But Jean, whom Maurice had brought to the farm wounded and almost dying, has to stay there in hiding for months while being nursed back to health by Henriette. They grow to love each other, but the full implications of their feelings are unrecognized even by themselves. Ultimately Jean also makes his way to Paris, re-enlists in the regular (Government) army, and fate decrees that Maurice, now a fanatical Communard, is mortally wounded by Jean during the last desperate resistance when the Communards, and various criminal elements posing as such, set fire to the whole of the centre of Paris. The curtain goes down on the holocaust and Jean’s departure, all hope of happiness with Henriette gone, to help build a new France.

Such are the barest bones of the story. But it is clothed with countless incidents, both in military and civilian life, countless authentic facts patiently gathered by Zola, who personally followed out the whole of the route taken in Part I, questioned any local people he could find with personal memories, such as a doctor in Sedan who had helped with the wounded, peasants and notables in and around the town, and in particular Charles Philippoteaux, brother of Auguste Philippoteaux, mayor of Sedan in 1870, and himself mayor of Givonne. He personally conducted Zola to all the places in the battle area and told him of his own glimpse of the Emperor at the farm of Baybel. He is the original of Delaherche, though not necessarily of the latter’s fussy officiousness.

The result is one of the best examples of Zola’s peculiar gift for taking masses of accurate, verifiable facts or documents and breathing into them life and a formal artistic pattern. Each little incident really happened (local tradition has it that everything in the novel is based on fact except the murder of Goliath, which is Zola’s invention), but still the characters are live people with motives and emotions. Zola’s art consists in the arrangement and the aesthetic and symbolical value, even as thousands of single notes are combined by a musical mind into a symphony.

But this formal aspect does raise a question in the reader’s mind: is it not contrived, does not Zola stretch the long arm of coincidence too far for credibility? It may be objected, and with some justification, that everyone happens to run into the appropriate person exactly when the next twist in the story or next pieces in the jigsaw are required, and that therefore many of the ‘fortuitous’ meetings are foreseeable, however improbable in real life. Some may feel that the works are visible if not creakingly audible. That may well be. But it is nearly a thousand years since this island of ours experienced invasion and occupation by a foreign power. The sceptical reader should try to picture, say, the clash of the defending English army with the invading Welsh in and around a small town in a river valley traversing a region of wooded hills, such as Bewdley on the Severn or Ross-on-Wye. All that is then needed is that one English soldier should hail from those parts, have local knowledge and relations and friends still living there, and the rest of the meetings and coincidences must follow in such a restricted environment, where everyone knows everyone else. If you place the small town near a frontier (and the Sedan area has been one of the cockpits of Europe all down the ages), there will be traitors who fraternize with the enemy, locals who see a chance of moneymaking, the underground resistance movements and guerrilla bands, the enemy repressions and penalties. Moreover in a frontier region there are bound to be divided loyalties, families with a foot in both camps, population torn by conflicting linguistic, religious, racial and traditional stresses and strains. Such has always been the painful position of Alsace, Germanic in language and many of its customs, intensely French emotionally, yet often treated with the most tactless lack of understanding by Paris, with its mania for domination and impatience of what it dismisses as la province. In a word, as in any drama, the symbolism, real meaning and significant confrontations are more important to the artist than plausibility in the narrow sense. The subject, after all, is war and how it poisons and deforms all human relationships.

Hence not only the apparent speciousness but also the choice of characters and points of view. In a historical novel it is unwise to challenge real history by placing well-known figures in the principal roles, but it is equally unwise to omit all known historical figures and try to give a slice of life in another period or setting, for that will produce a boring archaeological reconstruction. Zola avoids these traps by introducing Napoleon III, MacMahon, Bazaine, Thiers, Gambetta and many others episodically or indirectly, as seen through the eyes of lesser mortals. But the front-rank characters in the novel are typical soldiers or civilians representing various kinds of victims or beneficiaries of war.

In a sense the principal part is a dual one, a pair incarnating the two eternal and irreconcilable facets of the French national character: Jean Macquart and Maurice Levasseur. Jean is balanced, reasonable, hard-working, law-abiding and conservative; Maurice is highly intelligent (although his behaviour makes one wonder), but mercurial, brilliant at chicanery and destructive criticism but less so at construction, nervy, dashing, effervescent, but fatally inclined to collapse hysterically under stress. France has ever been thus, one half practising moderation and common sense, the other flying to the most violent extremes. Jean is not young, he is thirty-nine and has been through personal tragedy. He is, though there is little resemblance, brother of the smug, self-centred Lisa Quenu (Le Ventre de Paris) and of the pathetic Gervaise (L’ Assommoir). But the two girls left home early and went to Paris while he stayed in Provence as a carpenter and then served for seven years in the army, after which he became a farm-hand in a horrible village in the Beauce (La Terre). So he has lost touch with them and presumably has never seen his nephews the Lantier boys, Claude (L’ Oeuvre), Jacques (La Bête humaine) and Etienne (Germinal), nor Gervaise’s daughter by Coupeau, the notorious prostitute Nana. On the farm he was bitterly resented as a stranger by the family of the girl he married, and when his wife was brutally murdered by her own sister lest her bit of land should pass to Jean or his children, he left the land, horrified and broken-hearted, and re-enlisted shortly before the outbreak of war. He is perhaps the most healthy and sane member of the whole Rougon-Macquart tribe and certainly by far the best of the Macquarts.