could see the "power" of which the thing was "effect" (to borrow
one half of a celebrated aphorism of Hobbes's); but it must have been a
curious taste to which (borrowing the other) the books were "a cause of
pleasure." _La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret_ rose to a much higher level. To
regard it as merely an attack on clerical celibacy is to take a very
obvious and limited view of it. It is so, of course, but it is much
more. The picture of the struggle between conscience and passion is, for
once, absolutely true and human. There is no mistake in the psychology;
there is no resort to "sculduddery"; there is no exaggeration of any
kind, or, if there is any, it is in a horticultural extravagance--a
piece of fairy Bower-of-Bliss scene-painting, in part of the book, which
is in itself almost if not quite beautiful--a Garden of Eden provided
for a different form of temptation.[472] There is no poetry in _La
Conquete de Plassans_ or in _Le Ventre de Paris_; but the one is a
digression, not yet scavenging, into country life, and the other empties
one of M. Zola's note-books on a theme devoted to the Paris Markets--the
famous "Halles" which Gerard had done so lightly and differently long
before.[473] The key of this latter is pretty well kept in one of the
most famous books of the whole series, _L'Assommoir_, where the
beastlier side of pot-house sotting receives hundreds of pages to do
what William Langland had done better five centuries earlier in a few
score lines. _Pot-Bouille_--ascending a little in the social but not in
the spiritual scale--deals with lower middle-class life, and _Au Bonheur
des Dames_ with the enormous "stores" which, beginning in America, had
already spread through Paris to London. _Une Page d'Amour_ recovers
something of the nobler tone of _L'Abbe Mouret_; and _La Joie de
Vivre_--a title, as will readily be guessed, ironical in
intention--still keeps out of the gutter. _Nana_ may be said, combining
decency with exactitude, to stand in the same relation to the service of
Venus as _L'Assommoir_ does to that of Bacchus, though one apologises to
both divinities for so using their names. It was supposed, like other
books of the kind, to be founded on fact--the history of a certain young
person known as Blanche d'Antigny--and charitable critics have pleaded
for it as a healthy corrective or corrosive to the morbid tone of
sentimentality-books like _La Dame aux Camelias_. I never could find
much amusement in the book,