He was not always so spirited, and on those occasions one of his favorite jokes was to imitate the German jargon of Nucingen or Schmucke, or otherwise to speak in rama, like the clients of the middle class boarding house of Madame Vauquer (née de Conflans). At the time that he wrote Un Début dans la Vie based on an outline of Madame de Surville, he was seeking proverbs that were slightly off for the art student Mistigris, to whom later, having found him to be full of spirit, he gave a fine place in La Comédie Humaine, under the name of the great landscape painter Léon de Lora. Here are some of his nonsensical proverbs: "He is like an ass on a plain." "I am like the hare, I die or I flee." "Good Counts make good sieves." "Extremes become blocked." "The slap always smells the herring"; and so on like this. A discovery of this type put him in a good humor, and he would pleasantly frolic like an elephant through the furniture and around the salon. For her part, Madame de Girardin was in quest of sayings for the the famous lady of the seven little chairs of Le Courrier de Paris. She sometimes required my assistance, and if a stranger had entered, seeing this beautiful Delphine painting spirals through her golden hair with her white fingers, with a profoundly dreamlike air; Balzac, seated on one of the arms of the great upholstered chair on which Monsieur Girardin usually slept, his hands clenched in the bottoms of his pockets, his waistcoat turned back from his stomach, swinging his leg with a uniform rhythm, expressing with the tense muscles of his face an extraordinary mental focus; me planted between two cushions of the divan, like an opium eater seen in a hallucination; that stranger, certainly, could never have suspected what we were doing there, in so great a meditation; he would have supposed that Balzac was thinking of a new Madame Firmiani, Madame de Girardin of a role for Mademoiselle Rachel, and me of some sonnet. But it was nothing of the kind. As for the puns, Balzac, although his secret ambition was to create them, had, after painstaking efforts, to recognize his notorious incapacity in this area, and to keep to the slightly off proverbs, which preceded the rough puns brought into fashion by the school of good sense. What beautiful evenings that will never return! We were then far from foreseeing that this great and superb woman, carved fully out of marble from antiquity, that this stocky, robust, lively man, who combined in himself the vigor of the boar and the bull, half Hercules, half satyr, built to last longer than one hundred years, would soon sleep, one at Montmartre, the other at Père-Lachaise, and that, of the three, I alone would remain to preserve those memories that were already so distant and close to being lost.