that serve to
touch the suave skin of a woman;" of the "atmosphere of Paris in which
seethes a simoon that swells the heart;" of the "coefficient reason of
events;" of "pecuniary mnemonics;" of "sentences flung out through the
capillary tubes of the great female confabulation;" of "devouring
ideas distilled through a bald forehead;" of a "lover's enwrapping his
mistress in the wadding of his attentions;" of "abortions in which the
spawn of genius cumbers an arid strand;" of the "philosophic moors of
incredulity;" of a "town troubled in its public and private
intestines."

In one of the chapters of _Seraphita_, he says: "Wilfred arrived at
Seraphita's house to relate his life, to paint the grandeur of his
soul by the greatness of his faults; but, when he found himself in the
zone embraced by those eyes whose azure scintillations met with no
horizon in front, and offered none behind, he became calm again and
submissive as the lion who, bounding on his prey in an African plain,
receives, on the wing of the winds, a message of love, and stops. An
abyss opened into which fell the words of his delirium!"

And the same Wilfred "trusted to his perspicacity to discover the
parcels of truth rolled by the old servant in the torrent of his
divagations."

During the years of Balzac's greatest literary activity, which were
also those of his bitterest polemics, his opponents made much capital
out of the caprices of his pen. In the lawsuit against the _Revue de
Paris_, Monsieur Chaix d'Est-Ange, the defendant's counsel, provoked
roars of laughter by quoting passages from the _Lily in the Valley_;
and Jules Janin, in his criticism of _A Provincial Great Man in
Paris_, grew equally merry over the verbal conceits abounding in the
portraits of persons. And yet the very volumes that furnish the
largest number of ill-begotten sentences contain many passages of
sustained dignity, sober strength, and proportioned beauty.

Normally, Balzac's style, in spite of its mannerisms, its use and
abuse of metaphor, its laboured evolution and expression of the idea,
and its length and heaviness of period, adapts itself to the matter,
and alters with kaleidoscopic celerity, according as there is
description, analysis, or dramatization. Thus blending with the
subject, it loses a good deal of its proper virtue, which explains why
it does not afford the pleasure of form enjoyed in such writers as
George Sand, Flaubert, Renan, and Anatole France. The pl