route, to meet Madame Hanska; but this once accomplished, we can
gather little more, and we long for a diary or a confidential
correspondent. In the first rapture of his meeting at Neufchatel, he
did indeed open his heart to his sister, Madame Surville; but his
habitual discretion, and his care for the reputation of the woman he
loved, soon imposed silence upon him, and he ceased to comment on the
great drama of his life.

The great versatility of his mind, and the power he possessed of
throwing himself with the utmost keenness into many absolutely
dissimilar and incongruous enterprises at the same time, add further
to the difficulty of understanding him. An extraordinary number of
subjects had their place in his capacious brain, and the ease with
which he dismissed one and took up another with equal zest the moment
after, causes his doings to seem unnatural to us of ordinary mind.
Leon Gozlan gives a curious instance of this on the occasion of the
first reading of the "Ressources de Quinola."

Balzac had recited his play in the green-room of the Odeon to the
assembled actors and actresses, and before a most critical audience
had gone through the terrible strain of trying to improvise the fifth
act, which was not yet written. He and Gozlan went straight from the
hot atmosphere of the theatre to refresh themselves in the cool air of
the Luxembourg Gardens. Here we should expect one of two things to
happen. Either Balzac would be depressed with the ill-success of his
fifth act, at which, according to Gozlan, he had acquitted himself so
badly that Madame Dorval, the principal actress, refused to take a
role in the play; or, on the other hand, his sanguine temperament
would cause him to overlook the drawbacks, and to think only of the
enthusiasm with which the first four acts had been received. Neither