* * *

When Balzac began to write, no French novelist had a reputation as
such that might be considered great. Up to the epoch of the
Restoration, the novel had been declared to be an inferior species of
literature, and no author had dreamed of basing his claims to fame on
fiction. Lesage had been and was still appreciated rather on the
ground of his satire; and the Abbe Prevost, his slightly younger
contemporary, received but little credit in his lifetime for the
_Manon Lescaut_ that posterity was to prize. Throughout the eighteenth
century, he was chiefly regarded as a literary hack who had translated
Richardson's _Pamela_ and done things of a similar kind to earn his
livelihood. Rousseau too was esteemed less for his _Nouvelle Heloise_
than for his political disquisitions. No novelist since 1635 had ever
been elected to the French Academy on account of his stories. Jules
Sandeau was the first to break the tradition by his entrance among the
Immortals in 1859, to be followed in 1862 by Octave Feuillet.

Lesage was the writer who introduced into France with his _Gil Blas_
what has been called the personal novel--in other words, that story of
adventures of which the narrator is the hero, the aim of the story
being to illustrate first and foremost the vicissitudes of life in
general and those of a single person in particular. The subsequent
introduction of letters into the personal novel, which allowed more
than one character to assume the narrator's role, brought about a
change which those who initiated it scarcely anticipated. Together
with the larger interest, due to there being several narrators, came a
tendency to introspection and analysis, diminishing the prominence of
the facts and enhancing the effect produced by these facts on the
thoughts and feelings of the characters. It was this development of
the personal novel at the commencement of the nineteenth century,
exhibited in Chateaubriand's _Rene_, Madame de Stael's _Corinne_,
Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, George Sand's _Indiana_, and
Sainte-Beuve's _Volupte_, which contributed so much to create and
establish the Romantic School of fiction with its egoistic lyricism.

The historical novel, which more commonly is looked upon as having
been the principal agent in the change, gave, in sooth, only what
modern fiction of every kind could no longer do without, namely, local
colour. The so-styled historical novels of Madame de la Fayette
--_Zayde_ and