at the same time with
distinctly qualified success. He was not turned out of doors; nor were
the supplies, as in Quinet's case only a few months later, absolutely
withheld even for a short time. But his mother (who seems to have been
less placable than her husband) thought that cutting them down to the
lowest point might have some effect. So, as the family at this time
(April 1819) left Paris for a house some twenty miles out of it, she
established her eldest son in a garret furnished in the most Spartan
fashion, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to look after
him. He did not literally stay in this garret for the ten years of his
astonishing and unparalleled probation; but without too much metaphor
it may be said to have been his Wilderness, and his Wanderings in it to
have lasted for that very considerable time.

We know, in detail, very little of him during the period. For the first
years, between 1819 and 1822, we have a good number of letters to Laure;
between 1822 and 1829, when he first made his mark, very few. He began,
of course, with verse, for which he never had the slightest vocation,
and, almost equally of course, with a tragedy. But by degrees and
apparently pretty soon, he slipped into what was his vocation, and like
some, though not very many, great writers, at first did little better in
it than if it had not been his vocation at all. The singular tentatives
which, after being allowed for a time a sort of outhouse in the
structure of the _Comedie Humaine_, were excluded from the octavo
_Edition Definitive_ five-and-twenty years ago, have never been the
object of that exhaustive bibliographical and critical attention which
has been bestowed on those which follow them. They were not absolutely
unproductive--we hear of sixty, eighty, a hundred pounds being paid for
them, though whether this was the amount of Balzac's always sanguine
expectations, or hard cash actually handed over, we cannot say. They
were very numerous, though the reprints spoken of above never extended
to more than ten. Even these have never been widely read. The only
person I ever knew till I began this present task who had read them
through was the friend whom all his friends are now lamenting and are
not likely soon to cease to lament, Mr. Louis Stevenson; and when I once
asked him whether, on his honor and conscience, he could recommend me
to brace myself to the same effort, he said that on his honor and
conscience he must m