Читать книгу Émile Zola, Novelist and Reformer: An Account of His Life & Work - Ernest Alfred Vizetelly - Страница 10

A clerkship at the Docks Napoléon—Peregrinations through the Quartier Latin—Zola joined there by Cézanne—He lives in a glass cage—"L'Amoureuse Comédie"—Poetry and poverty—"Genesis"—Spring rambles—The Quartier Latin in 1860—Love in a garret—"La Confession de Claude," and the den in the Rue Soufflot—The fairy of one's twentieth year—Terrible straits—"Playing the Arab"—"Good for nothing"—Help from Dr. Boudet—Zola is engaged by M. Hachette and emerges from Bohemia—Hachette's authors and Zola—Fresh Peregrinations—Short stories—Zola's "band"—His correspondence with Antony Valabrègue—"Contes à Ninon"—Zola weaned from idyl and fable—"Madame Bovary"—Duality of Zola's nature—His improved circumstances—Newspaper articles—The lesson of "Henriette Maréchal—"La Confession de Claude" published—Zola's opinion of it—Barbey d'Aurévilly's attack and a threatened prosecution—Zola quits Hachette's, and refuses to pander to fools.

After choosing a scientific career, and then aspiring to poetic fame as great as that of Hugo or Musset, to sink even momentarily to a junior clerkship, worth sixty francs a month,[1] at the "Docks" in the Rue de la Douane, was hard indeed. Yet such became Zola's fate. Some who have written of the episode have fallen into various errors. An American account says that the young man became a dock labourer; an English biographer has referred to his place of employment as a business house. But on consulting any plan of Paris as it was in 1860 or thereabouts, it will be seen that a great entrepôt, with offices for the collection of the state customs and the municipal dues, then adjoined the "Docks Napoléon," where goods, coming into Paris by the St. Martin Canal, were landed. The establishment of this entrepôt and its adjuncts was carried out between 1833 and 1840;[2] the adjoining Rue de la Douane took its name from the enterprise, and it was there, then, that Zola, after failing at his examinations, secured employment as a clerk, the situation being found for him by his father's friend, Maître Labot, the advocate.

But the salary was the barest pittance. How could a young man of twenty live, in Paris, on two francs a day? Moreover, there was no prospect whatever of any "rise." At the expiration, therefore, of two months—after trudging a couple of miles twice a day between the "Docks" and the Quartier Latin, passing on the road the great Central Markets, whose wondrous life he now began to observe—Zola threw up this employment; and from the beginning of March, 1860, till the end of that year, then all through 1861, and the first three months of 1862, he led a life of dire Bohemian poverty. On arriving in Paris in February, 1858, he had lived with his mother at 63, Rue Monsieur-le-Prince. Thence, in January, 1859, they had moved to 241, Rue St. Jacques, a narrow and ancient thoroughfare, long one of the main arteries of Paris, intimately associated, too, with the student history of the original Quartier Latin. But in April, 1860, at the time when Zola quitted the "Docks," he and his mother found a cheaper lodging at 35, Rue St. Victor, another old street, on the slope of the "Montagne Ste. Geneviève," towards the Halle aux Vins and the Jardin des Plantes.

Here Zola's room was one of a few lightly built garrets, raised over the house-roof proper, and constituting a seventh "floor"; the leads in front forming a terrace whence the view embraced nearly all Paris. While Zola was lodging here, living very precariously and trying by fits and starts to secure some remunerative work, his friend Paul Cézanne arrived from Aix with the hope of making his way in the art world of the capital. Cézanne was more fortunately circumstanced than Zola, having a small monthly allowance to depend upon; and it was perhaps by way of helping his friend that he at first took up his residence with him in that seventh-floor garret. Zola was wonderfully cheered by the companionship; before long he again became as enthusiastic as Cézanne, and the two friends dreamt of conquering Paris, one as a poet, the other as a painter.

When the summer arrived they often laid a paillasse on the terrace outside their attic, and spent the mild and starry night in discussing art and literature. Moreover, while Cézanne began to paint, Zola wrote another poem à la Musset, which he entitled "Paolo"; as well as a tale, "Le Carnet de Danse," which was subsequently included in "Les Contes à Ninon." But there was no improvement in his position. Indeed, things went from bad to worse; and in the autumn of the year, as he had too much delicacy to sponge on Cézanne, whose allowance, moreover, was only just sufficient for himself, they ceased to live together, though they remained close friends.

About the same time Zola and his mother separated. She, over a term of years, had now and again secured some trifling sum of money by compromising one or another law-suit—sacrificing a considerable claim for little more than a morsel of bread. For the rest, she was helped by a few relatives of her own and by some friends of her deceased husband. In October, 1860, as her son could not as yet provide for her, she went to live at a pension in the Quartier Latin, assisted there, perhaps, by some friends, or else obtaining some employment in the house, for she was skilful with her needle. At all events, her son found himself for a time quite alone.

He now went to reside in the Rue Neuve St. Étienne du Mont, near the ancient church of that name, and his lodging, as usual, was at the very top of the house. This time it was a kind of belvedere or glass cage in which Bernardin de St. Pierre, the author of "Paul and Virginia," was said to have sought a refuge from the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. It was there, then, amid all the breezes of heaven, and inspired perhaps by the position of his retreat, that Zola wrote another poem, called "L'Aérienne," which he added to the pieces entitled "Rodolpho" and "Paolo," the first written at Aix, the second in the Rue St. Victor. These three compositions formed, as it were, a trilogy which he named "L'Amoureuse Comédie,"—"Rodolpho" representing the hell, "L'Aérienne" the purgatory, and "Paolo" the paradise of love.[3] This done, he sought a publisher, or, as Paul Alexis puts it, he imagined he sought one.

As a matter of fact, this slim, pale-faced poet, in his twenty-first year, with an incipient beard and long hair falling over his neck, had become extremely timid in everything that pertained to ordinary life. He was not deficient in will power, but misfortune—repeated rebuffs of all sorts—had deprived him of the ordinary confidence of youth in his intercourse with others. His circumstances were desperate enough. Alexis, when telling us that he composed his poem "L'Aérienne" in his glass cage near the sky, during the terribly severe winter of 1860–1861, shows him tireless, shivering in bed, with every garment he possesses piled over his legs, and his fingers red with the cold while he writes his verses with the stump of a pencil.

How does he live? it may be asked. He himself hardly knows. Everything of the slightest value that he possesses goes to the Mont-de-Piété; he timidly borrows trifling sums of a few friends and acquaintances, he dines off a penn'orth of bread and a penn'orth of cheese, or a penn'orth of bread and a penn'orth of apples, at times he has to content himself with the bread alone. His one beverage is Adam's ale; it is only at intervals that he can afford a pipeful of tobacco; his great desire when he awakes of a morning is to procure that day, by hook or crook, the princely sum of three sous in order that he may buy a candle for his next evening's work. At times he is in despair: he is forced to commit his lines to memory during the long winter night, for lack of the candle which would have enabled him to confide them to paper.

Yet he is not discouraged. When "L'Aérienne" is finished, he plans another poetic trilogy, which he intends to call "Genesis." He is still at a loss for bread, but his chief concern is to beg, borrow, or, if possible, buy the books which he desires to study before beginning his new poems. At last he plunges into the perusal of scientific works, consults Flourens on such subjects as longevity, instinct and intelligence, genius and madness, dips into Zimmermann's account of the origin of mankind and the marvels of human nature, reads Lucretius and Montaigne again, and prepares a plan of his intended composition. The first poem is to narrate "The Birth of the World" according to the views of modern science; the second—to be called "Mankind"—is to form a synthesis of universal history, while the third, the logical outcome of the previous ones, is to be written in a prophetic strain showing "The Man of the Future" rising ever higher and higher, mastering every force of nature, and at last becoming godlike.

But though that stupendous composition is long meditated, only eight lines of it are actually written. The long winter ends, the spring comes, and Zola turns to enjoy the sun-rays—at times in the Jardin des Plantes, which is near his lodging, at others along the quays of the Seine, where he spends hours among the thousands of second-hand books displayed for sale on the parapets. And all the life of the river, the whole picturesque panorama of the quays as they were then, becomes fixed in his mind, to supply, many years afterwards, the admirable descriptive passages given in the fourth chapter of his novel "L'Œuvre." There it is Claude Lantier who is shown walking the quays with his sweetheart Christine. And Zola was certainly not alone every time that he himself paced them. We know to what a young man's fancy turns in springtime, and he was as human as others. He lived, moreover, in the Quartier Latin, which still retained some of its old freedom of life, in spite of the many changes it was undergoing.

Baron Haussmann had set pick and spade to work there, and many an ancient tenement and court had been swept away in piercing the Rue des Écoles and the Boulevard St. Michel, then called "Boulevard Sebastopol, Rive Gauche." At that time the Chaumière was dead, the Prado also had disappeared, and the Closerie des Lilas—afterwards known as the Bal Bullier—had lately been renovated, in fact transformed, as Privat d'Anglemont recorded in one of the last sketches he wrote prior to his death in 1859. And with the disappearance or alteration of the old dancing places and tabagies, with the demolition of many an ancient den and haunt, the inhabitants of the Quartier and their manners and customs were likewise altering. In fact, there was a great crisis in la vie de Bohême. But though it was no longer such as it had been pictured by Murger, such as it had appeared to Théodore de Banville, who, recalling his youth, described it briefly yet forcibly a few years later,[4] it would be a mistake to imagine that it was altogether dead. Alphonse Daudet, who arrived in Paris from Nîmes a few months before Zola entered the Lycée St. Louis, has shown that many of the old habits and customs remained. Again, the writer of these pages, who knew the Quartier Latin well in the last years of the Second Empire, can recall that vestiges of its former life clung to it even till the war of 1870. There were still a few tenth-year students, still a few rapins, still a few grisettes, of a kind, lingering within its precincts. But the war proved the final coup de grâce; and the Quartier of the Third Republic with its chic students, its gambling hells, its demi-monde, its filles de brasserie, its garish vulgarity, its mock propriety, has resembled the old one in little save its studiousness, for, however much, for centuries past, its young men may have amused themselves, whatever their eccentricities, whatever their excesses, they have also studied, accumulated in that same Quartier a rich store of scholarship and science, which has enabled many of them to confer benefits on mankind.

Zola, then, knew the former Quartier in its last lingering hours, when there were no longer any taverners who sold books for hard cash and bought them back for a snack or a drink, but when old clo'men still perambulated the streets, when La Californie and other bibines still existed on the confines, and when L'Académie, the grimy absinthe den, still flourished in the Rue St. Jacques under the patronage of littérateurs who never wrote, painters who never painted, and spurious students in law and medicine and what not besides. Those were the men of whom one said: "When they are not talking they drink, when they are not drinking they talk." How they lived nobody knew, but one of them, a notorious character, who after a few glasses of absinthe would improvise the most extraordinary comic songs with rattling tunes, slept for some years in a stable. He was turned out of it one winter, and a few days later was found frozen to death in the moat of the fortifications near Montrouge.

Zola, for his part, indulged in no such bibulous dissipation, but he elbowed it often enough. And in his distressful poverty, without guide or support, it was fatal that he should turn to such consolation as might be offered him. Thus he went the way of many another young man dwelling in the Quartier, finding at last a companion for his penury, not the ideal Ninon of whom he had dreamt in Provence, not the Musette nor the Mimi whom Murger portrayed with the help rather of his imagination than of his memory, but such a one as the Bohemia of the time still had to offer.

A glimpse of his life at that moment is given in a few early newspaper articles, and particularly in one of his first books, "La Confession de Claude," which pictured the shameless immorality prevailing in certain sets of the Quartier Latin, and the weakness that came upon even a well-meaning young man when cast into such a sphere. At the same time romance is blended with fact in the "Confession"; and it would be quite a mistake to regard Claude's mistress, Laurence, as a portrait of the young woman to whom Zola became attached. At the same time, the aspirations of his nature are well revealed in that book, which beneath some literary exaggeration remains instinct with the genuine disappointment of one who has found the reality of love very different from his dream of it.

Some passages are certainly autobiographical. The scene is a maison meublée, which stood near the Pantheon, in the Rue Soufflot before that street was widened and rebuilt. Zola betook himself thither on being expelled from his glass cage near St. Étienne du Mont for non-payment of rent. The house was tenanted by students, their mistresses and other women, and the life led there was so riotous and disorderly that more than once the police came down on the place and removed some of the female tenants to the prison of St. Lazare. Here, then, Zola gathered materials for "La Confession de Claude"; here he elbowed his characters Jacques, Paquerette, Laurence, and Marie, while sharing a life of the greatest privation with the companion who had come to him. "Provence, the broad, sunlit country-side, the tears, the laughter, the hopes, the dreams, the innocence and pride of the past had all departed, only Paris with its mire, a garret and its misery, remained."[5]

Again, real episodes find a place in the "Confession,"—memories of early days, rambles in the valley of the Bièvre, amid the foetid stench of that sewer-like stream and the acreous odour of its tanneries; the first visit to the Closerie des Lilas, the disgust inspired there by the sight of all the harlots with their paint, their cracked voices, and their impudent gestures, and then the excursion through the waste lands of Montrouge, the paths and fields of Arcueil and Bourg-la-Reine, to Fontenay-aux-Roses, Sceaux, and the Bois de Verrières. But one need not imagine that this trip was made with such a creature as the callous, shameless, helpless Laurence, for, in recounting the episode elsewhere, Zola expressed himself as follows:

"I thought of my last excursion to Fontenay-aux-Roses with the loved one, the good fairy of my twentieth year. Springtime was budding into birth, the path was bordered by large fields of violets. … She leant on my arm, languishing with love from the sweet odour of the flowers. … Deep silence fell from the heavens, and so faint was the sound of our kisses that not a bird in all the hedges showed sign of fear. … We ascended to the woods of Verrières, and there, in the grass under the soft, fresh foliage, we discovered some tiny violets. … Directly I found a fresh one I carried it to her. She bought it of me, and the price I exacted was a kiss. … And now amid the hubbub of the Paris markets I thought of all those things, of all that happiness. … I remembered my good fairy, now dead and gone, and the little bouquet of dry violets which I still preserve in a drawer. When I returned home I counted their withered stems there were twenty, and over my lips there passed the gentle warmth of my loved one's twenty kisses."[6]

The man who has lived with a Laurence—the creature who robs youth of all its flame and degrades it to the mire—does not afterwards call her his good fairy. But whatever the liaison, whatever its origin and its ending, it was certainly marked by most distressful circumstances. As the winter of 1861 approached, Zola's poverty became terrible. It was then, as he afterwards told Guy de Maupassant,[7] that he lived for days together on a little bread, which, in Provençal fashion, he dipped in oil, that he set himself to catch sparrows from his window, roasting them on a curtain rod; and that he "played the Arab," remaining indoors for a week at a time, draped in a coverlet, because he had no garments to wear. Not only did he himself starve, but the girl who shared his poverty starved with him; and Paul Alexis and Maupassant and "Claude's Confession" relate how, at one moment of desperation, on a bitter winter evening, after an unbroken fast of thirty-six hours, he took off his coat on the Place du Panthéon and bade his tearful companion carry it to the pawnshop.

"It was freezing. I went home at the run, perspiring the while with fear and anguish. Two days later my trousers followed my coat, and I was bare. I wrapped myself in a blanket, covered myself as well as possible, and took such exercise as I could in my room, to prevent my limbs from stiffening. "When anybody came to see me I jumped into bed, pretending that I was indisposed."

Very little money can have been lent him on his few garments. He often used to say in after-life that the only coat he possessed in that year of misery ended by fading from black to a rusty green. Thus, when he went hither and thither soliciting employment, he was very badly received. "I gathered that people thought me too shabby. I was told, too, that my handwriting was very bad; briefly, I was good for nothing. … Good for nothing—that was the answer to my endeavours; good for nothing—unless it were to suffer, to sob, to weep over my youth and my heart. I had grown up dreaming of glory and fortune, I awoke to find myself stranded in the mire."

But it is a long lane that has no turning. At the close of 1861, an eminent medical man, Dr. Boudet of the Academy of Medicine, who had either been connected with the Lycée St. Louis or had acted as one of the examiners when Zola had attempted to secure a bachelor's degree, gave the young man a letter of recommendation to M. Louis Hachette, the founder of the well-known publishing business. Zola called at the firm's offices, but, for the time, he could only obtain a promise of the first suitable vacancy. Meantime, Dr. Boudet, moved by the sight of his pitiable poverty, came to his help in an ingenious manner. On the occasion of a new year the Parisians of the more prosperous classes invariably exchange visiting cards, and the doctor asked Zola to distribute those which he intended for his friends. At the same time the worthy scientist slipped a twenty-franc piece into the young man's hand as remuneration for his trouble. This discreetly veiled charity at least saved Zola from actual starvation during the festive season; but his heart remained heavy, and his feelings were not devoid of envy when he found that several of the doctor's cards were addressed to the prosperous parents of his former school-fellows at St. Louis.

However, a month later, February, 1862, he entered the "Bureau du Matériel" at Hachette's establishment, his salary being fixed at a hundred francs a month, an average of 2s. 8d. per diem;[8] and his duties, during the first few weeks, being confined to packing books for delivery. A little later he was promoted to the advertising department, with a slightly increased salary. He was now at least "assured of daily bread. Naturally painstaking and conscientious, he had done with Bohemia for ever; he had begun life, he was saved."[9]

Yet it was only by force of will that he accustomed himself to a round of comparative drudgery. If Bohemianism implied poverty, it meant liberty also; and, like many of us, Zola found it hard to have to work regularly, at set tasks and set hours. Again, it worried him that he had no opportunity to read all the books that passed through his hands. But necessity compelled obedience to discipline, and he ended by discharging his clerkly duties fairly well, while allowing full rein to his literary bent every evening and every Sunday. He turned, however, from poetry to prose, not, it would seem, because he doubted his poetical faculty, but because after all his sufferings he was impatient for success. Until that success should arrive he felt, rightly enough, that for ten publishers who might be willing to buy a volume of his prose he would not find one inclined to risk money on a volume of his verse. Everything tends to show, indeed, that the dreamer of the belvedere in the Rue St. Étienne du Mont was awaking to full consciousness of the stern and often unjust laws of the modern world, that, enlightened, instructed by his sojourn in Bohemia, he was ripening into a practical man.

In the advertising department of Messrs. Hachette's business the young clerk became acquainted with some of the authors whose works were published by the firm. He only occasionally caught sight of such celebrities as Guizot, Lamartine, Michelet, Littré, and Duruy, the Minister of Public Instruction; but other writers dropped in to inquire what arrangements were being made for launching some forthcoming work, or how the sales of a recent book were progressing, for that also was a matter with which Zola had to deal. Among the men with whom he thus had some intercourse were miscellaneous writers like Francis Wey, travellers like Ferdinand de Lanoye, popular novelists like Amédée Achard, a dozen of whose fifty romances—largely of Dumas' semi-historical pattern—were published by Hachette. Then there was the scholarly Prévost-Paradol, to whom Zola was attracted, for he had been professor of French literature at the faculty of Aix before embracing journalism and becoming a leading exponent of Orleanist doctrines—liberal, though scarcely democratic, views. His chief work, "La France Nouvelle," a classic for all who would study the condition of French society in the middle period of the nineteenth century, was not yet written; but Hachette already issued his "Études sur les Moralistes Français" and his "Essai sur l'Histoire Universelle."

Another visitor, one who called as a reviewer of the provincial press, not as an author, for he published his books elsewhere, was Duranty, a young novelist with an original, strongly marked personal talent, whose first book, "Le Malheur d'Henriette Gérard," had proved fairly successful, but who, in the end, failed to secure public recognition, though Zola became quite an admirer of his work—in a measure, perhaps, because it departed from most of the recognised canons and showed Duranty to be a man who, appreciated or not, followed his own bent and disdained to copy others.

But one of Hachette's leading authors at that time was Edmond About, the "nephew of Voltaire," who a few months before Zola was engaged by the firm had given it his vivid "Lettres d'un bon jeune homme," written au pas de charge, to the music, as it were, of a flourish of trumpets. Then, in 1862, in Zola's time, Hachette published About's fanciful "Cas de M. Guérin," and in the following year his novel "Madelon," which would be perhaps his best book had he not insisted unduly on its setting, with the result that it now seems somewhat old-fashioned. "Madelon," however, is to About what "La Dame aux Camélias" is to Dumas fils, "La Fille Élisa" to the Goncourts, "Sapho" to Daudet, and "Nana" to Zola. The young clerk read this book with keen and appreciative interest.

But of all the authors calling at his office, the one who most frequently lingered there to chat for a few minutes was the great critic Taine. He was then writing his "Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise" (1863–1864), and, on account, perhaps, of his contributions to the French reviews or of his "Philosophes classiques du XIXe Siècle" he occasionally found letters awaiting him at Hachette's. These were handed him by Zola, in whose presence he opened them. At times they were simply abusive, at others they warned him to be careful of his soul, and in either case they were anonymous. But Taine on receiving any such missive merely laughed and shrugged his shoulders. "It is of no account," he would say, "it only comes from some poor benighted country priest. I am anathema to the village curés."

Zola received no help or encouragement from the authors he met at Hachette's, but this is not surprising; in the first years, at all events, they knew nothing of his literary proclivities, and he was too timid to reveal them. He had now moved from the den in the Rue Soufflot to an old house, a former convent, in the Impasse St. Dominique, near the Rue Royer Collard, where he occupied a monastic room, overlooking a large garden. Thence he betook himself to the Rue Neuve de la Pépinière, between the fortifications and the Montparnasse cemetery, over which the view from his window extended. But his peregrinations were incessant, and at the beginning of the winter of 1863 he moved again, this time to 7, Rue des Feuillantines, a turning out of the Rue St. Jacques. Nearly all his spare time was given to writing. Thinking of the Bohemianism from which he had lately emerged, he began his novel "La Confession de Claude"; then put it by for a time, and devoted himself to short stories. His "Fée Amoureuse"[10] had been printed in an Aix newspaper, "La Provence"; and he now (1863) secured the insertion of a story called "Simplice," and another, "Le Sang," in the "Revue du Mois," issued at Lille. Others followed: "Les Voleurs et l'Ane," reminiscent of Bohemia; "Sœur des Pauvres," written in full view of the Montparnasse cemetery; and "Celle qui m'aime," in which, after féerie, parable, and pure romance, a touch of realism first appeared in Zola's work. He sent this last tale to Henri de Villemessant for the latter's then weekly journal, "Le Figaro," but the manuscript came back "declined with thanks."

Another attempt to secure the honours of print, this time with his poetic trilogy, "L'Amoureuse Comédie," proved equally unsuccessful. One Saturday evening, says Alexis, he timidly deposited the manuscript on M. Hachette's table, and on the Monday morning his employer sent for him. He had glanced at the poems, and though he was not disposed to publish them, he spoke to the young author in a kindly and encouraging manner, raised his salary to two hundred francs a month, and even offered him some supplementary work. For instance, he commissioned him to write a tale for one of his periodicals, one intended for children, and it was then that Zola penned his touching "Sœur des Pauvres"; but M. Hachette deemed it too revolutionary in spirit, and did not use it.

Zola's circumstances having now improved, he again sought a new home, and finding commodious quarters at 278, Rue St. Jacques, near the military hospital of the Val de Grâce, he took his mother to live with him. Her father, the aged M. Aubert, who, it seems probable, had retained or recovered some slender means in the course of the canal lawsuits, had died in 1862; but around the mother and her son were now gathered the latter's early friends, who, like him, had come from Aix to Paris. Paul Cézanne, Jean-Baptiste Baille, Marius Roux, and Solari, with Zola himself, formed a small, enthusiastic, ambitious band, such as was afterwards described so faithfully in "L'Œuvre." From time to time also, Antony Valabrègue, the future poet and critic, visited the capital, and on returning to Aix corresponded with Zola, whose letters[11] were very interesting.

One gleans from them that in 1864 Zola submitted some of his poetical pieces to L'Académie des Jeux Floraux of Toulouse, which "crowned" none of them; that he attended the evening literary lectures at the Salle des Conférences in the Rue de la Paix, and "reported," for some paper which is not specified, the accounts given of Chopin, "Gil Blas," Shakespeare, Aristophanes, La Bruyère's "Caractères," Michelet's "L'Amour" and the philosophy of Molière.[12] In April that year he had as yet done nothing with the various short stories to which reference has been made; and he thought of leaving them in abeyance while he completed the novel, "La Confession de Claude," which he had begun in 1862. Three months later, however, the stories were sold, and Zola wrote to Valabrègue: "The battle has been short, and I am astonished that I have not suffered more. I am now on the threshold: the plain is vast and I may yet break my neck in crossing it; but no matter, as it only remains for me to march onward I will march."

Besides the tales already enumerated, Zola's first volume, which opened with a glowing dedication to Ninon, the ideal love of his youth—some passages being inspired, however, by the riper knowledge that had come to him from the more material love of Bohemian days—included "Les Aventures du Grand Sidoine et du Petit Médéric," an entertaining fable of a giant and his tiny brother. Zola had sent his manuscript to M. Hetzel, then associated in business with M. Albert Lacroix, a scholarly man of letters who, a little later, founded the well-known Librairie Internationale and published several of the works of Victor Hugo: in return for which the great poet, whose own books were profitable, virtually compelled M. Lacroix to issue the works of his sons and his hangers-on, with the result that heavy losses frequently occurred.

Hetzel and Lacroix agreed to publish Zola's tales (under the collective title of "Contes à Ninon") without exacting anything for the cost of production, but the author was to receive no immediate payment. He, all eagerness to see his work in book-form, subscribed to every condition that was enunciated, and then ran home to tell his mother the good news. The volume was issued on October 24, 1864,[13] which became a red letter day in Zola's life. Writing to Valabrègue in the following January, he told him that more than half of the first edition (probably one of fifteen hundred copies) was then sold; and as the book at least made him known, procured him journalistic and literary work, he felt greatly inspirited, though he still remained at Hachette's, intending, he said, to keep his post for several years if possible, in order to increase "the circle of his relations." Meantime, as it was necessary he should "make haste, and rhyming might delay him," he left the Muse for ulterior wooing—that is, if she should not then have grown angry, or have eloped with some more naïf and tender lover than himself. Briefly, as he was writing prose to his personal advantage, he intended to persevere with it.

It may be said of Zola's first volume that it was gracefully, prettily written; that more than one of the tales contained in it was a poem in prose. Brimful of the author's early life in Provence, his youthful fancies and aspirations, those "Contes à Ninon" gave no warning of what was to follow from his pen. And yet at the very time of writing most of them he was being weaned from romance and fable and idyl. Not only had he taken considerable interest in About's "Madelon," but he had been studying Balzac, and particularly Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," the perusal of which had quite stirred him. A man had come, axe in hand, into the huge and often tangled forest which Balzac had left behind him; and the formula of the modern novel now appeared in a blaze of light. When "Madame Bovary" was issued in 1860, the average Parisian, the average literary man even, regarded it merely as a succès de scandale. Many of those who praised the book failed to understand its real import; and when Flaubert was satirised in the popular theatrical révue, "Ohé! les petits Agneaux," half Paris, by way of deriding him, hummed the trivial lines sung by the actress who impersonated "Madame Bovary":