Unless he had been self-centered, Balzac could never have left behind him his enormous and prodigious work. In spite of certain unlovely phases of his private character and failure to fulfil his literary and financial obligations, he was a man of great personal charm. Though at various times he was under consideration for election to the French Academy, his name is not found numbered among the "forty immortals." But he was the greatest of French novelists, a great creator of characters, who by some competent critics has been ranked with Shakespeare, and he has left to posterity the incomparable, though unfinished /Comedie humaine/, which is in itself sufficient for his "immortality." CHAPTER II RELATIVES AND FAMILY FRIENDS BALZAC'S MOTHER "Farewell, my dearly beloved mother! I embrace you with all my heart. Oh! if you knew how I need just now to cast myself upon your breast as a refuge of complete affection, you would insert a little word of tenderness in your letters, and this one which I am answering has not even a poor kiss. There is nothing but . . . Ah! Mother, Mother, this is very bad! . . . You have misconstrued what I said to you, and you do not understand my heart and affection. This grieves me most of all! . . ." The above extract is sadly typical of a relationship of thirty years, 1820-1850, between a mother, on the one hand, who never understood or appreciated her son--and a son, on the other, whose longings for maternal affection were never fully gratified. To his mother Balzac dedicated /Le Medicin de Campagne/, one of his finest sociological studies. Madame Surville has described Balzac's mother, and her own, as being rich, beautiful, and much younger than her husband, and as having a rare vivacity of mind and of imagination, an untiring activity, a great firmness of decision, and an unbounded devotion to her family; but as expressing herself in actions rather than in words. She devoted herself exclusively to the education of her children, and felt it necessary to use severity towards them in order to offset the effects of indulgence on the part of their father and their grandmother. Balzac inherited from his mother imagination and activity, and from both of his parents energy and kindness.