les and supporting a young
person on his knee, the whole garnished with the epigraph: Scenes de la
Vie Cachee. They seem to have given him, personally, a very unnecessary
annoyance, and indeed he was always rather sensitive to criticism. This
kind of stupid libel will never cease to be devised by the envious,
swallowed by the vulgar, and simply neglected by the wise. But Balzac's
peculiarities, both of life and of work, lent themselves rather fatally
to a subtler misconstruction which he also anticipated and tried to
remove, but which took a far stronger hold. He was represented--and
in the absence of any intimate male friends to contradict the
representation, it was certain to obtain some currency--as in his
artistic person a sardonic libeler of mankind, who cared only to take
foibles and vices for his subjects, and who either left goodness and
virtue out of sight altogether, or represented them as the qualities
of fools. In private life he was held up as at the best a self-centered
egotist who cared for nothing but himself and his own work, capable of
interrupting one friend who told him of the death of a sister by the
suggestion that they should change the subject and talk of "something
real, of _Eugenie Grandet_," and of levying a fifty per cent commission
on another who had written a critical notice of his, Balzac's, life and
works.*

* Sandeau and Gautier, the victims in these two stories, were
neither spiteful, nor mendacious, nor irrational, so they are
probably true. The second was possibly due to Balzac's odd notions
of "business being business." The first, I have quite recently
seen reason to think, may have been a sort of reminiscence of one
of the traits in Diderot's extravagant encomium on Richardson.

With the first of these charges he himself, on different occasions,
rather vainly endeavored to grapple, once drawing up an elaborate
list of his virtuous and vicious women, and showing that the former
outnumbered the latter; and, again, laboring (with that curious lack
of sense of humor which distinguishes all Frenchmen but a very few, and
distinguished him eminently) to show that though no doubt it is very
difficult to make a virtuous person interesting, he, Honore de Balzac,
had attempted it, and succeeded in it, on a quite surprising number of
occasions.

The fact is that if he had handled this last matter rather more lightly
his answer would have been a sufficient one, and that