Character Study

Balzac’s 1829 treatise La physiologie du mariage contains a strange passage:

https://books.google.com/books?id=z7k-AAAAYAAJ

“Four editions of the book, three of them printed in Balzac’s lifetime, in fact contain four different versions,” notes F.L. Bauer in Decrypted Secrets. “The author must have been playing a practical joke on the reader. Nevertheless, [French military cryptanalyst Étienne] Bazeries investigated such a cryptogram in 1901 and found that it did not fit any known scheme; it was une facétie de l’auteur.”