various times he was under consideration for election to the French
Academy, his name is not found numbered among the "forty immortals."
But he was the greatest of French novelists, a great creator of
characters, who by some competent critics has been ranked with
Shakespeare, and he has left to posterity the incomparable, though
unfinished _Comedie humaine_, which is in itself sufficient for his
"immortality."



CHAPTER II

RELATIVES AND FAMILY FRIENDS


BALZAC'S MOTHER

"Farewell, my dearly beloved mother! I embrace you with all my
heart. Oh! if you knew how I need just now to cast myself upon
your breast as a refuge of complete affection, you would insert a
little word of tenderness in your letters, and this one which I am
answering has not even a poor kiss. There is nothing but . . . Ah!
Mother, Mother, this is very bad! . . . You have misconstrued what
I said to you, and you do not understand my heart and affection.
This grieves me most of all! . . ."

The above extract is sadly typical of a relationship of thirty years,
1820-1850, between a mother, on the one hand, who never understood or
appreciated her son--and a son, on the other, whose longings for
maternal affection were never fully gratified. To his mother Balzac