A quoi bon? Such is the question coming by itself.  A book is also an activity, forming human souls.  If at least the reader would find in Zola’s book the bad and good side of human life in an equal proportion, or at least in such as one can find it in reality!  Vain hope!  One must climb high in order to get colors from a rainbow or sunset—­but everybody has saliva in his mouth and it is easy to paint with it.  This naturalist prefers cheap effects more than others do; he prefers mildew to perfumes, la bete humaine to l’ame humaine!

If we could bring an inhabitant of Venus or Mars to the earth and ask him to judge of life on the earth from Zola’s novels, he would say most assuredly:  “This life is sometimes quite pure, like ‘Le Reve,’ but in general it is a thing which smells bad, is slippery, moist, dreadful.”  And even if the theories on which Zola has based his works were, as they are not, acknowledged truths, what a lack of pity to represent life in such a way to the people, who must live just the same!  Does he do it in order to ruin, to disgust, to poison every action, to paralyze every energy, to discourage all thinking?  In the presence of that, we are even sorry that he has a talent.  It would have been better for him, for France, that he had not had it.  And one wonders that he is not frightened, that when a fear seizes even those who did not lead to corruption, he alone with such a tranquillity finishes his Rougon-Macquart as if he had strengthened the capacity for life of the French people instead of having destroyed it.  How is it possible that he cannot understand that people brought up on such corrupted bread and drinking, such bad water, not only will be unable to resist the storm, but even they will not have an inclination to do so!  Musset has written in his time this famous verse:  “We had already your German Rhine.”  Zola brings up his society in such a way that, if everything that he planted would take root, the second of Musset’s verses would be:  “But to-day we will give you even the Seine.”  But it is not as bad as that.  “La Debacle” is a remarkable book, notwithstanding all its faults, but the soldiers, who will read it, will be defeated by those who in the night sing:  “Glory, Glory, Halleluia!”

I consider Zola’s talent as a national misfortune, and I am glad that his times are passing away, that even the most zealous pupils abandon the master who stands alone more and more.

Will humanity remember him in literature?  Will his fame pass?  We cannot affirm, but we can doubt!  In the cycle of Rougon-Macquart there are powerful volumes, as “Germinal” or “La Debacle.”  But in general, that which Zola’s natural talent made for his immortality was spoiled by a liking for dirty realism and his filthy language.  Literature cannot use such expressions of which even peasants are ashamed.  The real truth, if the question is about vicious people, can be attained by other means, by probable reproduction of the state of their