Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (22 page)

N
INE MONTHS LATER
, in 1892, they went on holiday together, just the two of them, to Provence and Italy, for seven weeks. He published the last novel of his great sequence, which had taken twenty-five years to complete. The main character was a man, Dr Pascal, who, having ‘forgotten to live’, tries to make up for lost time by falling in love with his niece: ‘All that solitary passion had given birth to nothing but books.’ He dedicated it to the memory of his Mother and his dear Wife. Since his wife no longer had herself placed next to journalists at dinners and told them what to write, the novel was not well reviewed.

She did, however, attend the celebration lunch on the island in the Bois de Boulogne. Two hundred people were rowed across the lake and sat under a marquee, eating
truite saumonée
,
noix de veau aux pointes d’asperge
,
galantine truffée de perdreaux
and
bombe panachée
, to mark the completion of
Les Rougon-Macquart
and the Master’s imminent promotion to the rank of officer in the Légion d’Honneur. According to the newspaper, when Charpentier mentioned Mme É mile Zola in his speech, ‘she had to fight back her tears’.

Six weeks later, she attended one of those intimate dinners whose principal purpose had always been to allow everyone to see how much older everyone looked. They dined at Goncourt’s house in Auteuil with the Daudets and some other friends. The men talked about their difficult profession, and asked each other how much they were paid by newspapers. Alexandrine sat in the corner with Julia Daudet, and told her all about her life at Médan. É mile, on the other side of the room, looked nervous and tried to hear what she was saying. Now and then, he asked, ‘Is everything all right,
ma petite chérie
?’

They ate dinner by the windows and saw a dark cloud in the sky. It was certain to rain. She brightened the conversation by telling them how terrified É mile had been of lightning when he was a little boy. His mother had had to take him down to the cellar and wrap him in blankets. Even now, when there was a thunderstorm, they had to sit in the billiards room beneath the laundry with the curtains drawn and all the lights on, so that she had to wear dark glasses, and he would take out his handkerchief and use it as a blindfold, which was especially funny because of all the scientific rationalism in his novels–the thought of É mile Zola quivering at electrical discharges like some biblical sinner under an angry sky…

She knew that, when they had gone home, Goncourt would write it all down in his diary, and when future generations came to study the works of the great novelist, his life would have no secrets.

PART TWO

6

T
HE AUTUMN OF
1895 was miserable in Paris. When the drizzle finally stopped, raindrops sprang from the trees along the boulevards. The pavements were always slippery, and the top of the Eiffel Tower was lost in cloud.

In Italy, the sun lingered late into the season. The sky was an intense blue, like some impossibly perfect memory of childhood. Every day, she wore summer dresses, and organized her afternoons around the sites where she might find some shade and a cool drink.

She wrote to him every day–from the Royal Hotel in Naples and the Grand Hotel in Rome–because he had been unsettled by her departure. In thirty years, they had never spent more than a day or two apart. She told her sister’s child, Elina, that she had fallen in love with Italy: ‘There are so many things that one knows only from history books–but how much more interesting they are when one can walk about in these historic places!’ She learned enough Italian for shopping; she even wrote some thank-you letters in Italian; but everyone was so welcoming that she was able to speak French whenever she liked.

She was fêted by the French ambassador at the Vatican, and her movements were reported in the society column of the
Figaro
, along with those of princes and duchesses. Count Edoardo Bertolelli, who had published some of É mile’s novels in
La Tribuna
, insisted on seeing her every day. She was fourteen years older than the count, but he called her his ‘ray of sunshine’. When she dressed for dinner, she tied a bunch of violets to her belt. He took her fox-hunting, and she saw the Sistine Chapel, the Villa Borghese, the Villa Medici, the Forum and the Catacombs. She felt the earthquake that shook Rome one night in mid-November. The count was so charming that he ordered her portrait from a painter, for which she wore a silk dress and some feathers in her hair, and in one hand she held the bouquet the count had given her.

Sometimes, when she was alone at the hotel, she remembered the foundling hospital and the baby with the white paper attached to its bonnet. She thought of the young woman alone with two small children, and the father who was hardly ever there, and terrified that his wife would leave him. As ever, she had faced up to the inevitable. He was allowed to take tea with them every afternoon, but it was a strange life for Denise, who was six, and Jacques, who was four. She saw them only occasionally, like a visiting grandmother, but she already knew them better than É mile. She would have to tell him how to treat the children, and how different they were from each other. In Rome, she bought them presents and looked forward to their next walk together in the Tuileries. If Denise asked for news of ‘the Lady’ while she was away, he was to say that ‘the Lady’ sent kisses to them both.

‘Devote yourself to the ones who are near you,’ she told him. ‘Show them a smiling face as much as you can.’ (Some things were more easily explained in a letter.)

7

S
HE RETURNED TO
Italy the following year, and again in 1897. But that year, the holiday was cut short. He needed her at his side in Paris, because how could he face the storm alone? Kitchen slops and excrement were tipped over the garden wall; some soldiers had thrown stones at the house; a bucket of dirty water was poured over the children when they were riding their bicycles. Six months after his open letter to the President of the French Republic on the Dreyfus Affair, when every wall in Paris was covered with the words, ‘J’Accuse!’, he was sentenced to jail for criminal libel and forced to flee to England.

She went with him to the Gare du Nord, with his nightshirt wrapped in a newspaper. He was in a terrible state of agitation, but she insisted on staying behind. Someone had to talk to the journalists, the lawyers and the politicians. At least there would always be something interesting to report. When he had gone, she wrote to her friend, Mme Bruneau, whose husband had accompanied É mile to the court house every day:

She read all his letters and sorted them into separate piles–the messages of support and the death threats, which he did not need to see. Exile was arduous enough as it was, and so she spared him unnecessary details.

Some of the anonymous letters were addressed to her:

After reading each letter, she made a note of the date of reception, and filed it away for posterity.

She worried about him, sitting there without a word of English at the Queen’s Hotel in Upper Norwood. She told him to be brave, and that he would have to finish what he had started. ‘His latest letters saddened me,’ she told Mme Bruneau, ‘not because of his health, but because he seems disheartened. So I got on my big warhorse and terrorized my hero, which did him a lot of good, because today I can tell that his mental barometer is getting back to normal.’

She finally joined him in England in the autumn of 1898, but she stayed for only five weeks. There was little she could do for him while she was away from Paris. Captain Dreyfus was still on Devil’s Island, and É mile was still a fugitive from what the government called ‘justice’.

Upper Norwood was no substitute for Rome. Everything was served with potatoes. The fish, which was cooked without butter or salt, tasted waterlogged, and the pastries in the bakers’ windows were so stodgy that it made one ill just to look at them. She returned to Paris in time to buy Christmas presents for the children, to see the doctor about her emphysema and to catch up with his work. There were so many letters to write and so many people to visit. ‘I have to be you and myself at the same time’, she told him.

W
HEN AT LAST
the tide was turning and the hero was able to return, their half-marriage resumed. She settled in to her sadness as though arranging their possessions in a house that was too small or too dark. The days of literary battles and endless research were over, but he seemed happier now that he could indulge his hobby. He liked to say that only when one had taken a photograph of something could one claim to have truly seen it, because a photograph showed details that would otherwise have escaped attention. He invented a release mechanism that allowed him to take photographs of himself, and she saw them all sitting together, taking tea in the garden of the rented house near Médan–É mile pouring the tea–and the mother of his children, who had once been so pretty and who now looked so glum, as though she were contemplating the life that could never be hers.

Since he owned at least eight cameras and various pieces of equipment in heavy boxes, he needed Alexandrine to help carry them about the Champ de Mars. Day after day, they went to the Exhibition. He wanted to record everything. For the first time since 1889, they climbed to the second platform of the Eiffel Tower and looked down over the city. The sun was shining. A new century had begun, and Paris was dressed for a new beginning.

He photographed the roofscape, moving around the platform, until he had a complete panorama of the city, from the industrial
quartier
s in the east to the avenues and gardens in the west. When they viewed the assembled panorama, they saw a world as grandiose and coherent as his great sequence of novels. This was not the shrouded mass of roofs she had seen the first time; it was the vast, collective work of the nineteenth century, the man-made ocean in which her husband had been one of the brightest beacons.

8

T
HEY WOKE IN
the night with headaches and stomach pains, and thought it must have been something they had eaten. He said to her, ‘We’ll be better in the morning.’ Then they had fallen asleep again, and it seemed to her that she could see him lying there and could do nothing to help him.

She woke in the clinic at Neuilly. It was three days before she was strong enough to be taken to the house. She went straight to the room on the first floor and fell on her knees, sobbing, and embracing the body, and stayed with him for an hour. Even in her weakness, when she was still at the clinic, she had thought of Jeanne and asked the publisher to go to Mlle Rozerot and tell her the terrible news, so that she and the children could bid him their last farewell.

No culprit was ever found. The death was described as a dreadful accident and a national calamity, but both women knew that someone must have crept across the rooftops, while the unseeing searchlights swept over the city, and blocked up the chimney, then cleared it again in the early morning.

His enemies had not prevailed. A huge, silent crowd followed the hearse from the Rue de Bruxelles to the Montmartre cemetery. Soldiers presented arms as the procession passed. She had planned every detail of the ceremony herself. It was the greatest public event in Paris since the funeral of Victor Hugo. She was too frail to attend the burial, but she knew that somewhere in the crowd that stood at the graveside were two children and a young woman who might be mistaken for a widow, and that their photographs would join hers in the coffin.

S
HE SOLD
some of the paintings and antiques, and the land at Médan between the railway and the Seine. She made certain that Jeanne had everything she needed–because he had not made all the necessary financial arrangements–that Denise and Jacques worked hard and did not try to take advantage of their mother’s kindness. They discussed clothes and furniture and the flowers that were placed on the tomb where the children’s father had been laid to rest.