Loulou (fam.), Ducky, Darling
Page 82. — i. Je tous salue, Marie, the first words of the French version of the Ave Maria,
Page 34. — i. Bien que ses péchés auraient, etc. Flaubert, independent of grammatical conventions, f requently uses the indicative and the conditional, instead of the subjunctive, in concessive clauses introduced by bien que and quoique. In such cases the indicative and the conditional indicate a categorical statement of fact, or what the author affirma as fact.
Pagre 35* — i. la forêt, Le. the forest of Toucques.
Pagre 86. — i. Ils me l'auront volé ! They hâve probably stolen itfrom me!
Pagre 37. — i. comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI, and, as Charles X, King of France from 1824 to the Révolution of July, 1830, when he was forced to abdicate and go into exile. He died in 1836, about a year previous to this point of the narrative.
Pagre 38. — 1. Epinal, capital of the department of the Vosges, in northeastern France, celebrated for the manufacture of cheap popular pictures.
2. Le Père, etc. Flaubert 's intimate friends advised him to eut out this sentence, as bordering on caricature. (Cf. Zola, Romanciers naturalistes, p. 216).
3. demoiselles de la Vierge, not a regular religions order, but a f ree association of unmarried women, formed for certain pious work in a parish.
Page 40. — 1. Quelquefois, etc. Cf. page 25, note 1. For a similar artificial effect, cf. Chateaubriand, Atala, p. 84 (Calmann Lévy) : " L'astre . . . sortit enfin ... et son premier rayon rencontra l'hostie consacrée, que le prêtre en ce moment même élevait dans les airs."
Page 41. — 1. bonnes femmes, old women,
2. La Simonne, the Simon woman, Mrs, Simon, Observe the popular use of the definite article before women 's names. For the féminine form, Simonne, «f. Balzac, Médecin de campagne, p. 144 (Calmann Lévy): "En vertu d'une coutume romaine encore en usage ici, comme dans quelques autres pays de la France, et qui
consiste à donner aux femmes le nom de leurs maris, en y ajoutant une terminaison féminine/' etc.
Pagre 43. — 1. pierres d'Alençon, smoky quartz crystals found in the granité quarries near Alençon, the capital of the department of the Orne, in northern France.
Page 44. — 1. soleil d'or, i.e. the ostensoir, or monstrance.
2. elle crut voir, etc. Cf. this rhetorical ending with that of la Légende de saint Julien V Hospitalier which Flaubert loved to declaim in a loud voice to his friends.
Early in the year 1880 Zola edited a collection of short stories entitled les Soirées de Médan, so named from Médan, the town in which he had his country résidence. The contributors to this collection were Zola himself, and his five intimate friends, Maupassant, Alexis, Huysmans, Céard, and Hennique. Each one of the stories deals with an épisode of the Franco-Prussian war. Zola's contribution was V Attaque du moulin, which had previously appeared in a Russian periodical. Maupassant furnished his remarkable story Boule de suif, The work of the others is of minor importance. It may be added that in 1893 Zola, in collaboration with Louis Gallet, wrote the libretto of an opéra, with V Attaque du moulin as a basis, the music being composed by his friend Alfred Bruneau.
Pagre 45. — 1. une vraie gaieté, the gayest little place you could imagine.
