es Soeurs Vatard_, published in 1879, and the short story _Sac au
Dos_, which appeared in 1880 in the famous Zolaist manifesto, _Les
Soirees de Medan_, show the influence of _Les Rougon-Macquart_ rather
than of _Germinie Lacerteux_. For the time the 'formula' of Zola has
been accepted: the result is, a remarkable piece of work, but a story
without a story, a frame without a picture. With Zola, there is at all
events a beginning and an end, a chain of events, a play of character
upon incident. But in _Les Soeurs Vatard_ there is no reason for the
narrative ever beginning or ending; there are miracles of
description--the workroom, the rue de Sevres, the locomotives, the
_Foire du pain d'epice_--which lead to nothing; there are interiors,
there are interviews, there are the two work-girls, Celine and Desiree,
and their lovers; there is what Zola himself described as _tout ce
milieu ouvrier, ce coin de misere et d'ignorance, de tranquille ordure
et d'air naturellement empeste_. And with it all there is a heavy sense
of stagnancy, a dreary lifelessness. All that is good in the book
reappears, in vastly better company, in _En Menage_ (1881), a novel
which is, perhaps, more in the direct line of heritage from _L'Education
Sentimentale_--the starting-point of the Naturalistic novel--than any
other novel of the Naturalists.

_En Menage_ is the story of '_Monsieur Tout-le-monde_, an insignificant
personality, one of those poor creatures who have not even the supreme
consolation of being able to complain of any injustice in their fate,
for an injustice supposes at all events a misunderstood merit, a force.'
Andre is the reduction to the bourgeois formula of the invariable hero
of Huysmans. He is just enough removed from the commonplace to suffer
from it with acuteness. He cannot get on either with or without a woman
in his establishment. Betrayed by his wife, he consoles himself with a
mistress, and finally goes back to the wife. And the moral of it all
is: 'Let us be stupidly comfortable, if we can, in any way we can: but
it is almost certain that we cannot.' In _A Vau-l'Eau_, a less
interesting story which followed _En Menage_, the daily misery of the
respectable M. Folantin, the government employe, consists in the
impossible search for a decent restaurant, a satisfactory dinner: for M.
Folantin, too, there is only the same counsel of a desperate, an
inevitable resignation. Never has the intolerable monotony of small
inconvenien