specimen of others it may be mentioned that he once journeyed from
Paris to Besancon, then from Besancon right across France to
Angouleme, and then back to Paris on some business of selecting paper
for one of the editions of his books, which his publishers would
probably have done much better and at much less expense.

Still his actual receipts were surprisingly small, partly, it may be,
owing to his expensive habits of composition, but far more, according
to his own account, because of the Belgian piracies, from which all
popular French authors suffered till the government of Napoleon the
Third managed to put a stop to them. He also lived in such a thick
atmosphere of bills and advances and cross-claims on and by his
publishers, that even if there were more documents than there are it
would be exceedingly difficult to get at facts which are, after all,
not very important. He never seems to have been paid much more than
500 pounds for the newspaper publication (the most valuable by far
because the pirates could not interfere with its profits) of any one
of his novels. And to expensive fashions of composition and
complicated accounts, a steady back-drag of debt and the rest, must be
added the very delightful, and to the novelist not useless, but very
expensive mania for the collector. Balzac had a genuine taste for, and
thought himself a genuine connoisseur in, pictures, sculpture, and
objects of art of all kinds, old and new; and though prices in his day
were not what they are in these, a great deal of money must have run
through his hands in this way. He calculated the value of the contents
of the house, which in his last days he furnished with such loving
care for his wife, and which turned out to be a chamber rather of
death than of marriage, at some 16,000 pounds. But part of this was
Madame Hanska's own purchasing, and there were offsets of indebtedness
against it almost to the last. In short, though during the last twenty