He submitted to the sentence, but only for tragedy; he understood that he should give up trying to walk in the footsteps of Corneille and Racine, whom he so admired without being in their debt, for never were geniuses more contrary to that of himself. The novel offered him a more suitable model, and he wrote at this time a great number of volumes which he did not sign and which he always disavowed. The Balzac that we know and that we admire was still in limbo and struggled in vain to extricate himself. Those who had judged him capable of being nothing but a copyist appeared to be right; perhaps even this option had failed him, because his beautiful handwriting had already deteriorated with the crumpled, crossed out, overwritten, near hieroglyphic drafts of the writer fighting for the idea and no longer concerned about the beauty of the character. Thus, nothing resulted from this rigorous confinement, this hermetic life in the Thébaïde in which Raphaël outlines the budget: "Three sous of bread, two sous of milk, three sous of meat that prevented me from dying of hunger and kept my mind in a state of singular lucidity. My lodgings cost me three sous a day; I burned three sous of oil every night, I took care of my own room, I wore flannel shirts so that I would spend only two sous a day for laundry. I warmed myself with coal, whose price divided by the days in the year never gave more than two sous for each. I had suits of clothes, linens, and shoes for three years: I didn't want to get dressed except to go to certain public lectures and to the libraries; these expenses combined were only eighteen sous: there remained two sous for unforeseen things. I do not recall having, during this long period of work, having passed the Pont des Arts or ever buying water." Without doubt, Raphaël exaggerated these economies a little, but Balzac's correspondence with his sister shows that the novel does not differ much from the reality. The old woman referred to in his letters by the name of Iris la Messagère, who was 70 years-old, could not have been a very active housekeeper, as Balzac writes: "The news of my household is disastrous, the work does harm to its cleanliness. This rascal of Myself neglects himself more and more, he only descends every three or four days to make some purchases, he goes to the closest and worst provisioned merchants in the quarter: the others are too far, and the fellow economizes even his steps; so that your brother (destined for so much celebrity) is already nourished absolutely like a great man, that is to say that he is dying of hunger." "Another problem: The coffee is made terribly bitter by dirt. Lots of water is needed to correct the damage; but the water does not rise to my celestial garret (it descends there only on stormy days), it will require, after the purchase of the piano, the installation of a hydraulic machine, if the coffee continues to disappear while the master and the servant daydream."