ipse--any way to
express the thought. He forged a strange and wondrous style--a language
made up of all the slang of the street, combined with the terminologies
of the laboratory, law, medicine and science. He was an ignoramus.

But still the public read what he wrote and clamored for more, because
the man expressed humanity--he knew men and women.

Balzac was the first writer to discover that every human life is
intensely interesting; not merely the heroic and the romantic.

Every life is a struggle; and the fact that the battles are usually
bloodless, and the romance a dream, makes it no less real.

Balzac proved that the extraordinary and sensational were not necessary
to literature. And just as the dewdrop on the petal is a divine
manifestation, and every blade of grass is a miracle, and the three
speckled eggs in an English sparrow's nest constitute an immaculate
conception, so every human life, with its hopes, aspirations, dream,
defeats and successes, is a drama, joyous with comedy, rich in
melodrama and also dark and somber as can be woven from the warp and
woof of mystery and death.

Balzac wrote a dozen books or more a year. Of course he quarreled with
Barabbas, and lawsuits followed, where both sides were right and both
sides were wrong. Balzac hadn't the time to look after business details.
He would sign away his birthright for a month's peace, forgetful of the
day of reckoning. He supported his mother and brothers and sisters,
loaned money to everybody, borrowed from La Dilecta when the bailiffs
got too pressing, and all the time turned out copy religiously. He
practised the eight-hour-a-day clause, but worked in double shifts, from
two A.M. to ten A.M., and then from noon until eight o'clock at night.
Then for a month he would relax and devote himself to La Dilecta. She
was his one friend, his confidante, his comrade, his mother, his
sweetheart.

No woman was ever loved more devotedly, but the passionate intensity of
the man's nature must have been a sore tax at times on her time and
strength. A younger woman could not have known his needs, nor ministered
to him mentally. He was absorbed in his work and in his love, and these
were to him one.

He had won renown, for had he not called down on his head the attacks of
the envious? His manuscripts were in demand.

Balzac was thirty years of age; Madame De Berney was fifty-two. The sun
for him had not reached noon, but for her the shadows were lengthen