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It is difficult to separate the subject-matter of a novel from its treatment. Yet a word should be said of Balzac's widening the limits of admission. His widening was two-fold.
Hanska was profoundly religious and a practical Catholic; and from this time onward she exerted an influence over the trend of Balzac's thoughts. Indeed, he brought back from their first interviews the germ idea of his mystical story, Seraphita. The project of the special paper having failed to materialise at Besancon, he tried to carry it out through the mediation of Mme.
If Winnebago had taken the trouble to glance at the title of the book she laid face down on the pencil boxes as you entered, it would have learned that the book was one of Balzac's, or, perhaps, Zangwill's, or Zola's. She never could overcome that habit of snatching a chapter here and there during dull moments. She was too tired to read when night came.
Maitland. Barton and Mrs. Barton have practised the endowment of research, in the case of Winter, who has quite recovered from his injuries, and still hopes to fly. But he has never trusted himself again on his machine, which, moreover, has never flown again. Winter, like the alchemist who once made a diamond by chance, in Balzac's novel, has never recovered the creative moment.
He explained, with a well-adjusted prevision of future discord, if the elder Madame de Balzac's dignity were not sufficiently considered, that his wife had intended writing herself to offer her respects, but that her hands were so swollen with rheumatic gout that she could not hold a pen.
He was anxious that M. Surville should undertake the matter, as, after abstruse and careful calculations which have the puzzling veneer of practicality always observable in Balzac's mad schemes he considered that 1,200,000 francs might be made out of the affair, and that of course the engineer who arranged the transport would reap some of the benefit.
Even when, by sad mischance, two of Balzac's love-letters fell into M. de Hanski's hands, and the great writer was forced to stoop to the pretence that they were written in jest, the husband seems to have accepted the explanation, and not to have troubled further about the matter.
Here the disillusionment is that of all Balzac's chief dramatis personae. Moreover, the minor characters of Madame Bovary may well owe something to the Comedy. These doctors, chemists, cures, prefectoral councillors and country squires would possibly never have been depicted but for their having already existed for twenty years in the predecessor's gallery of portraits.
The description is a long one; and any one desirous of comparing with each other the impressions received by Balzac's contemporaries who came into close contact with him would do well to read it after this description by Lamartine. In the tenth of his lectures on Literature during the year 1856, the author of Jocelyn, speaking of what he had observed, said:
In the presence of certain illustrious dead, we understand the divine destiny of that intellect which has traversed earth to suffer and to be purified. The Cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise had been one of Balzac's favourite haunts in the old half-starved days of the Rue Lesdiguieres.
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