At the lunch at the Chalet des Iles the novelist's health was proposed by his old friend and publisher, M. Charpentier, and after the toast had been acknowledged, M. Catulle Mendès, who, as will be remembered, had gallantly assisted Zola when the columns of "La Cloche" and "Le Bien Public" were closed to "La Curée" and "L'Assommoir," spoke of the old quarrels between the Naturalists and the Parnassians, to which latter sect he, Mendès, had belonged. And, said he, though he still looked upon poetry as a much superior art to prose, he was anxious to declare publicly that he regarded Zola as one of the great literary glories of France. This was very pretty; and the novelist, not to be left behind in a matter of compliments, responded by referring to Mendès as a perfect artist and a good friend. Finally he proposed a toast to work, his old hobby, as he called it, the only one in which true happiness could be found. For some inscrutable reason General Iung--whose researches into the Iron Mask mystery may be remembered, and who happened to be among the guests on this occasion--thought the moment appropriate to re-echo a remark which had run through the newspapers, and to which one has already referred. "Monsieur Zola," said he, "you have written 'The Smash-up' ('La Débâcle'), let us hope that you will soon write 'Victory.'" "Ah, general!" replied Zola, raising his forefinger, "that is your business." And thereupon he sat down. The value of books is not to be estimated by their length or even by their popularity. Yet it may not be inappropriate to point out that the Rougon-Macquart series, which Zola had now completed, was really a colossal performance. Besides a large variety of other work, the novelist had written the twenty volumes of that series in about five and twenty years, introducing, as he proceeded, no fewer than twelve hundred characters to his readers. The twenty volumes represented nine thousand pages of print, each of three and thirty lines, and, assuming an average of nine words per line and making allowance for "blanks,"--by no means numerous in Zola's works,--one may say that they contained quite two million five hundred thousand words. Passing to another matter, one finds that at the time of the appearance of "Le Docteur Pascal" there had been sold over half a million copies of the ordinary Charpentier edition of the series. The popular illustrated editions of several of the stories, first sold in what one may call "penny parts," had also circulated very widely, at least to the extent of a quarter of a million copies; and further there had been some _éditions de luxe_, copies on special papers, and so forth. Moreover, there were five novels written before the Rougon-Macquart series was begun, with four volumes of short stories and seven volumes of essays and other papers, issued at various times, and one may therefore assume that between eight and nine hundred thousand copies of Zola's books