day at a prominent publishing house, and afterwards returning – as he proudly told his childhood friend Cézanne – to his Latin Quarter digs to ‘shut myself in my room and read or write until midnight’. Placing the fruit of this labour required pluck:
I am an employee in the publicity department of the bookseller Hachette. There I’ve been able to read
The Review of the Month
and admire your great passion for youth and freethinking. Won’t you extend some hospitality towards an unknown who has precisely nothing to recommend him save these very qualities of youth and independence?
La Revue du Mois
, a newish periodical that Zola had turned to after rejections from more prestigious magazines, did not acknowledge the poems accompanying this plea. Zola took the hint and, undaunted, sent two stories instead; ‘Blood’ was used straight away. The sense of fulfilment may have been fleeting – as soon as Zola considered
La Revue du Mois
a reliable outlet for future work, it folded – but, nonetheless, the publication of this story was an encouraging step towards his first book,
Contes à Ninon
(
Stories for Ninon
, 1864). Like the other pieces in that collection, ‘Blood’ is hardly trademark Zola. Reviewing
Contes à Ninon
under the cover of anonymity – a canny act of self-promotion that
was
trademark Zola – he drew attention to the story’s ‘icy surrealism’: this, from the author who would declare, at the peak of his literary fame, that ‘the imagination’ had no place in fiction, a novelist being ‘nothing more than a court clerk… who simply records what he has seen’. Yet, despite its apparently unnaturalistic extravagance , the never-ending surge of gore in ‘Blood’ – again thestory fulfils the title’s promise – reminds us that Zola is rarely the sober stenographer that he pretended to be in polemical essays like
Le Roman expérimental
(
The Experimental Novel
, 1880). His novels may originate in research trips and note-taking , but often they climax with cartoonish excess: the appalling study of peasant life
La Terre
(
The Earth
, 1887), for example, has a woman preside over the rape of her pregnant younger sister, whose belly she then shunts into a sickle, before setting fire to the murder witness – their elderly father – as he sleeps.
Where Zola sometimes intended such ghoulishness to focus public attention on iniquitous government policy –
La Terre
targeted rural land law – the grotesque element in ‘Blood’ makes a more indiscriminate protest, ‘expressing horror at violence and war’, as he said in his self-penned review. Three years before he wrote ‘Blood’, French troops fought to rid Italy of Austrian occupation; and three years before that, they fought to preserve the Ottoman Empire in the face of escalating Russian aggression. That never-ending surge of gore had a basis in reality. But ‘Three Wars’, the last item in this volume, shows that Zola was no peacenik. First published in May 1877 – nearly seven years after the French Emperor Napoleon III issued a disastrous declaration of war on Prussia – it was another of the
Parizskie Pis’ma
, and it responded to recent events as quickly as ‘The Flood’ had. Zola promised
Vestnik Evropy’
s editor that he would ‘try and talk to your readers about battles, our friend Turgenev having told me that all thoughts point that way, in Russia’. He was alluding to the Russian Empire’s latest war on Turkey, which began in the Balkans one month before ‘Three Wars’ appeared. Under such circumstances pacifism would not do. Rather than ‘expressing horror at violence’, Zola’s semi-autobiographical account – some of it expedientlyadapted from earlier French journalism – shows its allure, telling the story of the Crimean War (1853–6), the Second War of Italian Independence (1859) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) as experienced by two school friends, the brothers Louis and Julien. Though Zola
I am an employee in the publicity department of the bookseller Hachette. There I’ve been able to read
The Review of the Month
and admire your great passion for youth and freethinking. Won’t you extend some hospitality towards an unknown who has precisely nothing to recommend him save these very qualities of youth and independence?
La Revue du Mois
, a newish periodical that Zola had turned to after rejections from more prestigious magazines, did not acknowledge the poems accompanying this plea. Zola took the hint and, undaunted, sent two stories instead; ‘Blood’ was used straight away. The sense of fulfilment may have been fleeting – as soon as Zola considered
La Revue du Mois
a reliable outlet for future work, it folded – but, nonetheless, the publication of this story was an encouraging step towards his first book,
Contes à Ninon
(
Stories for Ninon
, 1864). Like the other pieces in that collection, ‘Blood’ is hardly trademark Zola. Reviewing
Contes à Ninon
under the cover of anonymity – a canny act of self-promotion that
was
trademark Zola – he drew attention to the story’s ‘icy surrealism’: this, from the author who would declare, at the peak of his literary fame, that ‘the imagination’ had no place in fiction, a novelist being ‘nothing more than a court clerk… who simply records what he has seen’. Yet, despite its apparently unnaturalistic extravagance , the never-ending surge of gore in ‘Blood’ – again thestory fulfils the title’s promise – reminds us that Zola is rarely the sober stenographer that he pretended to be in polemical essays like
Le Roman expérimental
(
The Experimental Novel
, 1880). His novels may originate in research trips and note-taking , but often they climax with cartoonish excess: the appalling study of peasant life
La Terre
(
The Earth
, 1887), for example, has a woman preside over the rape of her pregnant younger sister, whose belly she then shunts into a sickle, before setting fire to the murder witness – their elderly father – as he sleeps.
Where Zola sometimes intended such ghoulishness to focus public attention on iniquitous government policy –
La Terre
targeted rural land law – the grotesque element in ‘Blood’ makes a more indiscriminate protest, ‘expressing horror at violence and war’, as he said in his self-penned review. Three years before he wrote ‘Blood’, French troops fought to rid Italy of Austrian occupation; and three years before that, they fought to preserve the Ottoman Empire in the face of escalating Russian aggression. That never-ending surge of gore had a basis in reality. But ‘Three Wars’, the last item in this volume, shows that Zola was no peacenik. First published in May 1877 – nearly seven years after the French Emperor Napoleon III issued a disastrous declaration of war on Prussia – it was another of the
Parizskie Pis’ma
, and it responded to recent events as quickly as ‘The Flood’ had. Zola promised
Vestnik Evropy’
s editor that he would ‘try and talk to your readers about battles, our friend Turgenev having told me that all thoughts point that way, in Russia’. He was alluding to the Russian Empire’s latest war on Turkey, which began in the Balkans one month before ‘Three Wars’ appeared. Under such circumstances pacifism would not do. Rather than ‘expressing horror at violence’, Zola’s semi-autobiographical account – some of it expedientlyadapted from earlier French journalism – shows its allure, telling the story of the Crimean War (1853–6), the Second War of Italian Independence (1859) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1) as experienced by two school friends, the brothers Louis and Julien. Though Zola
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