hour is anything but an extraordinary rate of writing, and fifteen
hundred by no means unheard of with persons who do not write rubbish.

The references to this subject in Balzac's letters are very numerous;
but it is not easy to extract very definite information from them. It
would be not only impolite but incorrect to charge him with
unveracity. But the very heat of imagination which enabled him to
produce his work created a sort of mirage, through which he seems
always to have regarded it; and in writing to publishers, editors,
creditors, and even his own family, it was too obviously his interest
to make the most of his labor, his projects, and his performance. Even
his contemporary, though elder, Southey, the hardest-working and the
most scrupulously honest man of letters in England who could pretend
to genius, seems constantly to have exaggerated the idea of what he
could perform, if not of what he had performed in a given time. The
most definite statement of Balzac's that I remember is one which
claims the second number of _Sur Catherine de Medicis_, "La Confidence
des Ruggieri," as the production of a single night, and not one of the
most extravagant of his nights. Now, "La Confidence des Ruggieri"
fills, in the small edition, eighty pages of nearer four hundred than
three hundred words each, or some thirty thousand words in all. Nobody
in the longest of nights could manage that, except by dictating it to
shorthand clerks. But in the very context of this assertion Balzac
assigns a much longer period to the correction than to the
composition, and this brings us to one of the most curious and one of
the most famous points of his literary history.

Some doubts have, I believe, been thrown on the most minute account of
his ways of composition which we have, that of the publisher Werdet.
But there is too great a consensus of evidence as to his general