The Naturalists proper chiefly developed or seemed to develop one side of Balzac, but almost entirely abandoned his Romantic element. They aimed first at exact and almost photographic delineation of the accidents of modern life, and secondly at still more uncompromising non-suppression of the essential features and functions of that life which are usually suppressed. This school may be represented in chief by four novelists (really _three_, as two of them were brothers who wrote together till the rather early death of one of them), Emile Zola (1840-1903), Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), and Edmond (1822-1897) and Jules (1830-1870) de Goncourt. The first, of Italian extraction and Marseillais birth, began by work of undecided kinds and was always a critic as well as a novelist. Of this first stage _Contes a Ninon_ (1864) and _Therese Raquin_ (1867) deserve to be specified. But after 1870 Zola entered upon a huge scheme (suggested no doubt by the _Comedie humaine_) of tracing the fortunes in every branch, legitimate and illegitimate, and in every rank of society of a family, _Les Rougon-Macquart_, and carried it out in a full score of novels during more than as many years. He followed this with a shorter series on places, _Paris_, _Rome_, _Lourdes_, and lastly by another of strangely apocalyptic tone, _Fecondite_, _Travail_, _Verite_, the last a story of the Dreyfus case, retrospective and, as it proved, prophetic. The extreme repulsiveness of much of his work, and the overdone detail of almost the whole of it, caused great prejudice against him, and will probably always prevent his being ranked among the greatest novelists; but his power is indubitable, and in passages, if not in whole books, does itself justice.