an actress
of the Varietes. "The reply was generally taken for a joke," says
Mr. Symons, "but the lunch was a reality, and it was assuredly a rare
experience in the life of a solitary diligence to which we owe so
many impersonal studies in life." The sales of the book were, however,
enormous, and Zola's financial position was now assured.

Publication of the Rougon-Macquart series went steadily on.
_Pot-Bouille_ a story of middle-class life, was followed by its sequel
_Au Bonheur des Dames_, a study of life in one of the great emporiums
which were beginning to crush out the small shopkeepers of Paris. _La
Joie de Vivre_, that drab story of hypochondria and self-sacrifice, was
succeeded by _Germinal_, the greatest, if not the only really great,
novel of labour that has ever been written in any language. After
_Germinal_ came _L'Oeuvre_, which deals with art life in Paris, and is
in part an autobiography of the author. We now come to _La Terre_
around which the greatest controversy has raged. In parts the book is
Shakespearian in its strength and insight, but it has to be admitted at
once that the artistic quality of the work has been destroyed in large
measure by the gratuitous coarseness which the author has thought
necessary to put into it. Even allowing for the fact that the subject is
the brutishness and animality of French peasant life, and admitting that
the picture drawn may be a true one, the effect had been lessened by the
fact that nothing has been left to the imagination. On the other hand
there has, since Shakespeare, been nothing so fine as the treatment of
Pere Fouan, that peasant King Lear, by his ungrateful family. It has
been urged that Zola overdid the horrors of the situation and that no
parent would have been so treated by his children. By a singular chance
a complete answer to this objection may be found in a paragraph which
appeared in the _Daily Mail_ of 18th April, 1911. A few days before, a
peasant woman in France had entered her father's bedroom and struck him
nine times on the head with an axe, afterwards going home to bed. The
reason for the crime was that the old man two years previously had
divided his property between his two daughters on condition that they
paid him a monthly allowance. His elder daughter was always in arrear
with her share of the pension, and, after constant altercations between
father and daughter, the latter extinguished her liability in the manner
indicated. Now this t