But it is not until the plots of his stories are laid in the days of the restored Legitimist monarchy that Balzac finds his true province, and produces his most acutely observed, skilfully drawn female types and his most wonderful psychological analyses. Eminently fitted as he was, with his unshrinking eye and his hard hand, to paint the dullness and the dishonesty of the reign of the Citizen King, he was poet enough to look back regretfully from the prosaic days of the plutocracy to the refined elegance and freer, gayer tone of the days of the Legitimist Monarchy. That had still been an aristocratic period; and Balzac, who, without any proper claim to the title, regarded himself as an aristocrat, had no small respect for the aristocracy; the high-born, well-bred, beautiful woman was in his eyes the flower of humanity. He was of the generation that worshipped Napoleon; Napoleon's name appears on every tenth page of his novels, and (like Victor Hugo) he dreamed of rivalling, in his own domain of literature, the Emperor's world-wide dominion; in his study stood a statuette of Napoleon, and on the scabbard of the sword he had written: "What he has conquered with the sword I will conquer with the pen." But, granted all this, he nevertheless, with his dreams, his weaknesses, his vanities and his refinements, belonged to the Legitimist Monarchy, for which, moreover, the fact that his youth had been spent under it gave him a warmer feeling. In the days of gilded state-coaches and old French ceremonial, under the shelter of ecclesiasticism and frivolity, it had been possible for liberal ideas and humane morals to thrive in the higher classes of society; they disappeared when money ascended the throne. The social life of Paris lost that refined charm for which it had been so famous. It is not surprising, then, that Balzac painted the fair sinners of the Faubourg St. Germain with a lenient hand and flattering colours. One of the most eminent women of the day, the charming Delphine de Girardin, whose salon was a fashionable resort, was a true friend to Balzac as well as to Hugo and Gautier; but as far as his works are concerned, he undoubtedly learned more from the two duchesses who personified to him the greatness of Imperial France and the gay refinement of the _ancien régime_, and with whom he became intimate almost at the beginning of his literary career. These were Madame Junot, the Duchess of Abrantés, whom he assisted in her literary pursuits, and the Duchesse de Castries, who began their acquaintance by writing anonymously to him of her interest in his works, and to whom a probably unrequited passion on his side and violent jealousy on hers long bound him. She appears in his _Histoire des Treize_ under the name of the Duchesse de Langeais.