Pierre Loti`s Dialogue with Germinal and

Pierre Loti’s Dialogue with Germinal and Naturalism:
Pêcheur d’Islande
Richard M. Berrong
A
nyone who has dealt with Zola and Naturalism is likely to have encountered at least
reference to Pierre Loti’s discours de réception upon entering the French Academy
in 1892. About half-way through, after having praised the works of his predecessor, the
now-forgotten Octave Feuillet, Loti spent several minutes explaining his disagreement
with the major new literary movement of his day.
La condamnation du naturalisme est d’ailleurs en ceci, c’est qu’il prend ses
sujets uniquement dans cette lie du peuple des grandes villes où ses auteurs se
complaisent. N’ayant jamais regardé que cette flaque de boue, qui est très
spéciale et très restreinte, ils généralisent sans mesure les observations qu’ils y
ont faites, – et, alors, ils se trompent outrageusement. Ces [. . .] paysans, ces
laboureurs, pareils tous à des gens que l’on prendrait dans des bals de
Belleville, sont archi-faux. Cette grossièreté absolue, ce cynisme qui raille tout,
sont des phénomènes morbides, particuliers aux barrières parisiennes; j’en ai la
certitude, moi qui arrive du grand air de dehors. Et voilà pourquoi le
naturalisme, tel qu’on l’entend aujourd’hui, est destiné, – malgré le monstrueux
talent de quelques écrivains de cette école, – à passer, quand la curiosité
malsaine qui le soutient se sera lassée. (Loti, Discours 50-51) 1
Though this constitutes less than one page of the ninety-two in the version of Loti’s
talk Calmann-Lévy published as a small book a few weeks later, it is the passage that
created by far the greatest waves. 2 The new academician subsequently learned that Zola,
whom he had beaten out for Feuillet’s seat, had been in the audience. He wrote him a
letter saying that it had not been his intention to offend the leader of the Naturalists but
that “je trouve que vous vous trompez, que vous voyez les hommes comme ils ne sont
pas.” Zola wrote a pleasant reply. 3 Still, the lines were drawn: Loti had now placed
himself very publically among the growing number of those who opposed Zola’s
presentation of modern France. 4
1
2
3
4
This is not far from Henry James’ criticism of Zola as someone who sacrificed accuracy of human observation
to his theory of how humans behaved (see Brooks 66), but Loti still conceded that the Naturalists’ work was
based on “observation,” though too restricted. The text that Calmann-Lévy published in book form shortly
after Loti’s entrance into the Academy is a substantial revision of the text that he read in front of that body and
those who sat in the audience on 7 April 1892. For the text that Loti read see the website of the French
Academy, http://www.academie-francaise.fr, or various French newspapers of the day, which published the
same version found on the Academy website. The passage I quote is in the original version of the discours as
well, though there Loti used only the adjective faux, rather than archi-faux, to describe the Naturalists’
depictions of the non-Parisian working class.
Loti, a career naval officer who had no fondness for big city life, had already made the distinction between
“cette flaque de boue,” the cramped, unhealthy quarters of the poor in Paris, and the “grand air de dehors” in
Pêcheur d’Islande. There he described the air his fishermen breathe in the North Atlantic as “vierge comme
aux premiers jours du monde, et si vivifiant que, malgré leur fatigue, ils se sentaient la poitrine dilatée et les
joues fraîches” (I.1). Later in the novel his protagonist, Breton fisherman Yann Gaos, dismisses Paris as “’si
loin de la côte, [. . .] et tant de terres, tant de terres. . . ça doit être malsain. Tant de maisons, tant de monde. . .
il doit y avoir des mauvaises maladies, dans ces villes; non, je ne voudrais pas vivre là dedans, moi, bien sûr’”
(IV.8).
For contemporary reactions to the discours see Quella-Villéger 198-201.
For Loti’s letter to Zola and Zola’s reply see Quella-Villéger 200-201.
Zola kept seeking election to the Academy until his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair made that a complete
waste of time. In 1920 Loti told his secretary Gaston Mauberger that the Naturalist had called on him several
Dalhousie French Studies
-1-
2
Richard M. Berrong
Subsequent writers have gone so far as to describe Loti as the Academy’s
intentionally anti-Zola candidate and his discours as a dutiful mouthing of their antiNaturalist sentiments (Lacoste). That is to belittle the author without proof, however, and
to ignore that in criticizing Naturalism in 1892 he was speaking as a writer who had
himself once been drawn to it. Like Joris-Karl Huysmans before him, however, he had
subsequently abandoned the movement and gone a different way. 5 How he did that is
worth examining, since it produced a novel hailed by Henry James as “perfect,” Pêcheur
d’Islande (1886), one that dialogues with one of Naturalism’s finest, Germinal (1885). 6
Loti’s first three novels, Aziyadé (1879), Le mariage de Loti (1880), and Le roman
d’un spahi (1881), were set in foreign locales and figured the writer with some
justification as an exoticist. When asked for a fourth, however, he composed a work set
partly in France and drawn largely from his diary that he shaped in accord with a theme
popular among Naturalists: the devastating effects of alcohol on the lower classes. Zola
had scored a major success in 1876 with a novel on the ravages of hard liquor,
L’Assommoir, and his entire Rougon-Macquart series deals, to a greater or lesser extent
depending on the volume, with the effects of hereditary alcoholism. Mon frère Yves
(1883), Loti’s story of the alcoholic Yves Kermadec, whose elderly mother, like a Zola
narrator, attributes her sons’ drinking to an heredity scourge, was a major commercial
and critical success. 7
In his next effort, however, Pêcheur d’Islande, Loti presented different views
concerning issues on which Zola had been focusing. Using the latter’s latest creation,
Germinal, he set about writing a narrative that highlights these differences from
Naturalism by repeating and then changing elements in Zola’s masterpiece to produce
what became a masterpiece in its own right. Repetition with a significant difference was a
favorite stylistic device of Loti; he uses it repeatedly within Pêcheur d’Islande and other
of his novels. By doing the same thing here with an outside source as well he was simply
expanding this device to include what we now call intertexuality. 8 Peter Brooke, in the
climactic chapter of his study of how Henry James came to terms in his later works with
the contemporary French novelists he both admired and disliked, primarily Flaubert but
also Zola, has argued that “in his dialogue with the masters of French fiction–whom he
more and more sees as the writers he most needs to measure himself against–[James]
seems to be taking stock of his own choice in life” (Brooks 178). Pêcheur d’Islande
seems to have played the same role for Loti, though in his case it was not a matter of how
to incorporate more of what was being practiced by his contemporaries in French fiction
but rather of how to distance himself from their already experienced “monstrous”
appeal. 9
5
6
7
8
9
times to solicit his vote in those elections, so he must not have seen Loti as that staunch an opponent
(Mauberger 335).
Zola considered that Huysmans’ 1884 novel À rebours had dealt “a terrible blow” to Naturalism but remained
friends with him. The attack on both Naturalism and its creator in a review of La Terre published by five
young writers in the 18 August, 1887, issue of Le Figaro, baptized Le Manifeste des cinq, led subsequent
reviewers of that novel to speak of the bankruptcy of Naturalism. It is true that, starting with his next novel, Le
Rêve (1888), Zola himself largely gave up on presentations of the worker. On this see Walker 186-188; also
Hemmings 168-172.
James wrote that “Pêcheur d’Islande is to my sense perfect” and that Loti “is the companion, beyond all
others, of my own selection” in his two essays on the author (500, 516).
Yves’ mother’s explanation that her sons drink because “ils ont la tête de leur père” is in Chapter XXII. I cite
Loti’s novels in the fashion traditional in Loti scholarship, by chapter or part and chapter rather than referring
to pages in any particular edition, because the chapters are very short and there are so many different editions
of his novels.
In "Pêcheur d'Islande et Eugénie Grandet," I showed how Loti also used parallels with and then divergences
from Balzac’s by then classic Eugénie Grandet to emphasize certain other points he wanted to make about his
main characters.
Brooks shows that the most important thing James came to adapt from his French contemporaries was the use
Pierre Loti and Émile Zola
3
To the extent that one can judge from reading Germinal, one of the things that made
the greatest impression on Zola during his ten days in the coal-mining town of Anzin
doing research for the book was the miners’ impudeur. The first time he presents one of
their families at home, the Maheus, this is one of the things that he repeatedly singles out
for notice by the bourgeois readers who would have been his audience. The ten family
members live in a small house in the community built for the miners and make no effort
to hide the intimate moments of their lives from each other. If the eldest son, the twentyone-year-old Zacharie, lowers his nightshirt when he gets out of bed, it is “non par
pudeur, mais parce qu’il n’avait pas chaud” (63). 10 Once Étienne Lantier moves in and
has lived with them for awhile, the narrator notes that the fifteen-year-old daughter
“Catherine avait cessé de se hâter [à se vêtir], elle reprenait son habitude ancienne de
nouer ses cheveux au bord de son lit, les bras en l’air, remontant sa chemise jusqu’à ses
cuisses; et [Étienne], sans pantalon, l’aidait parfois, cherchant les épingles qu’elle perdait.
L’habitude tuait la honte d’être nu” (215).
For Étienne, who comes from a different world, this indifference to hiding the naked
body, this lack of pudeur, constitutes nothing less than a reversion to man’s animal
origins: “Est-ce qu’on était des bêtes, pour être ainsi parqués, les uns contre les autres,”
he thinks to himself, “si entassés qu’on ne pouvait changer de chemise sans montrer son
derrière aux voisins!” (218, cf. also 437). The exclamation point rather than a question
mark at the end of the sentence emphasizes Étienne’s revulsion and perhaps Zola’s at “les
promiscuités du coron” (218).
The novelist also indicates the Maheus’ lack of pudeur by mentioning from early on
that they do not seek privacy to defecate. His narrator notes the first time we meet them
that they “se soulageaient sans honte, avec l’aisance tranquille d’une portée de jeunes
chiens” (63), again linking impudeur to animal behavior. Once Étienne moves in with
them, he, too, remarks with disgust that “rien d’eux ne leur restât secret, pas même les
besoins intimes” (215).
Jean-Claude Bologne’s Histoire de la pudeur shows that the viewpoint of the
narrator and Étienne on this issue was very much that held by the French bourgeoisie of
the era. “La pudeur individuelle est caractéristiquement bourgeoise,” he states. “À la
Révolution, le bourgeois a eu besoin de sa pudeur pour s’affirmer devant la débauche
aristocratique ou la vulgarité populaire” (Bologne 324-325). The indifference of Zacharie
and the others concerning their nudity would therefore have been disagreable and
distancing for this bourgeoisie. In an era when Darwin’s theories concerning man’s
evolution from animals were very much part of the book-buying public’s consciousness,
Zola’s readers could not help but have thought something to the effect of: “See! When
man gives up on pudeur, that bastion of bourgeois culture, he reverts to his animal
origins!,” just as Étienne at one point concludes: “attenter à sa propre pudeur, c’est
renoncer à sa qualité d’homme” (325). Zola fosters this bourgeois view not only with his
above-cited descriptions of impudeur as animality, but also with his depiction of elevenyear-old Jeanlin Maheu, whom he twice describes as regressing to an animal state: “il
semblait avoir l’intelligence obscure et la vive adresse d’un avorton humain, qui
retournait à l’animalité d’origine” (241). 11
Bologne argues that the bourgeoisie took the same attitude toward the other aspect
of the Maheus’ impudeur to which Zola draws his reader’s attention, their failure to hide
defecation: “La vague de pudibonderie qui déferle sur la France au XIXe siècle s’abat
of character perspective to tell his stories. Loti, an admirer of Flaubert, had experimented with that before,
mostly in Mon frère Yves, but it became his guiding narrative device in Pêcheur d’Islande. On that see
Berrong, "Modes."
10
All citations from Germinal refer to the Folio edition prepared by Mitterand.
11
After Jeanlin kills the Breton soldier Lantier looks at him and sees “sa dégénérescence d’avorton à
l’intelligence obscure et d’une ruse de sauvage, lentement repris par l’animalité ancienne” (331).
3
4
Richard M. Berrong
avec une singulière violence sur la défécation” (166). Louis XIV could honor one of the
chosen male members of the court at Versailles by putting him in charge of his chamber
pot, but two centuries later France’s new aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, could not do
enough to shut the subject from sight and mind.
By focusing on the Maheus’ impudeur from the first time we see them Zola makes a
clear effort to distance the miners from his readers, indeed to show that they were that
which his readers took such pride, and made such efforts, not to be. Zola reinforces that
distance by having a major character, Étienne Lantier, who bears at least some
resemblance to those likely early readers and with whom they could therefore to at least
an extent have identified, remark on this issue with clear disgust.
If he starts with the Maheus, Zola goes on in Germinal to depict a similar impudeur
in the mining community as a whole. The women don’t bother to hide their (often
enormous) breasts when nursing their children in public. At the annual holiday known as
la Ducasse, “les mères ne se gênaient plus, sortaient des mamelles longues et blondes
comme des sacs d’avoine” (212). The phrasing “ne se gênaient plus” indicates that the
women simply get tired of worrying about pudeur, unlike the nineteenth-century French
bourgeoisie for whom it was a constant concern. Elsewhere the text repeatedly suggests
scandalized surprise when one of the miners’ wives suckles a child in front of a man not
in her family. More generally, when describing the miners at la Ducasse as the day
progresses and plenty of beer has been consumed, Zola notes that “on se mettait à l’aise,
la chair dehors, dorée dans l’épaisse fumée des pipes” (213). Again, this is exactly the
opposite of the nineteenth-century French bourgeoisie, who could never let themselves
become so “à l’aise” in public as to forget the behavior that distinguished them from the
lower classes.
Zola also comes back to the issue of public defecation when talking about the other
miners. At la Ducasse children get drunk on beer “et à quattre pattes sous les tables, se
soulageaient sans honte” (212). “L’habitude tuait la honte,” as we have already seen Zola
remark through Étienne’s consciousness.
This lack of shame about the body along with living in such cramped conditions
leads to an almost constant awareness of and frequent indulgence in sex as well, almost
regardless of age. Again, Zola first deals with this issue in his presentation of the Maheu
family. It is not surprising, though Étienne certainly seems surprised, that having grown
up in the cramped quarters of the miners’ lodgings with their paper-thin walls, Catherine
Maheu at fifteen “n’ignorait rien de l’homme ni de la femme” (95). As she prepares
breakfast for the rest of her family the first time we see her, Zola is careful to note that
“elle devait rêvasser aux histoires que Zacharie racontait sur le maître-porion et la
Pierronne” (69), the overseer and the married woman in the house across the street who
are carrying on an affair more or less under her husband’s nose. Zola’s phrasing, “elle
devait rêvasser,” distances such preoccupations from the narrator who, unlike when he
speaks of Lantier, here indicates that he can only guess at what such a person, different
from himself, might think. When, through the thin walls that separate their house from
that of the Levaques next door, Catherine hears Bouteloup, the Levaques’ border, mount
the steps to la Levaque’s bedroom moments after her husband heads out the door to go to
work, she “étouffa un rire à l’oreille de Zacharie: quoi donc? Bouteloup n’attendait même
plus que le mari fût parti!” (70). When Étienne first meets Catherine and asks about some
of the women who work in the mine, “elle disait tout, sans effronterie ni honte. [. . .]
Quand il revint sur la Mouquette [a particularly shameless example of promiscuity], pour
l’embarrasser, elle conta des histoires épouvantables, la voix paisible, très égayée” (95).
Even the younger children share this knowledge: “rien de la vie intime n’y restait
caché, même aux gamins” (64), the text informs us early on. Each morning Jeanlin
Maheu (age 11) and his hunchbacked sister Alzire (age 9) “s’égayaient ainsi du menage à
trois des voisins [les Levaque et Bouteloup]” through the thin walls (64). Indeed, Jeanlin
Pierre Loti and Émile Zola
5
and Lydie Pierron (age 10) “essayaient ensemble, dans les coins noirs, l‘amour qu’ils
entendaient et qu’ils voyaient chez eux, derrière les cloisions, par les fentes des portes, ils
savaient tout,” even though “ils ne pouvaient guère” (174). Nor does the presence of their
12 year old paymate Bébert make any difference: “ils ne se gênaient nullement en sa
présence” (174), just as the miners’ wives “ne se gênaient plus” when it came to exposing
their large breasts in public.
Once these miners get to an age when hormones become active and requisite body
parts work, Zola portrays their lives as an almost uninterrupted orgy. 12 When Étienne or
Hennebeau or others go walking through the fields, they invariably find themselves
surprising copulating unmarried couples going at it in the high grass, not worried in the
least that their activities may be seen by others similarly engaged: “on se logeait quand
même, coude à coude, sans s’occuper des voisins” (175).
The first readers of Germinal could not help but notice this focus on frequent and
impudique sex among the novel’s miners. To Anatole Claveau, who had written a review
of the work for Le Figaro in which he commented on all the sexual activity it contained,
Zola wrote: “Pourquoi retrancher de la vie, par convenance, le grand instinct génésique
[...]? j’ajoute que, dans la peinture des classes d’en bas, je croirais mon tableau faux et
incomplet, si je n’indiquais pas toutes les conséquences du milieu d’ignorance et de
misères” (Zola, Correspondance V. 244). As this remark demonstrates, to Zola–as to
some of his bourgeois potential readers–frequent, generally impudique sexual activity
was another distinguishing aspect of the life of the working poor.
This sexual activity is often not only impudique; it is generally the result of a desire
over which no control is exercised, something that Zola signals by repeatedly describing
it as “planting a child,” i.e., having intercourse without precautions. When la Maheude’s
vigorous toweling down of her just-bathed husband excites him to the point of having sex
with her, the text comments: “Toujours le bain finissait ainsi, elle le ragaillardissait à le
frotter si fort, puis à lui passer partout des linges, qui lui chatouillaient les poils des bras
et de la poitrine. D'ailleurs, c'était également chez les camarades du coron l'heure des
bêtises, où l'on plantait plus d'enfants qu'on n'en voulait” (167). Just as, a moment before,
the narrator had explained that once his wife started drying him Maheu became “heureux,
sans songer au lendemain de la dette” his family had contracted with Maigrat (165), so he
does not worry about future consequences when subsequently making spur-of-themoment love to her. Indeed, he can’t even control himself long enough for his wife to
take their infant daughter Estelle out of the room, remarking “Ah! ouiche! à trois mois,
est-ce que ça comprend?” (166). 13
Later, when Étienne goes for a walk in the country,
il tomba encore sur des couples. Il arrivait à Réquillart, et là, autour de la vieille
fosse en ruine, toutes les filles de Montsou rôdaient avec leurs amoureux.
C'était le rendez-vous commun, le coin écarté et désert, où les herscheuses
venaient faire leur premier enfant, quand elles n'osaient se risquer sur le carin.
12
13
Uninterrupted and envied, which Paule Lejeune called “un regard de mépris et d’envie” (184). The
conjugally frustrated Hennebeau’s desire to have such unlimited and repercussion-free sex (Zola, Germinal
414-415), which is how he sees the miners’ lives, evidently reflected those of the conjugally unsatisfied Zola
and definitely gives another perspective to the novel’s moralistic pre-occupation with the miners’ active sex
lives. If, as Paule Lejeune reported, Zola even admitted in a letter that he experienced orgasms while writing
about his miners’ sexual activity (Lejeune 183-184), it is difficult not to see in the sexual excesses he
described less the results of his alleged “scientific observation” than the fantasies produced by an
“overpowering sexuality striking against a puritanical repression” that was, in Robert J. Niess’ words, “the
very essence of Zola’s temperament” (159). In Zola’s “Germinal”: A Critical and Historical Study, Elliott
M. Grant noted that Zola had sketched la Mouquette out as boldly impudique even before he spent his weeklong “research” sojourn in Anzin (92).
In his 1993 film adaptation of the novel director Claudi Berri, to emphasize the bestiality of this scene, upon
which Zola insisted, has Maheu take his wife from behind.
6
Richard M. Berrong
[. . .] Et il semblait que ce fût, autour de la machine éteinte, près de ce puits las
de dégorger de la houille, une revanche de la création, le libre amour qui, sous
le coup de fouet de l'instinct, plantait des enfants dans les ventres de ces filles, à
peine femmes. (175)
In the mines, “le coup de bestialité [. . .] soufflait dans la fosse, le désir subit du
mâle, lorsqu’un mineur rencontrait une de ces filles à quatre pattres, les reins en
l’air” (91).
As Van de Walle and de Luca have written, by the time of Germinal’s publication
“contraception was widespread in French [middle- and upper-class] homes” (542). 14
Since “in France withdrawal became the standard technique early on, and [. . .] remained
so until the advent of hormonal contraception” (Van de Walle, de Luca 549; also Jütte
144-156), Zola’s middle- and upper-class readers would have seen the abundance of
illegitimate and undernourished offspring on which he so often focuses in Germinal as
yet more proof that, like Maheu when he is in such a rush to make love to his wife after
his bath, these people were incapable, unlike their social superiors, of controlling their
emotions even long enough to prevent conception. When la Maheude tells the very
bourgeois Grégoires that she has seven children, “M. Grégoire [. . .] eut un sursaut
indigné” and his wife murmurs “C’est imprudent” (141), both clearly bothered by the
lack of self-control such numbers would have indicated to readers of their class. Not
surprisingly, the one man in Germinal who exhibits real control over his very strong
sexual impulses is the bourgeois mining director, Hennebeau. Étienne, though not really a
bourgeois, nevertheless refrains from having sex with Catherine until their final moment
together, even though he suspects, at certain times, that she would have consented.
Other early readers of Germinal saw Zola’s implication in depicting these miners as
perpetually preoccupied with sexual desire that they do not control. In his review of the
novel, Jules Lemaître described the Rougon Macquart series of which it was the latest
installment as “une épopée pessimiste de l’animalité humaine” (Zola, Correspondance
V.244). In our own time Paule Lejeune, no fan of the work, has quite accurately observed
that “Zola insiste sur l’absense de pudeur, de retenue, sur l’aspect collectif de ce rut. [. . .]
D’après Zola, donc, une franche bestialité caractérise les rapports entre filles et garçons;
aucune allusion n’est faite au domaine de l’affectivité. Et cette bestialité exclut toute
forme de pudeur” (Lejeune 182). 15
Such impudeur on the part of the young girls in the mining community does not
bother their miner fathers. Zola presents them on this issue as “peu touchés de la question
de moralité et d’hygiène” (76) and notes in particular of la Moquette’s father, le Moque,
that he does or says nothing when miners make blatantly indecent proposals to her at la
Ducasse (203). If the young men’s mothers complain, it is only because they don’t want
their sons to move out and set up separate households to accommodate their girlfriends
and the children that result inevitably from their not simply illicit but careless constant
sex: “les mères seules se fâchaient, lorsque les garçons commençaient trop tôt, car un
garçon qui se mariait ne rapportait plus à la famille” (151).
Loti took up these same issues in Pêcheur d’Islande, sometimes in passages that
seem designed specifically to recall Germinal. Not surprisingly given his remarks about
the archifalseness of the Naturalists’ non-Parisian “paysans” and “laboureurs,” he
presented them without the same “grossièreté absolue.” One could note that he had spent
a lot more time in Paimpol, the Breton town that is the setting of his novel, than Zola had
14
15
In fact there were even campaigns directed at the bourgeoisie to convince them to cut back on their use of
contraception and have more children. On this see Surkis Chapter 4.
For Lejeune as for others, this is the bourgeoisie’s negative view of the worker as an immoral inferior: “La
classe ouvrière constitue une ‘race’ [pour la bourgeoisie française]: Comme les noirs ou les jaunes” (183).
Pierre Loti and Émile Zola
7
in Anzin with his one eight-day trip there to observe the lives of miners. 16 Loti came to
know some of the residents very well, such as Guillaume Floury and his family upon
whom he based Yann Gaos and his family. The interesting issue here is not, however,
whether Loti presented non-Parisian “laboureurs” more accurately, but rather how he
presented them in contrasting parallel with Zola’s miners. 17
He depicts his protagonist, Yann Gaos, a Breton fisherman, as the eldest of fourteen
children (twice the number of Maheu offspring) who live with their parents in a two-story
cottage in Pors Even, one of the communities that constitute Ploubazlanec (I.5). 18 These
numbers should have made for even more impudeur than chez les Maheu, who occupy a
house that would have been roughly the same size as that of the Gaos, but that is not how
Loti presents them. Rather, he has us see the Gaos household for the first time through
the eyes of Gaud Mével, the daughter of a wealthy bourgeois shipowner who lives in a
“maison de riches” in Paimpol where she has her own well-appointed room (I.3). French
novel readers of the 1880s would therefore have identified with her even more than with
Zola’s Étienne and assumed that she had their bourgeois sensitivity to impudeur. “Ses
yeux parcouraient attentivement ce logis des Gaos” (II.3) so, moreover, those readers
were assured that Gaud missed nothing.
Her inspection leads to no revolted observations about smells, however, unlike
Germinal, which remarks repeatedly on the smell of onions in the Maheu house (48, 169,
199, 218). Nor is there any mention of family members seeing each other naked, much
less of defecating in view of each other. Instead, Gaud immediately notices “des lits en
armoire” (which Bretons call lits clos) that “s’étageaient sur les côtés” (II:3). Though
neither she nor the narrator dots the is or crosses the ts for the reader–in that respect as in
16
17
18
Evidently sensing that a week could be seen as insufficient to acquire the sort of carefully documented
knowledge that he claimed to be at the base of his supposedly scientific work, Zola told a reporter for Le
Matin that he had spent three weeks there. Some of his biographers exaggerated that even further. See Zola,
Correspondance V.78.
Both these novels provided years of discussion about their accuracy. On the issue of the rampant sexuality
among the miners in Germinal Henriette Psichari, in her 1964 Anatomie d’un chef d’oeuvre “Germinal,”
affirmed that “dès qu’il s’agit d’un être humain et non plus d’un fait, l’imaginatif a primauté sur le réel”
(128); “Si l’on passait en revue tous les épisodes romanesques de Germinal, on en trouverait bien peu où le
possible ne soit surpassé par l’impossible” (131). On the other hand, in his 1972 study of Zola’s sources
Richard H. Zakarian argued that several of the works Zola used in preparing Germinal had lamented the
promiscuity in mining communities (112-114). Zakarian’s quotations from those sources don’t show if their
authors actually documented promiscuity–“frequent and indiscriminate changes of one’s sexual partners”–in
the mining community, however, or just a lot of sexual activity between unmarried couples, like the Maheus
and Zacharie and Philomène, since their only sources were statistics on illegitimate births in the region. With
characters like la Mouquette and Mme Désir, Zola quite clearly showed women in the mining community
not only having sex with a lover before marriage but with multiple partners.
Zola defended the promiscuity he depicted in Germinal as accurate in several letters, repeating his mantra
that he only wrote what he observed (see for example Correspondance V.253). To his friend and fellow
novelist Henry Céard, however, he did go so far as to admit that “j’agrandis, cela est certain; mais je
n’agrandis pas comme Balzac, pas plus que Balzac n’agrandit comme Hugo. [. . .] Nous mentons tous plus
ou moins [. . .]. Or – c’est ici que je m’abuse peut-être – je crois encore que je mens pour mon compte dans
le sens de la vérité. J’ai l’hypertrophie du détail vrai, le saut dans les étoiles sur le tremplin de l’observation
exacte. La vérité monte d’un coup d’aile jusqu’au symbole” (Zola, Correspondance V.249).
A few of the initial reviewers of Pêcheur d’Islande accused Loti of presenting the Bretons in too favorable a
light, most notably Maupassant, who wrote in the 6 July, 1886 edition of Gil Blas that “nous [. . .]
connaissons [. . .] ce paysan breton, brave et bon, mais en qui l’animalité première persiste à tel point qu’il
semble bien souvent une sorte d’être intermédiare entre la brute et l’homme” (Loti, Pêcheur 318). In
response one might point out that Pêcheur d’Islande does not deal with paysans but rather fishermen many
of whom had done their five years of military service traveling the world in the navy, as we see in the novel.
One could also point out Maupassant’s rather jaundiced view of humanity.
For my knowledge of Guillaume Floury and his family I am indebted to Pierre Floury, the grandson of one
of Guillaume’s cousins and the current director of the local history museum in Ploubazlanec. For my
knowledge of the house in Pors Even that served as the model for the Gaos home I am indebted to M.
Floury, who grew up in the house next to it, and to the present owners, the Portaguens.
8
Richard M. Berrong
others Loti’s understated Impressionist style is very different from Zola’s detail- and
commentary-rich Realism–Pêcheur d’Islande thereby makes the point that these people,
even if they have to live in close quarters, are still able to adhere to the pudeur that had
become so much a part of nineteenth-century French bourgeois life. In this way Loti is
careful not to distance his working-class characters from his bourgeois readers. 19
If pudeur does not break down in this one Breton fisherfolk household, neither does
it do so elsewhere. Just as in Germinal, in Pêcheur d’Islande Loti depicts children, or at
least one child, having too much to drink on a festive occasion, this time at the wedding
banquet of Yann and Gaud that serves repeatedly as a parallel for the Ducasse holiday in
Germinal: “Voici qu’un des petits frères d’Yann, un futur Islandais, avec une bonne
figure rose et des yeux vifs, tout d’un coup se trouve malade pour avoir bu trop de cidre.
Bien vite il faut l’emporter, le petit Laumec” (IV.7; my italics). Rather than leaving him
to his own devices as the parents in Germinal do, adults immediately take care of
Laumec; he does not have a chance to relieve himself under a table “sans honte” as Zola
had depicted in what was clearly the model for this episode. While much food and drink
is consumed at the banquet, at no point do the men or women give up on the restrictions
of pudeur: no women expose their breasts to feed infants, no men “se mett[en]t à l’aise, la
chair dehors” (213). Their tongues may loosen up, as we shall see, but not their blouses
or their belts.
The same is true regarding sex. As Étienne discovers early on with regard to
Catherine Maheu, Gaud Mével also “savait des choses de la vie [qui] lui avai[en]t été
révélé[es] bien au hasard, sans discernement aucun” (I.3). When she visits the Gaos home
in Pors Even and is given a tour, “elle n’osait pas questionner, mais elle aurait bien voulu
savoir où dormait Yann” (II.3). Loti is careful to add, however, that “une dignité innée,
excessive, lui avait servi de sauvegarde,” that “son beau regard clair [. . .] était si honnête
[. . .] que [des jeunes hommes] ne pouvaient guère s’y méprendre” (I.3), unlike Catherine
who sends no such signals to Chaval. 20 Given her “dignité innée,” it is not surprising that
Loti never presents Gaud as joking about sexual matters, as we see Catherine do through
Étienne’s surprised eyes (95).
Gaud’s pudeur with regard to sexual matters is repeated in Loti’s presentation of the
other Breton fisherfolk. Marie Gaos, Yann’s younger sister, is engaged to Sylvestre
Moan, Gaud’s cousin. When we see the young couple together at a wedding dance
through the recollections of Gaud, she remembers how “Marie et Sylvestre, les deux
fiancés, [. . .] dansaient ensemble. [Yann] riait, d'un air très bon, en les voyant tous deux
si jeunes, si réservés l'un près de l'autre, se faisant des révérences, prenant des figures
timides pour se dire bien bas des choses sans doute très aimables” (I.5). “Il n'aurait pas
permis qu'il en fût autrement, bien sûr,” the text continues, showing Yann and, by
implication, his fellow fishermen to have a very different, very much more bourgeois
attitude than Zola’s miners when it comes to the morality of their young daughters and
sisters.
Loti did not go so far as to suggest that all Breton women were pudiques, of course;
he knew his 1886 French readers would not have accepted that. The town prostitute, or at
least one of them, makes regular appearances in the novel as a minor character, such as
19
20
Gaud also notices that the Gaos household is “clair et propre, comme en général chez les gens de la mer”
(II.3). In that respect, however, Loti was not marking a significant distinction from Zola’s portrayal of the
working poor. While he may have been revolted by their impudeur and the smells in their homes, Zola did
depict at least some of his miners, the Maheus and the Pierrons if not the Levaques, as making efforts to
maintain a level of cleanliness.
Elliott M. Grant described Catherine as “possibly too non-resistant to the mores of her environment” (102),
but Zola seems more judgmental in describing her repeated acquiescence to Chaval. Huysmans wrote Zola
that he found her “charmante de résignation” (Grant 129), which probably tells us more about Huysmans
than Catherine.
Pierre Loti and Émile Zola
9
when, “Un soir de dimanche, très tard, [Gaud] l'avait vu [Yann] passer sous ses fenêtres,
reconduisant et serrant de près une certaine Jeannie Caroff, qui était jolie assurément,
mais dont la réputation était fort mauvaise.” (I.5). Unlike Zola with Jeanlin and Alzire,
however, Loti never shows either the Gaos or other children with a precocious knowledge
of, much less interest in, sex.
Nor does Loti, himself raised in a very Protestant household, attempt to suggest that
adult Bretons are puritanical. At the end of the wedding banquet that occurs early in the
novel he notes that “on s’embrassait beaucoup, à la fin de la nuit: baisers de cousins,
baisers de fiancés, baisers d’amants, qui conservaient malgré tout un bon air franc et
honnête” (I.5). There are lovers, couples having sex outside marriage, in this group.
Indeed, earlier in his description of that banquet he had remarked that “dans ce pays de
Paimpol, on va très loin en amour, à l’époque de la rentrée d’Islande. (Seulement on a le
coeur honnête, et l’on s’épouse après)” (I.5). As in the above-quoted descriptions of
Gaud, however, the operate adjective that the author repeats here is honnête.
It is this adjective and the perspective it creates that differentiates Loti’s presentation
of extramartial relations among his Breton fisherfolk from what is otherwise largely the
same behavior presented so voyeuristically and censorially in Germinal. The first thing
we learn about Germinal’s Philomène Levaque is that she has had two children with
Zacharie Maheu out of wedlock (64). The couple does, however, subsequently get
married. Similarly, la Maheude had two children by Maheu before she agreed to move
out of her family’s house and marry him, as she informs even virtual strangers like the
very bourgeois Grégoires with no apparent shame (142). Loti’s fisherfolk also have
extramarital sex, but they do so with the self-control necessary to avoid unwanted
pregnancies. There is no mention of illegitimate children in Pêcheur d’Islande. 21
In his male protagonist, Yann Gaos, Loti went so far as to create someone who
strongly resembles and yet, in important ways, also sharply differs from Chaval, the most
brutal and animalistic of Zola’s miners, on this issue. Once he has raped Catherine and
made her his own, Chaval “la tuait de caresses, repris pour elle d’un sauvage désir” (232).
Even at the end of the novel, after they have been trapped in the mine for days with no
food, Zola assures his readers that the brute “était repris d’une de ses anciennes fureurs de
désir” (567) for her.
Yann is no less attracted to women and has no less sauvage a nature. As already
noted, Gaud sees him one night with the town prostitute, Jeannie Caroff (I.5). When she
asks around about him, she discovers that while “on ne lui connaissait point
d’engagements; sans paraître tenir à l’une plus qu’à l’autre, il allait de droite à gauche, à
Lézardrieux aussi bien qu’à Paimpol, auprès des belles qui avaient envie de lui” (I.5). At
their very wedding banquet, when, after enough drink, “on se lançait même à parler
d’aventures drôles” among the sailors at the wedding table (IV.7), Yann, though he can
be only a few feet from his new bride, remarks of the prostitutes in a bordello in Hong
Kong that some of the other men are describing:
‘Oh! pour vilaines, je te crois’ [. . .] Lui aussi, dans un moment d’erreur, après
une longue traversée, les avait connues, ces Chinoises” (IV.7). There is also
mention during the course of the novel of a mistress in Bordeaux who tours the
cabaret circuit and another who lives on the Île de Ré (III.14).
21
This is a marked change from Loti’s previous novel, the more Naturalistic Mon Frère Yves, in which one of
Yves Kermadec’s brothers, Gildas, leaves the illegitimate offspring of his affair with a local woman with his
mother in Kergrist, just west of Paimpol (XX). That was based on reality–one of Pierre Le Cor’s brothers
had an illegitimate child who lived with his widowed mother in Kergrist–and shows that the absence of
something similar in Pêcheur d’Islande was a conscious choice by Loti rather than simply the result of naive
ignorance.
10
Richard M. Berrong
As with Chaval, there is a wild, animalistic quality to Yann, which Loti emphasizes
even more than Zola does with Chaval, starting with the very first chapter of the novel.
When, while he and Sylvestre play with the ship’s dog, Turc, the canine bites him, Yann
sends the poor beast flying against the bulkhead. “Il avait le coeur bon, ce Yann,” the text
explains, “mais sa nature était restée un peu sauvage, et quand son être physique était seul
en jeu, une caresse douce était souvent chez lui très près d'une violence brutale” (I.1).
When Gaud meets Yann the first time at the pardon des Islandais, “il l'intimidait, celuilà, décidément, avec son grand air sauvage” (I.5).
As she gets to know him better during the course of their second encounter,
however, the evening they spend together at a friend’s wedding party, Gaud–and through
her thoughts the bourgois reader–discovers that Yann’s character is self-controlled, that
he can bring out or suppress different aspects of it, including that sauvagerie, quite
consciously and with finesse, like an artist playing on an instrument: “Quel mélange il
était, de rudesse sauvage et d'enfantillage câlin!”, she recalls later. “Sa voix grave, qui
avec d'autres était brusque et décidée, devenait, quand il lui parlait, de plus en plus
fraîche et caressante; pour elle seule, il savait la faire vibrer avec une extrême douceur,
comme une musique voilée d' instruments à cordes” (I.5).
Loti reinforces the idea that Yann can control his sauvagerie like an artist by
repeating this musical imagery during the description of the couple’s wedding night:
Yann, qui, aux premiers instants, se serait mis à genoux comme devant la
vierge sainte, se sentit redevenir sauvage [. . .].
Alors brusquement, il l'enleva dans ses bras; avec sa manière de la tenir, la
bouche toujours appuyée sur la sienne, il était comme un fauve qui aurait
planté ses dents dans une proie. Elle, abandonnait son corps, son âme, à cet
enlèvement qui était impérieux et sans résistance possible, tout en restant doux
comme une grande caresse enveloppante [again that combination of violence
and tenderness] [. . .]
Autour d’eux, pour leur premier coucher de mariage, le même invisible
orchestre jouait toujours.
Houhou! . . . houhou! . . . Le vent tantôt donnait en plein son bruit caverneux
avec un tremblement de rage; tantôt répétait sa menace plus bas à l’oreille,
comme par un raffinement de malice, avec des petits sons filés, en prenant la
voix flûtée d’une chouette. [. . .].
Alors, dans le logis pauvre et sombre où passait le vent, ils se donnèrent l'un à
l'autre, sans souci de rien ni de la mort, enivrés, leurrés délicieusement par
l'éternelle magie de l' amour. . . (IV.7; emphasis mine)
Yann “se sentit redevenir sauvage”: he is aware of the shift in his nature, unlike an
irrational animal or Chaval. Lest we forget that he knows how to control it like a
musician his instrument, Loti reminds us of the episode at the first wedding banquet by
comparing the wind outside to an orchestra that also knows how to control the force of its
“voice”: “Le vent tantôt donnait en plein son bruit caverneux avec un tremblement de
rage; tantôt répétait sa menace plus bas à l’oreille [. . .] en prenant la voix flûtée d’une
chouette,” just as Yann at the first wedding party had known how to “faire vibrer [his
normally powerful and intimidating voice] avec une extrême douceur, comme une
musique voilée d'instruments à cordes” (I.5). Since the text had just compared the
fisherman to this wind two paragraphs before, remarking that he “éteignit la lumière
comme avait fait le vent” (IV.7), the reader would have good reason to associate the two.
It does not come as a surprise, then, that for all Yann’s animalistic sauvagerie [“comme
un fauve”] the scene ends another two paragraphs later in completely un-animalistic
equality: “ils se donnèrent l’un à l’autre, sans souci de rien ni de la mort.” This is very
different from Zola’s scenes of animalistic coupling, Chaval’s initial rape of Catherine or
Pierre Loti and Émile Zola
11
even Maheu’s behavior after his bath, and is no doubt a reference to Étienne and
Catherine’s “wedding night” when they are trapped in the mine at the end of the novel:
“Ils s’aimèrent dans le désespoir de tout, dans la mort” (579). 22 Yes, Loti’s non-Parisian
“laboureurs” have in them the potential for animalistic sauvagerie that a post-Darwin
generation of readers was coming to see as a particularly frightening explanation for
some of man’s violence. Unlike Zola’s workers, however, they are able to control it, even
with a certain artistry at times, saving them from the “grossièreté absolue” that
Naturalism attributed to them.
Loti shows the same self-censoring control in other Breton fishermen. As the sailor
gets into his story about the Hong Kong brothel at Yann and Gaud’s wedding table, he
modulates his language out of consideration for the non-sailor listeners, recalling that
when he and his friends couldn’t pay “voilà les deux Chinois, les deux . . . enfin les deux
patrons de la boîte, tu me comprends, – qui ferment la grille à clé, nous dedans!’” (IV.7).
He is recounting the story for the other sailors at the head table: when he starts by
explaining where the red light district is located in Hong-Kong “‘Ah! oui,’ répondait du
bout de la table un autre qui les avait fréquentées, ‘oui, en tirant sur la droite quand on
arrive?’” Still, he modulates his language to spare less hearty listeners some word for
pimp that would not have offended his intended audience. This contrasts with the parallel
scene in Germinal, la Ducasse, where not only did the women “ne se gên[er] plus” (212),
but everyone loosened their belts and let a great deal hang out (213).
Loti’s non-Parisian “laboureurs” also moderate their deeds. Gaud can go walking by
herself in the countryside between Paimpol and Pors Even because if she meets a man
“en la croisant, ils lui disaient bonjour. Des figures brunies, très mâles et décidées, sous
un bonnet de marin” (II.3). Loti stresses that these men are “très mâles,” but they do
nothing more than greet Gaud when they find her alone, a far cry from Zola’s abovequoted description of what happened when a miner found a woman alone in one of the
mineshafts (91). After her father loses all his money and leaves her a poor and
unprotected single woman Gaud moves out to Ploubazlanec to live with her distant and
poor relative Yvonne Moan, walking into Paimpol every day to work and back, often in
the dark. Yet still she “rentrait à la nuit, sans être distraite en chemin par aucun
amoureux, restée un peu hautaine, et encore entourée d’un respect de demoiselle; en lui
disant bonjour, les garçons mettaient, comme autrefois, la main à leur chapeau” (III.12).
Her isolated encounters with “très mâles” men are very different, and apparently
intentionally so, from Zola’s depiction of his “laboureurs” as men perpetually subject to
and overcome by their desire for sex every time they see a woman alone. Loti does not
suggest that the non-Parisian world of “laboureurs” and “paysans” is populated by
models of Victorian morality. His unmarried workers have sex, as the mentions of lovers
and prostitutes make clear. They also have a certain sense of propriety that Loti termed
“honnetêté,” however, something that keeps them from falling into “cette grossièreté
absolue” of word and deed that so scandalized many bourgeois readers when Zola’s
novels of the lower classes were first published. 23
One of the most striking differences between Zola and Loti’s depictions of the
working class comes with the latter’s reworking of Germinal’s bloodiest moment, when
the soldiers brought in to protect one of the mines open fire at the striking miners. In one
of the grand, cinematographic avant la lettre moments of the novel that Zola did so well
and that make it such a powerful work, the miners, desperate to bring the distant
corporation that controls their lives to decent bargaining, start to stone the troops so that
22
23
That Zola felt a need to mention, when describing Catherine and Étienne’s “nuit de noces,” that it took place
“sur ce lit de boue” (579) goes a long way toward suggesting the “puritanical repression” of which Niess
wrote (159).
Elliott M. Grant has a good survey of initial critical reactions to Germinal in his penultimate chapter.
12
Richard M. Berrong
they can destroy le Voreux. Pushed past their breaking point, these troops open fire
without an order, killing some of the strikers:
La Mouquette recevait deux balles dans le ventre. [. . .] elle poussa un grand
cri, elle s’étala sur les reins, culbutée par la secousse. Étienne accourut, voulut
la relever, l’emporter; mais, d’un geste, elle disait qu’elle était finie. [. . .]
Maheu, frappé en plein coeur, vira sur lui-même et tomba la face dans une
flaque d’eau, noire de charbon. (497)
Loti clearly had this scene in mind when he wrote Sylvestre’s ambush by the
Vietnamese in a rice field in Indochina. He reset the elements of Zola’s text to accord his
simple Breton sailor a moment of moving nobility, however:
Alors, lui, sentit une commotion à la poitrine, et, comprenant bien ce que
c’était, par un éclair de pensée, même avant toute douleur, il détourna la tête
vers les autres marins qui suivaient, pour essayer de leur dire, comme un vieux
soldat, la phrase consacrée: “Je crois que j’ai mon compte!” [. . . .]
Il tourna sur lui-même deux ou trois fois, la tête perdue de vertige et
cherchant à reprendre son souffle au milieu de tout ce liquide rouge dont la
montée l’étouffait, – et puis, lourdement, dans la boue, il s’abattit. (III.1)
Loti uses the same actions Zola ascribes to la Mouquette and Maheu, but with just the
slightest modifications causes them to make of Sylvestre’s death on the field of battle a
far more noble and moving moment than the great Naturalist seemed willing to accord his
striking workers. The last sentence, with its shift of the normal word order to create a
very Flaubertian rhythm, leaves us with a final image of a brave soldier collapsing (il
s’abattit) where Zola leaves us with the ignominy of “une flaque d’eau, noire de
charbon,” an element that Loti carefully shifted earlier in the sentence so that it does not
constitute part of the image we take away from his text. In this case, it is as if Loti is
giving Zola a lesson in how, with some careful rearrangement, he could have used his
material to accord his workers a nobility that the Naturalist here as elsewhere denies
them. 24
The same is true when Loti reworks the death of the Breton soldier Jules, killed by
Jeanlin for no apparent reason. Just as the “vent qui passait si haut [over Jeanlin’s murder
of Jules] avait peut-être soufflé sur la lande [en Bretagne où] deux femmes étaient
debout, la mère, la soeur, tenant leurs coiffes emportées” (477), so in Loti’s text as
Sylvestre dies from his wounds while the sun sets, “à ce moment, ce soleil se voyait
aussi, là-bas, en Bretagne [. . .] il éclairait d'une douce lumière blanche la grand'mère
Yvonne, qui travaillait à coudre, assise sur sa porte” (III.2). Loti replaces the terrible
connecting wind with a connecting sun whose “douce lumière blanche” in Brittany was
more in accord with his belief that nature often looks its most beautiful at our saddest
moments to mock us. 25 His presentation of Breton women who suffer because their
children have to perform senseless military service elsewhere intensifies the tragedy of
those deaths and that suffering, which Zola barely sketches here in Germinal, never
showing us the mother’s and sister’s grief when they subsequently learn of their young
24
25
If Sylvestre’s death in Pêcheur d’Islande owes something to Germinal, Loti also ennobled it and gave it
what his era would have seen as “racial” importance by having it recall a high point in the spurious final
book of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the death of Commius, the last Celtic warrior to oppose the invading
Romans (VIII.48).
The most striking example of this in Pêcheur d’Islande is when Yvonne, having been told that the
commissaire de l’inscription martime wants to see her, walks into Paimpol. The sun shines, there are flowers
in bloom, birds sing and butterflies brighten the landscape (III.5). The reader knows, however, while viewing
all this that when Yvonne reaches her destination she will learn that her grandson has been killed while
fighting in Indochina.
Pierre Loti and Émile Zola
13
soldier’s death, a moment whose parallel in Pêcheur d’Islande (III.5) constitutes one of
its most powerful and moving scenes. 26
It was his view of nature’s irony that led Loti to create one parallel with Germinal in
which Bretons come off worse than Zola’s miners. This is not surprising; he would not
have accorded some of the Naturalists a “talent,” albeit “monstrueux”–which, as the
Robert points out, denotes “ce qui choque extrêmement la raison, la morale” but also “ce
qui est d’une taille, d’une intensité prodigieuse et insolite”–had he not found things in
their best work to admire. In Germinal Jeanlin, Bébert, and Lydia one day snatch
Rasseneur’s breed rabbit, which Souvarine named Pologne and treated like a pet, and
after dragging it around the countryside by a rope to amuse themselves, take to stoning it.
Jeanlin “proposa d’égayer le bout de chemin, jusqu’aux arbres, en détachant Pologne et
en la poursuivant à coups de cailloux. [. . .] La lapine reprit sa course, le nez frisé, les
oreilles rabattues; une pierre lui pela le dos, une autre lui coupa la queue; et, malgré
l’ombre croissante, elle y serait restée, si les galopins n’avaient aperçu, au centre d’une
clairière, Étienne et Maheu debout” (336).
As unmitigatedly cruel as this is, Loti made his little monsters even crueler in a
scene that he very clearly modeled once again on Zola’s. One day the elderly Yvonne
Moan, a poor widow who has recently lost her last family member, Sylvestre, goes
walking with her pet cat. When Yann first notices her from a distance a true tragedy has
just taken place: “Ces gamins de Ploubazlanec lui avaient tué son chat, et elle les
menaçait de son bâton, très en colère et en désespoir: ‘Ah, s’il avait été ici, lui, mon
pauvre garçon, vous n’auriez pas osé, bien sûr, mes vilains drôles!’” (III.16). Yann chases
the boys away: “‘Vous n’avez pas honte?’ dit-il aux gamins, très en colère lui aussi, avec
sa voix et son ton qui imposaient,” that intimidating voice that Yann was not about to
modulate here. “Et, en un clin d’oeil, tous les petits se sauvèrent, penauds et confus,
devant le grand Gaos,” just as the three little monsters do at the arrival of Étienne and
Maheu in Germinal.
Loti’s gamins are in every way crueler than Zola’s. Not only do they kill the pet
rather than just tormenting it–“ils l’avaient tué avec des cailloux et son oeil pendait”–
whereas in Germinal Pologne survives to become Souvarine’s dinner (465). They also do
so at least in part to torture an already suffering, widely respected, and defenseless elderly
woman, who as they must know has recently learned of the death of her last surviving
descendent, Sylvestre. For her the loss of the cat intensifies this death and the feeling of
helplessness it causes her–“Ah! mon pauvre garçon, mon pauvre garçon. [. . .] s’il était
encore de ce monde, on n’aurait pas osé me faire ça, non bien sûr!”–making the
children’s action that much more cruel. Here it is important to note that Loti not only
loved cats but published several stories making his love of them known to a wide
audience. He may have argued that non-Parisian “laboureurs” and “paysans” were not as
“grossiers” as Zola made them out to be, but he did not claim that the great Naturalist had
misunderstood children. To signal the attentive reader that this scene is indeed in
dialogue with the incident in Germinal Loti wrote that Yvonne carries home the dead cat
“comme un lapin” (III.16).
26
Though a career naval officer, Loti constructed the episode of Sylvestre’s senseless death in Indochina to
condemn France’s Indochinese military involvement, which he knew first-hand from his own service there.
Similar sentiments suggested in an article written for Le Figaro in 1883 while he was on duty there had
resulted in his being recalled to France and might have led to a court-martial had not his friend and publisher
Juliette Adam intervened with her friends in high places (Quella-Villéger 95-104). Thirty years later when he
had been forced into retirement, Loti wrote in one of his autobiographical works, Prime jeunesse (1919):
"l'absurde et folle expédition du Tonkin venait d'être décrétée par l'un des plus néfastes de nos
gouvernements [celui de Jules Ferry]; on envoyait là-bas, pour un but stérile, des milliers d'enfants de France
qui ne devaient jamais revenir. [. . .] sacrifiés par la folie criminelle des politiciens colonisateurs" (XII). Zola
would also go on to write stronger words against the French military, as history knows and will never forget;
they also got him in trouble from which friends also had to rescue him.
14
Richard M. Berrong
Henry James began the first of his essays on “the remarkable genius who wears in
literature the name of Pierre Loti” by stating that
an achievement in art or in letters grows more interesting when we begin to
perceive its connections; and, indeed, it may be said that the study of
connections is the recognized function of intelligent criticism. [. . .] Pêcheur
d’Islande [. . .] is interesting as illustrating the talent and character of the
author, but [it] become[s] still more interesting as we note [its] coincidences
and relations with other works, for then they begin to illustrate other talents and
other characters as well: the plot thickens, the whole spectacle expands. (James
482-483)
While I would argue that James was sometimes too lavish in his praise of Loti–Matelot,
for which he had kind words, strikes me as an abandoned failure–the author’s best work,
and Pêcheur d’Islande is the best of the best, is worthy of all the praise James heaped
upon it. Elsewhere I have shown other of its “coincidences and relations with other
works” ("Pêcheur d'Islande et Eugénie Grandet”). Here I hope to have demonstrated its
very intentional and not coincidental relations with Germinal on the issue of the working
class, in the belief that the novel’s “whole spectacle expands” as a result.
Loti had too much respect for Zola’s “talent monstrueux” to dismiss it altogether.
On the other hand, Zola’s claim to write only from observation and scientific
documentation without personal or ideological intervention–the Naturalist, in his famous
formulation in Le roman experimental, “reprend l’étude du monde par l’observation et
l’analyse en niant l’absolu, l’idéal révélé et irrationnel” (125)–led some readers to assume
that everything he depicted in worlds unknown to them was actually documented fact, an
assumption that Loti could not countenance when it led to moral judgments that
conflicted with his own experience. 27 As a result, he chose to dialogue with Zola on the
issue of the latter’s representation of a part of humanity to which neither author nor most
of their readers belonged, painting them in an Impressionist style that often recalls Monet
and very much contrasts with the often somber, Dutch-painting style of his great
Naturalist contemporary.
This comparison to painting is not without value in understanding the differences
between two novels. Zola himself, in a letter of 22 March 1885 to Henri Céard, admitted
to “une simplification constante des personnages” in his efforts to make of Germinal
“une grande fresque” (Zola, Correspondance V.249). 28 As the Robert reminds us with its
first definition of the term, “grossièreté” also means “ce qui est [. . .] imparfaitement
façonné, exécuté. Grossièreté de fabrication.” That is the exact opposite of the
painstakingly detailed “décomposition de la lumière” that Zola himself had so praised in
Monet’s painting ten years before Germinal, during the second of what we now call the
27
28
After the publication of Germinal Zola wrote Francis Magnard that “l’observateur, le simple collectionneur
de faits, souffre, depuis la parution du livre, de voir contester l’exactitude de ses documents [. . .] je ne puis
résister au besoin de maintenir absolument la vérité générale des mineurs que j’ai mis en scène”
(Correspondance V.253).
It is interesting to note that frescos were held to be the most noble form of painting in the aesthetics
propounded by the École des Beaux Arts, an aesthetics rejected by the Impressionists. Claude Lantier, the
supposedly “revolutionary” painter of Zola’s next novel, L’Oeuvre, will also speak of his dream to paint
giant frescos that fill the Louvre. Ferdinand Brunetière–who, admittedly, did not like Zola’s work–wrote in
reviewing Germinal for the 1 May 1885 issue of La revue des deux mondes that the characters’ “actions sont
trop simples, et plus simples encore les mobiles qui les leur dictent” (Grant 120). Albert Thibaudet, who did
like the novel, nevertheless found it “grossièrement épique” (Grant 132), and Francisque Sarcey, the great
theater critic, wrote in his review of the work that “Zola procède par masses, le développement, chez lui, se
répand en nappes immenses [. . .] Zola vaut par l’ensemble,” to which Grant added: “a criticism that contains
a good deal of truth” (126).
Pierre Loti and Émile Zola
15
Impressionist Exhibitions (Zola, “Lettre à Paris” 315). For Zola Monet’s carefully
nuanced attention to all the shades of color in a scene had produced such “une intensité
de lumière aveuglante” that his canvases had the same effect as the things they depicted:
“on sent l’or pâle de l’astre brûler dans l’air” (Zola, “Lettre à Paris” 315). Eugène
Delacroix, one of the great forerunners of Impressionism and a painter whom Monet
particularly admired and studied, had explained in one of his notebooks decades before
that “the reason why the greenery of most landscapes lacks intensity [Zola’s word] and
life [i.e., resemblance with the thing painted] is that [painters] usually treat it in one
single tint” (House 111), in other words without “‘décomposition de la lumière,” with
“une simplification constante,” “grossièreté.”
Loti devoted considerable care in Pêcheur d’Islande to developing a style that would
be the literary equivalent of Monet’s Impressionism. He undertook to depict his
characters with a similarly nuanced painterly complexity. When he wrote his publisher,
Juliette Adam, to announce that he was about to finish the novel, he informed her that: “À
présente, vite, je fais le dernier vernissage de Yann et de Gaud” (Loti, Lettres 86). 29
Like Germinal, Pêcheur d’Islande turned into one of the great publishing successes
of the late nineteenth-century French novel. 30 Loti must have been as happy with his
efforts as his readers were. In his next novel, Madame Chrysanthème (1887), he
dialogued with Zola once again, this time taking on the Naturalist’s next novel, L’Oeuvre
(1886), to defend Impressionist painting, whose subtlety of nuance he had already
evinced with his non-Parisian “laboureurs” in Pêcheur d’Islande.
Kent State University
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30
On the various stylistic devices Loti developed to recreate the effects of Monet’s Impressionism in literature,
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By 1895 Germinal had sold 99,000 copies, Pêcheur d’Islande 80,000. Sales of Zola’s novel slackened
somewhat thereafter, however. By 1921 it had “only” sold 165,000 copies, while Pêcheur d’Islande was at
202,000.
16
Richard M. Berrong
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