ould have led to
reinstatement in favour. He was now, as he graphically expressed it,
"thrown into" the Rue de Tournon,[*] and apparently no provision was
made for his wants. His parents, who had moved from Villeparisis to
Versailles the year before, in order to be near Madame Surville,
limited their interference in his affairs to severe criticism on his
want of respect in not coming to see his family, and righteous wrath
at his extravagance in hanging his room with blue calico. These
reproaches he parried with the defence that he had no money to pay
omnibus fares, and could not even write often because of the expense
of postage; while anent the muslin, he stated that he possessed it
before his failure, as La Touche and he had nailed it up to hide the
frightful paper on the walls of the printing-office. Uncrushed by the
scathing comments on his attempts at decoration, curious though
characteristic efforts on the part of a starving man, he writes to his
sister a few days later: "Ah, Laure, if you did but know how
passionately I desire (but, hush! keep the secret) two blue screens
embroidered in black (silence ever!)."[+] He reopens his letter about
the screens to answer one from Madame Surville, written evidently at
the instigation of M. and Mme. de Balzac, to blame his supposed
idleness; and the poor fellow, to whom _this_ fault at least could at
no time be justly imputed, asks her if he is not already unhappy
enough, and tells her pathetically how he suffers from these unjust
suspicions, and that he can never be happy till he is dead. In the
end, however, he returns with childlike persistence to the screens as
a panacea for all his ills, and finishes with: "But my screens--I want
them more than ever, for a little joy in the midst of torment!"

[*] He says himself "Rue Cassini," but this is a mistake.

[+] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 82.

He had now apparently completely gone under, like many another
promising young man of whom great things are expected; and he had in
his pride and misery hidden himself from every one, except a few
intimate friends. With the death on June 19, 1829, of his father,
whose last days were saddened by the knowledge of his son's disaster,
the world was poorer by one castle in the air the less; for besides
his natural sorrow at the death of the kind old man, who was so much
softer than his wife, the dream of becoming a millionaire by means of
the Tontine capital faded way, like all poor Hon