especially in the _Caricature_, his
performances including, I regret to say, more than one puff of his own
work; and in this, as well as by the success of the _Chouans_, he became
known about 1830 to a much wider circle, both of literary and of private
acquaintance. It cannot indeed be said that he ever mixed much in
society; it was impossible that he should do so, considering the vast
amount of work he did and the manner in which he did it. This subject,
like that of his speculations, may be better finished off in a single
passage than dealt with by scattered indications here and there. He was
not one of those men who can do work by fits and starts in the intervals
of business or of amusement; nor was he one who, like Scott, could work
very rapidly. It is true that he often achieved immense quantities of
work (subject to a caution to be given presently) in a very few days,
but then his working day was of the most peculiar character. He could
not bear disturbance; he wrote best at night, and he could not work at
all after heavy meals. His favorite plan (varied sometimes in detail)
was therefore to dine lightly about five or six, then to go to bed and
sleep till eleven, twelve, or one, and then to get up, and with the help
only of coffee (which he drank very strong and in enormous quantities)
to work for indefinite stretches of time into the morning or afternoon
of the next day. He speaks of a sixteen hours' day as a not uncommon
shift or spell of work, and almost a regular one with him; and on one
occasion he avers that in the course of forty-eight hours he took but
three of the rest, working for twenty-two hours and a half continuously
on each side thereof. In such spells, supposing reasonable facility of
composition and mechanical power in the hand to keep going all the time,
an enormous amount can of course be accomplished. A thousand words
an hour is anything but an extraordinary rate of writing, and fifteen
hundred by no means unheard of with persons who do not write rubbish.

The references to this subject in Balzac's letters are very numerous;
but it is not easy to extract very definite information from them. It
would be not only impolite but incorrect to charge him with unveracity.
But the very heat of imagination which enabled him to produce his work
created a sort of mirage, through which he seems always to have regarded
it; and in writing to publishers, editors, creditors, and even his own
family, it was too o