Vincent van Gogh in Émile Zola's Germinal

On Sept. 9, 1876, Emile Zola writes in a letter to Albert Millaud: "Je suis un romancier naturaliste." With this designation in mind, in 1884 Zola goes to the mining region in the north of France and also crosses the Belgian border into the Borinage to study the life and characteristics of the people "du pays noir" for his novel Germinal. Only four years before, Vincent van Gogh had to leave that area of the Borinage in which he had preached and lived for almost two years. Much later, in 1924, the villagers of the region still remembered him. One of the characters in Germinal, the Abbé Ranvier, very closely resembles the Dutch evangelist. Therefore, taking into account Zola's extensive and scrupulous inquiries and the vivid impression van Gogh had left on the "borains," I show in this article that the fictional person and the real person are one and the same. (MCM)