easily, from his
anxiety not to wear his heart upon his sleeve, Balzac might be
misunderstood. He dined with her on January 29th, 1844, after a visit
to Russia, and related at table, with peals of laughter and apparently
enormous satisfaction, an instance which had come under his notice of
the ferocious exercise of absolute power. Any stranger listening,
would have thought him utterly heartless and brutal, but George Sand
knew better. She whispered to him: "That makes you inclined to cry,
doesn't it?"[*] He answered nothing; left off laughing, as if a spring
in him had broken; was very serious for the rest of the evening, and
did not say a word more about Russia.

[*] "Autour de la Table," by George Sand.

Balzac looked on the world as an arena; and as the occasion and the
audience arose, he suited himself with the utmost aplomb to the part
he intended to play, so that under the costume and the paint the real
Balzac is often difficult to discover. Sometimes he would pretend to
be rich and prosperous, when he thought an editor would thereby be
induced to offer him good terms; and sometimes, when it suited his
purpose, he would make the most of his poverty and of his pecuniary
embarrassments. Madame Hanska, from whom he required sympathy, heard
much of his desperate situation after the failure of Werdet, whom he
likens to the vulture that tormented Prometheus; but as it would not
answer for Emile de Girardin, the editor of _La Presse_, to know much
about Balzac's pecuniary difficulties, Madame de Girardin is assured
that the report of Werdet's supposed disaster is false, and Balzac
virtuously remarks that in the present century honesty is never
believed in.[*] Sometimes his want of candour appears to have its
origin in his hatred to allow that he is beaten, and there is
something childlike and naive in his vanity. We are amused when he
informs Madame Hanska that he is giving up the _Chronique de Paris_
--which, after a brilliant flourish of trumpets at the start, was a
complete failure--because the speeches in the Chambre des Deputes are
so silly that he abandons the idea of taking up politics, as he had
intended to do by means of journalism. In a later letter, however, he
is obliged to own that, though the _Chronique_ has been, of course, a
brilliant success, money is lacking, owing to the wickedness of
several abandoned characters, and that therefore he has been forced to
bring the publication to an end.

[*] "La Ge