At the time that the first novels signed by Balzac appeared, one did not have, to the same degree as today, the preoccupation, or, better said, the fever for gold. California had not been discovered; there existed perhaps several leagues of railway whose future one hardly suspected, and that one saw as a kind of conduit that led up to the Russian mountains, but that had fallen into disuse; the public ignored, so to speak, "business," and only bankers gambled at the Bourse. This movement of capital, this flow of gold, these calculations, these figures, this importance given to money in works that one still took as simple romantic fictions and not as serious portraits of life, singularly shocked the subscribers to the reading rooms, and critics added up the total sums spent or staked by the author. The millions of father Grandet led to arithmetic discussions, and serious people, troubled by the enormity of the totals, doubted the financial abilities of Balzac, very great abilities nevertheless, and recognized later. Stendhal said with a sort of disdainful smugness, "Before writing, I always read three or four pages of the Civil Code to give me the tone." Balzac, who understood money so well, also discovered poems and dramas in the Code: Le Contrat de Mariage, where he places in opposition, in the persons of Matthias and of Solonnet, the ancient and the modern notary, has all of the interest of the most eventful comedy of the cloak and sword. The bankruptcy in Grandeur et Décadence de César Birotteau makes you quiver like the story of an empire's fall; the conflict of the château and the cottage in Les Paysans offers just as much adventure as the siege of Troy. Balzac knows how to give life to the soil, to a house, to a heritage, to a capital, and in fact to heroes and heroines whose adventures are devoured with anxious avidity. These new elements introduced into the novel were not appreciated at first; the philosophical analyses, the detailed character portraits, the minute descriptions that seemed to have the future in view, were regarded as unpleasantly lengthy, and quite often one skipped them to move on to the story. Later, one recognized that the goal of the author was not to weave intrigues that were more or less well-plotted, but to portray society in its entirety, from the summit to the base, with its characters and its components, and that one will admire in it the immense variety of these types. Is it not Alexandre Dumas who said of Shakespeare: "Shakespeare, the man who has created the most after God?"; the words might be even more justly applied to Balzac; never, indeed, did so many living creatures issue from one human brain.