French painters have made subjects of many episodes in M. Zola's works,
but none has been more popular with them than Albine's pathetic,
perfumed death amidst the flowers. I know several paintings of great
merit which that touching incident has inspired.

Albine, if more or less unreal, a phantasm, the spirit as it were of
Nature incarnate in womanhood, is none the less the most delightful of
M. Zola's heroines. She smiles at us like the vision of perfect beauty
and perfect love which rises before us when our hearts are yet young and
full of illusions. She is the ideal, the very quintessence of woman.

In Serge Mouret, her lover, we find a man who, in more than one respect,
recalls M. Zola's later hero, the Abbe Froment of 'Lourdes' and 'Rome.'
He has the same loving, yearning nature; he is born--absolutely like
Abbe Froment--of an unbelieving father and a mother of mystical mind.
But unlike Froment he cannot shake off the shackles of his priesthood.
Reborn to life after his dangerous illness, he relapses into the
religion of death, the religion which regards life as impurity, which
denies Nature's laws, and so often wrecks human existence, as if indeed
that had been the Divine purpose in setting man upon earth. His
struggles suggest various passages in 'Lourdes' and 'Rome.' In fact, in
writing those works, M. Zola must have had his earlier creation in mind.
There are passages in 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' culled from the
writings of the Spanish Jesuit Fathers and the 'Imitation' of Thomas a
Kempis that recur almost word for word in the Trilogy of the Three
Cities. Some might regard this as evidence of the limitation of M.
Zola's powers, but I think differently. I consider that he has in both
instances designedly taken the same type of priest in order to show how
he may live under varied circumstances; for in the earlier instance he