he lives to-night will be
great anywhere, but he who cannot be a blessing where he now lives will
never be great anywhere on the face of God's earth. "We live in deeds,
not years, in feeling, not in figures on a dial; in thoughts, not
breaths; we should count time by heart throbs, in the cause of right."
Bailey says: "He most lives who thinks most."

If you forget everything I have said to you, do not forget this, because
it contains more in two lines than all I have said. Bailey says: "He
most lives who thinks most, who feels the noblest, and who acts the
best."

_VICTOR HUGO_

HONORE DE BALZAC

Delivered at the Funeral of Balzac, August 20, 1850.

Gentlemen: The man who now goes down into this tomb is one of those to
whom public grief pays homage.

In one day all fictions have vanished. The eye is fixed not only on the
heads that reign, but on heads that think, and the whole country is
moved when one of those heads disappears. To-day we have a people in
black because of the death of the man of talent; a nation in mourning
for a man of genius.

Gentlemen, the name of Balzac will be mingled in the luminous trace our
epoch will leave across the future.

Balzac was one of that powerful generation of writers of the nineteenth
century who came after Napoleon, as the illustrious Pleiad of the
seventeenth century came after Richelieu,--as if in the development of
civilization there were a law which gives conquerors by the intellect as
successors to conquerors by the sword.

Balzac was one of the first among the greatest, one of the highest among
the best. This is not the place to tell all that constituted this
splendid and sovereign intelligence. All his books form but one book,--a
book living, luminous, profound, where one sees coming and going and
marching and moving, with I know not what of the formidable and
terrible, mixed with the real, all our contemporary civilization;--a
marvelous book which the poet entitled "a comedy" and which he could
have called history; which takes all forms and all style, which
surpasses Tacitus and Suetonius; which traverses Beaumarchais and
reaches Rabelais;--a book which realizes observation and imagination,
which lavishes the true, the esoteric, the commonplace, the trivial, the
material, and which at times through all realities, swiftly and grandly
rent away, allows us all at once a glimpse of a most sombre and tragic
ideal. Unknown to himself, whether he wished it or not,