sacrifices they had made for him, and when he ought to be hard at work,
clearing off his debts. They summoned him home, and he left Fougeres at
the end of October, regretting the interruption to his task. But he had
no sooner arrived in Paris than he set to work again, and he did not
fail to keep his provincial friends informed of the progress of his
novel. The first thing he did was to change its title from The
Stripling, to which Mme. de Pommereul had objected, to The Chouans or
Brittany Thirty Years Ago, and finally settled definitely on The Last
Chouan or Brittany in 1800. This work, the first that he signed with
his own name, was finished in the beginning of 1829, and was published
by Urbain Canel. On the eleventh of March he announced to the Baron de
Pommereul that he was sending him a set.

"Between four and six days from now," he wrote, "you will receive the
four 12mo volumes of The Last Chouan or Brittany in 1800.

"Did I call it my work? . . . It is partly yours also, for as a matter
of fact it is built up from the precious anecdotes which you so ably
and so generously related to me between glasses of that pleasant and
mild vin de Grave and those crisp buttered biscuits."

The Last Chouan proved a success. It was criticised and its merit was
admitted. L'Universel shows the tone of most of the articles devoted to
it: "After all, the work is not without interest; if reduced to half
its length, it would be amusing from one end to the other. In general,
the style is pretentious in almost all of the descriptive parts, but
the dialogue is not lacking in naturalness and frankness."

In 1829, after the publication of The Last Chouan, Honore de Balzac
plunged boldly, under his own name, into the turmoil of literature. He