Elsewhere, continuing the joking, he reprimands the lazy Myself, the only footman that he has in his service, who does not fill the basin, leaves dust balls scattered freely under the bed, the dirt obscuring the windows, and the spiders spinning their webs in the corners. In another letter, he writes: "I have eaten two melons … it will be necessary to pay for them with nuts and dry bread!" One of the rare recreations that he permitted himself was to go to the Jardin des Plantes or Père-Lachaise. At the summit of the funereal hill, he towered over Paris like Rastignac at the burial of Père Goriot. His gaze glided over this ocean of slate and tile that cover up so much luxury, misery, intrigue and passion. Like a young eagle, he took in his prey at a glance; but he still had no wings, no beak, no talons, although his eye could already fix itself on the sun. He said, contemplating the tombs: "There are no more beautiful epitaphs than these: La Fontaine, Masséna, Molière: one single name that says everything and makes us dream!" This sentence contains an ill-defined but prophetic understanding that the future realized, alas!, too soon. On the slope of the hill, upon a sepulchral stone, beneath a bust cast in bronze, after the marble of David, the word BALZAC says everything and makes the solitary wanderer dream. The dietary regimen recommended by Raphaël could be favorable to the lucidity of the brain; but certainly it was worthless for a young man used to the comfort of family life. The fifteen months that passed under these intellectual burdens, sadder, without fail, than those of Venice, had made the youthful Tourangeau with the soft, glowing cheeks a Parisian skeleton, haggard and yellow, nearly unrecognizable. Balzac reentered the paternal home, where the fatted calf was killed for the return of this only slightly prodigal child. I glide lightly over the period of his life when he tried to ensure independence by speculations in the book trade and during which only a lack of capital prevented him from finding success. These ventures put him in debt, mortgaged his future, and despite the devoted assistance offered perhaps too late by the family, burdened him with the rock of Sisyphus that he so many times pushed just to the edge of the hill, and which always fell back with more crushing weight upon the shoulders of this Atlas, overloaded besides by an entire world. This debt that he made it a sacred duty to discharge, because it represented the fortune of those who were dear to him, was Necessity armed with a spiked whip, her hand bearing bronze nails that harassed him night and day, with neither truce nor pity, making him regard every hour of repose or recreation as a theft. She dominated his entire life painfully, often rendering it inexplicable to he who did not possess its secret. Having provided these indispensable biographical details, I come to my direct and personal impressions of Balzac.