In _Marthe: histoire d'une fille,_ which followed in 1876, two years later, Huysmans is almost as far from actual achievement as in _Le Drageoir à Epices,_ but the book, in its crude attempt to deal realistically, and somewhat after the manner of Goncourt, with the life of a prostitute of the lowest depths, marks a considerable advance upon the somewhat casual experiments of his earlier manner. It is important to remember that _Marthe_ preceded _La Fille Élisa_ and _Nana._ "I write what I see, what I feel, and what I have experienced," says the brief and defiant preface, "and I write it as well as I can: that is all. This explanation is not an excuse, it is simply the statement of the aim that I pursue in art." Explanation or excuse notwithstanding, the book was forbidden to be sold in France. It is Naturalism in its earliest and most pitiless stage--Naturalism which commits the error of evoking no sort of interest in this unhappy creature who rises a little from her native gutter, only to fall back more woefully into the gutter again. Goncourt's Élisa at least interests us; Zola's Nana at all events appeals to our senses. But Marthe is a mere document, like her story. Notes have been taken--no doubt _sur le vif_--they have been strung together, and here they are with only an interesting brutality, a curious sordidness to note, in these descriptions that do duty for psychology and incident alike, in the general flatness of character, the general dislocation of episode. _Les Sœurs Vatard,_ published in 1879, and the short story _Sac au Dos,_ which appeared in 1880 in the famous Zolaist manifesto, _Les Soirées de Médan,_ show the influence of _Les Rougon-Macquart_ rather than of _Germinie Lacerteux._ For the time the "formula" of Zola has been accepted: the result is, a remarkable piece of work, but a story without a story, a frame without a picture. With Zola, there is at all events a beginning and an end, a chain of events, a play of character upon incident. But in _Les Sœurs Vatard_ there is no reason for the narrative ever beginning or ending; there are miracles of description--the workroom, the rue de Sèvres, the locomotives, the _Foire du pain d'épice_--which lead to nothing; there are interiors, there are interviews, there are the two work-girls, Céline and Désirée, and their lovers; there is what Zola himself described as _tout ce milieu ouvrier, ce coin de misère et d'ignorance, de tranquille ordure et d'air naturellement empesté._ And with it all there is a heavy sense of stagnancy, a dreary lifelessness. All that is good in the book reappears, in vastly better company, in _En Ménage_ (1881), a novel which is, perhaps, more in the direct line of heritage from _L'Education Sentimentale_--the starting-point of the Naturalistic novel--than any other novel of the Naturalists.