The ’Physiology of Marriage’ followed quickly (1829-30), and despite a certain pruriency of imagination, displayed considerable powers of analysis, powers destined shortly to distinguish a story which ranks high among its author’s works, ‘La Maison du chat-qui-pelote’ (1830).  This delightful novelette, the queer title of which is nearly equivalent to ’At the Sign of the Cat and the Racket,’ showed in its treatment of the heroine’s unhappy passion the intuition and penetration of the born psychologist, and in its admirable description of bourgeois life the pictorial genius of the genuine realist.  In other words the youthful romancer was merged once for all in the matured novelist.  The years of waiting and observation had done their work, and along the streets of Paris now walked the most profound analyst of human character that had scrutinized society since the days when William Shakespeare, fresh from Stratford, trod the streets and lanes of Elizabethan London.

The year 1830 marks the beginning not merely of Balzac’s success as the greatest of modern realists, but also of his marvelous literary activity.  Novel after novel is begun before its predecessor is finished; short stories of almost perfect workmanship are completed; sketches are dashed off that will one day find their appropriate place in larger compositions, as yet existing only in the brain of the master.  Nor is it merely a question of individual works:  novels and stories are to form different series,—­’Scenes from Private Life,’ ’Philosophical Novels and Tales,’—­which are themselves destined to merge into ’Studies of Manners in the Nineteenth Century,’ and finally into the ‘Comedie humaine’ itself.  Yet it was more than a swarm of stories that was buzzing in his head; it was a swarm of individuals often more truly alive to him than the friends with whom he loved to converse about them.  And just because he knew these people of his brain, just because he entered into the least details of their daily lives, Balzac was destined to become much more than a mere philosopher or student of society; to wit, a creator of characters, endowed with that “absolute dramatic vision” which distinguishes Homer and Shakespeare and Chaucer.  But because he was also something of a philosopher and student of sociology, he conceived the stupendous idea of linking these characters with one another and with their several environments, in order that he might make himself not merely the historian but also the creator of an entire society.  In other words, conservative though he was, Balzac had the audacity to range himself by the side of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and to espouse the cause of evolution even in its infancy.  The great ideas of the mutability of species and of the influence of environment and heredity were, he thought, as applicable to sociology as to zooelogy, and as applicable to fiction as to either.  So he meditated the ‘Comedie humaine’ for several years before he announced it in 1842, and from being almost the rival of Saint-Hilaire he became almost the anticipator of Darwin.