His legal apprenticeship completed, it was naturally expected that he would follow the law as a profession, but Balzac had other ideas; he felt as did Corneille _e tutti quanti_, that his vocation was not such as is found in courts, and expressed a preference for a purely literary life. “But,” objected his father, “do you not know that in literature, to avoid being a slave, you must be a king?” “Very well,” Balzac replied, “king I will be.” After many arguments it was finally agreed that he should be allowed two years of probation; and as his family were about to return to the country, he was lodged in the Rue Lesdiguières, near the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, on an allowance of a hundred francs a month. His life there he has in “Facino Cane” described as follows:— “I passed my days at the neighboring library. I lived frugally, for I had accepted all the conditions of that monastic life which is so necessary to students and thinkers. I seldom went out, and when I did a simple promenade was converted into a source of study, for I observed the customs of the faubourg, its inhabitants and their characters. As badly dressed as the workmen and as careless of decorum, I attracted no attention from them, and was enabled to mix among them and watch their bargains and disputes. “Observation had become to me intuitive. It penetrated the spirit without neglecting the body, or rather it seized exterior details so clearly that it immediately went beyond them. It gave me the power of living the life of any individual upon whom it was exercised, and permitted me to substitute my personality for his, as did the dervish in the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ who had the power of occupying the body and soul of those over whom he pronounced certain words. When, therefore, between eleven and twelve at night, I encountered a workman and his wife returning from the theatre, I amused myself in following them from the Boulevard du Pont-aux-Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. At first they would speak of the play which they had just witnessed. From that they would begin to talk of their own affairs, the mother dragging her child after her, listening neither to its complaints nor to its demands. The money which was to be paid to them was added, and then spent in twenty different ways. Then came the household details, murmurings on the excessive price of potatoes, the length of the winter, energetic discussions on the baker’s bill, and finally little quarrels, in which they displayed their characters in picturesque words. While listening to them I espoused their life. I felt their rags on my back; my feet marched in their tattered shoes; their desires, their needs, all passed into my spirit, and mine into theirs: it was the dream of a waking man. With them I grew angry at their tyrannical masters or at their customers who made them come again and again without paying what they owed.