Honoré Balzac, or de Balzac, as he loved to call himself--though really there was no “noble” blood in his veins--was baptized under the name of Balssa. He was born on May 20, 1799, at Tours. His mother, Laure Sallambier, was a Parisian; his father, a provincial from Languedoc. After completing his studies in Paris, Honoré began the study of law at the age of seventeen, but after eighteen months’ apprenticeship to an attorney and a second year and a half’s service to a notary, his literary ambition began to turn him away from the law. Already at the age of twenty he had conceived the idea of a drama on Cromwell, but after fifteen months’ labor, he read it to a company of friends who received it coldly. In 1822, he made his first essay at the novel, under the title, _The Inheritress de Birague_. From this time on he labored incessantly in producing the gigantic works which have immortalized his name. Debt was always threatening to overwhelm Balzac, for in the days of his largest income his free life and passion for luxuries kept him constantly in danger of going down in the flood. Once, in 1825, when his first novels produced but little return, he felt compelled to leave his vocation of letters to become bookseller, printer, and type-founder. But after three years of disaster, resulting in one hundred thousand francs of debt, he once more took up his pen, this time to succeed most splendidly--though it required ten years of strenuous, almost frenzied, production to clear him of his obligations. The story of his loves is closely knit with his literary career, as are also the records of his minglings with the men of his day, but no such brief monograph as this can even refer adequately to the details of his personal life. Inspiration, observation, and labor were its dominant notes throughout. Two thousand distinct characters move as in life through his forty-seven volumes of more than sixteen thousand aggregate pages, all produced in twenty-five years of actual pen-craft. What a monument for the titan who in 1850 passed away in his prime! * * * * * There are two marked tendencies of extreme displayed by the short-story: The first, and the more modern, is a fondness for over-compression; that is, the practice of skeletonizing the story, of giving little more than a bare, swift outline of the action, and only so much accessory material as may be needed to round out a body decently clothed upon with flesh. The story is everything, the setting almost nothing. It scarcely need be said that this tendency comes perilously near to robbing the short-story of the literary qualities which it should rightly display. A few of Maupassant’s compact and abrupt shorter fictions may serve to illustrate this characteristic--not to mention unhappy examples all too prevalent to-day.