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This article examines Balzac’s thinking on art, starting with a phrase found in several of the novelist’s works from the 1840s, which synthesizes the undertaking that is La Comédie humaine: “peindre la société moderne en action.” Less dependent on the ancient and classical idea of ut pictura poesis, which makes painting, as a visible duplication of nature, the model of art, the representation of Balzac’s modern society is better understood in terms of the notion of the “tableau.” Poised between copy and invention, the Balzacian “tableau” can be read as a fundamental epistemological and aesthetic category of the novelist’s poetics. This article thus offers a unique form of poetics, quite different from those readings that only recognize in Balzac a total and general synthesis of modern society.