e saying that the most insignificant incidents frequently
influence and even shape our careers.

But I must come back to "The Fortune of the Rougons." It has, as I have
said, its satirical and humorous side; but it also contains a strong
element of pathos. The idyll of Miette and Silvere is a very touching
one, and quite in accord with the conditions of life prevailing in
Provence at the period M. Zola selects for his narrative. Miette is
a frank child of nature; Silvere, her lover, in certain respects
foreshadows, a quarter of a century in advance, the Abbe Pierre Fromont
of "Lourdes," "Rome," and "Paris." The environment differs, of course,
but germs of the same nature may readily be detected in both characters.
As for the other personages of M. Zola's book--on the one hand, Aunt
Dide, Pierre Rougon, his wife, Felicite, and their sons Eugene, Aristide
and Pascal, and, on the other, Macquart, his daughter Gervaise of
"L'Assommoir," and his son Jean of "La Terre" and "La Debacle," together
with the members of the Mouret branch of the ravenous, neurotic, duplex
family--these are analysed or sketched in a way which renders their
subsequent careers, as related in other volumes of the series,
thoroughly consistent with their origin and their up-bringing. I venture
to asset that, although it is possible to read individual volumes of
the Rougon-Macquart series while neglecting others, nobody can really
understand any one of these books unless he makes himself acquainted
with the alpha and the omega of the edifice, that is, "The Fortune of
the Rougons" and "Dr. Pascal."

With regard to the present English translation, it is based on one made
for my father several years ago. But to convey M. Zola's meaning more
accurately I have found it necessary to alter, on an average, at least
one sentence out of every three. Thus, though I only claim to edit the
volume, it is, to all intents and purposes, quite a new English version
of M. Zola's work.

E. A. V. MERTON, SURREY: August, 1898.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

I wish to explain how a family, a small group of human beings, conducts
itself in a given social system after blossoming forth and giving birth
to ten or twenty members, who, though they may appear, at the first
glance, profoundly dissimilar one from the other, are, as analysis
demonstrates, most closely linked together from the point of view of
affinity. Heredity, like gravity, has its laws.

By resolving the duplex ques