doubt it helped him when genius had come, the two things are in his
case, as in most, pretty sufficiently distinct. What the genius itself
was I must do my best to indicate hereafter, always beseeching the
reader to remember that all genius is in its essence and quiddity
indefinable. You can no more get close to it than you can get close to
the rainbow, and your most scientific explanation of it will always
leave as much of the heart of the fact unexplained as the scientific
explanation of the rainbow leaves of that.



Honore de Balzac was born at Tours on the 16th of May, 1799, in the
same year which saw the birth of Heine, and which therefore had the
honor of producing perhaps the most characteristic writers of the
nineteenth century in prose and verse respectively. The family was a
respectable one, though its right to the particle which Balzac always
carefully assumed, subscribing himself "_de_ Balzac," was contested.
And there appears to be no proof of their connection with Jean Guez de
Balzac, the founder, as some will have him, of modern French prose,
and the contemporary and fellow-reformer of Malherbe. (Indeed, as the
novelist pointed out with sufficient pertinence, his earlier namesake
had no hereditary right to the name at all, and merely took it from
some property.) Balzac's father, who, as the _zac_ pretty surely
indicates, was a southerner and a native of Languedoc, was fifty-three
years old at the birth of his son, whose Christian name was selected
on the ordinary principle of accepting that of the saint on whose day
he was born. Balzac the elder had been a barrister before the
Revolution, but under it he obtained a post in the commissariat, and
rose to be head of that department for a military division. His wife,
who was much younger than himself and who survived her son, is said to