Three days later a mutual friend came to tell me the awful news. Julien had received a letter the day before, informing him that his brother was dead. A shell blast had killed him at Borny. I ran straight away to the poor boy’s digs; I found no one. The next morning I was still in bed when a tall young man called, dressed as a franc-tireur.14 It was Julien. At first I didn’t recognise him. Then I hugged him tight, tears in my eyes. He didn’t cry. He sat down for a moment, waving away my pity.
‘You see,’ he said, quietly, ‘I wanted to say goodbye to you. Now that I’m on my own, I’ll get bored just doing nothing… I found out that a company of franc-tireurs was setting off, so I put my name down yesterday… It’ll keep me busy.’
‘When do you go?’
‘Couple of hours… Goodbye!’
He hugged me back. I didn’t dare quiz him further. He left, and I thought of him always.
After the catastrophe at Sedan,15 and some days after the siege of Paris, I got some news. Our boy, who was so pale, so girlish, fought like a wolf – so one of his comrades told me. He was a savage, lurking in the bushes, preferring knives to guns. He stayed on the lookout all night long, hunting men like game; if anyone crossed his path, he slit their throat. I couldn’t speak. This couldn’t be Julien. Had this timid poet really become a butcher?
Now Paris was cut off from the rest of the world. The siege started; it was thrilling and soporific by turns. I couldn’t go out without thinking of winter nights back in Aix. The streets were deserted, with homes shuttered down early. You could hear cannons and gunfire in the distance, of course, but the sound seemed to lose its way in the mournful silence of this vast city. Some days, there’d be hope in the air: the people would rouse themselves and forget about the long queues at the baker’s, about the rations, about the unlit stoves, about the shells that rained down on the left bank. Then some new disaster would leave everyone dazed, and the silence would begin again: the silence of a city on the verge of dying. Yet during this long siege I did glimpse corners of undisturbed happiness: people making do, not willing to sacrifice their everyday walk in the bright winter sunshine; lovers who smiled at one another in their suburban hideaway, deaf to the sound of shelling. You lived one day at a time. All our illusions were shattered. We waited for a miracle. Provincial garrisons might come to rescue us, or maybe there’d be a mass evacuation, or some other extraordinary measure that would be taken when the time was right.
One day I was at one of the outposts when a man was brought in after having been found in a ditch. I recognised Julien. He insisted on speaking to a general so that he could pass on intelligence. I stayed with him all night. He hadn’t slept in a bed since September, refusing to delegate his cutthroat duties. He didn’t reveal much, only shrugging his shoulders and saying that it was the same thing every time: he killed as many Prussians as he could, however he could, with his gun or with his knife. Overall, he said, it was a very dull life, and much less dangerous than you’d think. He had never been in any real danger, except once when the French accused him of spying and were about to shoot him.
The next day, he said he was going back, into the fields, into the woods. I begged him to stay in Paris. We were at my place; he was sitting down, he didn’t seem to hear. Suddenly, he said:
‘You’re right. Enough… I killed my share.’
Two days later, he told me that he had just joined the cavalry. I was speechless. Hadn’t he avenged his brother enough then? Or was he in the grip of some new-found patriotism? I smiled.
‘I’m covering for Louis, so it’s soldier or nothing for me. Ah… gunpowder! Homeland, you see, it’s the ground where the ones you loved lie sleeping.’
NOTES
1. In 1783 Russia annexed the Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula, from Turkey. When religious tension caused these two nations to fight the Crimean War (1853–6), France – fearing Russian expanionism, like its ally Britain – intervened on the side of the Turks. ‘The Italian campaign’ (1859) bolstered Sardinia in its war against Austria, rulers of the northern regions Lombardy and Venetia since 1815. ‘The catastrophe of 1870’ refers to the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1), which Emperor Napoleon III declared and lost.
2. In September 1855 Franco-British troops seized the Ukrainian port city, a key Russian naval base, after an eleven-month siege.
3. In 1830 Victor Hugo (1802–85) scored a controversial hit with the play Hernani, a courtly romance set in sixteenth-century Spain, which challenged the prevailing artistic fashion for seeking inspiration in Classical antiquity. Hernani helped to inaugurate a phase of literary Romanticism, of which Alfred de Musset (1810–57) was a central (if ambivalent) figure. Zola admired Hugo and Musset as a young man, but criticised them repeatedly in later life. ‘Lettre à la Jeunesse’ (‘Letter to the Youth’, 1880), for instance, argued that Hugo’s poetic idealism was ‘dangerous’, ‘leading young people into… lies’ and ‘vice’. Zola promoted his own earthy Naturalism as the remedy: it ‘may be frightening’, he conceded, ‘but not corrupting’.
4. Saint-Cyr is a military academy in Brittany, founded in 1803.
5. The Franco-Sardinian alliance defeated the Austrians at this northern Italian town on 4th June 1859.
6. A newspaper, founded in 1789, regarded – at the point in time that Zola describes – as an official organ of Napoleon III.
7. On 24th June 1859, Franco-Sardinian forces fought Austrian troops for more than nine hours at this northern Italian town; both sides suffered heavy losses.
8. Napoleon III’s declaration of war on Prussia came amid mounting domestic
demands for democratic reform.
9. The Congress of Vienna (1814–5) redrew European borders in the wake of the ultimately disastrous Napoleonic Wars (1803–15) between France and its rival continental powers; an alliance of English and Prussian forces inflicted on Napoleon Bonaparte his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo (18th June 1815).
10. The Corps Législatif is the chamber of elected representatives, where the prominent anti-Imperialist Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) denounced plans to attack Prussia.
11. Prussian troops seized the Alsatian village of Froeschwiller on 6th August 1870.
12. The Prussians’ nineteen-week siege of Paris began on 19th September 1870.
13. On 14th August 1870, the retreating French forces delayed their westward withdrawal to fight a bloody battle at Borny in Lorraine, east of Metz.
14. The decisive battle of the Franco-Prussian War was fought on 1st September 1870 at Sedan, a north-eastern town near the border with Belgium; Napoleon III surrendered with 17,000 men killed or wounded, and more captured. A Republic was declared on 4th September, while fighting continued for a further five months.
15. In Paris, a popular revolt at the circumstances of the defeat led to a two-month period of rule under ‘the Commune’, brutally repressed during the ‘Bloody Week’ of 21st–28th May 1871.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Emile Zola was born in April 1840 and grew up in Aix-en-Provence, where he befriended the artist Paul Cézanne. In 1858, Zola moved to Paris with his mother. Despite her hopes that he would become a lawyer, he in fact failed his baccalaureate, and went on to work for the publisher Hachette, and to write literary columns and art reviews. He lost his job at Hachette on publication of his autobiographical novel, La Confession de Claude (1865), before his earliest venture into naturalistic fiction, Thérèse Raquin (1867). His series of twenty volumes, Les Rougon-Macquart (1871–93) is a natural and social history of one family under the Second Empire in France, individual volumes exploring social ills and the influence of nature and nurture on human nature. L’Assommoir (1877) concerned drunkenness and the Parisian working classes, Nana (1880) addressed sexual exploitation, and Germinal (1885) considered labour conditions. Other novel sequences followed, always entailing vast amounts of research. Zola’s later life as a writer was famously punctuated by his involvement in the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely acc
used of selling military secrets to the Germans. In a newspaper letter entitled ‘J’accuse’ (1898), Zola challenged the establishment and invited his own trial for libel, the author later removing briefly to England to escape the subsequent prison sentence. Emile Zola died in 1902, apparently asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes when asleep. Naturalism declined after his death, but his depictions of ‘Nature seen through a temperament’ were an important influence on writers such as Theodore Dreiser and August Strindberg.
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Copyright
Published by Hesperus Press Limited
28 Mortimer Street, London W1W 7RD
www.hesperuspress.com
‘The Flood’ first published as ‘L’Inondation’ in Le Capitaine Burle, 1882
‘Blood’ first published as ‘Le Sang’ in Contes à Ninon, 1864
‘Three Wars’ first published as ‘Trois Guerres’ in Madame Sourdis, 1880
First published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2013
Introduction and English language translation © Anthony Cummins, 2013
Selection © Hesperus Press, 2013
This ebook edition first published in 2013
Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge Studio
All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–1–78094–212–4
Emile Zola, The Flood
(Series: # )
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