It was in 1880 that the little hamlet on the Poissy Road awoke to find itself made famous by the publication of a volume which marks an epoch in French literature, and still more in the history of the short story. _Les Soirées de Médan_ was a manifesto by the naturalists, the most definite and the most defiant which had up to that time been made. It consisted of six short stories, several of which were of remarkable excellence, and all of which awakened an amount of discussion almost unprecedented. M. Zola came first with “L’Attaque du Moulin,” of which a translation is here offered to the English public. The next story was “Boule de Suif,” a veritable masterpiece in a new vein, by an entirely new writer, a certain M. Guy de Maupassant, thirty years of age, who had been presented to M. Zola, with warm recommendations, by Gustave Flaubert. The other contributors were M. Henri Céard, who also had as yet published nothing, a man who seems to have greatly impressed all his associates, but who has done little or nothing to justify their hopes. M. Joris Karel Huysmans, older than the rest, and already somewhat distinguished for picturesque, malodorous novels; M. Léon Hennique, a youth from Guadeloupe, who had attracted attention by a very odd and powerful novel, _La Dévouée_, the story of an inventor who murders his daughter that he may employ her fortune on perfecting his machine; and finally, the faithful Paul Aléxis, a native, like M. Zola himself, of Aix in Provence, and full of the perfervid extravagance of the South. The thread on which the whole book is hung is the supposition that these stories are brought to Médan to be read of an evening to M. Zola, and that he leads off by telling a tale of his own. Nothing need be said here, however, of the works of those disciples who placed themselves under the flag of Médan, and little of that story in which, with his accustomed _bonhomie_ of a good giant, M. Zola accepted their comradeship and consented to march with them. “The Attack on the Windmill” is here offered to those who have not already met with it in the original, and it is for our readers to estimate its force and truth. Whenever M. Zola writes of war, he writes seriously and well. Like the Julien of his late reminiscences, he has never loved war for its own sake. He has little of the mad and pompous chivalry of the typical Frenchman in his nature. He sees war as the disturber, the annihilator; he recognises in it mainly a destructive, stupid, unintelligible force, set in motion by those in power for the discomfort of ordinary beings, of workers like himself. But in the course of three European wars--those of his childhood, of his youth, of his maturity--he has come to see beneath the surface, and in his latest novel, _La Débâcle_, he almost agrees with our young Jacobin poets of one hundred years ago, that Slaughter is God’s daughter.