These things, however, are very much a case of "As You Like It" or "As It Strikes You," and I have said that _Le Cure de Tours_ strikes some good judges as of exceptional merit, while no one can refuse it merit in a high degree. I should not, except for the opening, place it in the very highest class of the _Comedie_, but it is high beyond all doubt in the second. The third part (The Two Brothers/A Bachelor's Establishment) of _Les Celibataires_ takes very high rank among its companions. As in most of his best books, Balzac has set at work divers favorite springs of action, and has introduced personages of whom he has elsewhere given, not exactly replicas--he never did that--but companion portraits. And he has once more justified the proceeding amply. Whether he has not also justified the reproach, such as it is, of those who say that to see the most congenial expression of his fullest genius, you must go to his bad characters and not to his good, readers shall determine for themselves after reading the book. It was the product of the year 1842, when the author was at the ripest of his powers, and after which, with the exception of _Les Parents Pauvres_, he produced not much of his very best save in continuations and rehandlings of earlier efforts. He changed his title a good deal, and in that MS. correction of a copy of the _Comedie_ which has been taken, perhaps without absolutely decisive authority, as the basis of the _Edition Definitive_, he adopted _La Rabouilleuse_ as his latest favorite. This, besides its quaintness, has undoubted merit as fixing the attention on one at least of the chief figures of the book, while _Un Menage de garcon_ only obliquely indicates the real purport of the novel. Jean-Jacques Rouget is a most unfortunate creature, who anticipates Baron Hulot as an example of absolute dependence on things of the flesh, _plus_ a kind of cretinism, which Hulot, to do him justice, does not exhibit even in his worst degradation. But his "bachelor establishment," though undoubtedly useful for the purposes of the story, might have been changed for something else, and his personality have been considerably altered, without very much affecting the general drift of the fiction.