One has little doubt in deciding that, of the two spurs which goaded Balzac's labours, his desire for wealth acted more persistently and energetically than his desire for glory. In his conversations, in his correspondence, money was the eternal theme; in his novels it is almost always the hinge on which the interest, whether of character, plot, or passion, depends. Money was his obsession, day and night; and, in his dormant visions, it must have loomed largely. Henry Monnier, the caricaturist, used to relate that, meeting him once on the Boulevard, the novelist tapped him on the shoulder and said: "I have a sublime idea. In a month I shall have gained five hundred thousand francs." "The deuce, you will," replied Monnier; "let's hear how." "Listen, then," returned his interlocutor. "I will rent a shop on the Boulevard des Italiens. All Paris is bound to pass by. That's so, isn't it?" "Yes. Well, what next?" "Next, I will establish a store for colonial produce; and, over the window, I will have printed, in letters of gold: 'Honore de Balzac, Grocer.' This will create a scandal; everybody will want to see me serving the customers, with the classical counter-skipper's smock on. I shall gain my five hundred thousand francs; it's certain. Just follow my argument. Every day these many people pass along the Boulevard, and will not fail to enter the shop. Suppose that each person spends only a sou, since half of it will be profit to me I shall gain so much a day; consequently, so much a week; so much a month." And thereupon, the novelist, launched into transcendental calculations, soaring with his enthusiasm into the clouds. It was the same Henry Monnier who, meeting him another time on the Place de la Bourse, and having had to listen to another of such mirific demonstrations about a scheme from which both were to derive millions, answered drily: "Then lend me five francs on strength of the affair." Noticing this sort of monomania, in an article which he wrote in the short-lived _Diogenes_, during the month of August 1856, Amedee Roland said of Balzac: "His ambition was to vie in luxury with Alexandre Dumas and Lamartine, who, before the Revolution of 1848, were the most prodigal and extravagant authors in the five continents. For anything like a chance of finding his elusive millions, he would have gone to China. Indeed, on one occasion, he took it into his head he would start, together with his friend, Laurent Jan, and go to see the great Mogul, maintaining that the latter would give him tons of gold in exchange for a ring he possessed, which came, so he asserted, right down from Mahomet. It was three o'clock in the morning when he knocked at Laurent Jan's door to inform his sleeping friend of his project; and the latter had the greatest difficulty in dissuading him from setting off forthwith in a post-chaise for India, of course, at the expense of the monarch in question."