Unless some other courageous man had arisen to tear the veil away from before human life, such as it is in so-called civilised communities, and show society its own self in all its rottenness, foulness, and hypocrisy—­so that on more than one occasion, shrinking guiltily from its own image, it has denounced the plain unvarnished truth as libel—­there would have been no ‘Nana’ and no ‘Pot Bouille,’ no ‘Assommoir,’ and no ‘Germinal.’  And no ‘La Terre.’  ‘La Debacle,’ and ‘Lourdes,’ and ‘Rome,’ ‘Paris,’ and ‘Fecondite,’ and all the other books that have flowed from Emile Zola’s busy pen would have remained unwritten.  But for my own part I would rather that the world should possess those books than that Zola when tempted, as he was, should have cast literature aside to plunge into the abominable and degrading vortex of politics.

Like all men of intellect he certainly has his views on important political questions, and again and again he has enunciated them in the face of fierce opposition.  In the Dreyfus case, however, he has been no politician, but simply the indignant champion of an innocent man.  And his task over, truth and justice vindicated, he asks no reward, no office; he simply desires to take up his pen once more and revert to his life work:—­The delineation and exposure of the crimes, follies, and short-comings of society as now constituted, in order that those who are in politics, who control human affairs, may, in full knowledge of existing evils, do their utmost to remedy them and prepare the way for a better and a happier world.

XIV

‘WAITING FOR THE VERDICT’

I can still see before me the sitting-room on the second floor of the Queen’s Hotel, in which M. Zola spent so much of his time and wrote so many pages of ‘Fecondite’ during the last six months or so of his exile.  A spacious room it was, if a rather low one, with three windows overlooking the road which passes the hotel.

A very large looking-glass in a gilt frame surmounted the mantelpiece, on which stood two or three little blue vases.  Paper of a light colour and a large flowing arabesque pattern with a broad frieze covered the walls.  There was not a single picture of any kind in the room, neither steel engraving, nor lithograph, nor chromo; and remembering what pictures usually are, even in the best of hotels, it was perhaps just as well that there should have been none in that room at the Queen’s.  Yet during the many hours I spent there the bareness of the walls often worried me.

Against the one that faced the fireplace stood a small sideboard.  Then on another side was a sofa, and here and there were half a dozen chairs.  The room was rich in tables, it counted no fewer than five.  On a folding card-table in one corner M. Zola’s stock of letter and ‘copy’ paper, his weighing scales for letters, his envelopes, pens, and pencils, were duly set out.  Then in front of the central window was the table at which he worked every morning.  It was of mahogany, little more than three feet long and barely two feet wide.  Whenever he raised his eyes from his writing, he could see the road below him, and the houses across the way.  On a similar table at another of the windows he usually kept such books and reviews as reached him from France.