One day when he had been dipping into English papers and books he tackled me on rather a curious point.  ‘Why is it,’ said he, ’that the Englishman when he writes of himself should invariably use a capital letter?  That tall “I” which recurs so often in a personal narrative strikes me as being very arrogant.  A Frenchman, referring to himself, writes je with a small j; a German, though he may gratify all his substantives with capital letters, employs a small i in writing ich; a Spaniard, when he uses the personal pronoun at all, bestows a small y on his yo, while he honours the person he addresses with a capital V.  I believe, indeed—­though I am not sufficiently acquainted with foreign languages to speak with certainty on the point—­that the Englishman is the only person in the world who applies a capital letter to himself.  That “I” strikes me as the triumph of egotism.  It is tall, commanding, and so brief!  “I”—­and that suffices.  How did it originate?’

It was difficult for me to answer M. Zola on the point; I am a very poor scholar in such a matter, and I could find nothing on the subject in any work of reference I had by me.  I surmised, however, that the capital I, as a personal pronoun, was a survival of the time when English, whether written or printed, was studded with capitals, even as German is to-day.  If I am wrong, perhaps some one who knows better will correct me.  One thing I have often noticed is that a child’s first impulse is to write ‘i,’ and that it is only after admonition that the aggressive and egotistical ‘I’ supplants the humbler form of the letter.  This did not surprise M. Zola, since vanity, like most other vices, is acquired, not inherent in our natures.  But in a chaffing way he suggested that one might write a very humorous essay on the English character by taking as one’s text that tall, stiff, and self-assertive letter ‘I.’

How far M. Zola actually carried his study of English I could hardly say, but during the last months of his exile he more than once astonished me by his knowledge of an irregular verb or of the correct comparative and superlative of an adjective.  And if he seldom attempted to speak English, he at least made considerable progress in reading it.  By the time he returned to France he could always understand any Dreyfus news in the English papers.  Of course the language in which the news was couched was of great help to him, as in three instances out of four it was simply direct translation from the French.

In this connection, while praising many features of the English Press, M. Zola more than once expressed to me his surprise that so much of the Paris news printed in London should be simply taken from Paris journals.  Some correspondents, said he, never seemed to go anywhere or to see anybody themselves.  They purely and simply extracted everything from newspapers.  This he was able to check by means of the many Paris prints which he received regularly.