In "Au Bonheur des Dames" M. Zola has taken as his theme a particular phase of the amalgamation and "universal providing" tendencies, as they have presented themselves in France; and the phase in question is certainly one of the most interesting, if only for the fact that it is so closely connected with the desires and needs of women. In a word the work deals with those huge drapery establishments, like the "Bon Marché" and the "Louvre", which are renowned throughout the world. We have no doubt several very large draper's emporiums in London, but I do not think that any one of them can claim to rival either in dimensions, extent of business, or completeness of organisation the great French establishments to which I have referred above. I can myself well remember the growth of the "Bon Marché" and the "Louvre". Transferred, when my education was but half-completed, from the solitude of the Sussex downs to the whirling vortex of Paris, I grew up amongst those Haussmannite transformations which virtually made the French capital a new city--a city which became my home for well nigh twenty years. Even now I am but a stranger in my own land, among my own kith and kin; and my memory ever dwells on those years when I saw Paris develop, opening her streets to air and light and health, increasing her wealth and her activity, on the one hand multiplying her workshops, ever busy, thanks to the taste and dexterity of her craftsmen, and on the other, by the attraction of a thousand pleasures, becoming the caravanserai of Europe. And my fanatical admiration for M. Zola and for all his works, the passion which has induced me to translate so many of them, arises mainly from the fact that they deal so largely with Paris and her life at a period which I so well remember, with scenes and incidents which I can so readily recall and which carry me back to the days when the heart was light and buoyant, and sorrow was a thing unknown. And when, now and again sundry supercilious English critics, qualified by a smattering of French and a few months' residence in France, presume to sneer at M. Zola's pictures of French manners and customs in the days of the Second Empire, I merely shrug my shoulders at their ignorance. For my own part I believe, for like St. Thomas I have seen.