f tenderness and despair; for I feel the future, and I need
this devoted mother on the day of triumph! When shall I reach
it? Take good care of our mother, Laure, for the present and
the future.... Some day, when my works are unfolded, you will
see that it must have taken many hours to think and write so
many things; and then you will absolve me of everything that
has displeased you, and you will excuse, not the selfishness of
the man (the man has none), but the selfishness of the worker.

Nothing can be more touching than that; Balzac's natural affections were
as robust as his genius and his physical nature. The impression of the
reader of his letters quite confirms his assurance that the man proper
had no selfishness. Only we are constantly reminded that the man had
almost wholly resolved himself into the worker, and we remember a
statement of Sainte-Beuve's, in one of his malignant foot-notes, to the
effect that Balzac was "the grossest, greediest example of literary
vanity that he had ever known"--_l'amour-propre litteraire le plus avide
et le plus grossier que j'aie connu_. When we think of what Sainte-Beuve
must have known in this line, these few words acquire a portentous
weight.

By this time (1832) Balzac was, in French phrase, thoroughly _lance_. He
was doing, among other things, some of his most brilliant work, certain
of the "Contes Drolatiques." These were written, as he tells his mother,
for relaxation, as a rest from harder labor. One would have said that no
work would have been much harder than compounding the marvellously
successful imitation of mediaeval French in which these tales are
written. He had, however, other diversions as well. In the autumn of
1832 he was at Aix-les-Bains with the Duchess of Castries, a great lady,
and one of his kindest friends. He has been accused of drawing portraits
of great ladies without knowledge of originals; but Mme. de Castries was
an inexhaustible fund of instruction upon this subject. Three or four
years later, speaking of the story of the "Duchesse de Laugeais" to one
of his correspondents, another _femme du monde_, he tells her that as a
_femme du monde_ she is not to pretend to find flaws in the picture, a
high authority having read the proofs for the express purpose of
removing them. The authority is evidently the Duchess of Castries.

Balzac writes to Mme. Carraud from Aix: "At Lyons I corrected 'Lambert'
again. I licked m