The conception of this novel appears to her "so sublime," that she compares its perusal to a walk through the catacombs, which the reader would not willingly have missed; "though the light of day seems stained afterwards with the mould of horror and dismay." She infers from much of its tenor that Balzac was "familiar with that which makes the agony of poverty--its vulgarity. Dirt, confusion, shabby expedients, living to live,--these are what make poverty terrible and odious; and in these Balzac would seem to have been steeped to the very lips." The skill with which he illustrates both the connection and the contrast between the depth of poverty and the height of luxury co-existing in Parisian life, is much dwelt upon by Margaret, as well as the praise-worthy fact that he depicts with equal faithfulness the vices developed by these opposite conditions. His insight and mastery appear to her "admirable throughout," the characters "excellently drawn," especially that of the Père Goriot, the father of two heartless women, for whom he has sacrificed everything, and who in turn sacrifice him without mercy to their own pleasures and ambitions. Admirable, too, she finds him "in his description of look, tone, gesture. He has a keen sense of whatever is peculiar to the individual." With this acute appreciation of the great novelist's merits, Margaret unites an equally comprehensive perception of his fatal defects of character. His scepticism regarding virtue she calls fearful, his spirit Mephistophelian. "He delights to analyze, to classify. But he has no hatred for what is loathsome, no contempt for what is base, no love for what is lovely, no faith for what is noble. To him there is no virtue and no vice; men and women are more or less finely organized; noble and tender conduct is more agreeable than the reverse,--that is all." His novels show "goodness, aspiration, the loveliest instincts, stifled, strangled by fate in the form of our own brute nature." Margaret did not, perhaps, foresee how popular strangling of this kind was destined to become in the romance of the period following her own.