d little in essentials from
Balzac at forty-five or fifty, a man of world-wide celebrity. He never
appears to have passed through those phases of belief and unbelief
--those wild enthusiasms, to be rejected later in life--which generally
fall to the lot of young men of talent. Perhaps his reasoning and
reflective powers were developed unusually early, so that he sowed his
mental wild oats in his boyhood. At any rate, in his garret in 1819 he
was the same Balzac that we know in later life. Large-minded and
far-seeing--except about his business concerns--he was from his youth
a _voyant_, who discerned with extraordinary acuteness the trend of
political events; and with an intense respect for authority, he was
yet independent, and essentially a strong man.

This absolute stability--a fact Balzac often comments on--is very
remarkable, especially as his was a life full of variety, during which
he was brought into contact with many influences. He studied the men
around him, and gauged their characters--though it must be allowed
that he did not make very good practical use of his knowledge; but
owing to his strength and breadth of vision, he was himself in all
essentials immovable.

The same ambitions, desires, and opinions can be traced all through
his career. The wish to enter political life, which haunted him
always, was already beginning to stir in 1819, when he wrote at the
time of the elections to a friend, M. Theodore Dablin, that he dreamt
of nothing but him and the deputies; and his last book, "L'Envers de
l'Histoire contemporaine," accentuated, if possible more than any work
that had preceded it, the extreme Royalist principles which he showed
in his garret play, the ill-fated "Cromwell."

He never swerved from the two great ambitions of his life--to be
loved, and to be famous. He was faithful in his friendships; and when
once he had found the woman whom he felt might be all in all to him,
and who possessed besides personal advantages the qualifications of
birth and money--for which he had always craved--no difficulties were
allowed to stand in the way, and no length of weary waiting could tire
out his patience. He was constant even to his failures. He began his
literary career by writing a play, and all through his life the idea
of making his fortune by means of a successful drama recurred to him
constantly. Several times he went through that most trying of
experiences, a failure which only just missed being a br