It was at this propitious moment that Balzac, already famous through his “Physiologie du Mariage,” presented his credentials in the “Peau de Chagrin,” and with an audacity unparalleled in literature represented his hero as troubled not only about the state of his mistress’ affections, but also as to whether he would have money enough to pay her fare in a cab. The stupefaction and indignation of the purists at this unheard-of infraction of their formal style were indescribable, but the Romantic school upheld the innovation, and the new generation applauded the realistic portrayal of the penniless student who went to an evening entertainment on the points of his shoes, while dreading a splash of mud more than a shot from a pistol. In this respect, therefore, the “Peau de Chagrin” marked the first return in the nineteenth century to the real and to the true; it gave a fresh impulse to an expiring literature, and constituted the corner-stone of the Realistic school, which has found such able exponents not only in the De Goncourts and Flaubert, but in Dickens, Thackeray, Tourgénieff, and a host of lesser lights. But Balzac’s incontestable superiority over other writers consists in his descriptions of the habits and customs of every-day life, and in his perception and rendition of the delicate and innumerable shadings which accompany their thousand complications, in the scenes of private life which he depicted, in the little mysterious dramas which take place every day in every social sphere, and especially in his portraits. The exactitude of the transcription, the delicacy of the shading, and the profusion and realism of detail are such that it would almost seem as though reality itself had been transported and placed before the eyes of the reader. The third and last number of the “Revue Parisienne” contains a criticism of Balzac’s on the “Chartreuse de Parme,” in which, in alluding to the author, he says, “Stendhal is one of the most remarkable writers of the day, but in his work form is neglected; he writes as a bird sings.” Form, the absence of which he noticed in Stendhal, was to him a source of continued care and preoccupation, and he would often spend an hour in burnishing a single sentence. With all his facility of conception, execution was exceedingly laborious, and his admiration of Gautier’s ability to dash off without an erasure a warm-colored and impeccable article, while unbounded, was not unmixed with a certain conviction that the work would be improved by a thorough revision.