Continually overthrown, but never conquered, in his letters during the next eight years he seems to breathe the delicious idea of De Custine, that hope is the imagination of those who are unhappy. In May, 1846, however, he wrote to his sister,— “A series of terrible and unbelievable disasters have happened to me. I am entirely without money, and am being sued by those who were friendly to me.... I shall have to work eighteen hours a day.” These terrible and unbelievable disasters were the result of a debt of ten thousand francs, which he owed to William Duckett, the editor of the “Dictionnaire de la Conversation,” who, being in difficulties himself, was obliged not only to sue Balzac, but to obtain an order for his arrest. Balzac, however, was not to be found. No trace of him was to be had at Passy, nor at any of his several habitations, which, though secret to the world at large, were necessarily known to the police. One day, however, a woman, whose advances to Balzac had not been met with that degree of cordiality which she had doubtless expected, called upon Duckett, and told him that Balzac was to be found at the residence of Madame Visconti, on the Champs-Élysées. In an hour the house was surrounded, and Balzac, interrupted in the middle of a chapter, was informed that a cab awaited him at the door. Madame Visconti, with a hospitality which was simply royal, asked the amount of the debt, and paid the ten thousand francs on the spot. A few days later Balzac wrote to Madame Hanska,— “You can form no idea of the life of a hunted hare which I have led. Two years of calm and tranquillity are absolutely necessary to soothe my spirit, worn by sixteen years of successive catastrophes. I am tired, very tired, of this incessant struggle. My last debts are more irksome than all the others which I have paid.” But now in regard to these debts, to the payment of which he seems to have devoted his life, it is only natural to ask in what they consisted and whence they came: for they became as famous as Balzac himself; they followed him about like a glittering retinue, and found their way not only into his correspondence, but into his romances, and supplied him with a subject of conversation of which he never tired.