cannot discover what has become of his wife. After a long search, he finds that she has married a very excellent young fellow, a neighbour; and in the face of her happiness, Olivier Bécaille has not the courage to disturb her. Like Tennyson’s “strong, heroic soul,” he passes out into the silence and the darkness.

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The exceedingly powerful story called “Jacques Damour” treats the same idea, but with far greater mastery, and in a less[Pg 43] conventional manner. Jacques Damour is a Parisian artisan, who becomes demoralised during the siege, and joins the Commune. He is captured by the Versailles army, and sentenced to penal servitude in New Caledonia, leaving a wife and a little girl behind him in Paris. After some years, in company with two or three other convicts, he makes an attempt to escape. He, in fact, succeeds in escaping, with one companion, the rest being drowned before they get out of the colony. One of the dead men being mistaken for him, Jacques Damour is reported home deceased. When, after credible adventures, and at the declaration of the amnesty, he returns to Paris, his wife and daughter have disappeared. At length he finds the former married to a prosperous butcher in the Batignolles, and he summons up courage, egged on by a rascally friend, to go to the[Pg 44] shop in midday and claim his lawful wife. The successive scenes in the shop, and the final one, in which the ruddy butcher, sure of his advantage over this squalid and prematurely wasted ex-convict, bids Félicie take her choice, are superb. M. Zola has done nothing more forcible or life-like. The poor old Damour retires, but he still has a daughter to discover. The finale of the tale is excessively unfitted for the young person, and no serious critic could do otherwise than blame it. But, at the same time, I am hardened enough to admit that I think it very true to life and not a little humorous, which, I hope, is not equivalent to a moral commendation. We may, if we like, wish that M. Zola had never written “Jacques Damour,” but nothing can prevent it from being a superbly constructed and supported piece of narrative,[Pg 45] marred by unusually few of the mechanical faults of his later work.

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Since 1884 M. Zola, more and more absorbed in the completion of his huge central edifice, has not found time to build many arbours or pavilions in his literary garden. No one can possibly say what such an active and forcible talent, still in the prime of life, will or 

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