osed to present himself as champion of the
Bourbon Royal Family, especially of the Duchesse de Berry, for whom he
had an immense admiration, while she read his books with much delight
during her captivity in the Castle of Blaye. He wrote to M. de Hanski
that he considered the exile of Madame and the Comte de Chambord the
great blot on France in the nineteenth century, as the French
Revolution had been her shame in the eighteenth.

[*] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 147.

This was Balzac's last serious attempt to stand for Parliament during
the Monarchy of July, though he often talked in his letters to Madame
Hanska of his political aspirations, looked forward to becoming a
deputy in 1839, and hoped till then to dominate European opinion
--rather a large ambition--by a political publication. In his letters
he is continually on the point of beginning his career as a statesman;
and in 1835 his views are even more inflated than usual. He will
absorb the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ and the _Revue de Paris_, is in
treaty to obtain one newspaper, and will start two others himself, so
that his power will be irresistible. "Le temps presse, les evenements
se compliquent,"[*] he cries impatiently. He is still strangled by
want of money--a hundred thousand francs is the modest sum he
requires; but he will write a play in the name of his secretary, and
the spectre of debt will be laid for ever.

[*] "Lettres a l'Etrangere."

However, in the stress of work, which made his own life like the
crowded canvas of one of his own novels, these brilliant schemes came
to nothing, and Balzac was never in the proud position of a deputy. He
gives his views clearly in a letter to Madame Carraud in 1830.[*]
"France ought to be a constitutional monarchy, to have a hereditary
royal family, a house of peers of extraordinary strength, which will
represent property, etc., with all possible guarantees for heredity,
and privileges of which the nature must be discussed; then a second
assembly, elective, representing all the interests of the intermediary
mass, which separates those of high social position from the classes
who are generally termed the people."

[*] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 108.

"The purport of the laws, and their spirit, should be designed to
enlighten the masses as much as possible--those who have nothing, the
workmen, the common people, etc., in order that as many as possible
should arrive at the intermediary state; but the people sh