"Maximes," rewriting
many of them more than thirty times.

Honore de Balzac had just completed his teens when he arrived in Paris,
and till 1830, some nine years, he lived, not in a garret, but in the
apartment over that, called a _grenier_; his daily expenses amounted to
about half a franc--three sous for bread, three for milk, and the rest
for firewood and candles. He passed his days in the public library of
the Arsenal, devouring books. In the evening he transcribed his notes,
and during the nights he took his walks abroad, and so gained an insight
into the depths of human depravity.

After his first novel, in 1830, he commenced earning money. Balzac, who
had the disease of creative genius in its most outrageous form,
"preached to us," says Theophile Gautier, "the strangest hygiene ever
propounded among laymen. If we desired to hand our names down to
posterity as authors, it was indispensable that we should immure
ourselves absolutely for two or three years; that we should drink
nothing but water, and eat only soaked beans, like Protogenes; that we
should go to bed at sunset and rise at midnight, to work hard till
morning; that we should spend the whole day in revising, amending,
extending, pruning, perfecting, and polishing our night's work, in
correcting proofs or taking notes, or in other necessary study." If the
author happened to be in love, he was to see the lady of his heart only
for one half-hour a year, but he might write to her, for the
cold-blooded reason that letter-writing improves the style. Not only did
Balzac preach this austere doctrine, but he practised it as nearly as he
could without ceasing altogether to be a man and a Frenchman. Leon
Gozlan's account of the daily life of the author of the "Comedie
Humaine" has often been quoted. On the average he worked eighteen hours
a day. He began his day with dinner at six in the afternoon, at which,
while he fed his friends generously, he himself ate little besides fruit
and drank nothing but water. At seven o'clock he wished his friends
good-night, and went to bed. At midnight he rose and worked--till
dinner-time next day: and so the world went round. George Sand calls
him, "Drunk on water, intemperate in work, and sober in all other
passions." Jules Janin asks, "Where has M. de Balzac gained his
knowledge of woman--he, the anchorite?" As it was, love and death came
to him hand-in-hand. He married a wealthy Polish lady in 1848. They
travelled over the ba