r. And what a
story-teller! What verve and wit! What indefatigable perseverance in
painting everything, daring everything, branding everything! How the
world is dissected by this man! What an annalist! What passion and
what coolness!

"The _Philosophic Tales_ are the red-hot interpretation of a
civilization ruined by debauch and well-being, which Monsieur de
Balzac exposes in the pillory. The _Arabian Nights_ are the complete
history of the luxurious East in its days of happiness and perfumed
dreams. _Candide_ is the epitome of an epoch in which there were
bastilles, a stag-park, and an absolute king. By thus taking at the
first bound a place beside these formidable or graceful tale-tellers,
Monsieur de Balzac proves one thing that remained to be proved; to
wit, that the drama, which was no longer possible to-day on the stage,
was still possible in the story--that our society, so dangerously
sceptical, _blase_, and scornful, could yet be moved by the galvanic
shocks of this poetry of the senses--full of life and colour, in flesh
and blood, drunk with wine and lust--in which Monsieur de Balzac
revels with such delight. Thus, the surprise was great, when, thanks
to this story-teller, we still found among us something resembling
poetry--feasts, intoxication, the light o' love giving her caresses
amidst an orgie, the brimming punch-bowl crowned with blue flames, the
yellow-gloved politician, scented adultery, the girl indulging in
pleasure and love and dreaming aloud, poverty clean and neat,
surrounded with respectability and happy hazard--we have seen all this
in Balzac. The Opera with its lemans, the pink boudoir and its flossy
hangings, the feast and its surfeits; we have even seen Moliere's
doctor reappear, such need has this man of sarcasm and grotesqueness.
The further you advance in the _Shagreen Skin_--vices, lost virtues,
poverties, boredom, deep silence, dry-as-dust science, angular,
witless scepticism, laughable egotism, puerile vanities, venal loves,
Jewish second-hand dealers, etc.--the more astonished and pained you
will be to recognize that the nineteenth century in which you live is
so made up. The _Shagreen Skin_ is _Candide_ with Beranger's notes; it
is poverty, luxury, faith, mockery; it is the heartless breast, the
brainless cranium of the nineteenth century--the century so bedizened
and scented, so revolutionary, so ill-read, so little worth, the
century of brilliant phantasmagorias, of which in fifty