The lapidary style in French poetry is embodied by Malherbe's famous correction of Desportes's allegedly "flabby" verse: Malherbe struck out entire stanzas and demanded that every word earn its place, establishing an ideal of poetic economy in which no syllable is wasted; Vigny's poetic style has often been described as lapidaire: his verse has the weight and permanence of carved stone, each line polished to a permanent formulation that resists paraphrase and seems to have always existed in that exact form; The medieval lapidaire as a genre is exemplified by the "Lapidaire" of Marbode of Rennes, which in its French verse adaptations describes the properties of sixty precious stones with the combination of natural observation, magical belief, and moral allegory characteristic of medieval encyclopedic poetry; A student practicing the lapidaire style should try to write a single line of verse so concentrated and well-made that it could be carved in stone: every adjective necessary, no word replaceable, the syntax creating an impression of permanent inevitability; Boileau's aphoristic distiques achieve the lapidaire quality through their compression of critical doctrine into perfectly balanced paired alexandrins that have the authority and memorability of proverbs; The Parnassian aesthetic, with its celebration of formal perfection and its comparison of poetry to sculpture, represents the 19th century's most explicit embrace of the lapidaire ideal, treating the perfectly made poem as a sculptural object whose value lies in the permanence and precision of its form.