What was wanting to Balzac in the hell of life, whose every spiral he descended, was virginity in love and ingenuousness in poetry. He always lost himself in the difficult places of style; and himself wept over the lack. When he wrote the _Search for the Absolute_, he was in quest of the ideal; but the ideal is that which one had inside one's self, just as love is. The studies of the chemist and alchemist, of the doctor and jurist, do not light the flame of Prometheus." The quotations do not exhaust the list of portraits emanating from Balzac's fellows, but they adequately illustrate the varying views, which were many. Indeed, like the sculptor who produces several studies of the same model and shows a different interpretation each time, critics have presented us, in more than one instance, with descriptions of the novelist, at an earlier and a later date, that contain important discrepancies. Balzac was an enigma because he was not always the same personality to himself. Both his energies and his desires carried him outside the limits in which a man's individuality is usually manifested. Despite Monsieur Houssaye, one may even sympathize, though incredulous, with admirers that would have him to be a universal genius, unfortunately thwarted by fate--one who else might have opened up all the avenues of knowledge that humanity can ever penetrate. This persuasion was undoubtedly his own; and it partly explains his Faustus curiosities leading him now and again into illegitimate and unwholesome experiments, of which we get some glimpse in his books and correspondence.