ZOLA 



6414 



ZOLLVEREIN 



the morning, extending upward from the posi- 

 tion of the sun. The light is brightest near the 

 tun. and it shades off by almost imperceptible 

 gradations. It was formerly supposed that 

 this light was never visible except in or near 

 the zodiac, and to this supposition the name is 

 due. It is admitted that the light proceeds 

 from a region surrounding the sun, but the 

 actual cause of such light is still a matter un- 

 .1 by astronomers. 



ZO'LA, in French zolah' , EMILE EDOUARD 

 CHARLES AXTOINE (1840-1902), a French novel- 

 was born at Paris, and educated at Aix. 

 Paris and Marseilles. Between 1859 and 1862 

 he was in extreme poverty, and several times 

 close to the 

 starving point. 

 Early in 1862 he 

 was glad to ac- 

 cept a position as 

 a clerk at the 

 equivalent of five 

 dollars a week in 

 a Paris publish- 

 ing house, and 

 while in this 

 work he began to 

 write. His first 

 book, Tales by 

 \inon, appeared 

 in 1864 and met with so little success that Zola 

 almost despaired of making any headway in 

 literature. In 1866, however, he bravely gave 

 up his work as a clerk to risk writing for a liv- 

 ing, and the next year his strong, stirring, but 

 rather morbid, novel, Therese Raquin, won him 

 fame and fortune. Like so many of his books, 

 it dealt with the sordid and sinful life of the 

 underworld of Paris. 



He next undertook a truly immense task in 

 telling in several volumes the story of an 

 imaginary Parisian family of the middle part 

 of the nineteenth century. He determined to 

 show in detail and with unsparing realism how 

 some of the family rose and how others sank, 

 and throughout the series the world should be 

 given such pictures of life in Paris as had never 

 before been known. The entire work is known 

 as The Chronicles oj the Rougon-Macquart 

 Family, and opens with a novel entitled The 

 Fortune oj Rougon. Others in the masterly 

 series are The Curie, The Conquest oj Plas- 

 sans, The Abbe Mouret and His Excellency, 

 Engine Rougon. The entire chronicle can be 

 compared only with another masterly French 

 series, The Human Comedy, by Balzac. In 



EMILE ZOLA 



1877 Zola wrote The Dram Shop, a novel which 

 so vividly described the consequences of drunk- 

 enness that all Europe was stirred by it. This 

 was followed by such gloomy but powerful 

 stories as Nona; Paris, dealing with the hidden 

 life of the Parisian population; Labor, discuss- 

 ing the problems of the hand worker, and Rome, 

 dealing with the Church. 



Estimate of His Work. Zola must ever be 

 considered one of the keenest observers in the 

 world's ranks of writers; he seemed to know 

 every phase of life and every motive back of a 

 good or evil deed. He preferred to deal with 

 the less noble qualities of men, their greed, 

 their temper and their lust, and with such 

 themes his stories sweep onward with a gloomy 

 power like that of a dark, deep river. The 

 usual lightness and daintiness of French au- 

 thors he did not possess; the subjects are -often 

 too horrible for any fanciful playing with stylo. 

 His chief defect is that he chose only one side 

 of life to describe, the side found in the darker 

 recesses of a great city; but the fact remains 

 that what he tells about really exists as he pic- 

 tured it. 



Champion of Dreyfus. In January, 1898, 

 Zola took an important part in the defense of 

 Captain Dreyfus, a French Jew unjustly ac- 

 cused of selling military secrets to Germany. 

 The novelist published a terrific denunciation 

 of French government officials, entitled / Ac- 

 cuse, and late in 1898 he was forced to flee to 

 England. The brave letter had much to do 

 with freeing Dreyfus in June, 1899, after which 

 event Zola returned to Paris. He lived in that 

 city until his death, on September 29, 1902, 

 which was caused by fumes from a defective 

 flue in his bedroom. He was given a public 

 funeral by the French government, and the 

 famous French author, Anatole France, de- 

 livered at his grave one of the most eloquent 

 orations of modern times. 



Consult Matthews' French Dramatists of the 

 Nineteenth Century; Vizetelly's With Zola in 

 England. 



ZOLLVEREIN, tsohl'jerin, the German 

 word for customs union, a term applied to the 

 commercial union between Prussia and the 

 other states of Germany which prepared the 

 way for the political union which culminated in 

 the German Empire in 1871. 



At the close of the Thirty Years' War Ger- 

 many was nothing more than a collection of 

 little states, each one glorying in its inde- 

 pendence and striving to build up its own petty 

 power without regard to national unity. Inter- 



