genius gave. It is sufficient to say that in the three
years following 1829 there were actually published the _Physiologie
du Mariage_, the charming story of _La Maison du Chat-que-Pelote_,
the _Peau de Chagrin_, the most original and splendid, if not the most
finished and refined, of all Balzac's books, most of the short _Contes
Philosophiques_, of which some are among their author's greatest
triumphs, many other stories (chiefly included in the _Scenes de la Vie
Privee_) and the beginning of the _Contes Drolatiques_.*

* No regular attempt will after this be made to indicate the date of
production of successive works, unless they connect themselves
very distinctly with incidents in the life or with general
critical observations. At the end of this introduction will be
found a full table of the _Comedie Humaine_ and the other works.
It may perhaps be worth while to add here, that while the labors
of M. de Lovenjoul (to whom every writer on Balzac must
acknowledge the deepest obligation) have cleared this matter up
almost to the verge of possibility as regards the published works,
there is little light to be thrown on the constant references in
the letters to books which never appeared. Sometimes they are
known, and they may often be suspected, to have been absorbed into
or incorporated with others; the rest must have been lost or
destroyed, or, which is not quite impossible, have existed chiefly
in the form of project. Nearly a hundred titles of such things are
preserved.

But without a careful examination of his miscellaneous work, which is
very abundant and includes journalism as well as books, it is almost
as impossible to come to a just appreciation of Balzac as it is without
reading the early works and letters. This miscellaneous work is all the
more important because a great deal of it represents the artist at quite
advanced stages of his career, and because all its examples, the earlier
as well as the later, give us abundant insight on him as he was "making
himself." The comparison with the early works of Thackeray (in _Punch_,
_Fraser_, and elsewhere) is so striking that it can escape no one who
knows the two. Every now and then Balzac transferred bodily, or with
slight alterations, passages from these experiments to his finished
canvases. It appears that he had a scheme for codifying his
"Physiologies" (of which the notorious one above mentioned i