they had established themselves in the famous
old _bourgeois_ quarter of the Marais, Honore was sent to divers private
tutors or private schools till he had "finished his classes" in 1816
at the age of seventeen and a half. Then he attended lectures at the
Sorbonne where Villemain, Guizot, and Cousin were lecturing, and
heard them, as his sister tells us, enthusiastically, though there are
probably no three writers of any considerable repute in the history of
French literature who stand further apart from Balzac. For all three
made and kept their fame by spirited and agreeable generalizations
and expatiations, as different as possible from the savage labor of
observation on the one hand and the gigantic developments of imagination
on the other, which were to compose Balzac's appeal. His father destined
him for the law; and for three years more he dutifully attended the
offices of an attorney and a notary, besides going through the necessary
lectures and examinations. All these trials he seems to have passed, if
not brilliantly, yet sufficiently.

And then came the inevitable crisis, which was of an unusually severe
nature. A notary, who was a friend of the elder Balzac's and owed him
some gratitude offered not merely to take Honore into his office, but
to allow him to succeed to his business, which was a very good one, in
a few years on very favorable terms. Most fathers, and nearly all French
fathers, would have jumped at this; and it so happened that about
the same time M. de Balzac was undergoing that unpleasant process of
compulsory retirement which his son has described in one of the best
passages of the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, the opening scene of _Argow
le Pirate_. It does not appear that Honore had revolted during his
probation--indeed he is said, and we can easily believe it from his
books, to have acquired a very solid knowledge of law, especially in
bankruptcy matters, of which he was himself to have a very close shave
in future. A solicitor, indeed, told Laure de Balzac that he found
_Cesar Birotteau_ a kind of _Balzac on Bankruptcy_; but this may have
been only the solicitor's fun.

It was no part of Honore's intentions to use this knowledge--however
content he had been to acquire it--in the least interesting, if nearly
the most profitable, of the branches of the legal profession; and he
protested eloquently, and not unsuccessfully, that he would be a man of
letters and nothing else. Not unsuccessfully; but