When the baby was born and Vizetelly's wife was on foot again, "they took their courage in both hands," as the French say, and moved to a neighbourhood where living was cheap. And though their street was "slummy," and from their front windows ragged urchins were constantly to be seen fetching penn'orths of porter in pewter cans, and often sampling the liquor on their way home, there lay behind the little house they rented a large cabbage field, beyond which were the grounds of Carnwath House and all the trees of Hurlingham. Vizetelly chose for his work a first-floor room, whence one looked out on the cabbage patch and the trees, and tried to devise some means of earning a living. For a while the sale of his books and the pawnshop helped him, and he gradually contrived to dispose of a few articles to newspapers. But the one idea that haunted him was to bring Zola to the front again in England. It was neither friendship for Zola nor an overpowering admiration for his writings that inspired that idea. Vizetelly thought chiefly of the ruin of his family and the odium cast on it by all that had happened. At the same time he knew that Zola as well as his father had been cruelly maligned by the Pecksniffs and those who had abetted them. Unfortunately nothing could be done at once. The next book that Zola wrote (after "Le Rêve") was "La Bête Humaine," and such was the state of public opinion that it seemed impossible to produce even a bowdlerised version of that work in England. Vizetelly felt--as he had felt with respect to the earlier translations--that one must proceed cautiously, that the ground must be well prepared in advance if the doctrine of outspokenness were ever to triumph. His father had acted too audaciously, too precipitately, with little or no diplomacy. And diplomacy was needed. It was useless to run against a wall of Cootes and Clarkes, an outflanking movement must be tried. After "La Bête Humaine" came "L'Argent," and that book and its subject did not seem attractive enough to pave the way for a genuine revival of Zola in England. So Vizetelly again had to wait. It was a dreary time, but his wife was as plucky a woman as lived, and between them they managed to keep the wolf from the door. At last, in the summer of 1891, on hearing that Zola had begun a novel on the Franco-German war, it occurred to Vizetelly that the opportunity for which he had been waiting since 1889 might be at hand. There were great possibilities in the subject chosen by Zola, and it was one which had much attraction for Vizetelly, who with boyish ambition had tried what he could do with his pen and his pencil amid the fierce struggle which was now to be Zola's theme.