From the Preface. The following pages from Zola, which the translator believes are now for the first time offered in English, were selected from two volumes published by Charpentier. The novel "Pour Une Nuit d'Amour" appeared in conjunction with "Le Captaine Burle" and some other fiction in a volume which was in its ninth thousand in 1885. "La Vierge au Girage" and "Les Repoussoirs," together with two other bits which the author called "Les Vielles aux Yeux Bleus" and "L'Amour Sous Les Toits," which I have not thought quite distinctive enough to include in these selections, were entitled as a group Esquisses Parisiennes, and appeared in a volume to which the tale Le Voeu d'Une Morte gave its name, published by the same firm a little later -"Nouvelle edition 1889." So much for the bibliography. I cannot be more detailed for lack of information. It is interesting to notice from a note presumably furnished by Zola himself that the source of the plot of the psychopathic novel "For A Night" is in Casanova. There is something distinctly of the moment in both the matter and the treatment: much more so in the former, for I am not quite certain that Mr Newte, Dr Sudermann or even Upton Sinclair would have caught and preserved the rarified calm and perfect simplicity of the atmosphere of "the little town of P.... "(which I have called Pinard for the smoothness of the English) and the limpidity of the Chanteclair.