bats_, sold rather dearer, six thousand francs being given,
and for the _Bourgeois_, nine thousand. The explanation of Sue's
getting more than he he imagined to be because Sue lived in grander
style than himself with flunkeys to open the door and overawe the
publishers who flocked to the successful writer, whereas he, living in
a cottage, had to cool his heels in an office ante-chamber, and was
exploited on account of his neediness. There was some truth in what he
said; but he did not sufficiently realize that Sue wrote, for the
market, exciting tales that everybody rushed to read. His own books
were, of course, most of them infinitely superior; but they appealed
to a much smaller public. All the same, he was loth to resign himself
to the depreciation Sue's bargains effected in his own. Feverishly he
strove to demonstrate by his painfully gained successes that they were
masterpieces, as he said, by the side of Sue's chimney-fronts, and as
far above them as Raphael was above Dubufe. Moliere, Lesage, Voltaire,
Walter Scott--these were the only names he acknowledged as rivals to
his own. Sue was nothing but a spangled and satined Paul de Kock.

We can grant him that, in fiction, his proper manner was as far in
advance of his epoch as, in politics, his doctrine was behind it.
George Sand was a medium in both, although she dwelt always a little
too much in the clouds. At a dinner with her towards the end of
January, the antagonism of their principles manifested itself over his
recent visit to Russia.

"If you were to see the Czar," Balzac said to her, "you would fall in
love with him and jump from your _bousingotism_[*] to autocracy."

[*] A word used to characterise the dress and manners of the
Romanticists, who were fond of Robespierre waistcoats, long
hair, and other peculiarities intended to distinguish them from
ordinary mortals.

Madame Dudevant waxed angry. It was not kind in a man who had resisted
her blandishments to make merry over her foibles.

The Russians, he gravely told her, were extremely amiable, easy to get
on with, exceedingly literary, since everything was done on paper, and
Russia was the only country in which people knew how to obey.

The mention of obedience in a people irritated the hostess; but on her
seething he poured a drop of cold water by asking jestingly:

"Would you, in a great danger, wish your servants to deliberate about
what you had ordered them to do?"

The
S