day while he and a friend of his were watching a beggar pass by, the
friend was so astonished to see Balzac touch his own sleeve; he seemed
to feel the rent which gaped at the elbow of the beggar.

Am I wrong in connecting this sort of imagination with that which one
witnesses in fanatics of religious faith? With such a faculty Balzac
could not be, like Edgar Poe, merely a narrator of nightmares. He was
preserved from the fantastic by another gift which seems contradictory
to the first. This visionary was in reality a philosopher, that is to
say, an experimenter and a manipulator of general ideas. Proof of this
may be found in his biography, which shows him to us, during his
college days at Vendome, plunged into a whirl of abstract reading. The
entire theological and occult library which he discovered in the old
Oratorian institution was absorbed by the child, till he had to quit
school sick, his brain benumbed by this strange opium. The story of
Louis Lambert is a monograph of his own mind. During his youth and in
the moments snatched from his profession, to what did he turn his
attention? Still to general ideas. We find him an interested onlooker
at the quarrel of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, troubling himself
about the hypothesis of the unity of creation, and still dealing with
mysticism; and, in fact, his romances abound in theories. There is not
one of his works from which you cannot obtain abstract thoughts by the
hundreds. If he describes, as in _The Vicar of Tours_, the woes of an
old priest, he profits by the opportunity to exploit a theory
concerning the development of sensibility, and a treatise on the
future of Catholicism. If he describes, as in _The Firm of Nucingen_,
a supper given to Parisian _blases_, he introduces a system of credit,
reports of the Bank and Bureau of Finance, and--any number of other
things! Speaking of Daniel d'Arthez, that one of his heroes who, with
Albert Savarus and Raphael, most nearly resembles himself, he writes: