the alliances which they were about to form. It is a
curious question, upon which I cannot profess to speak positively,
whether this voluminous story ever comes into hopeless conflict with
dates. I have some suspicions that the brilliant journalist, Blondet,
was married and unmarried at the same period; but, considering his very
loose mode of life, the suspicion, if true, is susceptible of
explanation. Such study as I have made has not revealed any case of
inconsistency; and Balzac evidently has the whole secret (for it seems
harsh to call it fictitious) history of the time so completely at his
fingers' ends, that the effect upon the reader is to produce an
unhesitating confidence. If a blunder occurs one would rather believe in
a slip of the pen, such as happens to real historians, not in the
substantial inaccuracy of the narrative. Sir A. Alison, it may be
remembered, brings Sir Peregrine Pickle to the Duke of Wellington's
funeral, which must have occurred after Sir Peregrine's death; and
Balzac's imaginary narrative may not be perfectly free from anachronism.
But, if so, I have not found him out. Everybody must sympathise with the
English lady who is said to have written to Paris for the address of
that most imposing physician, Horace Bianchion.

The startling realisation may be due in part to a mere literary trick.
We meet with artifices like those by which De Foe cheats us into
forgetfulness of his true character. One of the best known is the
insertion of superfluous bits of information, by way of entrapping his
readers into the inference that they could only have been given because
they were true. The snare is more worthy of a writer of begging-letters
than of a genuine artist. Balzac occasionally indulges in somewhat
similar devices; little indirect allusions to his old characters are
thrown in with a calculated nonchalance; we have bits of antiquarian
information as to the history of buildings; superfluous accounts of the
coats-of-arms of the principal families concerned, and anecdotes as to
their ancestry; and, after he has given us a name, he sometimes takes
care to explain that the pronunciation is different from the spelling.
As a rule, however, these irrelevant minutiae seem to be thrown in, not
by way of tricking us, but because he has so genuine an interest in his
own personages. He is as anxious to set De Marsay or the Pere Goriot
distinctly before us, as Carlyle to make us acquainted with Frederick or