The _nouvelle_ differs from the _conte_ in that it always claims to be a picture of ordinary life; and it differs from the novel in that it selects from ordinary life, and depicts by preference and almost exclusively, those examples of the strange, the rare, and the extraordinary which ordinary life does in spite of its monotony nevertheless contain. It is neither strange nor rare for a miser to make all the people about him, including his wife and children, victims of the passion to which he is himself enslaved; and that is the subject of _Eugénie Grandet_. It is nothing extraordinary for parents of humble origin to be almost disowned by their children whom they have married too far above them, in another class of society; and that is the subject of _Father Goriot_. But for a husband, as in _La Grande Bretèche_, to wall up his wife's lover in a closet, and that before her very eyes; and, through a combination of circumstances in themselves quite out of the ordinary, for neither one of them to dare or be able to make any defence against his vengeance--this is certainly somewhat rare! Then read _The Conscript_, or _An Episode under the Terror;_ the plot is no ordinary one, and perhaps, with a little exaggeration, we may say it can have occurred but once. Such, then, is the field of the _nouvelle_. Let us set off from it the fantastic, in the style of Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe, even though Balzac sometimes tried that also, as in _The Wild Ass's Skin_, for instance, or in _Melmoth Converted;_ for the fantastic belongs to the field of the _conte_. But unusual events, especially such as result from an unforeseen combination of circumstances; and really tragic adventures, which, like Monsieur and Madame de Merret's in _La Grande Bretèche_ or Cambremer's in _A Seashore Drama_, make human conscience hesitate to call the crime by its name; and illogical variations, deviations, or perversions of passion; and the pathology of feeling, as in _The Unknown Masterpiece;_ and still more generally, if I may so express myself, all those things in life which are out of the usual run of life, which happen _on its margin_, and so are beside yet not outside it; all that makes its surprises, its differences, its _startlingness_, so to speak--all this is the province of the _nouvelle_, bordering on that of the novel yet distinct from it. Out of common every-day life you cannot really make _nouvelles_, but only novels--miniature novels, when they are brief, but still novels. In no French writer of the last century, I think, is this distinction more evident or more strictly observed than it is in _The Human Comedy;_ and unless I am much mistaken, this may serve to solve, or at least to throw light on, the vexed question of Honoré de Balzac's _naturalism_ or _romanticism_.