u know that people who enjoy much are
naturally stupid. Touraine admirably explains the lazzarone. I have
come to regard glory, the Chamber, politics, the future, literature,
as veritable poison-balls to kill wandering, homeless dogs, and I say
to myself: 'Virtue, happiness, life, are summed up in six hundred
francs income on the bank of the Loire. . . .' My house is situated
half-way up the hill, near a delightful river bordered with flowers,
whence I behold landscapes a thousand times more beautiful than all
those with which rascally travellers bore their readers. Touraine
appears to me like a _pate de foie gras_, in which one plunges up to
the chin; and its wine is delicious. Instead of intoxicating, it makes
you piggy and happy. . . . Just fancy, I have been on the most poetic
trip possible in France--from here to the heart of Brittany by water,
passing between the most ravishing scenery in the world. I felt my
thoughts go with the stream, which, near the sea, becomes immense. Oh,
to lead the life of a Mohican, to run about the rocks, to swim in the
sea, to breathe in the fresh air and sun! Oh, I have realized the
savage! Oh, I have excellently understood the corsair, the adventurer
--their lives of opposition; and I reflected: 'Life is courage, good
rifles, the art of steering in the open ocean, and the hatred of man
--of the Englishman, for example.' (Here Balzac is of his time.) Coming
back hither, the ex-corsair has turned dealer in ideas. Just imagine,
now, a man so vagabond beginning on an article entitled, _Treatise of
Fashionable Life_, and making an octavo volume of it, which the _Mode_
is going to print, and some publisher reprint. . . . Egad! At the
present moment literature is a vile trade. It leads to nothing, and I
itch to go a-wandering and risk my existence in some living
drama. . . . Since I have seen the real splendours of this spot, I
have grown very philosophic, and, putting my foot on an ant-hill, I
exclaim, like the immortal Bonaparte: 'That, or men, what is it all in
presence of Saturn or Venus, or the Pole Star?' And methinks that the
ocean, a brig, and an English vessel to engulf, is better than a
writing-desk, a pen, and the Rue Saint-Denis."

About the events of the 1830 Revolution the novelist was apparently
but little concerned. True, the change was one of dynasty only, not of
_regime_, albeit Louis-Philippe posed rather as a plebiscitary
monarch. Balzac's clericalism and royalism, which