th and position, abases his pen to vile uses, and would
gladly abandon his mistress for a profitable marriage. At length a
duel, in which he is dangerously wounded, lays him on a sick-bed, and
Coralie, who has sacrificed her situation on the stage to her love for
him, and is herself ill, rises to nurse him back to health, and dies
under the strain.

The further history of Lucien de Rubempre belongs to the _Splendour
and Wretchedness of Courtezans_. Both the beginning and the middle and
the end exhibit the strong and the weak points of the novelist. The
defects were dwelt upon in the _Revue de Paris_, soon after the book's
first part came out, in probably the longest critical article devoted
to any single one of Balzac's writings. By the irony of events, Jules
Janin, who was the author of it, praised, some dozen years later,
where now he cursed. There was exaggeration in his panegyric,
pronounced in 1850 under the impulse dictating generosity to the
memory of a dead foe; and there was exaggeration also in his polemic
indited under the smart of Balzac's gibes against the press. However,
the closing words of the article, save for the tone, can hardly be
gainsaid: "Never," asserted Janin, "has Monsieur de Balzac's talent
been more diffuse, never has his invention been more languishing,
never has his style been more incorrect, even if we include the days
when the illustrious novelist had nothing to fear from serious
criticism, days when he was too unknown to be noticed by the small
newspapers, days when Monsieur Honore de Balzac was as yet only
Monsieur Horace de Saint-Aubin."[*]

[*] A _nom de guerre_ of Balzac in his apprenticeship days.

The preceding remarks might be applied in substance to the _Village
Cure_, which is one of the most incoherent of the novelist's
productions. "I have no time to finish the book; just the part that
concerns the Cure will be wanting," he explained to a correspondent. A
good deal else was lacking when it was published, the whole resembling
a patchwork of odds and ends of the crudest and least harmonious
design. Its central figure is Veronique, the wife of a Limoges banker
named Grasselin, and greatly her senior, to whom she has been married
by her parents before she has had the time to know anything of love
and its behests. Led by her goodness of heart to patronize a youth in
her husband's employ, she falls in love with him, as he with her, and,
through weakness, becomes his mistress. A