INTRODUCTION

The Writers Belly
Mark Kurlansky

To many Americans this may seem odd, but when I was a teenager my hero was Emile Zola. This was not because he spoke out so forcefully and dramatically against anti-Semitism and corruption in high places when Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery captain, was framed for an act of espionage and was serving a life sentence in a penal colony. And not just because he did things like that all his life. It was because Zola was engaged, a writer who understood that his success gave him a platform, and he had a profound sense of the responsibility that implied. All over the world there have been such writers. Victor Hugo was another one, Latin America has been famous for them, so have Africa and Asia. America had James Baldwin and John Steinbeck. What was so exceptional about Zola was that he was one of the rare politically engaged writers who never let his political convictions compromise his artistry.

Zola came from a generation much influenced by Hugo. But Zola admired Hugo more for his political commitment than for his romantic prose, or, in Zola's words, his “mountainous rhetoric,” which he found “chilling.”

Zola, a highly political man, always insisted on the separation of art and politics. Though he very much wanted to be known for his political stances, he did not want his novels to be thought of as political pieces. In 1876, when L'Assommoir, sometimes titled in English The Dram Shop, was first serialized, critics infuriated Zola by calling him a socialist writer for his dark depiction of working-class life. He responded, “I do not accept the label you paste on my back. I mean to be a novelist, purely and simply, without any qualifying adjective; if you insist on qualifying me, say that I am a naturalistic novelist. That will not annoy me.” Of course, his concern for the plight of the poor did not necessarily make him a socialist. He read Charles Fourier, Pierre Proudhon, and Karl Marx, and he appreciated their arguments, especially those of Marx, which were presented in the structure of science, because Zola worshipped science. But he was never completely comfortable with the movement, which is probably why the revolutionaries depicted in his books, especially in The Belly of Paris, are virtually comic characters. He was clearly a progressive firmly in the left wing of nineteenth-century politics, but he wanted to keep the distinction between a leftist novelist and a leftist who writes novels.

It was his contention that it was the duty of writers to expose the weaknesses in a society and the duty of politicians to act upon them. He assumed both roles but never mixed them. He believed a novel should bear the mark of an individual and not an ideology. There are no tirades or polemics in Zola novels. Those he reserved for well-crafted newspaper articles such as the famous “J' Accuse!” in which he attacked the government for its persecution of Dreyfus. Some of his characters have such fits, but he always makes them look a bit overblown and even silly. Zola often laughs at political radicals. The convictions are there in the way he portrays life, the way all of his characters have someone bigger trying to step on them, the way most people are consumed in banal struggles. Do not look for justice in a Zola novel; his world is maddeningly unfair. But he always has humor and a thrilling, dark sense of irony.

You cannot help but laugh at the legitimate political anger of Florent when he vents it by teaching a child penmanship with such sentences as “The day of justice will come.” Who but Zola would give us a scene like the one in The Belly of Paris where one of the greatest human rights atrocities in French history is recounted as a bedtime story for a child, while her father's hands are soaked in blood from making sausages?

Zola was always a man of his times, deeply involved in the ideas and movements of his day. He was one of the first amateur photographers, beginning shortly after the pastime was popularized in 1888 by George Eastman's first portable camera, the “box model.” In the last eight years of his life, he became one of the first modern shutterbugs, shooting several thousand snapshots. Though he was plump and unathletic, he also took up the new bicycling craze. In an age of science, of Darwin, an age when it was believed that science held the solutions, he called himself an “evolutionist” and wrote, “I must therefore ask of science to explain life to me, to make it known.”

Zola, like many French readers of his generation, was a great admirer of Honoré de Balzac, who died when Zola was ten years old and had written a cycle of ninety novels and novellas that he called The Human Comedy. For a long time Zola struggled with the question of how to be more than just an imitation of Balzac, who was also a realist, was also concerned with the social ills of the bourgeoisie, and had also portrayed life in Paris and the French provinces with great descriptive detail.

In his late twenties Zola began contemplating an enormous project, a series of novels about successive generations of a family in which characters would do battle with their inner selves and the demons they inherited. This was at a time when there was much discussion in France about the breakup, even disappearance, of the traditional family unit. Much was blamed on railroads, which, it was felt, made people too mobile.

Zola resolved to write two novels a year for the next twenty years, all about the fictional Rougon-Macquart family from Provence. He more or less kept to that schedule, occasionally frustrated, such as when Germinal, the miners' saga that many consider to be his masterpiece, took an entire nine months. By 1869, he had the cycle mapped out, and between 1872, at the age of thirty-two, and 1892, at the age of fifty-three, he carried out this plan. Zola had the words Nulla dies sine linea, “No day without a sentence,” engraved over his desk, but in truth he produced considerably more than a sentence. On most days he produced four handwritten pages, sometimes stopping the day's work in midsentence. He titled the series The Rougon-Macquarts: The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire. By its completion in 1892, the cycle consisted of twenty novels in thirty-one volumes and included all of the novels that have been deemed his most important work. He had created twelve hundred characters. He produced the first six books in five years. The Belly of Paris was the third.

When they were young his painter friend Paul Cézanne started to have doubts about his future, and Zola, trying to encourage him, wrote, “There are two men in an artist, the poet and the worker. He is born a poet, and he becomes a worker.”

He began his undertaking with a sense of inadequacy, believing that he had neither the depth of Balzac nor the poetic ear of Hugo. Zola wrote in a simple language, with great power but occasional clumsiness, even bad usage, which might be explained by the speed at which he worked. One of the great challenges of translating Zola is resisting the occasional desire to improve him. He needed more editing, and the translator has to resist providing it.

Zola's portrayals of poverty were shocking to readers of the time, especially the lower classes, who did not want to be seen that way. Readers were accustomed to having a certain degree of romance overlaid on misery. His raw portraits of the have-nots made his haves look all the more guilty. There is no poetry in Zola's novels. They are unflinchingly realistic, and this was a source of his power. Eventually it was the work of Zola more than other great writers that stirred the conscience of the middle class.

He had a close circle of friends with whom he frequently lunched, which included other writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, and Alphonse Daudet. In this circle Zola was known as someone who loved food, ate well and bountifully, and spoke very little unless fired up about some issue or when asked a question about his work. He seems to have been a shy man until sparked by one of his many passions. Some in this group, such as Flaubert, also mingled with members of the upper class, a social milieu in which Zola had no experience. From them he would extract knowledge for portraying those characters. It was one of a number of tricks Zola copied from Balzac.

All of the writers and artists of his group called themselves “naturalists,” a term coined by the painter Gustave Courbet. Zola pointed out that the term had a long history. In the seventeenth century, it had been used in philosophy to mean a school of thought that held up nature as the model. Naturalists, then, were predominantly atheists. After the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century of Darwin, whose principal works were published when Zola was a student, the term “naturalists” described those who used scientific methods. According to Zola, a naturalist artist used scientific methodology but infused it with his own language and personality. To Zola, scientific writing meant fiction whose facts were thoroughly researched. Science was the new fashion. Balzac, Flaubert, and many other writers in France, Italy, and other European countries were also experimenting with a scientific method of fiction writing. Zola's particular use of science, aside from the thoroughness of his research, may be seen in his study and application of the latest medical knowledge. In Zola, when a character is stricken with an ailment, the author knows of what he is writing.

Zola researched his books much as though he were a journalist writing nonfiction. In the 1880s, when he began Germinal, he lived with miners, drank with them at night, and went down into the mines; later, for La Bête humaine, he traveled on a train dressed as an engineer. In 1872, he lived in the belly of Paris. He spent his nights at the Courbevoie Bridge, where wagons loaded with food came into Paris from the west. He would scramble alongside the horses from the customs gate at the edge of the city eight miles to Les Halles with his pencil at the ready. He spent endless hours taking notes in the market and also examining the view from different approaches. A friend of painters—Cézanne was his closest boyhood friend—he tried to use words like brushstrokes. His visual descriptions can be labored. Several of his descriptions of food are so lengthy they will try the patience of all but the most dedicated foodies, though these remarkable passages are occasionally worth it, such as the depiction of Roquefort cheese resembling the face of an aristocrat stricken by a disease that attacked the rich who ate too many truffles. On the other hand, what a rare opportunity to view nineteenth-century French food firsthand.

His characterization of the bombastic painter Claude Lantier must have been shaped by years of counseling the chronically dissatisfied Cézanne, the impassioned perfectionist who once worked on a portrait of Zola and then, to the author's outrage, destroyed it because he did not like the way it was turning out. Cézanne was constantly flying into rages and depressions and tearing up his own work. Certainly Zola must have recalled his outings with Cézanne in Provence when he wrote about Florent and Claude in the countryside enjoying a long hike together. Claude Lantier has physical similarities to Cézanne, and he dresses like him in a red sash, felt hat, and old overcoat. But many of his views on art and his enthusiasm for morning markets are purely Zola. Novelists get into trouble when borrowing parts of friends for characters, and the recurring character of Claude Lantier strained Zola's friendship with Cézanne, who finally, after the 1886 publication of the novel L'Œuvre, about Lantier and the bohemian world of painters, stopped speaking to his childhood friend.

Zola also hounded the police for information on the administration of the market. This scientific approach, however, did not spare the speedy writer from the kinds of little errors in French grammar and spelling that a more careful editor might have caught and are not passed on in translation.

The beginning of the Rougon-Macquart cycle was delayed by the Franco-Prussian War, the German siege of Paris that forced Zola and many Parisians into exile in the provinces, and finally the overthrow of Napoleon III. To Zola and many French, the Bonapartes had been France's recurring curse, “a strange family that won't die,” he wrote, “that persists through its pale and moribund offspring.”

These events helped Zola's master project. By delaying the actual writing, he had time to plan out the novels, which established an orderly method so that when he did start to write each morning, he would consult the notes he had prepared, which he kept on index cards. His progress was so steady and programmed that he did only one draft, handing it in with only occasional cross-outs.

But the events also closed the book on the Second Empire and allowed Zola to write about a finite period of time. Newer events could not overtake his novel. In 1871, Zola wrote that the novels could now be set “inside a closed circle; it becomes the tableau of a dead reign,” of “a strange era fraught with madness and shame.”

He begins his fictional family, the ancestors of Beautiful Lisa and her nephew Claude Lantier in the The Belly of Paris, before the revolution that would unleash all the political forces of Zola's time, in Provence, just outside Plassans, the fictional name of his native Aix-en-Provence. Adélaïde Fouque is the daughter of landowning peasants outside Plassans. When she is eighteen her father goes mad and dies, and, left alone, she marries an illiterate gardener named Rougon. Three months after their son, Pierre, is born, Rougon dies. Adélaïde takes up with her neighbor, a brutal, alcoholic smuggler named Macquart, who lives apart from her in a windowless shack but nevertheless sires two illegitimate sons with her, the first Rougon-Macquarts.

The family appears in Le Ventre de Paris and winds its way through the cycle of novels. Lisa's sister Gervaise, the mother of Claude Lantier, is a principal character in L'Assommoir La Terre is the story of their brother Jean Macquart. Lisa's daughter, the little girl Pauline in The Belly of Paris, will grow up to be a leading character in La Joie de vivre

Throughout the Rougon-Macquart novels the harshest social criticism is leveled at the bourgeois class, Zola's class. In The Belly of Paris Lisa and Quenu are the great examples of the petite bourgeoisie, but there are similar couples in other novels, always fat, complacent, and obsessed with order. Curiously, they always have one child, a daughter, which provided the cycle of novels with an ample supply of bourgeois women. Women who read Zola may be inclined to stop dieting, for these bourgeois women, such as Lisa, drive men wild with their plumpness. Even while Lisa abuses Quenu and Florent with her small-mindedness, the sight of her ample round flesh excites the boy Marjolin to the brink of madness as he sneaks glimpses of her and her ample waist through the window.

The Belly of Paris was a hit when it first came out in 1873. Flaubert praised it, though the young Anatole France wrote that it was “vain, empty, detestable virtuosity,” and another critic called it “obscene.” There was a bit of both shock and fascination about this young writer who wrote about voluptuous women and the delights of food. The book expanded the young writer's readership and reputation. The first edition sold out in a month. Though it is good enough for a lesser writer to have built an enduring reputation on, it was eclipsed by the writer's later work. Zola himself considered it one of his best works, a better novel, he said, than L'Assommoir, which is generally considered one of his masterpieces. Most writers have a book that they regard as one of their best even though it never got its due. For Zola it was Le Ventre de Paris.

Le Ventre de Paris was one of five novels he adapted for the theater. It ran three and a half months at the Théâtre de Paris, not a spectacular success. The play has never been published. He coauthored it with William Busnach, with whom he had done his other adaptations. Letters from Busnach to Zola indicate that the stage adaptation had been thrown together hastily. Reviewers seemed to feel that the production relied more on spectacular settings—Les Halles at daybreak was singled out—than on true dramatic moments. But even Zola's most successful play the stage adaptation of Thérèse Raquin, comes off as a melodrama. Although Zola never achieved the triumph as a playwright that he did as a novelist, his novels are conspicuously theatrical. He develops characters and sets scenes and always gives rich visual backdrops. Almost every novel he wrote could easily be adapted to film.

To fully comprehend this novel, it must be understood that at the time Zola was writing it, France, and Paris in particular, had experienced more than eighty years of regular violent street uprisings. These events were considerably bloodier than the demonstrations brutally crushed by the police during the Algerian war or the skirmishes of May 1968. These were pitched battles on the streets between well-armed and -trained, war-hardened troops and armed rebels in which hundreds died. Though the would-be revolutionaries of Le Ventre de Paris make reference to the uprisings of 1848 and 1852 and even the violence of the 1830s and the late-eighteenth-century Revolution, in which 19,000 people were killed in the year-and-a-half-long “terror” of 1793–94, no doubt what Zola and his readers thought about was the recent events. In 1871, the uprising following the Franco-Prussian War claimed more lives than any battle of the war. While 900 of the 130,000 Versailles troops sent to crush the uprising were killed and another 6,500 were wounded, it is not even known how many Parisians they slaughtered on the streets during the six-day siege known as la semaine sanglante, the bloody week. A widely accepted estimate is between 25,000 and 30,000 dead. Many of them were executed by firing squads. Bodies were piled up around Paris. Gutters literally ran red with blood, and in places so did the Seine. Zola witnessed this, writing unsigned letters for a Parisian newspaper, La Cloche, and for Le Sémaphore de Marseille, a newspaper for which he wrote about 1,500 articles in the 1870s. Surveying the piles of corpses, he wrote, “Never will I forget the heartache I experienced at the sight of that frightful mound of bleeding human flesh thrown haphazardly on the two paths, heads and limbs mingled in horrible dislocation.”

It is against the background of this history and experience that Florent, Gavard, and the others in the Les Halles of his novel almost casually conspire to launch armed revolution. There would have been nothing difficult to believe about this to contemporary readers. On the other hand, the fear with which Lisa and others in the neighborhood reject such plans and disdain such plotters is also understandable. In fact, the 1871 Commune finished off the French appetite for violent revolution. It was the last one. But a different kind of violent cycle had taken its place. To avenge their defeat by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, which had set off the Commune uprising, the French leaped into World War I, defeated Germany, and imposed the punitive Versailles Treaty, an injustice, the denunciation of which brought Adolf Hitler to power. Germany got France, France got Germany, Germany got France, and then France was again liberated—two world wars and seventy-five years of bloody European history.

As might be expected from a late-nineteenth-century writer in the vanguard of the political thinking of his age, Zola was very interested in the status of women. To call him a feminist would be overstating it. In his own marriage, his wife, Alexandrine, like many of his women characters, came from a poor background and clung to the better life she had made by organizing and running everything, leaving Zola free for intellectual pursuits. It also gave him time for other pursuits, including a mistress with whom he had a second family. They all knew one another and, pleasantly for Emile, painfully for Alexandrine, they all spent time together.

The Belly of Paris has several examples of a smart, practical woman paired off with a good-natured, dreamy simpleton dependent on his woman's savvy, such as Lisa and Quenu and Cadine and Marjolin.

Few nineteenth-century novels portray women of the strength and complexity of Zola's women. Unlike those of Flaubert or Leo Tolstoy, Zola's are not so much the victims of an unfair society as women determined to be players. In The Belly of Paris Lisa scolds her husband for political activities, telling him, “If only you had asked my advice, if we had talked about it together. It's wrong to think that women don't understand politics … Do you want to know what I think? What my politics are?”

In both major and minor characters Zola shows an interest in the aspirations of women. When Clémence, herself a very minor character in The Belly of Paris, loses her job, she supports herself by giving French instruction to a young woman who is secretly trying to improve her education. We never learn anything more about this unnamed character, who is just a touch of set decoration in the picture he offers of society. Clémence herself holds her own in café political debates and is said to be manly.

Zola lived in a time when conservative politics and the Church supported the suppression of women while a new crop of progressives was denouncing the old ways. The subject fascinated young Zola, who continually wrote about it in letters to his friends. He seemed particularly influenced by the writings of Jules Michelet, a leading progressive who became a cultural hero of leftist youth after he was removed from his chair at the Collège de France because he refused to swear allegiance to the emperor in 1851. His books on women, L'Amour and La Femme, published in 1858 and 1859, when Zola was an impressionable teenager, called for a new role for women in society. To understand women, Michelet maintained, society had to free itself from the teachings of the Church and embrace science. Embracing science was the new religion of the time. Once women freed themselves of the slavery prescribed by the Church, they would become champions of progressive government, quite the opposite of Beautiful Lisa in The Belly of Paris, who proclaims, “I support a government that's good for business. If they commit acts of evil, I don't want to know.” But the freedom that the future held for women, according to Michelet, could be achieved only by a good marriage. Only through the progressive thinking of the husband could the wife be completed.

Despite the seeming simplicity of such theories, the women, the marriages, the relationships between men and women in Zola's novels are complicated. There is a great deal of fiction and a great deal of love. Zola prided himself on realism. As a young man Zola's letters were full of reflections on relations between the sexes. In 1860, shortly after the two Michelet books were published, Zola wrote to Cézanne, “A husband has been given a major project, to reeducate his wife. It takes more than sleeping together to be married, they must also think in tandem.” And that same year to a different friend:

Marriage in Zola's novels, as in life, is a complicated relationship full of pettiness but also love, stifling at times but at others comforting. In The Belly of Paris the marriage of the weak and simple Quenu to the forceful Lisa, in the hands of a lesser writer would have been a tale of an Amazonian tyranny, but in Zola's gifted hands it is a relationship of love, spite, jealousy tenderness, support—a marriage that is both difficult and solid. Even a character such as Lisa, who symbolizes all that was wrong with the petite bourgeoisie—fat, selfish, complacent, indifferent to the suffering of others, and a maddening hypocrite, who, despite a complete absence of religious belief, has a priest at the ready to rubber-stamp what she knows are misdeeds—is still a complete woman, so fully drawn, so human and real, that we cannot quite hate her, though she infuriates us.

Zola sets us up. Just when we are ready to hate a character, he shows us a human side that melts us. The horrid old gossip Mademoiselle Saget takes such pleasure in damaging everyone else with her gossip, but then we see her buying table scraps to eat, trying to cheer herself with the idea that she is eating scraps from the aristocracy but hoping no one sees her buying them. And we feel sorry for her.

Curiously, Zola's strong women have strong smells, and he devotes substantial space to describing them. Though the fleshy Beautiful Norman is described as an extremely attractive woman, lengthy descriptions are given of the odors she gives off and finally it is concluded that she is too “strong-smelling” for Florent's tastes. But Zola was obsessed in all his writing with descriptions of tastes and smells. He loved good food and detested bad eating. The Belly of Paris, a novel of food, of tastes and smells, has often been described, especially by English-speaking admirers, as “strange” or “bizarre.” Zola's friend the writer Edmond de Goncourt was one who noted Zola's curious olfactory obsession. In his Journal he wrote, “The nose of Zola is a very articular nose, a nose that interrogates, that approves, that condemns, a nose that is gay, a nose that is sad, a nose that punctuates the physiognomy of its master; the nose of a true hunting dog.”

Today, in an age when gastronomic fiction has become fashionable, this book seems ahead of its time. But despite Zola's being a bourgeois who loved food and looked it, the social criticism in The Belly of Paris revolves around the graphically illustrated conceit that the bourgeoisie not only eats too much but has an unhealthy obsession with food.

Zola's father, an Italian immigrant, was an adventurer who had done everything from joining the French Foreign Legion when it was first formed to becoming an engineer and building a major dam in Provence. Emile Zola was born in 1840 during a brief stay in Paris not far from the Les Halles neighborhood that would be the setting for The Belly of Paris. But his family soon returned to Aix-en-Provence, where Emile grew up. Like the central characters in The Belly of Paris, Florent and Quenu, Zola grew up in Aix and went to Paris as a penniless student. Many of Zola's characters have their roots in Aix, a town always referred to in his fiction by the pseudonym Plassans.

In Paris people who had little money found small apartments on the upper floors, and Zola for a time lived in an eighth-floor apartment with a view of the rooftops of Paris. As an aging and respected writer he looked back and recalled this view and the vow it inspired: “It was then, from my twentieth year on, that I dreamed of writing a novel of which Paris, with its ocean of roofs, would be a principal character, something like the chorus of antique Greek tragedies.” Twelve years before publication, he was already laying the groundwork for Le Ventre de Paris.

He lived meagerly in those years; he had little to eat, often surviving on bread dipped in olive oil from Provence that friends and family sent him. Later in life, when he had money, he would make up for the lost meals.

The Paris Zola came to in 1858 was considerably different from the one he had been born in. The emperor Napoleon III wanted to leave his mark on France by remaking the capital, an act of publicly financed arrogance that would often be imitated. Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand, and other French leaders have sought to leave their mark by changing Paris, but the most thorough remake was by Napoleon III. To accomplish this he brought in an architect, Georges Haussmann.

The wide boulevards and squares with resplendent monuments designed by Haussmann are much admired today, but at the time were regarded by many as the destruction of Paris. Haussmann himself was nicknamed “the great destroyer.” Paris had been a medieval city of narrow, winding streets, a teeming maze. Within these crowded and nearly unnavigable neighborhoods lived the Parisian masses that had risen up against Napoleon III's despotic rule on several bloody occasions.

It is not by chance that the layout of today's Paris bespeaks power and militarism. To many at the time, the emperor was simply bulldozing neighborhoods and building streets through them in which troops could quickly be deployed. A wide boulevard, later known as the boulevard Saint-Michel after a statue that was erected in a central square, cut a wide swath through the Latin Quarter. The same reshaping took place on the right bank. Poor people were evicted, neighborhoods were leveled, boulevards and monuments were built.

By the time Zola returned to Paris, the area around Les Halles was unrecognizable to him just as it is to Florent in the opening of The Belly of Paris. Paris streets were renamed after men of power, and only a few names remain today, mostly in the former Les Halles neighborhood—rue de la Ferronerie (Foundry), pas du Mule (Mule Path)—to remind Parisians not only of the old Paris names but of what the old Paris was. The gentrification and destruction of working-class neighborhoods is a theme that runs through The Belly of Paris and many other Zola novels. In Au Bonheur des dames, published ten years later, in 1883, a department store opens and an entire neighborhood of shops is put out of business. It is a process that has, sadly, continued in Paris, but The Belly of Paris is set at the dramatic beginning of this process.

Zola writes about longing for the little remaining of old Paris, “les belles rues d'autrefois” the beautiful old-fashioned streets, and as an example he cites rue de la Ferronerie. I remember feeling the same way a hundred years later, after they tore down Les Halles and it was just a hole in the ground and some of these same streets, including rue de la Ferronerie, were all that was left of the old neighborhood. It is all gone now, of course.

Not only public works but also poverty expanded in the Paris of Napoleon III. Inflation dramatically reduced the spending power of the average Parisian. Many of Paris's 1.7 million people were near starvation. The average worker spent between a third and two thirds of his income on bread. At the same time conspicuous displays of gluttony were made fashionable for the ruling class, encouraged by the emperor. Peace was maintained by police repression. As many as 35,000 Parisians were arrested for vagrancy in a single year.

In 1866, things grew even worse when Haussmann was caught skimming funds from his enormous public works budget and fired. The work stopped, and perhaps as many as 100,000 workers who had been rebuilding the city were thrown out of work.

While much of the city starved, the new boulevards were packed with restaurants and cafés offering gaudy displays of gourmandism. This was especially true in 1867, when Napoleon hosted a universal exposition and threw almost daily galas for visiting dignitaries.

In 1858, when Zola as a young man returned to the Paris of his birth, the final touches were being put on the first six pavilions of the newly redesigned Les Halles Centrales, the central market. The market had already been there for seven hundred years. An irony for Zola, whose novel is so much about the connection between Les Halles and fat people, the market was started in the twelfth century under Louis VI, who was known as Louis the Fat.

Napoleon I had planned to redesign it but was defeated by the British before the plans could get under way. The look of the new pavilions was something no Parisians had ever seen. In the plans it was called “a veritable palace of iron and crystal.” Some disapproved, but others, like Claude the painter in Le Ventre de Paris, thought it was the only original building of the century that “has sprung naturally out of the soil of our times.”

It most definitely was a product of the times. In 1845, Victor Baltard, a leading Paris architect and son of a prominent Paris neoclassical architect and artist, Louis-Pierre Baltard, was commissioned along with his partner, Félix Callet, an older but less-known architect, to redesign Les Halles. Their plan called for eight pavilions of various sizes with stone walls and metal roofs. In 1848, construction was halted by the revolution. In 1851, the new president of the republic, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, laid the first stone. The Baltard-Callet stone buildings were massive in appearance, and Parisians sneeringly called the design the “Les Halles fortress.” In 1853, Bonaparte, now emperor, stopped the construction and searched for a new idea, which he said should be “vast but light, like the new train stations.” He called for buildings that resembled umbrellas. Amazingly, the winning design was by the rejected team of Baltard and Callet, with ten iron-and-glass pavilions (an additional two were not completed until 1936). It was a state-of-the-art innovation of the Industrial Revolution.

Les Halles were the first buildings in France—and among the first in the world—to display their metalwork; all of the struts and arches were clearly visible since the construction was an entirely glass-covered metal frame. Almost no one in Paris, Zola included, had ever seen such buildings, and they were a sight to wonder at.

Baltard's Les Halles was one of the great successes of architectural history, a huge step forward in the development of metal architecture. It seemed so light and airy, even transparent, yet offered the strength of metal construction. Soon more train stations, the new phenomenon of department stores, and exhibition halls copied the idea. It became fashionable for buildings to have iron-and-glass roofs. It became the leading design for markets around the world.

In 1959, the government, after years of debate about the grubby market clogging traffic with trucks in the center of Paris, built a market in the southern suburbs of Rungis and La Villette. By the late 1960s only the meat market remained. In 1967, Janet Flanner, the celebrated American chronicler of prewar Paris, wrote a sad article in Life magazine, referring to Le Ventre de Paris and bemoaning that “the market smells of gasoline fumes. It used to smell of horses.” In March 1969, by order of President Charles de Gaulle, the market was officially closed over the protests of students, who by then had considerable practice protesting de Gaulle. Life magazine ran another article titled “‘The Belly of Paris,’ Les Halles, Closes Forever.”

By 1973, the market was completely gone and the emperor Napoleon's vision of a central Paris devoid of working-class neighborhoods began to be completed. Les Halles and its market people were replaced by a shopping mall and the surrounding neighborhoods were rebuilt to be expensive and fashionable and stripped of their charm. One of Baltard's pavilions, completed in 1854, was classified as a historic monument and moved up the Seine to Nogent-sur-Marne, where it is now known as the Pavillon Baltard.

This period of the empire, from the 1848 uprising to the 1871 uprising, is the setting of the Rougon-Macquart saga. The Belly of Paris takes place over one year from 1858 to 1859 and, like most of the other books, has a very strong sense of the political issues of the time. So it is not surprising that the lead character is a bagnard, a convict from the newly established penal colony of French Guiana.

France has never known what to do with its possession on the northeast shoulder of South America. There was a widely circulated legend in sixteenth-century Europe that somewhere in the continent of South America was a huge city holding astounding quantities of gold and other mineral riches. The Spanish called this never-seen city El Dorado. In 1595, the British explorer Sir Walter Raleigh published a report on his visit to the South American coast, The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, in which he claimed to have found El Dorado. This created considerable interest in the area. The French, the British, and the Dutch ended up with slices of the region, and although some gold could be panned in the rivers—and still is—no one has found anything comparable to the legend of El Dorado.

Every attempt to settle French Guiana has failed. A seventeenth-century effort was led by a man who appears to have gone mad and ruled with arbitrary brutality. The original colony of Cayenne, on the coast, was taken over by indigenous warriors, who, according to contemporary reports, ate the settlers. Slaves were imported from Africa for plantations, but they constantly rebelled and ran away to the interior. In the eighteenth century, Louis XV sent 14,000 settlers. Ten thousand of them died of disease so rapidly that their bodies were dumped into the sea because there was no longer manpower available for burial. The remaining settlers fled to three offshore islands, which they called the Iles du Salut, the healthy islands, because they had less malaria and other diseases.

When Louis-Napoléon came to power, he was interested in the problem of settling this territory. Slavery, which had never worked well in Guiana, was abolished in all French territories in 1848. So he sent several boatloads of indentured Chinese laborers to work the land. They were not farmers, and they moved to Cayenne and set up shops. Their descendants still operate shops in Cayenne. Once their labor had fled, many plantation owners, recognizing a good idea, abandoned their land, and they too moved to Cayenne.

Then the emperor had an idea: instead of spending a fortune having the navy maintain prison ships—the ships in which the prisoners provided oar power were outmoded anyway—why not ship convicts to Guiana and force them to develop the land? They would stay there and marry local women—or maybe female convicts could be sent—and they would settle Guiana. To make this plan work, the convicts, after serving their time, were required to spend an equal amount of time as “free men” in the colony. The government even sent prostitutes to marry the first prisoners released, but the women refused to marry any of the convicts and the angry officials shipped them off to labor in a prison camp. Some coupling did take place, but most of the children born of these pairings died in infancy, and many of the female convicts proved to be barren. A fertility expert, Dr. Jean Orgéas, was sent from France to study the problem. After a five-year study, he concluded in 1864 that white people could not reproduce in the tropics.

Convicts were required to spend their terms in hard labor chained to another convict or to an iron ball. If caught trying to escape, they were sentenced to an additional two to five years; if they were serving a life sentence, the penalty was two to five years with double chains.

But most prisoners tried to escape because the alternative was to labor in such misery that half would die of either fever or suicide. The prison system never was able to operate in the interior. The center of the prison was at the mouth of the Maroni River, and the rest of the prisoners were held in either Cayenne or the Iles du Salut. There were a few jungle camps where convicts were forced to work naked, their bodies eaten by insects and slashed by razor grass and thorny bushes. Only the convicts singled out for the harshest treatment, or those most likely to attempt escape, were sent to the islands. Florent, being a political prisoner, was one of them.

Zola, as always, did careful homework and seemed to understand much about the penal colonies. But his story of Florent escaping and returning to France was extremely improbable. Of the 70,000 men and women sent to Guiana between 1851 and 1947, only a handful finished their sentences and returned to France. Almost no escapees made it back. Only 18,000 prisoners survived their sentences. Some did not even survive the initial voyage from France. There were many escape attempts, and some escapees succeeded and lived in South America, where they were called “Maroni boys” by those who knew. But there were no Cayenne boys in Paris.

In The Belly of Paris the gabby Les Halles shopkeepers who would have Florent and other characters sent to Guiana were thoughtlessly delivering them to a life sentence that many regarded as worse than death.

Cayenne was a growing French human rights scandal. Numerous exposés were written about it, and by 1939 the French government had banned the release in France of Hollywood movies on the subject. During World War II, France was unable to feed its Guiana prisoners, and an estimated two thousand died. Finally the prisons were closed in 1947, the prisoners released to sleep on the streets of the few coastal towns of French Guiana. For decades they remained, slowly dying off, lost and broken men with blank stares, “convict eyes,” as one woman said of Florent.

The interior to this day is inhabited only by the descendants of runaway slaves and indigenous tribes. For outsiders it is almost impossible to survive in this dense jungle that the French have named l'enfer vert, the green hell. The prisons are slowly being reclaimed by jungle growth and humidity. The only use France has found for French Guiana is for the European Space Agency's Europe's Spaceport, from which a handful of technicians and a great many military guards send rockets to outer space because Guiana has the logistical advantage of being near the equator.

It seems fated that Zola wrote about Guiana early in his career, because it turned up again toward the end of his life at the center of the Dreyfus Affair. Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island, making it famous, so that many Americans referred to the whole penal colony as Devil's Island, just as the French, with equal inaccuracy, called it Cayenne. Devil's Island is a tiny island that can be crossed from shore to shore on foot in a matter of minutes. There were never more than thirty convicts on the island at a time. Fewer than a hundred prisoners ever served on Devil's Island, so named because the waters around it are so wild and forbidding that it was said that the Devil lived there. Food and supplies were sent over in a basket by a cable from the mainland when the seas were too rough for boats.

Devil's Island was a place where political prisoners were sent, not to work but simply to be abandoned. In Zola's novel, it was where Florent was sent. In 1895, some thirteen years after Zola wrote about Florent, a real-life political prisoner, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was sent there. A twelve-square-yard stone house was built for him, where he was constantly watched by guards who were under orders not to talk to him. But apparently they did and even played chess with him.

Today the island is abandoned. In 1986, I visited it. There was no place to land a boat, and I persuaded a gendarme to take me up to the rocks in his rubber Zodiac. I rolled onto the rocks, and he accelerated out to sea. I reminded him of our agreement for him to pick me up in exactly one hour, but as he pulled away he smiled, and over the roar of his outboard I heard him shout, “Au revoir, Dreyfus II!”

I smiled back, but it was not an entirely comfortable feeling. The island was overgrown with coconut palms. That's what happens. Coconuts are seeds. They drop and take root and are split up the middle by a palm tree. One of the few signs of human life on the island was Dreyfus's stone house. The metal roof was gone, and the room was empty except for a few of the encroaching coconuts and palm fronds that had made their way inside. I stood in Dreyfus's prison anxiously peering through the windows with their remnants of iron bars past the palm trees of the tiny island to the sea, looking for signs of the Zodiac. I was equipped for survival with a pen, a notebook, a sketch pad, and a small set of watercolors. I painted a watercolor of the room and then walked out to the rocks, hoping to see the gendarme in the distance. But I remained calm until the hour was up. Four very long minutes later the smiling gendarme arrived.

Politics, as Zola wrote of Florent, was Zola's destiny. The Dreyfus case was the climax of that destiny. Zola said of himself that he was a dull conversationalist and found a voice only when championing a cause. The French Revolution launched almost two centuries of something close to civil war. One side supported the Bonapartes, while the other opposed them. One side was monarchist, militarist, Catholic, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic; the other was socialist, anti-imperial, antimilitary pro-women. They were the two sides that clashed over the Dreyfus Affair, and a lifetime of political stances seemed to lead Zola to the showdown. The split endured even after the Dreyfus Affair, with World War II collaborators and resisters and in the fight over decolonization in the 1950s and '60s. It was Zola's old adversaries, half a century after his death, who shouted down the French prime minister Pierre Mendès-France for withdrawing from Vietnam by shouting “Dirty Jew.” Zola lived only two years into the twentieth century, but it is easy to see where he would have stood throughout those years. Zola was always clear about where he stood.

In The Belly of Paris this divide is between the fat people and the thin people. In Zola's youth and in many of his novels, the split was between supporters of Napoleon III's empire and its opponents. By the time Zola was in his twenties, the repression had loosened and dozens of new anti-Napoleon journals had emerged in Paris. Zola launched his career in these journals, showing such a flair for controversy, whether in a political essay or a theater review, that he was sometimes accused of deliberately being contrary to get attention. In literature and the arts he was always a champion of modernism, one of the early supporters of the much-criticized Impressionism of Edouard Manet. Zola relished the attention, and he enjoyed being in Paris, which he called “the star of intelligence.”

At times Zola seemed almost frustrated that his defiant political stands did not evoke the kind of persecution—trials, banned writing, exile—for which the older and more celebrated Victor Hugo had famously been singled out. Zola's timing was off. While he was in Paris writing reviews, Hugo was in political exile. When he left Paris to avoid starvation under the 1871 German siege, Hugo was there eating zoo animals. Zola was ashamed that he had managed to escape Paris during the German siege. Manet stayed and manned artillery on a starvation diet, and many of Zola's artist and writer friends were there.

Then, in 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish army officer from the German-speaking part of Alsace that had been taken by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, was falsely accused of passing secrets to the German command. A wave of anti-Semitism was unleashed in France. Zola did not so much befriend Jews as loathe anti-Semitism. He regarded it as a backward affliction of the mind that, if left unchecked, would eventually destroy France. Dreyfus was convicted and sent to Devil's Island, and Zola became one of his most conspicuous defenders.

Zola's January 13, 1898, open letter in L'Aurore, “J'Accuse!” is considered one of the great masterpieces of journalism and is possibly Zola's most famous piece of writing. It explained how Dreyfus had been framed by a fellow officer and accused the army command of covering it up. It began to change public opinion and put Zola at the center of a historic conflict. He was forced to leave the country to avoid being prosecuted for writing “J'Accuse!” and became a highly controversial figure.

He refused to take payment for any of the articles he wrote on the Dreyfus case, and when in exile in England he turned down sizable sums because he considered the case a purely French affair and would not write about it abroad. Although he had long embraced the working class, it had always shown great misgivings about him. Only with the Dreyfus case was he finally embraced by workers and trade unions. But he lost many readers over Dreyfus and never regained his popularity.

On September 28, 1902, Zola died in his home outside Paris of carbon monoxide poisoning from a malfunctioning chimney. In 1927, a stove fitter made a deathbed confession that he and other anti-Dreyfusards, while repairing a neighbor's roof, had deliberately blocked Zola's chimney to kill him. The story which did not surface until 1953, has never been confirmed but is most certainly the version of his death that Zola would have preferred. The few real writers, the ones who stand up and use their voices for what they believe, understand that being a writer is not without risks.