The Flood Read online

  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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  SELECTED TITLES FROM HESPERUS PRESS

  Author Title Foreword writer

  Pietro Aretino The School of Whoredom Paul Bailey

  Pietro Aretino The Secret Life of Nuns

  Jane Austen Lesley Castle Zoë Heller

  Jane Austen Love and Friendship Fay Weldon

  Honoré de Balzac Colonel Chabert A.N. Wilson

  Charles Baudelaire On Wine and Hashish Margaret Drabble

  Giovanni Boccaccio Life of Dante A.N. Wilson

  Charlotte Brontë The Spell

  Emily Brontë Poems of Solitude Helen Dunmore

  Mikhail Bulgakov Fatal Eggs Doris Lessing

  Mikhail Bulgakov The Heart of a Dog A.S. Byatt

  Giacomo Casanova The Duel Tim Parks

  Miguel de Cervantes The Dialogue of the Dogs Ben Okri

  Geoffrey Chaucer The Parliament of Birds

  Anton Chekhov The Story of a Nobody Louis de Bernières

  Anton Chekhov Three Years William Fiennes

  Wilkie Collins The Frozen Deep

  Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness A.N. Wilson

  Joseph Conrad The Return Colm Tóibín

  Gabriele D’Annunzio The Book of the Virgins Tim Parks

  Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy: Inferno

  Dante Alighieri New Life Louis de Bernières

  Daniel Defoe The King of Pirates Peter Ackroyd

  Marquis de Sade Incest Janet Street-Porter

  Charles Dickens The Haunted House Peter Ackroyd

  Charles Dickens A House to Let

  Fyodor Dostoevsky The Double Jeremy Dyson

  Fyodor Dostoevsky Poor People Charlotte Hobson

  Alexandre Dumas One Thousand and

  One Ghosts

  George Eliot Amos Barton Matthew Sweet

  Henry Fielding Jonathan Wild the Great Peter Ackroyd

  F. Scott Fitzgerald The Popular Girl Helen Dunmore

  Gustave Flaubert Memoirs of a Madman Germaine Greer

  Ugo Foscolo Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis Valerio Massimo

  Manfredi

  Elizabeth Gaskell Lois the Witch Jenny Uglow

  Théophile Gautier The Jinx Gilbert Adair

  André Gide Theseus

  Johann Wolfgang The Man of Fifty A.S. Byatt

  von Goethe

  Nikolai Gogol The Squabble Patrick McCabe

  E.T.A. Hoffmann Mademoiselle de Scudéri Gilbert Adair

  Victor Hugo The Last Day of a Condemned Man Libby Purves

  Joris-Karl Huysmans With the Flow Simon Callow

  Henry James In the Cage Libby Purves

  Franz Kafka Metamorphosis Martin Jarvis

  Franz Kafka The Trial Zadie Smith

  John Keats Fugitive Poems Andrew Motion

  Heinrich von Kleist The Marquise of O– Andrew Miller

  Mikhail Lermontov A Hero of Our Time Doris Lessing

  Nikolai Leskov Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Gilbert Adair

  Carlo Levi Words are Stones Anita Desai

  Xavier de Maistre A Journey Around my Room Alain de Botton

  André Malraux The Way of the Kings Rachel Seiffert

  Katherine Mansfield Prelude William Boyd

  Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology Shena Mackay

  Guy de Maupassant Butterball Germaine Greer

  Prosper Mérimée Carmen Philip Pullman

  Sir Thomas More The History of King Richard III Sister Wendy Beckett

  Sándor Petofi John the Valiant George Szirtes

  Francis Petrarch My Secret Book Germaine Greer

  Luigi Pirandello Loveless Love

  Edgar Allan Poe Eureka Sir Patrick Moore

  Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock Peter Ackroyd

  and A Key to the Lock

  Antoine-François Manon Lescaut Germaine Greer

  Prévost

  Marcel Proust Pleasures and Days A.N. Wilson

  Alexander Pushkin Dubrovsky Patrick Neate

  Alexander Pushkin Ruslan and Lyudmila Colm Tóibín

  François Rabelais Pantagruel Paul Bailey

  François Rabelais Gargantua Paul Bailey

  Christina Rossetti Commonplace Andrew Motion

  George Sand The Devil’s Pool Victoria Glendinning

  Jean-Paul Sartre The Wall Justin Cartwright

  Friedrich von Schiller The Ghost-seer Martin Jarvis

  Mary Shelley Transformation

  Percy Bysshe Shelley Zastrozzi Germaine Greer

  Stendhal Memoirs of an Egotist Doris Lessing

  Robert Louis Stevenson Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Helen Dunmore

  Theodor Storm The Lake of the Bees Alan Sillitoe

  Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Ilych

  Leo Tolstoy Hadji Murat Colm Tóibín

  Ivan Turgenev Faust Simon Callow

  Mark Twain The Diary of Adam and Eve John Updike

  Mark Twain Tom Sawyer, Detective

  Oscar Wilde The Portrait of Mr W.H. Peter Ackroyd

  Virginia Woolf Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches Doris Lessing

  Virginia Woolf Monday or Tuesday Scarlett Thomas

  Emile Zola For a Night of Love A.N. Wilson

  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

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