But though that stupendous composition is long meditated, only eight lines of it are actually written. The long winter ends, the spring comes, and Zola turns to enjoy the sun-rays--at times in the Jardin des Plantes, which is near his lodging, at others along the quays of the Seine, where he spends hours among the thousands of second-hand books displayed for sale on the parapets. And all the life of the river, the whole picturesque panorama of the quays as they were then, becomes fixed in his mind, to supply, many years afterwards, the admirable descriptive passages given in the fourth chapter of his novel "L'Œuvre." There it is Claude Lantier who is shown walking the quays with his sweetheart Christine. And Zola was certainly not alone every time that he himself paced them. We know to what a young man's fancy turns in springtime, and he was as human as others. He lived, moreover, in the Quartier Latin, which still retained some of its old freedom of life, in spite of the many changes it was undergoing.
Baron Haussmann had set pick and spade to work there, and many an ancient tenement and court had been swept away in piercing the Rue des Écoles and the Boulevard St. Michel, then called "Boulevard Sebastopol, Rive Gauche." At that time the Chaumière was dead, the Prado also had disappeared, and the Closerie des Lilas--afterwards known as the Bal Bullier--had lately been renovated, in fact transformed, as Privat d'Anglemont recorded in one of the last sketches he wrote prior to his death in 1859. And with the disappearance or alteration of the old dancing places and _tabagies_, with the demolition of many an ancient den and haunt, the inhabitants of the Quartier and their manners and customs were likewise altering. In fact, there was a great crisis in _la vie de Bohême_. But though it was no longer such as it had been pictured by Murger, such as it had appeared to Théodore de Banville, who, recalling his youth, described it briefly yet forcibly a few years later,[4] it would be a mistake to imagine that it was altogether dead. Alphonse Daudet, who arrived in Paris from Nîmes a few months before Zola entered the Lycée St. Louis, has shown that many of the old habits and customs remained. Again, the writer of these pages, who knew the Quartier Latin well in the last years of the Second Empire, can recall that vestiges of its former life clung to it even till the war of 1870. There were still a few tenth-year students, still a few _rapins_, still a few _grisettes_, of a kind, lingering within its precincts. But the war proved the final _coup de grâce_; and the Quartier of the Third Republic with its _chic_ students, its gambling hells, its _demi-monde_, its _filles de brasserie_, its garish vulgarity, its mock propriety, has resembled the old one in little save its studiousness, for, however much, for centuries past, its young men may have amused themselves, whatever their eccentricities, whatever their excesses, they have also studied, accumulated in that same Quartier a rich store of scholarship and science, which has enabled many of them to confer benefits on mankind.