It is difficult to define her influence upon him as a writer; but it was inconsiderable. To it we owe the fanciful Swedenborgian romance, _Séraphita_, and the delicately finished, clever story, _Modeste Mignon_. Death came when Balzac's intellectual powers were in their zenith. He never wrote better than in the last year of his life. Hence his fame, too, was at its height. It had grown slowly. The first score of his novels gained him no widespread reputation among the general public; but they attracted the attention of the men of talent of the younger generation, who gathered round him and watched the progress of his literary career with the deepest interest. To those of them who wished to succeed in literature he recommended three things--diligence, a solitary life, and (this half in jest) the vow of chastity. He sanctioned correspondence with the object of their affections, because "letter-writing forms one's style." The young men were astonished to receive such advice from a man whose books were invariably greeted by the press with angry shrieks of offended morality; they had yet to learn that the charge of immorality is the invariable insult hurled by literary impotence at everything in literature that is vigorous and virile. In spite of all the attacks upon it, his name was held in ever more honourable repute, and at the time of his death his contemporaries had almost grasped the fact that in Balzac they possessed one of the really great authors who imbue a whole school of art with their spirit. Not only had he laid the foundation of the modern style of novel-writing, but--true son of a century during which science has penetrated ever farther into the domain of art--he had introduced a method of observation which could be followed by others. His name in itself was a great name, but the name of the founder of a school is Legion. The fact that he did not obtain full recognition in his lifetime is explained by two deficiencies in his works.