In spite of this, there are many people who have declared the Comedie Humaine to be indigestible.  Perhaps it is:  but then what about truffles?  Balzac’s publisher refused to be disturbed by any such criticism as that.  ‘Indigestible, is it?’ he exclaimed with what, for a publisher, was rare good sense.  ’Well, I should hope so; who ever thinks of a dinner that isn’t?’ And our English publisher, Mr. Routledge, clearly agrees with M. Poulet-Malassis, as he is occupied in producing a complete translation of the Comedie Humaine.  The two volumes that at present lie before us contain Cesar Birotteau, that terrible tragedy of finance, and L’lllustre Gaudissart, the apotheosis of the commercial traveller, the Duchesse de Langeais, most marvellous of modern love stories, Le Chef d’OEuvre Inconnu, from which Mr. Henry James took his Madonna of the Future, and that extraordinary romance Une Passion dans le Desert.  The choice of stories is quite excellent, but the translations are very unequal, and some of them are positively bad.  L’lllustre Gaudissart, for instance, is full of the most grotesque mistakes, mistakes that would disgrace a schoolboy.  ‘Bon conseil vaut un oeil dans la main’ is translated ’Good advice is an egg in the hand’!  ‘Ecus rebelles’ is rendered ’rebellious lucre,’ and such common expressions as ‘faire la barbe,’ ’attendre la vente,’ ‘n’entendre rien,’ palir sur une affaire,’ are all mistranslated.  ‘Des bois de quoi se faire un cure-dent’ is not ’a few trees to slice into toothpicks,’ but ‘as much timber as would make a toothpick’; ’son horloge enfermee dans une grande armoire oblongue’ is not ’a clock which he kept shut up in a large oblong closet’ but simply a clock in a tall clock-case; ‘journal viager’ is not ‘an annuity,’ ‘garce’ is not the same as ‘farce,’ and ‘dessins des Indes’ are not ‘drawings of the Indies.’  On the whole, nothing can be worse than this translation, and if Mr. Routledge wishes the public to read his version of the Comedie Humaine, he should engage translators who have some slight knowledge of French.

Cesar Birotteau is better, though it is not by any means free from mistakes.  ‘To suffer under the Maximum’ is an absurd rendering of ’subir le maximum’; ‘perse’ is ‘chintz,’ not ‘Persian chintz’; ’rendre le pain benit’ is not ‘to take the wafer’; ‘riviere’ is hardly a ’fillet of diamonds’; and to translate ’son coeur avait un calus a l’endroit du loyer’ by ‘his heart was a callus in the direction of a lease’ is an insult to two languages.  On the whole, the best version is that of the Duchesse de Langeais, though even this leaves much to be desired.  Such a sentence as ’to imitate the rough logician who marched before the Pyrrhonians while denying his own movement’ entirely misses the point of Balzac’s ’imiter le rude logicien qui marchait devant les pyrrhoniens, qui niaient le mouvement.’

We fear Mr. Routledge’s edition will not do.  It is well printed and nicely bound; but his translators do not understand French.  It is a great pity, for La Comedie Humaine is one of the masterpieces of the age.