their goal. The labour the book had cost him he
owned to Madame Hanska. Two members of the Academy of Sciences taught
him chemistry, so that he might be exact in his representation of
Claes' experiments; and he read Berzelius into the bargain. Moreover,
he had revised and modified the proofs of the novel no fewer than a
dozen times.

As Werdet tells, the real work of composition, with Balzac, hardly
commenced until he had a set of galley proofs. What he sent first to
the printer, scribbled with his crow's-quill, was a mere sketch; and
the sketch itself was a sort of Chinese puzzle, largely composed of
scratched-out and interpolated sentences; passages and chapters being
moved about in a curious _chasse-croise_, which the type-setters
deciphered and arranged as they best could. Margins and inter-columnal
spaces they found covered with interpolations; a long trailing line
indicated the way here and the way there to the destination of the
inserted passages. A cobweb was regular in comparison to the task
which the printers had to tackle in the hope of finding beginning,
middle, and end. In the various presses where his books were set up,
the employees would never work longer than an hour on end at his
manuscript. And the indemnity he had to pay for corrections reached
sometimes the figure of forty francs per sixteen pages. Numerous were
the difficulties caused on this score with publishers, editors, and
printers. Balzac justified himself by quoting the examples of
Chateaubriand, Ingres, and Meyerbeer in their various arts. To Buloz,
of the _Revue de Paris_, who expostulated, he impatiently replied: "I
will give up fifty francs per sheet to have my hands free. So say no
more about the matter." It is true that Buloz paid him 250 francs per
sheet for his contributions.

Indeed, the novelist's own method of work was a reversal of the
natural alternation of regular periods of activity and repose. He not
only, as he told all his correspondents with wearisome iteration,
burned the midnight oil, but would keep up these eighteen or twenty
hours' daily labour for weeks altogether, until some novel that he was
engaged on was finished. During these spells of composing he would see
no one, read no letters, but write on and on, eating sparingly,
sipping his coffee, and refreshing his jaded anatomy by taking a bath,
in which he would lie for a whole hour, plunged in meditation. After
his voluntary seclusions, he suddenly reappeared in