and forthwith returns to the Church. A further struggle between the
contending forces then certainly ensues, and ends in the final victory
of the Church. But it must at least be said that in the lapses which
occur in real life among the Roman priesthood, the circumstances are
altogether different from those which M. Zola has selected for his
story.

The truth is that in 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret,' betwixt lifelike
glimpses of French rural life, the author transports us to a realm of
poesy and imagination. This is, indeed, so true that he has introduced
into his work all the ideas on which he had based an early unfinished
poem called 'Genesis.' He carries us to an enchanted garden, the
Paradou--a name which one need hardly say is Provencal for Paradise*
--and there Serge Mouret, on recovering from brain fever, becomes, as it
were, a new Adam by the side of a new Eve, the fair and winsome Albine.
All this part of the book, then, is poetry in prose. The author has
remembered the ties which link Rousseau to the realistic school of
fiction, and, as in the pages of Jean-Jacques, trees, springs,
mountains, rocks, and flowers become animated beings and claim their
place in the world's mechanism. One may indeed go back far beyond
Rousseau, even to Lucretius himself; for more than once we are
irresistibly reminded of Lucretian scenes, above which through M. Zola's
pages there seems to hover the pronouncement of Sophocles:

No ordinance of man shall override
The settled laws of Nature and of God;
Not written these in pages of a book,
Nor were they framed to-day, nor yesterday;
We know not whence they are; but this we know,
That they from all eternity have been,