While the fat character in a modern novel is usually being reprimanded for being unable to live up to the expectations of bourgeois society, the fat characters in this novel are being reprimanded for living up to the expectations of bourgeois society.
I was hoping for more details of how nineteenth-c. Paris was provisioned, since the story is set in the food markets (with little idyllic bits in the nearby truck farms). There are a lot of details, I suppose; vast semi-public cellars of cheese, butter, fowl, everything; but so much of it is taken for granted... Food seems to be very efficiently used, as in Farmers of Forty Centuries, and for the same reason: so many people are poor that every scrap and broken meat can be sold for some tiny, scrabbling sum. Also, good wives and daughters spend a lot of time making leftovers edible.
Project Gutenberg file#5744, The Fat and the Thin; originally, Ventre de Paris
So wrote clew in Fiction (19th c.).