He was tall and somewhat stout. His hands were those of a prelate, and his head was that of a Nero. His hair was black and dense, and his forehead, furrowed by sabre-cuts of thought, was high and massive. His complexion was of an olive hue; his nose was prominent and slightly arched; his mouth was sympathetic, and his chin firm. But his most remarkable characteristic was the expression of his gold-brown eyes, which, eloquent with interrogations and replies, seemed, instead of receiving light from without, to project jets of interior flame. His many vicissitudes had endowed him with an air of such calm tranquillity as might have disconcerted a thunderbolt; while his voice, at once penetrating and soft, had the charm attributed to Talma’s. In conversation persuasive and magnetic, he held his auditors breathless in a torrent of words and gesture. He convinced almost at will, and his imagination, once unbridled, was sufficient to cause a vertigo. “He frightens me,” said Gérard de Nerval; “he is enough to drive one crazy.” “He possessed,” Gautier said, “a swing, an eloquence, and a _brio_ which were perfectly irresistible. Gliding from one subject to another, he would pass from an anecdote to a philosophical reflection, from an observation to a description. As he spoke, his face flushed, his eyes became peculiarly luminous, his voice assumed different inflections, while at times he would burst out laughing, amused by the comic apparitions which he saw before describing, and announced, in this way, by a sort of _fanfare_, the entrance of his caricatures and witticisms. The misfortunes of a precarious existence, the annoyances of debt, fatigue, excessive work, even illness, were unable to change this striking characteristic of continual and Rabelaisian joviality.” Friends, enemies, editors, strangers, money-lenders, and usurers, all with whom he came in contact, were fascinated and coerced by the extraordinary magnetism which he exerted without effort, and the most vigorous intellects were bewildered by his projects of fortune and dreams of glory. Attracted by the mine of wealth which the theatre opens to the popular playwright; and burdened with a real or imaginary weight of debt, from which one or two dramas, if favorably received, would free him entirely; and desirous, moreover, of experiencing the delirious intoxication which the plaudits of the gallery bring to the successful dramatist, Balzac’s inflammable imagination became a veritable whirlwind of plots and epigrams whenever a new play was well received.