This profound understanding of modern things rendered Balzac, it must be said, insensitive to sculptural beauty. He read with a careless eye the stanzas of white marble with which Greek art sung the perfection of the human form. In the museum of antiquities, he looked at the Venus de Milo without great ecstasy, but the Parisian woman who has stopped in front of the immortal statue, draped in her long cashmere shawl running without a crease from the neck to the heel, wearing her hat with a veil from Chantilly, gloved with her tight Jouvin gloves, showing from under the hem of her flounced dress the polished tip of her worn boots, made his eyes sparkle with pleasure. He analyzed her coquettish allure, he savored at length her skillful graces, only to find as she did that the goddess was too heavyset and would not be an attractive addition to the homes of Mesdames de Beauséant, de Listomère, or d'Espard. Ideal beauty, with its serene and pure lines, was too simple, too cold, too harmonious for this complicated, exuberant and diverse genius. He also says somewhere: "It is necessary to be Raphaël to portray many virgins." Character pleased him more than style, and he preferred looks to beauty. In his portraits of women, he never fails to put a mark, a crease, a wrinkle, a red blemish, a softened and tired corner, a vein that is too apparent, some detail indicating the bruises of life that a poet, in tracing the same image, would surely have suppressed, mistakenly without a doubt. I do not intend to criticize Balzac in this. This fault is his principal strength. He accepted nothing of the mythologies and traditions of the past, and he did not know, happily for us, that ideal that was achieved with the verses of the poets, the marbles of Greece and Rome, the paintings of the Renaissance, which stands between the eyes of artists and reality. He loved the woman of our day just as she is, and not as a pale statue; he loved her for her virtues, for her vices, for her fantasies, for her shawls, for her dresses, for her hats, and followed her across her life, far beyond the point in the journey where love abandons her. He prolonged her youth by many seasons, gave her springs with the summers of Saint-Martin, and gilded her twilight years with the most splendid rays. We are so classical, in France, that we have not perceived, after two thousand years, that roses, in our climate, do not bloom in April as in the descriptions of poets of antiquity, but in June, and that our women begin to be beautiful at the age at which those of Greece, who are more precocious, cease to be. How many charming types he has imagined or reproduced! Madame Firmiani, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, the Princess de Cadignan, Madame de Morsauf, Lady Dudley, the Duchess de Langeais, Madame Jules, Modeste Mignon, Diane de Chaulieu, without counting the middle class women, the seamstresses and the ladies of ill repute.