We follow Delphine as she drives, with Rastignac by her side, in her own carriage to the ball. The young man, who is well aware that she would drive over her father's corpse to show herself at this ball, but who is neither able to give her up nor brave enough to incur her displeasure by reproaching her, cannot refrain from saying a few words about the old man's pitiable condition. The tears come into her eyes. "I shall look ugly if I cry," she thinks; and they dry at once. "To-morrow morning I shall go to my father," she says, "and nurse him, and never leave his pillow." And she means what she says. She is not a radically bad woman, but she is a living picture of the discords of society; she belongs to the lower classes by birth, to the upper by marriage; she is rich, but the humiliating conditions of her marriage deprive her of the control of her fortune; she is pleasure-loving, empty-minded, and ambitious. Balzac's creative power was not equal to the production of a simple, pure, Shakespearean Cordelia; his region is not the region of the noble; but he has created a Regan and a Goneril who are more human and true to life than the great Englishman's. [1] "Mon Dieu! pleurer, elle a pleuré?"--"La tête sur mon gilet," dit Eugène.--"Oh! donnez-le-moi, ce gilet," dit le père Goriot. XVI BALZAC One day in 1836 Balzac appeared in his sister's room in the wildest of spirits. Imitating the gestures of a drum-major with his thick cane (on the cornelian handle of which was engraved in Turkish a sultan's motto: "I am the destroyer of obstacles"), he shouted to her during the pauses of an accompaniment of martial music made with his tongue: "Congratulate me, little one, for I am on the point of becoming a genius." He had conceived the idea of combining all his novels, those already published and those yet to be written, into one great work--_La Comédie Humaine_. The plan was stupendous and perfectly original; nothing of the kind existed in any known literature; it was a product of the same genius for systématisation which at the beginning of his career had inspired him with the idea of writing a series of historical romances embracing a succession of centuries. But this was a far more interesting and fertile idea. For, if the work were successful, it would possess the same force of illusion as if it dealt with historic facts, and it would, moreover, not merely be a little fragment of life symbolically and artistically enlarged into an image of the whole, but might justly lay claim to be, in the scientific sense of the word, a whole. In the _Divina Commedia_ Dante had, as it were, focussed all the philosophy and experience of life of the Middle Ages; his ambitious rival purposed giving to the world by means of two to three thousand characters, which each represented hundreds of others, a complete psychology of all the different classes of French society, and thus, indirectly, of his age. It is undeniable that the result was something unique.