Naturally enough, they contain some blunders. For instance, Zola was in error when, at the outset of "Son Excellence Eugène Rougon," he pictured an official of the Corps Législatif reading the minutes of a previous sitting, whereas the minutes were always taken as read, for otherwise hours would have been consumed in their perusal. He also erred with respect to the betting odds on a horse in "Nana," which was not surprising, the turf being virtually _terra incognita_ to him. Again,--and this was a bad blunder,--in "La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret,"[6] he spoke of lizards hatching their eggs on the rocks, instead of depositing them there and leaving them to be hatched by the warmth of the atmosphere. Critics made much of that unfortunate slip, which reminds one of a curious mistake made by Alexandre Dumas _père_, who relates in a novel that the peritonitis (!) of one of his characters was perforated by a sword thrust. Dumas certainly wrote rapidly, at times anyhow; but we must remember that the most painstaking works often fall short of perfection. Mérimée rewrote "Colomba" sixteen times before he sent it to the press; nevertheless several slips have been found in it. Flaubert devoted six years to "Madame Bovary," and yet pictured one of its characters paying another exactly eighty-five francs in two-franc pieces. Briefly, lapses are to be found in the most carefully written books as well as in the best-regulated families.[7] In Zola's short stories, particularly the earlier ones, his style often remains light even when it is most ornate. In the Rougon-Macquart novels, the insistence on a multiplicity of details tends to heaviness. Zola was well aware of it, for as far back as 1884, in conversation with Edmond de Goncourt, Maupassant, Huysmans, Alexis, and an English friend,[8] he said: "I am in the habit of feeling the pulse of the public, and am compelled to say that I notice signs of a reaction against us.... Our books will be regarded as heavy, and we cannot hide from ourselves that they are not easy to read. To follow us the reader has to make a determined mental effort." There is no little truth in that remark, but one may add that Zola is easier to read and follow than many of his brother realists. Fifty pages of the pyrotechnics of the Goncourts--the labour connected with which killed the younger one, Jules, as Edmond often acknowledged--may interest the reader, but after a few hundred of them one often feels dizzy and fagged. The brothers Margueritte, who proceeded from the Goncourts, have sometimes carried the passion for literary fireworks even further. Zola was quite unable to read their chief work, "Le Désastre." "I have taken up that book a dozen times," he said one day to the present writer, "but on each occasion, after picking my way through a few pages, I have had to put it down. There is some trick of style in every sentence. One is never allowed a moment's rest. After each of those trials it has seemed to me