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Updated: June 6, 2025
Witness such fiction as "The Magic Skin," "Seraphita," and "The Quest of the Absolute." It is hard to believe that the author of such creations is he of "Pere Goriot" or "Cousine Bette." But it is Balzac's wisdom to see that such pictures are quite as truly part of the Human Comedy: because they represent man giving play to his soul exercising his highest faculties.
The first, Bourignard or Ferragus, is, of course, another, though a somewhat minor example Collin or Vautrin being the chief of that strange tendency to take intense interest in criminals, which seems to be a pretty constant eccentricity of many human minds, and which laid an extraordinary grasp on the great French writers of Balzac's time.
In fact, a great master may sin against the "modesty of nature" in many ways, and I have felt this painfully in reading Balzac's romance it is not worthy the name of novel 'Le Pere Goriot, which is full of a malarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art.
However that may be, the result was a terrible blow to Balzac; who was now, in addition to all his other liabilities, in debt for forty thousand francs to the shareholders. It is as a member of the staff of the Chronique, that the name of Theophile Gautier first appears in connection with Balzac; and the two men remained close friends till Balzac's death.
One cannot view it I cannot, at least without thinking of the great monarchical centuries, and of the picturesque names which I have learned from Balzac's novels and from the history of France. In his "Etude de Catherine de Medicis," Balzac speaks of Madame de Sauve, and I am sure she must have lived in the Place des Vosges. Monsieur de Montresser might have occupied a flat on the first floor.
It speaks much for Balzac's courage, patience, and determination, or perhaps for the intuitive force of a genius which refused to be denied outlet, that he struggled through this weary time, and in spite of opposition kept to his fixed purpose of becoming a writer.
In the Figaro of December 15th, 1837, Edouard Ourliac gives a burlesque account of the confusion caused in the printing-offices by Balzac's peculiar methods of composition. This is an extract from the article: "Let us sing, drink and embrace, like the chorus of an opera comique. Let us stretch our calves, and turn on our toes like ballet-dancers.
Sir Bulwer Lytton's renderings of a homoeopath and a water-cure specialist are open to the same charge, and could only have been successful in the hands of a master. There are at least two doctors in Balzac's novels. Rastignac, man of fashion and science, is drawn with the master's usual skill, but he is not a doctor. His art has no prominence.
I rarely heard of my Weybridge friends now, and never, directly, of Sylvia. My life seemed infinitely remote from that of the luxurious Wheeler ménage. She was in several ways not unlike a kitten, or something feline, of larger growth: the panther, for example, in Balzac's thrilling story, "A Passion in the Desert."
Though it may be abundantly clear that Nature's ideal is Hume's and Balzac's, is it not a fact that this "high has proved too high, this heroic for earth too hard"? Is it not true that there are murmurs and mutterings of revolt both amongst men and women against a burden too grievous to be borne?
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