: The Attack on the Mill and Other Sketches of War by Zola Mile Gosse Edmund Contributor - War stories

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ESSAY BY MR. GOSSE 1

THE ATTACK ON THE MILL 47

THREE WARS 131

PUBLISHER'S CATALOG

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

THE SHORT STORIES OF M. ZOLA

For the next two years M. Zola was starving, and vainly striving to be a poet. Another "belv?d?re," as M. Al?xis calls it, another glazed garret above the garret, received him in the Rue Neuve St. ?tienne 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, came to an end; he obtained a clerkship in the famous publishing house of M. Hachette.

On a somewhat larger scale is "Les Voleurs et l'?ne," 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 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 Al?xis, 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, "Soeur 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 ?tes un r?volt?," and to have returned him the manuscript as "too revolutionary." "Soeur 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 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.

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 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 landscape--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.

In 1878, M. Zola, who had long been wishing for a place whither to escape from the roar of Paris, bought a little property on the right bank of the Seine, between Poissy and Meulan, where he built himself the house which he still inhabits, and which he has made so famous. M?dan, the village in which this property is placed, is a very quiet hamlet of less than two hundred inhabitants, absolutely unillustrious, save that, according to tradition, Charles the Bold was baptised in the font of its parish church. The river lies before it, with its rich meadows, its poplars, its willow groves; a delicious and somnolent air of peace hangs over it, though so close to Paris. Thither the master's particular friends and disciples soon began to gather: that enthusiastic Boswell, M. Paul Al?xis; M. Guy de Maupassant, a stalwart oarsman, in his skiff, from Rouen; others, whose names were soon to come prominently forward in connection with that naturalistic school of which M. Zola was the leader.

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