ttlefields of Europe, to collect notes for a work,
and then settled down in a luxurious mansion in the Champs Elysees.
Nothing was wanting in that palatial residence, for every fancy of
Balzac had been gratified. Three months after the house-warming Balzac
was dead.

Balzac, after he had made a plan of a novel, and had, after the most
laborious research, gathered together the materials which he was to
embody in it, locked himself in his private apartment, shut out all the
light of day, and then, by the aid of his study lamp, he toiled day and
night. His servants, knowing so well his peculiar habits, brought him
food and drink. Finally, with his task completed, as he thought, he came
forth from his retirement looking more dead than alive. But invariably
his task was not altogether satisfactory to him, after all, for again he
would seek the seclusion of his chamber to rearrange and make more
perfect that which he had before supposed wholly complete. Then, too,
when his work was in the hands of the printer, he was as apt as not to
alter, in one way and another, the manuscript, until both printer and
publisher were on the verge of despair. He corrected up to as many as
twelve proofs, and many of his "corrections" consisted in rewriting
whole pages. What "copy" he must have produced during the twenty years
in which he brought out ninety-seven volumes! Like Voltaire, Balzac had
a passion for coffee, more to keep him awake than as a stimulant. That
beverage shortened his life, which ended by hypertrophy of the heart.
When he sat down to his desk, his servant, who regarded a man that
abstained even from tobacco as scarcely human, used to place coffee
within reach, and upon this he worked till his full brain would drive
his starved and almost sleepless body into such forgetfulness that he
often found himself at daybreak bareheaded, in dressing gown and
slippers, in the Place du Carrousel, not knowing how he came there,
miles away from home. Now, coffee acts upon some temperaments as
laudanum acts upon others, and many of the manners and customs of Balzac
were those of a confirmed opium-eater. He had the same strange
illusions, the same extravagant ideas, the same incapacity for
distinguishing with regard to outward things, between the possible and
the impossible, the false and the true. His midnight wanderings, his
facility in projecting himself into personalities utterly unlike his
own, belong to the experiences of the "English