e, advocate, of
the Council under Louis XVI. Both these statements however appear to
be incorrect, and may be considered to have been harmless fictions on
the part of the old gentleman, as no record of his name can be found
in the Royal Calendar, which was very carefully kept. Almanacs are
awkward things, and his name _is_ mentioned in the National Calendar
of 1793 as a "lawyer" and "member of the general council for the
section of the rights of man in the Commune." But he evidently
preferred to draw a veil over his revolutionary experiences, and it
seems rather hard that, because he happened to possess a celebrated
son, his little secrets should be exposed to the light of day. Later
on he became an ardent Royalist, and in 1814 he joined with Bertrand
de Molleville to draw up a memoir against the Charter, which Balzac
says was dictated to him, then a boy of fifteen; and he also mentions
that he remembers hearing M. de Molleville cry out, "The Constitution
ruined Louis XVI., and the Charter will kill the Bourbons!" "No
compromise" formed an essential part of the creed of the Royalists at
the Restoration.

When M. de Balzac[*] married, in 1797, he was in charge of the
Commissariat of the Twenty-second Military Division; and in 1798 he
came to live in Tours, where he had bought a house and some land near
the town, and where he remained for nineteen years. Here, on May 16,
1799, St. Honore's day, his son, the celebrated novelist, was born,
and was christened Honore after the saint.

[*] The Balzac family will be accorded the "de" in this account of
them.

Old M. de Balzac was in his own way literary, and had written two or
three pamphlets, one on his favourite subject--that of health. He
seems to have been a man of much originality, many peculiarities, and
much kindness of heart. He was evidently impulsive, like his
celebrated son, and he certainly made a culpable mistake, and a cruel
one for his family, when he rashly concluded that he would always
remain a bachelor, and arranged that his income should die with him.
He afterwards hoped to repair the wrong he had thus done to his
children, by outliving the other shareholders and obtaining a part of
the immense capital of the Tontine. Fortunately for himself he
possessed extraordinary optimism, and power of excluding from his mind
the possibility of all unpleasant contingencies--qualities which he
handed on in full measure to Honore. He therefore kept himself happy