fashion. As soon as one novel is fairly on the stocks he
plunges into another, and while he is rummaging in this with one hand,
he stretches out a heroic arm and breaks ground in a third. His plans
are always vastly in advance of his performance; his pages swarm with
titles of books that were never to be written. The title circulates with
such an assurance that we are amazed to find, fifty pages later, that
there is no more of it than of the cherubic heads. With this, Balzac was
constantly paid in advance by his publishers--paid for works not begun,
or barely begun; and the money was as constantly spent before the
equivalent had been delivered. Meanwhile more money was needed, and new
novels were laid out to obtain it; but prior promises had first to be
kept. Keeping them, under these circumstances, was not an exhilarating
process; and readers familiar with Balzac will reflect with wonder that
these were yet the circumstances in which some of his best tales were
written. They were written, as it were, in the fading light, by a man
who saw night coming on, and yet couldn't afford to buy candles. He
could only hurry. But Balzac's way of hurrying was all his own; it was a
sternly methodical haste, and might have been mistaken, in a more
lightly-weighted genius, for elaborate trifling. The close tissue of his
work never relaxed; he went on doggedly and insistently, pressing it
down and packing it together, multiplying erasures, alterations,
repetitions, transforming proof-sheets, quarrelling with editors,
enclosing subject within subject, accumulating notes upon notes.

The letters make a jump from 1822 to 1827, during which interval he had
established, with borrowed capital, a printing house, and seen his
enterprise completely fail. This failure saddled him with a mountain of
debt which pressed upon him crushingly for years, and of which he rid
himself only toward the close of his life. Balzac's debts are another
labyrinth in which we do not profess to hold a clue. There is scarcely a
page of these volumes in which they are not alluded to, but the reader
never quite understands why they should bloom so perennially. The
liabilities incurred by the collapse of the printing scheme can hardly
have been so vast as not to have been for the most part cancelled by ten
years of heroic work. Balzac appears not to have been extravagant; he
had neither wife nor children (unlike many of his comrades, he had no
illegitimate offspring), a