Nana (Barnes & Noble Classics) - Emile Zola [5]
Émile Zola was born in Paris on April 2, 1840. His father, François, who was born Francesco Zolla in Venice, arrived in France right after the July Revolution of 1830, to make his mark and his fortune as an engineer. He was brilliant, and was unquestionably in the right place at the right time for the fulfillment of his talents and energies. The culmination of his enterprise was to be the construction of a system of canals and tunnels to bring drinking water to the city of Aix. Unfortunately, in early 1847, when the work was in its initial stages, he contracted pneumonia and died, at the age of fifty-one. His investment in the scheme was immediately parceled up among the other investors. His wife and child were left just enough money to send Émile to the local collège, where he spent a reasonably happy adolescence running around with his friends Louis Baille and Paul Cézanne, who was to become a great painter, although neither he nor Emile showed any particular promise at the time. After Émile’s maternal grandmother died when he was an adolescent, the remainder of the family—he, his mother, and his grandfather—moved to Paris, where they lived in penury. Émile proceeded to become entranced by the wonders of the city to the detriment of his studies. After failing his oral examination—he never earned his secondary degree—he spent several years living the bohemian life in all its most traditional aspects: unheated garrets in miserable neighborhoods, lack of food and clothing, all-night debates with his companions on artistic and philosophical subjects. At his lowest ebb, he occupied a furnished room in a hotel otherwise populated by prostitutes, and threw in his lot with one of them, who pawned his last overcoat for him. This period was to prove significant when, almost two decades later, he set out to write Nana.
Finally, when he was nearly twenty-two, his luck began to turn. First he pulled a high number in the draft lottery, virtually exempting him from military service, and then a friend of his father’s got him a job at the Hachette publishing house. It was a lowly position in the shipping department, but he was able to turn it to considerable advantage. He got to know many of the most important writers in France, running errands for them and otherwise ingratiating himself. Since the lineup included the two most fearsome critics in the country, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve and Hippolyte Taine, he had obtained for himself a powerful set of connections for his future career. Now that he was solvent and adequately lodged, he did not disdain the lowlife among whom he had earlier been consigned, but methodically explored alleys and dives and concert saloons, sometimes in the company of his friend Cézanne, who could not force himself to become a full-time Parisian any more than he could remain in the countryside for longer than a few months at a stretch.
Zola began to publish: a collection of tales, a study of Don Quixote, an increasing number of newspaper and magazine contributions, both criticism and fiction, and eventually, in 1865, his first novel, La Confession de Claude. Around this same time, partly as a result of his friendship with Cézanne, he came