story. It is not uninteresting to the technical student to compare the two pieces, the composition of which was separated by about ten years.

[Pg 39]

V.

Finally, in 1884, M. Zola published a fourth collection, named, after the first of the series, Naïs Micoulin. This volume contained in all six stories, each of considerable extent. I do not propose to dwell at any length on the contents of this book,[Pg 40] partly because they belong to the finished period of naturalism, and seem more like castaway fragments of the Rougon-Macquart epos than like independent creations, but also because they clash with the picture I have sought to draw of an optimistic and romantic Zola returning from time to time to the short story as a shelter from his theories. Of these tales, one or two are trifling and passably insipid; the Parisian sketches called “Nantas” and “Madame Neigon” have little to be said in favour of their existence. Here M. Zola seems desirous to prove to us that he could write as good Octave Feuillet, if he chose, as the author of Monsieur de Camors himself. In “Les Coquillages de M. Chabre,” which I confess I read when it first appeared, and have now re-read, with amusement, we see the heavy M. Zola endeavouring to sport as gracefully[Pg 41] as M. de Maupassant, and in the same style. The impression of buoyant Atlantic seas and hollow caverns is well rendered in this most unedifying story. “Naïs Micoulin,” which gives its name to the book, is a disagreeable tale of seduction and revenge in Provence, narrated with the usual ponderous conscientiousness. In each of the last mentioned the background of landscape is so vivid that we half forgive the faults of the narrative.

[Pg 40]

[Pg 41]

The two remaining stories in the book are more remarkable, and one of them, at least, is of positive value. It is curious that in “Le Mort d’Olivier Bécaille” and “Jacques Damour” M. Zola should in the same volume present versions of the Enoch Arden story, the now familiar episode of the man who is supposed to be dead, and comes back to find his wife re-married. Olivier Bécaille[Pg 42] is a poor clerk, lately arrived in Paris with his wife; he is in wretched health, and has always been subject to cataleptic seizures. In one of these he falls into a state of syncope so prolonged that they believe him to be dead, and bury him. He manages to break out of his coffin in the cemetery, and is picked up fainting by a philanthropic doctor. He has a long illness, at the end of which he 

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