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In "Germinal," Zola, who spent months observing every phase of their life, has given a picture, unsurpassed in any literature, of the misery and degradation of the worker. An investigation in 1874, and indignation at some of the conditions then discovered, brought about modifications of the law.
In late 1999, the "Top 20" the 20 most downloaded authors included Jules Verne at 11 and Emile Zola at 16. They still have a very good ranking in the present "Top 100". As a side remark, the first "images" ever made available by Project Gutenberg were French Cave Paintings, posted in April 1995, with an XHTML version posted in November 2000.
This was notably the case with my version of 'Paris. While that work was passing through the Press M. Zola was already in all the throes of the Dreyfus affair, and somehow, as he has acknowledged to me with regret, he forgot to tell me that at the last moment he had changed the names of several personages in the story.
But in the hearts of how many repentant sinners does there not echo through life a similar mournful refrain. This lesson has been taught by Zola in more than one of his romances. In "A Love Episode" how poignant is this expiation! In all literature there is nothing like the portrayal of the punishment of Helene Grandjean. Helene and little Jeanne are reversions of type.
These poor Giants, of whom Zola would talk, have become so weak and shrunken with time, that nobody is able any longer to make them out, even as dwarfs. The Spanish realists of the same period are the height of the disagreeable. The most repugnant of them all is Pereda.
His recollections of his Dead House are harrowing, and make the literature of prison life, whether written by Hugo, Zola, Tolstoy, or others, like the literary exercise of an amateur. It is this sense of reality, of life growing like grass over one's head, that renders the novels of Dostoïevsky "human documents."
Another typical wrong to the old Rome, or rather to the not-yet Rome, was the building-up, beyond the Tiber, of the Quarter of the Fields, so called, where Zola in his novel of Rome has placed most of the squalor which he so lavishly employs in its contrasts.
Zola had contributed the manuscript of the "Attaque du Moulin," and it was at Maupassant's house that the five young men gave in their contributions. Each one read his story, Maupassant being the last.
I have said that M. Zola is opposed to warfare on principle. His views in this respect have long been shared by me. Life's keenest impressions are those acquired in childhood and youth.
Neither of them seemed to understand that there are limits imposed on each profession by the mode of its operation. For Zola the novel was not only an observation working upon the voluntary acts of life, it was an experiment like that of the astrologers whom Moses met in Egypt producing phenomena artificially, and allowing a law of necessity to be deduced from the result.