fterwards set
forth more fully in his _Country Doctor_ and _Village Cure_, partly
explains why all his best work, besides being impregnated with
fatalism, has such a constant outlook on the past. It was a dogma with
him rather than a philosophy, and was clung to more from taste than
from reasonable conviction. He believed in aristocratic prerogative,
because he believed in himself, and ranked himself as high as, or
rather higher than, the noble. This was at the bottom of his doctrine;
but he was glad all the same to have his claim supported by such
outward signs of the inward grace as were afforded by vague genealogy
and the homage of the great. Duchesses were his predilection when they
were forthcoming; failing them, countesses were esteemed.

The Duchess d'Abrantes--one of his early admirers--to whom he
dedicated his _Forsaken Woman_, was herself a colleague in letters;
and he was able to render her some service through his relations with
publishers. Their correspondence shows them to have been on very
friendly terms. In one of his letters to her, he insisted on his
inability to submit to any yoke, and rebutted her insinuation that he
permitted himself to be led--possibly the Duchess's hint referred to
Madame de Berny. "My character," he said, "is the most singular one I
have ever come across. I study myself as I might another person. I
comprise in my five feet two every incoherence, every contrast
possible; and those who think me vain, prodigal, headstrong,
frivolous, inconsistent, foppish, careless, idle, unstable, giddy,
wavering, talkative, tactless, ill-bred, impolite, crotchety,
humoursome, will be just as right as those who might affirm me to be
thrifty, modest, plucky, tenacious, energetic, hardworking, constant,
taciturn, cute, polite, merry. Nothing astonishes me more than myself.
I am inclined to conclude I am the plaything of circumstances. Does
this kaleidoscope result from the fact that, into the soul of those
who claim to paint all the affections and the human heart, chance
casts each and every of these same affections in order that by the
strength of their imagination they may feel what they depict? And can
it be that observation is only a sort of memory proper to aid this
mobile imagination? I begin to be of this opinion."

Balzac appears to have been introduced to the Duchess d'Abrantes about
the year 1830, when he was engaged in writing his _Shagreen Skin_,
which, out of the numerous pieces of fic