The Belly of Paris Read online

  Then the emperor had an idea: instead of spending a fortune having the navy maintain prison ships—the ships in which the prisoners provided oar power were outmoded anyway—why not ship convicts to Guiana and force them to develop the land? They would stay there and marry local women—or maybe female convicts could be sent—and they would settle Guiana. To make this plan work, the convicts, after serving their time, were required to spend an equal amount of time as “free men” in the colony. The government even sent prostitutes to marry the first prisoners released, but the women refused to marry any of the convicts and the angry officials shipped them off to labor in a prison camp. Some coupling did take place, but most of the children born of these pairings died in infancy, and many of the female convicts proved to be barren. A fertility expert, Dr. Jean Orgéas, was sent from France to study the problem. After a five-year study, he concluded in 1864 that white people could not reproduce in the tropics.

  Convicts were required to spend their terms in hard labor chained to another convict or to an iron ball. If caught trying to escape, they were sentenced to an additional two to five years; if they were serving a life sentence, the penalty was two to five years with double chains.

  But most prisoners tried to escape because the alternative was to labor in such misery that half would die of either fever or suicide. The prison system never was able to operate in the interior. The center of the prison was at the mouth of the Maroni River, and the rest of the prisoners were held in either Cayenne or the Iles du Salut. There were a few jungle camps where convicts were forced to work naked, their bodies eaten by insects and slashed by razor grass and thorny bushes. Only the convicts singled out for the harshest treatment, or those most likely to attempt escape, were sent to the islands. Florent, being a political prisoner, was one of them.

  Zola, as always, did careful homework and seemed to understand much about the penal colonies. But his story of Florent escaping and returning to France was extremely improbable. Of the 70,000 men and women sent to Guiana between 1851 and 1947, only a handful finished their sentences and returned to France. Almost no escapees made it back. Only 18,000 prisoners survived their sentences. Some did not even survive the initial voyage from France. There were many escape attempts, and some escapees succeeded and lived in South America, where they were called “Maroni boys” by those who knew. But there were no Cayenne boys in Paris.

  In The Belly of Paris the gabby Les Halles shopkeepers who would have Florent and other characters sent to Guiana were thoughtlessly delivering them to a life sentence that many regarded as worse than death.

  Cayenne was a growing French human rights scandal. Numerous exposés were written about it, and by 1939 the French government had banned the release in France of Hollywood movies on the subject. During World War II, France was unable to feed its Guiana prisoners, and an estimated two thousand died. Finally the prisons were closed in 1947, the prisoners released to sleep on the streets of the few coastal towns of French Guiana. For decades they remained, slowly dying off, lost and broken men with blank stares, “convict eyes,” as one woman said of Florent.

  The interior to this day is inhabited only by the descendants of runaway slaves and indigenous tribes. For outsiders it is almost impossible to survive in this dense jungle that the French have named l'enfer vert, the green hell. The prisons are slowly being reclaimed by jungle growth and humidity. The only use France has found for French Guiana is for the European Space Agency's Europe's Spaceport, from which a handful of technicians and a great many military guards send rockets to outer space because Guiana has the logistical advantage of being near the equator.

  It seems fated that Zola wrote about Guiana early in his career, because it turned up again toward the end of his life at the center of the Dreyfus Affair. Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island, making it famous, so that many Americans referred to the whole penal colony as Devil's Island, just as the French, with equal inaccuracy, called it Cayenne. Devil's Island is a tiny island that can be crossed from shore to shore on foot in a matter of minutes. There were never more than thirty convicts on the island at a time. Fewer than a hundred prisoners ever served on Devil's Island, so named because the waters around it are so wild and forbidding that it was said that the Devil lived there. Food and supplies were sent over in a basket by a cable from the mainland when the seas were too rough for boats.

  Devil's Island was a place where political prisoners were sent, not to work but simply to be abandoned. In Zola's novel, it was where Florent was sent. In 1895, some thirteen years after Zola wrote about Florent, a real-life political prisoner, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was sent there. A twelve-square-yard stone house was built for him, where he was constantly watched by guards who were under orders not to talk to him. But apparently they did and even played chess with him.

  Today the island is abandoned. In 1986, I visited it. There was no place to land a boat, and I persuaded a gendarme to take me up to the rocks in his rubber Zodiac. I rolled onto the rocks, and he accelerated out to sea. I reminded him of our agreement for him to pick me up in exactly one hour, but as he pulled away he smiled, and over the roar of his outboard I heard him shout, “Au revoir, Dreyfus II!”

  I smiled back, but it was not an entirely comfortable feeling. The island was overgrown with coconut palms. That's what happens. Coconuts are seeds. They drop and take root and are split up the middle by a palm tree. One of the few signs of human life on the island was Dreyfus's stone house. The metal roof was gone, and the room was empty except for a few of the encroaching coconuts and palm fronds that had made their way inside. I stood in Dreyfus's prison anxiously peering through the windows with their remnants of iron bars past the palm trees of the tiny island to the sea, looking for signs of the Zodiac. I was equipped for survival with a pen, a notebook, a sketch pad, and a small set of watercolors. I painted a watercolor of the room and then walked out to the rocks, hoping to see the gendarme in the distance. But I remained calm until the hour was up. Four very long minutes later the smiling gendarme arrived.

  Politics, as Zola wrote of Florent, was Zola's destiny. The Dreyfus case was the climax of that destiny. Zola said of himself that he was a dull conversationalist and found a voice only when championing a cause. The French Revolution launched almost two centuries of something close to civil war. One side supported the Bonapartes, while the other opposed them. One side was monarchist, militarist, Catholic, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic; the other was socialist, anti-imperial, antimilitary pro-women. They were the two sides that clashed over the Dreyfus Affair, and a lifetime of political stances seemed to lead Zola to the showdown. The split endured even after the Dreyfus Affair, with World War II collaborators and resisters and in the fight over decolonization in the 1950s and '60s. It was Zola's old adversaries, half a century after his death, who shouted down the French prime minister Pierre Mendès-France for withdrawing from Vietnam by shouting “Dirty Jew.” Zola lived only two years into the twentieth century, but it is easy to see where he would have stood throughout those years. Zola was always clear about where he stood.

  In The Belly of Paris this divide is between the fat people and the thin people. In Zola's youth and in many of his novels, the split was between supporters of Napoleon III's empire and its opponents. By the time Zola was in his twenties, the repression had loosened and dozens of new anti-Napoleon journals had emerged in Paris. Zola launched his career in these journals, showing such a flair for controversy, whether in a political essay or a theater review, that he was sometimes accused of deliberately being contrary to get attention. In literature and the arts he was always a champion of modernism, one of the early supporters of the much-criticized Impressionism of Edouard Manet. Zola relished the attention, and he enjoyed being in Paris, which he called “the star of intelligence.”

  At times Zola seemed almost frustrated that his defiant political stands did not evoke the kind of persecution—trials, banned writing, exile—for which the older and more celebrated Victor Hugo had f
amously been singled out. Zola's timing was off. While he was in Paris writing reviews, Hugo was in political exile. When he left Paris to avoid starvation under the 1871 German siege, Hugo was there eating zoo animals. Zola was ashamed that he had managed to escape Paris during the German siege. Manet stayed and manned artillery on a starvation diet, and many of Zola's artist and writer friends were there.

  Then, in 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish army officer from the German-speaking part of Alsace that had been taken by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, was falsely accused of passing secrets to the German command. A wave of anti-Semitism was unleashed in France. Zola did not so much befriend Jews as loathe anti-Semitism. He regarded it as a backward affliction of the mind that, if left unchecked, would eventually destroy France. Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil's Island, and Zola became one of his most conspicuous defenders.

  Zola's January 13, 1898, open letter in L'Aurore, “J'Accuse!” is considered one of the great masterpieces of journalism and is possibly Zola's most famous piece of writing. It explained how Dreyfus had been framed by a fellow officer and accused the army command of covering it up. It began to change public opinion and put Zola at the center of a historic conflict. He was forced to leave the country to avoid being prosecuted for writing “J'Accuse!” and became a highly controversial figure.

  He refused to take payment for any of the articles he wrote on the Dreyfus case, and when in exile in England he turned down sizable sums because he considered the case a purely French affair and would not write about it abroad. Although he had long embraced the working class, it had always shown great misgivings about him. Only with the Dreyfus case was he finally embraced by workers and trade unions. But he lost many readers over Dreyfus and never regained his popularity.

  On September 28, 1902, Zola died in his home outside Paris of carbon monoxide poisoning from a malfunctioning chimney. In 1927, a stove fitter made a deathbed confession that he and other anti-Dreyfusards, while repairing a neighbor's roof, had deliberately blocked Zola's chimney to kill him. The story which did not surface until 1953, has never been confirmed but is most certainly the version of his death that Zola would have preferred. The few real writers, the ones who stand up and use their voices for what they believe, understand that being a writer is not without risks.

  THE BELLY OF PARIS

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the silence of a deserted avenue, wagons stuffed with produce made their way toward Paris, their thudding wheels rhythmically echoing off the houses sleeping behind the rows of elm trees meandering on either side of the road. At the pont de Neuilly a cart full of cabbages and another full of peas met up with eight carts of turnips and carrots coming in from Nanterre. The horses, their heads bent low, led themselves with their lazy, steady pace, a bit slowed by the slight uphill climb. Up on the carts, lying on their stomachs in the vegetables, wrapped in their black-and-gray-striped wool coats, the drivers slept with the reins in their fists. Occasionally the light from a gas lamp would grope its way through the shadows and brighten the hobnail of a boot, the blue sleeve of a blouse, or the tip of a hat poking from the bright bloom of vegetables—red bouquets of carrots, white bouquets of turnips, or the bursting greenery of peas and cabbages.

  All along the road and all the nearby routes, up ahead and farther back, the distant rumbling of carts told of other huge wagons, all pushing on through the darkness and slumber of two in the morning, the sound of passing food lulling the darkened town to stay asleep.

  Madame François's horse, Balthazar, an overweight beast, led the column. He dawdled on, half asleep, flicking his ears until, at rue de Longchamp, his legs were suddenly frozen by fear. The other animals bumped their heads into the stalled carts in front of them, and the column halted with the clanking of metal and the cursing of drivers who had been yanked from their sleep. Seated up top, Madame François, with her back against a plank that held the vegetables in place, peered out but saw nothing by the faint light of the little square lantern to her left, which barely lit one of Balthazar's glistening flanks.

  “Come on, lady, let's keep moving,” shouted one of the men who was kneeling in turnips. “It's just some drunken idiot.”

  But as she leaned over she thought she made out a dark patch of something blocking the road, about to be stepped on by the horse.

  “You can't just run people over,” she said, jumping down from her wagon.

  It was a man sprawled across the road, his arms stretched out, facedown in the dust. He seemed extraordinarily long and as thin as a dry branch. It was a miracle that Balthazar had not stepped on him and snapped him in two. Madame François thought he was dead, but when she crouched over him and took his hand, she found it was still warm.

  “Hey, mister,” she called softly.

  But the drivers were growing impatient. The one kneeling in the vegetables shouted in a gruff voice, “Give it up, lady. The son of a bitch is plastered. Shove him in the gutter.”

  In the meantime, the man had opened his eyes. He stared, motionless, at Madame François, with a look of bewilderment. She too thought that he must be drunk.

  “You can't stay there, you're going to get yourself run over,” she told him. “Where were you going?”

  “I don't know,” the man replied in a feeble voice. Then, with great effort and a worried face, “I was going to Paris, and I fell. I don't know …”

  Now she could see him better, and he was pathetic with his black pants and black overcoat, so threadbare that they showed the contour of his bare bones. Underneath a hat of coarse black cloth that he had pulled down as though afraid of being recognized, two large brown eyes of a rare gentleness could be seen on a hard and tormented face. Madame François thought that this man was much too feeble to have been drinking.

  “Where in Paris were you going?” she asked.

  He didn't answer right away. This cross-examination was worrying him. After a moment's reflection, he cautiously replied, “Over there, by Les Halles.”

  With great difficulty he had almost stood up again and seemed anxious to be on his way. But Madame François noticed him trying to steady himself against one of the wagon shafts.

  “You're tired?”

  “Very tired,” he mumbled.

  Adopting a gruff tone, as though annoyed, and giving him a shove, she shouted, “Go on, move it! Get up in my wagon! You're wasting my time. I'm going to Les Halles, and I can drop you off with my vegetables.”

  When he refused, she practically threw him onto the turnips and carrots in the back with her thick arms and shouted impatiently, “That's enough! No more trouble from you. You're beginning to annoy me, my friend. Didn't I tell you that I'm headed to the market anyway? Go to sleep up there. I'll wake you when we get there.”

  She climbed back up, sat sideways with her back against the plank again, and took Balthazar's reins. He started up sleepily, twitching his ears. The other carts followed. The column resumed its slow march in the dark, the sound of wheels on the paving stones again thudding against the sleeping housefronts. The wagoneers, wrapped in their coats, returned to their snoozing. The one who had called out to Madame François grumbled as he lay down, “Damn, does she have to take care of every bum? You are something, lady.”

  The carts rolled on, the horses, with their heads bowed, leading themselves. The man Madame François had picked up was lying on his stomach, his long legs lost in the turnips, which filled the back of the cart, while his head was buried in the spreading carrot bunches. With weary outstretched arms he seemed to hug his bed of vegetables for fear a jolt of the cart would send him sprawling in the road. He watched the two endless columns of gaslights ahead of him, which vanished in the distance into a confusion of other lights. A large white cloud nuzzled the horizon, so that Paris appeared to be sleeping in a glowing mist illuminated by all the lamps.

  “I'm from Nanterre. My name is Madame François,” the woman said after a moment's silence. “Ever since I lost my poor husband, I go to Les
Halles every morning. It's a hard life, but what can you do. And you?”

  “My name is Florent, I come from far away,” the stranger replied awkwardly. “I'm really sorry, but I'm so exhausted that it's hard to talk.”

  He did not want to say any more, so Madame François became silent too, letting the reins fall loosely on the back of Balthazar, who seemed to know every paving stone along the route.

  In the meantime, Florent, staring at the broadening sparkle of Paris in the distance, contemplated the story that he had decided not to tell the woman. Sentenced to Cayenne1 for his involvement in the events of December,2 he had escaped to Dutch Guiana, where he had drifted for two years, filled with a passion to return to France but also afraid of the imperial police. He was about to enter the great city that he had so deeply missed and longed for. He told himself that he would hide there, returning to the peaceful existence he had once lived. The police knew nothing. Everyone would assume that he had died over there. He thought about his arrival at Le Havre, where he had landed with only fifteen francs hidden in the corner of a handkerchief. It had been enough for a coach to Rouen, but from there he had had to make his way on foot, having only thirty sous left. At Vernon he had spent his last two sous on bread. After that he couldn't remember anything. He thought he had slept in a ditch for several hours, and he might have shown a policeman the papers with which he had supplied himself. But these images danced vaguely in his head. He had come all the way from Vernon with nothing to eat, accompanied by fits of anger and sudden despondency that had made him chew the leaves on the hedges he passed along the way. He had kept walking despite stomach cramps, his belly knotted, his vision blurred, his feet advancing, unconsciously drawn by the image of Paris, so far away, beyond the horizon, calling to him, waiting for him.