on, to which she was constantly adding another chapter, like so many
links in a never-ending chain. She now gave a hero to her romance, a
hero whose name was Corambe. He was her ideal, a man whom she had made
her god. Whilst blood was flowing freely on the altars of barbarous
gods, on Corambe's altar life and liberty were given to a whole crowd
of captive creatures, to a swallow, to a robin-redbreast, and even to a
sparrow. We see already in all this her tendency to put moral intentions
into her romantic stories, to arrange her adventures in such a way that
they should serve as examples for making mankind better. These were the
novels, with a purpose, of her twelfth year.

Let us now study a striking contrast, by way of observing the first
signs of vocation in two totally different novelists. In the beginning
of _Facino Cane_, Balzac tells us an incident of the time when, as an
aspiring writer, he lived in his attic in the Rue Lesdiguieres. One
evening, on coming out of the theatre, he amused himself with following
a working-man and his wife from the Boulevard du Pontaux-Choux to the
Boulevard Beaumarchais. He listened to them as they talked of the piece
they had just seen. They then discussed their business matters, and
afterwards house and family affairs. "While listening to this couple,"
says Balzac, "I entered into their life. I could feel their clothes on
my back and, I was walking in their shabby boots."

This is the novelist of the objective school, the one who comes out of
himself, who ceases to be himself and becomes another person.

Instead of this exterior world, to which Balzac adapts himself, Aurore
talks to us of an inner world, emanating from her own fancy, the
reflection of her own imagination, the echo of her own heart, which is
really herself. This explains the difference between Balzac's impersonal