A demur must likewise be entered against his style's possessing the qualities that constitute a charm apart from the matter expressed. Too many tendencies wrought in him uncurbed for his ideas to clothe themselves constantly in a suitable and harmonious dress. Generally when his personality intruded itself in the narrative, it was quite impossible for him to speak unless affectedly, with a mixture of odd figures of speech and similes that hurtled in phrases of heavy construction. Taine has collected a few of these. In the _Cure of Tours_ we read:-- "No creature of the feminine gender was more capable than Mademoiselle Sophie Gamard of formulating the elegiac nature of an old maid." Elsewhere, he speaks of the "fluid projections of looks 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.