I had been dreaming, therefore, and if I had been dreaming I must have been asleep. But what had provoked my somnolence? Was it the approach of a storm, the heat of the theatre, or the vaudeville with which the performance commenced? Perhaps all three. ----- Footnote 18: _Balzac Chez Lui._ Léon Gozlan. Footnote 19: _Le Figaro_, 20 October, 1876. CHAPTER IV. THE CHASE FOR GOLD. “Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiæ est.”—SENECA, _De Tranquillitate Animi_, c. 15. From Balzac’s early manhood his entire existence was consumed in a feverish pursuit of wealth; and had the mines of California been discovered at an earlier date, there is little doubt that he would have exchanged his pen for a pick, and sought, in a red shirt, to realize the millions with which he dowered his characters. At the outset of his career, he was, as has been seen, unsuccessful in a business enterprise, and became, in consequence, heavily involved in debt. This spectre of the past haunted him so continually that it not only found frequent expression in his writings, in which money became a hymn, but it brought to him illusions and projects of fortune which were at once curious and fantastic. At one time, shortly after the publication of “Facino Cane,”—who, it will be remembered, was imprisoned in the dungeons of Venice, and, in making his escape, discovered the hidden treasures of the Doges, which he proposed to seek and share with his biographer,—Balzac became fairly intoxicated with the delusions of his hero, and his dreams of secreted wealth assumed such a semblance of reality that he at last imagined, or pretended that he had learned, the exact spot where Toussaint Louverture had buried his famous booty. “‘The Gold Bug’ of Edgar Poe,” Gautier writes, “did not equal in delicacy of induction and clearness of detail his feverish recital of the proposed expedition by which we were to become masters of a treasure far richer than Kidd’s.” “Sandeau was as easily seduced as myself. It was necessary that Balzac should have two robust and devoted accomplices, and, in exchange for our assistance, he was good enough to offer to each of us a quarter of the prodigious fortune. Half was to be his, by right of conquest. It was arranged that we were to purchase spades and picks, place them secretly in a ship, and, to avoid suspicion, reach the designated spot by different roads, and then, after having disinterred the treasure, we were to embark with it on a brig freighted in advance. In short, it was a real romance, which would have been admirable had it been written instead of recited. It is of course unnecessary to add that the booty was not unearthed. We discovered that we had no money to pay our traveling expenses, and our united capital was insufficient to purchase even the spades.”