Zola, however, replied very naturally, frankly, and boldly, that he, Flaubert, possessed a small fortune and was therefore able to disregard all sorts of considerations, whereas he, Zola, had been obliged to earn his living by his pen and undertake at times all kinds of writing, even contemptible work. "What I write," he added, "may be divided into two parts. There are my books by which I am judged, and by which I desire to be judged, and there are my critical notices in 'Le Bien Public,' my Russian articles, and my correspondence for Marseilles which I regard as of no account, which I reject, and which I only undertake in order to help on my books. I first placed a nail in position and with the stroke of a hammer I drove it half an inch into the brain of the public, then with a second blow I drove it in an inch. Well, my hammer is the newspaper work which I myself do round my own books."[23]
Nothing could have been more frank than this, not even his remark on the same occasion—in reply evidently to some criticism of Flaubert's, which Goncourt does not exactly specify,—that he cared not a rap for the word "naturalism," and yet intended to repeat it, because things required christening in order that the public might regard them as new.[24] In all this one traces the determination to succeed at any cost, the fighting spirit which had prompted Zola to write to Antony Valabrègue, more than ten years previously, that he belonged to an impatient age, that if he did not trample others under foot they would pass over him, and that he did not desire to be crushed by fools. Thus, whatever might be his contempt for the weapons of his time—advertisement and pushfulness—he readily made use of them, feeling that if he neglected to do so, amid all the stress, all the fierce competition around him, he might well go under and fail to reach the goal, in spite of the talent of which he was conscious. The battle of the age was the keenest there had ever been, a man could only triumph by incessantly thrusting himself forward, and Zola, for his part, did so without hesitation.
[1] Zola's "Documents Littéraires," p. 178.
[2] "Journal des Goncourt," Vol. IV, p. 44.
[3] "Le Ventre de Paris," Paris, Charpentier, 1873, 2 editions, 18mo, 362 pages; 3d edition, 1876, 18mo, 358 pages. From this point all the volumes of the ordinary edition of "Les Rougon-Macquart" were priced at 3 francs 50 centimes. The forty-seventh thousand of "Le Ventre de Paris" (Charpentier edition) was on sale in 1903. There is also an edition illustrated with wood engravings. Paris, Flammarion, n. d. large 8vo.
[4] Alphonse Daudet's "Trente ans de Paris," 1888. There are numerous discrepancies in the accounts which Daudet, Zola, and Goncourt have left of some of these dinners; but the author has endeavoured to give a general idea of them.
[5] "Journal des Goncourt," Vol. V, p. 173.
[6] Zola's "Les Romanciers Naturalistes," p. 181.