ola in the
Pantheon, with the great men of his land. Few of his contemporaries
who voted against his admission to the Academy will be his neighbours
in the eternal sleep. His admission to the dead Immortals must be
surely the occasion for much wagging of heads, for reams of
platitudinous writing on the subject of fate and its whirligig
caprice.

This stubborn, silent man of violent imagination, copious vocabulary,
and a tenacity unparalleled in literature, knew that a page a day--a
thousand words daily put on paper every day of the year--and for
twenty years, would rear a huge edifice. He stuck to his desk each
morning of his life from the time he sketched the Plan general; he
made such terms with his publishers that he was enabled to live
humbly, yet comfortably, in the beginning with his "dear ones," his
wife and his mother. In return he wrote two volumes a year, and, with
the exception of a few years, his production was as steady as water
flowing from a hydrant. This comparison was once applied to herself by
George Sand, Zola's only rival in the matter of quantity. But Madame
Sand was an improviser; with notes she never bothered herself; in her
letters to Flaubert she laughed over the human documents of Zola, the
elaborate note taking of Daudet, for she was blessed with an excellent
memory and a huge capacity for scribbling. Not so Zola. Each book was
a painful parturition, not the pain of a stylist like Flaubert, but
the Sisyphus-like labor of getting his notes, his facts, his
characters marshalled and moving to a conclusion. Like Anthony
Trollope, when the last page of a book was finished he began another.
He was a workman, not a dilettante of letters.

In 1868 he had blocked out his formidable campaign. Differing with
Balzac in not taking French society as a whole for a subject, he
nevertheless owes, as do all French fiction writers since
1830--Stendhal alone excepted--his literary existence to Balzac;
Balzac, from whom all blessings, all evils, flow in the domain of the
novel; Balzac, realist, idealist, symbolist, naturalist, humourist,
tragedian, comedian, aristocrat, bourgeois, poet, and cleric; Balzac,
truly the Shakespeare of France. The Human Comedy attracted the
synthetic brain of Zola as he often tells us (see L'Oeuvre, where
Sandoz, the novelist, Zola himself, explains to Claude his scheme of a
prose epic). But he was satisfied to take one family under the Second
Empire, the Rougon-Macquarts--these nam