vigour, the personification of happiness; and his
conscientious mother immediately set to work to repair the
deficiencies of his former education, and sent him to lectures at the
Sorbonne, where he heard extempore speeches from such men as
Villemain, Guizot, and Cousin. Apparently this teaching opened a new
world to him, and he learned for the first time that education can be
more than a dull routine of dry facts, and felt the joy of contact
with eloquence and learning. Possibly he realised, as he had not
realised before--Tours being, as he says, a most unliterary town--that
there were people in the world who looked on things as he did, and who
would understand, and not laugh at him or snub him. He always returned
from these lectures, his sister says, glowing with interest, and would
try as far as he could to repeat them to his family. Then he would
rush out to study in the public libraries, so that he might be able to
profit by the teaching of his illustrious professors, or would wander
about the Latin Quarter, to hunt for rare and precious books. He used
his opportunities in other ways. An old lady living in the house with
the Balzacs had been an intimate friend of the great Beaumarchais.
Honore loved to talk to her, and would ask her questions, and listen
with the greatest interest to her replies, till he could have written
a Life of the celebrated man himself. His powers of acute observation,
interest, and sympathy--in short, his intense faculty for human
fellowship, as well as his capacity for assimilating information from
books--were already at work; and the future novelist was consciously
or unconsciously collecting material in all directions.

In 1816 it was considered necessary that he should be started with
regular work, and he was established for eighteen months with a
lawyer, M. de Guillonnet-Merville, who was, like M. Lepitre, a friend
of the Balzac family, and an ardent Royalist. Eugene Scribe--another
amateur lawyer--as M. de Guillonnet-Merville indulgently remarked, had
just left the office, and Honore was established at the desk and table
vacated by him. He became very fond of his chief, whom he has
immortalised as Derville in "Une Tenebreuse Affaire," "Le Pere
Goriot," and other novels; and he dedicated to this old friend "Un
Episode sous la Terreur," which was published in 1846, and is a
powerful and touching story of the remorse felt by the executioner of
Louis XVI. After eighteen months in this offi