The extra ordinary formal beauty of the text links, in a single movement, the internal work of a language in pursuit of perception with all the strength of its stylistic originality, and the conquest of a hitherto unperceived pathological individuality: The liver, reduced to a third of its volume, was, as it were, hidden in the region that it occupies; its external surface, slightly mammillated and emptied, was a yellowish grey in col our; when cut, it seemed to be made up entirely of a mass of small seeds, round or oval in shape, varying in size from a millet seed to a hemp seed.