ight; and he makes the true boast that, though he may have the
egotism of the hard worker, he has never yet forsaken any one for whom
he feels affection, and is the same now in heart as when he was a boy.

[*] "Correspondance," vol. ii. p. 115.

Other early and lifelong friendships were with Madame Delannoy, who
lent him money, and was in all ways kind to him, and with M. de
Margonne, who lived at Sache, a chateau on the Indre, in the beautiful
Touraine valley described in "Le Lys dans la Vallee," and who had held
Balzac on his knees when a child. Balzac often paid him visits,
especially when he wanted to meditate over some serious work, as he
found the solitude and pure air, and the fact that he was treated in
the neighbourhood simply as a native of the country and not as a
celebrity, peculiarly stimulating to his imagination and powers of
creation. He wrote "Louis Lambert," among other novels at the house of
this hospitable friend. Madame de Margonne he did not care for: she
was, according to his unflattering portrait of her, intolerant and
devout, deformed, and not at all _spirituelle_. But she did not count
for much; Balzac went to the house for the sake of her husband.

An intimacy was formed about this time between Balzac and La Touche,
the editor of the _Figaro_, who, as has been already mentioned, helped
him in the prosaic task of nailing up draperies. This intimacy must
have been of great value to Balzac's education in the art of
literature, and is remarkable for that reason in the history of a man
in whose writings small trace of outside influence can be descried,
and who, except in the case of Theophile Gautier, seemed little
affected by the thought of his contemporaries. Therefore, though a
long way behind Madame de Berny--without whom Balzac, as we know him,
would hardly have existed--La Touche deserves recognition for his
work, however small, in moulding the literary ideals and forming the
taste of the great writer. Besides this, his friendship with Balzac is
almost unique in the history of the latter, in the fact that, for some
reason we do not know, it was suddenly broken off; and that almost the
only occasion when Balzac showed personal dislike almost amounting to
hatred, in criticism, was when, in 1840, in the _Revue Parisienne_, he
published an article on "Leo," a novel by La Touche. He became, George
Sand says, completely indifferent to his old master, while the latter
--a pathetic, yet thorny and