been already observed, his period was one ungrateful to the
iconographer. His character, not as a writer but as a man, must occupy
us a little longer. For some considerable time--indeed it may be said
until the publication of his letters--it was not very favorably judged
on the whole. We may, of course, dismiss the childish scandals
(arising, as usual, from clumsy or malevolent misinterpretation of
such books as the _Physiologie de Mariage_, the _Peau de Chagrin_, and
a few others), which gave rise to the caricatures of him such as that
of which we read, representing him in a monk's dress at a table
covered with bottles and supporting a young person on his knee, the
whole garnished with the epigraph: Scenes de la Vie Cachee. They seem
to have given him, personally, a very unnecessary annoyance, and
indeed he was always rather sensitive to criticism. This kind of
stupid libel will never cease to be devised by the envious, swallowed
by the vulgar, and simply neglected by the wise. But Balzac's
peculiarities, both of life and of work, lent themselves rather
fatally to a subtler misconstruction which he also anticipated and
tried to remove, but which took a far stronger hold. He was
represented--and in the absence of any intimate male friends to
contradict the representation, it was certain to obtain some currency
--as in his artistic person a sardonic libeler of mankind, who cared
only to take foibles and vices for his subjects, and who either left
goodness and virtue out of sight altogether, or represented them as
the qualities of fools. In private life he was held up as at the best
a self-centered egotist who cared for nothing but himself and his own
work, capable of interrupting one friend who told him of the death of
a sister by the suggestion that they should change the subject and
talk of "something real, of _Eugenie Grandet," and of levying a fifty
per cent commission on another who had written a critical notice of
his, Balzac's, life and works.*