of grandmother’s nervousness?  “Yes!” answers the author.  But if Adelaide Fouque had not had it, her descendants would be good or bad just the same and have the same occupations men and women usually have in this world.  “Certainly!” Zola answers; “but Adelaide Fouque had nervousness.”  And further discussion is impossible, because one has to do with a man who his own voluntary fancy takes for a law of nature and his brain cannot be opened with a key furnished by logic.  He built a genealogical tree; this tree could have been different—­but if it was different, he would sustain that it can be only such as it is—­and he would prefer to be killed rather than be convinced that his theory was worthless.

At any rate, it is such a theory that it is not worth while to quarrel about it.  A long time ago it was said that Zola had one good thing—­his talent; and one bad—­his doctrine.  If as a consequence of an inherited nervousness one can become a rascal as well as a good man, a Sister of Charity as well as Nana, a farmer boy as well as Achilles—­in that case there is an heredity which does not exist.  A man can be that which he wishes to be.  The field for good will and responsibility is open, and all those moral foundations on which human life is based come out of the fire safely.  We could say to the author that there is too much ado about nothing, and finish with him as one finishes with a doctrinarian and count only his talent.  But he cares for something else.  No matter if his doctrine is empty, he makes from it other deductions.  The entire cycle of his books speaks precisely.  “No matter what you are, saint or criminal, you are such on the strength of the law of heredity, you are such as you must be, and in that case you have neither merit nor are you guilty.”  Here is the question of responsibility!  But we are not going to discuss it.  The philosophy has not yet found the proof of the existence of man, and when cogito ergo sum of Cartesius was not sufficient for it, the question is still open.  Even if all centuries of philosophy affirm it or not, the man is intrinsically persuaded that he exists, and no less persuaded that he is responsible for his whole life, which, without any regard to his theories, is based on such persuasion.  And then even the science did not decide the question of the whole responsibility.  Against authorities one can quote other authorities, against opinions one can bring other opinions, against deductions other deductions.  But for Zola such opinion is decided.  There is only one grandmother Adelaide, or grandfather Jacques, on whom everything depends.  From that point begins, according to my opinion, the bad influence of the writer, because he not only decides difficult questions to be decided once and forever, but he popularizes them and facilitates the corruption of society.  No matter if every thief or every murderer can appeal to a grandmother with nervousness.  Courts, notwithstanding the cycle of Rougon-Macquart, will place them behind bars.  The evil is not in single cases, but in this, that into the human soul a bad pessimism and depression flows, that the charm of life is destroyed, the hope, the energy, the liking for life, and therefore all effort in the direction of good is shattered.