uble; and her elder son found it hard to bear
with her complainings, excusable and even justifiable though they
might be. It is not pleasant to read the passages in his letters to
Madame Hanska, in which he reiterates the old charge of his
misfortunes being all due to his mother. In some of them he goes so
far as to say that she was a monster and a monstrosity, that she was
hastening the death of his sister Laure--Laure outlived them both
--after hastening those of his sister Laurence and his grandmother, that
she hated him before he was born, that she had a dreadful countenance,
that the doctor affirmed her to be not mad but malicious, that his
father had stated in 1822 he--Honore--would never have a worse enemy
than his mother. Had his mother been all this and more, it would have
been ungenerous and unfilial to blacken her reputation to a stranger.
And, being false, it was odious. Madame Balzac's partiality towards
the second son--heavily enough punished--did not prevent her from
loving the elder, though their characters (hers and his) were not made
to comprehend each other; and her lack of enthusiasm in the days of
his literary apprenticeship was natural enough in a parent who
understood only too well the impractical, improvident mind he
possessed, and feared its consequences. The fact was that Balzac ill
supported remonstrances from his own family, and especially from his
mother, and, when irritated by them, forgot every benefit he had
received from her.

This peculiarity of temperament rendered his feelings toward many of
his friends exceedingly variable. One day he was lauding them to the
skies, another depreciating them to a cipher. Even his sister, Laure,
in spite of her loyalty to him, did not escape attacks from his fickle
humour. Like her mother, she never thoroughly penetrated the nature of
this wayward, excitable, compass-boxing brother of hers, whose gaze
was so much in the clouds and whose feet so often in the mire. But she
defended him to others; and, as far as her purse and her husband's
could possibly afford, she gave him money when he was hard up--and
when he was not!--money which he was never in a hurry to pay back. Yet
her, too, he maligned to "The Stranger," because she now and again
ventured on expostulations.

Madame Balzac made two stays in the Passy cottage, neither of them
very long. After leaving the first time, she asked her son to pay her
a somewhat larger sum per month, which would allow