He set to work with herculean energy, and worked, one may say without a pause, through all the years of his youth and manhood, until, at the age of fifty, he collapsed from over-exertion--fell as suddenly as the bull that has received its death-thrust on a Spanish arena. The reason of production being so little of a pleasure, so entirely a labour to him, is to be sought in the fact that, though his great and active imaginative power was unceasingly impelling him to write, it was not supported by any innate or early acquired stylistic skill. In mastery of form Balzac was not the equal of many of his contemporaries. He never succeeded in writing a pleasing poem (those which are to be found in his novels are the work of others--Madame de Girardin, Théophile Gautier, Charles de Bernard, Lasailly), and he and none other was the author of the much derided, halting line with which his Louis Lambert begins the epic of the Incas: "O Inca! ô roi infortuné et malheureux!" Novel after novel did he write under a pseudonym and repudiate before he attained to a style; his struggle to obtain the mastery of French prose was a desperate one; and it was one of his greatest griefs that the young Romanticists who followed in the steps of Victor Hugo long refused to acknowledge him as a real artist. The delicately sympathetic Gautier, ever ready to admire, was the only author to greet him with prompt recognition. But Balzac's astonishment was boundless when he saw young Gautier, without preparation or any great exertion, and without needing to make any corrections, fling off, at a desk in the printer's office, an article irreproachable in both style and matter. It was long before he could be persuaded that Gautier had not had his _feuilleton_ ready in his head. At last he grasped the fact that there is such a thing as innate faculty of style, a faculty which had been denied him. How he toiled to acquire it! How ardently he admired Gautier when he really comprehended the quality of his plastic talent! We come upon a curious proof of this so late as the year 1839, when Balzac, in describing the principal female characters in his novel _Beatrix_, employs almost word for word descriptions from articles written by Gautier two years previously on Jenny Colon and Mademoiselle Georges, the actresses.[1] We feel, in comparing the passages, how eagerness when we see how commonplace and feeble the additions from his own vocabulary are.