d out the
same device on a gigantic scale. He has peopled not a country town but a
metropolis. There is a whole society, with the members of which we are
intimate, whose family secrets are revealed to us, and who drop in, as
it were, in every novel of a long series, as if they were old friends.
When, for example, young Victurnien d'Esgrignon comes to Paris he makes
acquaintance, we are told, with De Marsay, Maxime de Trailles, Les
Lupeaulx, Rastignac, Vandenesse, Ajuda-Pinto, the Duchesses de
Grandlieu, de Carigliano, de Chaulieu, the Marquises d'Espard,
d'Aiglemont, and De Listomere, Madame Firmiani, the Comtesse de Serizy,
and various other heads of the fashionable world. Every one of these
special characters has a special history. He or she appears as the hero
or heroine of one story, and plays subsidiary parts in a score of
others. They recall to us innumerable scandalous episodes, with which
anybody who lives in the imaginary society of Balzac's Paris feels it a
duty to be as familiar as a back-stairs politician with the gossip of
the House of Commons. The list just given is a mere fragment of the
great circle to which Balzac introduces us. The history of their
performances is intimately connected with the history of the time; nay,
it is sometimes essential to a full comprehension of recent events.
Bishop Proudie, we fear, would scarcely venture to take an active part
in the Roman Catholic emancipation; he would be dissolved into thin air
by contact with more substantial forms; but if you would appreciate the
intrigues which were going on at Paris during the campaign of Marengo,
you must study the conversations which took place between Talleyrand,
Fouche, Sieyes, Carnot, and Malin, and their relations to that prince of
policemen, the well-known Corentin. De Marsay, we are told, with
audacious precision of time and place, was President of the Council in
1833. There is no tendency on the part of these spectres to shrink from
the light. They rub shoulders with the most celebrated statesmen, and
mingle in every event of the time. One is driven to believe that Balzac
really fancied the banker Nucingen to be as tangible as a Rothschild,
and was convinced that the conversations of Louis XVIII. with Vandenesse
were historic facts. His sister tells us that he discussed the behaviour
of his own creations with the utmost gravity, and was intensely
interested in discovering their fate, and getting the earliest
information as to