The notorious debts were finally paid, the dream union completed, the nest made for happiness padded and covered with down; as if they had foreseen his approaching end, those who envied Balzac started to praise him: Les Parents Pauvres, Le Cousin Pons, where the genius of the author shines in all its radiance, united all opinions. It was too beautiful; nothing more remained for him but to die.
 His illness made rapid progress, but nobody believed that there would be a fatal outcome, so much we all trusted in the athletic constitution of Balzac. I thought firmly that he would bury us all.
 I was going to take a trip to Italy. And before leaving I wanted to say goodbye to my illustrious friend. He had left in a carriage to collect from customs some exotic curiosity. I drew away reassured, and at the moment that I returned to my carriage, I was given a note from Madame de Balzac, which explained to me obligingly and with polite regrets why I had not found her husband at home. At the bottom of the letter, Balzac had scrawled these words. "I can neither read, nor write. "De Balzac." I have preserved like a relic that ominous line, probably the last that was written by the author of La Comédie Humaine; it was, and I did not understand it right away, the final cry, "My God, why have you forsaken me!" of the thinker and of the worker. The idea that Balzac could die did not even occur to me. A few days after that, I was eating ice cream at the Café Florian, on the Piazza Saint Marco; in my hand I found the Journal des Débats, one of the few French papers that was available in Venice, and I saw in it the announcement of the death of Balzac. I almost fell from my chair onto the stones of the Piazza at this sudden news, and my pain was quickly mixed with an impulse of indignation and outrage that was not very Christian, because all souls have an equal value before God. I had just visited the insane asylum on the island of San-Servolo, and I saw there decrepit idiots, doddering octogenarians, human worms who are not even guided by animal instinct, and I asked myself why this luminous brain was extinguished like a flame on which one blows, while tenacious life persisted in these murky heads that were dimly traversed by fickle rays. Nine years have already passed since that fatal date. Posterity has commenced for Balzac; every day he seems greater. When he was in the company of his contemporaries, he was poorly appreciated, he was seen only in fragments under sometimes unfavorable circumstances: now the edifice that he built rises as one draws further away, like the cathedral of a city that conceals the neighboring houses, and which on the horizon appears immense above the flattened roofs. The monument is not completed, but, such as it is, it terrifies by its enormity, and surprised generations will ask themselves who is the giant who alone has raised these formidable blocks and built so high this Babel that made all of society sing.