the color, the elan that emanate from the army and the call of country.  We have flashed before us one of those reactionary movements, after the French Revolution, which take on a magic romanticism because they culminate in the name of Napoleon.  While one reads, one thinks war, breathes war—­it is the only life for the moment.  Just ahead a step, one feels, is the “imminent deadly breach”; the social or business or Bohemian doings of later Paris are as if they did not exist.  And this particular novel will achieve such a result with the reader, even although it is not by any means one of Balzac’s supreme achievements, being in truth, a little aside from his metier, since it is historical and suggests in spots the manner of Scott.  But this power of envisaging war (which will be farther realized if such slighter works as “A Dark Affair” and “An Episode Under the Terror” be also perused), is only a single manifestation of a general gift.  Suppose there is desired a picture very common in our present civilization—­most common it may be in America,—­that of the country boy going up to the city to become—­what?  Perhaps a captain of commerce, or a leader of fashion:  perhaps a great writer or artist; or a politician who shall rule the capitol.  It is a venture packed full of realistic experience but equally full of romance, drama, poetry—­of an epic suggestiveness.  In two such volumes as “A Great Provincial Man in Paris” and “Lost Illusions,” all this, with its dire chances of evil as well as its roseate promise of success, has been wonderfully expressed.  So cogently modern a motive had never been so used before.

Sometimes in a brace of books Balzac shows us the front and back-side of some certain section of life:  as in “Cousin Pons” and “Cousine Bette.”—­The corner of Paris where artists, courtesans and poor students most do congregate, where Art capitalized is a sacred word, and the odd estrays of humanity, picturesque, humorous, and tragic, display all the chances of mankind,—­this he paints so that we do not so much look on as move amidst the throng.  In the first-named novel, assuredly a very great book, the figure of the quaint old connoisseur is one of fiction’s superlative successes:  to know him is to love him in all his weakness.  In the second book, Bette is a female vampire and the story around her as terrible as the other is heart-warming and sweet.  And you know that both are true, true as they would not have been apart:  “helpless each without the other.”

Again, how much of the gambling activities of modern business are emblazoned in another of the acknowledged masterpieces, “Caesar Birotteau.”  We can see in it the prototype of much that comes later in French fiction:  Daudet’s “Risler Aine et Froment Jeune” and Zola’s “L’Argent,” to name but two.  Such a story sums up the practical, material side of a reign or an epoch.