"With Cromwell he had not yet avenged himself upon M. -- (the friend of
whom mention has just been made); for, blunt as ever, the latter
pronounced his opinion of the tragedy in the most uncompromising terms.
Honore protested, and declined to accept his judgment; but his other
auditors, though in milder terms, all agreed that the work was
extremely faulty.

"My father voiced the consensus of opinion when he proposed that they
should have Cromwell read by some competent and impartial authority. M.
Surville, engineer of the Ourcq Canal, who was later to become Honore's
brother-in-law, suggested a former professor of his at the Polytechnic
School. (Mlle. Laure de Balzac was married in May, 1820, one month
after the reading of Cromwell, to M. Midy de Greneraye Surville,
engineer of Bridges and Highways.)

"My father accepted this dean of literature as decisive judge.

"After a conscientious reading, the good old man declared that the
author of Cromwell had better follow any other career in the world than
that of literature."

Such was the judgment passed upon this masterpiece which had been
intended to be "the breviary of peoples and of kings!" Yet these
successive condemnations in no way shook Balzac's confidence in his own
genius. He wished to be a great man, and in spite of all predictions to
the contrary he was going to be a great man. No doubt he re-read his
tragedy in cold blood and laughed at it, realising all its emphatic and
bombastic mediocrity. But it was a dead issue, and now with a new
tensity of purpose he looked forward to the works which he previsioned