t
Harborough Sherard, pp. 103, 104. London, Chatto & Windus, 1893.

Similar instances are frequently to be found in the writings of English
as well as French novelists, and are, of course, easily explained. A
young man unknown to fame, and unable to procure the publication of a
long novel, often contents himself with embodying some particular idea
in a short sketch or story, which finds its way into one or another
periodical, where it lies buried and forgotten by everybody--excepting
its author. Time goes by, however, the writer achieves some measure of
success, and one day it occurs to him to elaborate and perfect that old
idea of his, only a faint _apercu_ of which, for lack of opportunity, he
had been able to give in the past. With a little research, no doubt, an
interesting essay might be written on these literary resuscitations; but
if one except certain novelists who are so deficient in ideas that they
continue writing and rewriting the same story throughout their lives, it
will, I think, be generally found that the revivals in question are due
to some such reason as that given above.

It should be mentioned that the article of M. Zola's young days to which
I have referred is not one on market life in particular, but one on
violets. It contains, however, a vigorous, if brief, picture of the
Halles in the small hours of the morning, and is instinct with that
realistic descriptive power of which M. Zola has since given so many
proofs. We hear the rumbling and clattering of the market carts, we see
the piles of red meat, the baskets of silvery fish, the mountains of
vegetables, green and white; in a few paragraphs the whole market world
passes in kaleidoscopic fashion before our eyes by the pale, dancing
light of the gas lamps and the lanterns. Several years after the paper
I speak of was published, when M. Zola began to issue "Le Ventre
de Paris," M. Tournachon, better known as Nadar, the aeronaut and
photographer, rushed into print to proclaim that the realistic novelist
had simply pilfered his ideas from an account of the Halles which he
(Tournachon) had but lately written. M. Zola, as is so often his wont,
scorned to reply to this charge of plagiarism; but, had he chosen, he
could have promptly settled the matter by producing his own forgotten
article.

At the risk of passing for a literary ghoul, I propose to exhume some
portion of the paper in question, as, so far as translation can avail,
it will show how M