The wind entered in slight puffs, rustling the curtains to and fro; but Helene was quite unconscious of it. Yet the shawl had slipped off her shoulders, and her hair had become unwound, with wanton tresses sweeping down to her hips. She had left her arms free and uncovered, that she might be the more ready; and she had forgotten all, absorbed entirely in her love for her child Jeanne. And Dr. Deberle, busy above the child, no longer thought of his unbuttoned coat, or of the shirt-collar Jeanne's clutch had torn away. "It has all passed away now," said the doctor in a whisper, who had not yet looked at Helene. Now he raised his eyes, and could scarcely refrain from smiling, so hale and hearty was she in every way. Never had he seen such classical beauty. Tall and commanding, she was a nut-brown Juno, with gleams of gold in her skin and hair. When she slowly turned her head, its profile showed the severe purity of a statue. Her grey eyes and pearly teeth lit up her whole face. But what astonished the doctor was the superbness of her whole figure. She stood there -- a model of queenliness, chastity, and modesty, gazing back at him. French author Emile Zola (1840-1902), author of Nana and Theresa Raquin, wrote the series of novels Les Rougon-Macquart, of which A Love Episode is one, as "a physiological history of the Second Empire" -- and as a penetrating depiction of human strengths and foibles. In Zola there is the theorist and the writer, the poet, the scientist and the optimist features that are basically joined together in his own confession of positivism; later in his life, when he saw his own position turning into an anachronism, he would still style himself with irony and sadness over the lost cause as "an old and rugged Positivist.""