uncomfortable figure, as portrayed by his
contemporaries--continued to belittle and revile his former pupil,
while all the time he loved him, and longed for a reconciliation which
never took place. La Touche had a quick instinct for discovering
genius: he introduced Andre Chenier's posthumous poems to the public,
and launched Jules Sandeau and George Sand. But he was soured by
seeing his pupils enter the promised land only open to genius, while
he was left outside himself. Sooner or later, the eager, affected
little hypochondriacal man with the bright eyes quarrelled with all
his friends, and a rupture would naturally soon take place between the
ultra-sensitive teacher, ready to take offence on the smallest
pretext, and the hearty, robust Tourainean, who, whatever his troubles
might be, faced the world with a laugh, who insisted on his genius
with cheery egotism, and who, in spite of real goodheartedness and
depth of affection, was too full of himself to be always careful about
the feelings of others. How much Balzac owed to La Touche we do not
know; but though, as we have already seen, there were other reasons
for his sudden stride in literature between 1825 and 1828, it is
significant that "Les Chouans," the first book to which he affixed his
name, and in which his genius really shows itself, was written
directly after his intercourse with this literary teacher. No doubt La
Touche, who was cursed with the miserable fate of possessing the
temperament of genius without the electric spark itself, magnified the
help he had given, and felt extreme bitterness at the shortness of
memory shown by the great writer, whom he vainly strove to sting into
feeling by the acerbity of his attacks.

Never at any time did Balzac go out much into society, but his
anonymous novels, though they did not bring him fame, had opened to
him the doors of several literary and artistic salons, and he was a
frequenter of that of Madame Sophie Gay, the author of several novels,
one of which, "Anatole," is said to have been read by Napoleon during
the last night spent at Fontainebleau in 1814. Hers was essentially an
Empire salon, antagonistic to the government of the Bourbons, and
Balzac's feelings were perhaps occasionally ruffled by the talk that
went on around him, though more probably the interest he found in the
study of different phases of opinion outweighed his party
prepossessions. Those evenings must have been an anxious pleasure;
for, wit