It was an ordinary Saturday morning in the winter of 1879.
The entire Paris region was permeated with the gloomy chill of melting snow, a feeling particularly strong in Médan, located in the suburbs.
Although the vegetation here had already withered, the dense river network and excellent ventilation kept the air as pure as a maiden's first kiss.
Médan had always been a good place for city dwellers to escape the summer heat, but few people came in winter.
Only a strangely shaped country villa in the northwest corner of Médan was unusually lively today.
Because here, the new owner of this villa—Monsieur Émile Zola—was preparing a lavish banquet to welcome his friends and to celebrate his official move into the villa.
Although the villa had been purchased last year, its condition was very poor at the time; the floor on the second story almost caused Monsieur Zola, who was inspecting it, to fall to the first floor.
Fortunately, the success of L'Assommoir brought good earnings, allowing him to extensively renovate the villa, and finally, he could move in recently—an excited Zola, disregarding that it was a "summer villa" intended for holidays, insisted on experiencing the life of a "great writer" in advance.
After all, he had long envied his friend Flaubert's three-story villa in the heart of Paris.
As dawn broke, the valet was half-kneeling on the stone steps at the villa entrance, meticulously polishing each stone with graphite, ensuring they were as clean as new.
The mistress, with her chest held high, directed the gardener, coachman, and maids, each busy with different tasks.
Among them, the most important was the cook, because by midday, Monsieur Zola's good friends—a group of erudite, lively, and food-loving young men: Guy de Maupassant, Paul Alexis, Léon Hennique, Henri Céard, and Huysmans—would arrive at the villa to celebrate with Monsieur Zola.
Each of them could eat twice the portion of an ordinary person—and Monsieur Zola could eat three times.
If any gentleman felt even a hint of hunger during the gathering, it would be a great disgrace for Madame Zola!
By noon, the dining room of the villa was overflowing with delicious food and joy—
Platters of Norman lobster aspic, fresh butter and various bread baskets, Périgord truffle cream soup, pan-fried fish with champagne sauce, and Rossini-style roasted fillet steak, served with expensive black truffle slices and seasonal vegetables, along with sherry, blackcurrant liqueur, absinthe, and of course, fine wines from Bordeaux.
Zola and his loyal young followers feasted heartily, eating for a full two hours before contentedly moving to the warm fireplace in the living room, where each lit a cigar or a personal pipe, puffing away.
At this moment, the logs in the fireplace burned brightly, the flickering orange-red flames greedily licking the air, isolating the bleakness of the riverbank outside the window, leaving only the warm scent of burning pine and the rich aroma of cigars filling the room.
As the owner of the villa, the initiator of the gathering, and the eldest among them, Émile Zola stroked his large beard with his hand, put down his cigar, and walked to the front of the fireplace.
Maupassant and the others knew that their passionate elder was about to deliver another deafening pronouncement—
"...That's the problem, my friends!"
Émile Zola's voice boomed with its usual power, like a statue outlined by firelight, his emphatic gestures almost stirring the air.
"What do our cafés, our taverns, those so-called 'people's places,' serve?
Bread mixed with sawdust and plaster powder!
Cheap wine so poor it scratches the throat!
And what about those factory owners, those bankers?
In their private rooms at the 'Louvre' restaurant, they enjoy fresh oysters transported overnight from Brittany with silver cutlery, drinking the finest vintage wines from Burgundy's Grand Crus!"
The few listeners scattered around the fireplace had varying expressions.
Maupassant was comfortably slumped in a large velvet armchair, his long legs casually crossed, a faint, almost imperceptible smile playing on his lips.
His gaze wasn't fixed on the impassioned Zola but was instead observing the villa's freshly renovated interior with keen interest.
Huysmans, on the other hand, sat on a stiff, straight-backed chair, his body slightly leaning forward, fingers interlaced on his knees.
On his face, with its harsh features and clear look of world-weariness, his brows were habitually furrowed, as if in silent agreement, or perhaps meticulously criticizing Zola's imprecise choice of words.
Paul Alexis was the most composed; he occupied the thickest, most comfortable sofa chair on the other side of the fireplace, slowly taking a pinch of fine tobacco from a carved wooden box.
With his well-maintained, distinctly jointed hands, he meticulously and unhurriedly filled his large meerschaum pipe.
The others also held various poses, not all their attention focused on Zola—today's discussion was destined to be very long, and this was merely the appetizer.
The burning pine logs in the fireplace crackled softly, briefly filling the silence after Zola's voice faded.
"So, Émile—" Huysmans finally broke the silence, his voice possessing a cool, cutting quality much like himself.
"Are you planning in your next novel to have some starving worker storm into the 'Louvre' restaurant and stab a fat, complacent banker in the throat with a fork?"
Everyone laughed; it was a good joke.
Zola's broad chest rose and fell, but he wasn't annoyed:
"That's too extreme!
What I want is to expose that suffocating abscess, to let the sunlight in!
Violence cannot solve the fundamental problems!"
He waved his arms, attempting to steer the conversation back to his grand framework of social analysis.
"Abscess, Émile, that's a good word,"
Paul Alexis spoke, his voice clear and resonant.
"But you must be careful; overzealous passion will only turn your characters into mere puppets of your accusations."
His grey-blue eyes, through the curling smoke, fixed on Zola:
"Balzac also wrote about greed, and about sin, but his Vautrin, Père Goriot, Rastignac… they are alive, struggling with all their contradictions and vitality, not merely existing to prove that 'society is a big festering sore.'"
"Rastignac…"
Maupassant seemed suddenly awakened by the name, the vague interest in his eyes instantly replaced by a vivid spark.
He abruptly sat upright, his languid posture gone, as if wound up:
"Ah! Speaking of Rastignac!
My friends, you absolutely wouldn't believe it, a few days ago, in a class at the Sorbonne Faculty of Arts,
I saw a living, breathing young man who could accurately fling Rastignac's label back into the face of an arrogant nobleman!"
Huysmans raised an eyebrow, a rare hint of piqued curiosity appearing on his stern face.
Zola, whose train of thought had been interrupted, frowned slightly in displeasure, but seeing the almost feverish excitement in Maupassant's eyes, he temporarily put aside his own topic.
Maupassant was completely immersed in the excitement of his discovery, speaking rapidly like a machine gun:
"He's a student named Lionel Sorel, from the provinces, penniless and rattling, wearing a jacket with shiny elbows, commuting by public carriage, and living in the notoriously smelly Eleventh Arrondissement!"
Zola's curiosity was also piqued; in his mind, the Sorbonne Faculty of Arts was a playground for rich idlers and a graveyard for stubborn pedants—when had poor students ever had their day there?
Seeing that his "digression" had received Zola's tacit approval, Maupassant became even more excited.
(End of Chapter)
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