However, the greatest fault is not here; but rather in the delineation of character. Zola, who, in my opinion, has admirably depicted people poisoned by alcohol, and the common middle classes of the towns and of the country, has not studied criminals according to nature: undoubtedly because the latter are not so easily met with; nor allow themselves to be studied even in prisons. Zola's figures of criminals give me the false pictorial effect produced by certain photographs taken from portraits, and not from the living subjects. For this reason it is then that I, who have studied thousands and thousands of criminals, should not know how to class his Roubaud, a good clerk and a good husband, who on accidentally discovering the secret of the old amours of his wife with Grandmorin, which were not yet done with, throws himself upon her, wishes to kill her, finally changes his mind, and ends by deciding on the murder of the pseudo-adulterer, with the complicity of his wife. Can he be called a criminal through passion? But then it is _she_ that he should have killed, or at least the adulterer being killed he should have repented of it. And again, criminals through passion are, like Roubaud, very good and respectable people, but in their crimes they rush blindly and headlong forward, without accomplices, without premeditation, and without artifices. And they repent, they confess: they are the only criminals who feel remorse. He has no remorse; for some time he leads a life of revenge, and, afterwards, suddenly, he gives himself up to vice, to wine, to gambling, and forgets his wife, and he is jealous of her no more; on the contrary, indifferent, he assists in her infidelities. Can he be called a born criminal, a _bête_? But then how explain that he had lived so long without vices, free from debauchery, and that he had been so good a clerk? He could still be a criminal incidentally; but for a correct, steady, quiet man, as a railway official ought to be, would the discovery of the old amour of his wife be a proportionate reason for him to commit a premeditated murder, the greatest of crimes? And then, as we shall see, criminaloids are born criminals in part; they have many of the latters' psychological and physical characteristics. Now Roubaud has a full beard, red hair, and quick eyes: the only anomalies are meeting eyebrows, a low forehead, and a flat head: nothing is said of hysterical or epileptical ancestors.