time before I could persuade myself that Balzac, to speak familiarly,
was a much better fellow than others, and I myself, have been
accustomed to think him. But it is also some time since I came to the
conclusion that he was so, and my conversion is not to be attributed
to any editorial retainer. His education in a lawyer's office, the
accursed advice about the _bonne speculation_, and his constant
straitenings for money, will account for his sometimes looking after
the main chance rather too narrowly; and as for the Eugenie Grandet
story (even if the supposition referred to in a note above be
fanciful) it requires no great stretch of charity or comprehension to
see in it nothing more awkward, very easily misconstrued, but not
necessarily in the least heartless or brutal attempt of a rather
absent and very much self-centered recluse absorbed in one subject, to
get his interlocutor as well as himself out of painful and useless
dwelling on sorrowful matters. Self-centered and self-absorbed Balzac
no doubt was; he could not have lived his life or produced his work if
he had been anything else. And it must be remembered that he owed
extremely little to others; that he had the independence as well as
the isolation of the self-centered; that he never sponged or fawned on
a great man, or wronged others of what was due to them. The only
really unpleasant thing about him that I know, and even this is
perhaps due to ignorance of all sides of the matter, is a slight touch
of snobbishness now and then, especially in those late letters from
Vierzschovnia to Madame de Balzac and Madame Surville, in which, while
inundating his mother and sister with commissions and requests for
service, he points out to them what great people the Hanskas and
Mniszechs are, what infinite honor and profit it will be to be
connected with them, and how desirable it is to keep struggling
engineer brothers-in-law and ne'er-do-well brothers in the colonies
out of sight lest they should disgust the magnates.