est, even if some of the
work then published had been more or less excogitated and begun during
the Wilderness period), he certainly so far left his eremitical habits
as to become acquainted with most of the great men of letters of the
early thirties, and also with certain ladies of more or less high
rank, who were to supply, if not exactly the full models, the texts
and starting-points for some of the most interesting figures of
the _Comedie_. He knew Victor Hugo, but certainly not at this time
intimately; for as late as 1839 the letter in which he writes to Hugo to
come and breakfast with him at Les Jardies (with interesting and
minute directions how to find that frail abode of genius) is couched in
anything but the tone of a familiar friendship. The letters to Beyle
of about the same date are also incompatible with intimate knowledge.
Nodier (after some contrary expressions) he seems to have regarded
as most good people did regard that true man of letters and charming
tale-teller; while among the younger generation Theophile Gautier and
Charles de Bernard, as well as Goslan and others, were his real and
constant friends. But he does not figure frequently or eminently in any
of the genuine gossip of the time as a haunter of literary circles,
and it is very nearly certain that the assiduity with which some of his
heroes attend _salons_ and clubs had no counterpart in his own life. In
the first place he was too busy; in the second he would not have been at
home there. Like the young gentleman in _Punch_, who "did not read books
but wrote them," though in no satiric sense, he felt it his business not
to frequent society but to create it.

He was, however, aided in the task of creation by the ladies already
spoken of, who were fairly numerous and of divers degrees. The most
constant, after his sister Laure, was that sister's schoolfellow, Madame
Zulma Carraud, the wife of a military official at Angouleme and the
possessor of a small country estate at Frapesle, near Tours. At both
of these places Balzac, till he was a very great man, was a constant
visitor, and with Madame Carraud he kept up for years a correspondence
which has been held to be merely friendly, and which was certainly
in the vulgar sense innocent, but which seems to me to be tinged with
something of that feeling, midway between love and friendship, which
appears in Scott's letters to Lady Abercorn, and which is probably not
so rare as some think. Madame de