Balzac's country has, like the real country, its ministers, its judges, its generals, its financiers, manufacturers, merchants, and peasants. It has its priests, its town and country doctors, its men of fashion, its painters, sculptors, and designers, its poets, prose authors, and journalists, its old and its newly created aristocracy, its vain and unfaithful, and its lovable, victimised wives, its authoresses of genius and its provincial blue-stockings, its old maids, its actresses, and its host of courtesans. And the illusion is astonishing and complete. The personages reappear in one after another of the numerous novels; we make acquaintance with them in all the different stages of their lives; they are constantly being alluded to by other characters when they do not appear themselves; the descriptions of their appearance, dress, homes, habits, and daily life are as minute and exact as if they had been given by a dressmaker, a doctor, a tradesman, or a lawyer, and at the same time so vivid that we feel as if we must certainly find the person described either in the street and house indicated as his home, or else paying a call upon the distinguished lady whose salon is the rendezvous of all the people of fashion in the novels. It seems almost impossible that these beings, one and all, should be mere figments of the brain; we involuntarily think of the France of that day as peopled by them. And it is the whole of France. For Balzac described in their turn towns and districts in every part of the country.[1] Far from despising the provinces, he took a pride in displaying his intimate knowledge of all the peculiarities of their stagnant life, of their virtues, all culminating in resignation, and their vices, the offspring of narrow-mindedness. But Paris in a very special manner lives in his pages. And Balzac's Paris is not the old city of _Notre-Dame de Paris_, the picturesque, medieval capital with its marked social contrasts, its animated street life, and its superstitious ecclesiasticism; still less is it Victor Hugo's ideal Paris, that impossible New Jerusalem of intellect and enlightenment; it is the real modern city with its joy, its sorrow, and its shame--the entrancing wonder of our own age, which throws the seven of antiquity into the shade--the gigantic polypus with the hundred thousand tentacles which drag everything, near and far, into its clutches--the great cancer eating into France. The Paris of the author's own day lives in his books, with its narrow streets, of which he gives Rembrandt-like etchings, with its rattle and shrieks, its street cries in the early morning and its mighty evening chorus of voices--a sea of sound which he reproduces for us with an orchestral effect, reminding us of the men initiated into the mysteries of old, who seemed to have eaten drums and drunk cymbals.[2] Balzac knows about everything in Paris--the architecture of the houses, the furniture of