narrative scale is very seldom possible and would be still more rarely
satisfactory. The best substitute for it is the already glanced at
_Repertoire_ of MM. Christophe and Cerfbeer, a curious but very
satisfactory Biographical Dictionary of the Comedy's _personae_.

[158] "Sans genie je suis flambe," as he wrote early to his sister.

[159] This is about the best of the batch, and I agree with those who
think that it would not have disfigured the _Comedie_. Indeed the
exclusion of these _juvenilia_ from the _Edition Definitive_ was a
critical blunder. Even if Balzac did once wish it, the "dead hand" is
not to be too implicitly given way to, and he was so constantly changing
his views that he probably would have altered this also had he lived.

[160] A certain kind of commentator would probably argue from Mr.
Browning's well-known words "_fifty_ volumes long" that he _had_, and
another that he had _not_ read the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_.

[161] He would not have liked the name "patriot" because of its
corruption, but he was one.

[162] Not a few things, some of them very good, came between--the
pleasant _Maison du Chat-qui-Pelote_, several of the wonderful short
stories, and the beginning of the _Contes Drolatiques_. But none of them
had the "importance"--in the artistic sense of combined merit and
scale--of the _Peau_.

[163] I mean, of course, as far as books go. We have positive testimony
that there was a live Becky, and I would I had known her!

[164] Originally and perhaps preferably called _La Rabouilleuse_ from
the early occupation of its heroine, Flore Brazier, one of Balzac's most
notable figures.

[165] It is one of the strangest instances of the limitations of some of
the best critics that M. Brunetiere declined even to speak of this great
book.

[166] The immense influence of Maturin in France, and especially on
Balzac, is an old story now, though it was not always so.

[167] It is possible that some readers may miss a more extended survey,
or at least sample, of these characters. But the plea made above as to
abstract of the stories is valid here. There is simply not room to do
justice to say, Lucien de Rubempre, who pervades a whole block of novels
and stories, or to others from Rastignac to Corentin.

[168] It has sometimes occurred to me that perhaps the skin _was_ that
of Job's onager.

[169] He does try a sort of pseudo-poetical style sometimes; but it is
seldom successful, and sometimes me