Thus it is that Balzac was able to pack into a short book--he never wrote a long one--such an effect of crowds and events, above all such an effect of time. Nobody knows how to compress so much experience into two or three hundred pages as Balzac did unfailingly. I cannot think that this is due in the least to the laborious interweaving of his books into a single scheme; I could believe that in general a book of Balzac's suffers, rather than gains, by the recurrence of the old names that he has used already elsewhere. It is an amusing trick, but exactly what is its object? I do not speak of the ordinary "sequel," where the fortunes of somebody are followed for another stage, and where the second part is simply the continuation of the first in a direct line. But what of the famous idea of making book after book overlap and encroach and entangle itself with the rest, by the device of setting the hero of one story to figure more or less obscurely in a dozen others? The theory is, I suppose, that the characters in the background and at the corners of the action, if they are Rastignac and Camusot and Nucingen, retain the life they have acquired elsewhere, and thereby swell the life of the story in which they reappear. We are occupied for the moment with some one else, and we discover among his acquaintances a number of people whom we already know; that fact, it is implied, will add weight and authority to the story of the man in the foreground--who is himself, very likely, a man we have met casually in another book. It ought to make, it must make, his situation peculiarly real and intelligible that we find him surrounded by familiar friends of our own; and that is the artistic reason of the amazing ingenuity with which Balzac keeps them all in play.