truth,--and he made frequent visits to the towns where she lived,
especially to Issoudun, at her chateau of Frapesle, after the Commander
had gone into retirement.

The Physiology might seem to have been an abnormal work for a man of
Balzac's years if it was not known that he had two collaborators, Mme.
de Berny, who brought him her experience as a woman of the world, and
his father, who gave him the greater part of his maxims.

Francois de Balzac believed that he was ordained to live for more than
a hundred years, and perhaps he would have attained that age if he had
not succumbed to the after-effects of an operation on the liver, June
19, 1829. Honore felt this loss keenly, for, although his father often
showed himself sceptical as to the value of his son's literary efforts,
too little attention has been paid to the share that he had in the
origin of that son's ideas.

The Physiology had only just appeared when Balzac published the Scenes
of Private Life, on March 10, 1836; and without slackening speed, he
contributed to a number of different journals. Emile de Girardin had
welcomed him to the columns of La Mode, which he had founded in 1829,
under the patronage of the Duchesse de Berry, and he contributed
sketches to it regularly: El Verdugo, The Usurer, a Study of a Woman
(signed "By the author of the Physiology of Marriage"), Farewell, The
Latest Fashion in Words, A New Theory of Breakfasting, The Crossing of
the Beresina, and Chateau Life, an essay against the publication of
which Balzac protested because his sensitive literary conscience was
unwilling that it should be printed until developed into something more
than a crude sketch,--and lastly came the Treatise on Fashionable Life,
a manual which, under the form of pleasantry, was saturated with