t.

Had he taken to politics in his younger days he would at least have made
his mark in the career thus chosen. And it may be that, in some respects,
French public life might then have been healthier than it has proved
during the last quarter of a century. Perchance, too, on the other hand,
many old maids and young persons, not to mention ecclesiastics and
vigilance societies, would have been spared manifold pious ejaculations
and gasps of horror. Again, my poor father--imprisoned, ruined, and
hounded to his death--might still have been alive.

Unless some other courageous man had arisen to tear the veil away from
before human life, such as it is in so-called civilised communities, and
show society its own self in all its rottenness, foulness, and
hypocrisy--so that on more than one occasion, shrinking guiltily from its
own image, it has denounced the plain unvarnished truth as libel--there
would have been no 'Nana' and no 'Pot Bouille,' no 'Assommoir,' and no
'Germinal.' And no 'La Terre.' 'La Debacle,' and 'Lourdes,' and 'Rome,'
'Paris,' and 'Fecondite,' and all the other books that have flowed from
Emile Zola's busy pen would have remained unwritten. But for my own part
I would rather that the world should possess those books than that Zola
when tempted, as he was, should have cast literature aside to plunge into
the abominable and degrading vortex of politics.

Like all men of intellect he certainly has his views on important
political questions, and again and again he has enunciated them in the
face of fierce opposition. In the Dreyfus case, however, he has been no
politician, but simply the indignant champion of an innocent man. And his
task over, truth and justice vindicated, he asks no reward, no office; he
simply desires to take up his pen once more and revert to his life
work:--The delineation and exposure of the crimes, follies, and
short-comings of society as now constituted, in order that those who
_are_ in politics, who control human affairs, may, in full knowledge of
existing evils, do their utmost to remedy them and prepare the way for a
better and a happier world.

XIV

'WAITING FOR THE VERDICT'

I can still see before me the sitting-room on the second floor of the
Queen's Hotel, in which M. Zola spent so much of his time and wrote so
many pages of 'Fecondite' during the last six months or so of his exile.
A spacious room it was, if a rathe