soon imposed silence upon him, and he ceased to comment on the
great drama of his life.

The great versatility of his mind, and the power he possessed of
throwing himself with the utmost keenness into many absolutely
dissimilar and incongruous enterprises at the same time, add further
to the difficulty of understanding him. An extraordinary number of
subjects had their place in his capacious brain, and the ease with
which he dismissed one and took up another with equal zest the moment
after, causes his doings to seem unnatural to us of ordinary mind.
Leon Gozlan gives a curious instance of this on the occasion of the
first reading of the "Ressources de Quinola."

Balzac had recited his play in the green-room of the Odeon to the
assembled actors and actresses, and before a most critical audience
had gone through the terrible strain of trying to improvise the fifth
act, which was not yet written. He and Gozlan went straight from the
hot atmosphere of the theatre to refresh themselves in the cool air of
the Luxembourg Gardens. Here we should expect one of two things to
happen. Either Balzac would be depressed with the ill-success of his
fifth act, at which, according to Gozlan, he had acquitted himself so
badly that Madame Dorval, the principal actress, refused to take a
role in the play; or, on the other hand, his sanguine temperament
would cause him to overlook the drawbacks, and to think only of the
enthusiasm with which the first four acts had been received. Neither
of these two things took place. Balzac "n'y pensait deja plus." He
talked with the greatest eagerness of the embellishments he had
proposed to M. Decazes for his palace, and especially of a grand
spiral staircase, which was to lead from the centre of the Luxembourg
Gardens to the Catacombs, so that these might be shown to visitors,
and become a source of profit to Paris. But of his play he said
nothing.

The reader of "Lettres a l'Etrangere," which are written to the woman
with whom Balzac was passionately in love, and whom he afterwards
married, may, perhaps, at first sight congratulate himself on at last
understanding in some degree the great author's character and mode of
life. If he dives beneath the surface, however, he will find that
these beautiful and touching letters give but an incomplete picture;
and that, while writing them, Balzac was throwing much energy into
schemes, which he either does not mention to his correspondent, or
touches on in