A clerkship at the Docks Napoléon--Peregrinations through the Quartier Latin--Zola joined there by Cézanne--He lives in a glass cage--"L'Amoureuse Comédie"--Poetry and poverty--"Genesis"--Spring rambles--The Quartier Latin in 1860--Love in a garret--"La Confession de Claude," and the den in the Rue Soufflot--The fairy of one's twentieth year--Terrible straits--"Playing the Arab"--"Good for nothing"--Help from Dr. Boudet--Zola is engaged by M. Hachette and emerges from Bohemia--Hachette's authors and Zola--Fresh Peregrinations--Short stories--Zola's "band"--His correspondence with Antony Valabrègue--"Contes à Ninon"--Zola weaned from idyl and fable--"Madame Bovary"--Duality of Zola's nature--His improved circumstances--Newspaper articles--The lesson of "Henriette Maréchal"--"La Confession de Claude" published--Zola's opinion of it--Barbey d'Aurévilly's attack and a threatened prosecution--Zola quits Hachette's, and refuses to pander to fools. After choosing a scientific career, and then aspiring to poetic fame as great as that of Hugo or Musset, to sink even momentarily to a junior clerkship, worth sixty francs a month,[1] at the "Docks" in the Rue de la Douane, was hard indeed. Yet such became Zola's fate. Some who have written of the episode have fallen into various errors. An American account says that the young man became a dock labourer; an English biographer has referred to his place of employment as a business house. But on consulting any plan of Paris as it was in 1860 or thereabouts, it will be seen that a great entrepôt, with offices for the collection of the state customs and the municipal dues, then adjoined the "Docks Napoléon," where goods, coming into Paris by the St. Martin Canal, were landed. The establishment of this entrepôt and its adjuncts was carried out between 1833 and 1840;[2] the adjoining Rue de la Douane took its name from the enterprise, and it was there, then, that Zola, after failing at his examinations, secured employment as a clerk, the situation being found for him by his father's friend, Maître Labot, the advocate.