e he was puffed up by the lionizing
he had enjoyed abroad. It was hardly to be expected that a man should
study economy who saw himself already appointed to the Secretaryship
for Foreign Affairs. "This is the only department which would suit
me," he said to Werdet. "I have now my free entry to the house of the
Count d'Appony, Ambassador of Austria, and to that of Rothschild,
Consul of the same Power. What glory for you, Master Werdet, to have
been my publisher. I will make your fortune then."

His display and luxury manifested themselves in greater sumptuousness
of furniture, more servants in livery, a box at the Opera for himself,
and another at the _Italiens_. And the two secretaries must not be
forgotten--one was not sufficient--the Count de Belloy and the Count
de Grammont. Sandeau was not grand enough for the post. The reason
given by Balzac to Madame Hanska was Jules' idleness, nonchalance, and
sentimentality. As a matter of fact, Sandeau did not care to play
always second fiddle, and to write tragedies or comedies for which
Balzac wished to get all the credit. Moreover, he was not a
Legitimist. The novelist had tried to convert him to his own doctrine
of autocratic government and had signally failed. These sprigs of
nobility he felt himself more in sympathy with.

About this time his epistles to "The Stranger" were full of himself
and his Herculean labours, and Madame Hanska hinted pretty plainly
that the quantity of the latter did not necessarily imply their
quality. Such expression of opinion notwithstanding, he boasted of
conceiving, composing, and printing the _Atheist's Mass_, a short
novel, it is true, in one night only. His portrait by Louis Boulanger,
which was painted during the year of 1835, had been ordered rather
with a view to advertizing him at the ensuing Salon, although he
asserted it was because he wanted to correct a false impression given
of him by Danton's caricature in the earlier months of the year. The
likeness produced by Boulanger he esteemed a good one, rendering his
Coligny, Peter the Great persistence, which, together with an intrepid
faith in the future, he said was the basis of his character. The
future hovered as a perpetual mirage in all his introspections,
sometimes with tints of dawn, at other times half-threatening. "I am
the Wandering Jew of thought," was his cry to Eve from the Hotel des
Haricots, "always up and walking without repose, without the joys of
the heart, without