n gauche_. They were followed next year by six
others:--_L'Heritiere de Birague_; _Jean Louis, ou La Fille trouvee_;
_Clotilde de Lusignan, ou Le Beau Juif_; _Le Centenaire, ou Les Deux
Beringheld_; _Le Vicaire des Ardennes_; _Le Tartare, ou Le Retour de
l'exile_. And these were again followed up in 1823 by three more: _La
Derniere Fee, ou La Nouvelle Lampe merveilleuse_; _Michel et Christine et
la suite_; _L'Anonyme, ou Ni pere ni mere_. In 1824 came _Annette et le
criminel_, a continuation of the _Vicaire_; in 1825, _Wann-Chlore_, which
afterwards took the less extravagant title of _Jane la pale_. These novels,
which filled some two score volumes originally, were published under divers
pseudonyms ("Lord R'hoone," an anagram of "Honore," "Horace de Saint
Aubin," &c.), and in actual collaboration with two or three other writers.
But though there is not yet in them anything more than the faintest dawn of
the true Balzac, though no one of them is good as a whole, and very few
parts deserve that word except with much qualification, they deserve far
more study than they have usually received, and it is difficult to
apprehend the true Balzac until they have been studied. They ceased for a
time, not because of the author's conviction of their badness (though he
entertained no serious delusions on this subject), nor because they failed
of a certain success in actual money return, but because he had taken to
the earliest, the most prolonged, and the most disastrous of his dabblings
in business--this time as a publisher to some extent and still more as a
printer and type-founder. Not very much was known about his experiences in
this way (except their general failure, and the result in hampering him
with a load of debt directly for some ten years and indirectly for the
whole of his life) till in 1903 MM. Hanotaux and Vicaire published the
results of their inquiries into the actual accounts of the concern. There
seems to have been no reason why it should not have succeeded, and there
has been claimed for it first, that it provided Balzac with a great amount
of actual detail which he utilized directly in the novels, and secondly,
that it gave him at whatever cost a still more valuable experience of
practical life--the experience which has so often been wanting to men of
letters. Anyhow, from 1825 to 1828, the future author of the _Comedie
humaine_ was a publisher, printer and type-founder; and in the last year he
had to abscond, or so