The Disappearance of Émile Zola

by Michael Rosen

  Back in Paris, the crisis concerning Zola’s property reached a head at the end of September, with the bailiffs ordering a sale of Zola’s effects. Wealthy friends stepped in, bought key articles and thereby brought the sale to a close. Zola’s editor Charpentier and his wife came over from Paris to see Zola and his family in early October just as Zola was describing it as one of the most beautiful autumns he had ever seen. They all went out in a landau to Windsor. For Denise, this was a day to remember, the woods, the squirrels, the deer, the park – it all seemed glorious. Baskets of flowers on the terrace of the castle reproduced an image of the crown, while in the chapel, everyone wanted to sit on the Queen’s chair, she wrote. There’s a nice irony in this scene, France’s most celebrated anti-monarchist enjoying a little monarchy-worship on the other side of the Channel. In a restaurant, they ate an extraordinary turtle soup, while Zola and Charpentier made up crazy stories for the children as explanations of how the soup had been prepared. It’s an image of gaiety, fun and enjoyable family social life.

  One problem: on her return Madame Charpentier recounted the story of the day to Madame Zola. The Zolas appear to have had some kind of deal whereby Zola had agreed not to share his family life with people whom Alexandrine regarded as her and Zola’s friends – like the Charpentiers. A letter full of dire anguish and despair followed. Alexandrine reminded Zola of what she had been through: how she had suffered and struggled at his side – right from the start when things were hard; how she had found courage from looking forward to a contented old age; how she had enjoyed Zola’s tough life and work; how they had clung to each other against the thorns that lay in their path. And now the reverse had happened: near in time to her and Zola’s deaths, these thorns had cruelly cut into her skin.

  The arrangement that Alexandrine, Zola and Jeanne had made may have enabled them all to carry on from one day to the next, but it also came at a price: they often caused each other real pain.

  Zola revealed in his letters to Alexandrine that when the children would no longer be with him in England, he would be terrified of being all alone.

  Zola was told that the anti-semitic newspaper La Libre Parole had made the group’s domestic arrangements public – albeit in a garbled fashion. On 13 October, it announced that Zola was accompanied during his exile by (hint, hint) ‘a friend’ (‘une amie’), one Madame Rozereau [sic]. Madame would be returning to France with two children. M. Zola would leave the train in the suburbs while Madame continued to Paris. A similar story ran in another paper of the same persuasion, Le Petit Journal. For reasons that are not entirely clear, this scandalous situation, so elegantly hinted at by Zola’s enemies, was not then shouted from the rooftops by all and sundry. In spite of Desmoulin’s and others’ terrible warnings, the skies did not open, no great finger of accusation was pointed at him, Jeanne or Alexandrine. Zola’s ménage did indeed turn out to be grist for the mill, but ended up in the bin. Perhaps it slipped out of sight in fin de siècle France for no other reason than that people from the professional classes laying blame and opprobrium on the irregular domestic arrangements of others would lay themselves open to the same accusation.

  On 10 October the little household made one more move: to Bailey’s Hotel, Gloucester Road, South Kensington. At the time, its adverts described it as ‘Under Royal patronage also American and Colonial families; renowned for many years for its home comforts and thorough completeness in every detail: 300 APARTMENTS, including self-contained suites facing gardens free from all noise; careful attention given to children’s meals, which are served in special dining-room … elevator to all floors; electric lighted throughout …’

  It was the best they could find, Vizetelly assured Zola, giving privacy in their room as they could dine there rather than with the other guests. Jeanne and the children left from Bailey’s on 15 October and Zola moved, on his own, to the Queen’s Hotel in Upper Norwood, under the name ‘M. J. Richard’.

  Adverts told newspaper readers of the time that the Queen’s Hotel was ‘close to Crystal Palace, in its own beautiful grounds of five acres. Renowned for healthy position. Highly recommended by physicians. Table d’hôte 7 o’clock. Good stabling. Lawn tennis.’ London Standard, 27 July 1898.

  Vizetelly and Wareham the lawyer chose it for Zola: they thought that he would be able to stay as secluded as he wanted to be in one of the suites and, as there was no ‘vast hall’ to cross, he would be able to come and go without a dozen servants standing around scrutinising guests. At first, Zola stayed in rooms overlooking the back garden but once the trees lost their leaves, he moved to a ground-floor suite facing the road. Apart from a short spell in another hotel, the Queen’s was where Zola would stay until his return to France in June 1899. In considering Zola as the Paris novelist or campaigner for the liberty of Dreyfus, it’s almost farcical to think he spent nearly eight months of his life holed up in a suburban hotel in Norwood.

  As ever, when the situation was desperate, Zola immersed himself in work. He broke off from his daily regime of working all morning, every morning, on Fécondité and took up Vizetelly’s offer to write something inspired by ‘The Castle’, the derelict mansion near ‘Penn’. He called the story ‘Angeline ou la maison hantée’ (‘Angeline or the haunted house’) and he transferred the setting to France. While Zola was absorbed by questions of truth in the Dreyfus Affair, he transformed the Vizetellys’ researches into a tale about seeking the truth. The observer-narrator in the story passes through several accounts of what may or may not have happened until he witnesses ‘the truth’ for himself … or is it? Vizetelly translated it and it was published in The Star a few months later before Zola returned to France. Incidentally, when I visited ‘Penn’ in 2014, I looked for ‘The Castle’ but it has long since disappeared. At a short distance from ‘Penn’, though, I came across Castle Road, an unacknowledged presence of what was once a supposedly haunted house.

  Reading the story not only allows us to picture the state of Zola’s imaginative life at this time, we can also imagine it landing on breakfast tables and being read all over Britain as it was syndicated across many newspapers even while Zola was still living in England.

  At first glance, the central motif of this odd little story appears to be Angeline herself, yet on reflection, my feeling is that the real theme is how the narrator is haunted. Haunting involves a ‘return’ – or several returns – over which the haunted one appears to have little or no control. Just as happens on the narrator’s final visit to the house, the story hovers somewhere between dream and reality, between sleep and wakefulness. Again, at first glance, the reason for the haunting seems straightforward: the murder or suicide of Angeline. But behind the death are several transgressive motives: jealousy of Angeline by the stepmother, jealousy of the stepmother by Angeline, the stepmother’s perceived disrespect towards the late wife/mother, a hint of over-intimate love in the ‘passionate embrace’ between father and daughter, and, of course, the desire to kill – to remove the rival from the scene. Some of this is a playing-out of the classic Electra trope. In this particular instance, though – as with Snow White – ‘mother’ is split between mother and stepmother, the first rendered perfect and idealised by being dead, and the second on to whom is displaced the sexual rivalry for the love of the father. The tale ‘permits’ the telling of unacceptable desires – including murder – precisely because they are channelled through the more socially acceptable rivalry between daughter and stepmother.

  The narrator is a man, so his haunting is from a father’s perspective. What returns as a haunting, seen purely from this perspective, is a father’s role in the incestuous feelings. In this sense, it’s not so much that the truth has to be found but that it has to be suppressed. This is done by the narrative of the story itself. The artist, ‘V’, banishes the haunting by telling the narrator that the girl simply died of natural causes, and that the calling-out for Angeline was real, and not a return. The narrator is relieved. Yet, there is no reason offered in th
e story itself as to why this account should be more believed than any other. Why should an old woman’s version be any less reliable than a dreamy poet’s, the narrator’s own dream-vision, or a celebrated artist’s version? In that sense, the hauntings are as ‘real’ as the ‘real’ explanation.

  If we think of Zola at this point in his life, in the midst of various crises, creating these images of mental and emotional struggles, can we say that the story shines a light on any of his fears and anxieties? Or should we say that it stands alone as a playful game within the ghost-story format? In one respect, the triangle he had set up in real life with Alexandrine and Jeanne created an Electra-like situation. He was having a father–daughter-like relationship with Jeanne while staying in his relationship with the woman who had been a mother-figure of sorts to Jeanne and was even now, ‘mothering’ Zola, managing his affairs in Paris. This wasn’t regarded at the time as being of itself beyond the pale, though: the mistress-figure was regarded by many as acceptable, so long as one was discreet about it. However, in Zola’s case, as we’ve seen, Alexandrine’s discovery of the affair resulted in a huge crisis and many small ones thereafter.

  Later, once the daughter-like figure of Jeanne became a mother, perhaps we can say that the next phase in the classic psycho-drama was starting to play out. In her memoir, Denise wrote:

  I was a little jealous of my mother, of the affection she bore my father; I always wanted to take his arm, I really lived in the atmosphere of glory that I sensed surrounded him. My mother never ever let go of him; she smiled at my authoritarian tenderness. In that way, she let me enjoy the infinite kindness of holding myself up against my father’s arm, something I’ve never forgotten.

  Through 17, 18 and 19 October, as Zola was writing the story, sitting alone in the Queen’s Hotel in Norwood, he was painfully aware that, by returning to France, Jeanne and Denise had ‘vanished’ and that each of them in their own way was in constant danger of being harmed – or worse. Fear of absence is a kind of haunting too. Separated from his loved ones, Zola conjured up their images, imagined possible mishaps and misfortunes, wrestled with the complications and consequences of his divided life, and reflected on his role in altering the lives of everyone near to him. I suspect that this little, rather unghostly ghost story not only played with the difficulty of ascertaining truth, symbolically replaying some of Zola’s concerns with the Dreyfus case, but also enabled him to safely explore some of the emotions swirling round in his mind: transgressive feelings in the story don’t appear to happen directly to Zola, it’s not a confession. They happen safely to an impersonal narrator, and are then banished. In the autumn of 1898, in the suburban surroundings of the Queen’s Hotel, fiction-making was doing its work.

  6

  ‘A little corner of life’

  Early on in Zola’s stay at the Queen’s Hotel, on 19 October, the Daily Telegraph ran a story under the heading ‘Search for Zola’. Madame Zola had assured the journalist (or the journalist’s informant) that Zola would not be returning to Paris until the Dreyfus case had been reviewed and the judgment of the court martial that had found Dreyfus guilty had been revoked. The paper reported that the person sent by the court that had found Zola guilty had roamed about looking for Zola, but it was said that Zola had a double, one M. Ignace Ephrussi of the ‘famous Jewish financial family, which has a matrimonial connection with the house of Rothschilds’. Detectives had been duped by this double and as a result had given incorrect information to the court that was chasing Zola: the court official had trailed the wrong man. Zola told Alexandrine he had read all this and praised her for what she had told the journalist.

  However, their final letters to each other before Alexandrine set out for England returned to the theme of their mutual pain. Zola explained that he hadn’t fully told her about a crisis he had experienced at the end of September. He had felt so utterly lost that he had stayed in bed for two days, more through despair than an actual illness. He was physically and morally shattered (‘brisé’).

  Alexandrine told Zola that her life was also ‘brisée’ forever, and every day it was crumbling away even more. This was something she could tell him only now, as she hadn’t wanted to write before about how much she had suffered during the previous few months. She spoke of their ‘torments’ and questioned Zola’s view that these would end. This was a hope she couldn’t have herself; they would only end when she was deep in the ground, because after the torments of today there would be others. Yes, she read that Zola had cried over her letters to him, but ‘let’s not talk any more about the thing that’s brought this sadness between us’.

  Zola was also writing to Jeanne, keeping her up to date with how the food at the Queen’s was even worse, the Sundays were just as terrible, and the hotel wasn’t very clean. He didn’t mention it, but the contrast with the luxury of his and Alexandrine’s stay at the Savoy five years earlier must have been stark. He was extremely anxious that no one should know about Jeanne’s stay in England, telling her to do what she could to prevent the children from talking about it. He urged her to defend them against even the most terrible threats to say where they had been and what they had been doing. One indiscreet word about the name of the country or town would set their enemies on his tracks and start off an investigation: this would be disastrous, he said, for his peace of mind. He asked her to remember the form of conduct he had told her to keep to: ‘silent and indifferent’.

  The fact that the Libre Parole had spilled the beans about Zola’s domestic set-up anyway wasn’t mentioned. He told Jeanne that he treasured the memory of the places they had lived together in England. In his mind’s eye, he said, he could see the pair of them going for bike rides – on their own or with the children. He thought that the two months together in England had tied them even closer.

  In the midst of this ardour, Zola was very concerned with the children’s progress and reminded Jeanne that she had promised to keep him up to date with details of their studies. She had to be honest about it, too. He had some instructions for her: she had to remind the children that they had promised to be good when they were with her, and, if they were, they would get a present from Papa. And they must try very hard not to do anything to make their mother angry. He told Jeanne that he had put the little silver swan ornament on his desk and it was right by him, while he did his writing. He said it spoke to him of the three of them, a time in his life that he would never forget.

  On 25 October, Alexandrine arrived at Victoria at 4.50 in the afternoon escorted by M. Fasquelle, Zola’s publisher, and they made their way immediately to the Queen’s Hotel. A cause for optimism cropped up at this point: the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Appeal agreed to investigate the Dreyfus case. Perhaps, Zola thought, he would be able to return to France sooner than expected.

  Madame Zola would stay with her husband at the Queen’s Hotel, Upper Norwood, until 5 December. We can capture a sense of this time and place from the photos that Zola took. He took a photo of the hotel itself, a neo-Georgian pile which had opened in 1854 and had attracted many famous visitors including Florence Nightingale, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German Crown Prince Frederick (who became Kaiser Frederick III) and King Faisal I. Zola’s camera shows us the road outside as if it were a wide continental boulevard. A woman in a boater pushes her bike past the hotel. An elderly couple walk their dog. A man on a horse trots past.

  From his room at the rear of the hotel, Zola snapped the ornamental garden. In another part of the grounds, chickens and a donkey graze peacefully. Opposite the hotel, across the road at the front, Zola took a picture of the detached houses that he wrote about:

  I have never seen a soul in those houses during all the months I have been here. They are occupied certainly for the window blinds are pulled up every morning and lowered every evening, but I can never detect who does this and I’ve never seen anybody leave the houses or enter them …

  Down the road there was a livelier house, one which had a balconied window, whi
ch Zola noticed was almost invariably open, and here he often spotted servants and children: ‘That is the one little corner of life and gaiety, amidst all the other silence and lack of life. Whenever I feel dull or worried I look over there.’

  We have to imagine many afternoons of Zola’s stay in Norwood with him loading his camera into the front basket of a bike and cycling out of the Queen’s Hotel to seek scenes to snap. His attention was drawn to the busy streets around Church Road, catching shoppers, horses-and-carts, shop displays, and workers laying electricity cables along the street. These are images of south London middle-class bustle. Modernity, movement and travel come even more to the fore in his many pictures of the local Southern Railway stations, trains, cyclists and, above all, the Crystal Palace itself, which he showed rising out of his pictures, too vast, too wide and too high for the frame, displaying its thousands of panes of shiny glass.

  Sometimes, it’s a solitary person who attracts his eye: a road sweeper in the middle of an empty street, a policeman, a lone horse or a woman striding across the road with her dog, with shops and houses stretching away from her, Alexandrine reading in the window of the hotel, or poignantly standing on her own by an oak tree in the middle distance. The coalman delivers coal, cows walk by the hotel on their way to or from being milked, and many women cyclists cross Zola’s viewfinder.