Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/320

304 being detected in treasonable correspondence with the duke of Bourgogne, he was confined by Louis in an iron cage 8 feet square. On his release, however, eleven years after wards, he was loaded with honours by Sixtus IV., was sent as legate to France, and received the bishopric of Albano. He died at Ancona in 1491.  BALUZE,, a celebrated French scholar, was born at Tulle on the 24th of December 1630, and died in July 1718. After completing his education at the uni versity of Toulouse, he was invited by M. de Marca, afterwards archbishop of Paris, to undertake the superin tendence of his library. De Marca died in 1G62, and Baluze, after acting as librarian to Le Tellier and the archbishop of Auch, obtained in 16G7 a similar situation with the famous Colbert, which he retained till 1700, some years after the death of that minister. His reputa tion and his mastery of French law and antiquities obtained for him in 1670 the professorship of canon law in the royal college, a chair founded expressly for him. On the fall of the Cardinal de Bouillon in 1710, Baluze, who had attached himself to his party, was removed by a lettre de cachet from Paris, and transferred from Rouen to Blois, Tours, and Orleans in succession. He obtained his recall in 1713, though he never recovered his professorship. Of Baluze s numerous works the best known is the Capitularia Regum Francorum, which is of considerable historical value. The Miscellanea, in 7 vols., contain several curious extracts from manuscripts found by him in the libraries at Paris.  BALZAC,, perhaps the greatest name in the post-Revolutionary literature of France, was born at Tours in 1799, and died in 1858. His date thus corre sponds with the whole period of the rise, the acme, and the decline of the Romantic school, to which he can scarcely, however, be said to have belonged. It is true that he was inspired by many of the influences that animated Victor Hugo and his followers. Like them he was much occupied by the study of the fantastic element in mediaeval art, so strongly opposed to the calm and limit of classical litera ture, like them he reproduced the remoter phases of life and passion, and thought that few subjects were so base or obscure as to be unworthy of artistic treatment. But there is something in the powerful personality of Balzac indicated by the colossal body, by the strong and sensual face, somewhat resembling the profile of the Emperor Nero, which preserved him from the mannerism of any school. He was never successful in reproducing the existence of the past, he was essentially the man of his own day, and La Comedie Humaine is as much the picture of the 19th, as the Divina Commedia is of the 13th century. The passions that move his characters are the intense desire of boundless wealth, of luxury, of social distinction ; and though here and there his financiers, his journalists, his political intriguers, his sordid peasantry, are relieved by the introduction of some pure figure, like that of Euge nie. Grandet, of David, or of Eve, there are only too many elaborate studies of creatures sunk below the surface of humanity, the embodiments of infinite meanness and nameless sin. He was merely &quot; the secretary of society,&quot; he said, and &quot; drew up the inventory of vices and virtues.&quot; His ambition was, &quot; by infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the 19th century that history of morals which the old civilizations of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and India, have left untold.&quot; The consequence of this ambition is, that Balzac s voluminous romances have too often the air of a minute and tedious chronicle, and that the contemporary reader is wearied with a mass of details about domestic architecture, about the stock exchange, and about law, which will prove invaluable to posterity. Balzac s private history, which may be traced through many passages of his novels, was a strange and not a happy one. He was early sent from his home in Tours to the college of Vendome, where he neglected the studies and sports of childhood to bury himself in mystic books and mystic reveries. He has told the story of his school life in Louis Lambert, how he composed a tMorie de la volonte, a theory which was to complete the works of Mesmer, Lavater, Gall, and Bichat. This promising treatise was burned by one of the masters of the school ; and Balzac, falling into bad health, returned home. The next stage in his education was a course of study at the Sorbonne, and of lectures on law. In the offices of avoues and notaries he picked up his knowledge of the by-ways of chicanery, knowledge which he uses only too freely in his romances. Nature did not mean Balzac for an advocate ; he was constant in the belief in his own genius, a belief which for many years he had all to himself, and his family left him to work and starve, on the scantiest pittance, in a garret of the Rue Lesdiguieres. There followed ten years of hard toil, poverty, experiments in this and that way of getting a living. These struggles are described in Facino Cane, in the Peau de Chagrin, and in a series of letters to the author s sister, Madame de Surville. Balzac found &quot; three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for firing &quot; suffice to keep him alive, while he devoured books in the library of the Arsenal, copied out his notes at night, and then wandered for hours among the scenes of nocturnal Paris. &quot; Your brother,&quot; he writes to Madame de Surville, &quot; is already nourished like a great man, he is dying of hunger.&quot; He tried to make money by scribbling many volumes of novels without promise, and borrowed funds to speculate in the business of printing. Ideas which have since made other men s fortunes failed in Balzac s hands, and he laid the foundations of those famous debts which in later life were his torment and his occupation. At length appreciation came, and with appreciation what ought to have been wealth. Balzac was unfortunately as prodigal of money as of labour ; he would shut himself up for months, and see no one but his printer ; and then for months he would disappear and dissipate his gains in some mysterious hiding-place of his own, or in hurried travelling to Venice, Vienna, or St Petersburg. As a child he had been a man in thought and learning ; as a man he was a child in caprice and extravagance. His imagination, the intense power with which he constructed new combina tions of the literal facts which he observed, was like the demon which tormented the magician with incessant de mands for more tasks to do. When he was not working at La Comedie Humaine, his fancy was still busy with its characters; he existed in an ideal world, where some accident was always to put him in possession of riches beyond the dreams of avarice. Meantime he squandered all the money that could be rescued from his creditors on sumptuous apparel, jewels, porcelain, pictures. His excesses of labour, his sleepless nights, his abuse of coffee under mined his seemingly indestructible health. At length a mysterious passion for a Russian lady was crowned by marriage ; the famous debts were paid, the visionary house was built and furnished, and then, &quot; when the house was ready, death entered.&quot; Balzac died at the culmination of his fame, and at the beginning, as it seemed, of the period of rest to which he had always looked forward. It is impossible to enter on a detailed criticism of Balzac s novels. In them he scales every height and sounds every depth of human character, from the purity of the mys terious Seraphitus Seraphita, cold and strange, like the peaks of her northern Alps, to the loathsome sins of the Marnefs, whose deeds should find no calendar but that of Hell. In the great divisions of his Comedie, the scenes of private and of public life of the provinces and of the city, 