to a friend (in whose hands they proved profitable), but of a margin
of debt from which he may be said never to have fully cleared himself.

He had more than twenty years to live, but he never cured himself of
this hankering after _une bonne speculation_. Sometimes it was
ordinary stock-exchange gambling; but his special weakness was, to do
him justice, for schemes that had something more grandiose in them.
Thus, to finish here with the subject, though the chapter of it never
actually finished till his death, he made years afterwards, when he
was a successful and a desperately busy author, a long, troublesome,
and costly journey to Sardinia to carry out a plan of resmelting the
slag from Roman and other mines there. Thus in his very latest days,
when he was living at Vierzschovnia with the Hanska and Mniszech
household, he conceived the magnificently absurd notion of cutting
down twenty thousand acres of oak wood in the Ukraine, and sending it
_by railway_ right across Europe to be sold in France. And he was
rather reluctantly convinced that by the time a single log reached its
market the freight would have eaten up the value of the whole
plantation.

It was perhaps not entirely chance that the collapse of the printing
scheme, which took place in 1827, the ninth year of the Wanderings in
the Wilderness, coincided with or immediately preceded the conception
of the book which was to give Balzac passage into the Promised Land.
This was _Les Chouans_, called at its first issue, which differed
considerably from the present form, _Le Dernier Chouan ou la Bretagne
en 1800_ (later _1799_). It was published in 1829 without any of the
previous anagrammatic pseudonyms; and whatever were the reasons which
had induced him to make his bow in person to the public, they were
well justified, for the book was a distinct success, if not a great