after the opening of the action. There is almost no picture of the
slowly moving years; there is little but a concise chronicle of the
few widely spaced events. Balzac is at no pains to sit with Eugenie in
the twilight, while the seasons revolve; not for him to linger, gazing
sympathetically over her shoulder, tenderly exploring her sentiments.
He is actually capable of beginning a paragraph with the casual
announcement, "Five years went by in this way," as though he belonged
to the order of story-tellers who imagine that time may be expressed
by the mere statement of its length. Yet there is time in his book, it
is very certain--time that lags and loiters till the girl has lost her
youth and has dropped into the dull groove from which she will
evidently never again be dislodged. Balzac can treat the story as
concisely as he will, he can record Eugenie's simple experience from
without, and yet make the fading of her young hope appear as gradual
and protracted as need be; and all because he has prepared in advance,
with his picture of the life of the Grandets, a complete and enduring
impression.

His preliminary picture included the representation of time, secured
the sense of it so thoroughly that there is no necessity for recurring
to it again. The routine of the Maison Grandet is too clearly known to
be forgotten; the sight of the girl and her mother, leading their
sequestered lives in the shadow of their old tyrant's obsession, is a
sensation that persists to the end of their story. Their dreary days
accumulate and fill the year with hardly a break in its monotony; the
next year and the next are the same, except that old Grandet's
meanness is accentuated as his wealth increases; the present is like
the past, the future will prolong the present. In such a scene
Eugenie's patient acquiescence in middle age becomes a visible fact,
is divined and accepted at once, without further insistence; it is
latent in the scene from the beginning, even at the time of the small
romance of her youth. To dwell upon the shades of her long
disappointment is needless, for her power of endurance and her
fidelity are fully created in the book before they are put to the
test. "Five years went by," says Balzac; but before he says it we
already see them opening and closing upon the girl, bearing down upon
her solitude, exhausting her freshness but not the dumb resignation in
which she sits and waits. The endlessness, the sameness, the silen