“But I shouldn’t like a woman because I knew that you had loved her.”

“You are a woman; but men who have loved the same woman will seek each other from the ends of the earth, and will take an intense pleasure in their recollections.  I don’t know whether that aphorism is to be found in Balzac; if not, it is an accident that prevented him from writing it, for it is quite Balzacian—­only he would give it a turn, an air of philosophic distinction to which it would be useless for me to pretend.”

“I wonder if I should like him.  Tell me about him.”

“You would be more likely than most women to appreciate him.  Supposing you put the matter to the test.  You would not accept these horses, maybe you will not refuse a humbler present—­an edition of Balzac.  There’s a very good one in fifty-two volumes.”

“So many as that?”

“Yes; and not one too many—­each is a masterpiece.  In this enormous work there are something like two thousand characters, and these appear in some books in principal, in other books in subordinate, parts.  Balzac speaks of them as we should of real people.  A young lady is going to the opera and to a ball afterwards, and he says—­

“’It is easy to imagine her delight and expectation, for was she not going to meet the delicious Duchesse de la Maufregneuse, and her friend the celebrated Madame d’Espard, Coralis, Lucien de Rubempre and Rastignac.’

“These people are only mentioned in the Memoires de deux jeunes Mariees.  But they are heroes and heroines in other books, in Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan, Le Pere Goriot, and Les Illusions Perdues.”  Before you even begin to know Balzac, you must have read at least twenty volumes.  There is a vulgarity about those who don’t know Balzac; we, his worshippers, recognise in each other a refinement of sense and a peculiar comprehension of life.  We are beings apart; we are branded with the seal of that great mind.  You should hear us talk among ourselves.  Everyone knows that Popinot is the sublime hero of L’Interdiction, but for the moment some feeble Balzacian does not remember the other books he appears in, and is ashamed to ask....  But I’m boring you.”

“No, no; I love to listen.  It is more interesting than any play.”

Owen looked at her questioningly, as if he doubted the flattery, which, at the bottom of his heart, he knew to be quite sincere.

“You cannot understand Paris until you have read Balzac.  Balzac discovered Paris; he created Paris.  You remember just now what I said of those villas?  I was thinking at the moment of Balzac.  For he begins one story by a reading of the human characteristics to be perceived in its streets.  He says that there are mean streets, and streets that are merely honest; there are young streets about whose morality the public has not yet formed any opinion; there are murderous streets—­streets older than the oldest hags; streets that we may esteem—­clean streets, work-a-day streets and commercial streets.  Some streets, he says, begin well and end badly.  The Rue Montmartre, for instance, has a fine head, but it ends in the tail of a fish.  How good that is.  You don’t know the Rue Montmartre?  I’ll point it out next time we’re that way.  But you know the Rue de la Paix?”