I am certain no one but Balzac--except it be some of the rougher, homelier Dutch painters--has caught the spirit of those mellow, sensual "interiors" of typical country houses, with their mixture of grossness and avarice and inveterate conservatism; where an odour of centuries of egotism emanates from every piece of furniture against the wall and from every gesture of every person seated over the fire! One is plunged indeed into the dim, sweet, brutal heart of reality here, and the imagination finds starting places for its wanderings from the mere gammons of dried bacon hanging from the smoky rafters and the least gross repartee and lewd satyrish jest of the rustic Grangousier and Gargamelle who quaff their amber-coloured cider under the flickering of candles. If he did not pile up his descriptions of old furniture, old warehouses, old barns, old cellars, old shops, old orchards and old gardens, this thick human atmosphere--overlaid, generation after generation, by the sensual proclivities of the children of the earth--would never possess the unction of verisimilitude which it has. If he were all the while fussing about his style in the exhausting Flaubert manner, the rich dim reek of all this time-mellowed humanity would never strike our senses as it does. Thus much one can see quite clearly from reading de Maupassant, Flaubert's pupil, whose stark and savage strokes of clean-cut visualisation never attain the imaginative atmosphere or Rabelaisian aplomb of Balzac's rural scenes. But supreme as he is in his provincial towns and villages, one cannot help associating him even more intimately with the streets and squares and river banks of Paris. I suppose Balzac has possessed himself of Paris and has ransacked and ravished its rare mysteries more completely than any other writer. I once stayed in a hotel called the Louis le Grand in the Rue Louis le Grand, and I shall never forget the look of a certain old Parisian Banking-House, now altered into some other building, which was visible through the narrow window of my high-placed room. That very house is definitely mentioned somewhere in the Human Comedy; but mentioned or not, its peculiar Balzacian air, crowded round by sloping roofs and tall white houses, brought all the great desperate passionate scenes into my mind. I saw old Goriot crying aloud upon his "unkind daughters." I saw Baron Hulot dragged away from the beseeching eyes and clinging arms of his last little inamorata to the bedside of his much wronged wife. I saw the Duchesse de Langeais, issuing forth from the chamber of her victim-victor, pale and tragic, and with love and despair in her heart.