A Love Episode

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 whole. Frailties are certainly not the whole of human nature. But they cannot be excluded from a comprehensive view of it. The "Rougon-Macquart series" did not carry Zola into the Academy. But the reputation of Moliere has managed to survive a similar exclusion, and so will the fame of Zola, who will be bracketed with Balzac in future classifications of artistic excellence. For twenty-two years, from La Fortune des Rougon, in 1871, to Docteur Pascal in 1893, the series continued to focus the attention of the world, and Zola was the most talked about man in the literature of the epoch. La Fortune des Rougon was introductory.