From these secret and laborious studies, as well as from possible fermentation of ideas, Balzac fell into a sort of coma and nervous fever, which was singularly inexplicable to his masters and teachers. His parents were hastily summoned, and the precocious boy, now almost epileptic, was taken home, where rest and quiet gradually calmed the tumult in his brain, and restored the health and vivacity of boyhood. Little by little the results of his extraordinary labors became classified within his troubled mind, and to them were added other ideas of a less abstract nature; and in wandering on the banks of the Loire, or in attending the impressive ceremonies at the Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, he acquired not only a love of the beautiful, but also the sincere and abiding faith in religion with which he subsequently enriched the pages of the “Comédie Humaine.” At home, as at school, however, his intelligence was entirely unsuspected, and his sister, Madame de Surville, relates that whenever he chanced to make a brilliant remark his mother would invariably say, “It is impossible, Honoré, for you to understand what you are talking about;” whereupon Honoré would laugh, without deigning to enter into any explanations.[1] His father, however, who was an inoffensive disciple of both Montaigne and Swift, had his own reasons for thinking well of his son, and decided that a child of his could never by any chance be a fool; and while at that time he saw nothing in the boy which promised any immediate celebrity, he nevertheless cherished a few vague hopes. But the prescience which the father lacked had already visited the son. From time to time he stated that he would some day be famous, and this boast appeared so outrageously insulting to his brother and sisters that they punished him with every torture which childish ingenuity could invent. Balzac’s family soon after moved to Paris, where he again was placed at school. There, as at Vendôme, he gave no sign of future genius, and as before was regarded as an idler and a dullard. His classes completed, he attended the lectures of Guizot, Cousin, and Villemain, and his degree of bachelier-ès-lettres obtained, he entered a law office which Scribe had just quitted. Here he acquired that luminous insight to law and procedure which served him to such advantage in the varied litigations of his future world, and enabled him, years after, to plead, as Voltaire did for Calas, in defense of Sébastien Peytel, a former acquaintance, accused of the murder of his wife and servant. The case was lost, and his client convicted; but his oration was none the less superb, and his argument is still cited as one of the most brilliant efforts in the annals of the French bar.