Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (21 page)

Alexandrine had explained Jeanne’s qualities to É mile, and he had not objected when she declared her intention to take the girl with them to Royan, where she had coped well with all the turmoil of a summer vacation. (He could hardly have objected, since Royan was his idea.) That had been barely nine months before the dinner on the Eiffel Tower. She was still disappointed that, after the holiday, Jeanne Rozerot had handed in her notice for ‘personal reasons’, which she had tactfully not enquired after. With all the important visitors and two rather moody employers, she must have found life at Médan somewhat bewildering. It was vexing, all the same, to spend so much time training a servant only for someone else to have the benefit.

3

T
HEY SET OFF
for the Pyrenees on 9 September 1891, which was rather late in the year, but he was determined to leave, saying that he needed a holiday after the battle of writing
La Débâcle
. She stopped in the middle of packing to write to her cousin:

They took the train to Lourdes and saw cripples throwing away their crutches and falling over in the crowd, and consumptives being plunged into water that even the sloppiest laundress would have poured away. They saw the chilly spa towns and the jagged curtain of the Pyrenees. When they crossed the border to San-Sebastián, it poured with rain, and all the time they both felt that they should have been somewhere else.

On the beach at Biarritz, where they stayed at the Grand Hôtel, she realized that they looked like an ill-matched couple, which was normal at their age, but it made her feel sad, and also faintly apprehensive, but mostly sad. É mile was beginning to resemble the portrait that Manet had painted of him twenty years before. The defiant curl of his mouth was almost mischievous. He wore white flannel suits and struck jaunty poses. All that developing of photographs–an art that she herself had never quite mastered–was making him behave as though he was always about to be photographed. He looked like a man who knew how to take a holiday, even in late September. He might almost be described as thin. The bicycle had something to do with it, of course, but this was also his reward for spurning their shared indulgences.

He folded the newspaper and pushed himself out of the deckchair. He was going to take an energetic walk. She saw that his face was slightly flushed. She might ask him later on, and he would probably say that it was a symptom of his ‘
malaises nerveux
’, which he attributed to his relentless work.

When he had gone, she picked up the newspaper. There was a long editorial on the Jews. It was the centenary of their emancipation by the Revolution, but now, said the writer, ‘things have gone too far the other way’. Several articles were devoted to ‘the future war’ with Germany, and to the fact that French citizens were to be allowed to enter Alsace-Lorraine without a passport. Footmen and printers were on strike, and the union of café
garçons
had asserted its right to wear facial hair: every
garçon
in Paris was now growing a moustache in a show of solidarity. A penniless Austrian tailor who had had himself delivered to the Exhibition in a crate had become a ‘café-concert phenomenon’ and was touring Europe as ‘the Human Parcel’.

None of this was likely to have altered É mile’s mood or to have brought a flush to his face. There was nothing in the paper about É mile Zola, and nothing about any of his literary rivals. In fact, the news was as uninteresting as it usually was in the holidays. The movements of grand duchesses and princes were assiduously reported. A courtesan wrote to deny the malicious rumours of marriage that had been printed in the gossip column, and blamed them on ‘feminine vengeance’. Various violent crimes had been committed in the provinces, and the new tramlines in the Avenue de la Grande Armée were causing accidents. There was rain over the Channel, and cloud over Paris.

Page three and the back page were always the same. Even sitting in a deckchair, with the gulls wheeling overhead and the bunting flapping in the Atlantic breeze, it was easy to imagine oneself in Paris.
Lohengrin
was at the Opéra,
Cinderella
at the Châtelet, ‘eccentric clowns’ at the Folies-Bergères, and
La Demoiselle du téléphone
at the Nouveautés. The Eiffel Tower would be closing for the winter on 2 November, but there were still concerts every evening in the restaurant on the first platform.

She read on, through the advertisements for false teeth, hair-restorer and soap–soap was everywhere, even among the serious news, disguised as editorial comment. ‘
The exquisite, persistent perfume of Savon Ixora makes the skin silky, white and delicate.
’ Mme Baldini of 3 Rue de la Banque gave daily lessons on the art of remaining forever young. É mile had no need of such lessons, even if they had been offered to gentlemen. Perhaps something in the ‘Correspondances personnelles’ had given him an idea for a novel.

She was not a storyteller–she could never have pieced together the million details that went to make a novel–but she found those telegrammatic messages as evocative as the first page of a serial. Some of them suggested the happy continuation of a normal life. Some of them were sad, though it was hard to say why. She wondered whether the people to whom they were addressed would see the messages, and she thought it ironic that things that had to be kept secret from a husband or a wife were printed where everyone could see them.

The Duval household would be celebrating the arrival of the ‘superb’ pheasant by eating it, she imagined, with oysters and a nice bouillon. It was the meal that she and É mile had always shared when they returned to Médan, though with a partridge instead of a pheasant. It reminded her that they would soon be home. She scanned the advertisements on the back page, which, apart from the ‘very fetching and curious photographs’ from a Dutch publisher, were all addressed to women. There was a carpet sale at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, and the new winter collection was about to be unveiled at the Samaritaine. That, too, had been one of their shared pleasures–the orgies of shopping in the big department stores, and all the research for
Au Bonheur des Dames
, the ravenous accumulation of facts, the desire to know everything that went on in the basements and the attics. He had been like a little boy, wallowing in the lingerie, blushing at the buxom dummies, ‘turning pink with pleasure’ like the man in his novel. She preferred to make her own jackets and dresses, but there might be something to buy for the new maid that she couldn’t have worn herself.

When he returned from his walk, Émile still felt slightly out of sorts, and suggested that they bring the holiday to an end. While Alexandrine organized the packing, he wrote some letters. He seemed pleased to be returning, but also reluctant to leave. It was the first time that either of them had been abroad. Perhaps he was sorry that the adventure was over. Soon, when his sequence of novels was complete, there would be more time for holidays and more time to enjoy the house.

4

T
HE LETTER ARRIVED
on Tuesday 10 November, forty days after their return. Her own post was usually quite humdrum: family correspondence, begging letters, bills for food, clothes and work on the house. But she also read his correspondence and told him how to reply to people who wanted articles or translation rights. She wrote to editors of supposedly impecunious magazines who owed him money. Sometimes she felt that the person least able to defend the fortune and reputation of É mile Zola was her husband. There was the time, for instance, when he gave away the manuscript of
Nana
to a journalist, who promptly sold it to an American collector for twelve thousand francs!

This letter was addressed to her, Madame É mile Zola. She did not recognize the hand, and the letter was unsigned. It was as short and orderly as an invoice. She read it in an instant: ‘Mlle Jeanne Rozerot…66, Rue Saint-Lazare…has had two children by your husband.’

L
ATER THAT DAY
, the clerk at the telegraph office was presented with a terrific piece of gossip, a nugget of scandal in the bland stream of greetings and condolences. M. É mile Zola wished to send an urgent message to his friend in Paris, M. Henry Céard–or, as he was sometimes known, for the purposes of private communication, M. Duval:

I
N THE TWENTY-SIX YEARS
they had lived together, she had often been able to follow a plot as it developed in his mind. A story, she knew, could begin almost anywhere. It might start with a short railway journey and a woman in a compartment, clutching a small package. The window, in which her face is reflected, shows scenes from the past and the present, like slides from a magic lantern: a house by the railway, a sail on the river, the telegraph poles ticking past, the coal smoke over the northern suburbs.

Next, a slate-grey autumn evening in the city: the crowd, cowering under the drizzle in the Rue Saint-Lazare, between the station and the fish-food restaurants; the endless funeral procession of black suits and umbrellas.

A woman in a dark dress stops on the pavement and stares up at a soot-streaked window. Behind the window, a tableau in the style of Mary Cassatt: a young mother putting her child and her baby to bed. The woman in the dark dress climbs the stairs with the steady trudge of a rent collector. Outside, the evening sky above the Gare Saint-Lazare floods the street with red. Over the traffic, the shunting engines can be heard shrieking and bellowing like great beasts in their wrought-iron cage.

The Rue Saint-Lazare met the Rue Blanche a few yards from the south-eastern corner of the station. It was the opening scene of
La Bête humaine
–the fifth-floor room with the view of the railway lines disappearing into the Batignolles tunnel, and a piano banging away downstairs. It was curious how often her spirit seemed to inhabit one of his male characters.

A
FEW DAYS AFTER
the letter arrived, an upholsterer came to Médan. The walls and door of the bedroom were to be padded in case the servants, who were so hard to replace, were frightened away by the shouting and screaming.

5

S
HE HAD GONE TO
number 66 and broken the lock and found the apartment empty. She had found a room full of someone else’s life: homemade curtains, flowers in a vase, some plates and cutlery, the sweetish smell of breast-milk. She found two cots that must have come from the Samaritaine. There were framed photographs–riding his bicycle in the Bois de Boulogne, standing on a beach somewhere. She did not know who had taken the photographs. There was a writing desk, which she easily broke open, and enough letters inside to make a novel, which she began to read and then burned to ashes.

She might have stayed in the room for a few minutes or for more than an hour. She walked back past the house at number 16 where she was born. Because of the station, the area was always crowded. It was the best place to buy fresh seafood. She passed the fishmongers’ stalls across from the station but the smell of the apartment stayed with her.

Until she decided what to do, they would both stay indoors. She went to the kitchen, which she had practically abandoned those last few years. The recipe called for a fire that could roast a sheep in a few minutes, though the only meat was fish. A bottle of oil, one tomato, garlic, a fistful of pepper. Everyone must have known–the men, of course, and probably Marguerite Charpentier and Julia Daudet, who each had three children of their own.

Every afternoon at four o’clock, tea was served with a plate of pastries, which had to be finished.