eaten up the value of the whole plantation.

It was perhaps not entirely chance that the collapse of the printing
scheme, which took place in 1827, the ninth year of the Wanderings in
the Wilderness, coincided with or immediately preceded the conception of
the book which was to give Balzac passage into the Promised Land.
This was _Les Chouans_, called at its first issue, which differed
considerably from the present form, _Le Dernier Chouan ou la Bretagne
en 1800_ (later _1799_). It was published in 1829 without any of the
previous anagrammatic pseudonyms; and whatever were the reasons which
had induced him to make his bow in person to the public, they were well
justified, for the book was a distinct success, if not a great one. It
occupies a kind of middle position between the melodramatic romance of
his nonage and the strictly analytic romance-novel of his later time;
and, though dealing with war and love chiefly, inclines in conception
distinctly to the latter. Corentin, Hulot, and other personages of the
actual Comedy (then by no means planned, or at least avowed) appear; and
though the influence of Scott is in a way paramount* on the surface,
the underwork is quite different, and the whole scheme of the loves of
Montauran and Mademoiselle de Verneuil is pure Balzac.

* Balzac was throughout his life a fervent admirer of Sir Walter,
and I think Mr. Wedmore, in his passage on the subject, distinctly
undervalues both the character and the duration of this esteem.
Balzac was far too acute to commit the common mistake of thinking
Scott superficial--men who know mankind are not often blind to
each other's knowledge. And while Mr. Wedmore seems not to know
any testimony later than Balzac's _thirty-eighth_ year, it is in
his _forty-sixth_, when all his own best work was done, except the
_Parents Pauvres_, that he contrasts Dumas with Scott saying that
_on relit Walter Scott_, and he does not think any one will
re-read Dumas. This may be unjust to the one writer, but it is
conclusive as to any sense of "wasted time" (his own phrase)
having ever existed in Balzac's mind about the other.

It would seem as if nothing but this sun of popular approval had been
wanting to make Balzac's genius burst out in full bloom. Although we
have a fair number of letters for the ensuing years, it is not very easy
to make out the exact sequence of production of the marvelous harvest
which his