Months passed, and the young Provençal seemed to be making but little progress in the world. His poems definitely failed to find a publisher, and for a while he seems to have flagged even in the production of prose. Towards the beginning of 1864, however, he put together the seven stories which I have already mentioned, added to them a short novel entitled “Aventures du Grand Sidoine,” prefixed a fanciful and very prettily turned address “À Ninon,” and carried off the collection to a new publisher, M. Hetzel. It was accepted, and issued in October of the same year. M. Zola’s first book appeared under the title of _Contes à Ninon_. This volume was very well received by the reviewers, but ten years passed before the growing fame of its author carried it beyond its first edition of one thousand copies. There is no critical impropriety in considering these early stories, since M. Zola has never allowed them, as he has allowed several of his subsequent novels, to pass out of print. Nor, from the point of view of style, is there anything to be ashamed of in them. They are written with an uncertain and an imitative, but always with a careful hand, and some passages of natural description, if a little too precious, are excellently modulated. What is really very curious in the first _Contes à Ninon_ is the optimistic tone, the sentimentality, the luscious idealism. The young man takes a cobweb for his canvas, and paints upon it in rainbow-dew with a peacock’s feather. Except, for a brief moment, in “Celle qui m’Aime,” there is not a phrase that suggests the naturalism of the Rougon-Macquart novels, and it is an amusing circumstance that, while M. Zola has not only been practising, but very sternly and vivaciously preaching, the gospel of Realism, this innocent volume of fairy stories should all the time have been figuring among his works. The humble student who should turn from the master’s criticism to find an example in his writings, and who should fall by chance on the _Contes à Ninon_, would be liable to no small distress of bewilderment. II.