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A question more and more vital, and which we repeated to ourselves with anxiety. The National Guard had shown no sign of earnestness. The eloquent proclamation, written at Marie's by Jules Favre and Alexander Rey, and addressed in our name to the National Legions, had not been printed. Hetzel's scheme had failed.

We may be grateful to Hetzel for this advice, which Balzac evidently followed; as the preface is written in a quiet and modest tone unusual with him, and he follows Hetzel's counsel, and gives a concise summary of his intention in writing the "Comedie Humaine."

Shutting himself into his writing den, a small narrow room with a low ceiling, he proceeded to finish The Village Cure and The Diaries of Two Young Brides; he began A Dark Affair for a journal called Le Commerce, The Two Brothers, later A Bachelor's Establishment, for La Presse; Les Lecamus, for Le Siecle; The Trials and Tribulations of an English Cat, for one of Hetzel's publications, Scenes from the Private and Public Life of Animals; he worked upon The Peasants and wrote Ursule Mirouet, altogether more than thirty thousand lines in the newspaper columns, in less than one year!

"Madame Elizabeth awaits M. Hetzel at No. 10, Rue des Moulins." In accordance with this note Hetzel had come. We accepted Hetzel's offer, and it was agreed that at nightfall Representative Versigny, who performed the duties of Secretary to the Committee, should take him our decrees, our Proclamation, such items of news as may have reached us, and all that we should judge proper to publish.

"It is grand, it is terrifying in verve, in philosophy, in novelty, in painting, in style." And yet there was Eugene Sue selling the Wandering Jew to a newspaper for a hundred thousand francs, while the Philosophy of Conjugal Life, a publication of his own in Hetzel's Diable a Paris, fetched only eight hundred; and the Peasants was paid for only at the rate of sixty centimes a line.