As Bianchou he is alienist and physician; in Dr. Mirouët he is medium and mesmerist; he is a miser in Grandet and discounter in Gobseck; he is vicar at Tours and old maid at Issoudun. None better than he has described that class of fascinating scoundrels of which Rastignac is the type, nor painted more clearly the heralds of _ennui_ and philosophers of satiety than he has done in De Marsay and Maxime de Trailles. In “Les Deux Poètes” he is printer and manufacturer of paper; in the “Cousin Pons” he presents the flower of an imagination intoxicated with the master paintings of great artists; while in the “Illusions Perdues” the journalist is dissected and the publisher decomposed. In the veins of his characters there is not a drop of ink; they live, move, and have their being, and their eyelashes are as delicately finished as their epigrams. Starting from the mud and vermin of Parisian by-ways, and ascending to the steps of the throne, Balzac garnered every possible type, no two of which are similar; each is original and all are profoundly human; and while the dregs of London are not further removed from the splendors of Teheran than is mother Nourrison from the Duc de Grandlieu, yet Balzac’s intuition divined the one as clearly as he described the other. In his transitions and contrasts, however, there is as little abruptness as there is in the marriage of the blue of the skies with the green of a landscape; changes follow in orderly and natural sequence, and the mind of the reader is only confused at the multiplicity of his attainments, which present in turn houses and costumes, interiors and countries, intermingled with plot, science, religion, politics, agriculture, erudition, mysticism, and wit. Balzac was also a delicious landscape painter, and his scenes from Brittany in “Les Chouans,” his landscapes of Touraine and particularly that of Vouvay in “La Femme de Trente Ans,” the grand sketch of Norway in “Séraphita,” that of the Mediterranean island in “La Duchesse de Langeais,” are cited by Davin as masterpieces of graphic description. The resources of Balzac’s genius are perhaps as clearly exhibited in “Eugénie Grandet” as in any of his other works, and the appearance of this romance gave the keynote to the present Realistic school. “Eugénie Grandet” is the conquest of absolute truth in art. It is the drama applied to the most simple events of life; the fusion of the trivial and the sublime, the pathetic and the grotesque. It is a picture of life as it is, and the model of what a novel should be.