"Why, sir, I don't see anything.

"Tut, tut! hold your tongue, impudence!

"And he does, singing while he sweeps and sweeping while he sings,
laughs in talking and talks in laughing. He has arranged my linen in
the cupboard by the chimney, after papering the receptacle white; and,
with a three-penny blue paper and bordering, he has made a screen. The
room he has painted from the book-case to the fireplace. On the whole,
he is a good fellow."

In the introduction to _Facino Cane_, which Balzac wrote some fifteen
years later, there is a return of memory to this sojourn in the
Lesdiguieres garret. "I lived frugally," he says; "I had accepted all
the conditions of monastic life, so needful to the worker. When it was
fine, the utmost I did was to go for a stroll on the Boulevard
Bourdon. One hobby alone enticed me from my studious habits, and even
that was study. I used to observe the manners of the Faubourg, its
inhabitants, and their characters. Dressed as plainly as the workmen,
indifferent to decorum, I aroused no mistrust, and could mix with them
and watch their bargaining and quarrelling with each other as they
went home from their toil. My faculty of observation had become
intuitive; it penetrated the soul without neglecting the body, or
rather it so well grasped exterior details that at once it pierced
beyond. It gave me the power of living the life of the individual in
whom it was exercised, enabling me to put myself in his skin, just at
the dervish of the _Arabian Nights_ entered the body and soul of those
over whom he pronounced certain words."

The would-be man of letters pushed his hobby even to dogging people to