His father’s weakness in thus giving in to his son was most irritating to Balzac’s mother, who was endowed with the business faculties so frequently met with among French women.  She was convinced that a little experience would soon cause her son to change his mind.  But he, on his part, ignored his hardships.  He began to dream of a life of fame.  In his garret, too, he began to develop that longing for luxury which was to increase with the years, and which was to cost him so much.  At this time, he took frequent walks through the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise around the graves of Moliere, La Fontaine and Racine.  He would occasionally visit a friend with whom he could converse, but he usually preferred a sympathetic listener, to whom he could pour out his plans and his innermost longings.  Otherwise his life was as solitary as it was cloistered.  He confined himself to his room for days at a time, working fiercely at the manuscript of the play, Cromwell, which he felt to be a masterpiece.

This work he finished and took to his home for approval in April, 1820.  What must have been his disappointment when, certain of success, he not only found his play disapproved but was advised to devote his time and talents to anything except literature!  But his courage was not daunted thus.  Remarking that tragedies appeared not to be in his line, he was ready to return to his garret to attempt another kind of literature, and would have done so, had not his mother, seeing that he would certainly injure his health, interposed; and although only fifteen months of the allotted two years had expired, insisted that he remain at home, and later sent him to Touraine for a much needed rest.

During his stay at home, he was to suffer another disappointment.  His sister Laure, to whom he had confided all his secrets and longings, was married to M. Surville in May, 1830, and moved to Bayeux.  He was thus deprived of her congenial companionship.  The separation is fortunate for posterity, however, since the letters he wrote to her reveal much of the family life, both pleasant and otherwise, together with a great deal concerning his own desires and struggles.  Thus early in life, he realized that his was a very “original” family, and regretted not being able to put the whole group into novels.  His correspondence gives a very good description of their various eccentricities, and he has later immortalized some of these by portraying them in certain of his characters.

Continually worried by his irritable mother, feeling himself forced to make money by writing lest he be compelled to enter a lawyer’s office, he produced in five years, with different collaborators, a vast number of works written under various pseudonyms.  He tutored his younger and much petted brother Henri, but found his pleasures outside of the family circle.  It was arranged that he should give lessons to one of the sons of M. and Mme. de Berny, and thus