y gradually descends upon Eugenie's hope. Balzac
carefully refrains from making the book hinge on anything so
commonplace as a sudden discovery of the young man's want of faith.
The worst kind of disappointment does not happen like that, falling as
a stroke; it steals into a life and spreads imperceptibly. Charles's
final act of disloyalty is only a kind of coda to a drama that is
practically complete without it. Here, then, is a climax that is
essentially pictorial, an impression of change and decay, needing time
in plenty above all; and Balzac leads into it so cunningly that a
short summary of a few plain facts is all that is required, when it
comes to the point. He saves his climax, in other words, from the
burden of deliberate expatiation, which at first sight it would seem
bound to incur; he leaves nothing for it to accomplish but just the
necessary touch, the movement that declares and fulfils the intention
of the book.

There is the same power at work upon material even more baffling,
apparently, in La Recherche de l'Absolu. The subject of that perfect
tale is of course the growth of a fixed idea, and Balzac was faced
with the task of showing the slow aggravation of a man's ruin through
a series of outbreaks, differing in no way one from another, save in
their increasing violence. Claes, the excellent and prosperous young
burgher of Douai, pillar of the old civic stateliness of Flanders, is
dragged and dragged into his calamitous experiments by the bare
failure (as he is persuaded) of each one in turn; each time his
researches are on the verge of yielding him the "absolute," the
philosopher's stone, and each time the prospect is more shining than
before; success, wealth enough to restore his deepening losses a
thousand times over, is assured by one more attempt, the money to make
it must be found. And so all other interest in life is forgotten, his
pride and repute are sacrificed, the splendid house is gradually
stripped of its treasures, his family are thrust into poverty; and he
himself dies degraded, insane, with success--surely, surely success,
this time--actually in his grasp. That is all, and on that straight,
sustained movement the book must remain throughout, reiterating one
effect with growing intensity--always at the pitch of high hope and
sharp disappointment, always prepared to heighten and sharpen it a
little further. There can be no development through any variety of
incident; it is the same suspen