In the introduction to _Facino Cane_, which Balzac wrote some fifteen years later, there is a return of memory to this sojourn in the Lesdiguieres garret. "I lived frugally," he says; "I had accepted all the conditions of monastic life, so needful to the worker. When it was fine, the utmost I did was to go for a stroll on the Boulevard Bourdon. One hobby alone enticed me from my studious habits, and even that was study. I used to observe the manners of the Faubourg, its inhabitants, and their characters. Dressed as plainly as the workmen, indifferent to decorum, I aroused no mistrust, and could mix with them and watch their bargaining and quarrelling with each other as they went home from their toil. My faculty of observation had become intuitive; it penetrated the soul without neglecting the body, or rather it so well grasped exterior details that at once it pierced beyond. It gave me the power of living the life of the individual in whom it was exercised, enabling me to put myself in his skin, just at the dervish of the _Arabian Nights_ entered the body and soul of those over whom he pronounced certain words." The would-be man of letters pushed his hobby even to dogging people to their homes, and to registering in note-book or brain their conversations--records of joys, sorrows, and interests. "I could realize their existence," he affirms; "I felt their rags on my back. I walked with my feet in their worn-out shoes; it was the dreaming of a man awake. . . . To quit my own habits and become another by the intoxication of my moral faculties at will, such was my diversion. To what do I owe this gift? Is it second sight? Is it one of those possessions of the mind that lead to madness? I have never sought out the causes of this gift. I have it and use it--that is all I can say." Honore's 'prentice attempts at producing a masterpiece oscillated between the novel and the drama. Two stories, entitled respectively _Coquecigrue_ (an imaginary animal) and _Stella_, were abandoned before they were begun. A comic opera had the same fate. The _Two Philosophers_, a farce in which a couple of sham sages mocked at the world and quarrelled with each other, while secretly coveting the good things they affected to despise, appears to have been worked at, but uselessly. Next a tragedy, tackled with greater resolution, was composed and entirely finished. Curiously, the subject of it, _Cromwell_, was the same as that chosen by Victor Hugo, a few years later, to achieve the overthrow of classicism and the substitution of Romanticism in its stead.