The Belly of Paris (4 page)
Read The Belly of Paris Online
Authors: Emile Zola
Tags: #France, #19th Century, #European Literature
Devil's Island was a place where political prisoners were sent, not to work but simply to be abandoned. In Zola's novel, it was where Florent was sent. In 1895, some thirteen years after Zola wrote about Florent, a real-life political prisoner, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was sent there. A twelve-square-yard stone house was built for him, where he was constantly watched by guards who were under orders not to talk to him. But apparently they did and even played chess with him.
Today the island is abandoned. In 1986, I visited it. There was no place to land a boat, and I persuaded a gendarme to take me up to the rocks in his rubber Zodiac. I rolled onto the rocks, and he accelerated out to sea. I reminded him of our agreement for him to pick me up in exactly one hour, but as he pulled away he smiled, and over the roar of his outboard I heard him shout, “Au revoir, Dreyfus II!”
I smiled back, but it was not an entirely comfortable feeling. The island was overgrown with coconut palms. That's what happens. Coconuts are seeds. They drop and take root and are split up the middle by a palm tree. One of the few signs of human life on the island was Dreyfus's stone house. The metal roof was gone, and the room was empty except for a few of the encroaching coconuts and palm fronds that had made their way inside. I stood in Dreyfus's prison anxiously peering through the windows with their remnants of iron bars past the palm trees of the tiny island to the sea, looking for signs of the Zodiac. I was equipped for survival with a pen, a notebook, a sketch pad, and a small set of watercolors. I painted a watercolor of the room and then walked out to the rocks, hoping to see the gendarme in the distance. But I remained calm until the hour was up. Four very long minutes later the smiling gendarme arrived.
Politics, as Zola wrote of Florent, was Zola's destiny. The Dreyfus case was the climax of that destiny. Zola said of himself that he was a dull conversationalist and found a voice only when championing a cause. The French Revolution launched almost two centuries of something close to civil war. One side supported the Bonapartes, while the other opposed them. One side was monarchist, militarist, Catholic, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic; the other was socialist, anti-imperial, antimilitary pro-women. They were the two sides that clashed over the Dreyfus Affair, and a lifetime of political stances seemed to lead Zola to the showdown. The split endured even after the Dreyfus Affair, with World War II collaborators and resisters and in the fight over decolonization in the 1950s and '60s. It was Zola's old adversaries, half a century after his death, who shouted down the French prime minister Pierre Mendès-France for withdrawing from Vietnam by shouting “Dirty Jew.” Zola lived only two years into the twentieth century, but it is easy to see where he would have stood throughout those years. Zola was always clear about where he stood.
In
The Belly of Paris this
divide is between the fat people and the thin people. In Zola's youth and in many of his novels, the split was between supporters of Napoleon III's empire and its opponents. By the time Zola was in his twenties, the repression had loosened and dozens of new anti-Napoleon journals had emerged in Paris. Zola launched his career in these journals, showing such a flair for controversy, whether in a political essay or a theater review, that he was sometimes accused of deliberately being contrary to get attention. In literature and the arts he was always a champion of modernism, one of the early supporters of the much-criticized Impressionism of Edouard Manet. Zola relished the attention, and he enjoyed being in Paris, which he called “the star of intelligence.”
At times Zola seemed almost frustrated that his defiant political stands did not evoke the kind of persecution—trials, banned writing, exile—for which the older and more celebrated Victor Hugo
had famously been singled out. Zola's timing was off. While he was in Paris writing reviews, Hugo was in political exile. When he left Paris to avoid starvation under the 1871 German siege, Hugo was there eating zoo animals. Zola was ashamed that he had managed to escape Paris during the German siege. Manet stayed and manned artillery on a starvation diet, and many of Zola's artist and writer friends were there.
Then, in 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish army officer from the German-speaking part of Alsace that had been taken by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, was falsely accused of passing secrets to the German command. A wave of anti-Semitism was unleashed in France. Zola did not so much befriend Jews as loathe anti-Semitism. He regarded it as a backward affliction of the mind that, if left unchecked, would eventually destroy France. Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil's Island, and Zola became one of his most conspicuous defenders.
Zola's January 13, 1898, open letter in
L'Aurore
, “J'Accuse!” is considered one of the great masterpieces of journalism and is possibly Zola's most famous piece of writing. It explained how Dreyfus had been framed by a fellow officer and accused the army command of covering it up. It began to change public opinion and put Zola at the center of a historic conflict. He was forced to leave the country to avoid being prosecuted for writing “J'Accuse!” and became a highly controversial figure.
He refused to take payment for any of the articles he wrote on the Dreyfus case, and when in exile in England he turned down sizable sums because he considered the case a purely French affair and would not write about it abroad. Although he had long embraced the working class, it had always shown great misgivings about him. Only with the Dreyfus case was he finally embraced by workers and trade unions. But he lost many readers over Dreyfus and never regained his popularity.
On September 28, 1902, Zola died in his home outside Paris of carbon monoxide poisoning from a malfunctioning chimney. In 1927, a stove fitter made a deathbed confession that he and other
anti-Dreyfusards, while repairing a neighbor's roof, had deliberately blocked Zola's chimney to kill him. The story which did not surface until 1953, has never been confirmed but is most certainly the version of his death that Zola would have preferred. The few real writers, the ones who stand up and use their voices for what they believe, understand that being a writer is not without risks.
HE
B
ELLY OF
P
ARIS
C
HAPTER
O
NE
In the silence of a deserted avenue, wagons stuffed with produce made their way toward Paris, their thudding wheels rhythmically echoing off the houses sleeping behind the rows of elm trees meandering on either side of the road. At the pont de Neuilly a cart full of cabbages and another full of peas met up with eight carts of turnips and carrots coming in from Nanterre. The horses, their heads bent low, led themselves with their lazy, steady pace, a bit slowed by the slight uphill climb. Up on the carts, lying on their stomachs in the vegetables, wrapped in their black-and-gray-striped wool coats, the drivers slept with the reins in their fists. Occasionally the light from a gas lamp would grope its way through the shadows and brighten the hobnail of a boot, the blue sleeve of a blouse, or the tip of a hat poking from the bright bloom of vegetables—red bouquets of carrots, white bouquets of turnips, or the bursting greenery of peas and cabbages.
All along the road and all the nearby routes, up ahead and farther back, the distant rumbling of carts told of other huge wagons, all pushing on through the darkness and slumber of two in the
morning, the sound of passing food lulling the darkened town to stay asleep.
Madame François's horse, Balthazar, an overweight beast, led the column. He dawdled on, half asleep, flicking his ears until, at rue de Longchamp, his legs were suddenly frozen by fear. The other animals bumped their heads into the stalled carts in front of them, and the column halted with the clanking of metal and the cursing of drivers who had been yanked from their sleep. Seated up top, Madame François, with her back against a plank that held the vegetables in place, peered out but saw nothing by the faint light of the little square lantern to her left, which barely lit one of Balthazar's glistening flanks.
“Come on, lady, let's keep moving,” shouted one of the men who was kneeling in turnips. “It's just some drunken idiot.”
But as she leaned over she thought she made out a dark patch of something blocking the road, about to be stepped on by the horse.
“You can't just run people over,” she said, jumping down from her wagon.
It was a man sprawled across the road, his arms stretched out, facedown in the dust. He seemed extraordinarily long and as thin as a dry branch. It was a miracle that Balthazar had not stepped on him and snapped him in two. Madame François thought he was dead, but when she crouched over him and took his hand, she found it was still warm.
“Hey, mister,” she called softly.
But the drivers were growing impatient. The one kneeling in the vegetables shouted in a gruff voice, “Give it up, lady. The son of a bitch is plastered. Shove him in the gutter.”
In the meantime, the man had opened his eyes. He stared, motionless, at Madame François, with a look of bewilderment. She too thought that he must be drunk.
“You can't stay there, you're going to get yourself run over,” she told him. “Where were you going?”
“I don't know,” the man replied in a feeble voice. Then, with great effort and a worried face, “I was going to Paris, and I fell. I don't know …”
Now she could see him better, and he was pathetic with his black pants and black overcoat, so threadbare that they showed the contour of his bare bones. Underneath a hat of coarse black cloth that he had pulled down as though afraid of being recognized, two large brown eyes of a rare gentleness could be seen on a hard and tormented face. Madame François thought that this man was much too feeble to have been drinking.
“Where in Paris were you going?” she asked.
He didn't answer right away. This cross-examination was worrying him. After a moment's reflection, he cautiously replied, “Over there, by Les Halles.”
With great difficulty he had almost stood up again and seemed anxious to be on his way. But Madame François noticed him trying to steady himself against one of the wagon shafts.
“You're tired?”
“Very tired,” he mumbled.
Adopting a gruff tone, as though annoyed, and giving him a shove, she shouted, “Go on, move it! Get up in my wagon! You're wasting my time. I'm going to Les Halles, and I can drop you off with my vegetables.”
When he refused, she practically threw him onto the turnips and carrots in the back with her thick arms and shouted impatiently, “That's enough! No more trouble from you. You're beginning to annoy me, my friend. Didn't I tell you that I'm headed to the market anyway? Go to sleep up there. I'll wake you when we get there.”
She climbed back up, sat sideways with her back against the plank again, and took Balthazar's reins. He started up sleepily, twitching his ears. The other carts followed. The column resumed its slow march in the dark, the sound of wheels on the paving stones again thudding against the sleeping housefronts. The wagoneers, wrapped in their coats, returned to their snoozing. The one who had called out to Madame François grumbled as he lay down, “Damn, does she have to take care of every bum? You are something, lady.”
The carts rolled on, the horses, with their heads bowed, leading themselves. The man Madame François had picked up was lying on
his stomach, his long legs lost in the turnips, which filled the back of the cart, while his head was buried in the spreading carrot bunches. With weary outstretched arms he seemed to hug his bed of vegetables for fear a jolt of the cart would send him sprawling in the road. He watched the two endless columns of gaslights ahead of him, which vanished in the distance into a confusion of other lights. A large white cloud nuzzled the horizon, so that Paris appeared to be sleeping in a glowing mist illuminated by all the lamps.
“I'm from Nanterre. My name is Madame François,” the woman said after a moment's silence. “Ever since I lost my poor husband, I go to Les Halles every morning. It's a hard life, but what can you do. And you?”