VI
 No one could have the ambition to write a complete biography of Balzac; any relationship with him was necessarily limited by gaps, absences, disappearances. Work absolutely ruled the life of Balzac, and if, as he himself says with touching sensitivity in a letter to his sister, he has painlessly sacrificed the joys and distractions of existence to this jealous god, it cost him to renounce all company that might have led to friendship. To reply with a few words to a long letter became for him who was overburdened with labor a prodigality that he could rarely permit himself; he was the slave of his work and a voluntary slave. He had, with a very good and very tender heart, the selfishness of the great worker. And who could have dreamed of being mad at his pressured negligences and his apparent forgetfulness, when one saw the results of his escapes or his seclusions? When, the work completed, he would reappear, one would have said that he had left you the day before, and he would take up the interrupted conversation once again, as if sometimes six months and more had not passed. He made trips within France to study localities that he included in Scènes de Province, and he withdrew to the houses of friends, in Touraine, or in the Charente, finding there a calm that the creditors did not always allow him in Paris. After some great work, he permitted himself, occasionally, a longer excursion to Germany, northern Italy, or Switzerland; but these rapid excursions, made with the preoccupations of bills that were due to be paid, contracts to fulfill, and limited funds for travel, may have fatigued him more than they gave him rest. His vast gaze took in the skies, the horizons, the mountains, the countryside, the monuments, the houses, the interiors to commit them to that universal and meticulous memory that never failed him. Superior in this to descriptive poets, Balzac saw man at the same time as nature; he studied the physiognomies, the manners, the passions, the characters in the same glance as locations, clothing and furnishings. One detail sufficed for him, as the least fragment of bone did for Cuvier, to accurately imagine and reconstitute a personality glimpsed while passing. Balzac has often been praised, and rightly so, for his power of observation; but, however great he was, it is not necessary to imagine that the author of La Comédie Humaine always drew from nature his portraits whose truth was so clearly from elsewhere. His process did not resemble in any way that of Henri Monnier, who followed in real life an individual in order to make a sketch with a pencil and a pen, drawing his least gestures, writing down his most insignificant phrases in order to obtain at the same time a photographic plate and a page of shorthand notes. Buried most of the time in the excavations of his work, Balzac could not materially observe the two thousand characters who play their role in his comedy of one hundred acts; but every man, when