Personally considered, Balzac was much more of a Benedictine than a disciple of Rabelais; even his student days were those of an anchorite, and purity of life was to him not only a refinement, but a basis indispensable to elevation of thought, and an essential in the production of any work of enduring value. Disorder he regarded as fatal to talent, and Gautier says that he preached what he practiced, and recommended to him that he should visit his Dulcinea but once a year, and then only for half an hour. “Write to her, if you wish to,” he said; “it forms the style.” In his books he has, it is true, agreeably painted the seductions of vice, but its contagious and destructive effects are rigorously exposed; and through all the struggles of his characters probity, purity, and self-denial are alone triumphant. In what, then, does his immorality consist? In his vast conception, it was necessary, he explained,[17] here to signalize an abuse and here to point out an evil; but every writer who has an aim and who breaks a fresh lance in the domain of thought is invariably considered immoral. Socrates was immoral; Christ was immoral: both were persecuted by the people whom they reformed. In describing in the “Comédie Humaine” all the elements of society, in grasping it in the immensity of its agitations, it was inevitable that one part should expose more wickedness than virtue, that one part of the fresco represented a culpable group: hence the critic has brought his charge of immorality without observing the morality of other parts destined to form a perfect contrast. And in this particular we must observe that the most conscientious moralists are agreed that society is incapable of producing as many good as evil actions, yet in the “Comédie Humaine” the virtuous characters exceed in number those of a reprehensible disposition. Blamable actions, faults, crimes, from the slightest to the most grave, find therein an invariable punishment, human or divine, evident or secret; and while it would be impossible to clothe two or three thousand characters in white and orange blossoms, it must be evident even to the most careless observer that the Marneffes, male and female, the Hulots, Brideaus _e tutti quanti_, are not imagined,—they are simply described. ----- Footnote 14: See Introduction by M. Felix Davin to the first edition of the _Comédie Humaine_. Footnote 15: _Correspondance de H. de Balzac_. Footnote 16: See also _La Peau de Chagrin_. Footnote 17: Preface to the _Comédie Humaine_. CHAPTER III. THE BUSKIN AND THE SOCK. “Le génie, c’est la patience.”—BUFFON. In the story of “Albert Savarus” Balzac drew a picture of the hero which, with slight modifications, might have served as his own.