We have news from Paris of the death of Honore De Balzac, one of the most eminent French writers of the nineteenth century.  “Eighteen months ago,” says a Paris letter, “already attacked by dropsy, he quitted France to contract a marriage with a Russian lady, to whom he was devotedly attached.  To her he had dedicated ‘Seraphitus,’ and he had accumulated in his hotel of the Beaujoin quarters all the luxuries which could contribute to her pleasure.  He returned to France three months ago, in a state of extreme danger.  Last week he underwent an operation for abscess in his legs:  mortification ensued.  On the morning of the 18th he became speechless, and at midnight he expired.  His sister, Madame de Surville, visited his deathbed, and the pressure of her hand was the last sign he gave of intelligence.”  We must defer for another occasion what we have to say of the great novelist-the idol of women, even at seventy-the Voltaire of our age, as he was accustomed to style himself in private—­the historian of society—­French society—­as it is.  The author of Le Peau de Chagrin, Le Physiologie du Marriage, Le Dernier Chauan, Eugene Grandet, and the Scenes de la Vie Parisienne, and Scenes de la Vie de Province, was one of the marks of the era, and being dead, we will speculate upon him.  At present we can only translate for the International the following funeral oration by Victor Hugo, pronounced at his grave: 

“GENTLEMEN—­The man who has just descended into this tomb is one of those whom the public sorrow follows to the last abode.  In the times where we are all fictions have disappeared.  Henceforth our eyes are fixed not on the heads that reign but on the heads that think, and the whole country is affected when one of them disappears.  At this day, the people put on mourning for the man of talent, the nation for the man of genius.

“Gentlemen, the name of Balzac will be mingled in the luminous trace that our epoch will leave in the future.

“M. de Balzac belonged to that potent generation of writers of the nineteenth century who came after Napoleon, just as the illustrious pleiades of the seventeenth century came after Richelieu, and in the development of civilization a law caused the domination of thought to succeed the domination of the sword.

“M. de Balzac was one of the first among the greatest, one of the highest among the best.  This is not the place to say all or that splendid and sovereign intelligence.  All his books form only one hook, living, luminous, profound, in which we see moving all our contemporaneous civilization, mingled with I know not what of strange and terrible; a marvelous book, that the poet has entitled comedy, and which he might have called history; which assumes all forms and all styles:  which goes beyond Tacitus and reaches Suetonius, which crosses Beaumarchais and reaches Rabelais; a book which is observation itself, and imagination itself; which is prodigal of the true, the passionate, the common, the trivial, the material, and which at moments throws athwart realities, suddenly and broadly torn open, the gleam of the most somber and tragic ideal.