im. After all his care and pains, he
slipped and fell in the ball-room, and his mortification at the smiles
of the women round was so great that he never danced again, but looked
on henceforward with cynicism which he expresses in the "Peau de
Chagrin." That wonderful book, side by side with its philosophical
teaching, gives a graphic picture of one side of Balzac's restless,
feverish youth, as "Louis Lambert" does of his repressed childhood.
Neither Louis Lambert nor the morbid and selfish Raphael give,
however, the slightest indication of Balzac's most salient
characteristic both as boy and youth--the healthy _joie de vivre_, the
gaiety and exuberant merriment, of which his contemporaries speak
constantly, and which shone out undimmed even by the wretched health
and terrible worries of the last few years of his life. In his books,
the bitter and melancholy side of things reigns almost exclusively,
and Balzac, using Raphael as his mouthpiece, says: "Women one and all
have condemned me. With tears and mortification I bowed before the
decision of the world; but my distress was not barren. I determined to
revenge myself on society; I would dominate the feminine intellect,
and so have the feminine soul at my mercy; all eyes should be fixed
upon me, when the servant at the door announced my name. I had
determined from my childhood that I would be a great man. I said with
Andre Chenier, as I struck my forehead, 'There is something underneath
that!' I felt, I believed the thought within me that I must express,
the system I must establish, the knowledge I must interpret." In
another place in the same book the bitterness of his social failure
again peeps out: "The incomprehensible bent of women's minds appears
to lead them to see nothing but the weak points in a clever man and
the strong points of a fool."

Reading these words, we can imagine poor Honore, a proud,
supersensitive boy, leaning against the wall in the ball-room, and
watching enviously while agreeable nonentities basked in the smiles he
yearned for. It was a hard lot to feel within him the intuitive
knowledge of his genius; to hear the insistent voice of his vocation
calling him not to be as ordinary men, but to give his message to the
world; and yet to have the miserable consciousness that no one
believed in his talents, and that there was a huge discrepancy between
his ambition and his actual attainments.

In 1820 Honore attained his majority and finished his l