This first idea of his was as felicitous as it was daring; he was to be type-founder, printer, bookseller, and author in one; for he himself, full of enthusiasm for his grand projects, wrote the prefaces for his editions of the classics. But, after he had persuaded his parents to put the greater part of their capital into the undertaking, after he had set agoing a type-foundry and printing establishment, and printed good, illustrated, one-volume editions of Molière and La Fontaine, the French booksellers to a man combined against their would-be colleague, flatly refused to circulate his editions, and quietly awaited his commercial ruin, to take up his idea and profit by it themselves. At the end of three years Balzac was compelled to sell his books as waste-paper, and dispose of his printing machinery at a great loss. He himself underwent all the misfortunes of the poor inventive printer in _Ève et David_. He was left not only poor, but so overburdened with debt that he had to work all the rest of his life simply to pay his creditors, regain his independence, and restore his mother's fortune. And this debt, to demolish which he had no weapon but his pen, was not a passive enemy; it grew, and attacked him from new quarters; as for long his only means of meeting one engagement was to incur another. It was in the course of these transactions that he became acquainted with all the various types of Parisian money-lenders, of whom he has given such striking portraits in Gobseck and kindred characters; and the words: "My debts! my creditors!" are constantly in his thoughts and of constant recurrence in those letters to his intimate friends in which the warm heart of the heavily burdened man allows itself free expression. "Remorse," he writes in one of his novels, "is not so bad as debt, for it cannot clap us into prison." He actually had a short experience of life in a debtor's prison, and to avoid a repetition of it had often to hide, to change his place of residence, or have his letters sent to misleading addresses. The genuine poet, he lived with his debts as with an inexhaustible source of emotion; his imagination received, as it were, a daily spur to industry when the thought of his debts awoke him and he seemed, as soon as he opened his eyes, to see his promissory notes appearing out of every corner and jumping like grasshoppers all over the room.