beer-bottles and yelling women. A year, at the age of two-and-twenty, spent in this atmosphere of sordid and noisy vice, left its mark for ever on the spirit of the young observer. He lived on bread and coffee, with two sous’ worth of apples upon gala days. He had, on one occasion, even to make an Arab of himself, sitting with the bed-wraps draped about him, because he had pawned his clothes. All the time, serene and ardent, he was writing modern imitations of Dante’s “Divina Commedia,” epics on the genesis of the world, didactic hymns to Religion, and love-songs by the gross. Towards the close of 1861 this happy misery, this wise folly,[Pg 7] came to an end; he obtained a clerkship in the famous publishing house of M. Hachette.

[Pg 6]

[Pg 7]

But after these two years of poverty and hardship he began to write a few things which were not in verse. Early in 1862 he again addressed to the visionary Ninon a short story called “Le Sang.” He confesses himself weary, as Ninon also must be, of the coquettings of the rose and the infidelities of the butterfly. He will tell her a terrible tale of real life. But, in fact, he is absolutely in the clouds of the worst romanticism. Four soldiers, round a camp-fire, suffer agonies of ghostly adventure, in the manner of Hofmann or of Petrus Borel. We seem to have returned to the age of 1830, with its vampires and its ghouls. “Simplice,” which comes next in point of date, is far more characteristic, and here, indeed, we find one talent of[Pg 8] the future novelist already developed. Simplice is the son of a worldly king, who despises him for his innocence; the prince slips away into the primæval forest and lives with dragon-flies and water-lilies. In the personal life given to the forest itself, as well as to its inhabitants, we have something very like the future idealisations in L’Abbé Mouret, although the touch is yet timid and the flashes of romantic insight fugitive. “Simplice” is an exceedingly pretty fairy story, curiously like what Mrs. Alfred Gatty used to write for sentimental English girls and boys: it was probably inspired to some extent by George Sand.

[Pg 8]

On a somewhat larger scale is “Les Voleurs et l’Âne,” which belongs to the same period of composition. It is delightful to find M. Zola describing his garret as “full of flowers and of light, and so high[Pg 9] up that sometimes one hears the angels talking on the roof.” His story describes a summer day’s adventure on the Seine, an improvised picnic of strangers on a grassy island of elms, a siesta disturbed by the 

 Prev. P 4/81 next