Unfortunately, too, Hugo not merely cannot, or at any rate does not, give the hungry sheep their proper food--an interesting story worked out by interesting characters--but will persist in giving them things as suitable (granting them to be in the abstract nourishing) as turnips to the carnivora or legs of mutton to the sheep which walk on them. It would, of course, not be just to press too strongly the objections to the novel of purpose, though to the present writer they seem almost insuperable. But it is not merely purpose in the ordinary sense which leads Victor astray, or rather (for he was much too wilful a person to be led) which he invents for himself to follow, with his eyes open, and knowing perfectly well what he is doing. His digressions are not _parabases_ of the kind which some people object to in Fielding and still more in Thackeray--addresses to the reader on points more or less intimately connected with the subject itself. A certain exception has been made in favour of some of the architectural parts of _Notre-Dame de Paris_, but it has been admitted that this will not cover "Ceci Tuera Cela" nor much else. For the presence of the history of the sewers of Paris in _Les Miserables_ and any number of other things; for not a little of the first volume of _Les Travailleurs_ itself; for about half, if not more, of _L'Homme Qui Rit_, starting from Ursus's Black-book of fancy pleasances, palaces, and estates belonging to the fellow-peers of Lord Linnaeus Clancharlie and Hunkerville; for not a few chapters even of _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, there is no excuse at all. They are simply repulsive or at least unwelcome "pledgets" of unsucculent matter stuck into the body of fiction, as (but with how different results!) _lardons_ or pistachios or truffles are stuck into another kind of composition. It is partly, but not wholly, due to this deplorable habit of irrelevant divagation that Hugo will never allow his stories to "march" (at least to begin with marching),[122] _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_ being here the only exception among the longer romances, for even _Les Travailleurs de la Mer_ never gets into stride till nearly the whole of the first volume is passed. But the habit, however great a nuisance it may be to the reader, is of some interest to the student and the historian, for the very reason that it does not seem to be wholly an outcome of the other habit of digression. It would thus be, in part at least, a survival of that odd old "inability to begin" which we noticed several times in the last volume, aggravated by the irrepressible wilfulness of the writer, and by his determination not to do like other people, who _had_ by this time mostly got over the difficulty.