It is marked that in each of these examples the deficiency has been directly fatal. No stranger doom was ever appointed for a man so plainly desiring only to be just than the absurdity of not resting till he had buried the felicity of his past, such as it was, under a great flat leaden slab. “Vérité” is a plea for science, as science, to Zola, is _all_ truth, the mention of any other kind being mere imbecility; and the simplification of the human picture to which his negations and exasperations have here conducted him was not, even when all had been said, credible in advance. The result is amazing when we consider that the finer observation is the supposed basis of all such work. It is not that even here the author has not a queer idealism of his own; this idealism is on the contrary so present as to show positively for the falsest of his simplifications. In “Fécondité” it becomes grotesque, makes of the book the most muscular mistake of _sense_ probably ever committed. Where was the judgment of which experience is supposed to be the guarantee when the perpetrator could persuade himself that the lesson he wished in these pages to convey could be made immediate and direct, chalked, with loud taps and a still louder commentary, the sexes and generations all convoked, on the blackboard of the “family sentiment?” I have mentioned, however, all this time but one of his categories. The second consists of such things as “La Fortune des Rougon” and “La Curée,” as “Eugène Rougon” and even “Nana,” as “Pot-Bouille,” as “L’Œuvre” and “La Joie de Vivre.” These volumes may rank as social pictures in the narrowest sense, studies, comprehensively speaking, of the manners, the morals, the miseries—for it mainly comes to that—of a bourgeoisie grossly materialised. They deal with the life of individuals in the liberal professions and with that of political and social adventures, and offer the personal character and career, more or less detached, as the centre of interest. “La Curée” is an evocation, violent and “romantic,” of the extravagant appetites, the fever of the senses, supposedly fostered, for its ruin, by the hapless second Empire, upon which general ills and turpitudes at large were at one time so freely and conveniently fathered. “Eugène Rougon” carries out this view in the high colour of a political portrait, not other than scandalous, for which one of the ministerial _âmes damnées_ of Napoleon III., M. Rouher, is reputed, I know not how justly, to have sat. “Nana,” attaching itself by a hundred strings to a prearranged table of kinships, heredities, transmissions, is the vast crowded _epos_ of the daughter of the people filled with poisoned blood and sacrificed as well as sacrificing on the altar of luxury and lust; the panorama of such a “progress” as Hogarth would more definitely have named—the progress across the high plateau of “pleasure” and down the facile descent on the other side. “Nana” is