The close relationships between artists and authors in 19th-century France is evidenced in the illustrious novels of Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Marcel Proust, J. K. Huysmans, and Guy de Maupassant. These novelists wrote about painting, created painters as characters, and physically described characters in the vein of their painter-friends. Anka Muhlstein, author of "The Pen and The Brush: How Passion for Art Shaped Nineteenth-Century French Novels," discusses how the intimate exchange between authors and artists influenced the literary current of the time.