assigned, while libels on his own personal character were freely
circulated. Zola replied to these attacks in a manner so calm and so
convincing that quotation may be permitted. "It would be well," he said,
"to read my novels, to understand them, to see them clearly in their
entirety, before bringing forward the ready-made opinions, ridiculous
and odious, which are circulated concerning myself and my works. Ah!
if people only knew how my friends laugh at the appalling legend which
amuses the crowd! If they only knew how the blood-thirsty wretch, the
formidable novelist, is simply a respectable bourgeois, a man devoted to
study and to art, living quietly in his corner, whose sole ambition is
to leave as large and living a work as he can. I contradict no reports,
I work on, and I rely on time, and on the good faith of the public, to
discover me at last under the accumulation of nonsense that has been
heaped upon me." This statement is absolutely in accordance with fact,
and when it is realized that the writer of the Rougon-Macquart novels
was merely a hard-working, earnest man, filled with a determination to
complete the vast task which he had planned, and not to be turned
from his ideas by praise or blame, it will go far to promote a better
understanding of his aims and methods. It is necessary too, as has
already been said, that the various novels forming the Rougon-Macquart
series be considered not as separate entities, but as chapters of one
vast whole.

_L'Assommoir_ was an immediate success with the public, and the sales
were unusually large for the time, while now (1912) they amount to one
hundred and sixty-two thousand copies in the original French alone.

In 1878 Zola published _Une Page d'Amour_, the next volume of the
series, a simple love story containing some very beautiful and romantic
descriptions of Paris. Then followed _Nana_, to which _L'Assommoir_ was
the prelude. _Nana_ dealt with the vast demimonde of Paris, and while it
was his greatest popular success, was in every sense his worst book. Of
no subject on which he wrote was Zola more ignorant than of this, and
the result is a laboured collection of scandals acquired at second-hand.
Mr. Arthur Symons, in his _Studies in Prose and Verse_, recounts how an
English paper once reported an interview in which the author of _Nana_,
indiscreetly questioned as to the amount of personal observation he had
put into the book, replied that he had once lunched with