Cousin Pons tells the story of a collector of curios, for whose property various relatives are intriguing. Cousine Bette teaches us the lengths to which a Parisian middle-class family will go to get the money to maintain their respectability, and the catastrophes which are likely to follow when character is rotten at the bottom. Madame de Langeais is one of the shorter and more exciting stories of Parisian love. César Birroteau portrays the typical life of a Parisian lawyer, and The House of Nucingen that of a Parisian banker, while in The Illustrious Gaudissart we have the French drummer or travelling salesman. In still another series of novels, much less generally read, Balzac goes into philosophy and even the mysticism of Swedenborg. The most philosophic of these novels is Louis Lambert, the most mystical and Swedenborgian is Seraphita, the story of an angel, so to speak. The Magic Skin is symbolistic, and The Search for the Absolute gives us most realistically the mystic and self-sacrificing life of an inventor. Zola has attempted to do for his time what Balzac did for his, and in stories of the Rougon-Macquart family tells us the life histories of as varied a series of characters. The thing that made Balzac great, however, is his profound knowledge of human nature and the laws of human life, while Zola is bent on telling the thrilling stories he has found in different classes of society which, as a journalist, he has investigated. Balzac and Zola handle contemporary life in much the same spirit that the romantic novelists handle the life of a past age; but Balzac is also a realistic student of character, and the interest in his characters predominates over the interest in his subjects and scenes. He is as much a master of description, however, as Scott or Victor Hugo. But much of Balzac’s and Zola’s realism is distasteful to the English or American reader. To be appreciated they must be read intellectually and not emotionally.