esires--to be celebrated and to
be loved--be satisfied?" They were, but at a cost that was dearly
paid.

However great Balzac's potential genius, it was too little developed,
too little exercised at this period for him to produce anything of
real, permanent worth. The fiction in which he was destined to excel,
the only fiction he was peculiarly fitted to write, demanded maturity
of experience that he could hardly acquire before another decade had
passed over his head. Yet the stories he reeled off had a certain
market value. _The Heiress of Birague_ was sold for eight hundred
francs, _Jean-Louis_, or the _Foundling Girl_, for thirteen hundred;
and a higher price still was obtained (whether the money was actually
received is uncertain) for the _Handsome Jew_, afterwards republished
under a fresh title, _The Israelite_.

Contemporary critics declined to acknowledge that, in these books and
their congeners,[*] there were some traces of a master-hand. To-day
the traces are perceptible, because criticism has a better opportunity
of discovering them. Here and there, and especially in _Argow, the
Pirate_, is to be noticed a beginning of the realism that was
afterwards the novelist's excellence. The theme, that of a brigand
purified by love, is, as Monsieur le Breton remarks in his study of
Balzac, a romantic one in the manner of Byron, and has things in
common with Walter Scott's _Heart of Midlothian_, Victor Hugo's
_Bug-Jargal_, and Pixerecourt's _Belveder_. There is an atmosphere of
imagination in it, the action is quick, and the characters are
strongly though distortedly drawn. Moreover, a breath of healthy
sentiment runs through the story, which is not always the case in the
later and more celebrated novels. Balzac must have learnt much and
acquired much that was useful to him during this puddling of his ore
in the furnace of his early efforts; and, if in his maturer age he
retained certain defects of the Romantic school, it was because a
lurking sympathy with them in his nature prevented his shaking himself
free of them, when he reformed his manner.

[*] Other youthful productions were The Centenarian, The Last Fairy,
Don Gigadas, The Excommunicated Man, Wann-Chlore, or Jane the
Pale, The Curate of the Ardennes, and Argow, the Pirate.

The style of his letters at this same period was admirable, sparkling
with wit and with a humour that unfortunately grew rarer, bitterer,
and even coarser often, in his l