I am young and hungry, and there is nothing on my plate.  Oh, Laure, Laure, my two boundless desires, my only ones—­to be famous, and to be loved—­they ever be satisfied?

For the next ten years he was learning his trade, and the artistic use of the fiction writer’s tools.  What is more to the point, is the fact that he began to dream of a series of great novels, which should give a true and panoramic picture of the whole of human life.  This was the first intimation of his “Human Comedy,” which was so daringly undertaken and so nearly completed in his after years.  In his early days of obscurity, he said to his readers: 

Note well the characters that I introduce, since you will have to follow their fortunes through thirty novels that are to come.

Here we see how little he had been daunted by ill success, and how his prodigious imagination had not been overcome by sorrow and evil fortune.  Meantime, writing almost savagely, and with a feeling combined of ambition and despair, he had begun, very slowly indeed, to create a public.  These ten years, however, had loaded him with debts; and his struggle to keep himself afloat only plunged him deeper in the mire.  His thirty unsigned novels began to pay him a few hundred francs, not in cash, but in promissory notes; so that he had to go still deeper into debt.

In 1827 he was toiling on his first successful novel, and indeed one of the best historic novels in French literature—­The Chouans.  He speaks of his labor as “done with a tired brain and an anxious mind,” and of the eight or ten business letters that he had to write each day before he could begin his literary work.

“Postage and an omnibus are extravagances that I cannot allow myself,” he writes.  “I stay at home so as not to wear out my clothes.  Is that clear to you?”

At the end of the next year, though he was already popular as a novelist, and much sought out by people of distinction, he was at the very climax of his poverty.  He had written thirty-five books, and was in debt to the amount of a hundred and twenty-four thousand francs.  He was saved from bankruptcy only by the aid of Mme. de Berny, a woman of high character, and one whose moral influence was very strong with Balzac until her early death.

The relation between these two has a sweetness and a purity which are seldom found.  Mme. de Berny gave Balzac money as she would have given it to a son, and thereby she saved a great soul for literature.  But there was no sickly sentiment between them, and Balzac regarded her with a noble love which he has expressed in the character of Mme. Firmiani.

It was immediately after she had lightened his burdens that the real Balzac comes before us in certain stories which have no equal, and which are among the most famous that he ever wrote.  What could be more wonderful than his El Verdugo, which gives us a brief horror while compelling our admiration?  What, outside of Balzac himself, could be more terrible than Gobseck, a frightful study of avarice, containing a deathbed scene which surpasses in dreadfulness almost anything in literature?  Add to these A Passion in the Desert, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, The Droll Stories, The Red Inn, and The Magic Skin, and you have a cluster of masterpieces not to be surpassed.