“À Ninon,” and carried off the collection to a new publisher, M. Hetzel. It was accepted, and issued in October of the same year. M. Zola’s first book appeared under the title of Contes à Ninon. This volume was very well received by the reviewers, but ten years passed before the growing fame of its author carried it beyond its first edition of one thousand copies.

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There is no critical impropriety in considering these early stories, since M. Zola has never allowed them, as he has allowed several of his subsequent novels, to pass out of print. Nor, from the point of view of style, is there anything to be ashamed of in[Pg 13] them. They are written with an uncertain and an imitative, but always with a careful hand, and some passages of natural description, if a little too precious, are excellently modulated. What is really very curious in the first Contes à Ninon is the optimistic tone, the sentimentality, the luscious idealism. The young man takes a cobweb for his canvas, and paints upon it in rainbow-dew with a peacock’s feather. Except, for a brief moment, in “Celle qui m’Aime,” there is not a phrase that suggests the naturalism of the Rougon-Macquart novels, and it is an amusing circumstance that, while M. Zola has not only been practising, but very sternly and vivaciously preaching, the gospel of Realism, this innocent volume of fairy stories should all the time have been figuring among his works. The humble student who should turn from[Pg 14] the master’s criticism to find an example in his writings, and who should fall by chance on the Contes à Ninon, would be liable to no small distress of bewilderment.

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II.

Ten years later, in 1874, M. Zola published a second volume of short stories, entitled Nouveaux Contes à Ninon. His position, his literary character, had in the meantime undergone a profound modification. In 1874 he was no longer unknown to the public or to himself. He had already published four of the Rougon-Macquart novels, embodying the natural and social history of a French family during the Second Empire. He was scandalous and famous, and already bore a great turbulent name in literature and criticism. The Nouveaux Contes à Ninon,[Pg 15] composed at intervals during that period of stormy evolution, have the extraordinary interest which attends the incidental work thrown off by a great author during the early and noisy manhood of his talent. After 1864 M. Zola had written one unsuccessful novel after another, until at last, 

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