Emile Zola was left an orphan in childhood, and experienced bitter poverty. He began work as a bundle-clerk in a publishing house, and trained himself to be a writer at night. He knew what it was to be half-starved, and to write in bed with his fingers freezing in an unheated room. His struggle for recognition was long; for more than a score of years he wrote pot-boilers without success. But he had faith in his own genius, he was a stubborn plodder, and in his grim, sober fashion he worked his way to the top. When I was a boy this Frenchman’s name was a synonym for everything loathsome; Tennyson wrote about “wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism.” This writer had used words never before used in literature, and described actions never before described; the critics could find but one explanation--that he was a vile-minded wretch. But in fact he was one of the most conscientious writers and most determined reformers that ever lived. He wrote that “‘l’Assommoir’ is morality in action ... the first story of the people that has the true scent of the people.” And he added: “I do not defend myself, my work will defend me. It is a true book.” He had set himself to tell the full truth about the world in which he lived; to portray it as it actually was, both high and low, without mercy, without fear or shame, without sparing the hideous facts. Having such a picture before you, you might make what you pleased of it; you might become a cynic or a sensualist, a saint or a revolutionist; but until you had the facts, how could you judge what you ought to become? He planned a tremendous work, to consist of more than a score of volumes, the “Rougon-Macquart series,” to tell the history of a family under the Second Empire. We are back in the time of Napoleon the Little, when Victor Hugo was driven into exile, and the French bourgeoisie set up their puppet emperor. Zola had imbibed the materialistic science of his time; he believed that human life was determined by heredity, and he wished to exhibit this force working in society. He chose two people suffering from a nervous disease, and showed their descendants, the rich ones plundering and squandering, the poor ones sunk in drunkenness and degradation. For years the critics spurned these books, and the public neglected them; but at last came a masterpiece, “l’Assommoir,” which had an enormous sale. The title means, literally, “The Slaughter-House”; it is the name of a saloon in the working-class quarter of Paris, where the poor are lured to their doom. It has been just twenty-five years since I read this book, but I still see the procession of ghastly scenes: the poor woman slave in a laundry, the husband a house-painter, and their brood of wretched, neglected children. I gasp as I see the painter slip and fall from the roof to his death; I shudder as I see the child Nana, peeping through the key-hole at the obscenities her parents are committing.