THE AVERAGE WOMAN

By WOLCOTT BALESTIER

World.—“Characteristic, fresh, and simply-pathetic.”

St. James’s Gazette.—“Decidedly good stories and well told.”

Scotsman.—“The book will interest every one who takes it up.”

Morning Post.—“Considerable freshness of inspiration ... touches both of humour and pathos.”

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

The Attack on the Mill AND OTHER SKETCHES OF WAR

BY Émile Zola

WITH AN ESSAY ON THE SHORT STORIES OF M. ZOLA BY EDMUND GOSSE

LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN BEDFORD STREET W.C. MDCCCXCII

All rights reserved

THE SHORT STORIES OF M. ZOLA

It is by his huge novels, and principally by those of the Rougon-Macquart series, that M. Zola is known to the public and to the critics. Nevertheless, he has found time during the thirty years of his busy literary career to publish about as many small stories, now comprised in four separate volumes. It is natural that his novels should present so very much wider and more attractive a subject for analysis that, so far as I can discover, even in France no critic has hitherto taken the shorter productions separately, and discussed M. Zola as a maker of contes. Yet there is a very distinct interest[Pg 2] in seeing how such a thunderer or bellower on the trumpet can breathe through silver, and, as a matter of fact, the short stories reveal a M. Zola considerably dissimilar to the author of “Nana” and of “La Terre”—a much more optimistic, romantic, and gentle writer. If, moreover, he had nowhere assailed the decencies more severely than he does in these thirty or forty short stories, he would never have been named among the enemies of Mrs. Grundy, and the gates of the Palais

Mazarin would long ago have been opened to receive him. It is, indeed, to a lion with his mane en papillotes that I here desire to attract the attention of English readers; to a man-eating monster, indeed, but to one who is on his best behaviour and blinking in the warm sunshine of Provence.

[Pg 3]

I.

The first public appearance of M. Zola in any form was made as a writer of a short story. A southern journal, La Provence, published at Aix, brought out in 1859 a little conte entitled “La Fée Amoureuse.” When this was written, in 1858, the future novelist was a student of eighteen, attending the rhetoric classes at the Lycée St. Louis; when it was printed, life in Paris, far from his delicious South, was beginning to open before him, harsh, vague, with a threat of poverty and failure. “La Fée Amoureuse” may still be read by the curious in the Contes à Ninon. It is a fantastic little piece, in the taste of the eighteenth-century trifles of Crébillon or Boufflers, written with considerable care in an over-luscious vein—a fairy tale[Pg 4] about an enchanted bud of sweet marjoram, which expands and reveals the amorous fay, guardian of the loves of Prince Loïs and the fair Odette. This is a moonlight-coloured piece of unrecognisable Zola, indeed, belonging to the period of his lost essay on “The Blind Milton dictating to his Elder Daughter, while the Younger accompanies

him upon the Harp,” a piece which many have sighed in vain to see.

He was twenty when, in 1860, during the course of blackening reams of paper with poems à la Musset, he turned, in the aërial garret, or lantern above the garret of 35 Rue St. Victor, to the composition of a second story—“Le Carnet de Danse.” This is addressed to Ninon, the ideal lady of all M. Zola’s early writings—the fleet and jocund virgin of the South, in whom he romantically personifies the Provence after[Pg 5] which his whole soul was thirsting in the desert of Paris. This is an exquisite piece of writing—a little too studied, perhaps, too full of opulent and voluptuous adjectives; written, as we may plainly see, under the influence of Théophile Gautier. The story, such as it is, is a conversation between Georgette and the programme-card of her last night’s ball. What interest “Le Carnet de Danse” possesses it owes to the style, especially that of the opening pages, in which the joyous Provençal life is elegantly described. The young man, still stumbling in the wrong path, had at least become a writer.

For the next two years M. Zola was starving, and vainly striving to be a poet. Another “belvédère,” as M. Aléxis calls it, another glazed garret above the garret, received him in the Rue Neuve St. Étienne[Pg 6] du Mont. Here the squalor of Paris was around him; the young idealist from the forests and lagoons of Provence found himself lost in a loud and horrid world of quarrels, oaths, and dirt, of popping beer-bottles and yelling women. A year, at the age of two-and-twenty, spent in this atmosphere of sordid and noisy vice, left its mark for ever on the spirit of the young observer. He lived on bread and coffee, with two sous’ worth of apples upon gala days. He had, on one occasion, even to make an Arab of himself, sitting with the bed-wraps draped about him, because he had pawned his clothes. All the time, serene and ardent, he was writing modern imitations of Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” epics on the genesis of the world, didactic hymns to Religion, and love-songs by the gross. Towards the close of 1861 this happy misery, this wise folly,[Pg 7]

came to an end; he obtained a clerkship in the famous publishing house of M. Hachette.

But after these two years of poverty and hardship he began to write a few things which were not in verse. Early in 1862 he again addressed to the visionary Ninon a short story called “Le Sang.” He confesses himself weary, as Ninon also must be, of the coquettings of the rose and the infidelities of the butterfly. He will tell her a terrible tale of real life. But, in fact, he is absolutely in the clouds of the worst romanticism. Four soldiers, round a camp-fire, suffer agonies of ghostly adventure, in the manner of Hofmann or of Petrus Borel. We seem to have returned to the age of 1830, with its vampires and its ghouls. “Simplice,” which comes next in point of date, is far more characteristic, and here, indeed, we find one talent of[Pg 8] the future novelist already developed. Simplice is the son of a worldly king, who despises him for his innocence; the prince slips away into the primæval forest and lives with dragon-flies and water-lilies. In the personal life given to the forest itself, as well as to its inhabitants, we have something

very like the future idealisations in L’Abbé Mouret, although the touch is yet timid and the flashes of romantic insight fugitive. “Simplice” is an exceedingly pretty fairy story, curiously like what Mrs. Alfred Gatty used to write for sentimental English girls and boys: it was probably inspired to some extent by George Sand.

On a somewhat larger scale is “Les Voleurs et l’Âne,” which belongs to the same period of composition. It is delightful to find M. Zola describing his garret as “full of flowers and of light, and so high[Pg 9] up that sometimes one hears the angels talking on the roof.” His story describes a summer day’s adventure on the Seine, an improvised picnic of strangers on a grassy island of elms, a siesta disturbed by the somewhat stagey trick of a fantastic coquette. According to his faithful biographer, M. Paul Aléxis, the author, towards the close of 1862, chose another lodging, again a romantic chamber, overlooking this time the whole extent of the cemetery of Montparnasse. In this elegiacal retreat he composed two short stories, “Sœur des Pauvres” and “Celle qui m’Aime.” Of these, the former was written as a commission for the young Zola’s employer, M. Hachette, who wanted a tale appropriate for a children’s newspaper which his firm was publishing. After reading what his clerk submitted to him, the publisher is said to have remarked, “Vous[Pg 10]

êtes un révolté,” and to have returned him the manuscript as “too revolutionary.” “Sœur des Pauvres” is a tiresome fable, and it is difficult to understand why M. Zola has continued to preserve it among his writings. It belongs to the class of semi-realistic stories which Tolstoi has since then composed with such admirable skill. But M. Zola is not happy among saintly visitants to little holy girls, nor among pieces of gold that turn into bats and rats in the hands of selfish peasants. Why this anodyne little religious fable should ever have been considered revolutionary, it is impossible to conceive.

Of a very different order is “Celle qui m’Aime,” a story of real power. Outside a tent, in the suburbs of Paris, a man in a magician’s dress stands beating a drum and inviting the passers-by to enter and gaze on[Pg 11] the realisation of their dreams, the face of her who loves you. The author is persuaded to go in, and he finds himself in the midst of an assemblage of men and boys, women and girls, who pass up in turn to look through a glass trap in a box. In the description of the various types, as they file by, of the aspect of the interior of the tent, there is the touch of a new hand. The vividness of the study is not maintained; it passes off into romanesque extravagance, but for a few moments the attentive listener, who goes back to these early stories, is conscious that he has heard the genuine accent of the master of Naturalism.

Months passed, and the young Provençal seemed to be making but little progress in the world. His poems definitely failed to find a publisher, and for a while he seems to have flagged even in the production of[Pg 12] prose. Towards the beginning of 1864, however, he put together the seven stories which I have already mentioned, added to them a short novel entitled “Aventures du Grand Sidoine,” prefixed a fanciful and very prettily turned address “À Ninon,” and carried off the collection to a new publisher, M. Hetzel. It was accepted, and issued in October of the same year. M. Zola’s first book appeared under the title of Contes à Ninon. This volume was very well received by the reviewers, but ten years passed before the growing fame of its author carried it beyond its first edition of one thousand copies.

There is no critical impropriety in considering these early stories, since M. Zola has never allowed them, as he has allowed several of his subsequent novels, to pass out of print. Nor, from the point of view of style, is there anything to be ashamed of in[Pg 13] them. They are written with an uncertain and an imitative, but always with a careful hand, and some passages of natural description, if a little too precious, are excellently modulated. What is really very curious in the first Contes à Ninon is the optimistic tone, the sentimentality, the luscious idealism. The young man takes a cobweb for his canvas, and paints upon it in rainbow-dew with a peacock’s feather. Except, for a brief moment, in “Celle qui m’Aime,” there is not a phrase that suggests the naturalism of the Rougon-Macquart novels, and it is an amusing circumstance that, while M. Zola has not only been practising, but very sternly and vivaciously preaching, the gospel of Realism, this innocent volume of fairy stories should all the time have been figuring among his works.

The humble student who should turn from[Pg 14] the master’s criticism to find an example in his writings, and who should fall by chance on the Contes à Ninon, would be liable to no small distress of bewilderment.

II.

Ten years later, in 1874, M. Zola published a second volume of short stories, entitled Nouveaux Contes à Ninon. His position, his literary character, had in the meantime undergone a profound modification. In 1874 he was no longer unknown to the public or to himself. He had already published four of the Rougon-Macquart novels, embodying the natural and social history of a French family during the Second Empire. He was scandalous and famous, and already bore a great turbulent name in literature and criticism. The Nouveaux Contes à Ninon,[Pg 15] composed at intervals during that period of stormy evolution, have the extraordinary interest which attends the incidental work thrown off by a great author during the early and noisy manhood of his talent. After 1864 M. Zola had written one unsuccessful novel after another, until at last, in Thérèse Raquin, with its magnificent study of crime chastised by its own hideous after-gust, he produced a really remarkable performance. The scene in which the paralytic mother tries to denounce the domestic murderess

was in itself enough to prove that France possessed one novelist the more.

This was late in 1867, when M. Zola was in his twenty-eighth year. A phrase of Louis Ulbach’s, in reviewing Thérèse Raquin, which he called “littérature putride,” is regarded as having stated the question of Naturalism and M. Zola who had not, up[Pg 16] to that time, had any notion of founding a school, or even of moving in any definite direction, was led to adopt the theories which we identify with his name during the angry dispute with Ulbach. In 1865 he had begun to be drawn towards Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and to feel, as he puts it, that in the salons of the Parnassians he was growing more and more out of his element “among so many impenitent romantiques.” Meanwhile he was for ever feeding the furnaces of journalism, scorched and desiccated by the blaze of public life, by the daily struggle for bread. He was roughly affronting the taste of those who differed from him, with rude hands he was thrusting out of his path the timid, the dull, the old-fashioned. The spectacle of these years of M. Zola’s life is not altogether a pleasant

one, but it leaves on us the impression of a[Pg 17] colossal purpose pursued with force and courage. In 1870 the first of the Rougon Macquart novels appeared, and the author was fairly launched on his career. He was writing books of large size, in which he was endeavouring to tell the truth about modern life with absolute veracity, no matter how squalid, or ugly, or venomous that truth might be.

But during the whole of this tempestuous decade M. Zola, in his hot battle-field of Paris, heard the voice of Ninon calling to him from the leafy hollows, from behind the hawthorn hedges, of his own dewy Provence—the cool Provence of earliest flowery spring. When he caught these accents whistling to his memory from the past, and could no longer resist answering them, he was accustomed to write a little conte, light and innocent, and brief enough to be[Pg 18] the note of a caged bird from indoors answering its mate in the trees of the garden. This is the real secret of the utterly incongruous tone of the Nouveaux Contes when we compare them with the Curée and Madeleine Férat of the same period. It would be utterly to misunderstand the nature of M. Zola to complain, as Pierre Loti did the other day, that the coarseness and cynicism of the naturalistic novel, the tone of a ball at Belleville, could not sincerely co-exist with a love of beauty, or with a nostalgia for youth and country pleasures. In the short stories of the period of which we are speaking, that poet which dies in

every middle-aged man lived on for M. Zola, artificially, in a crystal box carefully addressed “à Ninon là-bas,” a box into which, at intervals, the master of the Realists slipped a document of the most refined ideality.

[Pg 19]

Of these tiny stories—there are twelve of them within one hundred pages—not all are quite worthy of his genius. He grimaces a little too much in “Les Epaules de la Marquise,” and M. Bourget has since analysed the little self-indulgent dévote of quality more successfully than M. Zola did in “Le Jeûne.” But most of them are very charming. Here is “Le Grand Michu,” a study of gallant, stupid boyhood; here “Les Paradis des Chats,” one of the author’s rare escapes into humour. In “Le Forgeron,” with its story of the jaded and cynical town-man, who finds health and happiness by retiring to a lodging within the very thunders of a village blacksmith, we have a profound criticism of life. “Le Petit Village” is interesting to us here, because, with its pathetic picture of Woerth in Alsace, it is the earliest of M. Zola’s studies of war. In other of[Pg 20] these stories the spirit of Watteau seems to inspire the sooty Vulcan of Naturalism. He prattles of moss-grown fountains, of alleys of wild strawberries, of rendezvous under the

wings of the larks, of moonlight strolls in the bosquets of a château. In every one, without exception, is absent that tone of brutality which we associate with the notion of M. Zola’s genius. All is gentle irony and pastoral sweetness, or else downright pathetic sentiment.

The volume of Nouveaux Contes à Ninon closes with a story which is much longer and considerably more important than the rest. “Les Quatre Journées de Jean Gourdon” deserves to rank among the very best things to which M. Zola has signed his name. It is a study of four typical days in the life of a Provençal peasant of the better sort, told by the man himself. In[Pg 21] the first of these it is spring: Jean Gourdon is eighteen years of age, and he steals away from the house of his uncle Lazare, a country priest, that he may meet his coy sweetheart Babet by the waters of the broad Durance. His uncle follows and captures him, but the threatened sermon turns into a benediction, the priestly malediction into an impassioned song to the blossoming springtide. Babet and Jean receive the old man’s blessing on their betrothal.

Next follows a day in summer, five years later; Jean, as a soldier in the Italian war, goes through the horrors of a battle and is wounded, but not dangerously, in the shoulder. Just as he marches into action he receives a letter from Uncle Lazare and Babet, full of tender fears and tremors; he reads it when he recovers consciousness after the battle. Presently he creeps off to[Pg 22] help his excellent colonel, and they support one another till both are carried off to hospital. This episode, which has something in common with the “Sevastopol” of Tolstoi, is exceedingly ingenious in its observation of the sentiments of a common man under fire.

The third part of the story occurs fifteen years later. Jean and Babet have now long been married, and Uncle Lazare, in extreme old age, has given up his cure, and lives with them in their farm by the river. All things have prospered with them save one. They are rich, healthy, devoted to one another, respected by all their neighbours; but there is a single happiness lacking—they have no child. And now, in the high autumn splendour—when the corn and the grapes are ripe, and the lovely Durance winds like a riband of white satin through the gold and purple of the land[Pg 23]scape—this gift also is to be theirs. A little son is born to them in the midst of the vintage weather, and the old uncle, to whom life has now no further good thing to offer, drops painlessly from life, shaken down like a blown leaf by his access of joy, on the evening of the birthday of the child.

The optimistic tone has hitherto been so consistently preserved, that we must almost resent the tragedy of the fourth day. This is eighteen years later, and Jean is now an elderly man. His son Jacques is in early manhood. In the midst of their felicity, on a winter’s night, the Durance rises in spate, and all are swept away. It is impossible, in a brief sketch, to give an impression of the charm and romantic sweetness of this little masterpiece, a veritable hymn to the Ninon of Provence; but it raises many curious reflections to consider that this exquisitely pathetic[Pg 24] pastoral, with all its gracious and tender personages, should have been written by the master of Naturalism, the author of Germinal and of Pot-Bouille.

III.