e and notified me,
and two or three words as fine as amber mended _maman's_
countenance. The thing is nothing--a mere drop of water; but
it's to give you an example of our manners. Ah, we are a jolly
set of originals in our holy family. What a pity I can't put us
into novels!

His father wished to find him an opening in some profession, and the
thought of being made a notary was a bugbear to the young man: "Think of
me as dead, if they cap me with that extinguisher." And yet, in the next
sentence, he breaks out into a cry of desolate disgust at the aridity of
his actual circumstances: "They call this mechanical rotation
living--this perpetual return of the same things. If there were only
something to throw some charm or other over my cold existence. I have
none of the flowers of life, and yet I am in the season in which they
bloom. What will be the use of fortune and pleasures when my youth has
departed? What need of the garments of an actor if one no longer plays a
part? An old man is a man who has dined, and who watches others eat; and
I, young as I am--my plate is empty, and I am hungry. Laure, Laure, my
two only and immense desires, _to be famous and to be loved_--will they
ever be satisfied?"

These occasional bursts of confidence in his early letters to his sister
are (with the exception of certain excellent pages, addressed in the
last years of his life to the lady he eventually married) Balzac's most
delicate, most emotional utterances. There is a touch of the ideal in
them. Later, one wonders where he keeps his ideal. He has one of course,
artistically, but it never peeps out. He gives up talking sentiment, and
he never discusses "subjects"; he only talks business. Meanwhile,
however, at this period, business was increasing with him. He agrees to
write three novels for eight hundred and twenty dollars. Here begins the
inextricable mystery of Balzac's literary promises, pledges, projects,
and contracts. His letters form a swarming register of schemes and
bargains through which he passes like a hero of the circus, riding half
a dozen piebald coursers at once. We confess that in this matter we have
been able to keep no sort of account; the wonder is that Balzac should
have accomplished the feat himself. After the first year or two of his
career, we never see him working upon a single tale; his productions
dovetail and overlap, and dance attendance upon each other in the most
bewildering