To make his characters swarm, and to make the great central thing they swarm about “as large as life,” portentously, heroically big, that was the task he set himself very nearly from the first, that was the secret he triumphantly mastered. Add that the big central thing was always some highly representative institution or industry of the France of his time, some seated Moloch of custom, of commerce, of faith, lending itself to portrayal through its abuses and excesses, its idol-face and great devouring mouth, and we embrace main lines of his attack. In “Le Ventre de Paris” he had dealt with the life of the huge Halles, the general markets and their supply, the personal forces, personal situations, passions, involved in (strangest of all subjects) the alimentation of the monstrous city, the city whose victualling occupies so inordinately much of its consciousness. Paris richly gorged, Paris sublime and indifferent in her assurance (so all unlike poor Oliver’s) of “more,” figures here the theme itself, lies across the scene like some vast ruminant creature breathing in a cloud of parasites. The book was the first of the long series to show the full freedom of the author’s hand, though “La Curée” had already been symptomatic. This freedom, after an interval, broke out on a much bigger scale in “L’Assommoir,” in “Au Bonheur des Dames,” in “Germinal,” in “La Bête Humaine,” in “L’Argent,” in “La Débâcle,” and then again, though more mechanically and with much of the glory gone, in the more or less wasted energy of “Lourdes,” “Rome,” “Paris,” of “Fécondité,” “Travail” and “Vérité.”