This last, I confess frankly, has always bored me, even though the volume contains _La Fille aux Yeux d'Or_. The idea of a secret society in Society itself was not new; it was much more worthy of Sue or Soulie than of Balzac, and it does not seem to me to have been interestingly worked out. But perhaps this is due to my perverse and elsewhere confessed objection to crime and conspiracy novels generally. Neither have I ever cared much for the group of "Scenes de la Vie Politique," ranging from _Une Tenebreuse Affaire_ to _Le Depute d'Arcis_, the last being not entirely Balzac's own. The single volume, "Scenes de la Vie Militaire," consisting merely of _Les Chouans_ and _Une Passion dans le Desert_, is much better, and the "Scenes de la Vie de Campagne" reach a high level with _Le Medecin de Campagne_, _Le Cure de Village_, and the late, grim, but very noteworthy _Les Paysans_. None, however, of these sometimes rather arbitrary groups of Balzac's contains such thoroughly satisfactory matter as that which he chose to call "Etudes Philosophiques." It includes only one full-volume novel, but that is the _Peau de Chagrin_ itself.[165] And here are most of the short stories singled out at first, _La Recherche de l'Absolu_, _Jesus Christ en Flandre_, _Le Chef-d'oeuvre Inconnu_, with _Melmoth Reconcilie_[166] in the same batch. The two volumes entitled _L'Enfant Maudit_ and _Les Marana_ contain all but a dozen remarkable tales. Here, too, is the curious treatise _Sur Catherine de Medicis_, with another, to some people among the most interesting of all, the autobiographic _Louis Lambert_, and also the mystical, and in parts very beautiful, _Seraphita_. The "Etudes Analytiques," which complete the original _Comedie_ with the two notorious volumes of _Physiologie du Marriage_ and _Petites Miseres de la Vie Conjugale_, are not novels or tales, and so do not concern us. They are not the only instance in literature showing that the sarcasm The _God_ you took from a printed book extends to other things besides divinity. The old conventional satires on marriage are merely rehashed with some extra garlic. Balzac had no personal experience of the subject till just before his death, and his singular claustral habits of life could not give him much opportunity for observation. [Sidenote: "Balzacity": its constitution.]