curved, and always ready to laugh, attested, like the ruddiness in his
full cheeks, to the purity and richness of his blood. His forehead,
high, broad, and unwrinkled, save for a line between the eyes, and his
neck, thick, round, and columnar, contrasted in their whiteness with
the colour in the rest of the face. His hands were large and dimpled
--"beautiful hands," his sister calls them. He was proud of them, and
had a slight prejudice against any one with ugly extremities. His
nose, about which he gave special directions to David when his bust
was taken, was well cut, rather long, and square at the end, with the
lobes of the open nostrils standing out prominently. As to his eyes,
according to Gautier, there were none like them.[*] They had
inconceivable life, light, and magnetism. They were eyes to make an
eagle lower his lids, to read through walls and hearts, to terrify a
wild beast--eyes of a sovereign, a seer, a conqueror. Lamartine likens
them to "darts dipped in kindliness." Balzac's sister speaks of them
as brown; but, according to other contemporaries, they were like
brilliant black diamonds, with rich reflections of gold, the white of
the eyeballs being tinged with blue. They seemed to be lit with the
fire of the genius within, to read souls, to answer questions before
they were asked, and at the same time to pour out warm rays of
kindliness from a joyous heart.

[*] "Portraits Contemporains--Honore de Balzac," by Theophile Gautier.

At all points Balzac's personality differed from that of his
contemporaries of the Romantic School--those transcendental geniuses
of despairing temper, who were utterly hopeless about the prosaic
world in which, by some strange mistake, they found themselves; and
from which they felt that no possible inspiration for their art could
be drawn. So little attuned were these unfortunates to their