deal of pains, and one of whom he seems to have
"caressed," as the French say, with a curious admixture of dislike and
admiration.

The first, Bourignard or Ferragus, is, of course, another, though a
somewhat minor example--Collin or Vautrin being the chief--of that
strange tendency to take intense interest in criminals, which seems to
be a pretty constant eccentricity of many human minds, and which laid an
extraordinary grasp on the great French writers of Balzac's time. I must
confess, though it may sink me very low in some eyes, that I have never
been able to fully appreciate the attractions of crime and criminals,
fictitious or real. Certain pleasant and profitable things, no doubt,
retain their pleasure and their profit, to some extent, when they are
done in the manner which is technically called criminal; but they seem
to me to acquire no additional interest by being so. As the criminal of
fact is, in the vast majority of cases, an exceedingly commonplace and
dull person, the criminal of fiction seems to me only, or usually, to
escape these curses by being absolutely improbable and unreal. But I
know this is a terrible heresy.

Henri de Marsay is a much more ambitious and a much more interesting
figure. In him are combined the attractions of criminality, beauty,
brains, success, and, last of all, dandyism. It is a well-known and
delightful fact that the most Anglophobe Frenchmen--and Balzac might
fairly be classed among them--have always regarded the English dandy
with half-jealous, half-awful admiration. Indeed, our novelist, it will
be seen, found it necessary to give Marsay English blood. But there is
a tradition that this young Don Juan--not such a good fellow as Byron's,
nor such a _grand seigneur_ as Moliere's--was partly intended to
represent Charles de Remusat, who is best known to this generation
by very sober and serious philosophical works, and by his part in
his mother's correspondence. I do not know that there ever were any
imputation on M. de Remusat's morals; but in memoirs of the time, he
is, I think, accused of a certain selfishness and _hauteur_, and he
certainly made his way, partly by journalism, partly by society, to
power very much as Marsay did. But Marsay would certainly not have
written _Abelard_ and the rest, or have returned to Ministerial rank in
our own time. Marsay, in fact, more fortunate than Rubempre, and of a
higher stamp and flight than Rastignac, makes with them Balzac's trinit