"The Four Days of Jean Gourdon" (Les Quatre Journees de Jean Gourdon; 1874, in: Nouveaux Contes a Ninon) deserves to rank among the very best things to which Zola has signed his name. It is a study of four typical days in the life of a Provencal peasant of the better sort, told by the man himself... --- In the first of these it is "Spring": Jean Gourdon is eighteen years of age, and he steals away from the house of his uncle Lazare, a country priest, that he may meet his coy sweetheart Babet by the waters of the broad Durance... Next follows a day in "Summer," five years later; Jean, as a soldier in the Italian war, goes through the horrors of a battle and is wounded. This episode, which has something in common with the "Sevastopol" of Tolstoy, is exceedingly ingenious in its observation of the sentiments of a common man under fire... The "Autumn" of the story occurs fifteen years later. Jean and Babet have now long been married. They are rich, healthy, devoted to one another,...