It is by his huge novels, and principally by those of the
_Rougon-Macquart_ series, that M. Zola is known to the public and to
the critics. Nevertheless, he has found time during the thirty years
of his busy literary career to publish about as many small stories,
now comprised in four separate volumes. It is natural that his novels
should present so very much wider and more attractive a subject for
analysis that, so far as I can discover, even in France no critic has
hitherto taken the shorter productions separately, and discussed M.
Zola as a maker of _contes_. Yet there is a very distinct interest
in seeing how such a thunderer or bellower on the trumpet can breathe
through silver, and, as a matter of fact, the short stories reveal a
M. Zola considerably dissimilar to the author of “Nana” and of “La
Terre”--a much more optimistic, romantic, and gentle writer. If,
moreover, he had nowhere assailed the decencies more severely than he
does in these thirty or forty short stories, he would never have been
named among the enemies of Mrs. Grundy, and the gates of the Palais
Mazarin would long ago have been opened to receive him. It is, indeed,
to a lion with his mane _en papillotes_ that I here desire to attract
the attention of English readers; to a man-eating monster, indeed, but
to one who is on his best behaviour and blinking in the warm sunshine
of Provence.