Complete Works of Emile Zola (1866 page)

To this day I do not know whether the man was a lunatic, an imposter seeking money, or an
agent provocateur
, that is, one who imagined that he might through me inveigle M. Zola into an illegal act which would lead to prosecution and imprisonment. The last-mentioned status that I have ascribed to my interviewer is by no means an impossible one, considering the many dastardly attempts made to discredit and ruin M. Zola. And yet, suspicious and abrupt as was the man’s leave-taking when he heard French being spoken outside Wareham’s private room (where the interview took place), I nowadays think it more charitable to assume that he was a trifle crazy. One thing is certain, he had come to the wrong person in applying to me to aid and abet him in the foolhardy enterprise he spoke of.

This is the first time I have told this anecdote in any detail; but at the period when the incident occurred I spoke of it casually to a few friends, to which circumstance I am inclined to attribute the earlier paragraphs which appeared in the newspapers about American schemes for delivering Dreyfus. The person whom I saw was, I believe, a German-American.

Well, this incident, preposterous as it may appear (but truth, remember, is quite as fantastic as fiction), had proved another link in the chain of suspicious occurrences in which I had been mixed up prior to M. Zola’s exile. Other curious little incidents had followed, and thus for many months I had been living — even as we lived long ago in besieged Paris — in distrust of all strangers, and the climax had come with my foolish fears respecting a couple of French musicians. The story I have told goes against me, but the man who cannot tell a story against himself when he thinks it a good one can have, I think, little grit in his composition.

From the time of my adventure with the French musicians I steeled myself against excessive fears whilst remaining duly vigilant. On one point I was still anxious, which was that M. Zola should be able to settle down in a convenient retreat where him himself would enjoy all necessary quietude; whilst we, Wareham and I, knowing him to be well screened from his enemies, would be less liable to those ‘excursions and alarums’ which had hitherto troubled us. As the next chapter will show, this consummation was near at hand.

IX

A QUIET HOME AND A HAUNTED HOUSE

It was M. Zola himself who, after some stay at Oatlands, discovered, in the course of his excursions with M. Desmoulin, a retreat to his liking. It was a house in that part of Surrey belonging to a city merchant, who was willing to let it furnished for a limited period. The owner met M. Zola on various occasions and showed himself both courteous and discreet.

The details of the ‘letting’ were arranged between him and Mr. Wareham; and my wife hastily procured servants for the new establishment. These servants, however, did not speak French, and I settled with M. Zola that my eldest daughter, Violette, should stay with him to act in some measure as his housekeeper and interpreter. This was thrusting a young girl, not quite sixteen, into a position of considerable responsibility, but I thought that Violette would be equal to the task, provided she followed the instructions and advice of her mother; and as she was then at home for the summer holidays she was sent down to M. Zola’s without more ado.

I shall have occasion to speak of her hereafter in some detail, in connection with a very curious incident which marked M. Zola’s exile. Here I will merely mention that a Parisienne by birth and speaking French from her infancy, it was easy for her to understand and explain the master’s requirements.

Like M. Zola, she was provided with a bicycle, and the pair of them occasionally spent an afternoon speeding along leafy Surrey lanes and visiting quaint old villages. The mornings, however, were devoted to work, for it was now that M. Zola started on his novel, ‘Fecondite,’ the first of a series of four volumes, which will be, he considers, his literary testament.

These books, indeed, are to embody what he regards as the four cardinal principles of human life. First Fruitfulness, as opposed to neo-Malthusianism, which he holds to be the most pernicious of all doctrines; next Work, as opposed to the idleness of the drones, whom he would sweep away from the human community; then Truth, as opposed to falsehood, hypocrisy, and convention; and, finally, Justice to one and all, in lieu of charity to some, oppression to others, and favours for the privileged few.

All four books—’Fruitfulness,’ ‘Work,’ ‘Truth,’ and ‘Justice’ — are to be stories; for years ago M. Zola arrived at the conclusion that mere essays on sociology, though they may work good in time among people of culture, fail to reach and impress the masses in the same way as a story may do. It is, I take it, largely on this account that Emile Zola has become a novelist. He has certainly written essays, but he knows how inconsiderable have been their sales in comparison with those of his works embodying precisely the same principles, but placed before the world in the form of novels. To criticise him as a mere story-teller is arrant absurdity.

He himself put the whole case in a nutshell when he remarked, ‘My novels have always been written with a higher aim than merely to amuse. I have so high an opinion of the novel as a means of expression that I have chosen it as the form in which to present to the world what I wish to say on the social, scientific, and psychological problems that occupy the minds of thinking men. I might have said what I wanted to say to the world in another form. But the novel has to-day risen from the place which it held in the last century at the banquet of letters. It was then the idle pastime of the hour, and sat low down between the fable and the idyll. To-day it contains, or may be made to contain, everything; and it is because that is my creed that I am a novelist. I have, to my thinking, certain contributions to make to the thought of the world on certain subjects, and I have chosen the novel as the best means of communicating these contributions to the world.’

If critics in reviewing one or another of M. Zola’s books would only bear these declarations of the author in mind, the reading public would often be spared many irrelevant and foolish remarks.

M. Zola’s device is
Nulla dies sine linea
, and even before the materials for ‘Fecondite’ were brought to him from France he had given an hour or two each day to the penning of notes and impressions for subsequent use. With the arrival of his books and memoranda, work began in a more systematic way. At half-past eight every morning he partook of a cup of coffee and a roll and butter, no more, and shortly after nine he was at his table in a small room overlooking the garden of the house he had rented. And there he remained regularly, hard at work, until the luncheon hour, covering sheet after sheet of quarto paper with serried lines of his firm, characteristic handwriting.

M. Zola has retained possession of the MSS. of almost every work written by him, and I know that these MSS. often differ largely from the books actually given to the world. The ‘copy’ is not only extremely clear, but remarkably free from erasures and interpolations. But when his first proofs reach him M. Zola revises them with the greatest care. He will strike out whole passages in the most drastic manner, and alter others until they are almost unrecognisable.

He will even at the last moment change some character’s name, and I know all the inconvenience that arises on certain occasions from having had to prepare portions of my translations from first proofs, through lack of time to wait for the corrected matter.

This was notably the case with my version of ‘Paris.’ While that work was passing through the Press M. Zola was already in all the throes of the Dreyfus affair, and somehow, as he has acknowledged to me with regret, he forgot to tell me that at the last moment he had changed the names of several personages in the story. Thus Duthil (as originally written and given in my translation) became Dutheil in the French book; Sagnier was changed to Sanier; the Princess de Horn was renamed Harn and finally Harth, and young Lord George Eliott became Elson.

Of course some of the reviewers of my translations attacked me virulently for my unwarrantable presumption in changing the very names of M. Zola’s characters; they were unaware that the names given by me were those first selected by the author, who had afterwards altered them and forgotten to tell me of it.

Coming back to ‘Fecondite,’ I should say that M. Zola wrote an average of three pages per day of that book during his exile in England. Work ceased at the luncheon hour, as I have said, and consequently he could dispose of his afternoons.

But it will be remembered that the summer of 1898 was exceptionally hot, so hot indeed that M. Zola, though many years of his childhood were spent under the scorching sun of Provence, found a siesta absolutely necessary after the midday meal. It was only later that he ventured out on foot or on his bicycle, often taking his hand camera with him.

At some distance from the house where he was residing, in the midst of large deserted grounds, overrun with grass and weeds, there stood a mournful-looking, unoccupied private residence of some architectural pretensions, on the building of which a considerable sum had evidently been expended. The place took M. Zola’s fancy the first time he passed it on his bicycle. The iron entrance gate was broken, and he was able to enter the garden and peep through the ground-floor windows.

All spoke of decay and abandonment; and when, through my daughter, M. Zola began to make inquiries about the place, he was told a fantastic tragic story. A murder, it was said, had been committed there many years previously; a poor little girl had been killed by her stepmother, and her remains had been buried beneath a scullery floor.

There was also talk of the child’s father, who at night drove up to the house in a phantom carriage drawn by ghostly horses, and hammered at the door of the mansion and shouted aloud for his dead child!

The story was alleged to be well known, and it was said that not a girl from Chertsey to Esher, from Walton to Byfleet, would have dared to pass that house after nightfall, when harrowing voices rang out through the trees, and the shadowy horses of the ghostly carriage trotted swiftly and silently over the gravel.

The story not only impressed my daughter Violette, but it greatly interested M. Zola, on whose behalf I made various inquiries. For instance, I closely questioned an old gardener who had known the district for long years. All he could tell me, however, was that there were certainly some strange rumours abroad among the womenfolk, but that for his own part he had never heard of any crime and had never seen any ghost.

And at last others told me quite a different story of the house’s abandonment, and this I here venture to give, though I certainly cannot vouch for its accuracy. The place had been built, it seemed, some forty years previously by a retired and wealthy London pawnbroker, a gaunt, shrivelled old man, who, mounted on a white mare, had in his declining years been a familiar figure on the roads of the district.

Extremely eccentric, he had largely furnished and decorated the house with unredeemed articles that had been pledged with him. There was nothing
en suite
. Old chairs of divers patterns were mingled with odd tables and sideboards and sofas; there were also innumerable daubs ‘ascribed’ to old masters, and a wonderful display of Wardour-street
bric-a-brac
. But, indeed, one has only to look at an average pawnbroker’s shop to picture what kind of articles the house must have contained.

It seems that the old fellow in question had three daughters, whom he kept more or less imprisoned on his recently-acquired property, though they were charming girls well worthy of being sought in marriage; and the story I heard was that three officers sojourning in the district had one day espied the three forlorn damsels over the garden hedge, and had forthwith begun to court them, much to the ire of the misanthropic, retired pawnbroker. That stern old gentleman ordered his daughters into the house, and then kept them in stricter confinement than ever.

But love laughs at locksmiths, and the amorous officers eventually carried the place by storm, and beat down all parental resistance. Three weddings followed on the same day, and all ended for a time as in a fairy tale. But the old pawnbroker subsequently married again to relieve his solitude, and after his death his will was attacked, and an interminable lawsuit ensued, with the result that the property was left unoccupied. Now, it appeared, it was for sale, and before long would probably be cut up into building plots.

Whatever romantic element there might be in the story of the pawnbroker and his daughters, M. Zola much preferred the popular and gruesome legend of the little girl murdered in the scullery; and, some time later, when he consented to write a short story for ‘The Star,’ it was this legend which he took as his basis, building thereon the pathetic sketch of ‘Angeline,’ the scene of which he transferred to France.

He has stated in his article ‘Justice,’ published in Paris on his return from exile, that during most of the time he spent in England he was virtually in a desert. There were people about him of course; but he retired into himself as it were, communing with his own thoughts, and seeking no intercourse with strangers. This is true of the period to which I am now referring. Still he did not complain of solitude. In fact he knew that quiet was essential for his work. Only once or twice did anything happen of a nature to cause any anxiety. Neither Wareham nor myself was much troubled at this period; there was a lull even in the periodical visits which gentlemen of the Press kindly favoured me.

Still we had taken our precautions by admitting a mutual friend, Mr. A. W. Pamplin, into our confidence. If M. Zola’s communications with Paris, through Wareham and myself, should be threatened, Mr. Pamplin was to take upon himself the duty of re-establishing them.

At M. Zola’s house there was, so far as I am aware, but one brief
alerte
. This occurred one afternoon, when a servant came to my daughter with the tidings that there was a French hunchback at the door. Violette impulsively rushed off to tell M. Zola of it; but when in her turn she went to the door to see who the person might be, she found that he was an Englishman, a traveller for some county directory, who had merely performed his legitimate work in requesting to know the name of the occupier of the house. Of course the only name given was that of the owner, then absent at the seaside.