The Flood

It rained non-stop for two weeks in the south of France during the summer of 1875. The Garonne – the 400-mile-long river that springs up in the Pyrenees, running northwest through Toulouse and Bordeaux – burst its banks, killing more than 1,000 people in the towns and villages that it swamped under nearly twelve metres of water. Days later, a newspaper reported that ‘the stench arising from the ruined quarter of Saint-Cyprien at Toulouse leads to the supposition that many bodies are yet lying beneath the stones of the fallen buildings’.

Zola relished this kind of detail. At the time of the disaster, he was still trying to establish his reputation. ‘Although he works from morning until night and lives extremely modestly, he can hardly make ends meet,’ observed his friend Ivan Turgenev. ‘He stays at home all the time with his wife, never puts his gloves on, and doesn’t have a suit.’ Unlike Turgenev (the son of an heiress) Zola enjoyed no private wealth. His much-needed fees from journalism had dwindled after two of the newspapers for which he wrote were shut down, and the unimagined income from
L’Assommoir
(1877) – the harrowing novel of drink and debt that gave Zola his first taste of international celebrity – remained some time away. But there was hope. While his recent book
La Conquête de Plassan
s (
The Conquest of Plassans
, 1874) had flopped, with 170 copies sold in the six months since
publication
, its surprising popularity abroad won Zola a handy gig as the Paris correspondent of
Vestnik Evropy
(
European Herald)
, a St Petersburg monthly. Among the regular, lucrative ‘
Parizskie Pis’ma
’ (‘Letters from Paris’) that he contributed was ‘
Navod
nenie
’ – ‘The Flood’ – ‘a sort of short story’, as Zola told his editor, featuring ‘the most tragic and most affecting incidents’ from ‘the floods that have laid waste to our southern districts’.

‘The Flood’ was written within a month of the disaster and possesses, in miniature, the characteristic attributes that
animate
Zola’s better-known fiction. It is told from the perspective of Louis Roubieu, a wealthy seventy-year-old farmer who lives in a village on the Garonne. The title is the story’s own spoiler. Plot has no role to play, and even if the past-tense narration plays its usual trick – lulling you into forgetting that
it’s already happened
– Louis tells us at the beginning, more or less, what we will have learned by the end. ‘The Flood’ relies on horror, not suspense. Zola revels, as usual, in the gruesome particulars that most of his literary contemporaries prefer to ignore: the water that remorselessly suffocates our narrator’s son-in-law flows from the same pen as the boozy vomit that splatters Coupeau’s bedsheets in
L’Assommoir
or the weeping sores that pockmark the ruined prostitute heroine of
Nana
(1880). As with the final pages of
L’Assommoir
– when Coupeau’s widow Gervaise is discovered, ‘already green’ – we may feel that Zola is not observing tragedy but instead indulging an appetite for narrative rubbernecking. Yet the story’s afterlife invites us to soften so harsh a judgement. When the Garonne overflowed once again, in 1930, a special edition of ‘The Flood’ raised relief funds for its victims, nearly three decades after Zola’s death. Henry James once said that ‘Zola’s
naturalism
is ugly and dirty, but he seems to me to be
doing something
’; perhaps the remark contained more truth than James knew.

‘Blood’ (‘Le Sang’, 1863), the second story presented here, dates from an earlier phase of Zola’s career, when his reputation was even less certain. In this eerie tale, which is among the first pieces that he succeeded in getting printed, four soldiers embroiled in an unspecified war find themselves haunted by bizarre, quasi-biblical visions. Zola composed it in
his early twenties. He had been living in Paris for four years, working by 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:

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 the
story 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 expediently
adapted 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 narrates, he stays intriguingly offstage. In the last instalment, when Napoleon III declares war on Prussia, there is only the merest hint – and it needs fairly strenuous interpretation – that our speaker is the busy thirty-year-old who is about to embark on the twenty-volume
Rougon-Macquart
novel cycle, with the achievement of
Thérèse
Raquin
(1867) already behind him. ‘Zola’ just shuttles around Paris, seemingly without ambition, as his friends are drawn deeper into the conflict, the city’s siege approaching. The real Zola was in Marseille; more to the point – as his self-effacement discreetly implies – he was exempt from military service, being the only son of a widow (square that with his bellicose opening paragraphs). By the time ‘Three Wars’ was published, Zola could self-efface as much as he liked:
L’Assommoir
had been published, and all Europe knew his name.

–
Anthony Cummins, 2013

A Note on the Text

These translations are based on the texts of ‘L’Inondation’, ‘Le Sang’ and ‘Les Trois Guerres’ as collected in Henri Mitterand’s edition of the
Oeuvres complètes
(Paris: Cercle du Livre précieux, 1966–70), vol. 9. ‘L’Inondation’ was first published in Russian (‘Navodnenie’,
Vestnik Evropy
, Aug. 1875) before appearing, in Zola’s original French, in the collection
Le Capitaine Burle
(Paris: Charpentier, 1882). ‘Le Sang’ was first published in
La Revue du Mois
, Oct. 1863, then collected in
Contes à Ninon
(Paris: Hetzel & Lacroix, 1864). The book was translated into English as
Stories for Ninon
by Edward Vizetelly (London: William Heinemann, 1895). ‘Les Trois Guerres’ was first published in Russian (‘Moi vosponninaya iz voennyx epox’,
Vestnik Evropy
, Apr. 1877), then in French (‘Mes souvenirs de guerre’,
Le Bien Public
, 10, 17 and 24 Sep. 1877), before appearing, under its eventual title and with the introduction that is translated here, in the multi-authored collection
Bagatelles
(Paris: Dentu, 1892). Edmund Gosse translated it into English, in
The Attack on the Mill: and other sketches of war
(London: William Heinemann, 1892).

My name is Louis Roubieu. I am seventy. I was born in
Saint-Jory
, a village several miles up the Garonne from Toulouse. For fourteen years I fought with the earth to keep bread on the table. Then the good times came; last month, I was still the richest farmer in the village.

It was as if we were blessed. We had a happy home; the sun was on our side, and I don’t remember one bad harvest. There were nearly a dozen of us at the farm, living in this bliss: I was leading the young ones to work, still able to hold my own; my younger brother Pierre, who never married – he was a retired sergeant; and my sister Agathe, who moved in with us after her husband died – a formidable woman, stout, carefree, with a laugh you’d hear from the other side of the village. Then there was the whole gang: my son Jacques, his wife Rose, and their three girls Aimée, Véronique and Marie. Aimée was married to Cyprien Bouisson, a great strapping fellow who was the father of her two little boys; one aged two, the other ten months. Véronique was only just engaged; she was going to marry Gaspard Rabuteau. And Marie, she was quite the young lady – so fair, so blonde, she looked like a city girl. That was ten, counting everyone. I was a grandfather and a great-grandfather. At mealtimes, I had my sister Agathe to my right and my brother Pierre to my left; the children closed the circle, sitting oldest to youngest, their heads decreasing in size, right down to the ten-month-old who was already tucking in to his food like a grown man. All you’d hear would be the sound of spoons scraping plates! The kids could eat all right. Mealtimes were always great fun. ‘Give us some bread then, granddad!’ I felt a surge of pride and joy whenever the little ones reached their hands out to me. ‘A big slice, granddad!’

Those were the days! We all worked hard. Then in the evenings Pierre invented games and told us stories about his regiment. On Sundays Aunt Agathe made pancakes for the girls. Marie sang hymns like a choirgirl; with her blonde hair falling around her shoulders, hands clasped to her pinafore, she looked like a saint. When Aimée married Cyprien, I added another floor to the house; laughing, I said we’d need to raise it again once Véronique and Gaspard got married. If we’d kept building an extension for every new couple, the house would have ended up in the heavens. We didn’t want to move out. We’d more likely have built an entire town on our own land! When the different generations get along so well, it’s nice to be able to live and die in the place where you grew up.

We had a gorgeous May this year. The crops hadn’t
promised
so much in a long time. One day I did the rounds with my son Jacques. We were gone for nearly three hours. Our pale green meadows stretched out along the banks of the Garonne; the grass was a good three feet tall, and already there were shoots a yard long on the willow bed that we planted last year. We checked on the fields that we had bought up one by one as the money rolled in; the wheat grew plentifully, and our vines were flourishing. It would be a great vintage. Jacques laughed, poking me in the shoulder.

‘Well, we’ll not be wanting for bread and wine any more, eh? You must have cut a deal with the good Lord himself for him to decide to rain money on us like this!’

We often joked about the bad old days. Jacques was right. I must have made friends in high places – some saint, or, indeed, the good Lord himself – because we were having all the luck in the world. Whenever it hailed, the hail stopped just at the edge of our fields. Whenever disease struck neighbours’ vineyards, it was as if some kind of wall protected our own.
After a while, I thought it was only fair. I never hurt anybody; I felt that I was owed this happiness.

On the way back, we crossed the land that we owned on the other side of the village. The plantations of mulberry trees were coming on like a dream, and the almond trees had a full yield. We chatted away, making plans. Once we had enough money, we’d buy up all the pieces of land that connected our fields, and then we would be the owners of an entire area of the village. If this year’s crops lived up to their promise, our dreams were about to come true.

We were nearly home when we saw Rose calling out to us, agitated. ‘Quick, hurry!’

One of our cows had just had a calf, causing something of a stir. Aunt Agathe was palpating its massive belly while the girls peered at the newborn. It seemed yet another blessing. We owned nearly a hundred animals – cows and sheep, mostly, not counting the horses – and recently we had needed to extend our stables.

‘Time to celebrate!’ I said. ‘A bottle of fortified wine for us tonight.’

But Rose took us to one side and explained that Véronique’s fiancé, Gaspard, had come to set a date for the wedding. He was staying for dinner. Gaspard was the eldest son of a farmer from Moranges. He was a big lad of twenty, renowned for his amazing strength; once, he defeated Martial, The Lion of the South, at a fair in Toulouse. For all that, he was very shy. He was an honest young man with a heart of gold; he blushed whenever Véronique looked him in the eye.

I asked Rose to call him. He was out in the courtyard helping our servants hang the washing. We were in the dining room; when he came up, Jacques turned to me. ‘Say something, father.’

‘So,’ I asked, ‘you’ve come to set a date for the big day?’

‘Yes, Monsieur Roubieu.’ His cheeks were very red.

‘Don’t blush, my boy. If you want, let’s do it on the 10th of July. That’s St Félicité’s Day. It’s the 23rd of June today, so you’ve barely two weeks to wait. Félicité was my wife’s name. It will bring you happiness. So, all set eh?’

‘St Félicité’s Day, Monsieur Roubieu.’

Giving me and Jacques a friendly tap – he could have floored a bull – he kissed Rose, calling her Mother. He might have been a bruiser, with thumping great fists, but he was so much in love with Véronique that he couldn’t eat nor drink. He admitted that he would have been ill if we had refused to let her marry him.

‘Now, let’s eat – you’ll stay for food, won’t you? I know I’m starving!’

There were eleven of us at the table that evening. We sat Gaspard down next to Véronique. He was so overwhelmed that he didn’t even touch his plate, staring at her with tears in his eyes. Cyprien and Aimée smiled; they’d only been married for three years. Jacques and Rose looked more serious – they’d been together for a quarter of a century – but they still gave each other sly little looks full of love. I felt that I was living my life all over again in our two young lovers. Their happiness brought a corner of paradise to our table. We had a terrific meal that night. Aunt Agathe tried out some jokes – she always knew how to make you laugh – and Pierre, bless him, wanted us to know all about his fling with some young Lyonnaise. It was a good thing that we were having dessert, and that everyone talked over each other. I had two bottles of fortified wine fetched from the cellar; we drank to Gaspard and Véronique’s future happiness. In our home a toast went like this: ‘Don’t fight – have lots of children – and make lots of
money – good luck!’ Then we sang. Gaspard knew some love songs in patois. We asked Marie to sing us a hymn. She stood up; her delicate voice tickled your ears like a tin whistle.

I had gone to stand at the window. Gaspard joined me. ‘Nothing new round your way?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But they reckon all this rain we’ve been having could well mean trouble.’

It had rained for nearly sixty hours without a break. The Garonne was very full from the day before. But we trusted her. That smooth broad expanse was so bountiful that, as long as she didn’t overflow, we couldn’t call her a bad neighbour. What’s more, if you’re from the country, you don’t leave your home on just any old whim – not even when the roof’s about to cave in.

‘Well,’ I shrugged. ‘It’ll amount to nothing. It’s the same every year. She rears up, raging, then she settles down
overnight
, meek as a lamb. You’ll see, lad; we’ll be laughing about it just like we always do. The weather’s fine, see!’

It was seven o’clock; the sun was setting. The sky was so blue! It was like a velvety blue blanket, sprinkled with flecks of gold from the setting sun. I had never seen the village drift off into so sweet a sleep. The rosy tint faded from the rooftiles. I heard a neighbour laughing, then I heard some children at the nearby bend in the road; further away, there was the vague noise of distant herds trooping back to their stables. The Garonne rumbled on all the while, but I was so used to it that it sounded just like silence. The sky turned pale; the village drifted further into sleep. It was the kind of evening that you get after a fine day. All of our good fortune, I thought – our excellent crops, our happy home, Véronique’s engagement – was raining down on us from the heavens. We were being blessed.

I went back to the table where the girls were busy
gossiping
. We were listening to them, smiling, when, in the peace and quiet of the countryside, we heard a sudden scream. It was a scream of distress – and death.

‘The Garonne! The Garonne!’