标题: 1975.12 埃米尔-左拉和他的朋友保罗-塞尚 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-9-30 00:23 标题: 1975.12 埃米尔-左拉和他的朋友保罗-塞尚 Emile Zola and His Friend Paul Cezanne
By Rolaine Hochstein
DECEMBER 1975 ISSUE
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A story by Rolaine Hochstein
When Emile Zola was forty-five and fat from overeating, he went down to Aixen-Provence to visit his friend Paul Cézanne. He took a fast train south from Paris with his idolatrous young secretary sitting opposite him in the plush of their private compartment. His eyebrows made a horizontal bar above his squint. His head hair had been cleverly tonsured to lap boyishly over his wrinkled forehead.
The southern sun struck Zola as he backed off the train, carefully outmaneuvering the stiffness in his knees and hip joints, and climbed into the hired buggy. His coat was cashmere. His soft leather shoes reflected the sunlight. He looked like a million and was worth almost that much.
Paul Cézanne was sitting on a wooden bench built around the trunk of an oak tree when he heard the creak of the buggy. He walked slowly toward the gate to see who was there. His torn straw hat wobbled on his head over eyes like bright blue peach pits. He saw it was his dear old friend, and his smile split as wide as a slice of cantaloupe.
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Cézanne came running, wide-legged in washedout, paint-spattered overalls, and grabbed his friend by the shoulders and kissed him more than once on both cheeks. These men were French, you know. This was in the middle 1880s. They were in their middle forties. Forty was older then than it is now. “1 suppose you want to know what brings me here?” Emile said to Paul.
Cezanne’s polished cheeks turned redder. He never knew what reactions were expected of him. “Where will I put you?” he said. “All dressed up like a Christmas goose. We must find you a place where you won’t get dirty.”
Madame Cezanne watched from a side porch where she sat with her legs spread making a table of her skirt as she cut apples into a bowl. From the distance she looked like a wood carving with its bright paint fading. She stood up slowly, slowly set down the bowl of apples, and came slowly down from the porch (in wooden shoes!). Emile had not seen her since before the marriage. She was heavy but still healthy. She had, he thought, grown to look like her husband.
Mme. Cezanne wiped her hands on her long apron as she approached the city people. The short man, glossy with pomade and self-content. The tall young woman, slim as a dandelion with a frizz of hair over a pale pink face, eyebrows like question marks.
Paul didn’t know what to do about the young woman—she was not Mme. Zola, certainly; she was not a daughter—so he ignored her. Mme. Cezanne asked her if she would like to come in and wash up. She gave them separate bedrooms, of course, and Zola made it clear to Monique, Brigitte, whatever her name was, that there would be no afterhours visiting.
In 1886 Emile Zola wrote a book about a crazy stubborn artist who never made it because he was too crazy and too stubborn to paint the kind of pictures that people wanted to look at. Zola’s friend Edouard Manet had died three years earlier, and a lot of people thought this book by Zola was really about Manet.
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I understand that Manet was social, liked to be seen at the right places, in good clothes, with pretty women. He seems to have ended pretty much as he started except minus a leg (amputated: an undiagnosed disease) and plus a reputation as leader of the oddball painters that some critics derisively called “impressionists” but that Zola insisted on referring to as “naturalists.” Maybe Manet would have liked having a novel written about him. It doesn’t matter. The artist Zola had in mind was a total unknown, a weird, antisocial character from the provinces, who had in fact gone to school with Zola and who had been his friend for more than thirty years before Zola wrote the book. He knew who it was about, all right. After he read the book, glowering at page after page with his closely set, farseeing eyes, hurt and anger wringing his heart down into his belly until he couldn’t sit straight; after he thought it was bad enough doing what he had to do and always wondering if it was really junk as so many people said it was but doing it anyway because that was what he saw; after thinking on high days he had a masterpiece going and thinking on low days he ought to do something constructive like take up house painting, knowing it’s only one life and he’s spending it as a failure; after forgetting rejection, forgetting Paris, the expositions, Zola with his ease and his acclaim and his women (it was hard to forget the women), now to find himself used, reduced to words—facts of his life, small and secret experiences, his doubts, his torment, all used. Paul Cézanne was not a man to howl. The shape of his friend’s treachery filled his mind. He never spoke to Zola again.
He was right. You don’t do that to a friend. You don’t put yourself up high and mighty after you’ve had successes, bought yourself a closetful of clothes and a house in the country, and then turn out an isn’t-that-too-bad kind of book about the failure of your old buddy. I only wonder why Zola sent him a copy of the book. He hadn’t sent a book since the first novel, which Cézanne faithfully read and praised. Was this Zola’s idea of courtesy, or was it an act of hatred? Cézanne didn’t analyze. He felt the hatred. But me—I want to know why.
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Rolaine Hochstein is a free-lance writer who lives in New Jersey. This is her first appearance in The Atlantic.
You’d have taken Emile as the rich kid of the two. His mother dressed him in white suits while Paul ran around in peasant shirts and baggy pants. Emile, being small, sat up front under the teacher’s hairy nose. Paul sat with the big boys in the back. Played cards. Passed around dirty pictures. Farted freely. Scratched. His old man, though rich, was tight, and Paul, never having an extra centime to bet on card games, bets with dares. He loses and has to put a very ripe Camembert on the teacher’s high-seated chair. He often gets caught. M. Spilo, all arms, legs, and hollow chest, a spider in his black suit, waves Paul into a corner and switches him on his bare behind. Only Emile didn’t laugh.
In the heavy rain, Emile walks along the high middle of the dirt road. Paul sloshes in the ruts. “Does it still hurt?” Emile asks.
“A small thing. A small sting.” Paul watches the advance of his booted feet on the slippery edges of red mud pools. “I’ve got a hard ass by now.”
“He should not be allowed to use the whip.” Emile had a snub nose, neat hands and feet, nearsighted, ovine eyes. He was invited to the birthday parties of the daughter of the mayor.
On a freezing morning, Emile, bundled against the cold and with more books than necessary tied in a leather strap, knocks on the door of the Cézanne farmhouse, runs down the long hall and raps on Paul’s bedroom door. “Hurry or you’ll make me late again!” His weak eyes in pre-daylight make out his friend in a shirt and stockings squatting on the terra-cotta floor, tracing with his finger. Emile droops into a laughing fit, kicks at his friend. “You nut! You’ll ruin me!”
Emile was faster at schoolwork, but Paul’s voice had thickened, and wisps of yellow whiskers had sprouted along the sides of his pimply (I hope not) face. Paul had hair in other places, too. He wished he could talk about the hair and the strange, terrible stiffening, but there were only the boys in the back of the room, who could not be trusted to sustain a serious moment. Emile was out of the question. Though only a year younger, he seemed to be constructed without the usual pipes and sewers that were responsible for Paul’s excitement and disgust. They spent an hour watching two black ants in a death struggle on a boulder under a bridge. They talked about other things. Paul’s eyes, cagey and blue over the crack of his nose, never met the soft gaze of his reasonable friend.
Zola at eighteen packed three cases with books and clothes and boarded the coach for Paris. The University. A career in law. To make the world a better place. The widowed mother came to see him off although Emile had asked her, in all common sense, to stay home and save herself a lot of unproductive tears. Zola felt he had been a decent son, considerate and affectionate, so he left the ministrations of his mother with more relief than regret. “If you have any problems, call me immediately,” they told one another. She stands on her toes below the coach window and offers a face flowery with tears, her brimmed purple bonnet falling back on black taffeta shoulders. At this moment, up rushes Paul—lanky, lopsided. “You can’t go without a present.” He makes an awkward bow to Mme. Zola as through the window he passes to Emile a little basket covered with a napkin. The coach takes off. Zola lifts the napkin. Twelve beautiful flounder! Freshly caught, so there is no feel of slime. It is fully two hours before they start to stink.
Paul stayed home, where he was expected to shape up, learn accounting, take over his father’s banking business.
What a success, Zola in Paris! Never in the sleepy South had he felt such energy, never had he seen his goals so clearly before him! The University was no more than his base of operations. He took his time, looked around, asked discreet questions. He was friendly, but careful—like a real Lord Chesterfield’s son. Once he had appropriate friends, he’d think about women. It was time. His long friendship with prudish Cezanne had left him fit for a monastery. In Paris, with friends who knew their way around, he could get that over with.
I don’t know why I have it in for Zola. There’s no reason to put a man down, just because he knows what he wants and goes after it. Why shouldn’t he make his way? The widow had taught him good manners, but the ease, the confidence— they came from a different source. He was born with a silver tongue in his mouth, something like that. Mention the book of the day, the play of the hour, the new opera from Italy, the new treatise from Germany—young Zola had seen it, read it, loved it, hated it. He could make his words flow like the most symmetrical of Paris fountains, or crash like the ocean against the Brittany rocks. The Great Critic was most taken with him:
“Strong opinions for such a young man, yet well defended.”
“Monsieur is very kind.”
“You should write lest your words blow away.”
“To write for a drawer is no better than to speak in the air.”
The point is made. The Great Critic drops a word to an editor. Talent is always welcome when it is flexible. Zola gives up the study of law: the pen is mightier.
You can see Zola in a group portrait by his friend Henri Fantin-Latour, which hangs in the Jeu de Paume among vastly better works by many of the people therein portrayed. Vastly better works is the kind of phrase Zola might use in his art criticism but would certainly delete from his novels. There he stands with his good-boy face, his hair slicked back, his boxy body elegantly dressed, his new pince-nez suspended on a satin cord. He looks very comfortable among his friends. (Monet and Renoir are there, looking like characters from La Bohème.) They’re all standing round Manet.
Zola had a tiny nose, luckily for Paul Muni, who also had a small one and got to play Zola in the movies. You can see him again, toward the back of the museum. He is a little older, thinner, sitting at his writing table. No provincial, he. A fine Japanese screen is painted in to break the space and to show that Zola is up on Japanese art. On a shelf above the desk is a print of a famous painting by Zola’s friend Manet, who not at all coincidentally was the painter of the very portrait we’re talking about.
None of this is exactly true, you understand. I take a fact here, an impression there, an inkling. I know nothing about these men. In fact, I think Zola and Cézanne went to Paris together, two men not much younger than I am, hoping to make good in the city. Cézanne has a little problem. He wants to be an artist but he can’t draw. The other artists who are going to be the French Impressionists are having their own troubles rebelling—you know—against their Old School teachers. But Cézanne . . . Get this: Cézanne can’t even pass the entrance examination! Cézanne can’t even get into school!
He has no grace. No sense of direction. But somehow, bumping against doors, he comes to meet those other artists who will have nothing to do with shapely Venuses stepping out of shells. He meets roughhouse Courbet and suave Manet, and he introduces them to his buddy Zola. Zola’s ears stand up. These artists, he thinks, paint like he writes. Naturalists. Comers, like him. Working from life. No pretense. No frosting. Oh, thinks Zola, if these dudes would forget their pretty colors and lighting effects, if they’d focus on underwear.
garbage, deathbeds, they would really have something going!
Cézanne, of course, is a hopeless case. Everybody laughs at his paintings, awkward and rough, like Paul himself. With every rejection his accent gets coarser, his manners get worse. Dapper Manet moves to shake his hand late one afternoon on the Boulevard St. Germain. Cézanne pulls away in horror. “Don’t touch!” he croaks. “I haven’t bathed in two weeks!”
Zola, meantime, is busy writing about Paul’s friends. He has become an art critic. Zola is in. Cézanne is out. Paul goes back to Provence. Manet paints the Zola portrait. Zola sits at his businesslike desk, in a profile that looks both sensitive and resolute, holding an art book. On the wall above, very clear, is a print of Manet’s famous Olympia. Among a fan of pamphlets on the desk, the first, clearly titled, is Zola’s monograph on Manet. One hand washes the other.
By this time Zola is a married man.
He didn’t marry Céleste, Renoir’s model, who worshiped Zola, her eyes an incredible wash of blue, blinking in agreement to his harangue on social injustice.
Nor Francine, who took him in her arms when depression (at the smallest disappointment) floored him, whose enormous, pale-nippled breasts flattened like soufflés as he sank against them, and who crooned into his ear reminders of his accomplishments and expectations.
Nor the fanciful Liliane, with the wicked nose and sharp chin, a teaser and tweaker who could make him hot and then freeze him with laughter: “A real intellectual would be in a library studying.”
No. Emile Zola, having known many women, knew enough to choose a suitable wife. He needed regulation, stability, a graceful hostess, a tactful associate who could, when the need arose, smooth the prickles of parties who might possibly feel themselves attacked in one way or another by her husband’s written or spoken opinions. He needed, in addition, a self-contained woman, who would understand that many of his hours must be spent apart, writing, reading, keeping up a large correspondence (Paris, after all, was not the world), visiting editorial offices, circulating at conventions, conferences, and of course the salons frequented by important people in politics and the arts, getting about to the theater, the galleries, and even, on occasional evenings, to Latin Quarter cafes with his old friends the artists, who were still shouting and banging on tables about the way an Irish setter’s hair looks when it is ruffled by wind in full sunlight . . .
Jacqueline Dudevant (let’s say her name was) was the daughter of a rich lawyer. She was nineteen. docile, fastidious, dressed in expensive good taste, and accomplished in small ways at many small things. She played a little at the piano. She painted tiny flowers on bone-china plates. Everyone marveled at her English (which was terrible, spoken in a—pardon the expression—froglike gargle, in memorized phrases seldom appropriate to the moment, and with the animation of one of Madame Alexandre’s bisque dolls). Her German was worse. Zola thought he saw intelligence behind the practiced brightness of her extremely round eyes. She was tall, broad-boned, tiny-breasted, freckled under creams and powder. People said she was a great beauty, and maybe, if she’d been allowed to run loose in the country for a few months, she might have turned into something frisky and unpredictable and loving. Zola didn’t speculate. The mother was worried about his temperament—perhaps too fiery, too aggressive. Was he dependable? Would he be gentle? The father wanted him. He saw a great future in Zola and a strong hand to guide the pliant Jacqueline, a grand ménage to occupy her. He offered a formidable dowry and the promise of an inheritance.
Poking along country roads, his head full of the shapes and colors of distant hills, houses, trees, Cézanne gradually acknowledged his love for Henriette, who sometimes walked beside him, quiet as he. She was a broad, sober peasant, maybe a couple of years older than he was: he didn’t ask; she didn’t tell. She was everything he needed, a clean, strong woman who made him comfortable when she could. He lived behind his easel, often driving himself crazy, but he liked to pass the rest of his time in the atmosphere of her serenity. He loved to watch her strong, sure movements as she peeled potatoes, scrubbed a table, hiked up her heavy skirts for a muddy walk to the well. Old Man Cézanne disapproved; even if the boy was slightly deranged—as they suspected he was—there was no call to marry a stupid, untaught, not even beautiful peasant. There were others—the daughter of a foreman, if not one of the homelier of the eligible girls from good families. The old man had supported his son’s follies for many years. Crazy pictures not fit for an outhouse wall. But this latest caprice he would not permit. It was not to be discussed.
So Paul spent some years as a more or less permanent visitor chez Henriette, whose parents weren’t happy with the arrangement either. An engagement to a gentleman would ordinarily be a good thing, but this one was a kind of cucumber. Money couldn’t excuse everything. Henriette, a decent, hard-working girl, very good with cows, could still make a marriage. She was not yet thirty. There were many childbearing years ahead. Instead, she stood without a contract, depending only on the whim of a man who was likely to fall into a mood and remain speechless for days. One could see him in the field painting his distorted scenes with murky colors running together, the unfortunate trees with leaves like feathers. The parents of Henriette were not pleased, but what could they do?
Zola had problems too. Every morning he woke up with a battle going on in his head. A woman in his head said, “I want. I want. As a child I had only one toy, a headless doll that my father had found in a garbage can.”
Zola soothed her. He saw only that she was scrawny as an icicle, with yellow hair so thin it seemed to hang in shreds. He would have to decide about her age and the condition of her clothing, what were her eating habits, how did she walk. “I will come to you,” he promised. His wife slept beside him, snoring delicately. Zola could not send her away or move to the country himself in order to write his story. He had responsibilities. But maybe, this morning, since the woman (what would he call her? Germaine? Nanette?) was so importunate, maybe he could hurry to his writing desk and set her down fresh from these thoughts.
Here’s exactly how it happened. Zola rolled out of bed. took a fast leak (where did they go in Paris in those days?), rinsed his mouth with the 1870s equivalent of Listerine, threw a dressing gown over his striped nightshirt, and, damn the servants, hurried to his desk, where the pens were always sharp.
He sat down. He selected a pen and arranged some paper . . .
But there was the in-box with important letters to be answered. A reminder about his tailor’s bill. Invitations to speak. Requests for charity. A photograph of a starving child in India. How could he refuse while his own family flourished? He had to call a publisher who owed him money. Another was yelling for a manuscript. Zola loved organizing his business affairs. Business was neat and finite. There would be lunch today at Victor’s with the editor Nicolet and the beautiful Englishwoman he traveled with. What would Zola wear? The article for Le Monde Nouveau was due on Friday. He’d have to start right away if he expected to enjoy a long lunch. Money was important. Rent was high. Jacqueline’s frail health required expensive medical consultations.
Poor Nanette. Or Germaine. She would have to wait until the article was finished. Because, Zola promised himself, he would not rush this story. When it was time for Germaine or Lili, he would clear his head of everything else. No other commitment. He would open himself to her and she would grow inside him. slowly taking life on his sheets of paper until she burst into the world as Zola’s masterpiece, as alive to the world as she was in the brief, painful, tantalizing morning visits to Zola in his bed.
When Cézanne showed up in Paris he looked worse than usual. He tried to look spruce but looked instead like a newly released jailbird buttoned into a charity suit. With the scrubbed face and the big hands sticking out of his sleeves, he looked like a man hanging, and felt like one, too.
Zola hugged him in the uninhibited new Paris style. Cézanne blushed with happiness and embarrassment. Emile had become so dashing. His clothes and hair were rumpled. Everything moved when he talked, and he always talked. Now Paul was the sober one. “I want to tell you,” Cézanne begins.
“Yes. do. I’m dying to hear.”
“What I’m working on. Some of the old men from the countryside . . .”
“Using models? Portraits from life? That’s beautiful, Paul. You should have been at that a long time ago. I’ve been painting from life, so to speak, from the beginning. It’s the only way . . .”
Zola, despite the fear of losing regard, took Cézanne to any dealer who would look. Paul, in his current phase, thought his work had to be worthwhile because he put so much effort into it. He held up the canvases hopefully. He told the dealer to stand at the far end of the shop. He took him outside into the daylight. The dealers were polite because Zola was present. Nobody laughed until Zola and his friend were out the door.
Zola took Cézanne to see Manet and Pissarro, both of whom were in Paris at the time. Paul could surely use some technical help, some solid intelligence about brushwork. composition, colorwell, everything, really. Cézanne respectfully studied the work of the Impressionists. He listened to them politely.
Generous, expansive, Zola brought Cézanne among his literary friends. They, with cigars and wristwatches, sat back in their chairs with their legs crossed at the knee (showing off their silk stockings), thinking what a splendid fellow their Emile must be to take on this ludicrous bumpkin in loyalty to childhood friendship. (Be sure Cézanne recognized none of this. What did he think? Maybe he was considering the shape of the space between this man’s ear and his shoulder.)
“Sit down,” says Zola, “and tell my friends what you saw in the Louvre this morning. I’ll get us an apéritif. What’ll it be? Pernod? Vermouth?”
Cézanne pulls out a chair. “Just get me a beer.” He hands Zola a filthy hundred-franc note. He blinks at the dandies around the table. “At the Louvre today I saw the Captive Slave. Tomorrow I will return with a drawing book.”
“What will you draw?”
“The ribs and back of the Captive Slave.”
“So. You are interested in anatomy.”
Paul crashes his fist against the table. Saucers clatter. “I am interested in strain!”
Zola was annoyed with his friend. He was acting like a professional failure. Every year he sent canvases to be judged for showing at the great Salon exposition. Every year they were summarily rejected. Once, at Zola’s urging, the judges took pity on the poor, dogged fellow and arranged to hang one of his works—four or five scrawny blue naked men standing around a swimming hole—in a sideshow of “interesting new directions.” Spectators were so enraged that the thing was soon taken down and returned to Provence.
“You have a reasonable choice,” Zola told Cezanne over beers in Brasserie Lipp. “Consider the public and be shown, or do what you like and forget the public. You are a lucky man. Unlike Renoir, you don’t have to paint for a living.”
Cézanne’s laugh made people stare. “But I have to paint to live.” Remember, this was a hundred years ago, and people weren’t as sophisticated as we are now. Cézanne scratched at Zola’s lapel and laughed with tears coming down all over his face. “Hang the public,” Paul said. “And hang the pictures in my barn.”
Zola, a positive thinker, a problem solver, blamed his friend for self-indulgence. The man made no effort to keep up. He probably didn’t even vote. His wife was no challenge. He had insisted on marrying Henriette the day after the ending of the mourning period for his father. She remained passive and grateful, the perfect wife for a man who wishes to scoop himself out and smear his insides on a canvas.
Zola shut his eyes. He had nothing to be ashamed of. None of his work had to hang in barns. His novels were published and popular, yet he was uncompromised. Never did he spray eau de cologne over a foul odor, nor pretend that street people talk like professors, or that the poor are content in their privation. Zola was not squeamish. Pus. Vomit. He rubbed the public face in it. That was his power.
He imagined Henriette sitting in the garden watching her husband work. She, with hands like scraped beets, did not long to be taken out to tea. She probably liked to make love.
Inever saw the Paul Muni movie. I don’t watch TV much. But I always get Zola as an old man mixed up in my mind with Chopin’s piano teacher, another Muni role. A big head of gray hair. Mine is already beginning to thin.
Recognition came early to Zola. Plaques. Medals. Foreign translations. He was voted one of the ten best-dressed men in France. Great statesmen confided in him. Strangers on the street came up to shake his hand. By the time he was forty he no longer had to be introduced anywhere. Always the best table. The upstairs room at the Vingt-et-un.
Jacqueline (Mme. Zola) was not unhappy. Clothes and parties, calls paid and received, the occasional pleasures of a young man’s attentions helped to lighten the steps (in the most painful of pointed shoes) which moved her toward the day when she would put on bedroom slippers and acknowledge herself an old woman. Zola saw his wife growing old but hated more the signs of age on his own face. His beard covered a chin that was beginning to puff like that on a caricature of Pantalone. He wondered why he didn’t feel better about himself. Lately his brilliant friends had become less interesting than the wine seller on the corner. Zola had never been much of a ladies’ man, but—in an effort to put some sparkle into his life—he tried. There was a little laundress . . .
Now, with Manet dead, the barbarian Americans were snatching at Impressionist paintings. A railroad entrepreneur offered Zola a thousand dollars for a medium-sized street scene that was hung on the wall of his foyer. “Take money for Manet?” Zola punned. The visitor thought Zola was mocking his pronunciation. “Monet, Manet,” he said. “Name your price and I’ll pay it.” Zola disappeared into a closet and returned with a canvas of a bowl of apples by his friend Cézanne. “I’ll sell you this one. Take my word, he’s better than both of the others.” The American was enraged at the joke.
In truth, Zola was tired of the so-called Impressionists now that they were popular. He smiled into his beard, rubbing his tongue over the spaces where he had lost three teeth. “If you live long enough,” he told the dealer Armand-Ruel, “all your bizarre ideas become commonplace.” He was happy to see Monet at last getting his hands on some cash, but that didn’t change Zola’s life. If anything, it made him feel more banal. He began a reassessment in his art columns. He wrote that the Impressionists had been grossly overrated, by him especially.
One day when he was feeling restless, worthless, close to the edge of a frightening hole, he suddenly decided to pay a visit to Old Paul.
“I suppose you want to know what brings me here,” Emile said jauntily.
“What does it matter?” Paul managed to reply. “As long as you are here.” He was obviously overjoyed and did his best to make them both comfortable, Emile and the unexplained young woman. They all sat in the back yard under the trees. Henriette brought out food, hot bread, fresh butter, fruit, cheese. Paul opened a bottle of chateau wine. Probably there were frisky children running around.
Paul, you swine! Zola thought. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you see how old you’re getting? Pebbles under your eyes, veins in your cheeks, skin coarse, jaw falling away. Paul, tell me the truth. Doesn’t it hurt you?
Paul answered him directly. “My face is becoming more interesting. It will be a better subject the next time I paint it.” He saw the pain under his friend’s ironic smile and knew he had again given the unasked-for response. “Why should I worry about the loss of youth?” He listened affectionately for Zola’s explanation so that he could share his friend’s feeling. But it was impossible to understand all this concern over occasional dyspepsia, a stiff’ back.
“The choice,” Cézanne said at last, “is to grow old or to die. One is lucky to grow old. There is always one’s work.”
Zola was stung with envy. He cut his visit short on an absurd pretext. He took his secretary and fled. Two months later (no time at all) he had a new book, l’Oeuvre. Paul felt that he had been violated. He threw the book into the kitchen fire and never again spoke of his friendship with Emile Zola.
Years later, when Zola rose as the champion of Captain Dreyfus, Cézanne took the other side. □
你可以在他的朋友亨利-方丹-拉图尔（Henri Fantin-Latour）的群像中看到左拉的身影，这幅画挂在Jeu de Paume博物馆中，其中许多人的作品都好得多。更好的作品是左拉在他的艺术评论中可能使用的短语，但肯定会从他的小说中删除。他站在那里，带着他那张好孩子的脸，头发向后梳理，他方正的身体穿得很优雅，他的新眼镜挂在缎子上。他在他的朋友中看起来非常舒服。(莫奈和雷诺阿也在那里，看起来像《波希米亚人》中的人物。