The interest does not arise alone from the contrasts of his foibles,
which, forsooth, are nearly always comic--when they are not tragic. We
are just as much attracted by the contrasts of his qualities, and by
the interplay of the former with the latter--the victories and
defeats, the glimpses of immense possibility, the struggles between
temperament and environment, all these having a fullness of display
rarely found in human nature.
Besides the portraits in painting or sculpture executed of the
novelist by Deveria, Boulanger, David d'Angers, and others, some
mention of which has already been made, there was one begun by
Meissonier, who unfortunately did not finish it. Monsieur Jules
Claretie states that the canvas on which it was drawn was subsequently
covered by the artist's _Man choosing a Sword_, to-day in the Van
Prael collection at Brussels. About Boulanger's picture Theophile
Gautier has a good deal to tell us in his article of 1837, published
in the _Beaux Arts de la Presse_; and it scarcely agrees with Balzac's
condemnation of the portrait as a daub, when he saw the canvas some
years later in Russia. Remarking on the difficulty of rendering the
novelist's physiognomy, on account of its mobility and strange aspect,
Gautier gives it as his opinion that Boulanger succeeded perfectly in
seizing the complex expression which seemed to escape all efforts of
the brush.
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