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A fortnight after he had quitted the Rue des Marais, the letter he wrote to General de Pommereul showed him planning out a fresh future.
As soon as it was printed he sent off forty copies to General de Pommereul, for the purpose of distribution among his friends in Fougeres; and he wrote him: "I shall write successively four or five more, in order to prove to the electors who nominate me that I can do them honour, and that I shall try to be useful to the country.
On some evenings he remained in the drawing-room in company with his hosts, and entered into controversies with Mme. de Pommereul, who, being very pious herself, tried to persuade him to make a practice of religion; while Balzac, in return, when the discussion was exhausted, endeavoured to teach her the rules of backgammon.
You can give me them back when you have recovered what has been stolen from you." Having uttered these few brusk words, he turned and hurried away. Later we shall meet with a younger General de Pommereul, to whom the novelist dedicated his Melmoth Reconciled, adding, "In remembrance of the constant friendship that united our fathers and subsists between the sons."
But he had no sooner arrived in Paris than he set to work again, and he did not fail to keep his provincial friends informed of the progress of his novel. The first thing he did was to change its title from The Stripling, to which Mme. de Pommereul had objected, to The Chouans or Brittany Thirty Years Ago, and finally settled definitely on The Last Chouan or Brittany in 1800.
When the law was made Balzac was thirty-one, and paid the requisite amount; he therefore determined, in spite of his enormous output of literary work at this time, to add the career of a deputy to his labours; and in April, 1831, he wrote to ask for the assistance of the General Baron de Pommereul, with whom he had been staying at Fougeres, collecting material for "Les Chouans," while at the same time he worked up the country politically.
This work, the first that he signed with his own name, was finished in the beginning of 1829, and was published by Urbain Canel. On the eleventh of March he announced to the Baron de Pommereul that he was sending him a set. "Between four and six days from now," he wrote, "you will receive the four 12mo volumes of The Last Chouan or Brittany in 1800.
He questioned M. de Pommereul as to the main facts about the Chouans; he jotted down in his notebook, which he afterwards came to call his larder, a host of original anecdotes preserved by oral tradition; and he roamed the whole countryside, fixing in his mind the landscapes and the gestures, attitudes and physiognomies of the peasants, and saturating himself with the atmosphere of the region in which he was to place the chief scenes of his drama.
Equally great was his benevolence. On one occasion, hearing that his friend General de Pommereul was in monetary difficulties, he called at the General's house, and, finding only Madame de Pommereul, said to her, as he placed two heavy bags on the table: "I am told you are short of cash. These ten thousand crowns will be more useful to you than to me. I don't know what to do with them.
The great political events of the epoch then absorbing the attention of Germany and France explain why the affair I have just told you about passed completely unobserved. Melmoth Reconciled To Monsieur le Général Baron de Pommereul, a token of the friendship between our fathers, which survives in their sons.
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