aneous writing, in a Dutch painting of
bourgeois life, _Le Maison du Chatqui-pelote_, which relates the
sorrows of the draper's daughter, Augustine, drawn from her native
sphere by an artist's love. From the day that Balzac began to wield
his pen with power to the day, in 1850, when he died, exhausted by
the passion of his brain, his own life was concentrated in that of
the creatures of his imagination. He had friends, and married one
of the oldest of them, Madame Hanska, shortly before his death.
Sometimes for a little while he wandered away from his desk. More
than once he made wild attempts to secure wealth by commercial
enterprise or speculation. These were adventures or incidents of his
existence. That existence itself is summed up in the volumes of his
_Human Comedy_. He wrote with desperate resolve and a violence of
imagination; he attacked the printer's proof as if it were crude
material on which to work. At six in the evening he retired to sleep;
he rose at the noon of night, urged on his brain with cups of coffee,
and covered page after page of manuscript, until the noon of day
released him. So it went on for nearly twenty years, until the
intemperance of toil had worn the strong man out.

There is something gross in Balzac's genius; he has little wit, little
delicacy, no sense of measure, no fine self-criticism, no lightness
of touch, small insight into the life of refined society, an imperfect
sense of natural beauty, a readiness to accept vulgar marvels as the
equivalent of spiritual mysteries; he is monarchical without the
sentiment of chivalric loyalty, a Catholic without the sentiment of
religion; he piles sentence on sentence, hard and heavy as the
accumulated stones of a cairn. Did he love his art for its own sake?
It must have been so; but he esteemed it also as an implement of power,
as the means of pushing towards fame and grasping gold.

Within the gross body of his genius, however, an intense flame burnt.
He had a vivid sense of life, a perception of all that can be seen
and handled, an eager interest in reality, a vast passion for _things_,
an inexhaustible curiosity about the machinery of society, a feeling,
exultant or cynical, of the battle of existence, of the conflict for
wealth and power, with its triumphs and defeats, its display of fierce
volition, its pushing aside of the feeble, its trampling of the fallen,
its grandeur, its meanness, its obscure heroisms, and the cruelties
of its pat