continue writing and rewriting the same story throughout their lives, it
will, I think, be generally found that the revivals in question are due
to some such reason as that given above.

It should be mentioned that the article of M. Zola's young days to which
I have referred is not one on market life in particular, but one on
violets. It contains, however, a vigorous, if brief, picture of the
Halles in the small hours of the morning, and is instinct with that
realistic descriptive power of which M. Zola has since given so many
proofs. We hear the rumbling and clattering of the market carts, we see
the piles of red meat, the baskets of silvery fish, the mountains of
vegetables, green and white; in a few paragraphs the whole market world
passes in kaleidoscopic fashion before our eyes by the pale, dancing
light of the gas lamps and the lanterns. Several years after the paper
I speak of was published, when M. Zola began to issue "Le Ventre
de Paris," M. Tournachon, better known as Nadar, the aeronaut and
photographer, rushed into print to proclaim that the realistic novelist
had simply pilfered his ideas from an account of the Halles which he
(Tournachon) had but lately written. M. Zola, as is so often his wont,
scorned to reply to this charge of plagiarism; but, had he chosen, he
could have promptly settled the matter by producing his own forgotten
article.

At the risk of passing for a literary ghoul, I propose to exhume some
portion of the paper in question, as, so far as translation can avail,
it will show how M. Zola wrote and what he thought in 1867. After the
description of the markets to which I have alluded, there comes the
following passage:--