The way of her doing this is wonderfully told, and the various characters, minor as well as major, muster in wonderful strength. I do not know that Balzac has made quite the most of Hector Hulot's vice --in fact, here, as elsewhere, I think the novelist is not happy in treating this particular deadly sin. The man is a rather disgusting and wholly idiotic old fribble rather than a tragic victim of Libitina. So also his wife is too angelic. But Crevel, the very pattern and model of the vicious bourgeois who had made his fortune; and Wenceslas Steinbock, pattern again and model of the foibles of _Polen aus der Polackei_; and Hortense, with the better energy of the Hulots in her; and the loathsome reptile Marneffe, and Victoria, and Celestine, and the Brazilian (though he, to be sure, is rather a transpontine _rastaqouere_), and all the rest are capital, and do their work capitally. But they would not be half so fine as they are if, behind them, there were not the savage Pagan naturalism of Lisbeth Fischer, the "angel of the family"--and a black angel indeed. One of the last and largest of Balzac's great works--the very last of them, if we accept _La Cousine Bette_, to which is pendant and contrast--_Le Cousin Pons_ has always united suffrages from very different classes of admirers. In the first place, it is not "disagreeable," as the common euphemism has it, and as _La Cousine Bette_ certainly is. In the second, it cannot be accused of being a _berquinade_, as those who like Balzac best when he is doing moral rag-picking are apt to describe books like _Le Medecin de Campagne_ and _Le Lys dans la Vallee_, if not even like _Eugenie Grandet_. It has a considerable variety of interest; its central figure is curiously pathetic and attractive, even though the curse of something like folly, which so often attends Balzac's good characters, may a little weigh on him. It would be a book of exceptional charm even if it were anonymous, or if we knew no more about the author than we know about Shakespeare. As it happens, however, _Le Cousin Pons_ has other attractions than this. In the first place, Balzac is always great--perhaps he is at his greatest--in depicting a mania, a passion, whether the subject be pleasure or gold-hunger or parental affection. Pons has two manias, and the one does not interfere with, but rather helps, the other. But this would be nothing if it were not that his chief mania, his ruling passion, is one of Balzac's own. For, as we have often had occasion to notice, Balzac is not by any means one of the great impersonal artists. He can do many things; but he is never at his best in doing any unless his own personal interests, his likings and hatreds, his sufferings and enjoyments, are concerned. He was a kind of actor-manager in his _Comedie Humaine_; and perhaps, like other actor-managers, he took rather disproportionate care of the parts which he played himself.