His unbridled imagination takes free course. He works in dream. And, since of course we can never succeed in building within ourselves perfectly water-tight compartments, entirely separating dream from memory and imagination from observation, reality does find its way into his _nouvelles_ by way of exactness in detail, but their conception remains essentially or chiefly romantic; just as in his long novels, _Eugénie Grandet, A Bachelor's Establishment (Un Ménage de Garçon), César Birotteau, A Dark Affair, Cousin Pons_, and _Cousin Bette_, his observation remains naturalistic, and his imagination perverts it, by magnifying or exaggerating, yet never intentionally or systematically or to the extent of falsifying the true relations of things. Shall I dare say, to English readers, that by this fact he belongs to the family of Shakespeare? His long novels are his _Othello_, his _Romeo_, his _Macbeth_, his _Richard III._, and _Coriolanus;_ and his _nouvelles_, his short stories, are his _Tempest_, his _Twelfth Night_, and his _Midsummer Night's Dream_. This comparison, which really is not a comparison but a mere analogy, such as might be drawn between Musset and Byron, may serve to bring out one more characteristic of Balzac's _nouvelles_--they are philosophic; in his _The Human Comedy_ it is under the title of _Philosophic Studies_ that he brought together, whatever their origin, such stories as _A Seashore Drama, The Unknown Masterpiece_, and even _The Conscript_. By so doing he no doubt meant to imply that the sensational stories on which they are based did not contain their whole significance; that he was using them merely as a means of stating a problem, of fixing the reader's attention for a moment on the vastness of the mysterious or unknown by which we are, so to speak, enwrapped about. "We might add this tragic story," he writes at the end of his _The Conscript_, "to the mass of other observations on that sympathy which defies the law of space--a body of evidence which some few solitary scholars are collecting with scientific curiosity, and which will one day serve as basis for a new science, a science which till now has lacked only its man of genius." These are large words, it would seem, with which to point the moral of a mere historical anecdote. But if we consider them well, we shall see that, whatever we may think of this "new science," Balzac wrote his _The Conscript_ for the sole purpose of ending it with that sentence. Read, too, _A Seashore Drama_. It is often said that "A fact is a fact"--and I scarcely know a more futile sophism, unless it be the one which consists in saying that "Of tastes and colours there is no disputing." Such is not Balzac's opinion, at any rate. He believes that a fact is more than a fact, that it is the expression or manifestation of something other or more than itself; or again, that it is a piece of evidence, a _document_, which it is not enough to have put on record, but in which we must also seek,