Piping Hot! (Pot-Bouille): A Realistic Novel

Piping Hot! (Pot-Bouille): A Realistic Novel

One day, in the middle of a long literary conversation, Thodore Duret said to me: I have known in my life two men of supreme intelligence. I knew of both before the world knew of either. Never did I doubt, nor was it possible to doubt, but that they would one day or other gain the highest distinctionsthose men were Lon Gambetta and mile Zola. Of Zola I am able to speak, and I can thoroughly realise how interesting it must have been to have watched him, at that time, when he was poor and unknown, obtaining acceptance of his articles with difficulty, and surrounded by the feeble and trivial in spirit, who, out of inborn ignorance and acquired idiocy, look with ridicule on those who believe that there is still a new word to say, still a new cry to cry. I did not know mile Zola in those days, but he must have been then as he is now, and I should find it difficult to understand how any man of average discrimination could speak with him for half-an-hour without recognising that he was one of those mighty monumental intelligences, the statues of a century, that remain and are gazed upon through the long pages of the worlds history. This, at least, is the impression mile Zola has always produced upon me. I have seen him in company, and company of no mean order, and when pitted against his compeers, the contrast has only made him appear grander, greater, nobler. The witty, the clever Alphonse Daudet, ever as ready for a supper party as a literary discussion, with all his splendid gifts, can do no more when Zola speaks than shelter himself behind an epigram; Edmond De Goncourt, aristocratic, dignified, seated amid his Japanese watercolours, bronzes, and Louis XV. furniture, bitterly admits, if not that there is a greater naturalistic god than he, at least that there is a colossus whose strength he is unable to oppose. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 54686
Author: Zola, Émile
Release Date: May 8, 2017
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Illustrator: Bellenger, Georges