oks of the _Comedy_. There is no
need to repeat these or to add to their names. Occasionally, the
result was not bad, when, as with _Cesar Birotteau_, the subject had
been long in the novelist's head. This, however, was the exception.
The fifty-five sheets once composed in a single week, and the six
thousand lines once reeled off in ten days, were probably invented as
well as set on paper within the periods stated. No doubt, much was
altered in the galley proofs; but the alterations would be made with
the same celerity, so that they risked being no improvement either in
style or matter. Balzac, indeed, was aware of the imperfections
arising from such a method; and he not infrequently strove to correct
them in subsequent editions. The task might perhaps have been carried
out fully, if the bulk of his new novels had not been continually
growing faster than he could follow it with his revision.

The commercial compromises that he consented to were still more
injurious to the artistic finish of some of his later pieces of
fiction. For instance, when the _Employees_ was about to come out in a
volume, after its publication as a serial the length was judged to be
insufficient by the man of business. He wanted more for his money.
What did Balzac do? He searched through his drawers, pitched upon a
manuscript entitled _Physiology of the Employee_, and drilled it into
the other story. Of these patchwork novels _The Woman of Thirty Years
Old_ is the worst. Originally, it was six distinct short tales which
had appeared at divers dates. The first was entitled _Early Mistakes_;
the second, _Hidden Sufferings_; the third, _At Thirty Years Old_; the
fourth, _God's Finger_; the fifth, _Two Meetings_; and the sixth and
last, _The Old Age of a Guilty Mother_. In 1835, the author took it
into his head to join them together under one title, _The Same Story_,
although the names of the characters differed in each chapter, so that
the chief heroine had no fewer than six appellations. Not till 1842
did he remedy this primary incoherence, yet without the removal of the
_aliases_ doing anything towards bestowing consistency on the several
personages thus connected in Siamese-twin fashion. To-day, any one who
endeavors to read the novel through will proceed from astonishment to
bewilderment, and thence to amazement. Nowhere else does Balzac come
nearer to that peculiar vanity which fancies that every licence is
permissible to talent.

In his chap