manner so calm and so convincing that quotation may be permitted.  “It would be well,” he said, “to read my novels, to understand them, to see them clearly in their entirety, before bringing forward the ready-made opinions, ridiculous and odious, which are circulated concerning myself and my works.  Ah! if people only knew how my friends laugh at the appalling legend which amuses the crowd!  If they only knew how the blood-thirsty wretch, the formidable novelist, is simply a respectable bourgeois, a man devoted to study and to art, living quietly in his corner, whose sole ambition is to leave as large and living a work as he can.  I contradict no reports, I work on, and I rely on time, and on the good faith of the public, to discover me at last under the accumulation of nonsense that has been heaped upon me.”  This statement is absolutely in accordance with fact, and when it is realized that the writer of the Rougon-Macquart novels was merely a hard-working, earnest man, filled with a determination to complete the vast task which he had planned, and not to be turned from his ideas by praise or blame, it will go far to promote a better understanding of his aims and methods.  It is necessary too, as has already been said, that the various novels forming the Rougon-Macquart series be considered not as separate entities, but as chapters of one vast whole.

L’Assommoir was an immediate success with the public, and the sales were unusually large for the time, while now (1912) they amount to one hundred and sixty-two thousand copies in the original French alone.

In 1878 Zola published Une Page d’Amour, the next volume of the series, a simple love story containing some very beautiful and romantic descriptions of Paris.  Then followed Nana, to which L’Assommoir was the prelude. Nana dealt with the vast demimonde of Paris, and while it was his greatest popular success, was in every sense his worst book.  Of no subject on which he wrote was Zola more ignorant than of this, and the result is a laboured collection of scandals acquired at second-hand.  Mr. Arthur Symons, in his Studies in Prose and Verse, recounts how an English paper once reported an interview in which the author of Nana, indiscreetly questioned as to the amount of personal observation he had put into the book, replied that he had once lunched with an actress of the Varietes.  “The reply was generally taken for a joke,” says Mr. Symons, “but the lunch was a reality, and it was assuredly a rare experience in the life of a solitary diligence to which we owe so many impersonal studies in life.”  The sales of the book were, however, enormous, and Zola’s financial position was now assured.