ARTIST'S MODEL.(Emile Zola, Paul Cezanne, friends)(Biography)

When Emile Zola and Paul Cezanne stopped speaking to each other, they had been friends for thirty-four years. They met in 1852, at their school in Aix-en-Provence, when they were twelve and thirteen, and they both cherished memories of their shared boyhood. Cezanne kept with him a screen that he and Zola had decorated together--the screen appeared in a number of his paintings--and Zola often evoked those beautiful days when they would set out before dawn, books in their pockets, to walk in the hills: "They had an instinctive absorption at the bosom of Nature, the unconsidered adoration of boys for trees, streams, mountains. . . . From the time they were fourteen they were solitaries, enthusiasts, ravaged by the fever of literature and of art." When, at the age of seventeen, Zola moved to Paris with his mother--Zola's father had died when the little boy was only six--the young writer and the aspiring painter kept up a passionate correspondence. Cezanne, a fine Latinist, sent long, humorous poems in complicated metres. Zola's eyes were already turned toward artistic success, and he often placed his talents second to his friend's. "Give me a great painter, or I shall never forgive you," he exhorted. And, protectively, "I don't want anyone to spoil my Cezanne for me."

Zola persuaded Cezanne to join him in Paris, and, once there, Cezanne helped Zola to understand the work of Manet, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, whose paintings from life and nature fought the stuffy prescriptions of the official Salon. When the Emperor Napoleon III proclaimed, in 1863, that for once the pictures rejected by the French Academy of Fine Arts would be shown to the public, Cezanne and Zola went together to the Salon of the Refused to see the bourgeoisie outraged by the naked picnicker in Manet's "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe." Zola was fired with enthusiasm--he was always a battler for the downtrodden--and wrote his first pieces of art criticism in defense of Manet and those who came to be known as the Impressionists. The essays were published under the title "My Salon," with a long dedicatory letter to Paul Cezanne: "It's for you alone that I wrote these pages, I know that you will read them with your heart and that, tomorrow, you will love me more affectionately." Cezanne seems never to have complained that his own paintings were hardly mentioned in the book; he appreciated the way Zola patiently came back to sit for him even after he had one of his rages and smashed up the canvases. They were young, and everyone they knew was poor, but Zola was working hard as a journalist and surviving, and on Thursday nights they would all crowd into Zola's apartment and eat the one decent meal of the week. Then they would argue about painting and nature and revolution late into the night.

Twenty years passed: the Emperor left the throne, the French lost the Franco-Prussian War and established the Third Republic, and Zola made his fortune and his reputation. His series of Rougon-Macquart novels (subtitled "the natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire") was variously reviled and acclaimed; he built a house in the country with the proceeds from "The Drinking Den," "Nana," and, in 1885, the harrowing and best-selling account of a miners' strike, "Germinal." This period in Zola's life, thoughtfully considered in Frederick Brown's impressive biography, is newly accessible now that Nouveau Monde Editions has published twelve volumes of his complete works (another nine are forthcoming), arranged in chronological order; the project is under the direction of the renowned Zola scholar Henri Mitterand and incorporates, for the first time, journalism and correspondence alongside the novels. Nouveau Monde has just issued the volume bearing most directly on the question of what happened to the camaraderie between Zola and Cezanne. For it was a novel that marked the end of the friendship, a book that Zola decided--he was in a hurry and said he could think of nothing better--to call "L'Oeuvre," or "The Work."

In the spring of 1885, flush from the success of "Germinal," Zola announced to the press that he was going to return to the world of the Impressionists for "L'Oeuvre," the fourteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series. Before Zola had even finished his customary intensive period of research, he was well behind the rigid schedule by which he produced a novel a year. And then the friends of Edmond de Goncourt and his late brother Jules began telling the newspapers that Zola's forthcoming "L'Oeuvre" would plagiarize "Manette Salomon," the Goncourts' novel about a painter. Zola dashed off an angry reply, but in fact his plans ...