Abstract: This article takes a look back at the role of “bodies” or “imponderable fluids” in the Balzacian system in order to relate it to the importance that the novelist accords to movement in his hermeneutics of the body. Such a connection makes it possible to question the heaviness that Taine criticized in Balzac’s practice of embodiment, but also to confront his conception of the body with that of Zola. Two radically different visions of physiology thus emerge.
