His romances are modern histories which are founded upon living data, as histories in general are on dead data. And in history he knows also how to employ soberness, by contenting himself with a very simple sketch, disdaining the vulgar tricks which are as easy to invent as they are far from the truth. I ought to be still more partial to "La Bête Humaine"; for, with a generosity not very frequent in men of letters, M. Zola avows that he had recourse to my "Homme Criminel" and my "Homme de Génie" for the material for his romance. Nevertheless, I cannot forbear mixing some criticism with the praises merited by this work, for I do not find satisfied by it that which I regard more than my personal vanity: my love of truth. In "La Bête Humaine" all those artifices which the romanticists had accustomed us to, and from which Zola was freed, reappear, and that alas too often! In the first place, it is a sufficiently strange fatality that the same knife that was given as a mark of conjugal love should be by turns the instrument of every murder committed, and that all the assassinations, derailments, and suicides invariably occur at the Croix-de-Maufras, where the first lewd practices of the President Grandmorin took place. That a great number of criminals should be congregated in the small enclosure of a second-rate railway station and of its approaches, is in itself a strange fact, but it is still more strange that every crime always derives its character from that accursed place which already bears a fateful and dismal name. This is contrary to the laws of probability; for we know by statistics that the number of criminals, as well as of crimes, is always the same for a certain number of people, or a certain number of square miles, or years, and cannot be massed and restricted to a small space of ground, to so few individuals, and so short a time. This is an atavistic reversion, or, we might say, a return to the old ways of romance, in which fatal events always followed each other in certain fatal localities, or through particular men and by certain fated weapons, etc. In "La Fortune des Rougon," also, there is a certain musket which serves for the murder of gendarmes by a grandfather and his nephew, and of the nephew by gendarmes; as if the cause of the fatality was not the hereditary instinct, but this silent and unconscious instrument.