Such, then, is Zola's great series: one work in twenty volumes, in whose pages appear twelve hundred human characters besides many others, such as La Lison, the engine which Jacques Lantier worships and which seems to be endowed with life; such, too, as old Bonhomme, Pascal's horse; Bataille and Trompette, the horses of the coal-pit; Zephyr, who falls in the great cavalry charge at Sedan; Mathieu and Bertrand, the two big dogs; Pologne, the unlucky rabbit; Minouche, the egotistical cat; Gédéon, the comical donkey who gets drunk in the vintage scene of "La Terre"; César, the great bull at La Borderie; La Coliche and her calves; Mathieu, Désirée's pig; Alexandre, her big lusty rooster, and a score of others. Zola always loved animals; he put them into his books, and they entered largely into his life. As for the human characters of his great series these are of all classes, all kinds. Napoleon III appears in various volumes, at the Tuileries, at Compiègne, at St. Cloud, and again and again during the war of 1870. The Empress is seen also, like the Duke de Morny and other high personages of state. Members of one and another aristocracy, politicians and functionaries, judges and lawyers, medical men and other scientists, bishops and priests, generals and soldiers, company promoters, speculators and shareholders, schoolmasters and revolutionaries, _bourgeois_ of Paris and the provinces, artists and shopkeepers, street hawkers, peasants and miners, workmen of innumerable callings, pass across Zola's stage. The reader enters the homes of all those classes; he goes from the palace to the hovel, from the dancing-hall to the coal-pit, from the cathedral to the boozing-ken, from the artist's studio to the Chamber of Deputies, from the great drapery shop to the harlot's boudoir; he sees Paris, her boulevards, her slums, her promenades, her theatres, her quays, under twenty different aspects, at dawn, at noon, at night, in shine and rain and snow; he travels to the rocky shore of a boisterous and predatory sea; he finds fairyland in the magic garden of the Paradou, he roams the bleak coal country of the north; he is buffeted by the mistral and scorched by the blazing sun of Provence; he gazes on La Beauce, an ocean of waving corn, and on the battlefield of Sedan, strewn with the dead and dying. Religion, politics, sociology, art, science, trade, agriculture, military affairs, life's characteristics, duties, functions, errors and aims, love, marriage, eating, drinking, and a hundred other matters are discussed before him. Beautiful friendships, confiding loves, ardent passions, terrible jealousies and rivalries, lofty aspirations, horrid lusts, generous sacrifices, deeds of bravery and virtue, cruelty and vengeance, greed, craft, and cowardice,--in a word, both the nobility and the mire of life in turn confront one, in such wise that this Rougon-Macquart series is like a miniature world.