[2] Merely to show exactly what I mean, I give a single example. The courtesan Josépha asks the old, worn-out roué, Baron Hulot, one of Napoleon's generals, if it is true that he has caused the death of his brother and his uncle, brought misery and disgrace upon his family, and defrauded the government, all to gratify his mistress's whims. "Le baron inclina tristement la tête.--Eh bien! j'aime cela! s'écria Josépha, qui se leva pleine d'enthousiasme. C'est un _brûlage générale_! c'est Sardanapale! c'est grand! c'est complet! On est une canaille, mais on a du cœur. Eh bien! moi j'aime mieux un mange-tout passionné comme toi pour les femmes que ces froids banquiers sans âme qu'on dit vertueux et qui ruinent des milliers de familles avec leurs rails.... Ça n'est pas comme toi, mon vieux; tu es un homme à passions; on te ferait vendre ta patrie! Aussi, vois-tu, je suis prête à tout faire pour toi! Tu es mon père, tu m'as lancée! c'est sacré. Que te faut-il? Veux-tu cent mille francs? On s'exterminera le tempérament pour te les gagner." Do not these words give life to the woman who speaks and the man she addresses? [3] (The lady's name was Madame de Bemy. Letters to Louise, Nos. I. and XXII., the letter to his mother, dated Jan. I, 1836, and that of October 1836 to Madame Hanska, taken in combination, show this plainly. XIII BALZAC Balzac's earliest literary model was, as already mentioned, Sir Walter Scott, an author of whom he can never have reminded any one, and with whom, when his genius reaches its maturity, he has hardly anything in common. The writer of the _Comédie Humaine_ was a man of far too modern a spirit to be able to remain faithful to historic fiction. He felt no home-sickness for any past century; he had amassed a vast wealth of observation, and involuntarily chose themes in which he could turn this to the best account. He was dimly conscious that the writer of historical novels, unless he be content simply to thrust the characters which he has before him as models into antiquated costumes, must take his modern, personal, psychological observations, and, as it were, force them back into a more primitive age--a difficult task, the attempt at which seldom resulted in more than a thinly disguised reproduction of the manners and customs of the writer's contemporaries, or at any rate of their ideas. It was not in Balzac's nature to collect information laboriously from old chronicles; he studied the living men and women of his own day.