The third of the series, _La Fille aux Yeux d’Or_, in some respects one of Balzac’s most brilliant effects, has been looked at askance by many of his English readers. At one time he had the audacity to think of calling it _La Femme aux Yeux Rouges_. To those who consider the story morbid or, one may say, _bizarre_, one word of justification, hardly of apology, may be offered. It was in the scheme of the _Comedie Humaine_ to survey social life in its entirety by a minute analysis of its most diverse constituents. It included all the pursuits and passions, was large and patient, and unafraid. And the patience, the curiosity, of the artist which made Cesar Birotteau and his bankrupt ledgers matters of high import to us, which did not shrink from creating a Vautrin and a Lucien de Rubempre, would have been incomplete had it stopped short of a Marquise de San-Real, of a Paquita Valdes. And in the great mass of the _Comedie Humaine_, with its largeness and reality of life, as in life itself; the figure of Paquita justifies its presence. Considering the _Histoire des Treize_ as a whole, it is of engrossing interest. And I must confess I should not think much of any boy who, beginning Balzac with this series, failed to go rather mad over it. I know there was a time when I used to like it best of all, and thought not merely _Eugenie Grandet_, but _Le Pere Goriot_ (though not the _Peau de Chagrin_), dull in comparison. Some attention, however, must be paid to two remarkable characters, on whom it is quite clear that Balzac expended a great deal of pains, and one of whom he seems to have “caressed,” as the French say, with a curious admixture of dislike and admiration. The first, Bourignard or Ferragus, is, of course, another, though a somewhat minor example--Collin or Vautrin being the chief--of that strange tendency to take intense interest in criminals, which seems to be a pretty constant eccentricity of many human minds, and which laid an extraordinary grasp on the great French writers of Balzac’s time. I must confess, though it may sink me very low in some eyes, that I have never been able to fully appreciate the attractions of crime and criminals, fictitious or real. Certain pleasant and profitable things, no doubt, retain their pleasure and their profit, to some extent, when they are done in the manner which is technically called criminal; but they seem to me to acquire no additional interest by being so. As the criminal of fact is, in the vast majority of cases, an exceedingly commonplace and dull person, the criminal of fiction seems to me only, or usually, to escape these curses by being absolutely improbable and unreal. But I know this is a terrible heresy.