somewhat stagey trick of a fantastic coquette. According to his faithful biographer, M. Paul Aléxis, the author, towards the close of 1862, chose another lodging, again a romantic chamber, overlooking this time the whole extent of the cemetery of Montparnasse. In this elegiacal retreat he composed two short stories, “Sœur des Pauvres” and “Celle qui m’Aime.” Of these, the former was written as a commission for the young Zola’s employer, M. Hachette, who wanted a tale appropriate for a children’s newspaper which his firm was publishing. After reading what his clerk submitted to him, the publisher is said to have remarked, “Vous[Pg 10] êtes un révolté,” and to have returned him the manuscript as “too revolutionary.” “Sœur des Pauvres” is a tiresome fable, and it is difficult to understand why M. Zola has continued to preserve it among his writings. It belongs to the class of semi-realistic stories which Tolstoi has since then composed with such admirable skill. But M. Zola is not happy among saintly visitants to little holy girls, nor among pieces of gold that turn into bats and rats in the hands of selfish peasants. Why this anodyne little religious fable should ever have been considered revolutionary, it is impossible to conceive.

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Of a very different order is “Celle qui m’Aime,” a story of real power. Outside a tent, in the suburbs of Paris, a man in a magician’s dress stands beating a drum and inviting the passers-by to enter and gaze on[Pg 11] the realisation of their dreams, the face of her who loves you. The author is persuaded to go in, and he finds himself in the midst of an assemblage of men and boys, women and girls, who pass up in turn to look through a glass trap in a box. In the description of the various types, as they file by, of the aspect of the interior of the tent, there is the touch of a new hand. The vividness of the study is not maintained; it passes off into romanesque extravagance, but for a few moments the attentive listener, who goes back to these early stories, is conscious that he has heard the genuine accent of the master of Naturalism.

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Months passed, and the young Provençal seemed to be making but little progress in the world. His poems definitely failed to find a publisher, and for a while he seems to have flagged even in the production of[Pg 12] prose. Towards the beginning of 1864, however, he put together the seven stories which I have already mentioned, added to them a short novel entitled “Aventures du Grand Sidoine,” prefixed a fanciful and very prettily turned address 

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