“In any case,” Rivière continues, “it is these black gulfs that interest Dostoevsky most, and his whole effort is directed towards suggesting how utterly unreachable they are.... We, on the other hand, faced with a soul’s complexity and endeavouring to give a picture of it, instinctively seek to organize our material.” Serious enough! But there is more to come. “At need, we force things a trifle; we suppress a few small divergencies, and interpret certain obscure details in the sense most useful towards establishing a psychological unity. The ideal we strive towards is the complete closing up of every gulf.”[72] I am not so sure that we do not find some gulfs in Balzac, inexplicably abrupt; nor am I sure either that Dostoevsky’s are as unfathomed as at first would be imagined. Shall I give you an example of Balzac’s gulfs? I see one in _La Recherche de l’Absolu_. Balthazar Claès is seeking the philosopher’s stone: apparently he has completely forgotten the religious training of his childhood. He is absorbed by his quest. He neglects his wife, Josephine, whose religious mind is horror-stricken at her husband’s disbelief. One day she enters the laboratory without warning. The draught of the opening door causes an explosion, and Madame Claès falls fainting.... What is the cry that escapes Balthazar’s lips? One wherein suddenly reappears his childhood’s belief, long overlaid by the dross of his atheism. “Thank God you’re still alive! The Saints have preserved you from death!” Balzac does not press the incident any further, and no doubt nineteen out of every twenty readers will never even detect the fault. The abyss of which it gives a glimpse is left unexplained: maybe no explanation is possible. As a matter of fact, that was of no interest to Balzac. His one concern was to produce characters free of all inconsequences, wherein he was in perfect accord with French feeling; for what we French require most of all is logic. I can say with respect not only to the _Comédie Humaine_, but also to the comedy of everyday life as we live it, that the _dramatis personæ_ (for we French delineate ourselves as we see ourselves) are after a Balzacian ideal. The inconsequences of our nature, should such exist, seem to us awkward and ridiculous. We deny them. We try to ignore them, to palliate them. Each of us is conscious of our unity, our continuity even, and everything we repress and thrust beneath our consciousness, like the feeling that suddenly reasserts itself in Claès, we try to suppress completely, and failing this, we cease to hold it of any account. We consistently behave as the character we are--or fancy we are--ought to behave. The majority of our actions are dictated, not by the pleasure we take in doing them, but by the need of imitating ourselves and projecting our past into the future. We sacrifice truth (that is to say, sincerity) to purity and continuity of line.