If Balzac took his pecuniary cares to heart, there was little if any fretting on the part of that splendid prodigal the great Dumas, who now issued his "Chevalier d'Harmental," an inferior work, no doubt, yet one which showed traces of the lion's paw. Sue's contribution to the literature of 1840, "La Vigie de Koat-Ven," is now almost forgotten; so is Legouvé's "Edith de Falsen," though it ran through several editions. Doubtless one of the most popular novels of the day was still Charles de Bernard's best work, "Gerfaut," the fifth edition of which now came from the press. George Sand, for her part, was penning a minor work, "Pauline"; Soulié was building his "Château des Pyrénées"; and Mérimée, diffident and painstaking, was copying and modifying, sixteen times in succession, his still familiar tale of "Colomba." Stendhal had given his "Chartreuse de Parme" to the world in the previous year. Flaubert was but a young man of nineteen, travelling in southern France and plunging, at Marseilles, into a transient love affair, which was to suggest an episode of "Madame Bovary." Finally, in that same year, 1840,--within six weeks after the birth of Émile Zola,--Alphonse Daudet, who was destined to become his friend, and, in a sense, his rival for fame, came into the world at Nîmes in Provence. In these two, Zola and Daudet, was repeated a phenomenon often observed in the history of French literature: the advent of a superior man of strong masculinity, attended or soon followed by that of another, distinguished by femininity of mind. Thus Corneille and Racine, Voltaire and Rousseau, Hugo and Lamartine. Very similar was the _accouplement_ of Zola and Daudet, who, the one appealing to the reason, the other to the heart, stood in the domain of fiction, at least at one period of their careers, head and shoulders above every contemporary. Daudet waged his battle with a quick and slender rapier, Zola brandished a heavy mace--akin to those redoubtable weapons with which the warriors of mediæval days beat down the helms of their antagonists. Some, too, have likened Daudet to an Arab horse, all eagerness and nerves, while Zola has been called a cactus of Provence that had sprouted between the paving-stones of Paris. The great city was his birthplace, and he was proud of it; yet Provence certainly had many claims on him, for there he was conceived, and there, as the following pages will show, he spent the greater part of his childhood under circumstances which exercised no little influence on his disposition, life, and work. NOTES [1] Only one of Giuseppe Zola's works--"Lezioni di Storia delle Leggi e di Costume de' popoli," etc., Milan, 1809--is in the British Museum Library. Among the others, in addition to the volumes placed in the "Index expurgatorius," were some elaborate commentaries on the history of the Church (3 vols., 1780-1786), a dissertation on the theological authority of St. Augustine, a treatise on Death, etc.