Born in Paris on April 2, 1840, Emile Zola was raised in Aix-en-Provence, where his father, an Italian engineer, had been hired by the municipality to build its waterworks. François Zola died just as construction began and the prospect of wealth turned into a nightmare of litigation from which his widow emerged penniless. This loss had lifelong effects on Emile. Another loss occurred when Madame Zola took her seventeen-year-old son north to Paris. Torn from his bosom friends, Paul Cezanne and Jean-Baptistin Baille, he drifted unhappily through late adolescence, failing the baccalaureate examination, vainly seeking employment, and discovering the squalid side of bohemia.
In 1862, fortune smiled at last. He was given a clerkship by Hachette and Company, and soon became the firm’s publicity director. In that position he established a network of contacts throughout the newspaper world. He also produced a novel entitled La Confession de Claude (having previously written quantities of bad verse in the style of Musset). Four years at Hachette persuaded him that he could earn his livelihood in journalism. Indeed, he had already contributed long articles to Le Salut Public, a paper in Lyon. And so he made the leap, quitting Hachette at about the same time he was setting up house with his future wife, Gabrielle Alexandrine Meley.
Polemics marked Zola’s career from the outset.
Polemics marked Zola’s career from the outset. L’Evenement had him review the 1866 Salon, and in articles ridiculing Academic art he championed painters shunned by officialdom,
