le money with pamphlets and occasional stories, but his thirst
for fame was far from satisfied. He was sure that he was called to
literature, and yet he was not sure that he had the power to succeed. In
one of his letters to his sister, he wrote:

I am young and hungry, and there is nothing on my plate. Oh, Laure,
Laure, my two boundless desires, my only ones--to be famous, and to be
loved--they ever be satisfied?

For the next ten years he was learning his trade, and the artistic use
of the fiction writer's tools. What is more to the point, is the fact
that he began to dream of a series of great novels, which should give
a true and panoramic picture of the whole of human life. This was the
first intimation of his "Human Comedy," which was so daringly undertaken
and so nearly completed in his after years. In his early days of
obscurity, he said to his readers:

Note well the characters that I introduce, since you will have to follow
their fortunes through thirty novels that are to come.

Here we see how little he had been daunted by ill success, and how his
prodigious imagination had not been overcome by sorrow and evil fortune.
Meantime, writing almost savagely, and with a feeling combined of
ambition and despair, he had begun, very slowly indeed, to create a
public. These ten years, however, had loaded him with debts; and his
struggle to keep himself afloat only plunged him deeper in the mire.
His thirty unsigned novels began to pay him a few hundred francs, not
in cash, but in promissory notes; so that he had to go still deeper into
debt.

In 1827 he was toiling on his first successful novel, and indeed one of
the best historic novels in French literature--The Chouans. He speaks of
his labor as "done with a tired brain and an anxious mind," and of the
eight or ten business letters that he had to write each day before he
could begin his literary work.

"Postage and an omnibus are extravagances that I cannot allow myself,"
he writes. "I stay at home so as not to wear out my clothes. Is that
clear to you?"

At the end of the next year, though he was already popular as a
novelist, and much sought out by people of distinction, he was at the
very climax of his poverty. He had written thirty-five books, and was in
debt to the amount of a hundred and twenty-four thousand francs. He was
saved from bankruptcy only by the aid of Mme. de Berny, a woman of high
character, and one whose moral influence was very strong with