since practically it is the only one of these stories that touches actual politics as the term is usually understood.  The military scenes are only two in number, ‘Les Chouans’ and ‘Une Passion dans le desert.’  The former of these has been sufficiently described already; the latter is one of the best known of the short stories, but rather deserves a place beside ’La Fille aux yeux d’or.’  Indeed, for Balzac’s best military scenes we must go to ’Le Colonel Chabert’ or to ‘Adieu.’

We now pass to those subterranean chambers of the great structure we are exploring, the ‘Etudes philosophiques.’  They are twenty in number, four being novels, one a composite volume of tales, and the rest stories.  The titles run as follows:—­’La Peau de chagrin,’ ‘L’Elixir de longue vie’ (The Elixir of Life), ‘Melmoth reconcilie,’ ‘Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu’ (The Anonymous Masterpiece), ‘Gambara,’ ‘Massimila Doni,’ ’Le Requisitionnaire,’ ‘Adieu,’ ‘El Verdugo,’ ‘Les Marana,’ ’L’Auberge rouge’ (The Red Inn), ‘Un Drame au bord de la mer’ (A Seaside Drama), ‘L’Enfant maudit’ (A Child Accursed) ‘Maitre Cornelius’ (Master Cornelius), ‘Sur Catherine de Medicis,’ ‘La Recherche de l’absolu,’ ‘Louis Lambert,’ ‘Seraphita,’ ‘Les Proscrits,’ and ’Jesus-Christ en Flandre.’

Of the novels, ‘La Peau de chagrin’ is easily first.  Its central theme is the world-old conflict between the infinite desires and the finite powers of man.  The hero, Raphael, is hardly, as M. Barriere asserts, on a level with Hamlet, Faust, and Manfred, but the struggle of his infinite and his finite natures is almost as intensely interesting as the similar struggles in them.  The introduction of the talisman, the wild ass’s skin that accomplishes all the wishes of its owner, but on condition that it is to shrink away in proportion to the intensity of those wishes, and that when it disappears the owner’s life is to end, gave to the story a weird interest not altogether, perhaps, in keeping with its realistic setting, and certainly forcing a disastrous comparison with the three great poems named.  But when all allowances are made, one is forced to conclude that ‘La Peau de chagrin’ is a novel of extraordinary power and absorbing interest; and that its description of its hero’s dissipations in the libertine circles of Paris, and its portrayal of the sublime devotion of the heroine Pauline for her slowly perishing lover, are scarcely to be paralleled in literature.  Far less powerful are the short stories on similar themes, entitled ’L’Elixir de longue vie,’ and ‘Melmoth reconcilie’ (Melmoth Reconciled), which give us Balzac’s rehandling of the Don Juan of Moliere and Byron, and the Melmoth of Maturin.