house for sixty-seven thousand francs, and Mme. de Berny put her son,
Alexandre, in charge of the foundry, in place of Balzac. The
liabilities amounted to 113,081 francs, of which 37,600 had been
advanced by Mme. de Balzac while the only assets were the 67,000 francs
resulting from the sale of the printing house. Among the debts recorded
in the settlement there are some which prove that at this time Balzac
had already acquired a taste for luxury; he owed Thouvenin, book-binder
to the Duc d'Orleans, 175 francs for binding a Lafontaine, a Boileau,
and a Thousand and One Nights, while the long unsettled bill of his
shoemaker amounted to no less than three hundred francs!

The intervention of his mother and the sacrifices that she consented to
make saved him from inevitable failure, but he had to endure an
avalanche of reproaches. At the age of twenty-nine he withdrew from
business, with debts amounting to ninety thousand francs, and how could
he, rebellious son that he was, ever hope to clear himself, when he
might by this time have been a prosperous notary, well on the road
towards honours, if he had only listened to the wise counsel of his
parents? His father, Francois Balzac, had learned of the disaster, in
spite of all the precautions taken to keep him in ignorance, and he
addressed a letter, very noble in tone, to M. Sedillot, thanking him
for having saved the family name from dishonour. We get an echo of the
recriminations which must have arisen within the family circle from the
firm yet bitter reply that Balzac made to his sister Laure:

"Your letter has given me two detestable days and two detestable
nights. I brooded over my justification, point by point, like
Mirabeau's Memoire to his father, and I was already fired with zeal for
the task; but I have decided not to write it. I cannot spare the time,
my dear sister, and besides I do not feel that I have been at all in