The Belly of Paris

To many Americans this may seem odd, but when I was a teenager my hero was Emile Zola. This was not because he spoke out so forcefully and dramatically against anti-Semitism and corruption in high places when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain, was framed for an act of espionage and was serving a life sentence in a penal colony. And not just because he did things like that all his life. It was because Zola was engaged, a writer who understood that his success gave him a platform, and he had a profound sense of the responsibility that implied. All over the world there have been such writers. Victor Hugo was another one, Latin America has been famous for them, so have Africa and Asia. America had James Baldwin and John Steinbeck. What was so exceptional about Zola was that he was one of the rare politically engaged writers who never let his political convictions compromise his artistry.

Zola came from a generation much influenced by Hugo. But Zola admired Hugo more for his political commitment than for his romantic prose, or, in Zola's words, his “mountainous rhetoric,” which he found “chilling.”

Zola, a highly political man, always insisted on the separation of
art and politics. Though he very much wanted to be known for his political stances, he did not want his novels to be thought of as political pieces. In 1876, when
L'Assommoir
, sometimes titled in English
The Dram Shop
, was first serialized, critics infuriated Zola by calling him a socialist writer for his dark depiction of working-class life. He responded, “I do not accept the label you paste on my back. I mean to be a novelist, purely and simply, without any qualifying adjective; if you insist on qualifying me, say that I am a naturalistic novelist. That will not annoy me.” Of course, his concern for the plight of the poor did not necessarily make him a socialist. He read Charles Fourier, Pierre Proudhon, and Karl Marx, and he appreciated their arguments, especially those of Marx, which were presented in the structure of science, because Zola worshipped science. But he was never completely comfortable with the movement, which is probably why the revolutionaries depicted in his books, especially in
The Belly of Paris
, are virtually comic characters. He was clearly a progressive firmly in the left wing of nineteenth-century politics, but he wanted to keep the distinction between a leftist novelist and a leftist who writes novels.

It was his contention that it was the duty of writers to expose the weaknesses in a society and the duty of politicians to act upon them. He assumed both roles but never mixed them. He believed a novel should bear the mark of an individual and not an ideology. There are no tirades or polemics in Zola novels. Those he reserved for well-crafted newspaper articles such as the famous “J' Accuse!” in which he attacked the government for its persecution of Dreyfus. Some of his characters have such fits, but he always makes them look a bit overblown and even silly. Zola often laughs at political radicals. The convictions are there in the way he portrays life, the way all of his characters have someone bigger trying to step on them, the way most people are consumed in banal struggles. Do not look for justice in a Zola novel; his world is maddeningly unfair. But he always has humor and a thrilling, dark sense of irony.

You cannot help but laugh at the legitimate political anger of Florent when he vents it by teaching a child penmanship with such sentences as “The day of justice will come.” Who but Zola would
give us a scene like the one in
The Belly of Paris
where one of the greatest human rights atrocities in French history is recounted as a bedtime story for a child, while her father's hands are soaked in blood from making sausages?

Zola was always a man of his times, deeply involved in the ideas and movements of his day. He was one of the first amateur photographers, beginning shortly after the pastime was popularized in 1888 by George Eastman's first portable camera, the “box model.” In the last eight years of his life, he became one of the first modern shutterbugs, shooting several thousand snapshots. Though he was plump and unathletic, he also took up the new bicycling craze. In an age of science, of Darwin, an age when it was believed that science held the solutions, he called himself an “evolutionist” and wrote, “I must therefore ask of science to explain life to me, to make it known.”

Zola, like many French readers of his generation, was a great admirer of Honoré de Balzac, who died when Zola was ten years old and had written a cycle of ninety novels and novellas that he called
The Human Comedy
. For a long time Zola struggled with the question of how to be more than just an imitation of Balzac, who was also a realist, was also concerned with the social ills of the bourgeoisie, and had also portrayed life in Paris and the French provinces with great descriptive detail.

In his late twenties Zola began contemplating an enormous project, a series of novels about successive generations of a family in which characters would do battle with their inner selves and the demons they inherited. This was at a time when there was much discussion in France about the breakup, even disappearance, of the traditional family unit. Much was blamed on railroads, which, it was felt, made people too mobile.

Zola resolved to write two novels a year for the next twenty years, all about the fictional Rougon-Macquart family from Provence. He more or less kept to that schedule, occasionally frustrated, such as when
Germinal
, the miners' saga that many consider
to be his masterpiece, took an entire nine months. By 1869, he had the cycle mapped out, and between 1872, at the age of thirty-two, and 1892, at the age of fifty-three, he carried out this plan. Zola had the words
Nulla dies sine linea
, “No day without a sentence,” engraved over his desk, but in truth he produced considerably more than a sentence. On most days he produced four handwritten pages, sometimes stopping the day's work in midsentence. He titled the series
The Rougon-Macquarts: The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire
. By its completion in 1892, the cycle consisted of twenty novels in thirty-one volumes and included all of the novels that have been deemed his most important work. He had created twelve hundred characters. He produced the first six books in five years.
The Belly of Paris
was the third.

When they were young his painter friend Paul Cézanne started to have doubts about his future, and Zola, trying to encourage him, wrote, “There are two men in an artist, the poet and the worker. He is born a poet, and he becomes a worker.”

He began his undertaking with a sense of inadequacy, believing that he had neither the depth of Balzac nor the poetic ear of Hugo. Zola wrote in a simple language, with great power but occasional clumsiness, even bad usage, which might be explained by the speed at which he worked. One of the great challenges of translating Zola is resisting the occasional desire to improve him. He needed more editing, and the translator has to resist providing it.

Zola's portrayals of poverty were shocking to readers of the time, especially the lower classes, who did not want to be seen that way. Readers were accustomed to having a certain degree of romance overlaid on misery. His raw portraits of the have-nots made his haves look all the more guilty. There is no poetry in Zola's novels. They are unflinchingly realistic, and this was a source of his power. Eventually it was the work of Zola more than other great writers that stirred the conscience of the middle class.

He had a close circle of friends with whom he frequently lunched, which included other writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, and Alphonse Daudet. In this circle Zola was known as someone who loved food, ate well and bountifully,
and spoke very little unless fired up about some issue or when asked a question about his work. He seems to have been a shy man until sparked by one of his many passions. Some in this group, such as Flaubert, also mingled with members of the upper class, a social milieu in which Zola had no experience. From them he would extract knowledge for portraying those characters. It was one of a number of tricks Zola copied from Balzac.

All of the writers and artists of his group called themselves “naturalists,” a term coined by the painter Gustave Courbet. Zola pointed out that the term had a long history. In the seventeenth century, it had been used in philosophy to mean a school of thought that held up nature as the model. Naturalists, then, were predominantly atheists. After the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century of Darwin, whose principal works were published when Zola was a student, the term “naturalists” described those who used scientific methods. According to Zola, a naturalist artist used scientific methodology but infused it with his own language and personality. To Zola, scientific writing meant fiction whose facts were thoroughly researched. Science was the new fashion. Balzac, Flaubert, and many other writers in France, Italy, and other European countries were also experimenting with a scientific method of fiction writing. Zola's particular use of science, aside from the thoroughness of his research, may be seen in his study and application of the latest medical knowledge. In Zola, when a character is stricken with an ailment, the author knows of what he is writing.

Zola researched his books much as though he were a journalist writing nonfiction. In the 1880s, when he began
Germinal
, he lived with miners, drank with them at night, and went down into the mines; later, for
La Bête humaine
, he traveled on a train dressed as an engineer. In 1872, he lived in the belly of Paris. He spent his nights at the Courbevoie Bridge, where wagons loaded with food came into Paris from the west. He would scramble alongside the horses from the customs gate at the edge of the city eight miles to Les Halles with his pencil at the ready. He spent endless hours taking notes in the market and also examining the view from different
approaches. A friend of painters—Cézanne was his closest boyhood friend—he tried to use words like brushstrokes. His visual descriptions can be labored. Several of his descriptions of food are so lengthy they will try the patience of all but the most dedicated foodies, though these remarkable passages are occasionally worth it, such as the depiction of Roquefort cheese resembling the face of an aristocrat stricken by a disease that attacked the rich who ate too many truffles. On the other hand, what a rare opportunity to view nineteenth-century French food firsthand.

His characterization of the bombastic painter Claude Lantier must have been shaped by years of counseling the chronically dissatisfied Cézanne, the impassioned perfectionist who once worked on a portrait of Zola and then, to the author's outrage, destroyed it because he did not like the way it was turning out. Cézanne was constantly flying into rages and depressions and tearing up his own work. Certainly Zola must have recalled his outings with Cézanne in Provence when he wrote about Florent and Claude in the countryside enjoying a long hike together. Claude Lantier has physical similarities to Cézanne, and he dresses like him in a red sash, felt hat, and old overcoat. But many of his views on art and his enthusiasm for morning markets are purely Zola. Novelists get into trouble when borrowing parts of friends for characters, and the recurring character of Claude Lantier strained Zola's friendship with Cézanne, who finally, after the 1886 publication of the novel
L'Œuvre
, about Lantier and the bohemian world of painters, stopped speaking to his childhood friend.

Zola also hounded the police for information on the administration of the market. This scientific approach, however, did not spare the speedy writer from the kinds of little errors in French grammar and spelling that a more careful editor might have caught and are not passed on in translation.

The beginning of the Rougon-Macquart cycle was delayed by the Franco-Prussian War, the German siege of Paris that forced Zola and many Parisians into exile in the provinces, and finally the overthrow
of Napoleon III. To Zola and many French, the Bonapartes had been France's recurring curse, “a strange family that won't die,” he wrote, “that persists through its pale and moribund offspring.”

These events helped Zola's master project. By delaying the actual writing, he had time to plan out the novels, which established an orderly method so that when he did start to write each morning, he would consult the notes he had prepared, which he kept on index cards. His progress was so steady and programmed that he did only one draft, handing it in with only occasional cross-outs.

But the events also closed the book on the Second Empire and allowed Zola to write about a finite period of time. Newer events could not overtake his novel. In 1871, Zola wrote that the novels could now be set “inside a closed circle; it becomes the tableau of a dead reign,” of “a strange era fraught with madness and shame.”

He begins his fictional family, the ancestors of Beautiful Lisa and her nephew Claude Lantier in the
The Belly of Paris
, before the revolution that would unleash all the political forces of Zola's time, in Provence, just outside Plassans, the fictional name of his native Aix-en-Provence. Adélaïde Fouque is the daughter of landowning peasants outside Plassans. When she is eighteen her father goes mad and dies, and, left alone, she marries an illiterate gardener named Rougon. Three months after their son, Pierre, is born, Rougon dies. Adélaïde takes up with her neighbor, a brutal, alcoholic smuggler named Macquart, who lives apart from her in a windowless shack but nevertheless sires two illegitimate sons with her, the first Rougon-Macquarts.

The family appears in
Le Ventre de Paris
and winds its way through the cycle of novels. Lisa's sister Gervaise, the mother of Claude Lantier, is a principal character in
L'Assommoir La Terre
is the story of their brother Jean Macquart. Lisa's daughter, the little girl Pauline in
The Belly of Paris
, will grow up to be a leading character in
La Joie de vivre