[158] "Sans génie je suis flambé," as he wrote early to his sister.
[159] This is about the best of the batch, and I agree with those who think that it would not have disfigured the Comédie. Indeed the exclusion of these juvenilia from the Édition Définitive was a critical blunder. Even if Balzac did once wish it, the "dead hand" is not to be too implicitly given way to, and he was so constantly changing his views that he probably would have altered this also had he lived.
[160] A certain kind of commentator would probably argue from Mr. Browning's well-known words "fifty volumes long" that he had, and another that he had not read the Œuvres de Jeunesse.
[161] He would not have liked the name "patriot" because of its corruption, but he was one.
[162] Not a few things, some of them very good, came between—the pleasant Maison du Chat-qui-Pelote, several of the wonderful short stories, and the beginning of the Contes Drolatiques. But none of them had the "importance"—in the artistic sense of combined merit and scale—of the Peau.
[163] I mean, of course, as far as books go. We have positive testimony that there was a live Becky, and I would I had known her!
[164] Originally and perhaps preferably called La Rabouilleuse from the early occupation of its heroine, Flore Brazier, one of Balzac's most notable figures.
[165] It is one of the strangest instances of the limitations of some of the best critics that M. Brunetière declined even to speak of this great book.
[166] The immense influence of Maturin in France, and especially on Balzac, is an old story now, though it was not always so.
[167] It is possible that some readers may miss a more extended survey, or at least sample, of these characters. But the plea made above as to abstract of the stories is valid here. There is simply not room to do justice to say, Lucien de Rubempré, who pervades a whole block of novels and stories, or to others from Rastignac to Corentin.