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'Taking one consideration with another, a reporter's lot, at times, is not a happy one. A climax was reached when one gentleman, after communicating with M. Zola by letter through various channels and receiving no answer from him, ascertained my address and called there.
Naturally Zola did not pose his old friend for the entire figure of the crazy impressionist, his hero, Claude. It was a study composed of Cézanne, Bazille, and one other, a poor, wretched lad who had been employed to clean Manet's studio, entertained artistic ambitions, but hanged himself.
That M. Zola should have applied to me directly he arrived in London will surprise none of those who are aware of the confidence he has for several years reposed in me. A newspaper referring to our connection recently called the great novelist 'my employer. But there has never been any question of employer or employed between Mr. Zola and me.
In France the daughter who is properly trained contents herself with water just coloured by the addition of a little Bordeaux or Burgundy. And the contrast between this custom and incidents which M. Zola noticed at Oatlands and to which he once or twice called my attention made a deep impression on him. The people staying at the hotel were certainly all of a good class.
We have seen in chapter seventh, how the influence of Balzac introduced to modern fiction that extension of subject and that preference for the external fact widely productive of change in the novel-making of the continent and of English-speaking lands. As the year 1830 was given significance by him, so, a generation later, the year 1870 was given significance by Zola.
That moribund society of the eighteenth century, which possessed painters, musicians and architects imbued with its tastes and doctrines, had not been able to produce a writer who could truly depict its dying elegances, the quintessence of its joys so cruelly expiated. With Zola, the nostalgia of the far-away was different.
The fighting in the court was a purely nervous manifestation, simply the hysterical result of that tension, and Zola's letter and his trial are a manifestation of the same kind. What would you have? The best people, always in advance of the nation, were bound to be the first to raise an agitation and so it has been. The second is Zola, and now he is being tried.
The lively man who in shirt sleeves dances with the jolly, plump salesgirl, the sunlight dripping through the vivid green of the tree leaves, lending dazzling edges to profiles, tips of noses, or fingers, is not the sullen ouvrier of Zola or Toulouse-Lautrec nor are the girls kin to Huysmans's Soeurs Vatard or the "human document" of Degas.
Thus the tract which lies before us to explore is equally remote from the idyllic imagination of George Sand, the gross actuality of Zola, and the combination of simple charm with minute and essential realism of Mr. Hardy's sketches in Wessex. Nor does the adoption of the pastoral label suffice to bring within the fold the fanciful animalism of Mr. Hewlett.
Zola wishes to have him an honest man. He is the outcast of the family Rougon-Macquart. In heredity there happens such lucky degenerations; the doctor knows about it, he considers himself as a happy exception, and it is for him a source of continuous inward pleasure. In the mean while, he loves people, serves them and sells them his medicine, which cures all possible disease.
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