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As the Rougon-Macquart series drew to a close, Zola's paunch troubled him. He increased drinking at meals, lost 30 pounds in three weeks. Daudet failed to recognize him on the street. Zola took his handsome dignified servant, Jeanne Rozerot, as a mistress. At the age of 49 he begat a daughter, begat a son a few years later. This belated parenthood altered the man. The steely scientist became messianic. Fecundity and progeny made him regard the future of his children and, relatively, of the race. He wrote books of prophecy and humanistic policy.
Then in a wave of Catholicism and anti-semitism Capt. Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason to the French army, was incarcerated on Devil's Island. In the third year of his imprisonment the verdict began to create protest. Out of his happy, latter-day quiet came Zola, white hot with zeal for Dreyfus' acquittal. The army and courts were proudly, rottenly impregnable. Zola publicly diagnosed the case, publicly accused the dignitaries involved, was tried and condemned to prison for a year. The frenzied mob was upon him and his advisors (among them Georges Clemenceau) thought it better for him to leave. He escaped, harried by conscience, to England. Two years later his accusations were proved correct. Suicide was epidemic in the high councils of France. Zola returned. Among all just people he was a public idol.
On the night of Sept. 28, 1902, Zola and his wife retired early, shut their door and all their windows. A fire was dying in the grate. The chimney was stopped up. Through the night the room filled with carbon monoxide. Mme. Zola almost perished. Emile Zola died of asphyxiation.
The Significance. Emile Zola's triumphant career resulted from his need for fame. Failure was unthinkable, not so much for its own sake, but for the restless sense of frustration it caused. Thus he completed 20 naturalistic novels, seven philosophic novels, countless newspaper articles, several plays, considerable juvenilia. In the span of his life Naturalism was initiated, scorned, accepted, apotheosized, suspected, deserted. Naturalism is, of course, only an easy appellation for an attitude. But its result in Zola is not defined by that word. Try as he did to be completely dispassionate, his works are suffused with strong, personal, poetic rhythm and color. Zola is greater than vague Naturalism. He includes it, transcends it with.sharp, savory revelations of life.
The Author. Matthew Josephson has been affiliated with left-wing poetry pamphlets (Broom, Secession, The Little Review). But for the past two years he has lost himself in the pursuit of Zola. His exposition has great dramatic momentum, his documentation is miraculously complete. This is a magnificent biography which relies on a vast harvesting and dynamic marshalling of facts and testimony, rather than the brilliant, suppositious and dubious psychologizing which is at once the glamor and fault of Strachey, Guedalla and Ludwig.