A truly rotten French cheese appears as a frequent metaphor for nothing less than life itself. Jeanne, upon first trying the cheese and finding it repulsive and also wonderful, spells out the direct comparison to the complexities of life right there on the page: “It tastes like life...Rotten and strange and rich and way too strong” (138). The cheese tastes like garbage and also like a sunny pasture; it’s so pungent and overwhelming that it’s almost too much to bear; it’s deeply off-putting and yet she still wants more.

The story of the farting dragon deepens the cheese metaphor even further. The dragon eats too much of the cheese, and it turns out he’s allergic to it. It’s not the cheese itself, but his inability to digest it, that causes his deadly, murderous farts. Living well and kindly, the book suggests, is not just a matter of taking life in, but of figuring out how to process it—and the undigested life can be very dangerous indeed.

One of the great victories of the story is the salvaging of a few remaining copies of the Talmud after the King’s book-burning. The children, reflecting on this rescue, observe that a book contains the labor of many people, and can thus hold many different worlds.