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By Root 1977 0

of captured horses, maddened by hunger, stampeded continually up and down. Even the river water, polluted by corpses, caused terrible dysentery, and the stench was unbearable. Jean Macquart and his friend Maurice Levasseur, whose family had always lived in the region, eventually escape and go to earth at the farm of the latter’s uncle, where his twin sister Henriette, whose husband has been shot by the Germans, is also living. Maurice goes back to Paris intending to fight on, is caught in the siege of Paris, is fired by the fever of the insurrection, deserts and becomes a Communard. But Jean, whom Maurice had brought to the farm wounded and almost dying, has to stay there in hiding for months while being nursed back to health by Henriette. They grow to love each other, but the full implications of their feelings are unrecognized even by themselves. Ultimately Jean also makes his way to Paris, re-enlists in the regular (Government) army, and fate decrees that Maurice, now a fanatical Communard, is mortally wounded by Jean during the last desperate resistance when the Communards, and various criminal elements posing as such, set fire to the whole of the centre of Paris. The curtain goes down on the holocaust and Jean’s departure, all hope of happiness with Henriette gone, to help build a new France.

Such are the barest bones of the story. But it is clothed with countless incidents, both in military and civilian life, countless authentic facts patiently gathered by Zola, who personally followed out the whole of the route taken in Part I, questioned any local people he could find with personal memories, such as a doctor in Sedan who had helped with the wounded, peasants and notables in and around the town, and in particular Charles Philippoteaux, brother of Auguste Philippoteaux, mayor of Sedan in 1870, and himself mayor of Givonne. He personally conducted Zola to all the places in the battle area and told him of his own glimpse of the Emperor at the farm of Baybel. He is the original of Delaherche, though not necessarily of the latter’s fussy officiousness.

The result is one of the best examples of Zola’s peculiar gift for taking masses of accurate, verifiable facts or documents and breathing into them life and a formal artistic pattern. Each little incident really happened (local tradition has it that everything in the novel is based on fact except the murder of Goliath, which is Zola’s invention), but still the characters are live people with motives and emotions. Zola’s art consists in the arrangement and the aesthetic and symbolical value, even as thousands of single notes are combined by a musical mind into a symphony.

But this formal aspect does raise a question in the reader’s mind: is it not contrived, does not Zola stretch the long arm of coincidence too far for credibility? It may be objected, and with some justification, that everyone happens to run into the appropriate person exactly when the next twist in the story or next pieces in the jigsaw are required, and that therefore many of the ‘fortuitous’ meetings are foreseeable, however improbable in real life. Some may feel that the works are visible if not creakingly audible. That may well be. But it is nearly a thousand years since this island of ours experienced invasion and occupation by a foreign power. The sceptical reader should try to picture, say, the clash of the defending English army with the invading Welsh in and around a small town in a river valley traversing a region of wooded hills, such as Bewdley on the Severn or Ross-on-Wye. All that is then needed is that one English soldier should hail from those parts, have local knowledge and relations and friends still living there, and the rest of the meetings and coincidences must follow in such a restricted environment, where everyone knows everyone else. If you place the small town near a frontier (and the Sedan area has been one of the cockpits of Europe all down the ages), there will be traitors who fraternize with the enemy, locals who see a chance of moneymaking, the underground resistance movements