Robert M. Viti is Professor of French at Gettysburg College, where he has taught since 1971. His articles on Stendhal, Maupassant and Zola have appeared in French Review, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Symposium, Les cahiers naturalistes, Romance Notes, French Studies, and Dalhousie French Studies. The present essay, his tenth on Zola's novels and short-stories, is an expanded version of a paper delivered at the Cincinnati Conference on Romance Languages and Literatures.