For Balzac was not merely an observer; he was a seer. If he happened to meet a workman and his wife going home from the theatre between eleven and twelve at night, he as likely as not followed them the whole way to their little house beyond the outer boulevards. He heard them talk (the mother dragging their child after her by the hand) first of the play, then of their own affairs. They talked of the money that was to be paid them next day, spending it in imagination in twenty different ways, quarrelling during the process and revealing their characters in the squabble. And Balzac listened so intently to their complaints of the length of the winter, the dearness of potatoes, the rise in the price of turf, that he at last lived their life, and, as we are told in his _Facino Cane_, "felt their rags upon his back and walked with his feet in their soleless shoes." Their dreams, their necessities, entered into his soul, and he went about in a kind of waking dream. Whilst this mental intoxication lasted he gave up all his usual habits and became something different from himself, became the age. He did not only write his stories, he lived them; his fictitious characters were so vividly present to him that he spoke of them to his acquaintances as if they actually existed. When he undertook a journey to a place he wished to describe, he would say: "I am going to Alençon, where Mademoiselle Carmon lives; to Grenoble, where Dr. Bénassis lives." He used to give his sister the news of his imaginary world. "Do you know who it is Félix de Vandenesse is marrying? A Mademoiselle de Grandville. It is a good match, in spite of all Mademoiselle de Bellefeuille has cost the family." One day when Jules Sandeau was speaking of his sister, who was ill, Balzac, who had been listening absently for some time, suddenly said: "This is all very well, my friend; but now to return to _realities_--let us talk of Eugénie Grandet." It was necessary that the illusion in his own case should be as strong as this, if he was to communicate it to others with approximate strength. His imagination had the commanding power which allows no doubt to arise. It exercised this quality in practical matters too. Amongst the hundreds of projects which occurred to him as possible means of freeing himself from debt, was that of covering the bare fields surrounding the little country-house of Les Jardies (which he had bought that he might have a security to give his mother) with enormous forcing-houses, which, because of the entire absence of shelter from the sun's rays, would require very little artificial heat. In these forcing-houses a hundred thousand pine-apples were to be grown, which, sold at five francs each, instead of at the ordinary price of twenty, would yield the fortunate grower a yearly income of 400,000 francs "without his requiring to produce a scrap of manuscript." With such convincing eloquence did the originator of this plan demonstrate the absolute certainty of its