Being the central novel of La comédie humaine, Illusions perdues displays most of Balzac’s thematic, narrative and stylistic strategies. One of those strategies is the faithful reproduction of a great variety of oral and written discourses. This paper analyses the relationship between the Aristotelian concept of mimesis and the nineteenth-century literary technique of realistic verisimilitude, and the way in which language and metalanguage are used as two essential tools in Balzac’s narrative. Through a comparison of examples taken from several translations of Illusions perdues in Spanish and English, the ultimate goal of this paper is to emphasize the importance for translators to be aware of the stylistic variety of Balzac’s novel in order to create in the target languages a realistic effect as near as possible to the original one.