Goncourt was unable to help his friend in this matter, at all events immediately; so Zola turned to another subject which he mentioned on the same occasion, that of a strike in a mining district, such as was in progress among the pitmen of northern France at that very moment. Forthwith he started for the scene of the trouble. "At Valenciennes since Saturday, among the strikers, who are remarkably calm," he wrote in February, 1884. "A splendid country as a scene for my book." This time his subject fairly carried him away. "He spent," says Mr. Sherard, "the best part of six months in travelling about, note-book in hand, through the various mining districts of the north of France and of Belgium, interviewing miners, exploring mines from pit-mouth to lowest depths, attending political meetings among the miners, studying various types of Socialist lecturers, drinking horrible beer and still more horrible brandy in the forlorn _cabarets_ of the _corons_ [miners' villages], interrogating miners' wives, and wandering about the fields in the neighbourhood of these _corons_ to watch the lads and lassies taking their poor pastimes when the day's drudgery was over."[54] Some eight or nine years subsequently, Mr. Sherard, on visiting the Borinage, as the coal district round Mons is called, fell in with an old _porion_ or "viewer" who had acted as one of Zola's guides, and who pronounced him to have been the most inquisitive gentleman he had ever met. Never had he known anybody who asked more questions, said he, unless, indeed, it were an investigating magistrate. Mr. Sherard mentions also that "Germinal"--for that was the book which proceeded from Zola's sojourn among the pitmen--was known in every mining village which he visited. There was not a _coron_ where at least one well-thumbed copy of the work could not be found: a proof of the appreciation in which it was held by the toilers on whose behalf it had been written. The preliminary study which "Germinal" necessitated, the long sojourn among new and strange scenes, the strong interest, the compassion roused by all Zola saw and heard, most certainly proved very beneficial to him, reinvigorating him, checking his hypochondriacal tendency, diverting his mind from self, renewing and enlarging his ideas. Thus he was again in possession of physical and mental strength when he began the actual writing of the book. Like his more recent novels it was published _en feuilleton_ by the "Gil Blas";[55] and an English version, prepared by Mr. Albert Vandam, appeared in a London weekly newspaper, "The People."[56]