ould certainly induce
the fortieth century to think that School one of the very best in
fiction, and to utter the most pathetic wails over the loss of the rest
of its production. Of _Boule de Suif_--in more senses than one the
feminine of the pair--more presently. But _L'Attaque_ itself is a
splendid and masculine success--the best thing by far, in respect of
flawlessness, that its author ever did, and not far below Merimee's
_Prise de la Redoute_.

Unfortunately it was not in these breaches that M. Zola chose to abide.
After the war, having no doubt laid his plans long before, he undertook
the vast Rougon-Macquart scheme with its score of volumes; and when this
was finished, carried on two others, smaller in bulk but hardly less
ambitious in scope, "Les Trois Villes"--_Lourdes_, _Paris_, _Rome_; and
"Les Quatre Evangiles"--_Fecondite_, _Travail_, and _Verite_, the fourth
of which was never written, while the third, _Verite_, appeared with a
black line round its cover, denoting posthumous issue.

[Sidenote: "Les Rougon-Macquart."]

In all these books the Experimental and Documentary idea is worked out,
with an important development in the other directions above glanced at.
The whole of the Rougon-Macquart series was intended to picture the
varying careers of the branches, legitimate and illegitimate, of two
families, under the control of heredity, and the evolution of the
cerebral lesion into various kinds of disease, fault, vice, crime, etc.
But further scope was found for the use of the document, human and
other, by allotment of the various books, both in this and in the later
groups, to the special illustration of particular places, trades,
professions, habits of life, and _quicquid agunt homines_ generally. The
_super_-title of the first and largest series, "Les Rougon-Macquart:
Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le Second Empire," can
hardly need comment or amplification to any intellect that is not
hopelessly enslaved to the custom of having its meat not only killed,
dressed, cooked, and dished, but cut up, salted, peppered, and put into
its mouth with assiduous spoonings. _La Fortune des Rougon_, in the
very year when Europe invited a _polemos aspondos_ by acquiescing in the
seizure of Alsace-Lorraine, laid the foundation of the whole. _La Curee_
and _Son Excellence Eugene Rougon_ show how the more fortunate members
of the clan prospered in the somewhat ignoble _tripotage_ of their time.
Anybody