school seems to wish to claim as its leader, has no connection to its features. Unlike certain literary persons who feed on nothing but their own genius, Balzac read a great deal and with a prodigious rapidity. He loved books, and he created a beautiful library that he intended to leave to the town of his birth, an idea that the indifference of the townspeople made him later abandon. He absorbed in a few days the voluminous works of Swedenborg, which were owned by his mother, who was rather preoccupied with mysticism at that time, and that reading was responsible for Séraphita-Séraphitus, one of the most astonishing products of modern literature. Never did Balzac approach, or move closer to ideal beauty than in that book: the ascension of the mountain has a quality that is ethereal, supernatural, and luminous that lifts you from the earth. The only two colors that are employed are celestial blue and snow white with a few pearlescent tones for shadow. I know nothing more intoxicating than this beginning. The panorama of Norway, with its sharply cut coastline seen from this height, dazzles and gives one vertigo. Louis Lambert was also influenced by the reading of Swedenborg; but soon Balzac, who had taken on the eagle wings of the mystics to soar into the infinite, descended to the earth that we inhabit, even though his robust lungs could have breathed indefinitely the thin air that is deadly for the weak: he abandoned the world beyond after that flight and returned to real life. Perhaps his remarkable genius would have gone out of view too quickly if he had continued to soar toward the unfathomable immensities of metaphysics, and we should be happy that he limited himself to Louis Lambert and Séraphita-Séraphitus, which represent sufficiently, in La Comédie Humaine, the supernatural side, and open a door that is sufficiently large into the invisible world. I now move on to a few more intimate details. The great Goethe had a horror of three things: one of the things was tobacco smoke, I am not permitted to say the two others. Balzac, like the Jupiter of the German poetic Olympus, could not stand tobacco in any form at all; he denounced the pipe and forbid the cigar. He did not tolerate even a light Spanish cigarette; the Asian hookah alone found favor with him, and yet he only tolerated that as a curiosity and because of its local color. In his diatribes against the herb of Nicot, he did not imitate the doctor who, during a dissertation on the dangers of tobacco, does not hesitate to take ample doses from a large box of tobacco near him: he never smoked. His Théorie des Excitants contains an indictment against tobacco, and there is no doubt that if he had been Sultan, like Amurath, he would have beheaded relapsed and obstinate smokers. He reserved all of his predilections for coffee, which did him so much harm and might have killed him, although he was built to become a centenarian.