one of the most carefully worked out and diversely important of his
novels. It should, of course, be read before _Splendeurs et Miseres
des Courtisanes_, which is avowedly its second part, a small piece of
_Eve et David_ serving as the link between them. But it is almost
sufficient by and to itself. _Lucien de Rubempre ou le Journalisme_
would be the most straightforward and descriptive title for it, and
one which Balzac in some of his moods would have been content enough
to use.

The story of it is too continuous and interesting to need elaborate
argument, for nobody is likely to miss any important link in it. But
Balzac has nowhere excelled in finesse and success of analysis, the
double disillusion which introduces itself at once between Madame de
Bargeton and Lucien, and which makes any _redintegratio amoris_ of a
valid kind impossible, because each cannot but be aware that the other
has anticipated the rupture. It will not, perhaps, be a matter of such
general agreement whether he has or has not exceeded the fair license
of the novelist in attributing to Lucien those charms of body and
gifts of mind which make him, till his moral weakness and
worthlessness are exposed, irresistible, and enable him for a time to
repair his faults by a sort of fairy good-luck. The sonnets of _Les
Marguerites_, which were given to the author by poetical friends
--Gautier, it is said, supplied the "Tulip"--are undoubtedly good and
sufficient. But Lucien's first article, which is (according to a
practice the rashness of which cannot be too much deprecated) given
likewise, is certainly not very wonderful; and the Paris press must
have been rather at a low ebb if it made any sensation. As we are not
favored with any actual portrait of Lucien, detection is less possible
here, but the novelist has perhaps a very little abused the privilege
of making a hero, "Like Paris handsome, and like Hector brave," or