“Three days before his death, he was still putting the finishing touches to his manuscripts; he had fair copies made for the printers, since he was more concerned about every detail and every minor cul de lampe than about anything else.²⁰² He died in this way on February 18, 1654, thinking chaotically about his flowery games and his conscience, sincere no doubt, having converted out of compunction, but having converted while holding firm to his defect and his weakness which always reemerged.”

“Nature, history, geography, the universe, existed only to provide him with his single and favorite plunder: metaphor. Let us examine ourselves, let us peer into our own literary conscience. I suspect that more than one eminent modern writer is not as distant to Guez de Balzac as he imagines.” Examining himself closely, Sainte-Beuve suspected he himself belonged to “that sort of spirit that is all for expression and imagery.”²⁰³

Like a malevolent genealogist who introduces venom into the family history, Sainte-Beuve identified Guez de Balzac as the forefather of style-obsessed writers of French prose. That cult, of such fatuous and ridiculous origin, whose beginnings will always remain uncertain, despite all conjecture, was destined to have a long and eventful life. It no longer gazed at itself in the waters of the Charente, but sailed in all parts, as far as the old Ocean, until it was lost from sight on Rimbaud’s Bateau ivre. In the sentences of Rousseau, leaving aside “his thought and his basic genius,” Sainte-Beuve’s ear recognized “the movement, cadence, caesuras, articulations, and in a way the framework” of Guez de Balzac’s prose.²⁰⁴ But other undertakings remained: with Chateaubriand, style becomes a magnificent plunder and he subjugates everything to his empire. His “spirit of conquest” did not belong just to politics. “Chateaubriand is a great writer, a great conqueror and invader in matters of style.²⁰⁵ (This is basically his only unity of passion and feeling, the unity of the stylist); he is neither realist, nor Christian, nor republican, nor socialist, nor … etc., but all this at the same time or in succession, according to what imagery, what more or less beautiful and tempting metaphors there are to be reaped in all fields of ideas: he cannot hold back and throws himself on them: he is a full-blown plunderer, a hoarder of bright and flowery tithes: royal lilies, red carnations, even violets hidden in the grass or knapweed in the cornfields of Beauce, he wanders the countryside searching out everything that seems lovely to pick and, where he has never sown, he gathers his plunder, the variegated flora of all harvests.”

Proust spoke of style as the “sign of the transformation that the writer’s thought imposes on reality.”²⁰⁶ Once the professorial distinction between “form” and “content” so admired by Sainte-Beuve has been abolished, thought displays itself in what had long passed for mere ornament. After Chateaubriand’s sonorous plundering, in Flaubert the scattered and splintered materials are brought together: “All parts of reality are converted into one and the same substance, with vast surfaces, in glittering monotone.²⁰⁷ No impurity is left. The surfaces have become reflective. All things are depicted there, but in reflection, without altering the uniformity of substance. Everything that was different has been converted and absorbed.”