_L’Assommoir_ was an immediate success with the public, and the sales were unusually large for the time, while now (1912) they amount to one hundred and sixty-two thousand copies in the original French alone.
In 1878 Zola published _Une Page d’Amour_, the next volume of the series, a simple love story containing some very beautiful and romantic descriptions of Paris. Then followed _Nana_, to which _L’Assommoir_ was the prelude. _Nana_ dealt with the vast demimonde of Paris, and while it was his greatest popular success, was in every sense his worst book. Of no subject on which he wrote was Zola more ignorant than of this, and the result is a laboured collection of scandals acquired at second-hand. Mr. Arthur Symons, in his _Studies in Prose and Verse_, recounts how an English paper once reported an interview in which the author of _Nana_, indiscreetly questioned as to the amount of personal observation he had put into the book, replied that he had once lunched with an actress of the Varietes. “The reply was generally taken for a joke,” says Mr. Symons, “but the lunch was a reality, and it was assuredly a rare experience in the life of a solitary diligence to which we owe so many impersonal studies in life.” The sales of the book were, however, enormous, and Zola’s financial position was now assured.
Publication of the Rougon-Macquart series went steadily on. _Pot-Bouille_ a story of middle-class life, was followed by its sequel _Au Bonheur des Dames_, a study of life in one of the great emporiums which were beginning to crush out the small shopkeepers of Paris. _La Joie de Vivre_, that drab story of hypochondria and self-sacrifice, was succeeded by _Germinal_, the greatest, if not the only really great, novel of labour that has ever been written in any language. After _Germinal_ came _L’Oeuvre_, which deals with art life in Paris, and is in part an autobiography of the author. We now come to _La Terre_ around which the greatest controversy has raged. In parts the book is Shakespearian in its strength and insight, but it has to be admitted at once that the artistic quality of the work has been destroyed in large measure by the gratuitous coarseness which the author has thought necessary to put into it. Even allowing for the fact that the subject is the brutishness and animality of French peasant life, and admitting that the picture drawn may be a true one, the effect had been lessened by the fact that nothing has been left to the imagination. On the other hand there has, since Shakespeare, been nothing so fine as the treatment of Pere Fouan, that peasant King Lear, by his ungrateful family. It has been urged that Zola overdid the horrors of the situation and that no parent would have been so treated by his children. By a singular chance a complete answer to this objection may be found in a paragraph which appeared in the _Daily Mail_ of 18th April, 1911. A few days before, a peasant woman in France had entered her father’s bedroom and struck him nine times on the head with an axe, afterwards going home to bed. The reason for the crime was that the old man two years previously had divided his property between his two daughters on condition that they paid him a monthly allowance. His elder daughter was always in arrear with her share of the pension, and, after constant altercations between father and daughter, the latter extinguished her liability in the manner indicated. Now this tragedy in real life is the actual plot of _La Terre_, which was written twenty-four years before it occurred.