with which he let himself be tempted, his
tendency to waste in travelling the funds he would have done more
wisely to employ in reducing his obligations or avoiding them. At such
moments he defended himself sharply, his tone savouring less of the
boudoir than the forum. Any and every excuse was pressed into service;
everything and everybody were responsible but himself. Even his mother
he accused of causing his indebtedness--his mother who had ruined
herself for him, and from whose remaining pittance he took in this
self-same year the wherewithal to go to Sardinia, although earning
many thousands of francs annually. The truth is that Balzac exploited
all the women that loved him, himself incapable of loving any one of
them with that entire devotion which, if roused, is unique in a man's
life; and, as he was ignorant of it, so he has never described it
adequately, faithfully. In one or two instances, he obtains a glimpse
of it--as Moses obtained a vision of the promised land--from afar;
when he tries to get nearer, he presents us with mere sensualism.

What Madame Hanska probably enjoyed most in his letters were the
_obiter dicta_ which he was never tired of pronouncing on his
contemporaries. Scribe, whose _Camaraderie_ he had been to see, he
summed up as a man who was conversant in his trade but had no
veritable art, who possessed talent but not the higher dramatic
genius, and who, moreover, was altogether lacking in style. Victor
Hugo's _Ruy Blas_ was to him an infamy in verse, and the rest of this
author's pieces miserable melodramas. Theophile Gautier's poetry was
decadent, his style sparkling with great wit; yet the man was wanting
in force of ideas. When, however, he added that Gautier would do
nothing that would last because he was engaged in journalism, he spoke
with all his hatred of a profession that refused him the honour he
deemed his due. Eugene Sue, also, he looked upon with jaundiced eyes,
as being a rival whose material success amazed him--a rival, indeed,
whom no less a critic than Sainte-Beuve erroneously declared to be his
equal. Sue, he informed Madame Hanska, was a man of narrow bourgeois
mind, perceiving merely certain insignificant details of the vulgar
evils of French contemporary society. To Balzac, besides, it was
blasphemy in Sue that he spoke slightingly of the century which to
this Legitimist was the grandest epoch in French history, slightingly
of Louis XIV., who, in the said Legitimist's o