As he contended against so many generally accepted opinions it was inevitable that his work and even his purpose should be greatly misjudged. Critics took in turn one and another volume of his Rougon-Macquart series, and pronounced condemnation on it. It was only when, after long years, the series was at last finished that some little justice was shown to the author. It should be remembered that no volume of the series is in itself a really complete work. The series indeed is the book, the volumes are but chapters of it. Besides, they ought not to be taken nowadays in the order in which they were originally published. It occasionally happens that writers are unable to produce their works in proper sequence. There have been instances when the second and fourth volumes of some literary undertaking have been published before the first and the third. So it was with the Rougon-Macquart novels. Zola was no walking encyclopædia. Every now and again it happened that he was not ready for the volume which by rights should have followed the one he had just finished. He lacked, at the moment, sufficient knowledge of the subject which that next volume was to embrace. Or else, as also happened at times, his fancy or his feelings or some combination of circumstances carried him onward, inducing him to skip a volume for a time. But he always reverted to it afterwards, like an author who, writing not twenty volumes, but one, has passed over some troublesome chapter, yet harks back and writes it at last, well knowing that his work will lack completeness and intelligibility if the gap be not filled up. In the chronicle of Zola's career given in our previous chapters, the Rougon-Macquart volumes have been mentioned in their chronological order; but the example of the critics who, even since the completion of the series, have followed that same order in judging Zola's work is not one to imitate. By adopting that system one may certainly trace the variations in Zola's general style over a term of years; but if the series is to be judged as a whole one must take its sections in the order in which the author himself desired they should be read. This he indicated in "Le Docteur Pascal," and confirmed by word of mouth to the present writer; and it is unfortunate, perhaps, that the French publishers should still "list" the volumes chronologically, thereby leading many readers astray. Some volumes of course--notably the first and the last--occupy their proper places in the lists, but others have to be taken in a very different order.