ECHOS
La Quotidienne

Tomorrow, Sunday, the inauguration of the Zola monument. An essentially, exclusively political event, to which literature will remain completely foreign. For show, we will talk about the novelist's work, but it is not the writer, in reality, that we want to honor, it is the polemicist who, during a struggle whose memory continues to weigh heavily and will weigh heavily on this country for a long time to come, committed an act of violent and passionate partisanship.

If the outbursts of his temperament had drawn Zola into the camp where Lemaître and Coppée, Drumond and Rochefort, Déroulède and Barrès were fighting, many of those who will rush tomorrow to celebrate his memory would show less ardor and enthusiasm; they would even be absent from the celebration. Certainly, we would not count, among Zola's thurifers, MM. Paul Boncour and Jouhaux…

Similarly, it is not the author of Germinal and l'Assommoir who was taken to the Pantheon; it is only the author of this page, all feverish with hatred and fury, which appeared under the title J'accuse! in a newspaper founded with a view to accomplishing a specific task and suppressed once this task was completed.

The speakers who will follow one another will doubtless exalt the merits and talent of the writer. But, deep down, they will only have in mind to exalt the intervention of the polemicist in a too famous affair, which tore France apart at the time, provoked discord even in homes, sometimes set sons against their parents, broke ties of affection between friends that nothing, later, could renew.

To give tomorrow's ceremony its clear character and its frank physiognomy, the presence of Mr. Anatole France would be necessary. M. Anatole France once made a terrible judgment on Emile Zola, which nothing can erase, and of which these few extracts will suffice to give an idea:

Zola tires by the overwhelming monotony of his formulas. The grace of things escapes him, beauty, majesty, simplicity flee him at will... He ignores the beauty of words as he ignores the beauty of things... He lends to all his characters "the panic of filth. In writing La Terre, he gave the Georgics of the scoundrel... His work is bad, and he is one of those unfortunates of whom one can say that it would be better if they had never been born... I will not deny him his detestable glory. No one before him had raised such a high heap of filth. This is his monument, the greatness of which cannot be disputed. Never had a man made such an effort to debase humanity, to insult all the images of beauty and love, to deny all that is beautiful and all that is good. Never had a man so misunderstood the ideal of men... M. Zola is worthy of profound pity...

Since then, M. Anatole France, touched, if one may say so, by grace, has judged that Zola was worthy, no longer of profound pity, but of profound admiration. He allowed himself to be carried to the presidency of the "Society of Friends of Zola". For this strange conversion to be effected, it was enough for M. Anatole France to commune with Emile Zola under the species of what has been called Dreyfusism.

It is exactly the same feeling that will gather tomorrow, around the Zola monument, so many diverse personalities, most of whom know, of the novelist's work, only the crude passages, the filthy words and the realistic descriptions.

PAUL MATHIEX.