More than 300 handwritten letters from Émile Zola addressed to Alexandrine Méley, his wife: this is what the National Library of France (BnF) has just acquired. This acquisition, rightly considered “exceptional”, includes letters written between 1876 and 1901, a year before his tragic death in circumstances that have remained unclear.
The 312 original letters included in the lot acquired by the French archives “share, day after day, all the events in the life of the writer during the periods when he was away” from his companion. All his life, Zola will devote a good part of his afternoons to his correspondence.
The set acquired by the BnF also includes four cards, as well as 34 telegrams. All of these documents are considered very important. So much so that this lot was already classified, since the 1990s, as a “historical monument”.
“Capital for the knowledge of Zola, his thought, his fights, this correspondence of more than 1100 pages delivers step by step his personal vision of the Dreyfus affair, from initial caution to total commitment”, indicates the BnF . In these letters, it is also a question of the literary work in progress to which the writer compels himself day after day. Other letters focus more on elements of the writer’s daily life while living in Paris and Médan. It is among other things about his great passion: photography. He also talks about his visits, his family, his loved ones.
These documents and a few others were the subject of a book in 2014. They then constituted the last and largest set of manuscripts still unpublished by the author of Germinal. Their full disclosure shows a fact already known: the role and importance of his wife in Zola’s career.
Kept for a long time by the writer’s great-granddaughter, Brigitte Émile-Zola, these letters were not to be made public until the beginning of the 21st century.e century, in accordance with a will expressed by Doctor Jacques Émile-Zola, son of the writer and Jeanne Rozerot.
In 2004, the publication of Zola’s letters addressed to Jeanne Rozerot, his mistress and the mother of his two children, also explored the territory of Zola’s intimate correspondence. The letters to Alexandrine make it possible to observe in parallel, from a different angle, part of the intellectual, psychological and love life of the giant of letters.
Émile Zola’s correspondence was first published in Quebec. Between 1978 and 1995, a Zola team produced, under the direction of Bard H. Bakker and Henri Mitterand, a carefully annotated edition of Émile Zola’s correspondence. It was published in 10 volumes by the Presses de l’Université de Montréal (PUM) and Éditions du CNRS, in collaboration with the Zola Center of the University of Toronto.
These hardcover and linen-covered volumes now seem difficult to find. They have not been reissued, confirms to To have to the director of the PUM, Patrick Poirier. To this important set have since been added two volumes of intimate correspondence, in 2004 and 2014, published in France by Gallimard: Letters to Jeanne Rozerot and Letters to Alexandrine.
In 2016, the edition of letters to Alexandrine won the Sévigné prize, a literary prize awarded annually to a correspondence edition. The heart of this last book is made up of the original letters that have just been acquired by the French archives.
These precious documents are added to a set of archives constituted for the most part by the bequest of Alexandrine in 1904, in execution of her husband’s last wishes.
Unsurprisingly, the Émile Zola collection held by the BnF is the largest in the world. It includes 91 volumes of the manuscripts of the Rougon Macquartthis vast fresco in 20 novels, numerous correspondences, preparatory files and various documents.
It also includes the manuscript of his famous “J’accuse…! », a text published in the newspaper Dawn which will have the effect of calling into question in broad daylight the parody of justice which then covers an anti-Semitism which plagues the French Republic. This position of Zola will earn him the deep hatred of the far right until today. The life of the writer will be threatened several times, until his suspicious death.
The BnF’s Zola collection has been regularly enhanced. Fully digitized, it is freely accessible to researchers and the curious on Gallica, the vast digital library of the BnF.