nd throwing them into
large baskets. She who was with me glanced longingly at the flowers, and
I called one of the women. "You want some violets?" said she. "How much?
A pound?"

God of Heaven! She sold her flowers by the pound! We fled in deep
distress. It seemed as though the country-side had been transformed into
a huge grocer's shop. . . . Then we ascended to the woods of Verrieres,
and there, in the grass, under the soft, fresh foliage, we found some
tiny violets which seemed to be dreadfully afraid, and contrived to
hide themselves with all sorts of artful ruses. During two long hours
I scoured the grass and peered into every nook, and as soon as ever I
found a fresh violet I carried it to her. She bought it of me, and
the price that I exacted was a kiss. . . . And I thought of all those
things, of all that happiness, amidst the hubbub of the markets of
Paris, before those poor dead flowers whose graveyard the footway had
become. I remembered my good fairy, who is now dead and gone, and the
little bouquet of dry violets which I still preserve in a drawer. When I
returned home I counted their withered stems: there were twenty of them,
and over my lips there passed the gentle warmth of my loved one's twenty
kisses.

And now from violets I must, with a brutality akin to that which M.
Zola himself displays in some of his transitions, pass to very different
things, for some time back a well-known English poet and essayist wrote
of the present work that it was redolent of pork, onions, and cheese.
To one of his sensitive temperament, with a muse strictly nourished on
sugar and water, such gross edibles as pork and cheese and onions were
peculiarly offensive. That humble plant the onion, employed to flavour
wellnigh every savoury dish, can assuredly need no defence; in most
European countries, too, cheese has long been known as the poor man's
friend; whilst as for pork, apart from all other considerations, I can
claim for it a distinct place in English literature. A greater essayist
by far than the critic to whom I am referring, a certain Mr. Charles
Lamb, of the India House, has left us an immortal page on the origin of
roast pig and crackling. And, when everything is considered, I should
much like to know why novels should be confined to the aspirations of
the soul, and why they should not also treat of the requirements of
our physical nature? From the days of antiquity we have all known what
befell the members whe