conceive, therefore, that a novel which takes our daily sustenance as
one of its themes has the best of all _raisons d'etre_. A foreign writer
of far more consequence and ability than myself--Signor Edmondo de
Amicis--has proclaimed the present book to be "one of the most original
and happiest inventions of French genius," and I am strongly inclined to
share his opinion.

It should be observed that the work does not merely treat of the
provisioning of a great city. That provisioning is its _scenario_; but
it also embraces a powerful allegory, the prose song of "the eternal
battle between the lean of this world and the fat--a battle in which, as
the author shows, the latter always come off successful. It is, too, in
its way an allegory of the triumph of the fat bourgeois, who lives well
and beds softly, over the gaunt and Ishmael artist--an allegory which
M. Zola has more than once introduced into his pages, another notable
instance thereof being found in 'Germinal,' with the fat, well-fed
Gregoires on the one hand, and the starving Maheus on the other."

From this quotation from Mr. Sherard's pages it will be gathered that M.
Zola had a distinct social aim in writing this book. Wellnigh the
whole social question may, indeed, be summed up in the words "food and
comfort"; and in a series of novels like "Les Rougon-Macquart," dealing
firstly with different conditions and grades of society, and, secondly,
with the influence which the Second Empire exercised on France, the
present volume necessarily had its place marked out from the very first.

Mr. Sherard has told us of all the labour which M. Zola expended on
the preparation of the work, of his multitudinous visits to the Paris
markets, his patient investigation of their organism, and his keen
artistic interest in their manifold phases of life. And bred as I was