The commercial compromises that he consented to were still more injurious to the artistic finish of some of his later pieces of fiction. For instance, when the _Employees_ was about to come out in a volume, after its publication as a serial the length was judged to be insufficient by the man of business. He wanted more for his money. What did Balzac do? He searched through his drawers, pitched upon a manuscript entitled _Physiology of the Employee_, and drilled it into the other story. Of these patchwork novels _The Woman of Thirty Years Old_ is the worst. Originally, it was six distinct short tales which had appeared at divers dates. The first was entitled _Early Mistakes_; the second, _Hidden Sufferings_; the third, _At Thirty Years Old_; the fourth, _God's Finger_; the fifth, _Two Meetings_; and the sixth and last, _The Old Age of a Guilty Mother_. In 1835, the author took it into his head to join them together under one title, _The Same Story_, although the names of the characters differed in each chapter, so that the chief heroine had no fewer than six appellations. Not till 1842 did he remedy this primary incoherence, yet without the removal of the _aliases_ doing anything towards bestowing consistency on the several personages thus connected in Siamese-twin fashion. To-day, any one who endeavors to read the novel through will proceed from astonishment to bewilderment, and thence to amazement. Nowhere else does Balzac come nearer to that peculiar vanity which fancies that every licence is permissible to talent. In his chapter on the social importance of the _Comedie Humaine_, Brunetiere tries to persuade us that, before Balzac's time, novelists in general gave a false presentation of the heroes by making love the unique preoccupation of life. And he seems to include dramatists in his accusation, declaring that love as a passion, the love which Shakespeare and Racine speak of, is a thing exceeding rare, and that humanity is more usually preoccupied with everything and anything besides love; love, he says, has never been the great affair of life except with a few idle people. Monsieur Brunetiere's erudition was immense, and the nights as well as the days he spent in acquiring his formidable knowledge may in his case have prevented more than a passing thought being given to the solicitation of love. If the eminent critic had been as skilled in psychology as he was in literature, he would have been more disposed to recognize that, amidst all the toils and cares of life, love, in some phase, is after all the mainspring, and that, if it were eliminated from man's nature, the most puissant factor of his activity would disappear. Love is part of the huge sub-conscious in man; and the novelist, in making the events of his fiction turn upon it, does no more than follow nature.