It must be acknowledged that, in dramatic composition, whatever Balzac had so far done by himself was done grudgingly, and, when possible, shifted on to other shoulders. Gozlan relates that Lassailly, who went to Les Jardies and lived there for some little time as a paid secretary, would be rung up at night, when his employer usually worked--rung up not once nor twice, but several times, to hear himself asked whether, in his waking or his dreaming, he had hatched any good plan; and poor Lassailly would have sorrowfully to avow that his brain had conceived nothing of any importance in the way of drama. How Harel, the managing director of the Porte-Saint-Martin, was brought to give in the same twelve-month to the rejected of the Renaissance a firm promise that anything he liked to do for that theatre should be acted is an impenetrable mystery. But then Harel himself was an oddity, and he may have felt bowels of compassion for a _confrere_ so original. The story goes that once he tried to borrow thirty thousand francs from King Louis-Philippe. "Ah! Monsieur Harel," replied the monarch, smiling, "I was thinking of applying to you for a similar sum." The subject that, after much cogitation, Balzac chose for Harel's stage was _Vautrin_--the Vautrin of _Pere Goriot_ and the _Lost Illusions_--back at his old trade of acting Providence to a presumably fatherless and friendless young man, whose fortunes he sought to advance by means similar to those that had brought Lucien de Rubempre (we are anticipating a little) to so miserable an end. In the concluding act of the play, the young man discovers that he has a family, and a father who is a noble; and he marries the girl he loves. But Vautrin is arrested, and, although he has been the instrument of his protege's happiness, he is led off to prison once more. The theme, as treated, was a somewhat hackneyed one, and was further spoiled by ill-managed contrasts of the serious and comic, of which in any form the French stage was not tolerant. Objection has been made on the same score to the _School for Husbands and Wives_ at the Theatre Francais, where it had been offered after its rejection by the Renaissance.