demeanour, his gestures, his ways
of speaking and behaving that it was impossible to know him and not
love him. . . . His good humour was so exuberant as to be contagious.
Notwithstanding the misfortunes he had just passed through, he had not
been with us a quarter of an hour before he made the General and me
laugh till tears came into our eyes."

The _Chouans_, which his two or three months' sojourn at Fougeres
enabled him to get on with rapidly, was completed after his return to
Paris, and was published under his own name in 1829. Charles Vimont,
who accepted and brought it out, paid him no more than a thousand
francs. The book, although it was not badly written, and contained
plenty of incident, very fair characterization, of the minor
personages especially, and local colouring imitated from Walter Scott,
made no great impression. For the ordinary reader it differed too
little from the Romanticism with which he was familiar. Moreover, the
action savoured too much of the melodramatic; and the character of
Mademoiselle de Verneuil, and that of the Chouan chief, whom she had
promised to deliver up to the emissaries of Fouche, were too nebulous
to gain general sympathy, even with the heroine's tragic devotion.
There is, however, a fine sketch of Brittany and of its spirit of
revolt; the numerous figures of the background are vigorously
executed, and nearly all the episodes of the drama are skilfully
presented. A perusal of the _Chouans_ makes us regret that there was
hardly any return to this kind of composition in the author's
after-work.

When embarking on his publishing enterprise, Balzac went to live in an
apartment of the Rue Tournon, No. 2[*] close to the Luxembourg. He
abandoned it for the Rue des Marais in 1826; and, this latter abode
being given up in 1828, he removed on his return from Brittany to No.
4, Rue Cassini, where he remained for some years. A friend of his,
Latouche--soon to become an enemy--helped him to liven up the walls of
his study with the famous blue calico that had adorned his room over
the printing office. Certain busybodies spread the report that he was
furnishing his new apartment extravagantly; and Laure, to whose ear
the tattle had come, ventured to allude to it in a letter reproaching
him with remissness in writing home and to her. The accusation of
extravagance, which later he really merited, was at this moment a
trifle previous, money being scarce and credit also. "Stamps and
omnibu