For instance, in placing Alfred de
Musset as a poet above Victor Hugo or Lamartine, he daringly
contradicted the opinions of his own day, and anticipated a criticism
which is at present becoming respectable if not fashionable. On the
other hand, his estimate of _Volupte_, Sainte-Beuve's just then
published novel, which he was soon to imitate and recreate in his
_Lily in the Valley_, was manifestly prejudiced. He called it a book
badly written in most of its parts, weak, loosely constructed,
diffuse, in which there were some good things, in short a puritanical
book, the chief character of it, Madame Couaen not being woman enough.
His opinion, which he imparted to Madame Hanska, he apparently took no
trouble to conceal, for Sainte-Beuve was evidently aware of it when he
treated Balzac very sharply in an article of this same year of 1834.
From that date, the celebrated lecturer looked with coldness and
disfavour on the novelist, and even in his final pronouncement of the
_Causeries du Lundi_, shortly after Balzac's death, he meted out but
faint praise.
Something has been said in a previous chapter of the novelist's belief
in certain occult powers of the mind, with which the newly discovered
action of magnetism seemed to him to be connected.
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