This new study of the nineteenth-century French realist novel focuses on the fundamental incompatibility between the narrative and the descriptive modes of discourse. It shows how major novelists including Balzac, Flaubert and Zola, like some of their twentieth-century successors, grappled with their belief or fear that their stories lied in their representation of time and history, or that their descriptions forgot the reality of their socio-historical world, highlighting their use of irony and allegory in the struggle against the deceitfulness of their own texts.