The ring, however, had a singular history in Balzac's dreamland. It was impressed with the seal of the Prophet, and had been stolen by the English from the Great Mogul. Balzac had or had not been informed by the Turkish ambassador that that potentate would repurchase it with tons of gold and diamonds, and was benevolent enough to propose that his friend should share in the stores which would exceed the dreams of Aladdin. How far these and other such fancies were a merely humorous protest against the harsh realities of life, may be a matter of speculation; but it is less doubtful that the fictitious personages with whom Balzac surrounded himself lived and moved in his imagination as distinctly as the flesh-and-blood realities who were treading the pavement of Paris. He did not so much invent characters and situations as watch his imaginary world, and compile the memories of its celebrities. All English readers are acquainted with the little circle of clergymen and wives who inhabit the town of Barchester. Balzac has carried out the same device on a gigantic scale. He has peopled not a country town but a metropolis. There is a whole society, with the members of which we are intimate, whose family secrets are revealed to us, and who drop in, as it were, in every novel of a long series, as if they were old friends. When, for example, young Victurnien d'Esgrignon comes to Paris he makes acquaintance, we are told, with De Marsay, Maxime de Trailles, Les Lupeaulx, Rastignac, Vandenesse, Ajuda-Pinto, the Duchesses de Grandlieu, de Carigliano, de Chaulieu, the Marquises d'Espard, d'Aiglemont, and De Listomere, Madame Firmiani, the Comtesse de Serizy, and various other heads of the fashionable world. Every one of these special characters has a special history. He or she appears as the hero or heroine of one story, and plays subsidiary parts in a score of others. They recall to us innumerable scandalous episodes, with which anybody who lives in the imaginary society of Balzac's Paris feels it a duty to be as familiar as a back-stairs politician with the gossip of the House of Commons. The list just given is a mere fragment of the great circle to which Balzac introduces us. The history of their performances is intimately connected with the history of the time; nay, it is sometimes essential to a full comprehension of recent events. Bishop Proudie, we fear, would scarcely venture to take an active part in the Roman Catholic emancipation; he would be dissolved into thin air by contact with more substantial forms; but if you would appreciate the intrigues which were going on at Paris during the campaign of Marengo, you must study the conversations which took place between Talleyrand, Fouche, Sieyes, Carnot, and Malin, and their relations to that prince of policemen, the well-known Corentin. De Marsay, we are told, with audacious precision of time and place, was President of the Council in 1833.