ABSTRACT
Ernest Renan drew himself in his Life of Jesus, as one may see by comparing it with his Memoirs of My Youth. He projected himself upon Jesus and wrote a life of Renan instead. He portrayed his individual traits and gave his own characteristics to Jesus. Yet literature scarcely offers such an instance of a man projecting himself upon a historical character. Such a projection is similar to the seeking, in an unusual degree, by nervous people of moral shelter and consolation in some other person. In Pere Goriot Balzac drew himself in Eugene Rastignac, but the author is also present in the villain of the novel, Vautrin or Jacques Collins, who appears likewise in Lost Illusions and The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans. The reason La Rochefoucauld, author of the Maxims, is called a cynic is because he reveals the unconscious, at the bottom of which is self-love.
