Its true concern, however, is with something much larger and more impalpable; the relationship between the crowd and the individual; the impersonal, … - C. A. Lejeune

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Its true concern, however, is with something much larger and more impalpable; the relationship between the crowd and the individual; the impersonal, jubilant, clamorous voice of the multitude, and the personal, agonisingly articulated dumbshow of a man.
You have to go to literature, to the novels of Dickens and Dumas, to find crowd scenes so superbly and massively handled. The changing scene is packed with people; you fix your eye on an individual player, only to find him presently overwhelmed, submerged, drowned in a sea of faces. And rightly so, for that is the whole secret of Les Enfants du Paradis. The characters are initially thrown together by the crowd and eventually torn apart, like so much flotsam and jetsam.