At that date Zola was planning a novel on the Paris markets--"Le Ventre de Paris"--and dramatising his earlier book, "Thérèse Raquin," working, so he told Goncourt, some nine hours and a half every day. When his play was finished he offered it to M. Hostein, the director of a new Parisian theatre, La Renaissance, and after numerous alterations had been effected, its five acts being reduced to four, it was staged and produced on July 11, 1873, when it met with a curious reception. The more frivolous, the "society" section of the audience, could not endure such tragic sombreness, and Francisque Sarcey, who held that the stage only existed for the amusement of the public, declared that "this man Zola" made him feel "quite ill." If, however, there was some hissing at the first performance of "Thérèse Raquin," there was also some applause, and when the curtain fell the question of success or failure seemed still to be hanging in the balance. But the professional critics agreed to slate the play, and moreover the "dog-days" were just beginning, the heat emptying even those theatres which had hitherto drawn large audiences, in such wise that after nine performances La Renaissance closed its doors for the summer vacation, and "Thérèse Raquin," as a play, was heard of no more. Zola consoled himself with the comparative success of his novel, "Le Ventre de Paris,"[3] which reached a second edition deservedly, for its kaleidoscopic pictures of the Paris markets were the best descriptive work that the author had as yet penned. Nevertheless, the book encountered some severe criticism at the hands of the few reviewers who condescended to notice it. Writers devoid of any Rabelaisian sense denounced it as the apotheosis of gluttony; the transference of a pork-butcher's shop to literature was regarded as outrageous; and a certain "symphony of cheeses" gave one critic such a fit of nausea, that an unsuspecting foreigner reading his remarks might have imagined cheese to be an abomination to the delicately constituted Parisians, whereas, in fact, they then consumed--and still consume to-day--a greater amount and a greater variety of cheese, often with the strangest flavours and odours, than any other community in the world.