ch thoroughly satisfactory matter as that which he chose to
call "Etudes Philosophiques." It includes only one full-volume novel,
but that is the _Peau de Chagrin_ itself.[165] And here are most of the
short stories singled out at first, _La Recherche de l'Absolu_, _Jesus
Christ en Flandre_, _Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, with _Melmoth
Reconcilie_[166] in the same batch. The two volumes entitled _L'Enfant
Maudit_ and _Les Marana_ contain all but a dozen remarkable tales. Here,
too, is the curious treatise _Sur Catherine de Medicis_, with another,
to some people among the most interesting of all, the autobiographic
_Louis Lambert_, and also the mystical, and in parts very beautiful,
_Seraphita_.

The "Etudes Analytiques," which complete the original _Comedie_ with the
two notorious volumes of _Physiologie du Marriage_ and _Petites Miseres
de la Vie Conjugale_, are not novels or tales, and so do not concern
us. They are not the only instance in literature showing that the
sarcasm

The _God_ you took from a printed book

extends to other things besides divinity. The old conventional satires
on marriage are merely rehashed with some extra garlic. Balzac had no
personal experience of the subject till just before his death, and his
singular claustral habits of life could not give him much opportunity
for observation.

[Sidenote: "Balzacity": its constitution.]

Experience, indeed, and observation (to speak with only apparent
paradox), though they played an important, yet played only a subordinate
part at any time in the great Balzacian achievement. Victor Hugo, in
what was in effect a funeral oration, described that achievement as "un
livre qui est l'Observation et qui est l'Imagination." But no one
familiar with the Victorian rhetoric will mistake the _clou_, the
dominating and decisive word of that sentence. It is the conjunction.
Hugo meant to draw attention to the astonishing _union_ of Imagination
with Observation--two things which, except in the highest poetry, are
apt to be rather strangers to each other--and by putting Imagination
last he meant also doubtless that this was the dominating--the
masculine--element in the marriage. In the immense volume of discussion
of Balzac which the long lifetime succeeding his death has seen, and
which thickened and multiplied towards the close of the last century and
a little later--owing to the conclusion of the _Edition Definitive_ with
its additions and illustrative matter