produced was followed by a pecuniary
catastrophe. He had embarked almost the whole of
his own little remaining property and his wife's
in two speculations; and they both failed. No
resource was now left him but to retire to a
small country house in the neighbourhood of
Paris, which he had purchased in his prosperous
days, and to live there as well as might be on
the wreck of his lost fortune. Honoré, sticking
fast to that hopeless business of becoming a great
man, was, by his own desire, left alone in a Paris
garret, with an allowance of five pounds English
a month, which was all the kind father could
spare to feed, clothe, and lodge the wrong-
headed son.

And now, without a literary friend to help
him in all Paris, alone in his wretched attic,
with his deal-table and his truckle-bed, his dog's-
eared books, his bescrawled papers, his wild
vanity, and his ravenous hunger for fame, Balzac
stripped resolutely for the great fight. He was
then twenty-three years old—a sturdy fellow to
look at, with a big, jovial face, and a strong
square forehead, topped by a very untidy and
superfluous allowance of long tangled hair. His
only difficulty at starting was what to begin
upon. After consuming many lonely months in
sketching out comedies, operas, and novels, he
finally obeyed the one disastrous rule which
seems to admit of no exception in the early lives
of men of letters, and fixed the whole bent of his
industry and his genius on the production of a
tragedy. After infinite pains and long labour,
the great work was completed. The subject was
Cromwell; and the treatment, in Balzac's hands,
appears to have been so inconceivably bad, that
even his own family—to say nothing of other
judicious friends—told him in the plainest terms,
when he read it to them, that he had perpetrated
a signal failure. Modest men might have
been discouraged by this. Balzac took his
manuscript back to his garret, standing higher
in his own estimation than ever. "I will give
up being a great dramatist," he told his parents
at parting, "and I will be a great novelist
instead." The vanity of the man expressed
itself with this sublime disregard of ridicule all
through his life. It was a precious quality to
him--it is surely (however unquestionably offensive
it may be to our friends) a precious quality
to all of us. What man ever yet did anything
great, without beginning with a profound belief
in his own untried powers?

Confident as ever, therefore, in his own
resources, Balzac now took up the pen once more
—this time, in the character of novelist. But
another and a serious check awaited him at the
outset. Fifteen months of solitude, privation,
and reckless hard writing—months which are
recorded in the pages of "La Peau de Chagrin"
with a fearful and pathetic truth drawn straight
from the bitterest of all experiences, the
experience of studious poverty—had reduced him
to a condition of bodily weakness which made
all present exertion of his mental powers simply
hopeless, and which obliged him to take refuge
—a worn-out, wasted man, at the age of twenty-
three—in his father's quiet little country house.
Here, under his mother's care, his exhausted
energies slowly revived; and here, in the first
days of his convalescence, he returned, with the
grim resolution of despair, to working out the
old dream in the garret, to resuming the old
hopeless, hapless business of making himself a
great man. It was under his father's roof,
during the time of his slow recovery, that the
youthful fictions of Balzac were produced. The
strength of his belief in his own resources and
his own future gave him also the strength, in
relation to these first efforts, to rise above his
own vanity, and to see plainly that he had not
yet learnt to do himself full justice. His early
novels bore on their title-pages a variety of
feigned names, for the starving, struggling
author was too proud to acknowledge them, so
long as they failed to satisfy his own conception
of what his own powers could accomplish.
These first efforts—now included in his collected
works, and comprising among them two stories,
"Jane la Pâle" and "Le Vicaire des Ardennes,"
which show unquestionable dawnings of the
genius of a great writer—were originally
published by the lower and more rapacious order of
booksellers, and did as little towards increasing
his means as towards establishing his reputation.
Still, he forced his way slowly and resolutely
through poverty, obscurity, and disappointment,
nearer and nearer to the promised land which
no eye saw but his own—a greater man, by far,
at this hard period of his adversity than at the
more trying after-time of his prosperity and his
fame. One by one, the heavy years, rolled on
till he was a man of thirty; and then the great
prize which he had so long toiled for, dropped
within his reach at last. In the year eighteen
hundred and twenty-nine, the famous
"Physiologie du Marriage" was published; and the
starveling of the Paris garret became a name
and a power in French literature.

In England, this book would have been universally
condemned as an unpardonable exposure
of the most sacred secrets of domestic life. It
unveils the whole social side of Marriage in its
innermost recesses, and exhibits it alternately
in its bright and dark aspects with a marvellous
minuteness of observation, a profound knowledge
of human nature, and a daring eccentricity
of style and arrangement which amply justify
the extraordinary success of the book on its first
appearance in France. It may be more than
questionable, judging from the English point of
view, whether such a subject should ever have
been selected for any other than the most serious,
reverent, and forbearing treatment. Setting this
objection aside, however, in consideration of the
French point of view, it cannot be denied that
the merits of the Physiology of Marriage, as a
piece of writing, were by no means over-estimated
by the public to which it was addressed.
In a literary sense, the book would have done
credit to a man in the maturity of his powers.
As the work of a man whose intellectual life was
only beginning, it was such an achievement as is not
often recorded in the history of modern literature.