But during the whole of this tempestuous decade M. Zola, in his hot battle-field of Paris, heard the voice of Ninon calling to him from the leafy hollows, from behind the hawthorn hedges, of his own dewy Provence--the cool Provence of earliest flowery spring. When he caught these accents whistling to his memory from the past, and could no longer resist answering them, he was accustomed to write a little _conte_, light and innocent, and brief enough to be the note of a caged bird from indoors answering its mate in the trees of the garden. This is the real secret of the utterly incongruous tone of the _Nouveaux Contes_ when we compare them with the _Curée_ and _Madeleine Férat_ of the same period. It would be utterly to misunderstand the nature of M. Zola to complain, as Pierre Loti did the other day, that the coarseness and cynicism of the naturalistic novel, the tone of a ball at Belleville, could not sincerely co-exist with a love of beauty, or with a nostalgia for youth and country pleasures. In the short stories of the period of which we are speaking, that poet which dies in every middle-aged man lived on for M. Zola, artificially, in a crystal box carefully addressed “à Ninon là-bas,” a box into which, at intervals, the master of the Realists slipped a document of the most refined ideality. Of these tiny stories--there are twelve of them within one hundred pages--not all are quite worthy of his genius. He grimaces a little too much in “Les Epaules de la Marquise,” and M. Bourget has since analysed the little self-indulgent _dévote_ of quality more successfully than M. Zola did in “Le Jeûne.” But most of them are very charming. Here is “Le Grand Michu,” a study of gallant, stupid boyhood; here “Les Paradis des Chats,” one of the author’s rare escapes into humour. In “Le Forgeron,” with its story of the jaded and cynical town-man, who finds health and happiness by retiring to a lodging within the very thunders of a village blacksmith, we have a profound criticism of life. “Le Petit Village” is interesting to us here, because, with its pathetic picture of Woerth in Alsace, it is the earliest of M. Zola’s studies of war. In other of these stories the spirit of Watteau seems to inspire the sooty Vulcan of Naturalism. He prattles of moss-grown fountains, of alleys of wild strawberries, of rendezvous under the wings of the larks, of moonlight strolls in the bosquets of a château. In every one, without exception, is absent that tone of brutality which we associate with the notion of M. Zola’s genius. All is gentle irony and pastoral sweetness, or else downright pathetic sentiment.