unfortunately did not finish it. Monsieur Jules
Claretie states that the canvas on which it was drawn was subsequently
covered by the artist's _Man choosing a Sword_, to-day in the Van
Prael collection at Brussels. About Boulanger's picture Theophile
Gautier has a good deal to tell us in his article of 1837, published
in the _Beaux Arts de la Presse_; and it scarcely agrees with Balzac's
condemnation of the portrait as a daub, when he saw the canvas some
years later in Russia. Remarking on the difficulty of rendering the
novelist's physiognomy, on account of its mobility and strange aspect,
Gautier gives it as his opinion that Boulanger succeeded perfectly in
seizing the complex expression which seemed to escape all efforts of
the brush. The description is a long one; and any one desirous of
comparing with each other the impressions received by Balzac's
contemporaries who came into close contact with him would do well to
read it after this description by Lamartine. In the tenth of his
lectures on Literature during the year 1856, the author of _Jocelyn_,
speaking of what he had observed, said:--

"His exterior was as uncultivated as his genius. It was the shape of
an element: big head, hair scattered over his collar and cheeks like a
mane that scissors never trimmed, lips thick, eyes soft but of flame;
costume clashing with every elegance; clothes too small for his
colossal body; waistcoat unbuttoned; linen coarse; blue stockings;
shoes that made holes in the carpet; an appearance as of a schoolboy
on holiday, who has grown during the year and whose stature has burst
his garments. Such was the man that by himself wrote a whole library
about his century, the Walter Scott of France, not the Walter Scott of
landscape and adventure, but what is much more prodigious, the Walter
Scott of characters, the Dante of the infinite circles of human life,
the Moliere of read comedy, less perfect but more fertile than the
Moliere of played comedy. Why does not his style equal his conception?
France would then have two Molieres, and the greater would not be he
who lived first."

Returning to the same subject in his hundred and sixth lecture, eight
years later, Lamartine continued:--

"He bore his genius so simply that he did not feel it. He was not
tall, and, however, the lighting up of his face and the mobility of
his body prevented his small stature from being noticed; but this
height swayed like his thought. Between the ground and