Here, then, we have the first characteristic feature in Balzac's work. No artistic tradition stands between him and the woman of the period. He studied no statue, worshipped no goddess, did no homage to ideal beauty; he saw and understood woman exactly as she was then, with her gowns, shawls, gloves, and hats, her caprices, virtues, temptations, and faults, her nerves and passions, with all their traces of unnaturalness, morbidness, and ennui. He loves her as she is. And he is not satisfied with studying her in the street, in the boudoir, or even in the bedchamber; he is not satisfied with analysing her soul; he inquires into the physiological causes of the psychological phenomena, into the sufferings and the diseases of women. He does more than merely indicate all that the weak and suffering sex silently endures. The second characteristic feature is, that it is not the young girl, nor even the young married woman, whom Balzac represents as the object of love; his chief female type, which has taken its name from the title of one of his stories, is _la femme de trente ans_. He discovered and proclaimed the simple truth that in such a climate as that of the north of France, a woman is not at her best, either physically or spiritually, at the age of eighteen. He described the woman who has left her first youth behind her, who feels more profoundly, thinks more maturely, has already suffered disappointments, but is still capable of intense, unalloyed feeling. Life has already set its mark upon her--here a line of suffering, and there a wrinkle--but she is still in full possession of all the attractions of her sex. She is melancholy; she has tasted happiness and has tasted suffering, is misunderstood or lonely; she has often been deceived, but is still waiting, capable of inspiring the strong, ardent passions which draw their nourishment from compassion. And, curiously enough, she is not seen and described from the point of view of the man of her own age, but from that of a younger man, with little experience of life. The vernal emotion, the ardent desire, the naïve enthusiasm, the unconscious idealisation of youthful passion, surround this no longer perfectly youthful figure with a glorifying halo, embellish, rejuvenate, deify the woman whose real attractions are her refinement, her feminine seriousness, and the grace born of genuine passion. The delineation is never idealistic in the sense that George Sand's delineations are; for nothing is suppressed of what women, when they talk or write of their own sex, are accustomed to ignore--of what even George Sand passes over in silence when she is describing women for whom she desires to awaken sympathy and admiration. To George Sand woman is above all a soul; to Balzac she is a natural phenomenon, and therefore not flawless, either physically or spiritually. His idealisation is either purely external (the transfiguring power of certain lights, of the erotic situation, &c),