It is by his huge novels and principally by those of the Rougon-Macquart series that M. Zola is known to the public and to the critics. Nevertheless he has found time during the thirty years of his busy literary career to publish about as many small stories now comprised in four separate volumes. It is natural that his novels should present so very much wider and more attractive a subject for analysis that so far as I can discover even in France no critic has hitherto taken the shorter productions separately and discussed M. Zola as a maker of contes. Yet there is a very distinct interest in seeing how such a thunderer or bellower on the trumpet can breathe through silver and as a matter of fact the short stories reveal a M. Zola considerably dissimilar to the author of "Nana" and of "La Terre" a much more optimistic romantic and gentle writer. If moreover he had nowhere assailed the decencies more severely than he does in these thirty or forty short stories he would never have been named among the enemies of Mrs. Grundy and the gates of the Palais Mazarin would long ago have been opened to receive him. It is indeed to a lion with his mane en papillotes that I here desire to attract the attention of English readers; to a man-eating monster indeed but to one who is on his best behaviour and blinking in the warm sunshine of Provence