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to know and befriend a group of young painters who found themselves at odds with the prevailing aesthetic as dictated by the powers who controlled the Salon. Manet, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Cézanne all had their works rejected by exhibition juries composed of the art establishment of the day, men like Jean-Léon Gérôme and Ernest Meissonier, neoclassical painters of battle scenes and overupholstered nudes. Zola became spokesman for the painters, writing numerous articles about them for the press and an entire short book about Manet, and he figures among the painters in two tableaux showing members of the group—the Impressionists, as yet unnamed—gathering together in studios. Nevertheless, his life remained precarious. Even as he was serializing his first major work, Thérèse Raquin (1867), he supported himself by setting type for a provincial newspaper, while Alexandrine Meley, his mistress—whom he later married—was still wrapping books at Hachette.

What initially made his name, oddly enough, was not his writing but the great portrait of him by Manet, exhibited in the 1868 Salon, in which he appeared as the very figure of dynamism and modernity—seated at his desk, fierce in his bi-colored beard, talismanically backed by Chinese and Japanese prints and a copy of Manet’s own scandalous nude Olympia. Meanwhile, Taine had written to him, “I believe that the future of the novel consists of the story of the will, struggling and winning its way through the chaos and upheavals of society” (Mitterand, Album Zola, p. 98; see “For Further Reading”). The notion did not fall on deaf ears. Zola had been reading Balzac, after all. In 1868 he signed a contract with the Lacroix publishing house for a cycle of ten novels, The Story of a Family, to be delivered at a rate of two volumes a year and annually compensated at 6,000 francs; eventually there would be twenty books, published over twenty-two years, at a steadily increasing rate of pay. Zola had been researching feverishly in libraries, particularly on the subject of heredity. He drew up a family tree in order to get a visual grip on his collective subject, carefully distributing the clan around all the major divisions of society, which he saw as consisting of four principal worlds—workers, tradespeople, bourgeoisie, and nobility-and “one world apart: whores, murderers, priests, artists” (Mitterand, p. 99).

He set to work at his usual feverish pace, but his rhythm was immediately thrown off by events. The regime of Napoleon III was weakening then, and republican forces-among whom Zola figured—were increasing in strength, but their rise was countered by ever more repressive measures. Newspapers, including virtually all the ones to which Zola contributed, were suppressed for varying periods, while the most direct assault on the liberty of the press came when the journalist Victor Noir was shot and killed by a member of the Bonaparte family. Meanwhile, industrial strikes raged around the country. As is frequently the case when regimes find themselves imperiled, the panacea came in the form of war, in this case against the Prussians. In the summer of 1870, crowds gathered in the streets of Paris, shouting, “To Berlin!” By September, however, after its decisive defeat at Sedan, on France’s eastern frontier, the empire had fallen and the emperor was a prisoner in Germany. From September 19 to January 28, Paris was besieged by the Prussians, a brutal war of attrition that saw numerous deaths from famine and disease. Zola first fled to the south, but he could not keep himself away from power and intrigue; besides, he was broke. So he traveled to Bordeaux, site of the provisional government, and tried for an official post, but the best he could obtain was a temporary handout. He returned to Paris in the spring of 1871, this time equipped with an assignment as parliamentary correspondent for a newspaper. Shortly thereafter, the government moved to Versailles, and an insurrection—which was to become the Commune—broke out in Paris. Zola blithely commuted between the two camps, which were at