ABSTRACT
The multi-talented writer and poet Theophile Gautier counted himself one of Balzac's friends; the novelist had recruited him as a contributor to the shortlived Chronique de Paris in 1836. Balzac, that enormous brain, that most penetrating of physiologists and most profound of observers, that highly intuitive intelligence was not a natural writer. Balzac has often been praised, and rightly so, for his talents as an observer. But, for all his greatness, it is wrong to imagine the author of La Comedie humaine copying his portraits from life, however striking their accuracy. Balzac underlines, enlarges, exaggerates, prunes, elaborates, uses light or shade, distances people or things, or brings them closer, according to the effect he wishes to produce. He is doubtless being true but with the additions and sacrifices that art entails. He prepares sombre backgrounds rubbed with bitumen for his luminous figures, and places a white background behind his dark ones.
