of one who had remained a riddle in certain things even to his best
friends, and who in the pages of this extraordinary book suddenly
appeared before my astonished eyes with all the splendor of that
genius of his which as years go by, becomes more and more admired and
appreciated.

One must be a scholar to understand Balzac; his style and manner of
writing is often so heavy and so difficult to follow, reminding one
more of that of a professor than of a novelist. And indeed he would
have been very angry to be considered only as a novelist, he who
aspired and believed himself to be, as he expressed it one day in the
course of a conversation with Madame Hanska, before she became his
wife, "a great painter of humanity," in which appreciation of his work
he was not mistaken, because some of the characters he evoked out of
his wonderful brain remind one of those pictures of Rembrandt where
every stroke of the master's brush reveals and brings into evidence
some particular trait or feature, which until he had discovered it,
and brought it to notice, no one had seen or remarked on the human
faces which he reproduced upon the canvas. Michelet, who once called
St. Simon the "Rembrandt of literature," could very well have applied
the same remark to Balzac, whose heroes will live as long as men and
women exist, for whom these other men and women whom he described,
will relive because he did not conjure their different characters out
of his imagination only, but condensed all his observations into the
creation of types which are so entirely human and real that we shall
continually meet with them so long as the world lasts.

One of Balzac's peculiarities consisted in perpetually studying
humanity, which study explains the almost unerring accuracy of his
judgments and of the descriptions which he gives us of things and