in
his creative powers, and describes more correctly his feelings when he
wrote "Les Chouans," "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote," and the "Peau de
Chagrin" itself, than those of this earlier period of his life, when
the difficulties of expressing himself often seemed insurmountable,
and the hiatus between his ideas and the form in which to clothe them
was almost impossible to bridge over.

Writing did not at any time come easily to him, and "Stella" and
"Coqsigrue," his first novels, were never finished; while a comedy,
"Les Deux Philosophes," was also abandoned in despair. Next he set to
work at "Cromwell," a tragedy in five acts, which was to be his
passport to fame. At this play he laboured for months, shutting
himself up completely, and loving his self-imposed slavery--though his
want of faculty for versification, and the intense difficulty he
experienced in finding words for the ideas which crowded into his
imaginative brain were decided drawbacks. While engaged on this work,
he may indeed have experienced some of the feelings he describes in
the "Peau de Chagrin," quoted above; for, curiously enough,
"Cromwell," his first finished production, was the only one of his
early works about which he was deceived, and which he imagined to be a
_chef d'oeuvre_. It was well he had this happy faith to sustain him,
as, according to the account of M. Jules de Petigny, the circumstances
under which the play was composed must, to put the matter mildly, have
been distinctly depressing.

This gentleman says: "I entered a narrow garret, furnished with a
bottomless chair, a rickety table and a miserable pallet bed, with two
dirty curtains half drawn round it. On the table were an inkstand, a
big copybook scribbled all over, a jug of lemonade, a glass, and a
morsel of bread. The heat in this wretched hole was stifling, and one
breathed a mephitic air which would have given cholera, if cholera had
then been invented!" Balzac was in bed, with a cotton cap of
problematic colour on his head. "You see," he said, "the abode I have
not left except once for two months--the evening when you met me.
During all this time I have not got up from the bed where I work at
the great work, for the sake of which I have condemned myself to this
hermit's life, and which happily I have just finished, for my powers
have come to an end." It must have been during these last months in
his garret, when he neglected everything for his projected
masterpiece, tha