ase always connected with and on the whole quite secondary to
work. He would even sometimes resist the commands by which at long
intervals Mme. Hanska would summon him to see her, and abstract the greater
part of his actual visits to her in order to serve this still more
absorbing mistress. He had, as we have seen, worked pretty hard, even
before 1829, and his work had partly taken forms not yet
mentioned--political pamphlets and miscellaneous articles which are now
accessible in the _Edition definitive_ of his works, and hardly one of
which is irrelevant to a just conception of him. Nor did he by any means
abandon these by-works after 1829; indeed, he at one time started and
almost entirely wrote, a periodical called the _Revue parisienne_. He wrote
some dramas and planned many more, though the few which reached the stage
left it again promptly. Balzac's dramas, as they appear in his works,
consist of _Vautrin, Les Ressources de Quinola, Pamela Giraud_ (arranged
for the stage by others), _La Maratre_ and _Mercadet le faiseur_, the last
of which has, since his death, been not unsuccessful. But on the whole he
did devote himself to his true vocation, with a furious energy beside which
even Scott's, except in his sadder and later days, becomes leisurely.
Balzac generally wrote (dining early and lightly, and sleeping for some
hours immediately after dinner) from midnight till any hour in the
following day--stretches of sixteen hours being not unknown, and the
process being often continued for days and weeks. Besides his habit of
correcting a small printed original into a long novel on the proofs, he was
always altering and re-shaping his work, even before, in 1842, he carried
out the idea of building it all into one huge structure--the _Comedie
humaine_ with its subdivisions of _Scenes de la vie parisienne, Etudes
philosophiques, &c._ Much pains have been spent upon this title and
Balzac's intentions in selecting it. But the "Human Comedy," as a
description for mere studies of life as his, will explain itself at once or
else can never be explained.

Of its constituents, however, some account must be given, and this can be
best done through an exact and complete list of the whole work by years,
with such abbreviated notes on the chief constituents as may lead up to a
general critical summary. Of the two capital works of 1829, we have spoken.
1830, the epoch year, saw part (it was not fully published till the next)
of _La Pea