Originally published in 1840, seventy years before Katherine Cecil Thurston's Max, Edgar Allen Poe's “The Man of the Crowd” highlights the anxieties that emerge around the illegibility of the modern city, which nightly presents “the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed.” The menacing figure of Poe's tale embodies the modern cityscape by refusing to be revealed, by withholding permission to be read. While Poe's tale sets out a recognizably Gothic vision of London's heterogeneous and thronging crowd, Julie Abraham argues that Honoré de Balzac's La Fille aux yeux d'or (The Girl with the Golden Eyes, 1835) establishes the terms that will dominate attempts to read the nature of the modern metropolitan landscape. In his attempt to lay out the “cadaverous physiognomy” of Paris, Balzac turns to “[a] few remarks on the Parisian” that depict the French capital in hellish terms which recall Dante's Inferno. Just as Poe relates his attempt to read the modern cityscape to the act of reading its citizens, Balzac connects the landscape of Paris, where “smoke billows, fires roar, everything flashes, boils, burns, and evaporates, everything is extinguished and rekindled, everything sparkles, glitters, and is itself consumed,” to an attempt to read the infernal physiognomy of the Parisians themselves and their “twisted, contorted faces [which] exude from every pore the thoughts, desires, and poisons which bloat their minds.” Indeed, Poe's narrative ends because physiognomy fails to provide an accurate reading of the metropolitan figure; similarly, Balzac's narrator admits that the faces he is attempting to read “are not faces but masks, masks of weakness or strength, masks of misery, joy, or hypocrisy, each one drained and marked with the indelible signs of breathless greed.”