“Summer” from Jean Gourdon’s Four Days, Émile Zola (1874)

“For more than six years, at the first shot in each fight, I had been saying good-bye to those I loved the most fondly, Babet and uncle Lazare. And now, barely a month before my discharge, I had to say good-bye again, and this time perhaps for ever.”

Just as the joyful exuberance of spring eventually gives way to the trying heat of summer, the innocent enchantments of childhood give way to the formative trials of adult life. Émile Zola was intimately familiar with such tests: Over 20 years after Jean Gourdon’s Four Days, he published J’Accuse...!, an open letter defending French army officer Alfred Dreyfus from charges of treason and accusing his persecutors of antisemitism, risking his career and personal safety in the process. He was charged with libel and had to spend over a year in England to avoid imprisonment.

Like Dreyfus, Jean Gourdon finds himself serving in the army in the second chapter of his story (find the first chapter, “Spring,” read aloud here), though his tribulations come on the battlefield instead of in the courtroom. Courtesy of Zola’s vivid descriptions, one feels the sweltering summer heat almost as powerfully as the carnage of warfare. A trial by fire, indeed.

Perhaps, even decades before he felt called to live by such principles himself, Zola understood the importance of doing one’s duty in the face of any kind of danger the world can summon. Perhaps Gourdon, who remains faithful to the family he is building back home through all of his experiences, served as an unattainable ideal for his creator, who would go on to father multiple children out of wedlock. That would help to explain the novella’s dream-like, poetic style, which stands in stark contrast to the author’s usual approach.

Whatever the case may be, Zola’s deep understanding of the human condition and transportive powers of language are sure to make this chapter a moving experience no matter where and when it is experienced.

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