Flaubert and his intimates: Zola, Goncourt, Tourgeneff, Daudet, and Maupassant--"Thérèse Raquin" as a play--"Le Ventre de Paris" and the sensitive critics--A first charge of plagiarism--The "Dinners of the Hissed Authors"--Zola and good fare--Sunday gatherings at Flaubert's--"La Conquête de Plassans"--"Les Héritiers Rabourdin"--Zola in the Rue St. Georges--His contributions to a Russian review--"La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret"--"Nouveaux Contes à Ninon"--"Son Excellence Eugène Rougon"--The truth about "back-stairs gossip"--Flaubert's mimicry of Napoleon III--Zola, Daudet, and "personalities" in fiction--Zola "sees mice and birds"--His stay at St Aubin-sur-Mer--He plans "L'Assommoir"--Publication of "Son Excellence"--Dramatic criticism for "Le Bien Public"--Zola's income early in 1876--Serial issue of "L'Assommoir"--The outcry and the cessation of publication--Catulle Mendès to the rescue--"L'Assommoir" as a book--Its large sales--A furious controversy--Articles, pamphlets, poems, parodies, and lectures--The years of "L'Assommoir" a date in French Literature--Other writings of the time--Zola's "band," Alexis, Huysmans, Maupassant, Céard, and Hennique--Flaubert, "L'Assommoir" and "Naturalism"--Zola's hammer, journalism--Self-assertion and pushfulness the weapons of the age. After the Franco-German War, Gustave Flaubert, who during fifteen years of the imperial _régime_ had resided, when in Paris, on the Boulevard du Temple, found a _pied-à-terre_ in the Rue Murillo, near the Parc Monceau, thereby becoming one of Zola's neighbours, for the Rue Murillo is only a few minutes' walk from the Rue de La Condamine. Zola frequently called on Flaubert, whom he at first found very downcast, for the fall of the Empire seemed to him the end of the world, and besides, he had not yet recovered from the failure of his book, "L'Education sentimentale," published in 1869. It was at Flaubert's that Zola again met Edmond de Goncourt, who was still mourning his brother, and feeling so discouraged that he hardly dared to take pen in hand. With Zola and Goncourt came Flaubert's young disciple, Guy de Maupassant, at that moment little more than one-and-twenty, then Ivan Tourgeneff and Alphonse Daudet, whom Zola had already met in the days of "L'Événement," these five being for a time the only intimates of the author of "Madame Bovary." They were not a very gay party, it would seem. One Shrove Sunday, says Zola, while the carnival horns were resounding in the streets, he sat till nightfall listening to Goncourt and Flaubert, who for hours did not cease recalling the past and lamenting its disappearance.[1] Goncourt, on his side, receiving Zola about this time (June, 1872), once more found him sickly and neurotic, complaining confusedly of rheumatism, heart and bladder trouble, and mastered by such acute nervous trembling that he had to employ both hands to carry his glass to his lips.[2]