character of the man who was not dismayed by the colossal task of the
Comedie Humaine; but pursued his work through discouragement, ill
health, and anxieties. Except near the end of his life, when, owing to
the unreasonable strain to which it had been subjected, his powerful
organism had begun to fail, Balzac refused to neglect his vocation
even for his love affairs--a self-control which must have been a
severe test to one of his temperament.

This absorption in his work cannot have been very flattering to the
ladies he admired; and one plausible explanation of Madame de
Castries' coldness to his suit is that she did not believe in the
devotion of a lover who, while paying her the most assiduous court at
Aix, would yet write from five in the morning till half-past five in
the evening, and only bestow his company on her from six till an early
bedtime. Even the adored Madame Hanska had to take second place where
work was concerned. When they were both at Vienna in 1835, he writes
with some irritation, apparently in answer to a remonstrance on her
part, that he cannot work when he knows he has to go out; and that,
owing to the time he spent the evening before in her society, he must
now shut himself up for fourteen hours and toil at "Le Lys dans la
Vallee." He adds, with his customary force of language, that if he
does not finish the book at Vienna, he will throw himself into the
Danube!

The great psychologist knew his own character well when, in another
letter to Madame Hanska, who has complained of his frivolity, he
cries, indignantly: "Frivolity of character! Why, you speak as a good
_bourgeois_ would have done, who, seeing Napoleon turn to the right,
to the left, and on all sides to examine his field of battle, would
have said, 'This man cannot remain in one place; he has no fixed