And life, as this Rabelaisian Frenchman saw it, in the chaotic years of the nineteenth century, was a terrible thing except to the blind and the numbed, and to those who, like himself, possessed 'unconquerable souls.' He found two primary motives in existence. Passion and the production of children was one. He said that this was the only one. But his life and his work made it clear that there was another, and that this other was money. Money, the need of it, the spending of it, fantastic but always acute plans for getting hold of it, like that suggested in _Facino Cane_, filled his own life, and were not banished even from his love-letters. His own obsession by debts and business forced on him as a novelist a new way of looking at life, and, through him, gave another outlook to story-telling. In the older novels, Fielding's for example, rich were rich, and poor were poor, and only to be changed from one to the other by some calamity or fairy godmother of a coincidence. People were static; unless they turned out to be Somebody's illegitimate son or rightful heir, their clothes were not of a finer cut as they grew older, and if they ate off wooden platters in the first chapter, they supped no more daintily in the last. In romantic tales and fairy stories, a hero might cut his way to fortune through dragons or piratical Turks; in the rogue novels he might swindle a dinner, and after long switchbacking between twopence and nothing, happen by accident upon a competence; he never, before Balzac took him in hand, went grimly at life, closing his heart, concentrating his energies, compelling even love to help him in his steady climb from poverty to opulence. He left that to the villain, and the story-teller took care that the villain eventually got his deserts. The older novelists were vastly interested in the progress of a love-affair; Balzac looks kindly at that, but his real interest is in the progress of a financial superman. The wealth and poverty of Balzac's characters is the quality that makes or breaks them. The mainspring of their actions is the desire of getting on in life. What is the tragedy of Eugénie Grandet, but money? What is the tragedy of Père Goriot, but money? Eliminate wealth and poverty from either of them and they cease to exist. If old Goriot had been rich and indulgent to his daughters he would have been an estimable father; but he is poor; his daughters must be luxurious, and so he is Père Goriot. The story is that of Lear and his kingdom, translated into hundred franc notes and lacking the Cordelia. Love, Wisdom, Gentleness are inconsequent dreamers in a house of Mammon. They talk in window corners and behind curtains, ashamed of their disinterestedness. They are like the old gods banished from the temples, whispering in secret places in the woods, and going abroad quietly in the twilight, while in the glare of noon the clanking brazen giant strides heavily across the world.