But another blow fell on Zola in 1880. In October his mother, long ailing and crippled, passed away at Médan. Various painful circumstances attended the death and the funeral; and Goncourt, writing at the end of the year, pictures Zola as having become a perfect hypochondriac in consequence of this loss. He complained of all sorts of ailments, kidney disease and palpitations of the heart, talked of his own death as being near at hand, and feared that he would not have time to finish anything. Briefly, "he was filling the world with his name, his books were selling by the hundred thousand, no other author, perhaps, had ever created such a stir, and yet he felt profoundly miserable."[28] About the time when his mother died his articles on "scientific fiction," previously issued, some in "Le Voltaire" and others in the "Viestnik Yevropi," were republished in a volume.[29] One of them had greatly offended Laffitte, the editor of "Le Voltaire," who being mixed up in sundry transactions with some of Gambetta's satellites, resented Zola's caustic allusions to them. Nor was an article on some scandal occasioned by the erotic publications of the "Gil Blas" to his liking. He ended by accusing his contributor of defending obscenity and of treating public men with disrespect. A rupture followed. Zola castigated Laffitte in a foot-note to one of the incriminated articles when he reissued them in a book, and turned to "Le Figaro," which gave him all liberty to defend his ideas. He then began a series of articles, republished in a volume the following year under the title of "Une Campagne."[30] They dealt with a great variety of subjects, political, literary, and social, and show how wide was the interest which Zola took in the affairs of his time. One of them on Victor Hugo and his poem "L'Ane" caused a sensation, for most people deemed it positive sacrilege to attack the greatest literary glory of the age. The uproar was even heard across the channel, and Mr. Swinburne, who admired "L'Ane," and held Zola to be mere "stench," manifested particular indignation. But a quarter of a century has elapsed since then, and it is a question whether many people would be inclined nowadays to regard "L'Ane" as a great poem. In a sense, Zola's attack was unkind, but it was essentially one on fetish worship, on the habit of lavishing indiscriminate praise on everything, good, bad, or indifferent, that might come from the pen of a writer of eminence. Let us remember that there has never yet been a poet of whom one might say his every line is a masterpiece. Homer nodded, so did Hugo, and so has even Mr. Swinburne himself.