ABSTRACT
Erich Auerbach's analysis of part of Balzac's description of the Pension Vauquer in Le Pere Goriot was instrumental in shifting discussion of realism away from subject matter and declared authorial purpose to the words on the page. Auerbach is undoubtedly representative of many readers in his unease with the unsystematic and apparently contradictory elements in Balzac's writing and with the latter's fondness for hyperbole. A modern-day reading might be more inclined to see in such features the very key to Balzac's achievement. Another writer of the romantic generation, Balzac, who had as great a creative gift and far more closeness to reality, seized upon the representation of contemporary life as his own particular task and, together with Stendhal, can be regarded as the creator of modern realism. Balzac's atmospheric realism is a product of his period, is itself a part and a result of an atmosphere.
