for June and July, so that he could get her the money.

Those few months of fashionable life and his frequenting aristocratic
clubs had put his affairs in a piteous state. Mme. de Balzac drew up a
balance sheet, without any attempt to spare him, and pointed out just
what sacrifices were necessary. He was in no position to meet the heavy
demands, in spite of his desperate toil. A gleam of hope, however, came
in the midst of his distress, for his friends at Sache held out
prospects of a wealthy marriage; but this hope was an elusive one: the
prospective bride was not expected in Touraine until the month of
October, and how in the meantime was he to pay his pressing debts? He
calculated the utmost that he could earn, he assumed certain advances,
he added up and with the help of his optimism he swelled his
prospective receipts, yet not sufficiently to satisfy his creditors. He
groaned, for he did not wish to sell at a loss what he had acquired
with such difficulty, despoil himself, strip himself bare like a St.
John;--then his energy reawoke and his self-confidence enabled him to
accept the hard test. He consented to give up his horses,--for whose
feed he was still owing, since he could not feed them on poetry, as he
humorously wrote to Mme. de Girardin,--and his cabriolet. What matter?
He was strong enough to rebuild the foundations of his fortune!

From now on Honore de Balzac thought of nothing but his work. He wrote
his Biographical Notice of Louis Lambert in thirty days and fifteen
nights; but this effort was so prodigious that an apoplectic stroke
prostrated him and he came very near dying. He endured his financial
anxieties and empty purse, upheld by the certainty of his own genius.
He knew how much unfinished work there was in the first version of his
books and he had spells of artistic despair, but they were brief, for
he relied on his strength of will to bring his writings to the