from one malady than he was overtaken by another.  Unable to work, distracted by bad news from his family, and being the witness of several financial failures incurred by Madame Hanska, Balzac naturally was supremely depressed.  At this time, a touch of what may not uncharitably be termed snobbishness is seen in his letters to his family when he extols the unlimited virtues of his Predilecta and the Countess Anna.

After seventeen long years of waiting, with hope constantly deferred, Balzac at last attained his goal when, on March 14, 1850, Madame Hanska became Madame Honore de Balzac.  His joy over this great triumph was beyond all adequate description, but he was unable to depart for Paris with his bride until April.  After a difficult journey, the couple arrived at Paris in May, but the condition of Balzac’s health was hopeless and only a few more months were accorded him.  With his usual optimism, he always thought that he would be spared to finish his great work, and when informed by his physician on August 17 that he would live but a few hours, he refused to believe it.

Unless he had been self-centered, Balzac could never have left behind him his enormous and prodigious work.  In spite of certain unlovely phases of his private character and failure to fulfil his literary and financial obligations, he was a man of great personal charm.  Though at various times he was under consideration for election to the French Academy, his name is not found numbered among the “forty immortals.”  But he was the greatest of French novelists, a great creator of characters, who by some competent critics has been ranked with Shakespeare, and he has left to posterity the incomparable, though unfinished Comedie humaine, which is in itself sufficient for his “immortality.”

CHAPTER II

RELATIVES AND FAMILY FRIENDS

BALZAC’S MOTHER

“Farewell, my dearly beloved mother!  I embrace you with all my heart.  Oh! if you knew how I need just now to cast myself upon your breast as a refuge of complete affection, you would insert a little word of tenderness in your letters, and this one which I am answering has not even a poor kiss.  There is nothing but . . .  Ah!  Mother, Mother, this is very bad! . . .  You have misconstrued what I said to you, and you do not understand my heart and affection.  This grieves me most of all! . . .”

The above extract is sadly typical of a relationship of thirty years, 1820-1850, between a mother, on the one hand, who never understood or appreciated her son—­and a son, on the other, whose longings for maternal affection were never fully gratified.  To his mother Balzac dedicated Le Medicin de Campagne, one of his finest sociological studies.