soaked in some such sublime element as might
still have hung about there--I mean on the very spot--from the vital
presence, so lately extinct, of the prodigious Balzac; which had
involved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud of other
presences, so arrayed an army of interrelated shades, that the air was
still thick as with the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing and
supposing and creating, with a whole imaginative traffic. The Pension
Vauquer, then but lately existent, according to Le Pere Goriot, on the
other side of the Seine, was still to be revealed to me; but the figures
peopling it are not to-day essentially more intense (that is as a matter
of the marked and featured, the terrible and the touching, as compared
with the paleness of the conned page in general,) than I persuade
myself, with so little difficulty, that I found the more numerous and
more shifting, though properly doubtless less inspiring, constituents of
the Pension Fezandie. Fantastic and all "subjective" that I should
attribute a part of their interest, or that of the scene spreading round
them, to any competent perception, in the small-boy mind, that the
general or public moment had a rarity and a brevity, a sharp intensity,
of its own; ruffling all things, as they came, with the morning breath
of the Second Empire and making them twinkle back with a light of
resigned acceptance, a freshness of cynicism, the force of a great
grimacing example. The grimace might have been legibly there in the air,
to the young apprehension, and could I but simplify this record enough I
should represent everything as part of it. I seemed at any rate
meanwhile to think of the Fezandie young men, young Englishmen mostly,
who were getting up their French, in that many-coloured air, for what I
supposed, in my candour, to be appointments and "posts," diplomatic,
commercial, vaguely official, and who, as I now infer, though I didn't
altogether embrace it at the time, must, under the loose rule of the
establishment, have been amusing themselves not a little. It was as a
side-wind of their free criticism, I take it, that I felt the first
chill of an apprehended decline of the establishment, some pang of
prevision of what might come, and come as with a crash, of the general
fine fallacy on which it rested. Their criticism was for that matter
free enough, causing me to admire it even while it terrified. They
expressed themselves in terms of magnificent scorn--such