ut
that the lady, who afterwards became Madame Rossini, refused to listen
to his suit, though she confessed to a great admiration for his
fascinating black eyes.

The original of Pauline has never been discovered, but, possibly with
a few traits borrowed from Madame de Berny, she is what Balzac
describes in the last pages of "La Peau de Chagrin" as an "ideal, as a
visionary face in the fire, a face with unimaginable delicate
outlines, a floating apparition, which no chance will ever bring back
again."

Since the year 1830 Balzac had lodged in the Rue Cassini, a little,
unfrequented street near the Observatory, with a wall running along
one side, on which was written "L'Absolu, marchand de briques," a name
which Theophile Gautier fancies may have suggested to him the title of
his novel "La Recherche de l'Absolu." Borget, Balzac's great friend
and confidant, had rooms in the same house; and later on, when Borget
was on one of his frequent journeys, these rooms were occupied by
Jules Sandeau, after his parting with George Sand. In despair at her
desertion, he tried to commit suicide; and Balzac, touched with pity
at his forlorn condition, proposed that he should come to Borget's
rooms, and took complete and kindly charge of him--a generosity which
Sandeau, after having lived at Balzac's expense for two years, repaid
in 1836, by deserting his benefactor when he was in difficulties.

Balzac was now in the full swing of work. He writes to the Duchesse
d'Abrantes in 1831:[*] "Write, I cannot! The fatigue is too great. You
do not know that I owed in 1828, above what I possessed. I had only my
pen with which to earn my living, and to pay a hundred and twenty
thousand francs. In several months I shall have paid everything, and I
shall have arranged my poor little household; but for six months I
have all the troubles of poverty, I enjoy my last miseries. I have
begged from nobody, I have not held out my hand for a penny; I have
hidden my sorrows, and my wounds."

[*] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 131.

Poor Balzac! over and over again we hear the same story about the
beautiful time in the future, which he saw coming nearer and nearer,
but which always evaded his grasp at the last. Very often, when he
appears grasping and dictatorial in his business dealings, we may
trace his want of urbanity to some pressing pecuniary anxiety, which
he was too proud to reveal. No doubt these difficulties often sprang
from his extraordinary w