. The journey back through
Genoa, the Grisons, and Bale was a pretext for continuing his
bric-a-brac purchases, Holbein's _Saint Peter_ being added to his
treasures.

Reaching Paris at last, he now took up his pen with his old ardour.
Fresh pledges for the future had been given him by Eve. These served
to lure him onward; and behind him were the creditors who had lent him
money for his trip, and were wanting some of it restored. At this
period Madame Hanska's funds and his own were partly associated. Some
of her capital and some of his own, probably the sum accruing from the
sale of Les Jardies, at present definitive, had been invested in North
Railway Shares. Besides, not a few of his paintings and antique pieces
of furniture had been paid for with advances from her strong-box.

The two works that issued from his new effort of creation were _Cousin
Bette_ and _Cousin Pons_. These, with _Pierrette_, made up his series
of the _Poor Relations_.

The _Old Musician_, as he originally called _Pons_, was meant to give
us the case of a man overwhelmed with humiliations and insults, yet
preserving his generosity and pardoning everybody and everything,
avenging himself only through kindness. Composed, like _Cesar
Birotteau_, very rapidly, it bears evidence of the author's haste.
There is no proper love interest in the book, the lack being supplied
by the friendship between Pons and the old German musician, Schmucke.
A number of subordinate biographies are interwoven with the principal
story--those of the banker Brunner, the Auvergnat Remonencq, the
Cibots, who were Pons' porters and caterers, Doctor Poulain and Lawyer
Fraisier. We have plots within plots, wheels within wheels, in this
strange, pathetic life of the musician, whose collecting hobby and
expert's skill in finding out rarities Balzac dwells on with all the
greater detail as he was indulging at that time his own bent in this
direction with peculiar zest and success. But the complexity and
crowding are foils one is glad to have against the sordid treachery of
the Cibot household, as, too, against the woes of Pons and Schmucke.
Perhaps nowhere in his achievement has the novelist got deeper down to
the rockbed of genuine humanity than in this work. _Cousin Pons_ was
published in 1847. _Cousin Bette_ came a year earlier.

Besides the two novels just mentioned, Balzac finished, during this
same period, the long series in which _Vautrin_ is a chief, if not the
chief, c