Émile Zola in the Bessin, in search of La Joie de vivre

Under the title "Émile Zola in the Bessin: in search of the joy of living", an article signed Th. B. toured the writer's work and Norman stays. He recalled his commitment to the Dreyfus affair with "J'accuse" in L'Aurore, his description of the Second Empire through the Rougon-Macquart, and the intensity of his descriptions, his evocation of love or human landscapes.

The author cited in particular Le Ventre de Paris, L'Œuvre, La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, Le Rêve and Au Bonheur des Dames to evoke this way of giving life to beings and things. He opposed Flaubert's taste for travel details to a less traveling Zola, whose stays in Normandy had nevertheless marked the novels. In Rouen, he wrote, Zola retained above all the sadness of the court and the office of the investigating judge.

According to this presentation, Zola had come to Bessin in 1875 and knew Arromanches, Vierville and the sector of the future Pointe du Hoc. The fictional village of Bonneville appeared as an assembly of notes taken on the coast, from Lion-sur-Mer to Cherbourg, rather than as a single place.

The visible continuation of the article evoked the crisis experienced by Zola in 1880 after the death of Duranty on April 9, Flaubert on May 8 and his mother on October 17. The author recalled his haunting of death, analyzed by Olivier Got from Edmond de Goncourt's diary, and his readings by Schopenhauer. He also alluded to the writer's subsequent death by gas, leaving open the question of his voluntary or accidental character.

Zola would have begun at the end of 1880 a first approach to La Joie de vivre. The text linked the later location of the novel in the Bessin to a trip the following year, especially to Grandcamp and Vierville. The end of this analysis is not kept on the scan. Under the photograph of a house was a hypothetical legend: it could be Lazare’s house.

Reconstructed or uncertain passages:
- The article is interrupted at the bottom of the column after "in a fishing village...". His biographical, literary and geographical references remain attributed to its author. The photograph does not identify with certainty the house of Lazarus.

Archive image: https://vierville.cordelle.eu/Photos2008/1875-80Zola.jpg