Ten years later, in 1874, M. Zola published a second volume of short stories, entitled _Nouveaux Contes à Ninon_. His position, his literary character, had in the meantime undergone a profound modification. In 1874 he was no longer unknown to the public or to himself. He had already published four of the Rougon-Macquart novels, embodying the natural and social history of a French family during the Second Empire. He was scandalous and famous, and already bore a great turbulent name in literature and criticism. The _Nouveaux Contes à Ninon_, composed at intervals during that period of stormy evolution, have the extraordinary interest which attends the incidental work thrown off by a great author during the early and noisy manhood of his talent. After 1864 M. Zola had written one unsuccessful novel after another, until at last, in _Thérèse Raquin_, with its magnificent study of crime chastised by its own hideous after-gust, he produced a really remarkable performance. The scene in which the paralytic mother tries to denounce the domestic murderess was in itself enough to prove that France possessed one novelist the more. This was late in 1867, when M. Zola was in his twenty-eighth year. A phrase of Louis Ulbach’s, in reviewing _Thérèse Raquin_, which he called “littérature putride,” is regarded as having stated the question of Naturalism and M. Zola who had not, up to that time, had any notion of founding a school, or even of moving in any definite direction, was led to adopt the theories which we identify with his name during the angry dispute with Ulbach. In 1865 he had begun to be drawn towards Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and to feel, as he puts it, that in the _salons_ of the Parnassians he was growing more and more out of his element “among so many impenitent _romantiques_.” Meanwhile he was for ever feeding the furnaces of journalism, scorched and desiccated by the blaze of public life, by the daily struggle for bread. He was roughly affronting the taste of those who differed from him, with rude hands he was thrusting out of his path the timid, the dull, the old-fashioned. The spectacle of these years of M. Zola’s life is not altogether a pleasant one, but it leaves on us the impression of a colossal purpose pursued with force and courage. In 1870 the first of the _Rougon Macquart_ novels appeared, and the author was fairly launched on his career. He was writing books of large size, in which he was endeavouring to tell the truth about modern life with absolute veracity, no matter how squalid, or ugly, or venomous that truth might be.