In spite of that last remark there is reason to believe that, in the case of "Rome," Zola had a difficulty in wrestling with his mountain of "notes," and that when confronted by some memorandum made many months previously, he sometimes imagined its phraseology to be his own and not the actual language of one of his authorities. It seems quite likely that if the latter had been patent to him he would have paraphrased the memorandum. With respect to the actual principle for which he contended it is obvious that the novelist possessed of any conscientiousness ought often to read up certain subjects and consult a variety of authorities. It is indeed a pity that the practice is not followed more generally, for one would then be spared the thousands of blunders in elementary questions of law, science, history, precedence, titles, etc., which appear in so much contemporary fiction. [Illustration: Émile Zola writing "Fécondité" at Walton-on-Thames, 1898 --Photo by V. R. Vizetelly] Zola's defence with respect to "Rome" will be found in a volume called "Nouvelle Campagne,"[12] which contains a number of articles he contributed to "Le Figaro" in 1896. They are of all sorts. The first, on the opportunism of Leo XIII, foreshadows the denunciation of the Roman Catholic Church which eventually appeared in "Vérité"; while another, called "Dépopulation," contains the germ of "Fécondité." There are various papers on the professional interests of literary men; a couple on Zola's love of animals, which was very marked throughout his life, and an incisive one, called "The Toad," in which he railed at the people who sent him abusive letters and the newspaper men who pursued him with pinpricks. Then, in a paper on a Parisian _clairvoyante_, a certain Mademoiselle Couesdon, who pretended to be in direct communication with the archangel Gabriel, he commented on the childishness of the imposture and deplored the senseless eagerness with which people imagined they would discover the secrets of the invisible by consulting a semi-hysterical girl. At the same time he admitted that such was the trend of the modern mind; and, after all, as people could only satisfy their yearnings in this way, one must let them do so, said he, pending the time when science would nourish the world with the bread of truth. However, the most notable article in the volume was certainly the one entitled "For the Jews," in which for the first time Zola gave expression to his surprise and disgust at the progress of anti-Semitism in France. In that campaign, the Dreyfus case, which at first had been merely an incident, was soon to become everything, for Colonel Picquart was now (July, 1896) making important discoveries which convinced him of the innocence of Dreyfus and the guilt of Esterhazy. That was as yet unknown to Zola, who did not begin to intervene until late in the autumn of the following year. Thus, in protesting against the anti-Jewish agitation which had been