ten, twenty individuals, who seem at first glance profoundly dissimilar, but who are shown through analysis to be intimately linked to one another. Heredity has its own laws, just like gravity. I will attempt to find and to follow, by resolving the double question of temperaments and environments, the thread that leads mathematically from one man to another." Although Zola and Cézanne were friends from childhood, they experienced a falling out later in life over Zola's fictionalised depiction of Cézanne and the Bohemian life of painters in Zola's novel L'Œuvre (The Masterpiece, 1886). From 1877, with the publication of L'Assommoir, Émile Zola became wealthy; he was better paid than Victor Hugo, for example. Because L'Assommoir was such a success, Zola was able to renegotiate his contract with his publisher Georges Charpentier to receive more than 14% royalties and the exclusive rights to serial publication in the press. Subsequently, sales of L'Assommoir were even exceeded by those of Nana (1880) and La Débâcle (1892). He became a figurehead among the literary bourgeoisie and organised cultural dinners with Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and other writers at his luxurious villa (worth 300,000 francs) in Médan, near Paris, after 1880. Despite being nominated several times, Zola was never elected to the . Zola's output also included novels on population (Fécondité) and work (Travail), a number of plays, and several volumes of criticism. He wrote every day for around 30 years, and took as his motto ("not a day without a line"). The self-proclaimed leader of French naturalism, Zola's works inspired operas such as those of Gustave Charpentier, notably Louise in the 1890s. His works were inspired by the concept of heredity and milieu (Claude Bernard and Hippolyte Taine) and by the realism of Balzac and Flaubert. He also provided the libretto for several operas by Alfred Bruneau, including Messidor (1897) and L'Ouragan (1901); several of Bruneau's other operas are adapted from Zola's writing. These provided a French alternative to Italian verismo. He is considered to be a significant influence on those writers that are credited with the creation of the so-called new journalism: Wolfe, Capote, Thompson, Mailer, Didion, Talese and others. Tom Wolfe wrote that his goal in writing fiction was to document contemporary society in the tradition of John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, and Émile Zola. Dreyfus affair Captain Alfred Dreyfus was a French-Jewish artillery officer in the French army. In September 1894,