Balthazar Claes in his quest for the Absolute, his disregard
of all else save his work, and the heroic devotion of
Josephine and Marguerite, are characteristic features of
Balzac's art; the sordidness of life and the mad passion for
the unattainable are admirably relieved, as in "Eugenie
Grandet" and "Old Goriot," by a certain nobility and purity of
motive. The novel is generally acknowledged one of Balzac's
masterpieces, both in vigour of portraiture and minuteness of
detail. Perhaps no one was ever better fitted to depict the
ruin wrought by a fixed idea than Balzac himself, who wasted
much of his laborious life in struggling to discover a short
cut to wealth.

_I.--Claes, the Alchemist_

In Douai, situated in the Rue de Paris, there is a house which stands
out from all the rest in the city by reason of its purely Flemish
character. In all its details, this tall and handsome house expresses
the manners of the domesticated people of the Low Countries. The name of
the house for some two centuries has been Maison Claes, after the great
family of craftsmen who occupied it. These Van Claes had amassed
fortunes, played a part in politics, and had suffered many vicissitudes
in the course of history without losing their place in the mighty
bourgeois world of commerce. They were substantial people, princes of
trade.

At the end of the eighteenth century the representative of this ancient
and affluent family was Balthazar Claes, a tall and handsome young man,
who after some years' residence in Paris, where he saw the fashionable
world and made acquaintance with many of the great savants, including
Lavoisier the chemist, returned to his home in Douai, and set himself to
find a wife.

It was on a visit to a relation in Ghent that he heard gossip concerning
a young lady living in Brussels, which made him curious to see so
interesting a person. Rumour had two tales to tell of this Mlle.
Josephine Temninck. She was beautiful, but she was deformed. Could
deformity be triumphed over by beauty of face? A relative of Claes
thought that it could, and maintained this opinion against the opposite
camp. This relative spoke of Mlle. Temninck's character, telling how the
sweet girl had surrendered her share of the family estate that her
younger brother might make a great marriage, and how she had quite
resigned herself, even on the threshold of her life, to the idea of
sp