Excerpt from Fruitfulness: Fécondité This, then, is M. Zola’s reply to the cry repeatedly raised by his hero, Abbé Pierre Froment, in the pages of Lourdes, Paris, and Rome: A new religion, 3 new religion! Critics of those works were careful to point out that no real answer was ever returned to the Abbé’s despairing call; and it must be confessed that one must yet wait for the greater part of that answer, since Fruitfulness, though complete as a narrative, forms but a portion of the whole. It is only after the publication of the succeeding volumes that one will be able to judge how far M. Zola’s doctrines and theories in their ensemble may appeal to the requirements of the World.