ome, have forgotten to give us the history of
manners? The fragment of Petronius on the private life of the Romans
excites rather than satisfies our curiosity....

[Sidenote: The novel defined]

"A sure grasp of the purport of this work will make it clear that I
attach to common, daily facts, hidden or patent to the eye, to the
acts of individual lives, and to their causes and principles, the
importance which historians have hitherto ascribed to the events of
public national life.... I have had to do what Richardson did but
once. Lovelace has a thousand forms, for social corruption takes the
hues of the medium in which it lives. Clarissa, on the contrary, the
lovely image of impassioned virtue, is drawn in lines of distracting
purity. To create a variety of Virgins it needs a Raphael.

"It was no small task to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous
types of a period; for this is, in fact, the number presented to us by
each generation, and which the Human Comedy must require. This crowd
of actors, of characters, this multitude of lives, needed a
setting--if I may be pardoned the expression, a gallery. Hence the
division into Scenes of Private Life, of Provincial Life, of Parisian,
Political, Military and Country Life. Under these six heads are
classified all the studies of manners which form the history of
society at large.

"The vastness of a plan which includes both a history and a criticism
of society, an analysis of its evils, and a discussion of its
principles, authorizes me, I think, in giving to my work the title
'The Human Comedy.' Is this too ambitious?"

[Sidenote: Balzac's Works]

Altogether, Balzac brought out more than a hundred prose romances. They
contain the most graphic pictures of the life of the French people under
Louis Philippe. Balzac said of himself that he described people as they
were, while others described them as they should be. A few months before
his death Balzac improved his circumstances by a marriage with the rich
Countess Hanska. On his death Victor Hugo delivered the funeral oration,
while Alexandre Dumas, his rival throughout life, erected a monument to him
with his own means.

One week later Louis Philippe, the deposed King of France, died at
Claremont in England, in his seventy-seventh year. His career, from the
time that he followed the example of