If we imagine him asking himself what he knew of the “social” life of the second Empire to start with, we imagine him also answering in all honesty: “I have my eyes and my ears—I have all my senses: I have what I’ve seen and heard, what I’ve smelled and tasted and touched. And then I’ve my curiosity and my pertinacity; I’ve libraries, books, newspapers, witnesses, the material, from step to step, of an _enquête_. And then I’ve my genius—that is, my imagination, my passion, my sensibility to life. Lastly I’ve my method, and that will be half the battle. Best of all perhaps even, I’ve plentiful lack of doubt.” Of the absence in him of a doubt, indeed of his inability, once his direction taken, to entertain so much as the shadow of one, “Vérité” is a positive monument—which again represents in this way the unity of his tone and the meeting of his extremes. If we remember that his design was nothing if not architectural, that a “majestic whole,” a great balanced façade, with all its orders and parts, that a singleness of mass and a unity of effect, in fine, were before him from the first, his notion of picking up his bricks as he proceeded becomes, in operation, heroic. It is not in the least as a record of failure for him that I note this particular fact of the growth of the long series as on the whole the liveliest interest it has to offer. “I don’t know my subject, but I must live into it; I don’t know life, but I must learn it as I work”—that attitude and programme represent, to my sense, a drama more intense on the worker’s own part than any of the dramas he was to invent and put before us.