A Love Episode by Émile Zola

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Produced by Dagny, John Bickers and David Widger,

PREPARER'S NOTE

This eBook was prepared from the edition published by the Societe des Beaux-Arts in 1905 for the Comedie d'Amour Series. Registered copy Number 153 of 500.

[Illustration: Comedie d'Amour Series]

A LOVE EPISODE

EMILE ZOLA

ILLUSTRATED BY DANTAN

[Illustration: Emile Zola]

ZOLA AND HIS WRITINGS

Emile Zola was born in Paris, April 2, 1840. His father was Francois Zola, an Italian engineer, who constructed the Canal Zola in Provence. Zola passed his early youth in the south of France, continuing his studies at the Lycee St. Louis, in Paris, and at Marseilles. His sole patrimony was a lawsuit against the town of Aix. He became a clerk in the publishing house of Hachette, receiving at first the modest honorarium of twenty-five francs a week. His journalistic career, though marked by immense toil, was neither striking nor remunerative. His essays in criticism, of which he collected and published several volumes, were not particularly successful. This was evidently not his field. His first stories, _Les Mysteres de Marseilles_ and _Le Voeu d'Une Morte_ fell flat, disclosing no indication of remarkable talent. But in 1864 appeared _Les Contes a Ninon_, which attracted wide attention, the public finding them charming. _Les Confessions de Claude_ was published in 1865. In this work Zola had evidently struck his gait, and when _Therese Raquin_ followed, in 1867, Zola was fully launched on his great career as a writer of the school which he called "Naturalist." _Therese Raquin_ was a powerful study of the effects of remorse preying upon the mind. In this work the naturalism was generally characterized as "brutal," yet many critics admitted that it was absolutely true to nature. It had, in fact, all the gruesome accuracy of a clinical lecture. In 1868 came _Madeleine Ferat_, an exemplification of the doctrine of heredity, as inexorable as the "Destiny" of the Greek tragedies of old.

And now dawned in Zola's teeming brain the vast conception of a "Naturalistic Comedy of Life." It was to be Balzac "naturalized," so to speak. The great cycle should run through the whole gamut of human passions, foibles, motives and interests. It should consist of human documents, of painstaking minuteness of detail and incontrovertible truth.

The idea of destiny or heredity permeates all the works of this portentously ambitious series. Details may be repellant. One should not "smell" a picture, as the artists say. If one does, he gets an impression merely of a small blotch of paint. The vast canvas should be studied as a

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