Now there are few harder tasks for a man of overflowing physical energy than this, of covering innumerable sheets of paper with wriggling unnatural lines traced with the end of a pen. It is likely to become a torment; the feet cross and uncross, the fingers itch, the inkpot flies across the room, and the energy defeats itself. There is the legend of Scott's hand, covering sheet after sheet so swiftly and with such regularity that it was painful to watch it; but Scott's was not the bomb-like brute energy of Balzac. Balzac, to give life to his scientific ideas, needed a more fiery vitality than Scott's, who began and ended with merely human notions. The actual writing of his books was proportionately more difficult for him. There was no mere eccentricity in his habit of getting the sketches for his books set up in type, and enlarging them from proofs in the middle of large sheets of paper, covering the vast margins with the additions that were to make the books themselves. It was a wise attempt to give himself the same physical outlet as that enjoyed by the painter or sculptor, to give himself something to pull about, something actual, something that could be attacked, anything rather than the terrible silkworm spinning of a single endless fibre. His energy would have been wasted in a hundred ways unless, so far as was possible, he had fitted his work to himself and himself to his work. Giant of concentration as he was, he added cubits to his stature by taking thought. He made his writing hours different from every one else's, wore a white frock something like a monk's habit, and found in the drinking of enormous quantities of coffee a stimulant as much theatrical as medicinal. These things meant much to him, and his use of them was an action similar to that of Poe's schoolboy, who, when guessing odd or even the marbles in his playmate's hand, would imitate the expression of his adversary's face and see what thoughts arose in his mind. The paraphernalia of work were likely to induce the proper spirit. When all his fellow Parisians were in bed, Balzac, gathering the voluminous white folds about his sturdy person, and glancing at the coffee stewing on the fire, sat down to his writing-table with the conviction of an alderman sitting down to a city dinner. There could never be a doubt in his mind as to the purpose for which he was there. [Balzac's prose.]