Throughout the work, however, despite these occasional blemishes, every episode connected with the Lamarques is a masterpiece of pathos and of simplicity, until the last scene of all, when the three children with their mother are about to light the charcoal collected by the little François as it dropped from the waggons when they passed along the quay, and kept in a corner of the miserable room, in readiness for the last hour of all.
The characters of the three boys, so dissimilar and yet united by the vague likeness of race, are drawn with a life-like distinctness: Georges, pensive and philosophic, proud, gentle, observant; Albert, sceptic and scornful, with his passionate sense that, since death killed his father through serving others, there can be no God; and the youngest, François, timid, imaginative, devoted, hiding himself under the table, to still the pangs of hunger with fancies of a lonely fairy isle where neither want nor death should come. These three children offer one of the most perfect pictures of innocent and unmerited suffering which literature can offer, and the limner of them and of their sorrows is a fine writer. Jacques Fougeraye, the central figure of the romance, yields his place to them as its chief interest; and is also perhaps inferior in interest to his unhappy and generous patron Dargelle. One would desire to know through what circumstances a man of the talent and character of Fougeraye comes to be destitute in the streets of Paris; something also of the parentage, education, influences which have gone towards making him what he is. In the same way one would wish to know how Lamarque fell into poverty, how his children became so cultured and refined, how the whole family is aloof in every way from their common and odious kindred. _Les jeunes_ do not deign to throw light on the antecedents of their _dramatis personæ_; they are wrong, for two reasons: one because they thus baulk the natural and legitimate curiosity of their readers; the second, that there is no true psychology (the word they worship) without study of the causes which have contributed to make a man or woman what the observer of them finds them to be. A writer like Gyp may with airy grace jump, as through a circus-hoop, into the middle of the lives of her personages without further explanation, but in a philosophic student of human nature in its sad seriousness such saltatory pranks are unbecoming.