al receipts were surprisingly small, partly, it may be,
owing to his expensive habits of composition, but far more, according to
his own account, because of the Belgian piracies, from which all popular
French authors suffered till the government of Napoleon the Third
managed to put a stop to them. He also lived in such a thick atmosphere
of bills and advances and cross-claims on and by his publishers, that
even if there were more documents than there are it would be exceedingly
difficult to get at facts which are, after all, not very important.
He never seems to have been paid much more than 500 pounds for the
newspaper publication (the most valuable by far because the pirates
could not interfere with its profits) of any one of his novels. And to
expensive fashions of composition and complicated accounts, a steady
back-drag of debt and the rest, must be added the very delightful, and
to the novelist not useless, but very expensive mania for the
collector. Balzac had a genuine taste for, and thought himself a genuine
connoisseur in, pictures, sculpture, and objects of art of all kinds,
old and new; and though prices in his day were not what they are in
these, a great deal of money must have run through his hands in this
way. He calculated the value of the contents of the house, which in his
last days he furnished with such loving care for his wife, and which
turned out to be a chamber rather of death than of marriage, at some
16,000 pounds. But part of this was Madame Hanska's own purchasing, and
there were offsets of indebtedness against it almost to the last. In
short, though during the last twenty years of his life such actual "want
of pence" as vexed him was not due, as it had been earlier, to the fact
that the pence refused to come in, but only to imprudent management
of them, it certainly cannot be said that Honore de Balzac, the most
desperately hard worker in all literature for such time as was allotted
him, and perhaps the man of greatest genius who was ever a desperately
hard worker, falsified that most uncomfortable but truest of
proverbs--"Hard work never made money."

If, however, he was but scantily rewarded with the money for which he
had a craving (not absolutely, I think, devoid of a touch of genuine
avarice, but consisting chiefly of the artist's desire for pleasant
and beautiful things, and partly presenting a variety or phase of the
grandiose imagination, which was his ruling characteristic), Balzac ha