Loti did the other day, that the coarseness and cynicism of the naturalistic novel, the tone of a ball at Belleville, could not sincerely co-exist with a love of beauty, or with a nostalgia for youth and country pleasures. In the short stories of the period of which we are speaking, that poet which dies in every middle-aged man lived on for M. Zola, artificially, in a crystal box carefully addressed “à Ninon là-bas,” a box into which, at intervals, the master of the Realists slipped a document of the most refined ideality.

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Of these tiny stories—there are twelve of them within one hundred pages—not all are quite worthy of his genius. He grimaces a little too much in “Les Epaules de la Marquise,” and M. Bourget has since analysed the little self-indulgent dévote of quality more successfully than M. Zola did in “Le Jeûne.” But most of them are very charming. Here is “Le Grand Michu,” a study of gallant, stupid boyhood; here “Les Paradis des Chats,” one of the author’s rare escapes into humour. In “Le Forgeron,” with its story of the jaded and cynical town-man, who finds health and happiness by retiring to a lodging within the very thunders of a village blacksmith, we have a profound criticism of life. “Le Petit Village” is interesting to us here, because, with its pathetic picture of Woerth in Alsace, it is the earliest of M. Zola’s studies of war. In other of[Pg 20] these stories the spirit of Watteau seems to inspire the sooty Vulcan of Naturalism. He prattles of moss-grown fountains, of alleys of wild strawberries, of rendezvous under the wings of the larks, of moonlight strolls in the bosquets of a château. In every one, without exception, is absent that tone of brutality which we associate with the notion of M. Zola’s genius. All is gentle irony and pastoral sweetness, or else downright pathetic sentiment.

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The volume of Nouveaux Contes à Ninon closes with a story which is much longer and considerably more important than the rest. “Les Quatre Journées de Jean Gourdon” deserves to rank among the very best things to which M. Zola has signed his name. It is a study of four typical days in the life of a Provençal peasant of the better sort, told by the man himself. In[Pg 21] the first of these it is spring: Jean Gourdon is eighteen years of age, and he steals away from the house of his uncle Lazare, a country priest, that he may meet his coy sweetheart Babet by the waters of the broad Durance. His uncle follows and captures him, but the threatened sermon turns into a benediction, the priestly 

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