Poor Allenet! It was not long afterwards that we accompanied his body to the grave, one gloomy afternoon towards the end of autumn--all of us who had known and loved him. He is dead also, that other Balzacian who was so much interested in this work, and for whom the /Comedie Humaine/ was an absorbing thought, Honore Granoux. He was a merchant of Marseilles, with a wan aspect and already an invalid when I met him. But he became animated when speaking of Balzac; and with what a mysterious, conspiratorlike veneration did he pronounce these words: "The Vicomte"--meaning, of course, to the thirty-third degree Balzacolatrites, that incomparable bibliophile to whom we owe the history of the novelist's works, M. de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul!--"The Vicomte will approve--or disapprove." That was the unvarying formula for Granoux, who had devoted himself to the enormous task of collecting all the articles, small or great, published about Balzac since his entry as a writer. And just see what a fascination this /devil of a man/--as Theophile Gautier once called him--exercises over his followers; I am fully convinced that these little details of Balzacian mania will cause the reader to smile. As for me, I have found them, and still find them, as natural as Balzac's own remark to Jules Sandeau, who was telling him about a sick sister: "Let us go back to reality. Who is going to marry Eugenie Grandet?" Fascination! That is the only word that quite characterizes the sort of influence wielded by Balzac over those who really enjoy him; and it is not to-day that the phenomenon began. Vallies pointed it out long ago in an eloquent page of the /Refractaires/ concerning "book victims." Saint Beuve, who can scarcely be suspected of fondness towards the editor-in-chief of the /Revue Parisienne/, tells a story stranger and more significant than every other. At one time an entire social set in Venice, and the most aristocratic, decided to give out among its members different characters drawn from the /Comedie Humaine/; and some of these roles, the critic adds, mysteriously, were artistically carried out to the very end;--a dangerous experiment, for we are well aware that the heroes and heroines of Balzac often skirt the most treacherous abysses of the social Hell.