tantalizingly unfinished study, of which it is nearly certain that
Balzac must at some time or other have meant to make much more than he
has made; Genestas, excellent as far as he goes, is not much more than
a type; and there is nobody else in the foreground at all except the
Doctor himself.

It is, however, beyond all doubt in the very subordination of these
other characters to Benassis, and in the skilful grouping of the whole
as background and adjunct to him, that the appeal of the book as art
consists. From that point of view there are grounds for regarding it
as the finest of the author's work in the simple style, the least
indebted to super-added ornament or to mere variety. The dangerous
expedient of a /recit/, of which the eighteenth-century novelists were
so fond, has never been employed with more successful effect than in
the confession of Benassis, at once the climax and the centre of the
story. And one thing which strikes us immediately about this
confession is the universality of its humanity and its strange freedom
from merely national limitations. To very few French novelists--to few
even of those who are generally credited with a much softer mould and
a much purer morality than Balzac is popularly supposed to have been
able to boast--would inconstancy to a mistress have seemed a fault
which could be reasonably punished, which could be even reasonably
represented as having been punished in fact, by the refusal of an
honest girl's love in the first place. Nor would many have conceived
as possible, or have been able to represent in lifelike colors, the
lifelong penance which Benassis imposes on himself. The tragic end,
indeed, is more in their general way, but they would seldom have known
how to lead up to it.

In almost all ways Balzac has saved himself from the dangers incident