The beginning of the movement, however, came about the middle of the sixties, and Zola was the first to champion the new artists with his trenchant pen. Assuming the name of his later hero Claude, he contributed in 1866 to _L'Événement_, under the title _Mon Salon_, that article which swamped the office with such a flood of indignant letters and occasioned such a secession of subscribers that the proprietor of the paper, the sage and admirable M. de Villemessant, felt himself obliged to give the naturalist critic an anti-naturalistic colleague in the person of M. Théodore Pelloquet. In these reviews of the Salon, collected in 1879 in the volume _Mes Haines_, and in the essay upon _Courbet, the Painter of Realism_--Courbet, the already recognised "master of Ornans "--those theories are laid down which Lantier and his friends announced at a later date in _L'Oeuvre_. Then the architect Dubiche, one of the members of the young _Bohème_, dreamed in a spirit of presage of a new architecture. "With passionate gestures he demanded and insisted upon the formula for the architecture of this democracy, that work in stone which should give expression to it, a building in which it should feel itself at home, something strong and forcible, simple and great, something already proclaimed in our railway stations and our markets in the grace and power of their iron girders, but purified and made beautiful, declaring the largeness of our conquests." A few years went by, and then the Paris Centenary Exhibition provided that something, though it was not in monumental stone. The great edifices were fashioned of glass and iron, and the mighty railway buildings were their forerunners. The enormous engine-rooms which gave space for thousands and the Eiffel Tower announced this new architecture. And as Dubiche prophesied a new architecture, so did Claude prophesy a new painting. "Sun and open air and bright and youthful painting are what we need. Let the sun come in and render objects as they appear under the illumination of broad daylight." In Zola Claude Lantier is the martyr of this new style. He is scorned, derided, avoided, and cast out. His best picture is smuggled, through grace and mercy, into the Exhibition by a friend upon the hanging committee as a _charité_. But, ten years after, these new doctrines had penetrated all the studios of Paris and of Europe like germs borne in the air.