system to make the received description of it doubtful. According to
this, the first draft of Balzac's work never presented it in anything
like fulness, and sometimes it did not amount to a quarter of the bulk
finally published. This being returned to him from the printer in
"slip" on sheets with very large margins, he would set to work on the
correction; that is to say, on the practical rewriting of the thing,
with excisions, alterations, and above all, additions. A "revise"
being executed, he would attack this revise in the same manner, and
not unfrequently more than once, so that the expenses of mere
composition and correction of the press were enormously heavy (so
heavy as to eat into not merely his publisher's but his own profits),
and that the last state of the book, when published, was something
utterly different from its first state in manuscript. And it will be
obvious that if anything like this was usual with him, it is quite
impossible to judge his actual rapidity of composition by the extent
of the published result.

However this may be (and it is at least certain that in the years
above referred to he must have worked his very hardest, even if some
of the work then published had been more or less excogitated and begun
during the Wilderness period), he certainly so far left his eremitical
habits as to become acquainted with most of the great men of letters
of the early thirties, and also with certain ladies of more or less
high rank, who were to supply, if not exactly the full models, the
texts and starting-points for some of the most interesting figures of
the _Comedie_. He knew Victor Hugo, but certainly not at this time
intimately; for as late as 1839 the letter in which he writes to Hugo
to come and breakfast with him at Les Jardies (with interesting and
minute directions how to find that frail abode of genius) is couched
in anything but the tone of a familiar friendship. The letters to