At the beginning of the Thirties, Balzac has, of course, not yet begun to write of society under the Constitutional Monarchy, its women and their passions. This happens later. And when it does happen, what we observe is, that he as a rule envisages this new material much more gloomily and austerely. The feeling of spring has vanished. Woman and love still form the centre of interest in many of the books. But affection has become passion and passion has become depravity. We read little of unselfish feeling and innocent sympathies, much of self-interested calculation, on the part of women as well as of men, nay, especially on the part of women; even in love, and still more when it is only a substitute for love which is described. In many of these novels the courtesan thrusts the fine lady into the background, and occasionally the former is represented as more disinterested than the latter. Abysses of selfishness and vice open before the reader's eyes. [1] _Cf_. Th. Gautier, _Portraits contemporains_, p. 108. [2] See _Le Message, La Grenadière, La Femme abandonnée, La grande Brétèche, Madame Firmiani, Une Fille d'Eve_, and _La Femme de trente Ans_, which last work is a collection of stories not originally written in connection with each other. XV BALZAC Of the books published by Balzac in 1833 and 1834, two are especially deserving of notice--the delicately wrought, classic tale, _Eugénie Grandet_, and the powerful, fateful _Père Goriot_. In the first-mentioned work Balzac competes with Molière (_l'Avare_) in the second with no less a writer than Shakespeare (_King Lear_).