"He related that Balzac had dined at his house on the preceding day, and that he had been more brilliant, more scintillating than ever. He very much amused us with the story of his trip to Austria. What fire! What verve! What power of imitation! It was marvelous. His manner of paying the postilions is an invention that only a novelist of genius could have discovered. ‘I was very embarrassed at each stopping point,' he said, ‘how was I going to pay? I did not know a word of German, I did not know the currency of the country. It was very difficult. Here is what I invented. I had a bag full of small silver coins, some kreuzers … When I arrived at the stopping point, I would take up my bag; the postilion would come to the window of the carriage; I would watch his eyes attentively, and I would put in his hand one kreuzer, … two kreuzer, … then three, then four, etc., until I saw him smile … when he smiled, I understood that I had given him one kreuzer too much … quickly I would take back my coin and my man was paid.'" At Les Jardies, he read Mercadet to me, the original Mercadet, by far more sweeping, complicated and dense than the piece arranged for the Gymnase by d'Ennery, with so much delicacy and skill. Balzac, who read like Tieck, without indicating acts, scenes, or names, utilized a voice that was particular to and perfectly recognizable for each character; the voices that he gave to the different kinds of creditors were hilariously funny: there were the hoarse, the honeyed, the hasty, the slow, the menacing, the pleading. They shrieked, wailed, scolded, muttered, screamed in every possible and impossible tone. Debt first sang a solo that soon an immense choir took up. He brought out creditors from everywhere, from behind the stove, from below the bed, from the drawers of the commode; they came from the chimney; they passed through the keyhole; others entered through the window like lovers; these sprung from the bottom of a trunk like those devilish toys that take you by surprise, those moved across the walls as if they were passing by an English ambush, it was a mob, an uproar, an invasion, truly a rising tide. Mercadet might well have shaken them off, when others always returned to start an assault, and as far as the horizon one could make out a somber swarm of creditors on the march, arriving like legions of termites to devour their prey. I do not know if this piece was better when performed this way, but no other performance produced such an effect. Balzac, during this reading of Mercadet, occupied, partially reclining, a long divan in the salon of Les Jardies because he had sprained his ankle when he slipped, like his walls, on the clay of his property. A stray hair, sticking through the fabric, poked the skin of his leg and bothered him. "The fabric is too thin, the hay passes through it; you will need to put a thick canvas beneath it," he said while pulling at the hair that annoyed him.