"Society was going to be the historian, I should not be but the secretary; in constructing the inventory of vices and of virtues, in assembling the principal features of the passions, in depicting the characters, in choosing the principal events of the society, in composing types by the blending of traits of several homogeneous characters, perhaps I could succeed in writing the history forgotten by so many historians, that of manners. With a great deal of patience and courage, I might be able to complete, on nineteenth century France, the book that we all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, India, have unfortunately not left us on their civilization, and that like the abbot Bartholomew, the courageous and patient Monteil had attempted regarding the Middle Ages, although in a form that was not appealing." But let us return to the garret on the Rue Lesdiguières. Balzac had not conceived the plan of the work that would immortalize him; he was still seeking it with anxiety, bated breath, and hard labor, trying everything and succeeding in nothing; however he already possessed that obstinacy in his work to which Minerva, as surly as she might be, must one day or another yield; he outlined comic operas, made plans for comedies, dramas and romances whose titles Madame de Surville has preserved: Stella, Coqsigrue, Les Deux Philosophes, without counting the terrible Cromwell, whose verses had caused him so much pain and yet were not worth much more than that which began his epic poem, Incas. Imagine to yourself young Honoré, his legs wrapped in a patched coat, his upper body protected by an old shawl of his mother, his headdress a sort of Dantesque cap and his hair of a cut that only Madame de Balzac knew, his coffee pot to his left, his inkwell to his right, working with a heaving chest and bowed forehead, like an ox at the plow, the field still stony and not cleared by those thoughts which would later trace for him such productive furrows. The lamp shines like a star in the front of the dark house, the snow falls in silence on the loosened tiles, the wind blows through the door and window "like Tulou on his Flute, but less agreeably." If some dawdling passerby had raised his eyes toward that little, obstinately flickering glow, he certainly would not have suspected that it was the dawning of one of the greatest glories of our age. Would you like to see a sketch of the place, transposed, it's true, but very exact, drawn by the author in La Peau de Chagrin, that work which contains so much of himself?