air every half-hour all evoke a moribund town where even the church stood on its last legs. To witness the Fête-Dieu, which featured a procession of citizens in the high, pointed hoods of medieval penitents, was to see “a lame Catholicism dragging itself beneath the blue heaven of old beliefs.” And nothing had replaced it, no faith or idea that could hoist men above the belfries and alert them to some new horizon. “Of course one finds serious students who read the papers and new books, and wax enthusiastic over new ideas, but they are so utterly lost in the crowd that one must consider them anomalous,” Zola wrote in later years. “I speak here about the majority and this majority wallow satisfied in complete ignorance: no reading, no literary or philosophical passions, no interest in the ideas that preoccupy the modern world.”
The ache of confinement begot rich fantasies of escape, so that any nomad for whom Aix was just one more way station on the road to distant climes might serve as his Pied Piper. Gypsies first of all. They lived in wagons near the impasse Sylvacanne outside town and Emile, though tales he had heard warned against visiting their encampment, felt a lure compounded of dread, recalcitrance, and fascination with the exotic women who kindled dreams that intramural life did not admit. “I saw ravishingly beautiful creatures there,” he wrote in an autobiographical section of Nouveaux contes à Ninon. “We young scamps who didn’t share the revulsion of proper folk would peek into the caravans where these people sleep during the winter, and I remember that one day, when my heart was heavy with some schoolboy grief, I dreamed of climbing into one of those departing wagons, of going off with those tall, beautiful girls whose black eyes scared me, of going far away, to the end of the earth, rolling forever along highways.” Highways brought another nomadic breed in the soldier, and beginning in 1854 soldiers filed through en route to Marseille and thence by ship to the Crimea. While peacetime traffic went around Aix, war offered it a grandstand view of the splendid army on whose exploits against Russia Louis-Napoleon counted to legitimize his reign. In fact most Aixois found this spectacle objectionable, for even if the government had not required as the price of admission that each citizen billet a man or two, regiments mustering at dawn cost them sleep. Lost sleep did not greatly trouble the young, however, and by 4 A.M. youths would have lined up along the Cours to watch a breathtaking sequence of cuirassiers, lancers, hussards, and dragoons. With the drumroll, they, too, moved forward, they including Emile, who had ceased to be a boarder after his first year at the College Bourbon. “We’d follow them on the wide, white roads,” Zola wrote. “I remember walking for miles. We’d march in rhythm, our books cinched to our backs like cartridge-pouches. We weren’t supposed to accompany the soldiers beyond the gunpowder magazine, but we’d trespass as far as the bridge, then up a slope, then on to the next village.”
Before long Emile would no longer need the licence of patriotic fervor to venture abroad. As they reached mid-adolescence, he, Paul Cézanne, and Jean-Baptistin Bailie, whom schoolmates dubbed “the inseparables,” consolidated their threesome in excursions that saw them go hiking through the countryside or, during the summer, bathe nude in the Arc river where it meandered under dense foliage south of town. “These were flights far from the world, an instinctive absorption in the kindly bosom of nature, an unreasoning act of worship of trees, water, mountains which purchased us the boundless joy of being alone and free,” he wrote in L’Oeuvre. The wild terrain François Zola had once surveyed became the playground in which Emile staked out his own claim on the world. Five miles up the Bibemus road and high above Aix he could encompass it all: an immense sky with sunlight glinting off the ferrous-red earth from which stone for Aix’s mansions had been quarried, pine trees braced in grotesque postures against the Mistral, chalk hills cupping a lake formed by the dam that finally stood complete eight years after its architect’s death, and the dam itself, spanning a cleft known as the Infernets gorge. Bibemus was one of their favorite itineraries. Another, to the south, took them along the route du Tholonet as far as a lovely hamlet of that name where they would pause for lunch and then resume their whimsical course down gullies or over the low walls that crisscrossed sheep meadows. When game season came, they packed guns, though no one among them could shoot straight and least of all Emile, who discovered at sixteen from not being able to read public notices how myopic he was. Their pleasure lay rather in the romp through lavender and gorse and thyme, in the expectant quiet of the hunter’s blind, the crunch of chalk dust underfoot, in mutton roasted on a spit, in the poems unfit for academic consumption of Hugo and Musset, which they heard themselves declaim to one another, subversively. Night would often have overtaken them before they saw Aix again and reduced to a spectral presence Mont Sainte-Victoire, the great crop of which kept constant watch over the vagabonds, aligning and crowning every point of view.
Several decades later, when Zola had written novels that exhale nostalgia for the Provençal garrigue and Cézanne was hauling his easel and colors up Bibemus road all year round in an obsessive tete-a-tete with the mountain. One could better appreciate the importance their peregrinations had had. Nature helped them feel good about themselves as they shook off the image of misfits to cultivate a sense of their grandiose singularity. Once the city disappeared, so for the time being did humiliations and problems that lurked therein. “With every return, [we succumbed to] the delicious vacancy of fatigue, a triumphant boastfulness over having walked farther than the previous time, the rapture of feeling carried forward by [our] momentum and by the brisk cadence of some fierce soldiers’ song, which rocked [us] as in the depths of a dream” was how Zola remembered this virile camaraderie. No doubt the experience did mobilize some unconscious or half-conscious fantasy to the extent that it derived its power from associations with the soldier-engineer in whose footsteps he felt himself “carried forward,” like a sleepwalker. It’s as if two fathers with discrete spheres of influence inhabited Emile, one holding him back, the other rallying him on, one emblemizing his frailty, the other being a kind of demiurge who made him vigorous. Which would gain the upper hand at any given moment was nothing he could safely predict, but his memoirs suggest that during such rambles the future chef de bande began to assert himself. He celebrated friendship, he nattered about life, he read his own verse, he defended dreams and had enough energy left over to support the weak-kneed Paul when hopelessness overwhelmed him, or when what Zola called “the evil demon” lay hold of him. “When he hurts you, you must not blame his heart, but rather the evil demon that clouds his thought,” Zola would caution Bailie. “He has a heart of gold and is a friend who can understand us, for he is just as mad as we, and just as much a dreamer.” So completely had their initial roles been reversed that Paul, standing head and shoulders taller than Emile, behaved like his silent shadow.
Paul’s cruel outbursts proclaimed, among other things, his exasperation with the authority he himself vested in Emile, and for once he was seconded by Louis-Auguste, who didn’t want rivals. Emile, in turn, used this authority to redress the balance between Paul’s material ease, which might otherwise have galled him, and his own humble circumstances. “Brotherhood,” as they described their friendship, was a commotion of the sublime and the unavowable. It often saw them cleave together until dawn feverishly sorting through ideas for some one eternal verity that would put everything right in “an infallible and complete religion.” It also armed them against fears neither could cope with alone, and particularly the fear of women. “Timid and maladroit, they banned woman herself [from their jaunts] and made their flaws out to be an austere virtue that marked them as superior,” wrote Zola in L’Oeuvre. “For two years Claude was consumed with love for a milliner’s apprentice, whom he trailed every evening and never had the courage to address. Sandoz nurtured dreams, women met on a journey, beautiful girls who would suddenly materialize in an unknown wood, yield themselves for the whole day, then dissipate at twilight like shadows.” When, in manhood, Paul developed the phobias of a recluse—not suffering himself to be touched and shrinking back from nude female models—it became obvious that his pent-up instincts had wrought greater havoc than Emile’s, but during adolescence shy was shy. The same woods offered them refuge; the same stream and bed of hot sand appeased yearnings that their schoolmates contrived to satisfy with a maid, at a brothel, or alone. Emile as well as Paul might have modeled for the lovelorn youngster adoring the milliner’s apprentice from afar and, indeed, clues indicate that at sixteen or seventeen Emile was smitten by a dark-haired girl named Louise Solari, who would never know what reveries had once been embroidered around her barely nubile person unless, years after the fact, she recognized someone very like herself in La Fortune des Rougon.
Whether he discovered modern verse extracurricularly or through a young teacher from Paris whose acknowledgment of the Romantic movement earned him a succès de scandale at the Collège Bourbon, Hugo and Musset came to walk beside Emile as third and fourth companions. “We didn’t amble alone. We had books in our pockets of in our game-bags. For one entire year, Victor Hugo held absolute sway over us.” The idea fathered on nineteenth-century schoolboys that French literature was a classical tirade silenced by the 1789 revolution kept Hugo young beyond his age, or at any rate kept his oldest poetry from going stale in the syllabus alongside consecrated texts. Les Orientales and Feuilles d’autumn had been written a generation earlier, but when high-strung children who were tuned for Boileau first heard such poems as “Les Djinns,” “Mazeppa,” and “Lord Byron en 1811,” they felt themselves vibrate to some new diapason. Hugo’s language promoted the thrill of heights they sought outside Aix and it must have stirred them to read:
Chaque homme, dans son coeur, crée à sa fantaisie
Tout un monde enchante d’art et de poésie.
C’est notre Chanaan que nous voyons d’en haut.
Restons où nous voyons. Pourquoi vouloir descendre
Et toucher ce qu’on rêve, et marcher dans la cendre?[3]
These lines echo Hugo’s preface to Les Orientales, where “good taste” of the kind that sanctions only “beautiful literature drawn with a chalk-line” is brought up on charges of having tyrannized the artistic imagination. Here was a parti pris Emile found altogether congenial.
Despite this, Hugo inspired nothing like as much affection as Alfred de Musset. While he may have offered them a lofty view, the Pelion on Ossa of Hugo’s rhetoric proved somewhat daunting to young men beset with anxieties that usually made them feel unqualified for an heroic role in life, if not for life itself. “We were born to literary consciousness after the December coup d’tat and knew about the battles of 1830 at second hand, through stories told us by our elders,” wrote Zola in 1879, just before he issued a naturalist manifesto the effect of which was to carry the war against good taste beyond territory that Hugo’s generation had conquered. “All that romantic heat had blown away and the exiled Hugo stood on a distant pedestal. . . . We couldn’t have said why his verse did not move us as deeply as Musset’s, but the mountainous rhetoric was already chilling us and Musset won our allegiance because the rhetorician in him doesn’t obtrude; he goes straight to the nerves.”
Victor Hugo on his distant pedestal in Guernsey was not yet the literary patriarch against whom Zola would measure himself at forty but a surrogate for the Olympian father whose death cast him adrift in time. Small, doubtful, anachronistic is how Emile felt vis-à-vis the previous generation and Musset understood better than anyone these sequela of orphanhood. In “Namouna,” “Rolla,” “Les Nuits” Emile found poetry scaled to his belief that a world from which great lungs had sucked up so much oxygen could sustain only neurasthenic, self-conscious forms of life. Musset’s waifs bantering while they weep and mourning religious faith by debauching themselves among its bare, ruined choirs, or committing suicide after one last quip, spoke to him as Laforgue’s Pierrot would speak to fin-de-siècle sensibilities. Where nothing seemed quite real except Mammon, consolation lay in arch parodies and quixotic shadow games that conferred a kind of elegance on adolescent despair. “We adored medieval decor, philtres, and sword thrusts: but we especially adored them in Musset’s limber style, with its scepticism and mocking overtones,” recalled Zola, who could not have enough of melodrama or of the Middle Ages, and who set out to write a romance about the Crusades. “We enthused over this ballad to the moon because it was for us the gauntlet a superior poet had thrown down at romantics as well as classics, the guffaw of an independent spirit in whom our entire generation recognized a brother.” This guffaw, which one might better describe as a stage laugh, resounds mirthlessly through the verse letters Paul would soon be writing Emile. It helped them, in their antic mood, make light of pain and keep the unruly self at a safe distance.
For under certain circumstances, Emile’s self ran amock. Beginning in childhood, he developed a terror of thunderstorms, for example, and more than once friends saw him shake uncontrollably as lightning flashed overhead. Obsessed with death, he relied on superstitious ceremonies to avert danger, which lay everywhere about him. In adolescence, this obsession was not yet the fullblown tyrant it became years later, when he couldn’t enter his study without first touching a particular tabletop, or hail a cab without assuring himself that its licence number augured well, or encounter a funeral procession without taking it to be a black omen. Indeed, the sensible boy evoked by Paul Alexis in Notes d’un ami is remarkably unlike the writer whose fanatical orderliness would gird him against the unforeseen. “I have often spoken about [his youth] with him, his mother, his former schoolmates,” wrote Alexis. “He was neither indolent nor given to swotting himself dizzy over books. An intelligent and practical boy . . . who, no sooner in the study hall or back at home, made for his desk, lost no time, courageously undertook his assignments, simplifying them as much as possible, and halted only when the task was done. Only then did he feel free and took full advantage of his freedom. In short, no excess of zeal, nothing except the indispensable and the necessary.” But inside the sensible boy was another whose burden of guilt and fear of punishment had already seen him create for himself a rich demonology, which fed on melodrama. It was not the sensible boy who regularly went to Aix’s theater and sat enthralled by the hokum that road companies served up there, or who devoured the novels of Eugène Sue and Dumas and Emmanuel Gonzalès and Paul Féval. It was his imaginative alter ego, who feared that one misstep would send him over the edge, into an abyss crackling with hellfire.
Emilie Zola encouraged such tendencies toward the melodramatic.
Emilie Zola encouraged such tendencies toward the melodramatic, as one gathers from a letter her son wrote to her on April 13, 1856. Having joined several classmates in a minor rumpus at the Collège Bourbon, he was singled out for punishment by the headmaster, and the headmaster announced that Madame Zola would duly receive a report of his misconduct. Emile softened the impending blow as best he could. It had been during a “lapse” in his thoughts about her that he went astray, he wrote, and with much breast-beating he vowed to make filial piety his infallible guide. Having often been told that he was her “only consolation,” he would prove himself “worthy” of the part she assigned him. Although misconduct sometimes had dramatic consequences under a regime that did not gladly suffer insubordination, his reiterated pledges of fidelity say more about the emotional climate Emilie fostered at home than about harsh discipline at school. She hovered over her son half awaiting a sign that nature had made him in the same breakable mold as her husband. It was incumbent on him to dispel such fears and the grief Emile imagined would pour out when his headmaster’s note reached her suggests how large they loomed. Equally large was his own fear of some untoward event severing the only bond that kept him from falling into oblivion. Each constantly reassured the other, yet neither felt reassured and Emile’s vow to “efface everything,” to make Emilie “forget everything” spoke against his deep knowledge that nothing he did could finally dry the tears shed by his mater dolorosa, or wipe clean the slate. A death having occurred, death married them both to hysteria. For Emile, it prepared ambushes, it loosed lightning bolts, it filled the world with consternation. Emilie, in turn, had nervous fits during which her memory fled and her throat became a ball of knotted muscle.
Dared he succeed where Francois had failed? Dared he not? His quandary must have been more acute than usual in 185 6, on the eve of a momentous decision he would face whether to take a classical degree after the fourth form or work toward a scientific baccalaureat. (That the choice existed at all was itself remarkable. Until 1852 plans for abolishing the integrated curriculum had consistently been beaten back by conservative opinion, which saw them as Trojan horses devised to unleash upon France a utilitarian spirit incompatible with the national “genius.”) Unlike many children, Emile kept faith with family tradition in choosing science. However tedious he found the study of classical languages, abandoning Greek when defectors were generally urged to consider themselves second-rate would have been more difficult had he not felt that filial piety endorsed his decision.” [Scientific education] is the seed of our future strength,” he wrote twenty-two years later, and no doubt some such argument began to grow on him long before it reached maturity as this patriotic dictum. By the third form, Emile, who had after all sprung from Francois Zola’s “seed,” may already have been formulating around “science,” “seed,” and “future strength” an hereditary imperative that ghosted for the paternal wisdom he didn’t enjoy. Even if other factors had not swayed him, there was the all-important promise of manhood, which inevitably came bound up with his idealized image of the father-scientist. Indeed, everything suggests that an oblique line led from the decision he made at this juncture—or the thinking behind it—to the grand finale of Les Rougon-Macquart, where Doctor Pascal, whose scientific notes have been wantonly destroyed, sires a son in articulo mortis.
Emilie, who was not demure by nature, held some view in the matter, but what view is moot, for Zola never discussed it and evidence makes equally plausible the notion of a reverent widow encouraging her son to follow Francois Zola and of an ambitious plaintiff wanting him to get the baccalauréat-ès-lettres for a career in public administration or law. Emile himself juggled these alternatives, even after he had presumably let one of them drop. “I want to do law; since a career one must have, the law is one I can happily square with my intellectual disposition,” he told Bailie in 1859. At any rate, his family’s plight would require him to do something more gainful than write poetry. How desperate that plight was may be inferred from a lease drawn up on November 28, 1855, between Emilie’s confederate, Marius Daime, who had a baker’s oven available for rent near the flour mill he owned in Aix, and Louis-Etienne Aubert, Emilie’s father, who at seventy-two still possessed enough strength to knead dough, if not enough to start painting houses again. As her slender resources dwindled, Emilie found ever cheaper accommodations. From the flat on the rue Belle-garde she moved to a small house on the rue Roux-Alpheran, near the Collège Bourbon. In 1855 another move saw her and her parents establish residence on the Cours des Minimes in a working-class neighborhood just outside the old quarter of Aix. Two years later, they moved again, this time into two rooms facing the “barri” or alley that ran alongside the city wall.
On October 16, 1857, Emilie suddenly lost her mother, Henriette Aubert, who had made herself indispensable since François Zola’s death ten years before. With destitution now a very real prospect, Emilie went back to Paris, where men of influence such as Alexandre Labot would, she hoped, be disposed to help her. Certainly Aix was not. The municipal council denied her request that it pension the widow of a man it sometimes still praised for his benefactions.
Emile’s circle of friends, which included Cézanne, Bailie, Philippe Solari, Marius Roux, and Louis Marguery, the son of a lawyer, did their best to fill out his shrunken world. They huddled around him as he waited through the Christmas holidays together with Louis-Etienne, and entered the new year wondering what the future held in store. Weeks more passed before a letter finally arrived from Emilie. It did not announce the date of her return but informed him instead that there would be no return. Emile was told to raise money for third-class railway tickets by selling the furniture they had not already pawned and to join her as quickly as possible.
Paul, Jean-Baptistin, and Emile met for the last time in a large room cluttered with schoolboy paraphernalia where they had spent many agreeable hours talking and rhyming three-act comedies and performing chemical experiments. They also planned excursions of farewell up the Bibemus road and along the wind-swept route du Tholonet. Imagining life apart from one another made them choke, but it was agreed that Emile should consider himself a prodromus rather than an exile, in whose footsteps they would follow sooner or later. Without fail, they would reassemble some day on the Left Bank, and no doubt the thought of their reunion kept Emile warm when, in February 1858, he and his grandfather boarded a train for the long, uncomfortable journey to the capital, which was still shaking from bombs that had recently exploded around the imperial carriage as it drew up before the Opera House.
- It may also have furnished material for the novel Therese Raquin, where a “bestial” half-Algerian helps her equally bestial lover drown the mother’s boy she married. Go back to the text.
- A jingling tune composed by Louis Napoleon’s mother, Queen Hortense, and played as a national anthem on all imperial occasions. Go back to the text.
- “In his heart every man creates as he fancies/A whole enchanted world of art and poetry./It is our Canaan we see from on high/Let us keep our vantage point. Why should one wish to descend/And touch one’s dream, and walk in ashes?” From “A mes amis L.B. et S.B.” Go back to the text.