or else it consists in passion for a certain limited time invalidating everything else, everything previous, and ennobling with its glow. Maternal love, wifely love, the bashful tenderness of the young girl, are painted by Balzac during this period with as masterly a touch as the unbridled erotic passion of the courtesan.[2] He shows us the Frenchwoman of four different historical periods. First, the Frenchwoman of the days of the Revolution. In that little masterpiece, _Le Réquisitionnaire_, one of his few perfectly proportioned stories, he represents, with the Reign of Terror as a background, a mother's love for her son. The little out-of-the-way town and Madame de Dey's curious house are drawn with a few strokes. Apprehension of the possible fate of a son who has been condemned to death; the expectation of his arrival in the disguise of a soldier who is to be quartered on her; the terrible anxiety, increasing from hour to hour till late at night; the apparently mysterious arrival of the young soldier who, unseen by the mistress of the house, is at once conducted to the bedchamber comfortably prepared for him; the mother's torturing restlessness and almost uncontrollable joy when she hears his steps in the room above, but feels obliged, in order not to betray his arrival, to continue her conversation in the drawing-room; her hurried entrance into his room, and the frightful discovery that the person who has arrived is not her son, but a real recruit--all this, compressed into a few pages, is described with extraordinary power and truth to nature. Next Balzac paints the women of the Napoleonic period, upon a background of military pomp and splendour, in all the glow and warmth of their admiration for the successful warriors. His picture bears the impress of the restless, pleasure-seeking haste with which life was lived at a time when it was possible for the young woman "to become fiancée, wife, mother, and widow between a first and a fifth bulletin from the Grande Armée," and when the near prospect of widowhood or honours or an immortal name, made the women more reckless and the officers more seductive. A period and a distinct female type are represented in the description of the review in the Tuileries Gardens, and of the evening party at the time of the battle of Wagram (in _La Femme de trente Ans_ and _La Paix du Ménage_).