ikely enough to come
across a hero or heroine as a child, after learning all about his or
her maturer life; to accompany people to the grave and see them
buried, and yet, in a later book, to be introduced to them as alive as
ever they were. This is disconcerting. Usually, Balzac remembers his
characters well enough to be consistent in other respects when he
makes them speak and act, or lets us into his confidence about them.
Still, he is guilty of a few lapses of memory. In _The Woman of Thirty
Years Old_, Madame d'Aiglemont has two children in the early chapters;
subsequently, one is drowned, and, instead of one remaining, we learn
there are three--a new reading of Wordsworth's _We are seven_. Again,
in the _Lost Illusions_, Esther Gobseck has blond hair in one
description of her, and black in another. We are reduced to supposing
she had dyed it. Mistakes of the kind have been made by others writers
of fiction who have worked quickly. In the _Comedy_, the number of
_dramatis personae_ is exceedingly large. Balzac laughingly remarked
one day that they needed a biographical dictionary to render their
identity clear; and he added that perhaps somebody would be tempted to
do the work at a later date. He guessed rightly. In 1893, Messrs.
Cerfbeer and Cristophe undertook the task and carried it through in a
book that they call the _Repertory of the Comedie Humaine_.[*] All the
fictitious personages or petty folk that live in the novelist's pages
are duly docketed, and their births, marriages, deaths, and stage
appearances recorded in this _Who's Who_, a big volume of five hundred
and sixty-three pages, constituting a veritable curiosity of
literature.

[*] This work has been made available at Project Gutenberg by Team
Balzac. It is in two volumes.--Preparer's Note.

Much has been said in the preceding chapters of the large use Balzac
made of his own life, his adventures, his experiences, in composing
the integral portions of his _Comedy_, so that its contents, for any
one who can interpret, becomes a valuable autobiography. And the
lesser as well as the greater novels supply facts. In the _Forsaken
Woman_, Madame de Beauseant, who has been jilted by the Marquis of
Ajuda-Pinto, permits herself to be wooed by Gaston de Nueil, a man far
younger than herself. After ten years, he, in turn, quits her to marry
the person his mother has chosen for him; but, unable to bear the
combined burden of his remorse and yearning reg