was only one Balzac. This happy father was an officer in the
commissary department of Napoleon's army, and so never had an
opportunity to win the bauble reputation at the cannon's mouth, nor show
his quality in the imminent deadly breach. He died through an earnest
but futile effort, filled with the fear of failure, to so regulate his
physical life that repair would exactly equal waste, and thus live on
earth forever.

The mother of our great man was a beauty and an heiress. Her husband was
twenty-five years her senior. She ever regarded herself as one robbed of
her birthright, and landed at high tide upon a barren and desert
domestic isle. Honore, her first child, was born before she was twenty.
Napoleon was at that time playing skittles with all Europe, and the
woman whom Fate robbed of her romance worshiped at the shrine of the
Corsican, because every good woman has to worship something or somebody.
She saw Napoleon on several occasions, and once he kissed his hand to
her when she stood in a balcony and he was riding through the street.
And there their intimacy ended, a fact much regretted in print by her
gifted son years afterward.

Six years of Balzac's life, from his sixth to his thirteenth year, were
spent in a monastery school, a place where fond parents were relieved by
holy men of their parental responsibilities, for a consideration.

Not once in the six years' time was the boy allowed to go home or to
visit his parents. Once a year, at Easter, his mother came to see him
and expressed regret at the backward state of his mind.

Balzac's education was gotten in spite of his teachers, and by setting
at naught the minute and painstaking plans of his mother. This mother
lived her life a partial invalid, whimsical, querulous, religious
overmuch, always fearing a fatal collapse; in this disappointed, for she
finally died peacefully of old age, going to bed and forgetting to
waken. She was long to survive her son, and realize his greatness only
after he was gone, getting the facts from the daily papers, which seems
to prove that the newspaper does have a mission.

Possibly the admiration of Balzac's mother for the little Corporal had
its purpose in God's great economy. In any event her son had some of the
Corsican's characteristics.

In the big brain of Balzac there was room for many emotions. The man had
sympathy plus, and an imagination that could live every life, feel every
pang of pain, know every throb of