There have been a number of critiques on Balzac and he has been discussed in many ways, but in my opinion one very characteristic feature has not been emphasized: this point is the absolute modernity of his genius. Balzac owes nothing to antiquity; for him there are neither Greeks nor Romans, and he has no need to cry for deliverance from them. One does not find in the composition of his talent any trace of Homer, of Virgil, of Horace, not even of De Viris Illustribus; nobody was ever less classical. Balzac, like Gavarni, observed his contemporaries; and, in art, the supreme difficulty is to portray that which one sees before one's eyes; one can pass through one's time without appreciating it, and that is what many eminent minds have done. To be of his time, nothing would appear to be simpler but nothing is more difficult! To wear no glasses, neither blue nor green, to think with his own brain, to use the speech of the present day, not stitch together a colorful fabric from the phrases of his predecessors! Balzac possessed this rare merit. The ages have their perspective and their distance; at that distance the great masses move away, the lines end, the flickering details disappear; with the help of classical memories, of melodious names from antiquity, the least rhetorician could create a tragedy, a poem, an historical study. But, to find yourself in the crowd, to be elbowed by it, and to appreciate its features, understand its flow, sort out its personalities, outline the features of so many diverse beings, to show the motives for their actions, that demands an entirely special genius, and this genius, the author of La Comédie Humaine had to a degree that no one has equaled and probably no one will equal.