nor
new men, nor men of talents. Monsieur Jules Sandeau had passed through
the thorny paths, the steppes, and the waste frontiers of literary life
in Paris, without losing his honor, but without retaining a particle of
illusion. He told me of his days of harsh and pernicious poverty, the
abyss of debt, the constable at the door, the agony of hunting after
dollar by dollar, "copy" hastily written to meet urgent wants, and the
sweet toil of literary exertion changed into torture. I questioned him
about Madame George Sand. What child of twenty has not been fired by
that free, proud poetry which refused to accept the cold chains of
commonplace life and justified the paradoxes of revolt by the eloquence
of the pleading and the beauty of the dream? I soon discovered that the
ideal and the real are two hostile brothers. De Balzac's works had
kindled sincere enthusiasm in my breast. Monsieur Jules Sandeau showed
me the dash of madness and of ingenuous depravity mixed with
incontestable genius in that powerful mind. He told me of De Balzac's
insane vanity, of his furious passion for wealth and luxury, of his
readiness to plunge and to drag others after him into the most hazardous
adventures, and of his insensibility to commercial honor.

After parting from Monsieur Jules Sandeau, I strolled towards a
circulating-library. I was asking the mistress of the establishment some
questions about the latest publications, when all of a sudden the glass
door opened in the most violent manner, and who should come in but
Monsieur Philoxene Boyer, rushing forward like a whirlwind, a last lock
of hair dancing on top of a bald pate, a livid complexion, a feverish
eye, a sack-overcoat friable as tinder, a hat reddened by the rain,
trousers falling in lint upon boots run down at the heel: such was the
appearance presented by Monsieur Philoxene Boyer, our old classmate at
college, and now a critic, a romantic, an uncomprehended man of genius,
and a literary man. I had already seen at the Exchange the martyrs of
money; I now saw a martyr of letters. Monsieur Philoxene Boyer is
neither a fool nor a foundling; he was educated with care; he belongs to
an excellent family of Normandy; he might have been at this very hour an
excellent gentleman-farmer, honored by his neighbors, and leading a
quiet, useful life, while cultivating his paternal acres, and making a
respectable woman happy. But when he graduated at the Law School, the
demon of literature se