You have not the right: I do not know
you, I have confided nothing to you personally. You are guilty of
impropriety in reading what is not addressed to you. You are _somebody_,
you are not the public. What do you want with me? I have not spoken to
you: you have nothing to say to me, and I nothing to reply.

So thought St. Augustine, Plato, Socrates, Cicero, Caesar, Bernardin de
St. Pierre, Montaigne, Alfieri, Chateaubriand, and all other men who have
confided to the world the genuine palpitations of their own hearts. True
gladiators they are in the human Colosseum, not playing miserable
comedies of sentiment and style to distract an academy, but struggling
and dying in earnest on the stage of the world, and writing on the sand,
with the blood of their own veins, the heroism, the failings, or the
agonies of the human heart.

Having said this, I resume these notes where I left them, blushing for
one thing only before these critics, that is, for not having either the
soul of St. Augustine or the genius of Jean Jacques Rousseau, in order to
merit, by indiscretions as sacred and touching, the pardon of tender
hearts and the condemnation of narrow minds, that take every movement of
the soul for an obscenity, and hide their faces whenever they are shown a
heart.

* * * * *

BALZAC.

We have news from Paris of the death of Honore De Balzac, one of the most
eminent French writers of the nineteenth century. "Eighteen months ago,"
says a Paris letter, "already attacked by dropsy, he quitted France to
contract a marriage with a Russian lady, to whom he was devotedly
attached. To her he had dedicated 'Seraphitus,' and he had accumulated in
his hotel of the Beaujoin quarters all the luxuries which could
contribute to her pleasure. He returned to France three months ago, in a
state of extreme danger. Last week he underwent an operation for abscess
in his legs: mortification ensued. On the morning of the 18th he became
speechless, and at midnight he expired. His sister, Madame de Surville,
visited his deathbed, and the pressure of her hand was the last sign he
gave of intelligence." We must defer for another occasion what we have
to say of the great novelist-the idol of women, even at seventy-the
Voltaire of our age, as he was accustomed to style himself in
private--the historian of society--French society--as it is. The author
of _Le Peau de Chagrin, Le Physiologie du Marriage, Le Dernier Chaua