The Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul rescued a page of the first of Balzac's letters to Madame Hanska which has been found up to this time, from a cobbler whose stall was opposite the house. The cobbler, when once started on the quest by the Vicomte, discovered many other letters, sketches, and unfinished novels, which had been picked up by the neighbouring shopkeepers, and were only saved in the nick of time from being used to wrap up pounds of butter, or to make bags for other household commodities. It was an exciting chase, requiring patience and ingenuity; and Balzac's former cook held out for years, before she would consent to sell a packet of letters which the Vicomte coveted specially. Sometimes incidentally there were delightful surprises, and occasionally real joys; as on the occasion when the searcher found at a distant grocer's shop, the middle of the letter, of which the first page had been saved from destruction at the hands of the cobbler. The bitter dislike Balzac had evoked in the literary world, and his occasional obscurity and clumsy style, have militated very strongly against his popularity in his native land, where perfection in the manipulation of words is of supreme importance in a writer. While in France, however, Balzac's undoubted faults have partially blinded his countrymen to his consummate merits as a writer, and they have been strangely slow in acknowledging the debt of gratitude they owe to him, the rest or the world has already begun to realise his power of creating type, his wonderful imagination, his versatility, and his extraordinary impartiality; and to accord him his rightful place among the Immortals. Nevertheless we are still too near to him, to be able to focus him clearly, and to estimate aright his peculiar place in literature, or the full scope of his genius. Some very great authorities claim him as a member of the Romantic School; while, on the other hand, he is often looked on--apparently with more reason--as the first of the Realists. His object in writing was, he tells us, to represent mankind as he saw it, to be the historian of the nineteenth century, and to classify human beings as Buffon had classified animals. No doubt this scheme was very imperfectly carried out: certainly the powerful mind of Balzac with its wealth of imagination, often projected itself into his puppets, so that many of his characters are not the ordinary men and women he wished to portray, but are inspired by the fire of genius. This fact does not, however, alter the aim of their creator. He intended to be merely a chronicler, a scientific observer of things around him; and though his works are tinged to a large extent with the Romanticism of the powerful school in vogue in his day, this object marks him plainly as the forerunner of the Realists, the founder of a totally new conception of the scope and range of the novel.