intervention of certain friends of his late father to continue his studies, and became a day pupil at the Lycee St. Louis, on the Boulevard St. Michael.  For some reason he made little progress there, and when he presented himself for his baccalaureat degree he failed to pass the examination.  A later attempt at the University of Marseilles had the same result.  As this examination is in France the passport to all the learned professions, Zola’s failure to pass it placed him in a serious position.  His mother’s resources were by this time entirely exhausted, and some means of support had to be sought without delay.  After many attempts, he got a place as clerk in a business house at a salary of twenty-six pounds a year, but the work proved so distasteful that after two months of drudgery he threw it up.  Then followed a period of deep misery, but a period which must have greatly influenced the work of the future novelist.  Wandering the streets by day and, when he could find money to buy a candle, writing poems and short stories by night, he was gaining that experience in the school of life of which he was later to make such splendid use.  Meantime his wretchedness was deep.  A miserable lodging in a garret, insufficient food, inadequate clothing, and complete absence of fire may be an incentive to high endeavour, but do not render easy the pathway of fame.  The position had become all but untenable when Zola received an appointment in the publishing house of M. Hachette, of Paris, at a salary beginning at a pound a week, but soon afterwards increased.  During the next two years he wrote a number of short stories which were published later under the title Contes a Ninon.  The book did not prove a great success, though its undoubted ability attracted attention to the writer and opened the way to some journalistic work.  About this time he appears to have been studying Balzac, and the recently published Madame Bovary of Flaubert, which was opening up a new world not only in French fiction, but in the literature of Europe.  He had also read the Germinie Lacerteux of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, on which he wrote an appreciative article, and this remarkable book cannot have been without its influence on his work.  The effect was indeed immediate, for in 1865 he published his next book, La Confession de Claud, which showed strong traces of that departure from conventional fiction which he was afterwards to make more pronounced.  The book was not a financial success, though it attracted attention, and produced many reviews, some favourable, others merciless.  Influenced by the latter, the Public Prosecutor caused inquiries regarding the author to be made at Hachette’s, but nothing more was done, and it is indeed doubtful if any successful prosecution could have been raised, even at a period when it was thought necessary to indict the author of Madame Bovary.