ile one reads, one thinks war, breathes war--it is
the only life for the moment. Just ahead a step, one feels, is
the "imminent deadly breach"; the social or business or Bohemian
doings of later Paris are as if they did not exist. And this
particular novel will achieve such a result with the reader,
even although it is not by any means one of Balzac's supreme
achievements, being in truth, a little aside from his metier,
since it is historical and suggests in spots the manner of
Scott. But this power of envisaging war (which will be farther
realized if such slighter works as "A Dark Affair" and "An
Episode Under the Terror" be also perused), is only a single
manifestation of a general gift. Suppose there is desired a
picture very common in our present civilization--most common it
may be in America,--that of the country boy going up to the city
to become--what? Perhaps a captain of commerce, or a leader of
fashion: perhaps a great writer or artist; or a politician who
shall rule the capitol. It is a venture packed full of realistic
experience but equally full of romance, drama, poetry--of an
epic suggestiveness. In two such volumes as "A Great Provincial
Man in Paris" and "Lost Illusions," all this, with its dire
chances of evil as well as its roseate promise of success, has
been wonderfully expressed. So cogently modern a motive had
never been so used before.

Sometimes in a brace of books Balzac shows us the front and
back-side of some certain section of life: as in "Cousin Pons"
and "Cousine Bette."--The corner of Paris where artists,
courtesans and poor students most do congregate, where Art
capitalized is a sacred word, and the odd estrays of humanity,
picturesque, humorous, and tragic, display all the chances of
mankind,--this he paints so that we do not so much look on as
move amidst the throng. In the first-named novel, assuredly a
very great book, the figure of the quaint old connoisseur is one
of fiction's superlative successes: to know him is to love him
in all his weakness. In the second book, Bette is a female
vampire and the story around her as terrible as the other is
heart-warming and sweet. And you know that both are true, true
as they would not have been apart: "helpless each without the
other."

Again, how much of the gambling activities of modern business
are emblazoned in another of the acknowledged masterpieces,
"Caesar Birotteau." We can see in it the prototype of much that
comes later in Fren