criminals, fictitious or real. Certain pleasant and profitable things,
no doubt, retain their pleasure and their profit, to some extent, when
they are done in the manner which is technically called criminal; but
they seem to me to acquire no additional interest by being so. As the
criminal of fact is, in the vast majority of cases, an exceedingly
commonplace and dull person, the criminal of fiction seems to me only,
or usually, to escape these curses by being absolutely improbable and
unreal. But I know this is a terrible heresy.

Henri de Marsay is a much more ambitious and a much more interesting
figure. In him are combined the attractions of criminality, beauty,
brains, success, and, last of all, dandyism. It is a well-known and
delightful fact that the most Anglophobe Frenchmen--and Balzac might
fairly be classed among them--have always regarded the English dandy
with half-jealous, half-awful admiration. Indeed, our novelist, it
will be seen, found it necessary to give Marsay English blood. But
there is a tradition that this young Don Juan--not such a good fellow
as Byron's, nor such a _grand seigneur_ as Moliere's--was partly
intended to represent Charles de Remusat, who is best known to this
generation by very sober and serious philosophical works, and by his
part in his mother's correspondence. I do not know that there ever
were any imputation on M. de Remusat's morals; but in memoirs of the
time, he is, I think, accused of a certain selfishness and _hauteur_,
and he certainly made his way, partly by journalism, partly by
society, to power very much as Marsay did. But Marsay would certainly
not have written _Abelard_ and the rest, or have returned to
Ministerial rank in our own time. Marsay, in fact, more fortunate than
Rubempre, and of a higher stamp and flight than Rastignac, makes with
them Balzac's trinity of sketches of the kind of personage whose part,
in his day and since, every young Frenchman has aspired to play, and