It has been previously shown that Zola began to study and plan the series in the middle of 1868, and commenced his first volume in May, 1869. For some seven or eight months, during the war of 1870-1871, he had been obliged to set his work aside, but apart from that break it had occupied the greater part of his attention during all the years that elapsed until "Le Docteur Pascal" appeared in 1893. Every year, as a rule, some months were occupied in framing a new volume, then several were given to the actual writing of it. In the first instance it was usually necessary to visit places and people, and in some cases certain branches of the chosen subject had to be studied in books, chiefly of a technical nature. This brings one to the consideration of a legend which has grown up around Zola and much of his work. It has been assumed, and repeated _ad nauseam_, by some critics, that he was a very ignorant man with little or no real experience of life, one who, aided by a little imagination, concocted his books out of others, basing his narratives entirely on printed documents. But that assumption is fallacious. It was helped on, certainly, by some of Zola's friends, notably by Paul Alexis, who in his account of the earlier Rougon-Macquart volumes expatiated at length on some of the novelist's sources of information.[3] This Alexis did with Zola's sanction, in a spirit of literary honesty, but his insistence on the subject perverted the judgment of several critics, in such wise that Zola has been largely described as a writer who acquired his information merely by cramming. That such a view of the man and his work is erroneous may be easily shown.