CHAPTER XVII CONCLUSION: THE MAN AND HIS PORTRAITS It may be affirmed, without thereby disparaging the _Comedie Humaine_, that Balzac's personality is even more interesting than his work; and this is a sufficient excuse for returning to it in a last chapter and trying, at the risk of repetition, to make its presentment completer by way of supplement and summary. The interest does not arise alone from the contrasts of his foibles, which, forsooth, are nearly always comic--when they are not tragic. We are just as much attracted by the contrasts of his qualities, and by the interplay of the former with the latter--the victories and defeats, the glimpses of immense possibility, the struggles between temperament and environment, all these having a fullness of display rarely found in human nature. Besides the portraits in painting or sculpture executed of the novelist by Deveria, Boulanger, David d'Angers, and others, some mention of which has already been made, there was one begun by Meissonier, who 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:--