soldiers, who after untold hardships returns to France to find his wife married a second time and determined to deny his existence.  The law is invoked, but the treachery of the wife induces the noble old man to put an end to the proceedings, after which he sinks into an indigent and pathetic senility.  Balzac has never drawn a more heart-moving figure, nor has he ever sounded more thoroughly the depths of human selfishness.  But the description of the battle of Eylau and of Chabert’s sufferings in retreat would alone suffice to make the story memorable.  ‘L’Interdiction’ is the proper pendant to the history of this unfortunate soldier.  In it another husband, the Marquis d’Espard, suffers from the selfishness of his wife, one of the worst characters in the range of Balzac’s fiction.  That she may keep him from alienating his property to discharge a moral obligation she endeavors to prove him insane.  The legal complications which ensue bring forward one of Balzac’s great figures, the judge of instruction, Popinot; but to appreciate him the reader must go to the marvelous book itself.  ‘Gobseck’ is a study of a Parisian usurer, almost worthy of a place beside the description of old Grandet; while ‘Les Employes’ is a realistic study of bureaucratic life, which, besides showing a wonderful familiarity with the details of a world of which Balzac had little personal experience, contains several admirably drawn characters and a sufficient amount of incident.  But it is time to leave these sketches and novels in miniature, and to pass by the less important ‘Scenes’ of this fascinating Parisian life, in order to consider in some detail the five novels of consummate power.

First of these in date of composition, and in popular estimation at least among English readers, comes, ‘Le Pere Goriot.’  It is certainly trite to call the book a French “Lear,” but the expression emphasizes the supreme artistic power that could treat the motif of one of Shakespeare’s plays in a manner that never forces a disadvantageous comparison with the great tragedy.  The retired vermicelli-maker is not as grand a figure as the doting King of Britain, but he is as real.  The French daughters, Anastasie, Countess de Restaud, and Delphine, Baroness de Nucingen, are not such types of savage wickedness as Regan and Goneril, but they fit the nineteenth century as well as the British princesses did their more barbarous day.  Yet there is no Cordelia in ‘Le Pere Goriot,’ for the pale Victorine Taillefer cannot fill the place of that noblest of daughters.  This is but to say that Balzac’s bourgeois tragedy lacks that element of the noble that every great poetic tragedy must have.  The self-immolation of old Goriot to the cold-hearted ambitions of his daughters is not noble, but his parental passion touches the infinite, and so proves the essential kinship of his creator with the creator of Lear.  This touch of the infinite, as in ’Eugenie Grandet,’ lifts the book up from the level of a merely masterly study of characters