Voltaire of our age, as he was accustomed to style himself in
private--the historian of society--French society--as it is. The author
of _Le Peau de Chagrin, Le Physiologie du Marriage, Le Dernier Chauan,
Eugene Grandet_, and the _Scenes de la Vie Parisienne_, and _Scenes de la
Vie de Province_, was one of the marks of the era, and being dead, we
will speculate upon him. At present we can only translate for the
_International_ the following funeral oration by Victor Hugo, pronounced
at his grave:

"GENTLEMEN--The man who has just descended into this tomb is one of those
whom the public sorrow follows to the last abode. In the times where we
are all fictions have disappeared. Henceforth our eyes are fixed not on
the heads that reign but on the heads that think, and the whole country
is affected when one of them disappears. At this day, the people put on
mourning for the man of talent, the nation for the man of genius.

"Gentlemen, the name of Balzac will be mingled in the luminous trace that
our epoch will leave in the future.

"M. de Balzac belonged to that potent generation of writers of the
nineteenth century who came after Napoleon, just as the illustrious
pleiades of the seventeenth century came after Richelieu, and in the
development of civilization a law caused the domination of thought to
succeed the domination of the sword.

"M. de Balzac was one of the first among the greatest, one of the highest
among the best. This is not the place to say all or that splendid and
sovereign intelligence. All his books form only one hook, living,
luminous, profound, in which we see moving all our contemporaneous
civilization, mingled with I know not what of strange and terrible; a