granddaughter--an English bore, he styled her--who looked
him up and down through an eye-glass as if he were an actor. His
relations with Emile, Delphine's husband, continued to be marked by
breezes. Before starting for Rome on the 17th of March, he sent him a
few sharp lines complaining of the _Presse's_ delay in printing the
_Peasants_. As a matter of fact, the readers of the _Presse_ were not
pleased with the story; and the editor had been obliged to request the
author to modify the unpublished part. Balzac complied, but felt sore.

The earlier chapters of this novel appeared in 1844; the last ones did
not come out until five years after the novelist's death. The plot of
the book turns on the struggle waged by the peasants and petty
bourgeois of Soulanges against a new but estimable landlord, General
Montcornet, whose estate they are determined to have by hook or by
crook in their own hands, not hesitating, at least some of them, to
assassinate the honest agent who strives to protect his employer's
property against their depredations. All these country folk Balzac has
portrayed with effects depending on the painter's and sculptor's art
as much nearly as on the writer's; and the inmates and visitors of the
village-inn and coffee-house are individualized with an anatomical
intensity fringing on the brutal. Like the _Village Cure_ and the
_Country Doctor_, the _Peasants_ is a novel with a purpose and a
warning. The author preaches against the dividing up of the land; and
advocates agriculture on a large scale by a reversion to the old
estates with their castles and forests. As adjuvants to these he
pleads for the development of Catholicism, a wider influence of the
clergy both in education and private life. His picture of peasant
avarice has been repeated by later writers, Guy de Maupassant and
Zola. True in many particulars, it is traced by a prejudiced mind, and
cannot be accepted as thoroughly representative.

At Rome he found Madame Hanska, and stayed with her there till May.
Instead of describing the Eternal City to his sister, he referred her
to de Lamennais' accounts, himself being fully occupied with his
companion and sight-seeing. He was duly received by the Pope, and
obtained a small crown chaplet for his mother, together with His
Holiness' blessing. Saint Peter's surpassed his expectations, and the
choir's _Miserere_ so delighted him that he went to hear it a second
time in lieu of that of the Sixtine Chapel