ABSTRACT
Paul Bourget, who was born two years after Balzac's death, dated his vocation as a novelist from the moment when, as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, he read Balzac's Le Pere Goriot in a Latin quarter cabinet de lecture. He was fascinated both by Balzac the man and by the extraordinary existence Balzac led as a creative writer. But where Barbey d'Aurevilly had welcomed the correspondence as giving the lie to Balzac's supposed immorality, Bourget went further in seeing it as imposing a view of our author as a highly sympathetic individual. Bourget's main contribution to the nineteenth-century debate over the nature of Balzac's creative genius, however, was to see the by now familiar two sides of the novelist as combined in a single being he terms an 'analytical visionary' rather than being at war with each other. In the first place, Balzac offers the modern artist the singular attraction of having been an analytical visionary.
