* Sandeau and Gautier, the victims in these two stories, were
neither spiteful, nor mendacious, nor irrational, so they are
probably true. The second was possibly due to Balzac's odd notions
of "business being business." The first, I have quite recently
seen reason to think, may have been a sort of reminiscence of one
of the traits in Diderot's extravagant encomium on Richardson.

With the first of these charges he himself, on different occasions,
rather vainly endeavored to grapple, once drawing up an elaborate list
of his virtuous and vicious women, and showing that the former
outnumbered the latter; and, again, laboring (with that curious lack
of sense of humor which distinguishes all Frenchmen but a very few,
and distinguished him eminently) to show that though no doubt it is
very difficult to make a virtuous person interesting, he, Honore de
Balzac, had attempted it, and succeeded in it, on a quite surprising
number of occasions.

The fact is that if he had handled this last matter rather more
lightly his answer would have been a sufficient one, and that in any
case the charge is not worth answering. It does not lie against the
whole of his work; and if it lay as conclusively as it does against
Swift's, it would not necessarily matter. To the artist in analysis as
opposed to the romance-writer, folly always, and villainy sometimes,
does supply a much better subject than virtuous success, and if he
makes his fools and his villains lifelike and supplies them with a
fair contrast of better things, there is nothing more to be said. He
will not, indeed, be a Shakespeare, or a Dante, or even a Scott; but
we may be very well satisfied with him as a Fielding, a Thackeray, or
a Balzac. As to the more purely personal matter I own that it was some