It is thus the painter’s aspiring and rejoicing consciousness of the great square swarming picture, the picture of France from side to side and from top to bottom, which he proposes to copy—unless we see the collective quantity rather as the vast primary model or sitter that he is unprecedentedly to portray, it is this that, rendering him enviable in proportion to his audacity and his presumption, gives a dignity to everything that makes the consciousness whole. The result is a state of possession of his material unlike that of any other teller of tales whatever about a circumjacent world, and the process of his gain of which opens up well-nigh the first of those more or less baffling questions, parts indeed of the great question of the economic rule, the practical secret, of his activity, that beset us as soon as we study him. To fit what he was and what he did, that is the measure of how he used himself and how he used every one and everything else, into his after all so brief career (for twenty years cover the really productive term of it) is for ourselves, we confess, to renounce any other solution than that of his having proceeded by a sense for facts, the multitudinous facts of the scene about him, that somehow involved a preliminary, a pre-experiential inspiration, a straightness of intuition truly impossible to give an account of and the like of which had never before been shown. He had not to learn things in order to know them; and even though he multiplied himself in more ways than we can reckon up, going hither and thither geographically, leading his life with violence, as it were, though always with intention, and wasting almost nothing that had ever touched him, the natural man, the baptised and registered Honoré, let loose with harsh promptitude upon a world formed from the first moment to excite his voracity, can only have been _all_ the exploiting agent, the pushing inquirer, the infallible appraiser, the subject of an _arrière-pensée_ as merciless, in spite of being otherwise genial, as the black care riding behind the horseman. There was thus left over for him less of mere human looseness, of mere emotion, of mere naturalness, or of any curiosity whatever, that didn’t “pay”—and the extent to which he liked things to pay, to see them, think of them, and describe them as prodigiously paying, is not to be expressed—than probably marks any recorded relation between author and subject as we know each of these terms.