endow her with any number of qualities, invent endless mad
adventures, watch her and hear her talk through the prism of my
imagination.' And this is the same man who, when his Thérèse
Raquin is due to appear, after declaring that he has put into the
book his flesh and blood, wonders whether he has not 'put a little
too much flesh into it' and whether the Public Prosecutor may not
send him to cool off in the cells.

What had happened in these few years to bring about so abrupt
and absolute a transformation? Zola grew up, of course; but that
is a statement of the process, not an explanation, neither is it a very
helpful statement; for in 1860 Zola was no longer an adolescent,
though in him the candour of adolescence does seem to have been
prolonged exceptionally into early manhood. Evidently there was
a certain stunting of emotional growth, a hindrance which, once
removed, released a sudden surge of energy. After that, the pattern
of Zola's character and outlook takes on a more or less final shape.
Behind the big-eyed, smoke-wreathed dreamer straight from
school, it is hard to discern the slick and lively journalist he was
shortly to turn into; but there is no great gap between the enter-
prising newspaperman and the burly builder of the later grandiose
and immensely profitable prose epics.

We are tempted to conclude that the latter stage was the funda-
mental one, and that there was needed, for the essential Zola to
begin living and working, some kind of psychological shock analo-
gous to the biological one that determines the emergence of the
insect from the chrysalis. To this shock, certain of his experiences in
the struggle to earn a living probably contributed. But there is no
accounting for the revolutionary reversal of values that has just been
illustrated, unless it is admitted that there was something quite arti-
ficial and fortuitous in Zola's state of mind during his phase of
delightful but penurious day-dreaming.

This state of mind is admirably reflected in the series of intermi-
nable letters that Zola sent to his two old school-friends, Jean-
Baptistin Baille and Paul Cézanne, after he had settled in Paris and
while they were still in the south. ¹ These letters tell us little about

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