Was Balzac wrong or right? Is tobacco, as he maintained, a deadly poison and does it intoxicate those that it does not turn stupid? Is it the opium of the Occident that dulls the will and the intelligence? These are questions that I cannot answer; but I am going to list here the names of some celebrated personages of our age, some of whom smoked while the others did not smoke: Goethe, Heinrich Heine, uniquely for Germans, did not smoke; Byron smoked; Victor Hugo does not smoke, neither does Alexandre Dumas père; on the other hand Alfred de Musset, Eugène Sue, Georges Sand, Mérimée, Paul de Saint-Victor, Emile Augier, Ponsard, smoked and still smoke; however they are not exactly imbeciles. This aversion, moreover, was shared by nearly all men who were born in our century or a little before. Only sailors and soldiers smoked then; at the odor of the pipe or the cigar, women fainted: they have become much tougher since then, and more than one pair of rosy lips has pressed with love the golden tip of a cigar, in a sitting room turned into a smoking room. Dowagers and turbaned mothers alone have preserved their old antipathy, and stoically watch their unfashionable salons be deserted by the youth. Every time that Balzac is obliged, for the credibility of the story, to allow one of his characters to indulge in this horrible habit, his brief and disdainful sentence betrays a secret disapproval: "As for de Marsay," he said, "he was busy smoking cigars." And he must have really loved this captain of dandyism to permit him to smoke in his work.