This illustration gains logically, much more than loses, from the rank predominance of the money-question, the money-vision, throughout all Balzac. There are lights in which it can scarce not appear to us that his own interest is greater, his possibilities of attention truer, in these pressing particulars than in all other questions put together; there could be no better sign of the appreciation of “things,” exactly, than so never relaxed a grasp of the part played in the world by just these. Things for things, the franc, the shilling, the dollar, are the very most underlying and conditioning, even dramatically, even poetically, that call upon him; and we have everywhere to recognise how little he feels himself to be telling us of this, that and the other person unless he has first given us full information, with every detail, either as to their private means, their income, investments, savings, losses, the state in fine of their pockets, or as to their immediate place of habitation, their home, their outermost shell, with its windows and doors, its outside appearance and inside plan, its rooms and furniture and arrangements, its altogether intimate facts, down to its very smell. This prompt and earnest evocation of the shell and its lining is but another way of testifying with due emphasis to economic conditions. The most personal shell of all, the significant dress of the individual, whether man or woman, is subject to as sharp and as deep a notation—it being no small part of his wealth of luck that the age of dress differentiated and specialised from class to class and character to character, not least moreover among men, could still give him opportunities of choice, still help him to define and intensify, or peculiarly to _place_ his apparitions. The old world in which costume had, to the last refinement of variety, a social meaning happily lingered on for him; and nothing is more interesting, nothing goes further in this sense of the way the social concrete could minister to him, than the fact that “César Birotteau,” to instance that masterpiece again, besides being a money-drama of the closest texture, the very epic of retail bankruptcy, is at the same time the all-vividest exhibition of the habited and figured, the representatively stamped and countenanced, buttoned and buckled state of the persons moving through it. No livelier example therefore can we name of the triumphant way in which any given, or as we should rather say taken, total of conditions works out under our author’s hand for accentuation of type. The story of poor Birotteau is just in this supreme degree a hard total, even if every one’s money-relation does loom larger, for his or her case, than anything else.