o procure independence by _une bonne
speculation_. Those who have read Balzac's books and his letters will
hardly think that he required much tempting. He began by trying to
publish--an attempt which has never yet succeeded with a single man of
letters, so far as I can remember. His scheme was not a bad one, indeed
it was one which has brought much money to other pockets since, being
neither more nor less than the issuing of cheap one-volume editions of
French classics. But he had hardly any capital; he was naturally quite
ignorant of his trade, and as naturally the established publishers and
booksellers boycotted him as an intruder. So his _Moliere_ and his
_La Fontaine_ are said to have been sold as waste paper, though if any
copies escaped they would probably fetch a very comfortable price now.
Then, such capital as he had having been borrowed, the lender, either
out of good nature or avarice, determined to throw the helve after the
hatchet. He partly advanced himself and partly induced Balzac's parents
to advance more, in order to start the young man as a printer, to which
business Honore himself added that of typefounder. The story was just
the same: knowledge and capital were again wanting, and though actual
bankruptcy was avoided, Balzac got out of the matter at the cost not
merely of giving the two businesses to a friend (in whose hands they
proved profitable), but of a margin of debt from which he may be said
never to have fully cleared himself.

He had more than twenty years to live, but he never cured himself of
this hankering after _une bonne speculation_. Sometimes it was ordinary
stock-exchange gambling; but his special weakness was, to do him
justice, for schemes that had something more grandiose in them. Thus,
to finish here with the subject, though the chapter of it never actually
finished till his death, he made years afterwards, when he was a
successful and a desperately busy author, a long, troublesome, and
costly journey to Sardinia to carry out a plan of resmelting the slag
from Roman and other mines there. Thus in his very latest days, when he
was living at Vierzschovnia with the Hanska and Mniszech household,
he conceived the magnificently absurd notion of cutting down twenty
thousand acres of oak wood in the Ukraine, and sending it _by railway_
right across Europe to be sold in France. And he was rather reluctantly
convinced that by the time a single log reached its market the freight
would have