ABSTRACT
The themes that we ponder together in Eranos from year to year have the virtue of inducing in us, during the preceding months, a state of premeditation which is peculiarly favourable to lucid reaction. It was in this manner, and with regard to this year's theme, that I found myself reacting over the winter to two works on Balzac which had just come out. For, in their respective interpretations of the work of our great novelist, these two books form a contrast as striking as it is instructive for what we are about to discuss.
