were, till the close of his life, like the ancestral bibelots of the mandarin-things to be worshipped while he was living in small apartments and having in a cook twice a week to boil some beef, which he ate cold at every meal till her next visit. He did, it is true, commit the folly of buying and furnishing a house to receive Madame Hanska, but this was a sentimental extravagance, a mistake, a grotesque, imaginative folly, rather than an act of luxury. He seems really to have had no taste for luxury, except as a sort of revel. He enjoyed a coloured dressing-gown of an Asiatic cut, which was given him in Russia, and walked up and down in it with the glee of a child. These things show the eccentricities of a man of genius, but show no taste for luxury. In his books there is an Oriental delight in excess, there are descriptions of feasts in which waste and delirious superflux of sensation disgust us with pleasure. There is extravagance here, bad taste, perhaps; but do not call this luxury. The luxurious man spends twenty francs on his dinner, or buys a handsome waistcoat. Balzac has not two coats to his back, but writes furiously in a monk's robe. His burly image is engraved upon our imaginations. Balzac the solitary, detached, prolific, indomitable creator has become one of those presiding geniuses whose busts crown the library of the mind. Volition has little to do with our acceptance of these worthies. Their names have significance for all men, because all men-even those who know nothing of them beyond the name -have been reached and influenced by them. |