The Attack on the Mill and Other Sketches of War

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