Do not these words give life to the woman who speaks and the man she addresses?
[3] (The lady's name was Madame de Bemy. Letters to Louise, Nos. I. and XXII., the letter to his mother, dated Jan. I, 1836, and that of October 1836 to Madame Hanska, taken in combination, show this plainly.
Balzac's earliest literary model was, as already mentioned, Sir Walter Scott, an author of whom he can never have reminded any one, and with whom, when his genius reaches its maturity, he has hardly anything in common. The writer of the _Comédie Humaine_ was a man of far too modern a spirit to be able to remain faithful to historic fiction. He felt no home-sickness for any past century; he had amassed a vast wealth of observation, and involuntarily chose themes in which he could turn this to the best account. He was dimly conscious that the writer of historical novels, unless he be content simply to thrust the characters which he has before him as models into antiquated costumes, must take his modern, personal, psychological observations, and, as it were, force them back into a more primitive age--a difficult task, the attempt at which seldom resulted in more than a thinly disguised reproduction of the manners and customs of the writer's contemporaries, or at any rate of their ideas. It was not in Balzac's nature to collect information laboriously from old chronicles; he studied the living men and women of his own day.
_La Physiologie du Mariage_, the first of his works to arouse attention, supplemented Brillat-Savarin's harmless _Physiologie du Goût_ with a half-jocose, half-scientific, wholly coarse analysis of that institution of society which French literature from time immemorial has treated as a butt for witticisms, an object of ironical homage, and a matter for unsparing investigation. Balzac regards it in the light of a tragi-comic social necessity, defends it, and assists it with good advice in its struggle with those destructive elements, masculine and feminine caprices and passions. Marriage has a special attraction for Balzac as being the battle-ground of two egoisms; he rushes with the ruthlessness of a wild boar through its boundless domain of attractions and repulsions, snuffing and poking his nose into everything. In France marriage has always been a tolerably external, public matter; it need not surprise us that Balzac has little reverence for its mysteries. He writes of them with Molière's outspokenness, but less healthily--more pessimistically and more grossly. The book is full of clever, coarse conceits and laughable anecdotes, and is often extremely amusing from the contrast between the frivolous, licentious matter and the professorial or father-confessor style in which it is expounded by the youthful lecturer on the science of marriage. It is, nevertheless, an immature production of a writer who has been early robbed of all beautiful illusions; and it must certainly be a repulsive book to most readers of the female sex, though we are told that a considerable proportion of its contents was communicated to the author by two women, neither of them young--Madame Hamelin and Madame Sophie Gay. _La Physiologie du Mariage_ reveals none of Balzac's nobility of thought and delicacy of feeling--nothing but his gift of ruthless, searching analysis.