he looks inward, contains humanity: it is a microcosm in which nothing is missing. He has, not always, but often observed within himself the numerous types that live in his work. That is why they are so complete. No one could absolutely comprehend the life of another; in such a case, there are motives that remain obscure, unknown details, actions of which one loses track. In even the most faithful portrait, some creativity is necessary. Balzac has thus created much more than he saw. His rare faculties of the analyst, of the physiologist, of the anatomist, have merely served the poet in him, just as the assistant serves the professor at his lectern when he passes him the substances that he needs for his demonstrations. Perhaps this could be the place to define the truth as understood by Balzac; in this time of realism, it is good to be understood on this point. The truth of art is not that of nature; everything that is represented through the means of art necessarily contains some element of the conventional; make it as small as possible, it still exists, be it perspective in painting, language in literature. Balzac accentuates, magnifies, enlarges, prunes, adds, shadows, illuminates, avoids or approaches men or things according to the effect that he wants to produce. He is truthful, without doubt, but with augmentations and sacrifices for art. He prepares backgrounds that are somber and darkened with charcoal for his luminous figures, he puts white backgrounds behind his dark figures. Like Rembrandt, he sets the light of day on the brow or nose of the character; sometimes, in his description, he obtains fantastic and bizarre results, by placing, without saying anything, a microscope under the eye of the reader; the details then appear with a supernatural clarity, an amplified minutia, some unbelievable and formidable magnifications; the tissues, the scaliness, the pores, the veins, the blemishes, the fibers, the capillaries take on an enormous importance, and turn a visage that is insignificant to the naked eye into a sort of fanciful mask as amusing as those that were sculpted under the cornice of the Pont-Neuf and vermiculated by time. The characters are also pushed to excess, as it is suited to each type: if Baron Hulot is a libertine, he additionally personifies lust: he is a man and a vice, an individual and an abstraction; he unites in himself all of the scattered traits of the character. Where a writer of lesser genius would have drawn a portrait, Balzac has created a figure. Men do not have as many muscles as Michelangelo gives them to suggest the idea of strength. Balzac is full of such useful exaggerations, of those dark strokes that enhance and support the outline; he dreams while writing, like the masters, and leaves his mark on everything. As this is not a literary critique, but a biographical study that I am writing, I will not take these remarks farther than necessary. Balzac, whom the Realist