and almost uncontrollable joy when she hears his steps in the room above, but feels obliged, in order not to betray his arrival, to continue her conversation in the drawing-room; her hurried entrance into his room, and the frightful discovery that the person who has arrived is not her son, but a real recruit-all this, compressed into a few pages, is described with extraordinary power and truth to nature.

Next Balzac paints the women of the Napoleonic period, upon a background of military pomp and splendour, in all the glow and warmth of their admiration for the successful warriors. His picture bears the impress of the restless, pleasure-seeking haste with which life was lived at a time when it was possible for the young woman "to become fiancée, wife, mother, and widow between a first and a fifth bulletin from the Grande Armée," and when the near prospect of widowhood or honours or an immortal name, made the women more reckless and the officers more seductive. A period and a distinct female type are represented in the description of the review in the Tuileries Gardens, and of the evening party at the time of the battle of Wagram (in La Femme de trente Ans and La Paix du Ménage).

But it is not until the plots of his stories are laid in the days of the restored Legitimist monarchy that Balzac finds his true province, and produces his most acutely observed, skilfully drawn female types and his most wonderful psychological analyses. Eminenlty fitted as he was, with his unshrinking eye and his hard hand, to paint the dulness and the dishonesty of the reign of the Citizen King, he was poet enough to look back regretfully from the prosaic days of the plutocracy to the refined elegance and freer, gayer tone of the days of the Legitimist Monarchy. That had still been an aristocratic period; and Balzac, who, without any proper claim to the title, regarded himself as an aristocrat, had no small respect for the aristocracy; the high-born, well-bred, beautiful woman was in his eyes the flower of humanity. He was of the generation that worshipped Napoleon; Napoleon's name appears on every tenth page of his novels, and (like Victor Hugo) he dreamed of rivalling, in his own domain of literature, the Emperor's world-wide dominion; in his study

stood a statuette of Napoleon, and on the scabbard of the sword he had written: "What he has conquered with the sword I will conquer with the pen." But, granted all this, he nevertheless, with his dreams, his weaknesses, his vanities and his refinements, belonged to the Legitimist Monarchy, for which, moreover, the fact that his youth had been spent under it gave him a warmer feeling. In the days of gilded state-coaches and old French ceremonial, under the shelter of ecclesiasticism and frivolity, it had been possible for liberal ideas and humane morals to thrive in the higher classes of society; they disappeared when money ascended the throne. The social life of Paris lost that refined charm for which it had been so famous. It is not surprising, then, that Balzac painted the fair sinners of the Faubourg St. Germain with a lenient hand and flattering colours. One of the most eminent women of the day, the charming Delphine de Girardin, whose salon was a fashionable resort, was a true friend to Balzac as well as to Hugo and Gautier; but as far as his works are concerned, he undoubtedly learned more from the two duchesses who personified to him the greatness of Imperial France and the gay refinement of the ancien régime, and with whom he became intimate almost at the beginning of his literary career. These were Madame Junot, the Duchess of Abrantés, whom he assisted in her literary pursuits, and the Duchesse de Castries, who began their acquaintance by writing anonymously to him of her interest in his works, and to whom a probably unrequited passion on his side and violent jealousy on hers long bound him. She appears in his Histoire des Treize under the name of the Duchesse de Langeais.

At the beginning of the Thirties, Balzac has, of course, not yet begun to write of society under the Constitutional Monarchy, its women and their passions. This happens later. And when it does happen, what we observe is, that he as a rule envisages this new material much more gloomily and austerely. The feeling of spring has vanished. Woman and love still form the centre of interest in many of the books. But affection has become passion and passion has become depravity. We read little of unselfish feeling and

innocent sympathies, much of self-interested calculation, on the part of women as well as of men, nay, especially on the part of women; even in love, and still more when it is only a substitute for love which is described. In many of these novels the courtesan thrusts the fine lady into the background, and occasionally the former is represented as more disinterested than the latter. Abysses of selfishness and vice

open before the reader's eyes.

XV
BALZAC

Of the books published by Balzac in 1833 and 1834, two are especially deserving of notice the delicately wrought, classic tale, Eugénie Grandet, and the powerful, fateful Père Goriot. In the first-mentioned work Balzac competes with Molière (L'Avare), in the second with no less a writer than Shakespeare (King Lear).

Eugénie Grandet does not represent the full measure of Balzac's talent, though he long went by the name of its author as a kind of title of honour. The book interested because of its careful and accurate descriptions of provincial life with its virtues and vices; it could be recommended for family reading, because the heroine was a chaste and nobleminded young girl; but its chief distinction lay in the wonderful manner in which Balzac's genius makes of covetousness and avarice, qualities of which hitherto only the comical side had been displayed, imposing vices. He shows how the instinct of amassing money, which it is the custom to regard as a laughable weakness, by degrees stifles every human feeling, and, raising its terrible Medusa head, tyrannises over the miser's surroundings; and he at the same time makes the miser himself a more human figure. To Balzac he is not the stereotyped comedy bourgeois, but a power-loving monomaniac, a petrified enthusiast, a poet, who at the sight of his gold revels in satisfied desire, but also in wild dreams. The miser is simply a man who is more thoroughly impressed than other men with the truth that money represents all human powers and pleasures. the representation of such a character, Balzac displays his peculiar gift, which is that of producing a powerful effect with small means, with what others have overlooked or

In

despised. From the symbolic standpoint the horizon of Eugénie Grandet is not narrow; but it was narrow in comparison with Balzac's characteristic and usual one.

In Père Goriot it widens.

Here it is not an out-of-theway provincial nook, but the great city of Paris which is studied, and which is unrolled, like a panorama, before our eyes. And there is no generalising and symbolising, as in La Peau de Chagrin; each class of society and each character in each class is provided with its own characteristic features. I have spoken of King Lear; but the story of the two coldhearted daughters and their father, full of deep meaning and feeling as it is, is only in an external sense the theme of the book. The real theme is the comparatively uncorrupted provincial youth's introduction to the world of Paris, his gradual discovery of the real nature of that world, his horror at the discovery, his refusal to do what others do, his temptations, and his gradual, yet rapidly completed, education for the life that is being lived around him. Nothing more profound than this study of the development of Rastignac's character has been produced by Balzac, or indeed by any modern novelist. He shows with marvellous art how on every side, except where men's words are dictated by hypocrisy or extreme naïveté, the young man meets with the same conception of society and receives the same advice. His relative and protectress, the charming and distinguished Madame de Beauséant, says to him: "The more coldly you calculate, the higher you will rise. Think of men and women simply as post-horses to be left behind you, brokenwinded, at each stage of your journey. . . . If you have any real feeling, hide it; never let it be suspected, or you are lost. . . . If you can manage to make women think you clever, men will soon believe that you are, unless you destroy their illusion too rudely. . . . You will find out what society is a company of dupes and rogues. Be neither the one nor the other." And the escaped galleyslave Vautrin says to him: "One must either force a way for one's self into the heart of that crowd as a cannon-ball does, or sneak in like the plague. Honesty is of no use. Men bend and submit to the power of genius; they hate it,