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Title: The Human Comedy
       Introductions and Appendix

Author: Honore de Balzac

Commentator: George Saintsbury

Release Date: November, 1999  [Etext #1968]
Posting Date: March 8, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HUMAN COMEDY ***




Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





THE HUMAN COMEDY

INTRODUCTIONS AND APPENDIX



By Honore De Balzac



      Note: 

      This reposting is dedicated to Dagny, who, 10 years ago,
      was part of the "Balzac Team" which produced 113 eBooks
      for Project Gutenberg. I cannot locate her present email
      address to thank her for the extraordinarily fine work she
      did at a time when we had none of the present easy programs
      to help locate errors--and to notify her that all her Balzac
      files have been rechecked and reposted.

      DW



                             CONTENTS

    Honore de Balzac
    Introduction and brief biography by George Saintsbury.

    Appendix
    List of titles in French with English translations and grouped
    in the various classifications.

    Author's introduction
    Balzac's 1842 introduction to The Human Comedy.






HONORE DE BALZAC

                  _"Sans genie, je suis flambe!"_

Volumes, almost libraries, have been written about Balzac; and perhaps
of very few writers, putting aside the three or four greatest of all, is
it so difficult to select one or a few short phrases which will in any
way denote them, much more sum them up. Yet the five words quoted above,
which come from an early letter to his sister when as yet he had not
"found his way," characterize him, I think, better than at least some
of the volumes I have read about him, and supply, when they are properly
understood, the most valuable of all keys and companions for his
comprehension.

"If I have not genius, it is all up with me!" A very matter-of-fact
person may say: "Why! there is nothing wonderful in this. Everybody
knows what genius is wanted to make a name in literature, and most
people think they have it." But this would be a little short-sighted,
and only excusable because of the way in which the word "genius" is too
commonly bandied about. As a matter of fact, there is not so very much
genius in the world; and a great deal of more than fair performance is
attainable and attained by more or less decent allowances or exhibitions
of talent. In prose, more especially, it is possible to gain a very
high place, and to deserve it, without any genius at all: though it is
difficult, if not impossible, to do so in verse. But what Balzac felt
(whether he was conscious in detail of the feeling or not) when he used
these words to his sister Laure, what his critical readers must feel
when they have read only a very little of his work, what they must feel
still more strongly when they have read that work as a whole--is that
for him there is no such door of escape and no such compromise. He had
the choice, by his nature, his aims, his capacities, of being a genius
or nothing. He had no little gifts, and he was even destitute of some of
the separate and indivisible great ones. In mere writing, mere style,
he was not supreme; one seldom or never derives from anything of his the
merely artistic satisfaction given by perfect prose. His humor, except
of the grim and gigantic kind, was not remarkable; his wit, for a
Frenchman, curiously thin and small. The minor felicities of the
literature generally were denied to him. _Sans genie, il etait flambe_;
_flambe_ as he seemed to be, and very reasonably seemed, to his friends
when as yet the genius had not come to him, and when he was desperately
striving to discover where his genius lay in those wonderous works
which "Lord R'Hoone," and "Horace de Saint Aubin," and others obligingly
fathered for him.

It must be the business of these introductions to give what assistance
they may to discover where it did lie; it is only necessary, before
taking up the task in the regular biographical and critical way of the
introductory cicerone, to make two negative observations. It did
not lie, as some have apparently thought, in the conception, or the
outlining, or the filling up of such a scheme as the _Comedie Humaine_.
In the first place, the work of every great writer, of the creative
kind, including that of Dante himself, is a _comedie humaine_. All
humanity is latent in every human being; and the great writers are
merely those who call most of it out of latency and put it actually on
the stage. And, as students of Balzac know, the scheme and adjustment
of his comedy varied so remarkably as time went on that it can hardly be
said to have, even in its latest form (which would pretty certainly have
been altered again), a distinct and definite character. Its so-called
scenes are even in the mass by no means exhaustive, and are, as they
stand, a very "cross," division of life: nor are they peopled by
anything like an exhaustive selection of personages. Nor again is
Balzac's genius by any means a mere vindication of the famous definition
of that quality as an infinite capacity of taking pains. That Balzac had
that capacity--had it in a degree probably unequaled even by the dullest
plodders on record--is very well known, is one of the best known things
about him. But he showed it for nearly ten years before the genius came,
and though no doubt it helped him when genius had come, the two things
are in his case, as in most, pretty sufficiently distinct. What the
genius itself was I must do my best to indicate hereafter, always
beseeching the reader to remember that all genius is in its essence and
quiddity indefinable. You can no more get close to it than you can get
close to the rainbow, and your most scientific explanation of it
will always leave as much of the heart of the fact unexplained as the
scientific explanation of the rainbow leaves of that.



Honore de Balzac was born at Tours on the 16th of May, 1799, in the same
year which saw the birth of Heine, and which therefore had the honor
of producing perhaps the most characteristic writers of the nineteenth
century in prose and verse respectively. The family was a respectable
one, though its right to the particle which Balzac always carefully
assumed, subscribing himself "_de_ Balzac," was contested. And there
appears to be no proof of their connection with Jean Guez de Balzac,
the founder, as some will have him, of modern French prose, and the
contemporary and fellow-reformer of Malherbe. (Indeed, as the novelist
pointed out with sufficient pertinence, his earlier namesake had no
hereditary right to the name at all, and merely took it from some
property.) Balzac's father, who, as the _zac_ pretty surely indicates,
was a southerner and a native of Languedoc, was fifty-three years old at
the birth of his son, whose Christian name was selected on the ordinary
principle of accepting that of the saint on whose day he was born.
Balzac the elder had been a barrister before the Revolution, but under
it he obtained a post in the commissariat, and rose to be head of that
department for a military division. His wife, who was much younger than
himself and who survived her son, is said to have possessed both beauty
and fortune, and was evidently endowed with the business faculties so
common among Frenchwomen. When Honore was born, the family had not long
been established at Tours, where Balzac the elder (besides his
duties) had a house and some land; and this town continued to be their
headquarters till the novelist, who was the eldest of the family, was
about sixteen. He had two sisters (of whom the elder, Laure, afterwards
Madame Surville, was his first confidante and his only authoritative
biographer) and a younger brother, who seems to have been, if not a
scapegrace, rather a burden to his friends, and who later went abroad.

The eldest boy was, in spite of Rousseau, put out to nurse, and at seven
years old was sent to the Oratorian grammar-school at Vendome, where he
stayed another seven years, going through, according to his own account,
the future experiences and performances of Louis Lambert, but making no
reputation for himself in the ordinary school course. If, however, he
would not work in his teacher's way, he overworked himself in his own by
devouring books; and was sent home at fourteen in such a state of health
that his grandmother (who after the French fashion, was living with her
daughter and son-in-law), ejaculated: _"Voila donc comme le college nous
renvoie les jolis enfants que nous lui envoyons!"_ It would seem indeed
that, after making all due allowance for grandmotherly and sisterly
partiality, Balzac was actually a very good-looking boy and young man,
though the portraits of him in later life may not satisfy the more
romantic expectations of his admirers. He must have had at all times
eyes full of character, perhaps the only feature that never fails in men
of intellectual eminence; but he certainly does not seem to have been in
his manhood either exactly handsome or exactly "distinguished-looking."
But the portraits of the middle of the century are, as a rule, rather
wanting in this characteristic when compared with those of its first
and last periods; and I cannot think of many that quite come up to one's
expectations.

For a short time he was left pretty much to himself, and recovered
rapidly. But late in 1814 a change of official duties removed the
Balzacs to Paris, and when they had established themselves in the famous
old _bourgeois_ quarter of the Marais, Honore was sent to divers private
tutors or private schools till he had "finished his classes" in 1816
at the age of seventeen and a half. Then he attended lectures at the
Sorbonne where Villemain, Guizot, and Cousin were lecturing, and
heard them, as his sister tells us, enthusiastically, though there are
probably no three writers of any considerable repute in the history of
French literature who stand further apart from Balzac. For all three
made and kept their fame by spirited and agreeable generalizations
and expatiations, as different as possible from the savage labor of
observation on the one hand and the gigantic developments of imagination
on the other, which were to compose Balzac's appeal. His father destined
him for the law; and for three years more he dutifully attended the
offices of an attorney and a notary, besides going through the necessary
lectures and examinations. All these trials he seems to have passed, if
not brilliantly, yet sufficiently.

And then came the inevitable crisis, which was of an unusually severe
nature. A notary, who was a friend of the elder Balzac's and owed him
some gratitude offered not merely to take Honore into his office, but
to allow him to succeed to his business, which was a very good one, in
a few years on very favorable terms. Most fathers, and nearly all French
fathers, would have jumped at this; and it so happened that about
the same time M. de Balzac was undergoing that unpleasant process of
compulsory retirement which his son has described in one of the best
passages of the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, the opening scene of _Argow
le Pirate_. It does not appear that Honore had revolted during his
probation--indeed he is said, and we can easily believe it from his
books, to have acquired a very solid knowledge of law, especially in
bankruptcy matters, of which he was himself to have a very close shave
in future. A solicitor, indeed, told Laure de Balzac that he found
_Cesar Birotteau_ a kind of _Balzac on Bankruptcy_; but this may have
been only the solicitor's fun.

It was no part of Honore's intentions to use this knowledge--however
content he had been to acquire it--in the least interesting, if nearly
the most profitable, of the branches of the legal profession; and he
protested eloquently, and not unsuccessfully, that he would be a man of
letters and nothing else. Not unsuccessfully; but at the same time with
distinctly qualified success. He was not turned out of doors; nor were
the supplies, as in Quinet's case only a few months later, absolutely
withheld even for a short time. But his mother (who seems to have been
less placable than her husband) thought that cutting them down to the
lowest point might have some effect. So, as the family at this time
(April 1819) left Paris for a house some twenty miles out of it, she
established her eldest son in a garret furnished in the most Spartan
fashion, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to look after
him. He did not literally stay in this garret for the ten years of his
astonishing and unparalleled probation; but without too much metaphor
it may be said to have been his Wilderness, and his Wanderings in it to
have lasted for that very considerable time.

We know, in detail, very little of him during the period. For the first
years, between 1819 and 1822, we have a good number of letters to Laure;
between 1822 and 1829, when he first made his mark, very few. He began,
of course, with verse, for which he never had the slightest vocation,
and, almost equally of course, with a tragedy. But by degrees and
apparently pretty soon, he slipped into what was his vocation, and like
some, though not very many, great writers, at first did little better in
it than if it had not been his vocation at all. The singular tentatives
which, after being allowed for a time a sort of outhouse in the
structure of the _Comedie Humaine_, were excluded from the octavo
_Edition Definitive_ five-and-twenty years ago, have never been the
object of that exhaustive bibliographical and critical attention which
has been bestowed on those which follow them. They were not absolutely
unproductive--we hear of sixty, eighty, a hundred pounds being paid for
them, though whether this was the amount of Balzac's always sanguine
expectations, or hard cash actually handed over, we cannot say. They
were very numerous, though the reprints spoken of above never extended
to more than ten. Even these have never been widely read. The only
person I ever knew till I began this present task who had read them
through was the friend whom all his friends are now lamenting and are
not likely soon to cease to lament, Mr. Louis Stevenson; and when I once
asked him whether, on his honor and conscience, he could recommend me
to brace myself to the same effort, he said that on his honor and
conscience he must most earnestly dissuade me. I gather, though I am not
sure, that Mr. Wedmore, the latest writer in English on Balzac at any
length, had not read them through when he wrote.

Now I have, and a most curious study they are. Indeed I am not sorry,
as Mr. Wedmore thinks one would be. They are curiously, interestingly,
almost enthrallingly bad. Couched for the most part in a kind of
Radcliffian or Monk-Lewisian vein--perhaps studied more directly from
Maturin (of whom Balzac was a great admirer) than from either--they
often begin with and sometimes contain at intervals passages not unlike
the Balzac that we know. The attractive title of _Jane la Pale_ (it
was originally called, with a still more Early Romantic avidity for
_baroque_ titles, _Wann-Chlore_) has caused it, I believe, to be
more commonly read than any other. It deals with a disguised duke, a
villainous Italian, bigamy, a surprising offer of the angelic first wife
to submit to a sort of double arrangement, the death of the second wife
and first love, and a great many other things. _Argow le Pirate_ opens
quite decently and in order with that story of the _employe_ which
Balzac was to rehandle so often, but drops suddenly into brigands
stopping diligences, the marriage of the heroine Annette with a retired
pirate marquis of vast wealth, the trial of the latter for murdering
another marquis with a poisoned fish-bone scarf-pin, his execution,
the sanguinary reprisals by his redoubtable lieutenant, and a finale
of blunderbusses, fire, devoted peasant girl with _retrousse_ nose, and
almost every possible _tremblement_.

In strictness mention of this should have been preceded by mention of
_Le Vicaire des Ardennes_, which is a sort of first part of _Argow le
Pirate_, and not only gives an account of his crimes, early history,
and manners (which seem to have been a little robustious for such a
mild-mannered man as Annette's husband), but tells a thrilling tale of
the loves of the _vicaire_ himself and a young woman, which loves are
crossed, first by the belief that they are brother and sister, and
secondly by the _vicaire_ having taken orders under this delusion. _La
Derniere Fee_ is the queerest possible cross between an actual fairy
story _a la_ Nordier and a history of the fantastic and inconstant loves
of a great English lady, the Duchess of "Sommerset" (a piece of
actual _scandalum magnatum_ nearly as bad as Balzac's cool use in his
acknowledged work of the title "Lord Dudley"). This book begins so
well that one expects it to go on better; but the inevitable defects
in craftsmanship show themselves before long. _Le Centenaire_ connects
itself with Balzac's almost lifelong hankering after the _recherche de
l'absolu_ in one form or another, for the hero is a wicked old person
who every now and then refreshes his hold on life by immolating a virgin
under a copper-bell. It is one of the most extravagant and "Monk-Lewisy"
of the whole. _L'Excommunie_, _L'Israelite_, and _L'Heritiere de
Birague_ are mediaeval or fifteenth century tales of the most
luxuriant kind, _L'Excommunie_ being the best, _L'Israelite_ the most
preposterous, and _L'Heritiere de Birague_ the dullest. But it is not
nearly so dull as _Dom Gigadus_ and _Jean Louis_, the former of which
deals with the end of the seventeenth century and the latter with the
end of the eighteenth. These are both as nearly unreadable as anything
can be. One interesting thing, however, should be noted in much of this
early work: the affectionate clinging of the author to the scenery of
Touraine, which sometimes inspires him with his least bad passages.

It is generally agreed that these singular _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_ were
of service to Balzac as exercise, and no doubt they were so; but I think
something may be said on the other side. They must have done a little,
if not much, to lead him into and confirm him in those defects of style
and form which distinguish him so remarkably from most writers of his
rank. It very seldom happens when a very young man writes very much, be
it book-writing or journalism, without censure and without "editing,"
that he does not at the same time get into loose and slipshod habits.
And I think we may set down to this peculiar form of apprenticeship of
Balzac's not merely his failure ever to attain, except in passages and
patches, a thoroughly great style, but also that extraordinary method
of composition which in after days cost him and his publishers so much
money.

However, if these ten years of probation taught him his trade, they
taught him also a most unfortunate avocation or by-trade, which he never
ceased to practise, or to try to practise, which never did him the least
good, and which not unfrequently lost him much of the not too abundant
gains which he earned with such enormous labor. This was the "game
of speculation." His sister puts the tempter's part on an unknown
"neighbor," who advised him to try to procure independence by _une bonne
speculation_. Those who have read Balzac's books and his letters will
hardly think that he required much tempting. He began by trying to
publish--an attempt which has never yet succeeded with a single man of
letters, so far as I can remember. His scheme was not a bad one, indeed
it was one which has brought much money to other pockets since, being
neither more nor less than the issuing of cheap one-volume editions of
French classics. But he had hardly any capital; he was naturally quite
ignorant of his trade, and as naturally the established publishers and
booksellers boycotted him as an intruder. So his _Moliere_ and his
_La Fontaine_ are said to have been sold as waste paper, though if any
copies escaped they would probably fetch a very comfortable price now.
Then, such capital as he had having been borrowed, the lender, either
out of good nature or avarice, determined to throw the helve after the
hatchet. He partly advanced himself and partly induced Balzac's parents
to advance more, in order to start the young man as a printer, to which
business Honore himself added that of typefounder. The story was just
the same: knowledge and capital were again wanting, and though actual
bankruptcy was avoided, Balzac got out of the matter at the cost not
merely of giving the two businesses to a friend (in whose hands they
proved profitable), but of a margin of debt from which he may be said
never to have fully cleared himself.

He had more than twenty years to live, but he never cured himself of
this hankering after _une bonne speculation_. Sometimes it was ordinary
stock-exchange gambling; but his special weakness was, to do him
justice, for schemes that had something more grandiose in them. Thus,
to finish here with the subject, though the chapter of it never actually
finished till his death, he made years afterwards, when he was a
successful and a desperately busy author, a long, troublesome, and
costly journey to Sardinia to carry out a plan of resmelting the slag
from Roman and other mines there. Thus in his very latest days, when he
was living at Vierzschovnia with the Hanska and Mniszech household,
he conceived the magnificently absurd notion of cutting down twenty
thousand acres of oak wood in the Ukraine, and sending it _by railway_
right across Europe to be sold in France. And he was rather reluctantly
convinced that by the time a single log reached its market the freight
would have eaten up the value of the whole plantation.

It was perhaps not entirely chance that the collapse of the printing
scheme, which took place in 1827, the ninth year of the Wanderings in
the Wilderness, coincided with or immediately preceded the conception of
the book which was to give Balzac passage into the Promised Land.
This was _Les Chouans_, called at its first issue, which differed
considerably from the present form, _Le Dernier Chouan ou la Bretagne
en 1800_ (later _1799_). It was published in 1829 without any of the
previous anagrammatic pseudonyms; and whatever were the reasons which
had induced him to make his bow in person to the public, they were well
justified, for the book was a distinct success, if not a great one. It
occupies a kind of middle position between the melodramatic romance of
his nonage and the strictly analytic romance-novel of his later time;
and, though dealing with war and love chiefly, inclines in conception
distinctly to the latter. Corentin, Hulot, and other personages of the
actual Comedy (then by no means planned, or at least avowed) appear; and
though the influence of Scott is in a way paramount* on the surface,
the underwork is quite different, and the whole scheme of the loves of
Montauran and Mademoiselle de Verneuil is pure Balzac.

  * Balzac was throughout his life a fervent admirer of Sir Walter,
    and I think Mr. Wedmore, in his passage on the subject, distinctly
    undervalues both the character and the duration of this esteem.
    Balzac was far too acute to commit the common mistake of thinking
    Scott superficial--men who know mankind are not often blind to
    each other's knowledge. And while Mr. Wedmore seems not to know
    any testimony later than Balzac's _thirty-eighth_ year, it is in
    his _forty-sixth_, when all his own best work was done, except the
    _Parents Pauvres_, that he contrasts Dumas with Scott saying that
    _on relit Walter Scott_, and he does not think any one will
    re-read Dumas. This may be unjust to the one writer, but it is
    conclusive as to any sense of "wasted time" (his own phrase)
    having ever existed in Balzac's mind about the other.

It would seem as if nothing but this sun of popular approval had been
wanting to make Balzac's genius burst out in full bloom. Although we
have a fair number of letters for the ensuing years, it is not very easy
to make out the exact sequence of production of the marvelous harvest
which his genius gave. It is sufficient to say that in the three
years following 1829 there were actually published the _Physiologie
du Mariage_, the charming story of _La Maison du Chat-que-Pelote_,
the _Peau de Chagrin_, the most original and splendid, if not the most
finished and refined, of all Balzac's books, most of the short _Contes
Philosophiques_, of which some are among their author's greatest
triumphs, many other stories (chiefly included in the _Scenes de la Vie
Privee_) and the beginning of the _Contes Drolatiques_.*

  * No regular attempt will after this be made to indicate the date of
    production of successive works, unless they connect themselves
    very distinctly with incidents in the life or with general
    critical observations. At the end of this introduction will be
    found a full table of the _Comedie Humaine_ and the other works.
    It may perhaps be worth while to add here, that while the labors
    of M. de Lovenjoul (to whom every writer on Balzac must
    acknowledge the deepest obligation) have cleared this matter up
    almost to the verge of possibility as regards the published works,
    there is little light to be thrown on the constant references in
    the letters to books which never appeared. Sometimes they are
    known, and they may often be suspected, to have been absorbed into
    or incorporated with others; the rest must have been lost or
    destroyed, or, which is not quite impossible, have existed chiefly
    in the form of project. Nearly a hundred titles of such things are
    preserved.

But without a careful examination of his miscellaneous work, which is
very abundant and includes journalism as well as books, it is almost
as impossible to come to a just appreciation of Balzac as it is without
reading the early works and letters. This miscellaneous work is all the
more important because a great deal of it represents the artist at quite
advanced stages of his career, and because all its examples, the earlier
as well as the later, give us abundant insight on him as he was "making
himself." The comparison with the early works of Thackeray (in _Punch_,
_Fraser_, and elsewhere) is so striking that it can escape no one who
knows the two. Every now and then Balzac transferred bodily, or with
slight alterations, passages from these experiments to his finished
canvases. It appears that he had a scheme for codifying his
"Physiologies" (of which the notorious one above mentioned is only
a catchpenny exemplar and very far from the best) into a seriously
organized work. Chance was kind or intention was wise in not allowing
him to do so; but the value of the things for the critical reader is
not less. Here are tales--extensions of the scheme and manner of the
_Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, or attempts at the _goguenard_ story of 1830--a
thing for which Balzac's hand was hardly light enough. Here are
interesting evidences of striving to be cosmopolitan and polyglot--the
most interesting of all of which, I think, is the mention of certain
British products as "mufflings." "Muffling" used to be a domestic joke
for "muffin;" but whether some wicked Briton deluded Balzac into the
idea that it was the proper form or not it is impossible to say. Here
is a _Traite de la Vie Elegante_, inestimable for certain critical
purposes. So early as 1825 we find a _Code des Gens Honnetes_, which
exhibits at once the author's legal studies and his constant attraction
for the shady side of business, and which contains a scheme for
defrauding by means of lead pencils, actually carried out (if we may
believe his exulting note) by some literary swindlers with unhappy
results. A year later he wrote a _Dictionnaire des Enseignes de
Paris_, which we are glad enough to have from the author of the
_Chat-que-Pelote_; but the persistence with which this kind of
miscellaneous writing occupied him could not be better exemplified than
by the fact that, of two important works which closely follow this in
the collected edition, the _Physiologie de l'Employe_ dates from 1841
and the _Monographie de la Presse Parisienne_ from 1843.

It is well known that from the time almost of his success as a novelist
he was given, like too many successful novelists (_not_ like Scott), to
rather undignified and foolish attacks on critics. The explanation may
or may not be found in the fact that we have abundant critical work of
his, and that it is nearly all bad. Now and then we have an acute remark
in his own special sphere; but as a rule he cannot be complimented on
these performances, and when he was half-way through his career this
critical tendency of his culminated in the unlucky _Revue Parisienne_,
which he wrote almost entirely himself, with slight assistance from his
friends, MM. de Belloy and de Grammont. It covers a wide range, but
the literary part of it is considerable, and this part contains that
memorable and disastrous attack on Sainte-Beuve, for which the critic
afterwards took a magnanimous revenge in his obituary _causerie_.
Although the thing is not quite unexampled it is not easily to be
surpassed in the blind fury of its abuse. Sainte-Beuve was by no means
invulnerable, and an anti-critic who kept his head might have found, as
M. de Pontmartin and others did find, the joints in his armor. But when,
_a propos_ of the _Port Royal_ more especially, and of the other works
in general, Balzac informs us that Sainte-Beuve's great characteristic
as a writer is _l'ennui, l'ennui boueux jusqu'a mi-jambe_, that his
style is intolerable, that his historical handling is like that of
Gibbon, Hume, and other dull people; when he jeers at him for exhuming
"La mere Angelique," and scolds him for presuming to obscure the glory
of the _Roi Soleil_, the thing is partly ludicrous, partly melancholy.
One remembers that agreeable Bohemian, who at a symposium once
interrupted his host by crying, "Man o' the hoose, gie us less o' yer
clack and mair o' yer Jairman wine!" Only, in human respect and other,
we phrase it: "Oh, dear M. de Balzac! give us more _Eugenie Grandets_,
more _Pere Goriots_, more _Peaux de Chagrin_, and don't talk about what
you do not understand!"

Balzac was a great politician also, and here, though he may not have
been very much more successful, he talked with more knowledge and
competence. He must have given himself immense trouble in reading the
papers, foreign as well as French; he had really mastered a good deal
of the political religion of a French publicist. It is curious to
read, sixty years after date, his grave assertion that "_La France a
la conquete de Madagascar a faire_," and with certain very pardonable
defects (such as his Anglophobia), his politics may be pronounced not
unintelligent and not ungenerous, though somewhat inconsistent and
not very distinctly traceable to any coherent theory. As for the
Anglophobia, the Englishman who thinks the less of him for that must
have very poor and unhappy brains. A Frenchman who does not more or less
hate and fear England, an Englishman who does not regard France with
a more or less good-humored impatience, is usually "either a god or
a beast," as Aristotle saith. Balzac began with an odd but not
unintelligible compound, something like Hugo's, of Napoleonism and
Royalism. In 1824, when he was still in the shades of anonymity, he
wrote and published two by no means despicable pamphlets in favor of
Primogeniture and the Jesuits, the latter of which was reprinted in
1880 at the last _Jesuitenhetze_ in France. His _Lettres sur Paris_ in
1830-31, and his _La France et l'Etranger_ in 1836, are two considerable
series of letters from "Our Own Correspondent," handling the affairs of
the world with boldness and industry if not invariably with wisdom. They
rather suggest (as does the later _Revue Parisienne_ still more) the
political writing of the age of Anne in England, and perhaps a little
later, when "the wits" handled politics and society, literature and
things in general with unquestioned competence and an easy universality.

The rest of his work which will not appear in this edition may be
conveniently despatched here. The _Physiologie du Mariage_ and the
_Scenes de la Vie Conjugale_ suffer not merely from the most obvious
of their faults but from defect of knowledge. It may or may not be that
marriage, in the hackneyed phrase, is a net or other receptacle where
all the outsiders would be in, and all the insiders out. But it is quite
clear that Coelebs cannot talk of it with much authority. His state
may or may not be the more gracious: his judgment cannot but lack
experience. The "Theatre," which brought the author little if any
profit, great annoyance, and a vast amount of trouble, has been
generally condemned by criticism. But the _Contes Drolatiques_ are not
so to be given up. The famous and splendid _Succube_ is only the best of
them, and though all are more or less tarred with the brush which tars
so much of French literature, though the attempt to write in an archaic
style is at best a very successful _tour de force_, and represents an
expenditure of brain power by no means justifiable on the part of a
man who could have made so much better use of it, they are never to be
spoken of disrespectfully. Those who sneer at their "Wardour Street" Old
French are not usually the best qualified to do so; and it is not to be
forgotten that Balzac was a real countryman of Rabelais and a legitimate
inheritor of _Gauloiserie_. Unluckily no man can "throw back" in this
way, except now and then as a mere pastime. And it is fair to recollect
that as a matter of fact Balzac, after a year or two, did not waste much
more time on these things, and that the intended ten _dizains_ never, as
a matter of fact, went beyond three.

Besides this work in books, pamphlets, etc., Balzac, as has been said,
did a certain amount of journalism, especially in the _Caricature_, his
performances including, I regret to say, more than one puff of his own
work; and in this, as well as by the success of the _Chouans_, he became
known about 1830 to a much wider circle, both of literary and of private
acquaintance. It cannot indeed be said that he ever mixed much in
society; it was impossible that he should do so, considering the vast
amount of work he did and the manner in which he did it. This subject,
like that of his speculations, may be better finished off in a single
passage than dealt with by scattered indications here and there. He was
not one of those men who can do work by fits and starts in the intervals
of business or of amusement; nor was he one who, like Scott, could work
very rapidly. It is true that he often achieved immense quantities of
work (subject to a caution to be given presently) in a very few days,
but then his working day was of the most peculiar character. He could
not bear disturbance; he wrote best at night, and he could not work at
all after heavy meals. His favorite plan (varied sometimes in detail)
was therefore to dine lightly about five or six, then to go to bed and
sleep till eleven, twelve, or one, and then to get up, and with the help
only of coffee (which he drank very strong and in enormous quantities)
to work for indefinite stretches of time into the morning or afternoon
of the next day. He speaks of a sixteen hours' day as a not uncommon
shift or spell of work, and almost a regular one with him; and on one
occasion he avers that in the course of forty-eight hours he took but
three of the rest, working for twenty-two hours and a half continuously
on each side thereof. In such spells, supposing reasonable facility of
composition and mechanical power in the hand to keep going all the time,
an enormous amount can of course be accomplished. A thousand words
an hour is anything but an extraordinary rate of writing, and fifteen
hundred by no means unheard of with persons who do not write rubbish.

The references to this subject in Balzac's letters are very numerous;
but it is not easy to extract very definite information from them. It
would be not only impolite but incorrect to charge him with unveracity.
But the very heat of imagination which enabled him to produce his work
created a sort of mirage, through which he seems always to have regarded
it; and in writing to publishers, editors, creditors, and even his own
family, it was too obviously his interest to make the most of his labor,
his projects, and his performance. Even his contemporary, though elder,
Southey, the hardest-working and the most scrupulously honest man of
letters in England who could pretend to genius, seems constantly to have
exaggerated the idea of what he could perform, if not of what he had
performed in a given time. The most definite statement of Balzac's that
I remember is one which claims the second number of _Sur Catherine de
Medicis_, "La Confidence des Ruggieri," as the production of a single
night, and not one of the most extravagant of his nights. Now, "La
Confidence des Ruggieri" fills, in the small edition, eighty pages
of nearer four hundred than three hundred words each, or some thirty
thousand words in all. Nobody in the longest of nights could manage
that, except by dictating it to shorthand clerks. But in the very
context of this assertion Balzac assigns a much longer period to the
correction than to the composition, and this brings us to one of the
most curious and one of the most famous points of his literary history.

Some doubts have, I believe, been thrown on the most minute account of
his ways of composition which we have, that of the publisher Werdet. But
there is too great a consensus of evidence as to his general system to
make the received description of it doubtful. According to this,
the first draft of Balzac's work never presented it in anything like
fulness, and sometimes it did not amount to a quarter of the bulk
finally published. This being returned to him from the printer in
"slip" on sheets with very large margins, he would set to work on the
correction; that is to say, on the practical rewriting of the thing,
with excisions, alterations, and above all, additions. A "revise"
being executed, he would attack this revise in the same manner, and not
unfrequently more than once, so that the expenses of mere composition
and correction of the press were enormously heavy (so heavy as to eat
into not merely his publisher's but his own profits), and that the last
state of the book, when published, was something utterly different from
its first state in manuscript. And it will be obvious that if anything
like this was usual with him, it is quite impossible to judge his actual
rapidity of composition by the extent of the published result.

However this may be (and it is at least certain that in the years above
referred to he must have worked his very hardest, even if some of the
work then published had been more or less excogitated and begun during
the Wilderness period), he certainly so far left his eremitical habits
as to become acquainted with most of the great men of letters of the
early thirties, and also with certain ladies of more or less high
rank, who were to supply, if not exactly the full models, the texts
and starting-points for some of the most interesting figures of
the _Comedie_. He knew Victor Hugo, but certainly not at this time
intimately; for as late as 1839 the letter in which he writes to Hugo to
come and breakfast with him at Les Jardies (with interesting and
minute directions how to find that frail abode of genius) is couched in
anything but the tone of a familiar friendship. The letters to Beyle
of about the same date are also incompatible with intimate knowledge.
Nodier (after some contrary expressions) he seems to have regarded
as most good people did regard that true man of letters and charming
tale-teller; while among the younger generation Theophile Gautier and
Charles de Bernard, as well as Goslan and others, were his real and
constant friends. But he does not figure frequently or eminently in any
of the genuine gossip of the time as a haunter of literary circles,
and it is very nearly certain that the assiduity with which some of his
heroes attend _salons_ and clubs had no counterpart in his own life. In
the first place he was too busy; in the second he would not have been at
home there. Like the young gentleman in _Punch_, who "did not read books
but wrote them," though in no satiric sense, he felt it his business not
to frequent society but to create it.

He was, however, aided in the task of creation by the ladies already
spoken of, who were fairly numerous and of divers degrees. The most
constant, after his sister Laure, was that sister's schoolfellow, Madame
Zulma Carraud, the wife of a military official at Angouleme and the
possessor of a small country estate at Frapesle, near Tours. At both
of these places Balzac, till he was a very great man, was a constant
visitor, and with Madame Carraud he kept up for years a correspondence
which has been held to be merely friendly, and which was certainly
in the vulgar sense innocent, but which seems to me to be tinged with
something of that feeling, midway between love and friendship, which
appears in Scott's letters to Lady Abercorn, and which is probably not
so rare as some think. Madame de Berny, another family friend of higher
rank, was the prototype of most of his "angelic" characters, but she
died in 1836. He knew the Duchesse d'Abrantes, otherwise Madame Junot,
and Madame de Girardin, otherwise Delphine Gay; but neither seems to
have exercised much influence over him. It was different with another
and more authentic duchess, Madame de Castries, after whom he dangled
for a considerable time, who certainly first encouraged him and probably
then snubbed him, and who is thought to have been the model of his
wickeder great ladies. And it was comparatively early in the thirties
that he met the woman whom, after nearly twenty years, he was at last to
marry, getting his death in so doing, the Polish Madame Hanska. These,
with some relations of the last named, especially her daughter, and
with a certain "Louise"--an _Inconnue_ who never ceased to be so--were
Balzac's chief correspondents of the other sex, and, as far as is known,
his chief friends in it.

About his life, without extravagant "pudding" of guesswork or of mere
quotation and abstract of his letters, it would be not so much difficult
as impossible to say much; and accordingly it is a matter of fact that
most lives of Balzac, including all good ones, are rather critical
than narrative. From his real _debut_ with _Le Dernier Chouan_ to his
departure for Poland on the long visit, or brace of visits, from which
he returned finally to die, this life consisted solely of work. One of
his earliest utterances, "_Il faut piocher ferme_," was his motto to
the very last, varied only by a certain amount of traveling. Balzac
was always a considerable traveler; indeed if he had not been so his
constitution would probably have broken down long before it actually
did; and the expense of these voyagings (though by his own account he
generally conducted his affairs with the most rigid economy), together
with the interruption to his work which they occasioned, entered no
doubt for something into his money difficulties. He would go to Baden or
Vienna for a day's sight of Madame Hanska; his Sardinian visit has been
already noted; and as a specimen of others it may be mentioned that he
once journeyed from Paris to Besancon, then from Besancon right
across France to Angouleme, and then back to Paris on some business
of selecting paper for one of the editions of his books, which his
publishers would probably have done much better and at much less
expense.

Still his actual receipts were surprisingly small, partly, it may be,
owing to his expensive habits of composition, but far more, according to
his own account, because of the Belgian piracies, from which all popular
French authors suffered till the government of Napoleon the Third
managed to put a stop to them. He also lived in such a thick atmosphere
of bills and advances and cross-claims on and by his publishers, that
even if there were more documents than there are it would be exceedingly
difficult to get at facts which are, after all, not very important.
He never seems to have been paid much more than 500 pounds for the
newspaper publication (the most valuable by far because the pirates
could not interfere with its profits) of any one of his novels. And to
expensive fashions of composition and complicated accounts, a steady
back-drag of debt and the rest, must be added the very delightful, and
to the novelist not useless, but very expensive mania for the
collector. Balzac had a genuine taste for, and thought himself a genuine
connoisseur in, pictures, sculpture, and objects of art of all kinds,
old and new; and though prices in his day were not what they are in
these, a great deal of money must have run through his hands in this
way. He calculated the value of the contents of the house, which in his
last days he furnished with such loving care for his wife, and which
turned out to be a chamber rather of death than of marriage, at some
16,000 pounds. But part of this was Madame Hanska's own purchasing, and
there were offsets of indebtedness against it almost to the last. In
short, though during the last twenty years of his life such actual "want
of pence" as vexed him was not due, as it had been earlier, to the fact
that the pence refused to come in, but only to imprudent management
of them, it certainly cannot be said that Honore de Balzac, the most
desperately hard worker in all literature for such time as was allotted
him, and perhaps the man of greatest genius who was ever a desperately
hard worker, falsified that most uncomfortable but truest of
proverbs--"Hard work never made money."

If, however, he was but scantily rewarded with the money for which he
had a craving (not absolutely, I think, devoid of a touch of genuine
avarice, but consisting chiefly of the artist's desire for pleasant
and beautiful things, and partly presenting a variety or phase of the
grandiose imagination, which was his ruling characteristic), Balzac had
plenty of the fame, for which he cared quite as much as he cared for
money. Perhaps no writer except Voltaire and Goethe earlier made such
a really European reputation; and his books were of a kind to be more
widely read by the general public than either Goethe's or Voltaire's.
In England (Balzac liked the literature but not the country, and never
visited England, though I believe he planned a visit) this popularity
was, for obvious reasons, rather less than elsewhere. The respectful
vogue which French literature had had with the English in the eighteenth
century had ceased, owing partly to the national enmity revived and
fostered by the great war, and partly to the growth of a fresh and
magnificent literature at home during the first thirty years of the
nineteenth in England. But Balzac could not fail to be read almost at
once by the lettered; and he was translated pretty early, though not
perhaps to any great extent. It was in England, moreover, that by far
his greatest follower appeared, and appeared very shortly. For it would
be absurd in the most bigoted admirer of Thackeray to deny that the
author of _Vanity Fair_, who was in Paris and narrowly watching French
literature and French life at the very time of Balzac's most exuberant
flourishing and education, owed something to the author of _Le Pere
Goriot_. There was no copying or imitation; the lessons taught by Balzac
were too much blended with those of native masters, such as Fielding,
and too much informed and transformed by individual genius. Some
may think--it is a point at issue not merely between Frenchmen and
Englishmen, but between good judges of both nations on each side--that
in absolute veracity and likeness to life, in limiting the operation of
the inner consciousness on the outward observation to strictly artistic
scale, Thackeray excelled Balzac as far as he fell short of him in the
powers of the seer and in the gigantic imagination of the prophet. But
the relations of pupil and master in at least some degree are not, I
think, deniable.

So things went on in light and in shade, in homekeeping and in travel,
in debts and in earnings, but always in work of some kind or another,
for eighteen years from the turning point of 1829. By degrees, as he
gained fame and ceased to be in the most pressing want of money, Balzac
left off to some extent, though never entirely, those miscellaneous
writings--reviews (including puffs), comic or general sketches,
political diatribes, "physiologies" and the like--which, with his
discarded prefaces and much more interesting matter, were at last,
not many years ago, included in four stout volumes of the _Edition
Definitive_. With the exception of the _Physiologies_ (a sort of short
satiric analysis of this or that class, character, or personage), which
were very popular in the reign of Louis Philippe in France, and which
Albert Smith and others introduced into England, Balzac did not do any
of this miscellaneous work extremely well. Very shrewd observations are
to be found in his reviews, for instance his indication, in reviewing La
Touche's _Fragoletta_, of that common fault of ambitious novels, a sort
of woolly and "ungraspable" looseness of construction and story, which
constantly bewilders the reader as to what is going on. But, as a rule,
he was thinking too much of his own work and his own principles of
working to enter very thoroughly into the work of others. His politics,
those of a moderate but decided Royalist and Conservative, were, as has
been said, intelligent in theory, but in practice a little distinguished
by that neglect of actual business detail which has been noticed in his
speculations.

At last, in the summer of 1847, it seemed as if the Rachel for whom
he had served nearly if not quite the full fourteen years already, and
whose husband had long been out of the way, would at last grant herself
to him. He was invited to Vierzschovnia in the Ukraine, the seat
of Madame Hanska, or in strictness of her son-in-law, Count Georges
Mniszech; and as the visit was apparently for no restricted period, and
Balzac's pretensions to the lady's hand were notorious, it might have
seemed that he was as good as accepted. But to assume this would have
been to mistake what perhaps the greatest creation of Balzac's great
English contemporary and counterpart on the one side, as Thackeray was
his contemporary and counterpart on the other, considered to be the
malignity of widows. What the reasons were which made Madame Hanska
delay so long in doing what she did at last, and might just as well, it
would seem, have done years before, is not certainly known, and it would
be quite unprofitable to discuss them. But it was on the 8th of October
1847 that Balzac first wrote to his sister from Vierzschovnia, and it
was not till the 14th of March 1850 that, "in the parish church of
Saint Barbara at Berditchef, by the Count Abbe Czarski, representing
the Bishop of Jitomir (this is as characteristic of Balzac in one way
as what follows is in another) a Madame Eve de Balzac, born Countess
Rzevuska, or a Madame Honore de Balzac or a Madame de Balzac the elder"
came into existence.

It does not appear that Balzac was exactly unhappy during this huge
probation, which was broken by one short visit to Paris. The interest
of uncertainty was probably much for his ardent and unquiet spirit, and
though he did very little literary work for him, one may suspect that
he would not have done very much if he had stayed at Paris, for signs
of exhaustion, not of genius but of physical power, had shown themselves
before he left home. But it is not unjust or cruel to say that by the
delay "Madame Eve de Balzac" (her actual baptismal name was Evelina)
practically killed her husband. These winters in the severe climate of
Russian Poland were absolutely fatal to a constitution, and especially
to lungs, already deeply affected. At Vierzschovnia itself he had
illnesses, from which he narrowly escaped with life, before the
marriage; his heart broke down after it; and he and his wife did not
reach Paris till the end of May. Less than three months afterwards, on
the 18th of August, he died, having been visited on the very day of his
death in the Paradise of bric-a-brac which he had created for his Eve in
the Rue Fortunee--a name too provocative of Nemesis--by Victor Hugo,
the chief maker in verse as he himself was the chief maker in prose of
France. He was buried at Pere la Chaise. The after-fortunes of his house
and its occupants were not happy: but they do not concern us.

In person Balzac was a typical Frenchman, as indeed he was in most ways.
From his portraits there would seem to have been more force and address
than distinction or refinement in his appearance, but, as has been
already observed, his period was one ungrateful to the iconographer. His
character, not as a writer but as a man, must occupy us a little longer.
For some considerable time--indeed it may be said until the publication
of his letters--it was not very favorably judged on the whole. We may,
of course, dismiss the childish scandals (arising, as usual, from clumsy
or malevolent misinterpretation of such books as the _Physiologie de
Mariage_, the _Peau de Chagrin_, and a few others), which gave rise to
the caricatures of him such as that of which we read, representing him
in a monk's dress at a table covered with bottles and supporting a young
person on his knee, the whole garnished with the epigraph: Scenes de la
Vie Cachee. They seem to have given him, personally, a very unnecessary
annoyance, and indeed he was always rather sensitive to criticism. This
kind of stupid libel will never cease to be devised by the envious,
swallowed by the vulgar, and simply neglected by the wise. But Balzac's
peculiarities, both of life and of work, lent themselves rather fatally
to a subtler misconstruction which he also anticipated and tried to
remove, but which took a far stronger hold. He was represented--and
in the absence of any intimate male friends to contradict the
representation, it was certain to obtain some currency--as in his
artistic person a sardonic libeler of mankind, who cared only to take
foibles and vices for his subjects, and who either left goodness and
virtue out of sight altogether, or represented them as the qualities
of fools. In private life he was held up as at the best a self-centered
egotist who cared for nothing but himself and his own work, capable of
interrupting one friend who told him of the death of a sister by the
suggestion that they should change the subject and talk of "something
real, of _Eugenie Grandet_," and of levying a fifty per cent commission
on another who had written a critical notice of his, Balzac's, life and
works.*

  * Sandeau and Gautier, the victims in these two stories, were
    neither spiteful, nor mendacious, nor irrational, so they are
    probably true. The second was possibly due to Balzac's odd notions
    of "business being business." The first, I have quite recently
    seen reason to think, may have been a sort of reminiscence of one
    of the traits in Diderot's extravagant encomium on Richardson.

With the first of these charges he himself, on different occasions,
rather vainly endeavored to grapple, once drawing up an elaborate
list of his virtuous and vicious women, and showing that the former
outnumbered the latter; and, again, laboring (with that curious lack
of sense of humor which distinguishes all Frenchmen but a very few, and
distinguished him eminently) to show that though no doubt it is very
difficult to make a virtuous person interesting, he, Honore de Balzac,
had attempted it, and succeeded in it, on a quite surprising number of
occasions.

The fact is that if he had handled this last matter rather more lightly
his answer would have been a sufficient one, and that in any case the
charge is not worth answering. It does not lie against the whole of his
work; and if it lay as conclusively as it does against Swift's, it would
not necessarily matter. To the artist in analysis as opposed to the
romance-writer, folly always, and villainy sometimes, does supply a much
better subject than virtuous success, and if he makes his fools and
his villains lifelike and supplies them with a fair contrast of better
things, there is nothing more to be said. He will not, indeed, be
a Shakespeare, or a Dante, or even a Scott; but we may be very well
satisfied with him as a Fielding, a Thackeray, or a Balzac. As to the
more purely personal matter I own that it was some time before I could
persuade myself that Balzac, to speak familiarly, was a much better
fellow than others, and I myself, have been accustomed to think him. But
it is also some time since I came to the conclusion that he was so, and
my conversion is not to be attributed to any editorial retainer. His
education in a lawyer's office, the accursed advice about the _bonne
speculation_, and his constant straitenings for money, will account for
his sometimes looking after the main chance rather too narrowly; and as
for the Eugenie Grandet story (even if the supposition referred to in
a note above be fanciful) it requires no great stretch of charity
or comprehension to see in it nothing more awkward, very easily
misconstrued, but not necessarily in the least heartless or brutal
attempt of a rather absent and very much self-centered recluse absorbed
in one subject, to get his interlocutor as well as himself out of
painful and useless dwelling on sorrowful matters. Self-centered and
self-absorbed Balzac no doubt was; he could not have lived his life
or produced his work if he had been anything else. And it must be
remembered that he owed extremely little to others; that he had the
independence as well as the isolation of the self-centered; that he
never sponged or fawned on a great man, or wronged others of what was
due to them. The only really unpleasant thing about him that I know, and
even this is perhaps due to ignorance of all sides of the matter, is
a slight touch of snobbishness now and then, especially in those late
letters from Vierzschovnia to Madame de Balzac and Madame Surville,
in which, while inundating his mother and sister with commissions
and requests for service, he points out to them what great people the
Hanskas and Mniszechs are, what infinite honor and profit it will be
to be connected with them, and how desirable it is to keep struggling
engineer brothers-in-law and ne'er-do-well brothers in the colonies out
of sight lest they should disgust the magnates.

But these are "sma' sums, sma' sums," as Bailie Jarvie says; and
smallness of any kind has, whatever it may have to do with Balzac the
man, nothing to do with Balzac the writer. With him as with some others,
but not as with the larger number, the sense of _greatness_ increases
the longer and the more fully he is studied. He resembles, I think,
Goethe more than any other man of letters--certainly more than any other
of the present century--in having done work which is very frequently, if
not even commonly, faulty, and in yet requiring that his work shall be
known as a whole. His appeal is cumulative; it repeats itself on each
occasion with a slight difference, and though there may now and then be
the same faults to be noticed, they are almost invariably accompanied,
not merely by the same, but by fresh merits.

As has been said at the beginning of this essay, no attempt will be
made in it to give that running survey of Balzac's work which is
always useful and sometimes indispensable in treatment of the kind.
But something like a summing up of that subject will here be attempted
because it is really desirable that in embarking on so vast a voyage the
reader should have some general chart--some notes of the soundings and
log generally of those who have gone before him.

There are two things, then, which it is more especially desirable to
keep constantly before one in reading Balzac--two things which, taken
together, constitute his almost unique value, and two things which not
a few critics have failed to take together in him, being under the
impression that the one excludes the other, and that to admit the other
is tantamount to a denial of the one. These two things are, first, an
immense attention to detail, sometimes observed, sometimes invented or
imagined; and secondly; a faculty of regarding these details through a
mental lens or arrangement of lenses almost peculiar to himself, which
at once combines, enlarges, and invests them with a peculiar magical
halo or mirage. The two thousand personages of the _Comedie Humaine_
are, for the most part, "signaled," as the French official word has it,
marked and denoted by the minutest traits of character, gesture, gait,
clothing, abode, what not; the transactions recorded are very often
given with a scrupulous and microscopic accuracy of reporting which no
detective could outdo. Defoe is not more circumstantial in detail
of fact than Balzac; Richardson is hardly more prodigal of
character-stroke. Yet a very large proportion of these characters, of
these circumstances, are evidently things invented or imagined,
not observed. And in addition to this the artist's magic glass, his
Balzacian speculum, if we may so say (for none else has ever had it),
transforms even the most rigid observation into something flickering and
fanciful, the outline as of shadows on the wall, not the precise contour
of etching or of the camera.

It is curious, but not unexampled, that both Balzac himself when he
struggled in argument with his critics and those of his partisans who
have been most zealously devoted to him, have usually tried to exalt the
first and less remarkable of these gifts over the second and infinitely
more remarkable. Balzac protested strenuously against the use of
the word "gigantesque" in reference to his work; and of course it is
susceptible of an unhandsome innuendo. But if we leave that innuendo
aside, if we adopt the sane reflection that "gigantesque" does not
exceed "gigantic," or assert as constant failure of greatness, but
only indicates that the magnifying process is carried on with a certain
indiscriminateness, we shall find none, I think, which so thoroughly
well describes him.

The effect of this singular combination of qualities, apparently the
most opposite, may be partly anticipated, but not quite. It results
occasionally in a certain shortcoming as regards _verite vraie_,
absolute artistic truth to nature. Those who would range Balzac in
point of such artistic veracity on a level with poetical and universal
realists like Shakespeare and Dante, or prosaic and particular realists
like Thackeray and Fielding, seem not only to be utterly wrong but to
pay their idol the worst of all compliments, that of ignoring his own
special qualifications. The province of Balzac may not be--I do no think
it is--identical, much less co-extensive, with that of nature. But it is
his own--a partly real, partly fantastic region, where the lights, the
shades, the dimensions, and the physical laws are slightly different
from those of this world of ours, but with which, owing to the things it
has in common with that world, we are able to sympathize, which we
can traverse and comprehend. Every now and then the artist uses his
observing faculty more, and his magnifying and distorting lens less;
every now and then he reverses the proportion. Some tastes will like him
best in the one stage; some in the other; the happier constituted
will like him best in both. These latter will decline to put _Eugenie
Grandet_ above the _Peau de Chagrin_, or _Le Pere Goriot_ above the
wonderful handful of tales which includes _La Recherche de l'Absolu_
and _Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, though they will no doubt recognize
that even in the first two named members of these pairs the Balzacian
quality, that of magnifying and rendering grandiose, is present, and
that the martyrdom of Eugenie, the avarice of her father, the blind
self-devotion of Goriot to his thankless and worthless children, would
not be what they are if they were seen through a perfectly achromatic
and normal medium.

This specially Balzacian quality is, I think, unique. It is like--it may
almost be said to _be_--the poetic imagination, present in magnificent
volume and degree, but in some miraculous way deprived and sterilized
of the specially poetical quality. By this I do not of course mean that
Balzac did not write in verse: we have a few verses of his, and they are
pretty bad, but that is neither here nor there. The difference between
Balzac and a great poet lies not in the fact that the one fills the
whole page with printed words, and the other only a part of it--but in
something else. If I could put that something else into distinct words
I should therein attain the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the
_primum mobile_, the _grand arcanum_, not merely of criticism but of
all things. It might be possible to coast about it, to hint at it,
by adumbrations and in consequences. But it is better and really
more helpful to face the difficulty boldly, and to say that Balzac,
approaching a great poet nearer perhaps than any other prose writer in
any language, is distinguished from one by the absence of the very
last touch, the finally constituting quiddity, which makes a great poet
different from Balzac.

Now, when we make this comparison, it is of the first interest to
remember--and it is one of the uses of the comparison, that it suggests
the remembrance of the fact--that the great poets have usually been
themselves extremely exact observers of detail. It has not made them
great poets; but they would not be great poets without it. And when
Eugenie Grandet starts from _le petit banc de bois_ at the reference to
it in her scoundrelly cousin's letter (to take only one instance out
of a thousand), we see in Balzac the same observation, subject to the
limitation just mentioned, that we see in Dante and Shakespeare, in
Chaucer and Tennyson. But the great poets do not as a rule _accumulate_
detail. Balzac does, and from this very accumulation he manages to
derive that singular gigantesque vagueness--differing from the poetic
vague, but ranking next to it--which I have here ventured to note as
his distinguishing quality. He bewilders us a very little by it, and he
gives us the impression that he has slightly bewildered himself. But the
compensations of the bewilderment are large.

For in this labyrinth and whirl of things, in this heat and hurry
of observation and imagination, the special intoxication of Balzac
consists. Every great artist has his own means of producing this
intoxication, and it differs in result like the stimulus of beauty or of
wine. Those persons who are unfortunate enough to see in Balzac little
or nothing but an ingenious piler-up of careful strokes--a man of
science taking his human documents and classing them after an orderly
fashion in portfolio and deed-box--must miss this intoxication
altogether. It is much more agreeable as well as much more accurate
to see in the manufacture of the _Comedie_ the process of a Cyclopean
workshop--the bustle, the hurry, the glare and shadow, the steam and
sparks of Vulcanian forging. The results, it is true, are by no means
confused or disorderly--neither were those of the forges that worked
under Lipari--but there certainly went much more to them than the dainty
fingering of a literary fretwork-maker or the dull rummagings of a
realist _a la Zola_.

In part, no doubt, and in great part, the work of Balzac is dream-stuff
rather than life-stuff, and it is all the better for that. What is
better than dreams? But the coherence of his visions, their bulk, their
solidity, the way in which they return to us and we return to them, make
them such dream-stuff as there is all too little of in this world. If it
is true that evil on the whole predominates over good in the vision
of this "Voyant," as Philarete Chasles so justly called him, two
very respectable, and in one case very large, though somewhat opposed
divisions of mankind, the philosophic pessimist and the convinced and
consistent Christian believer, will tell us that this is at least not
one of the points in which it is unfaithful to life. If the author is
closer and more faithful in his study of meanness and vice than in his
studies of nobility and virtue, the blame is due at least as much to his
models as to himself. If he has seldom succeeded in combining a really
passionate with a really noble conception of love, very few of his
countrymen have been more fortunate in that respect. If in some of his
types--his journalists, his married women, and others--he seems to have
sacrificed to conventions, let us remember that those who know attribute
to his conventions such a power if not altogether such a holy influence
that two generations of the people he painted have actually lived more
and more up to his painting of them.

And last of all, but also greatest, has to be considered the immensity
of his imaginative achievement, the huge space that he has filled for us
with vivid creation, the range of amusement, of instruction, of (after a
fashion) edification which he has thrown open for us all to walk in.
It is possible that he himself and others more or less well-meaningly,
though more or less maladroitly, following his lead, may have
exaggerated the coherence and the architectural design of the _Comedie_.
But it has coherence and it has design; nor shall we find anything
exactly to parallel it. In mere bulk the _Comedie_ probably, if not
certainly, exceeds the production of any novelist of the first class
in any kind of fiction except Dumas, and with Dumas, for various and
well-known reasons, there is no possibility of comparing it. All others
yield in bulk; all in a certain concentration and intensity; none even
aims at anything like the same system and completeness. It must be
remembered that owing to shortness of life, lateness of beginning,
and the diversion of the author to other work, the _Comedie_ is the
production, and not the sole production, of some seventeen or eighteen
years at most. Not a volume of it, for all that failure to reach the
completest perfection in form and style which has been acknowledged,
can be accused of thinness, of scamped work, of mere repetition, of mere
cobbling up. Every one bears the marks of steady and ferocious labor,
as well as of the genius which had at last come where it had been
so earnestly called and had never gone away again. It is possible to
overpraise Balzac in parts or to mispraise him as a whole. But so long
as inappropriate and superfluous comparisons are avoided and as his own
excellence is recognized and appreciated, it is scarcely possible to
overestimate that excellence in itself and for itself. He stands alone;
even with Dickens, who is his nearest analogue, he shows far more
points of difference than of likeness. His vastness of bulk is not more
remarkable than his peculiarity of quality; and when these two things
coincide in literature or elsewhere, then that in which they coincide
may be called, and must be called, Great, without hesitation and without
reserve.

                                                    GEORGE SAINTSBURY.





APPENDIX



THE BALZAC PLAN OF THE COMEDIE HUMAINE


The form in which the Comedie Humaine was left by its author, with
the exceptions of _Le Depute d'Arcis_ (incomplete) and _Les Petits
Bourgeois_, both of which were added, some years later, by the Edition
Definitive.

The original French titles are followed by their English equivalents.
Literal translations have been followed, excepting a few instances where
preference is shown for a clearer or more comprehensive English title.


[Note from Team Balzac, the Etext preparers: In some cases more than one
English translation is commonly used for various translations/editions.
In such cases the first translation is from the Saintsbury edition
copyrighted in 1901 and that is the title referred to in the personages
following most of the stories. We have added other title translations of
which we are currently aware for the readers' convenience.]




COMEDIE HUMAINE




SCENES DE LA VIE PRIVEE

     SCENES FROM PRIVATE LIFE


     La Maison du Chat-qui Pelote
     At the Sign of the Cat and Racket

     Le Bal de Sceaux
     The Ball at Sceaux

     La Bourse
     The Purse

     La Vendetta
     The Vendetta

     Mme. Firmiani
     Madame Firmiani

     Une Double Famille
     A Second Home

     La Paix du Menage
     Domestic Peace

     La Fausse Maitresse
     The Imaginary Mistress
     Paz

     Etude de femme
     A Study of Woman

     Autre etude de femme
     Another Study of Woman

     La Grande Breteche
     La Grand Breteche

     Albert Savarus
     Albert Savarus

     Memoires de deux Jeunes Mariees
     Letters of Two Brides

     Une Fille d'Eve
     A Daughter of Eve

     La Femme de Trente Ans
     A Woman of Thirty

     La Femme abandonnee
     The Deserted Woman

     La Grenadiere
     La Grenadiere

     Le Message
     The Message

     Gobseck
     Gobseck

     Le Contrat de Mariage
     A Marriage Settlement
     A Marriage Contract

     Un Debut dans la vie
     A Start in Life

     Modeste Mignon
     Modeste Mignon

     Beatrix
     Beatrix

     Honorine
     Honorine

     Le Colonel Chabert
     Colonel Chabert

     La Messe de l'Athee
     The Atheist's Mass

     L'Interdiction
     The Commission in Lunacy

     Pierre Grassou
     Pierre Grassou




SCENES DE LA VIE PROVINCE

     SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE

     Ursule Mirouet
     Ursule Mirouet

     Eugenie Grandet
     Eugenie Grandet

     Les Celibataires:
     The Celibates:
       Pierrette
       Pierrette

       Le Cure de Tours
       The Vicar of Tours

     Un Menage de Garcon
     A Bachelor's Establishment
     The Two Brothers
     The Black Sheep
     La Rabouilleuse

     Les Parisiens en Province:
     Parisians in the Country:
       L'illustre Gaudissart
       Gaudissart the Great
       The Illustrious Gaudissart

       La Muse du departement
       The Muse of the Department

     Les Rivalites:
     The Jealousies of a Country Town:
       La Vieille Fille
       The Old Maid

       Le Cabinet des antiques
       The Collection of Antiquities

     Le Lys dans la Vallee
     The Lily of the Valley

     Illusions Perdues:--I.
     Lost Illusions:--I.
       Les Deux Poetes
       The Two Poets

       Un Grand homme de province a Paris, 1re partie
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris, Part 1

     Illusions Perdues:--II.
     Lost Illusions:--II.
       Un Grand homme de province, 2e p.
       A Distinguished Provincial at Paris, Part 2

       Eve et David
       Eve and David




SCENES DE LA VIE PARISIENNE

     SCENES FROM PARISIAN LIFE

     Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes:
     Scenes from a Courtesan's Life:
       Esther heureuse
       Esther Happy

       A combien l'amour revient aux vieillards
       What Love Costs an Old Man

       Ou menent les mauvais Chemins
       The End of Evil Ways

       La derniere Incarnation de Vautrin
       Vautrin's Last Avatar

     Un Prince de la Boheme
     A Prince of Bohemia

     Un Homme d'affaires
     A Man of Business

     Gaudissart II.
     Gaudissart II.

     Les Comediens sans le savoir
     The Unconscious Humorists
     The Unconscious Comedians

     Histoire des Treize:
     The Thirteen:
       Ferragus
       Ferragus

       La Duchesse de Langeais
       The Duchesse de Langeais

       La Fille aux yeux d'or
       The Girl with the Golden Eyes

     Le Pere Goriot
     Father Goriot
     Old Goriot

     Grandeur et Decadence de Cesar Birotteau
     The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau

     La Maison Nucingen
     The Firm of Nucingen

     Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan
     The Secrets of a Princess
     The Secrets of the Princess Cadignan

     Les Employes
     The Government Clerks
     Bureaucracy

     Sarrasine
     Sarrasine

     Facino Cane
     Facine Cane

     Les Parents Pauvres:--I.
     Poor Relations:--I.
       La Cousine Bette
       Cousin Betty

     Les Parents Pauvres:--II.
     Poor Relations:--II.
       Le Cousin Pons
       Cousin Pons

     Les Petits Bourgeois
     The Middle Classes
     The Lesser Bourgeoise




SCENES DE LA VIE POLITIQUE

     SCENES FROM POLITICAL LIFE

     Une Tenebreuse Affaire
     The Gondreville Mystery
     An Historical Mystery

     Un Episode sous la Terreur
     An Episode Under the Terror

     L'Envers de l'Histoire Contemporaine:
     The Seamy Side of History:
     The Brotherhood of Consolation:
       Mme. de la Chanterie
       Madame de la Chanterie

       L'Initie
       Initiated
       The Initiate

     Z. Marcas
     Z. Marcas

     Le Depute d'Arcis
     The Member for Arcis
     The Deputy for Arcis




SCENES DE LA VIE MILITAIRE

     SCENES FROM MILITARY LIFE

     Les Chouans
     The Chouans

     Une Passion dans le desert
     A Passion in the Desert




SCENES DE LA VIE DE CAMPAGNE

     SCENES FROM COUNTRY LIFE

     Le Medecin de Campagne
     The Country Doctor

     Le Cure de Village
     The Country Parson
     The Village Rector

     Les Paysans
     The Peasantry
     Sons of the Soil




ETUDES PHILOSOPHIQUES

     PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

     La Peau de Chagrin
     The Magic Skin

     La Recherche de l'Absolu
     The Quest of the Absolute
     The Alkahest

     Jesus-Christ en Flandre
     Christ in Flanders

     Melmoth reconcilie
     Melmoth Reconciled

     Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu
     The Unknown Masterpiece
     The Hidden Masterpiece

     L'Enfant Maudit
     The Hated Son

     Gambara
     Gambara

     Massimilla Doni
     Massimilla Doni

     Les Marana
     The Maranas
     Juana

     Adieu
     Farewell

     Le Requisitionnaire
     The Conscript
     The Recruit

     El Verdugo
     El Verdugo

     Un Drame au bord de la mer
     A Seaside Tragedy
     A Drama on the Seashore

     L'Auberge rouge
     The Red Inn

     L'Elixir de longue vie
     The Elixir of Life

     Maitre Cornelius
     Maitre Cornelius

     Sur Catherine de Medicis:
     About Catherine de' Medici
       Le Martyr calviniste
       The Calvinist Martyr

       La Confidence des Ruggieri
       The Ruggieri's Secret

       Les Deux Reves
       The Two Dreams

     Louis Lambert
     Louis Lambert

     Les Proscrits
     The Exiles

     Seraphita
     Seraphita




AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION



In giving the general title of "The Human Comedy" to a work begun nearly
thirteen years since, it is necessary to explain its motive, to relate
its origin, and briefly sketch its plan, while endeavoring to speak of
these matters as though I had no personal interest in them. This is
not so difficult as the public might imagine. Few works conduce to
much vanity; much labor conduces to great diffidence. This observation
accounts for the study of their own works made by Corneille, Moliere,
and other great writers; if it is impossible to equal them in their fine
conceptions, we may try to imitate them in this feeling.

The idea of _The Human Comedy_ was at first as a dream to me, one of
those impossible projects which we caress and then let fly; a chimera
that gives us a glimpse of its smiling woman's face, and forthwith
spreads its wings and returns to a heavenly realm of phantasy. But this
chimera, like many another, has become a reality; has its behests, its
tyranny, which must be obeyed.

The idea originated in a comparison between Humanity and Animality.

It is a mistake to suppose that the great dispute which has lately
made a stir, between Cuvier and Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, arose from
a scientific innovation. Unity of structure, under other names, had
occupied the greatest minds during the two previous centuries. As we
read the extraordinary writings of the mystics who studied the sciences
in their relation to infinity, such as Swedenborg, Saint-Martin,
and others, and the works of the greatest authors on Natural
History--Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, etc., we detect in the
_monads_ of Leibnitz, in the _organic molecules_ of Buffon, in the
_vegetative force_ of Needham, in the correlation of similar organs of
Charles Bonnet--who in 1760 was so bold as to write, "Animals vegetate
as plants do"--we detect, I say, the rudiments of the great law of Self
for Self, which lies at the root of _Unity of Plan_. There is but one
Animal. The Creator works on a single model for every organized being.
"The Animal" is elementary, and takes its external form, or, to be
accurate, the differences in its form, from the environment in which
it is obliged to develop. Zoological species are the result of these
differences. The announcement and defence of this system, which is
indeed in harmony with our preconceived ideas of Divine Power, will
be the eternal glory of Geoffroi Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier's victorious
opponent on this point of higher science, whose triumph was hailed by
Goethe in the last article he wrote.

I, for my part, convinced of this scheme of nature long before the
discussion to which it has given rise, perceived that in this respect
society resembled nature. For does not society modify Man, according to
the conditions in which he lives and acts, into men as manifold as the
species in Zoology? The differences between a soldier, an artisan, a man
of business, a lawyer, an idler, a student, a statesman, a merchant, a
sailor, a poet, a beggar, a priest, are as great, though not so easy
to define, as those between the wolf, the lion, the ass, the crow,
the shark, the seal, the sheep, etc. Thus social species have always
existed, and will always exist, just as there are zoological species. If
Buffon could produce a magnificent work by attempting to represent in
a book the whole realm of zoology, was there not room for a work of the
same kind on society? But the limits set by nature to the variations of
animals have no existence in society. When Buffon describes the lion, he
dismisses the lioness with a few phrases; but in society a wife is not
always the female of the male. There may be two perfectly dissimilar
beings in one household. The wife of a shopkeeper is sometimes worthy of
a prince, and the wife of a prince is often worthless compared with the
wife of an artisan. The social state has freaks which Nature does not
allow herself; it is nature _plus_ society. The description of social
species would thus be at least double that of animal species, merely in
view of the two sexes. Then, among animals the drama is limited; there
is scarcely any confusion; they turn and rend each other--that is all.
Men, too, rend each other; but their greater or less intelligence makes
the struggle far more complicated. Though some savants do not yet admit
that the animal nature flows into human nature through an immense tide
of life, the grocer certainly becomes a peer, and the noble sometimes
sinks to the lowest social grade. Again, Buffon found that life was
extremely simple among animals. Animals have little property, and
neither arts nor sciences; while man, by a law that has yet to be
sought, has a tendency to express his culture, his thoughts, and his
life in everything he appropriates to his use. Though Leuwenhoek,
Swammerdam, Spallanzani, Reaumur, Charles Bonnet, Muller, Haller and
other patient investigators have shown us how interesting are the habits
of animals, those of each kind, are, at least to our eyes, always and
in every age alike; whereas the dress, the manners, the speech, the
dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a citizen, a priest, and
a pauper are absolutely unlike, and change with every phase of
civilization.

Hence the work to be written needed a threefold form--men, women, and
things; that is to say, persons and the material expression of their
minds; man, in short, and life.

As we read the dry and discouraging list of events called History,
who can have failed to note that the writers of all periods, in Egypt,
Persia, Greece, and Rome, have forgotten to give us a history of
manners? The fragment of Petronius on the private life of the Romans
excites rather than satisfies our curiosity. It was from observing this
great void in the field of history that the Abbe Barthelemy devoted his
life to a reconstruction of Greek manners in _Le Jeune Anacharsis_.

But how could such a drama, with the four or five thousand persons which
society offers, be made interesting? How, at the same time, please
the poet, the philosopher, and the masses who want both poetry and
philosophy under striking imagery? Though I could conceive of the
importance and of the poetry of such a history of the human heart, I
saw no way of writing it; for hitherto the most famous story-tellers had
spent their talent in creating two or three typical actors, in depicting
one aspect of life. It was with this idea that I read the works
of Walter Scott. Walter Scott, the modern troubadour, or finder
(_trouvere=trouveur_), had just then given an aspect of grandeur to a
class of composition unjustly regarded as of the second rank. Is it not
really more difficult to compete with personal and parochial interests
by writing of Daphnis and Chloe, Roland, Amadis, Panurge, Don Quixote,
Manon Lescaut, Clarissa, Lovelace, Robinson Crusoe, Gil Blas, Ossian,
Julie d'Etanges, My Uncle Toby, Werther, Corinne, Adolphe, Paul and
Virginia, Jeanie Deans, Claverhouse, Ivanhoe, Manfred, Mignon, than
to set forth in order facts more or less similar in every country,
to investigate the spirit of laws that have fallen into desuetude, to
review the theories which mislead nations, or, like some metaphysicians,
to explain what _Is_? In the first place, these actors, whose existence
becomes more prolonged and more authentic than that of the generations
which saw their birth, almost always live solely on condition of their
being a vast reflection of the present. Conceived in the womb of their
own period, the whole heart of humanity stirs within their frame, which
often covers a complete system of philosophy. Thus Walter Scott raised
to the dignity of the philosophy of History the literature which, from
age to age, sets perennial gems in the poetic crown of every nation
where letters are cultivated. He vivified it with the spirit of the
past; he combined drama, dialogue, portrait, scenery, and description;
he fused the marvelous with truth--the two elements of the times; and he
brought poetry into close contact with the familiarity of the humblest
speech. But as he had not so much devised a system as hit upon a manner
in the ardor of his work, or as its logical outcome, he never thought of
connecting his compositions in such a way as to form a complete history
of which each chapter was a novel, and each novel the picture of a
period.

It was by discerning this lack of unity, which in no way detracts from
the Scottish writer's greatness, that I perceived at once the scheme
which would favor the execution of my purpose, and the possibility of
executing it. Though dazzled, so to speak, by Walter Scott's amazing
fertility, always himself and always original, I did not despair, for I
found the source of his genius in the infinite variety of human nature.
Chance is the greatest romancer in the world; we have only to study it.
French society would be the real author; I should only be the secretary.
By drawing up an inventory of vices and virtues, by collecting the
chief facts of the passions, by depicting characters, by choosing
the principal incidents of social life, by composing types out of a
combination of homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed in
writing the history which so many historians have neglected: that of
Manners. By patience and perseverance I might produce for France in the
nineteenth century the book which we must all regret that Rome, Athens,
Tyre, Memphis, Persia, and India have not bequeathed to us; that history
of their social life which, prompted by the Abbe Barthelemy, Monteil
patiently and steadily tried to write for the Middle Ages, but in an
unattractive form.

This work, so far, was nothing. By adhering to the strict lines of a
reproduction a writer might be a more or less faithful, and more or less
successful, painter of types of humanity, a narrator of the dramas of
private life, an archaeologist of social furniture, a cataloguer of
professions, a registrar of good and evil; but to deserve the praise of
which every artist must be ambitious, must I not also investigate the
reasons or the cause of these social effects, detect the hidden sense
of this vast assembly of figures, passions, and incidents? And finally,
having sought--I will not say having found--this reason, this motive
power, must I not reflect on first principles, and discover in what
particulars societies approach or deviate from the eternal law of truth
and beauty? In spite of the wide scope of the preliminaries, which might
of themselves constitute a book, the work, to be complete, would need a
conclusion. Thus depicted, society ought to bear in itself the reason of
its working.

The law of the writer, in virtue of which he is a writer, and which I do
not hesitate to say makes him the equal, or perhaps the superior, of the
statesman, is his judgment, whatever it may be, on human affairs,
and his absolute devotion to certain principles. Machiavelli, Hobbes,
Bossuet, Leibnitz, Kant, Montesquieu, _are_ the science which statesmen
apply. "A writer ought to have settled opinions on morals and politics;
he should regard himself as a tutor of men; for men need no masters to
teach them to doubt," says Bonald. I took these noble words as my guide
long ago; they are the written law of the monarchical writer. And
those who would confute me by my own words will find that they have
misinterpreted some ironical phrase, or that they have turned against me
a speech given to one of my actors--a trick peculiar to calumniators.

As to the intimate purpose, the soul of this work, these are the
principles on which it is based.

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and capabilities;
society, far from depraving him, as Rousseau asserts, improves him,
makes him better; but self-interest also develops his evil tendencies.
Christianity, above all, Catholicism, being--as I have pointed out in
the Country Doctor (_le Medecin de Campagne_)--a complete system for
the repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the most powerful
element of social order.

In reading attentively the presentment of society cast, as it were, from
the life, with all that is good and all that is bad in it, we learn this
lesson--if thought, or if passion, which combines thought and feeling,
is the vital social element, it is also its destructive element. In this
respect social life is like the life of man. Nations live long only
by moderating their vital energy. Teaching, or rather education, by
religious bodies is the grand principle of life for nations, the only
means of diminishing the sum of evil and increasing the sum of good in
all society. Thought, the living principle of good and ill, can only be
trained, quelled, and guided by religion. The only possible religion is
Christianity (see the letter from Paris in "Louis Lambert," in which the
young mystic explains, _a propos_ to Swedenborg's doctrines, how there
has never been but one religion since the world began). Christianity
created modern nationalities, and it will preserve them. Hence, no
doubt, the necessity for the monarchical principle. Catholicism and
Royalty are twin principles.

As to the limits within which these two principles should be confined
by various institutions, so that they may not become absolute, every one
will feel that a brief preface ought not to be a political treatise. I
cannot, therefore, enter on religious discussions, nor on the political
discussions of the day. I write under the light of two eternal
truths--Religion and Monarchy; two necessities, as they are shown to be
by contemporary events, towards which every writer of sound sense ought
to try to guide the country back. Without being an enemy to election,
which is an excellent principle as a basis of legislation, I reject
election regarded as _the only social instrument_, especially so badly
organized as it now is (1842); for it fails to represent imposing
minorities, whose ideas and interests would occupy the attention of
a monarchical government. Elective power extended to all gives us
government by the masses, the only irresponsible form of government,
under which tyranny is unlimited, for it calls itself law. Besides, I
regard the family and not the individual as the true social unit. In
this respect, at the risk of being thought retrograde, I side with
Bossuet and Bonald instead of going with modern innovators. Since
election has become the only social instrument, if I myself were to
exercise it no contradiction between my acts and my words should be
inferred. An engineer points out that a bridge is about to fall, that it
is dangerous for any one to cross it; but he crosses it himself when it
is the only road to the town. Napoleon adapted election to the spirit of
the French nation with wonderful skill. The least important members of
his Legislative Body became the most famous orators of the Chamber
after the Restoration. No Chamber has ever been the equal of the _Corps
Legislatif_, comparing them man for man. The elective system of the
Empire was, then, indisputably the best.

Some persons may, perhaps, think that this declaration is somewhat
autocratic and self-assertive. They will quarrel with the novelist for
wanting to be an historian, and will call him to account for writing
politics. I am simply fulfilling an obligation--that is my reply. The
work I have undertaken will be as long as a history; I was compelled
to explain the logic of it, hitherto unrevealed, and its principles and
moral purpose.

Having been obliged to withdraw the prefaces formerly published, in
response to essentially ephemeral criticisms, I will retain only one
remark.

Writers who have a purpose in view, were it only a reversion to
principles familiar in the past because they are eternal, should always
clear the ground. Now every one who, in the domain of ideas, brings his
stone by pointing out an abuse, or setting a mark on some evil that it
may be removed--every such man is stigmatized as immoral. The accusation
of immorality, which has never failed to be cast at the courageous
writer, is, after all, the last that can be brought when nothing else
remains to be said to a romancer. If you are truthful in your pictures;
if by dint of daily and nightly toil you succeed in writing the most
difficult language in the world, the word _immoral_ is flung in your
teeth. Socrates was immoral; Jesus Christ was immoral; they both were
persecuted in the name of the society they overset or reformed. When a
man is to be killed he is taxed with immorality. These tactics, familiar
in party warfare, are a disgrace to those who use them. Luther and
Calvin knew well what they were about when they shielded themselves
behind damaged worldly interests! And they lived all the days of their
life.

When depicting all society, sketching it in the immensity of its
turmoil, it happened--it could not but happen--that the picture
displayed more of evil than of good; that some part of the fresco
represented a guilty couple; and the critics at once raised a cry
of immorality, without pointing out the morality of another position
intended to be a perfect contrast. As the critic knew nothing of the
general plan I could forgive him, all the more because one can no more
hinder criticism than the use of eyes, tongues, and judgment. Also the
time for an impartial verdict is not yet come for me. And, after all,
the author who cannot make up his mind to face the fire of criticism
should no more think of writing than a traveler should start on his
journey counting on a perpetually clear sky. On this point it remains
to be said that the most conscientious moralists doubt greatly whether
society can show as many good actions as bad ones; and in the picture
I have painted of it there are more virtuous figures than reprehensible
ones. Blameworthy actions, faults and crimes, from the lightest to the
most atrocious, always meet with punishment, human or divine, signal or
secret. I have done better than the historian, for I am free. Cromwell
here on earth escaped all punishment but that inflicted by thoughtful
men. And on this point there have been divided schools. Bossuet even
showed some consideration for great regicide. William of Orange, the
usurper, Hugues Capet, another usurper, lived to old age with no more
qualms or fears than Henri IV. or Charles I. The lives of Catherine
II. and of Frederick of Prussia would be conclusive against any kind
of moral law, if they were judged by the twofold aspect of the morality
which guides ordinary mortals, and that which is in use by crowned
heads; for, as Napoleon said, for kings and statesmen there are the
lesser and the higher morality. My scenes of political life are founded
on this profound observation. It is not a law to history, as it is to
romance, to make for a beautiful ideal. History is, or ought to be, what
it was; while romance ought to be "the better world," as was said by
Mme. Necker, one of the most distinguished thinkers of the last century.

Still, with this noble falsity, romance would be nothing if it were not
true in detail. Walter Scott, obliged as he was to conform to the ideas
of an essentially hypocritical nation, was false to humanity in his
picture of woman, because his models were schismatics. The Protestant
woman has no ideal. She may be chaste, pure, virtuous; but her
unexpansive love will always be as calm and methodical as the fulfilment
of a duty. It might seem as though the Virgin Mary had chilled the
hearts of those sophists who have banished her from heaven with her
treasures of loving kindness. In Protestantism there is no possible
future for the woman who has sinned; while, in the Catholic Church, the
hope of forgiveness makes her sublime. Hence, for the Protestant writer
there is but one Woman, while the Catholic writer finds a new woman in
each new situation. If Walter Scott had been a Catholic, if he had set
himself the task of describing truly the various phases of society which
have successively existed in Scotland, perhaps the painter of Effie
and Alice--the two figures for which he blamed himself in his later
years--might have admitted passion with its sins and punishments,
and the virtues revealed by repentance. Passion is the sum-total of
humanity. Without passion, religion, history, romance, art, would all be
useless.

Some persons, seeing me collect such a mass of facts and paint them
as they are, with passion for their motive power, have supposed,
but wrongly, that I must belong to the school of Sensualism and
Materialism--two aspects of the same thing--Pantheism. But their
misapprehension was perhaps justified--or inevitable. I do not share the
belief in indefinite progress for society as a whole; I believe in man's
improvement in himself. Those who insist on reading in me the intention
to consider man as a finished creation are strangely mistaken.
_Seraphita_, the doctrine in action of the Christian Buddha, seems to me
an ample answer to this rather heedless accusation.

In certain fragments of this long work I have tried to popularize the
amazing facts, I may say the marvels, of electricity, which in man
is metamorphosed into an incalculable force; but in what way do
the phenomena of brain and nerves, which prove the existence of an
undiscovered world of psychology, modify the necessary and undoubted
relations of the worlds to God? In what way can they shake the Catholic
dogma? Though irrefutable facts should some day place thought in the
class of fluids which are discerned only by their effects while their
substance evades our senses, even when aided by so many mechanical
means, the result will be the same as when Christopher Columbus detected
that the earth is a sphere, and Galileo demonstrated its rotation. Our
future will be unchanged. The wonders of animal magnetism, with which
I have been familiar since 1820; the beautiful experiments of Gall,
Lavater's successor; all the men who have studied mind as opticians have
studied light--two not dissimilar things--point to a conclusion in favor
of the mystics, the disciples of St. John, and of those great thinkers
who have established the spiritual world--the sphere in which are
revealed the relations of God and man.

A sure grasp of the purport of this work will make it clear that I
attach to common, daily facts, hidden or patent to the eye, to the acts
of individual lives, and to their causes and principles, the importance
which historians have hitherto ascribed to the events of public national
life. The unknown struggle which goes on in a valley of the Indre
between Mme. de Mortsauf and her passion is perhaps as great as the most
famous of battles (_Le Lys dans la Vallee_). In one the glory of the
victor is at stake; in the other it is heaven. The misfortunes of the
two Birotteaus, the priest and the perfumer, to me are those of mankind.
La Fosseuse (_Medecin de Campagne_) and Mme. Graslin (_Cure de Village_)
are almost the sum-total of woman. We all suffer thus every day. I have
had to do a hundred times what Richardson did but once. Lovelace has a
thousand forms, for social corruption takes the hues of the medium
in which it lives. Clarissa, on the contrary, the lovely image of
impassioned virtue, is drawn in lines of distracting purity. To create
a variety of Virgins it needs a Raphael. In this respect, perhaps
literature must yield to painting.

Still, I may be allowed to point out how many irreproachable figures--as
regards their virtue--are to be found in the portions of this work
already published: Pierrette Lorrain, Ursule Mirouet, Constance
Birotteau, La Fosseuse, Eugenie Grandet, Marguerite Claes, Pauline
de Villenoix, Madame Jules, Madame de la Chanterie, Eve Chardon,
Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon, Madame Firmiani, Agathe Rouget, Renee de
Maucombe; besides several figures in the middle-distance, who, though
less conspicuous than these, nevertheless, offer the reader an example
of domestic virtue: Joseph Lebas, Genestas, Benassis, Bonnet the cure,
Minoret the doctor, Pillerault, David Sechard, the two Birotteaus,
Chaperon the priest, Judge Popinot, Bourgeat, the Sauviats, the
Tascherons, and many more. Do not all these solve the difficult literary
problem which consists in making a virtuous person interesting?

It was no small task to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous
types of a period; for this is, in fact, the number presented to us by
each generation, and which the Human Comedy will require. This crowd of
actors, of characters, this multitude of lives, needed a setting--if
I may be pardoned the expression, a gallery. Hence the very natural
division, as already known, into the Scenes of Private Life, of
Provincial Life, of Parisian, Political, Military, and Country Life.
Under these six heads are classified all the studies of manners which
form the history of society at large, of all its _faits et gestes_, as
our ancestors would have said. These six classes correspond, indeed, to
familiar conceptions. Each has its own sense and meaning, and answers to
an epoch in the life of man. I may repeat here, but very briefly, what
was written by Felix Davin--a young genius snatched from literature by
an early death. After being informed of my plan, he said that the Scenes
of Private Life represented childhood and youth and their errors, as
the Scenes of Provincial Life represented the age of passion, scheming,
self-interest, and ambition. Then the Scenes of Parisian Life give a
picture of the tastes and vice and unbridled powers which conduce to
the habits peculiar to great cities, where the extremes of good and
evil meet. Each of these divisions has its local color--Paris and
the Provinces--a great social antithesis which held for me immense
resources.

And not man alone, but the principal events of life, fall into classes
by types. There are situations which occur in every life, typical
phases, and this is one of the details I most sought after. I have tried
to give an idea of the different districts of our fine country. My work
has its geography, as it has its genealogy and its families, its places
and things, its persons and their deeds; as it has its heraldry, its
nobles and commonalty, its artisans and peasants, its politicians and
dandies, its army--in short, a whole world of its own.

After describing social life in these three portions, I had to delineate
certain exceptional lives, which comprehend the interests of many
people, or of everybody, and are in a degree outside the general law.
Hence we have Scenes of Political Life. This vast picture of society
being finished and complete, was it not needful to display it in its
most violent phase, beside itself, as it were, either in self-defence or
for the sake of conquest? Hence the Scenes of Military Life, as yet the
most incomplete portion of my work, but for which room will be allowed
in this edition, that it may form part of it when done. Finally, the
Scenes of Country Life are, in a way, the evening of this long day, if
I may so call the social drama. In that part are to be found the purest
natures, and the application of the great principles of order, politics,
and morality.

Such is the foundation, full of actors, full of comedies and tragedies,
on which are raised the Philosophical Studies--the second part of my
work, in which the social instrument of all these effects is displayed,
and the ravages of the mind are painted, feeling after feeling; the
first of the series, _The Magic Skin_, to some extent forms a link
between the Philosophical Studies and Studies of Manners, by a work
of almost Oriental fancy, in which life itself is shown in a mortal
struggle with the very element of all passion.

Besides these, there will be a series of Analytical Studies, of which
I will say nothing, for one only is published as yet--The Physiology of
Marriage.

In the course of time I purpose writing two more works of this class.
First the Pathology of Social Life, then an Anatomy of Educational
Bodies, and a Monograph on Virtue.

In looking forward to what remains to be done, my readers will perhaps
echo what my publishers say, "Please God to spare you!" I only ask to be
less tormented by men and things than I have hitherto been since I began
this terrific labor. I have had this in my favor, and I thank God for
it, that the talents of the time, the finest characters and the truest
friends, as noble in their private lives as the former are in public
life, have wrung my hand and said, Courage!

And why should I not confess that this friendship, and the testimony
here and there of persons unknown to me, have upheld me in my career,
both against myself and against unjust attacks; against the calumny
which has often persecuted me, against discouragement, and against the
too eager hopefulness whose utterances are misinterpreted as those of
overwhelming conceit? I had resolved to display stolid stoicism in
the face of abuse and insults; but on two occasions base slanders have
necessitated a reply. Though the advocates of forgiveness of injuries
may regret that I should have displayed my skill in literary fence,
there are many Christians who are of opinion that we live in times when
it is as well to show sometimes that silence springs from generosity.

The vastness of a plan which includes both a history and a criticism of
society, an analysis of its evils, and a discussion of its principles,
authorizes me, I think, in giving to my work the title under which it
now appears--_The Human Comedy_. Is this too ambitious? Is it not exact?
That, when it is complete, the public must pronounce.


PARIS, July 1842






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