The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Love Episode, by Emile Zola

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Title: A Love Episode

Author: Emile Zola

Release Date: October 11, 2004 [EBook #13695]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LOVE EPISODE ***

Produced by Dagny, John Bickers and David Widger,

PREPARER'S NOTE

This eBook was prepared from the edition published by the Societe
des Beaux-Arts in 1905 for the Comedie d'Amour Series. Registered
copy Number 153 of 500.

[Illustration: Comedie d'Amour Series]

A LOVE EPISODE

BY

EMILE ZOLA

ILLUSTRATED BY DANTAN

[Illustration: Emile Zola]

ZOLA AND HIS WRITINGS

Emile Zola was born in Paris, April 2, 1840. His father was Francois
Zola, an Italian engineer, who constructed the Canal Zola in Provence.
Zola passed his early youth in the south of France, continuing his
studies at the Lycee St. Louis, in Paris, and at Marseilles. His sole
patrimony was a lawsuit against the town of Aix. He became a clerk in
the publishing house of Hachette, receiving at first the modest
honorarium of twenty-five francs a week. His journalistic career,
though marked by immense toil, was neither striking nor remunerative.
His essays in criticism, of which he collected and published several
volumes, were not particularly successful. This was evidently not his
field. His first stories, _Les Mysteres de Marseilles_ and _Le Voeu
d'Une Morte_ fell flat, disclosing no indication of remarkable talent.
But in 1864 appeared _Les Contes a Ninon_, which attracted wide
attention, the public finding them charming. _Les Confessions de
Claude_ was published in 1865. In this work Zola had evidently struck
his gait, and when _Therese Raquin_ followed, in 1867, Zola was fully
launched on his great career as a writer of the school which he called
"Naturalist." _Therese Raquin_ was a powerful study of the effects of
remorse preying upon the mind. In this work the naturalism was
generally characterized as "brutal," yet many critic