Publisher's Synopsis
be so or not, one may safely say that its wide acceptance is due, primarily, to him and to his renowned disciple Zola. 6 In the course of the last century, the designa-tion milieu became not only more generalized and more frequent in use, but also more extensive, and more specific and distinctive in meaning: "Depuis BALZAC [who in 1841 in his Comedie humaine, La maison du chat-qui-pelote, preface, p. 2, used the term loosely, in the "vulgar" sense], le sens vul-gaire du milieu social n'a fait que s'affirmer
