works; or rather one should say that he merely skimmed them, going with an instinct of which he was rather proud, to the one page, the one phrase that would be of use to him. Often a work of five hundred pages would give him only a single note which he painstakingly transcribed; often also such a volume would give him nothing at all. Here we find an explanation of the seven years which he spent on an average on each one of his books; for he lost at least four in his preparatory readings.
And as he read, his notes piled up, overflowed his portfolios, became unwieldy, mountainous. To give some idea of his conscientiousness in gathering material, Zola mentions that before writing L' Education Sentimentale he ran through the entire collection of Charivari, in order to saturate himself with the spirit of petty journalism, under Louis-Philippe; and that it was out of the words found in that collection that he created the char-
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