growling of Vautrin, the hissing of La Gamard, the melodious tones of
Madame de Mortsauf still linger in our ears. For such intensity of
evocation is as contagious as an enthusiasm or a panic.

There is abundant testimony going to show that with Balzac this
evocation is accomplished, as in the mystic arts by releasing it, so
to speak, from the ordinary laws of life. Pray note in what terms M.
le Docteur Fournier, the real mayor of Tours, relates incidents of the
novelist's method of work, according to the report of a servant
employed at the chateau of Sache: "Sometimes he would shut himself up
in his room and stay there several days. Then it was that, plunged
into a sort of ecstasy and armed with a crow quill, he would write
night and day, abstaining from all food and merely contenting himself
with decoctions of coffee which he himself prepared." [Brochure of M.
le Docteur Fournier in regard to the statue of Balzac, that statue a
piece of work to which M. Henry Renault--another devotee who had
established _Le Balzac_--had given himself so ardently. In this
brochure is found a very curious portrait of Balzac, after a sepia by
Louis Boulanger belonging to M. le Baron Larrey.]

In the opening pages of _Facino Cane_ this phenomenon is thus
described: "With me observation had become intuitive from early youth.
It penetrated the soul without neglecting the body, or rather it
seized so completely the external details that it went beyond them. It
gave me the faculty of living the life of the individual over whom it
obtained control, and allowed me to substitute myself for him like the
dervish in _Arabian Nights_ assumed the soul and the body of persons
over whom he pronounced certain words." And he adds, after describing
how he followed a workman and his wife along the street: "I could
espouse their very life, I felt their rags on my back. I trod in their