Balzac worked contemporaneously with the Romantic movement, but he worked outside it, and its influence upon him is felt only in an occasional pseudo-romanticism, like the episode of the pirate in _La Femme de Trente Ans._ His vision of humanity was essentially a poetic vision, but he was a poet whose dreams were facts. Knowing that, as Mme. Necker has said, "the novel should be the better world," he knew also that "the novel would be nothing if, in that august lie, it were not true in details." And in the _Human Comedy_ he proposed to himself to do for society more than Buffon had done for the animal world. "There is but one animal," he declares, in his _Avant-Propos,_ with a confidence which Darwin has not yet come to justify. But "there exists, there will always exist, social species, as there are zoological species." "Thus the work to be done will have a triple form: men, women, and things; that is to say, human beings and the material representation which they give to their thought; in short, man and life." And, studying after nature, "French society will be the historian, I shall need to be no more than the secretary." Thus will be written "the history forgotten by so many historians, the history of manners." But that is not all, for "passion is the whole of humanity." "In realizing clearly the drift of the composition, it will be seen that I assign to facts, constant, daily, open, or secret, to the acts of individual life, to their causes and principles, as much importance as historians had formerly attached to the events of the public life of nations." "Facts gathered together and painted as they are, with passion for element," is one of his definitions of the task he has undertaken. And in a letter to Mme. de Hanska, he summarises every detail of his scheme. "The _Études des Mœurs_ will represent social effects, without a single situation of life, or a physiognomy, or a character of man or woman, or a manner of life, or a profession, or a social zone, or a district of France, or anything pertaining to childhood, old age, or maturity, politics, justice, or war, having been forgotten. "That laid down, the history of the human heart traced link by link, the history of society made in all its details, we have the base.... "Then, the second stage is the _Études philosophiques,_ for after the _effects_ come the _causes._ In the _Études des Mœurs_ I shall have painted the sentiments and their action, life and the fashion of life. In the _Études philosophiques_ I shall say _why the sentiments, on what the life...._ "Then, after the _effects_ and the _causes,_ come the _Études analytiques,_ to which the _Physiologie du mariage_ belongs, for, after the _effects_ and the _causes,_ one should seek the _principles...._