y they
bear the imprint of a mind already _blase_.

From a letter Balzac sent to Levavasseur, while finishing the last
pages of the manuscript, it appears that he commenced his task as a
jest and completed it with more serious purpose: "I intended to dash
off a pleasantry," he told him, "and you came one morning and asked me
to do in three months what Brillat-Savarin took ten years to do. I
haven't an idea which is not the _Physiology_. I dream of it, I am
absorbed by it."

The sale of the book was in a measure due to the sort of scandal it
provoked. Ladies especially bought the volume to find out for
themselves how far they had been maligned; and Levavasseur, who was
pleased with his profits, introduced Balzac to Emile de Girardin, then
chief editor of the _Mode_, to which paper he now began to contribute
light articles, not to speak of other journals, which were only too
glad to receive something from his pen. The extent to which the fair
sex read the _Physiology_ and were affected by it is illustrated by a
story that Werdet tells of a hoax perpetrated at Balzac's expense by a
number of his society friends, who had cause to complain of his
uppishness towards them, a treatment based not merely on the belief he
entertained in his literary superiority, but on his pretensions to
aristocratic descent. The story belongs more properly to the middle
thirties, when he had been using the prefix "de" before his name
already for some years, justifying himself on the ground that his
father claimed issue from an old family that had resisted the Auvergne
invasion and had begotten the d'Entragues stock. His father, moreover,
so he said, had discovered documents in the Charter House establishing
a concession of lands made by a de Balzac in the fifth century; and a
copy of the transaction had been registered by the Paris Parliament.

Between 1833 and 1836 one of the most celebrated Paris "sets" was that
of the Opera "lions," seven young aristocratic sparks composing it,
or, to be precise, six, together with the Chevalier d'Entragues de
Balzac, as his friends jokingly dubbed him--he being an elder. It was
the period of his first flush of prosperity, when he drove about in a
hired carriage resplendent with the d'Entragues coat of arms, which
cost him five hundred francs a month; had a majestic coachman in fine
livery and a Tom Thumb groom; sported himself in gorgeous garments and
strutted about in the Opera _foyer_, amidst the real or