The text of The Novel of an Invertthe passionate confessions of a young Italian homosexual-appeared for the first time in 1894-1895 in several successive installments in Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle / Archives of Criminal Anthropology, a journal of psychology and sociology edited by Alexandre Lacassagne. These articles were published under the name of Dr. Laupts. He reissued them in 1896 in his work Tares et poisons: Perversion et perversité sexuelles / Defects and Poisons: Sexual

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... ion and Perversity, which was published by the publishing house Georges Carré in Paris. The cover announced in bold type a "preface" by Émile Zola. A new edition appeared in bookstores much later, in 1910, which included the initial letters but also a "sequel"-a follow-up letter written to the doctor after the anonymous author discovered his "confessions" in a medical treatise. This time, however, the editor revealed his true identity by appending to it his own name, Georges Saint-Paul; "Laupts" was an anagram-an inversion of his real name. The identity of the author remained unknown.¹ Therefore, almost fifteen years passed before the sequel of these scandalous confessions saw the light of day. Its publication-and the difficulties arising from it-include a number of concerns. In effect, three obstacles had to be overcome to prevent legal complications or to allay readers' fears: (1) the scientific apparatus had to be situated primarily in a system Alain Pages is the editor of Les Cahiers Naturalistes. He has published La Bataille litteraire (1989), Le Naturalisme (1989), Émile Zola de "J'accuse" au Pantheon (2008), Une journee dans l'affaire Dreyfus (2011), Zola et le groupe de Medan (2014), and L'affaire Dreyfus: Verites et legendes (2019). In collaboration with Brigitte Émile-Zola, he has also collected and published Zola's intimate letters to his mistress, Lettres à Jeanne Rozeot (2004), and to his wife, Lettres à Alexandrine (2015).