her
existence would all be seen through her eyes, making substance for her
thought. We should live _with_ Eugenie, throughout; we should share
her vigil, morning and evening, summer and winter, while she sat in
the silent house and listened to the noises of life in the street,
while the sun shone for others and not for her, while the light waned,
the wind howled, the snow fell and hushed the busy town--still Eugenie
would sit at her window, still we should follow the flow of her
resigned and uncomplaining meditations; until at last the author could
judge that five years, ten years, whatever it may be, had been
sufficiently shown in their dreary lapse, and that Charles might now
come back from the Indies. So it would be and so it would have to be,
a novelist might easily feel. How else could the due suggestion of
time be given, where there is so little to show for it in dramatic
facts?

But Balzac's treatment of the story is quite unexpected. He lays it
out in a fashion that is worth noting, as a good example of the
freedom of movement that his great pictorial genius allowed him. With
his scene and its general setting so perfectly rendered, the story
takes care of itself on every side, with the minimum of trouble on his
part. His real trouble is over when the action begins; he is not even
disturbed by this difficulty of presenting the sense of time. The plan
of Eugenie Grandet, as the book stands, seems to have been made
without any regard to the chief and most exacting demand of the story;
where another writer would be using every device he could think of to
mark the effect of the succeeding years, Balzac is free to tell the
story as straightforwardly as he chooses. To Eugenie the great and
only adventure of her life was contained in the few days or weeks of
Charles's first visit; nothing to compare with that excitement ever
happened to her again. And Balzac makes this episode bulk as largely
in the book as it did in her life; he pauses over it and elaborates
it, unconcerned by the fact that in the book--in the whole effect it
is to produce--the episode is only the beginning of Eugenie's story,
only the prelude to her years of waiting and watching.

He extends his account of it so far, nevertheless, that he has written
two thirds of the book by the time the young man is finally despatched
to the Indies. It means that the duration of the story--and the
duration is the principal fact in it--is hardly considered at all,