me, for the sake of this chequered story that I
mentioned the Palais de Justice and the Rue Royale. The most interesting
fact, to my mind, about the high-street of Tours was that as you walk
toward the bridge on the right hand _trottoir_ you can look up at the
house, on the other side of the way, in which Honore de Balzac first saw
the light. That violent and complicated genius was a child of the
good-humoured and succulent Touraine. There is something anomalous in
this fact, though, if one thinks about it a little, one may discover
certain correspondences between his character and that of his native
province. Strenuous, laborious, constantly infelicitous in spite of his
great successes, he suggests at times a very different set of
influences. But he had his jovial, full-feeding side--the side that
comes out in the "Contes Drolatiques," which are the romantic and
epicurean chronicle of the old manors and abbeys of this region. And he
was, moreover, the product of a soil into which a great deal of history
had been trodden. Balzac was genuinely as well as affectedly
monarchical, and he was saturated with a sense of the past. Number 39
Rue Royale--of which the basement, like all the basements in the Rue
Royale, is occupied by a shop--is not shown to the public; and I know
not whether tradition designates the chamber in which the author of "Le
Lys dans la Vallee" opened his eyes into a world in which he was to see
and to imagine such extraordinary things. If this were the case I would
willingly have crossed its threshold; not for the sake of any relic of
the great novelist which it may possibly contain, nor even for that of
any mystic virtue which may be supposed to reside within its walls, but
simply because to look at those four modest walls can hardly fail to
give one a strong impression of the force of human endeavour. Balzac, in
the maturity of his vision, took in more of human life than any one,
since Shakspeare, who has attempted to tell us stories about it; and the
very small scene on which his consciousness dawned is one end of the
immense scale that he traversed. I confess it shocked me a little to
find that he was born in a house "in a row"--a house, moreover, which at
the date of his birth must have been only about twenty years old. All
that is contradictory. If the tenement selected for this honour could
not be ancient and embrowned, it should at least have been detached.

There is a charming description in his