According to his habit, Balzac had risen at midnight, and had written until my arrival. His features betrayed no fatigue, aside from a slight darkening beneath the eyelids, and during the entire breakfast he demonstrated a wild gaiety. Little by little the conversation drifted toward literature, and he complained of the enormous difficulties of the French language. Style preoccupied him a great deal, and he sincerely believed that he had none at all. It is true that he was then generally thought to be lacking this quality. The school of Victor Hugo, in love with the sixteenth century and the Middle Ages, specialized in patterns, in rhythms, in structure, rich in words, breaking prose with the gymnastics of verse, and modeling itself on a master confident in his methods, would do nothing other than that which was well written, that is to say worked and toned beyond measure, and found the portrayal of modern manners to be useless, conventional, and lacking in lyricism. Balzac, despite the popularity that he had begun to enjoy among the public, was not admitted among the gods of Romanticism, and he knew it. While devouring his books, people did not pause to regard their serious side, and even for his admirers, he remained for a long time the most productive of our novelists and nothing else; this surprises today, but I can vouch for the truth of my assertion. He tortured himself in trying to achieve a style, and, in his anxiety to make corrections, he consulted people who were a hundred times his inferiors. Before signing his name to anything, he had written under different pseudonyms (Horace de Saint-Aubin, L. de Viellerglé, etc.) one hundred volumes just "to free his hand." However he already possessed a style of his own without being conscious of it. But let me return to our breakfast. While talking, Balzac played with his knife or his fork, and I noted that his hands were of a rare beauty, the true hands of a prelate, white, with fingers both slender and plump, and nails that were pink and shiny; he was proud of them and smiled with pleasure as I looked at them. He considered his hands to be evidence of breeding and aristocratic birth. Lord Byron, in a note, says with evident satisfaction, that Ali Pacha complimented him on the smallness of his ears, and inferred from them that he was a true gentleman. A similar remark upon his hands would have equally flattered Balzac, even more than the praise of one his books. He had a sort of prejudice against those whose extremities lacked finesse. The meal was rather fine, a paté de foie gras was part of it, but this was a deviation from his habitual frugality, as he remarked while laughing, and that for "this solemn occasion" he had borrowed his silver plates from his library!