alamatta. What
struck him as much as anything was the bedroom in brown, with the bed
on the floor in Turkish fashion. He was careful to assure his
correspondent that, Chopin being the _maitre de ceans_, she had no
need to be jealous. But jealous she was, though not of George Sand. As
Paris was a resort for rich Russians, Madame Hanska's cousins among
the number, she had frequent reports of Balzac's doings, distorted by
society gossip, the true and the untrue being fantastically mixed; and
it was no small task to disabuse her mind and persuade her that his
conduct was blameless. Indeed, at bottom she remained sceptical.

In 1841, three books were published which merit attention on the part
of a student of his works. The first, _A Shady Affair_, has the right
to be styled an historical novel. Dealing with the Napoleonic epoch,
its interest gathers chiefly round the person of the brave peasant
Michu, whose devotion to the Legitimist house of Cinq-Cygne brings
him, an innocent victim, to the scaffold. The character of Laurence de
Cinq-Cygne, a girl of the Flora MacDonald type, and the characters
also of the two cousins de Simeuse, who both loved her and conspired
with her, and whose pardon she gained only to lose these faithful
knights dying on a field of battle, are drawn with great power and
naturalness. And the plot, in which, together with other police spies,
the same Corentin reappears that was the evil genius of the _Chouans_,
is more rapid and less cumbered than in the earlier work. When the
_Shady Affair_ came out in the _Commerce_ journal, Balzac was accused
of having identified a certain Monsieur Clement de Ris with his Malin
de Gondreville, who plays an evil role in the story--that of an
unscrupulous, political turncoat, Revolutionary to begin with, Senator
under the Empire, and Peer under the Restoration. The novelist
defended himself against the imputation; but the resemblances between
the fictitious and the real personage were, all the same, too close to
be quite accidental.

Something, however, more important than the question of likeness or
portraiture in the book, is that it gives us Balzac's conception of
what the historical novel should be. His contemporary Dumas, and his
predecessor Walter Scott--the latter in a less degree than Dumas--did
not weave a romance on to a warp of history, but romanced the history
itself. What he tried to do was to keep the historical action exact
and accurate, and to throw