And yet, through his harshness and coldness, he was much more of a reminder of Mérimée, who stood alone in the past generation; to many, indeed, he appeared but a heavier, broader Mérimée. For the first thing noticeable in him was that he was a cold-blooded poet; and these two epithets, cold-blooded and poet, had previously been united in Mérimée alone. A closer study, however, would have shown that the cold-blooded deliberation of Mérimée was of quite a different character than that of Flaubert. Mérimée treated romantic material in an unromantic, dry, and meagre manner. His tone and his style corresponded, for the tone was ironical, the style lacking in imagery, and cold. With style and tone, however, the wildness of the theme and its barbaric, impassioned character were at variance. Flaubert, on the contrary, harmonized theme and tone. With infinitely superior irony he pictured the vapid and the absurd; but with theme and tone his style was at variance. He was not, as Mérimée, rational and meagre; he was all radiant with coloring, and harmonious, and he spread the gold-wrought veil of this style over all the commonplace and sorrowful incidents he narrated. No one could read the book aloud without being astonished at the music of its prose. The style contains a thousand melodious secrets; it aims the keenest satire at human weakness, powerless yearnings and aspirations, self-deception and self-satisfaction, to an accompaniment of organ music. While the surgeon in the text, without the slightest manifestation of sympathy, is lacerating and tearing to pieces, a beauty-loving lyric poet is sobbing out a low, wailing accompaniment. If we should turn to a page in which a village apothecary utters his half scientific prattle, in which a diligence tour is depicted, or an old casket described, we would find it, viewed from a stylistic standpoint, as highly colored and enduring as a mosaic, owing to the freshness of its expressions and the solid structure of its sentences. Each clause is so carefully put together that no two words could possibly be removed without destroying the entire page. The assured refinement of the imagery, the metallic ring of the musical flow of words, the rolling breadth of the prose rhythms, invested the narrative with a marvellous power that was now picturesque, now comic.