as your own, will grasp my thought in reading _la Maison Nucingen_
appended to _Cesar Birotteau_. Is there not a whole social
contrast between the two stories?

"DE BALZAC."

While hiding from his creditors, Balzac took refuge with Madame
Carraud at Issoudun, where he assumed the name of Madame Dubois to
receive his mail. Here he met some people whose names he made immortal
by describing them in his _Menage de Garcon_, called later _La
Rabouilleuse_. The priest Badinot introduced him to _La Cognette_, the
landlady to whom the vineyard peasant sold his wine. La Cognette, some
of whose relatives are still living, plays a minor role in the
_Comedie humaine_. Her real name was Madame Houssard; her husband,
whom Balzac incorrectly called "Pere Cognet," kept a little cabaret in
the rue du Bouriau. "Mere Cognette," who lost her husband about 1835,
opened a little cafe at Issoudun during the first years of her
widowhood. Balzac was an intermittent and impecunious client of hers;
he would enter her shop, quaff a cup of coffee, execrable to the
palate of a connoisseur like him, and "chat a bit" with the good old
woman who probably unconsciously furnished him with curious material.

The coffee drunk, the chat over, Balzac would strike his pockets, and
declaring they were empty, would exclaim: "Upon my word, Mere
Cognette, I have forgotten my purse, but the next time I'll pay for
this with the rest!" This habit gave "Mere Cognette" an extremely
mediocre estimate of the novelist, and she retained a very bad
impression of him. Upon learning that he had, as she expressed it,
"put me in one of his books," she conceived a violent resentment which
ended only with her death (1855). "The brigand," she exclaimed, "he