Page:Repertory of the Comedie Humaine.djvu/30

 fever to his readers, and to plunge them into a sort of Arabian Nights country, where all the passions, all the desires of real life appear, but expanded to the point of fantasy, like the dreams brought on by laudanum or hasheesh. Why, then, should we not understand the reason that, for certain readers, this world of Balzac's is more real than the actual world, and that they devoted their energies to imitating it?

It is possible that to-day the phenomenon is becoming rarer, and that Balzac, while no less admired, does not exercise the same fascinating influence. The cause for this is that the great social forces which he defined have almost ended their work. Other forces now shape the oncoming generations and prepare them for further sensitive influences. It is none the less a fact that, to penetrate the central portions of the nineteenth century in France, one must read and reread the Comedie Humaine. And we owe sincere thanks to Messieurs Cerfberr and Christophe for this Repertory. Thanks to them, we shall the more easily traverse the long galleries, painted and frescoed, of this enormous palace,&mdash;a palace still unfinished, inasmuch as it lacks those Scenes of Military Life whose titles awaken dreams within us: Forced Marches; The Battle of Austerlitz; After Dresden. Incontestably, Tolstoy's War and Peace is an admirable book, but how can we help regretting the loss of the painting of the Grand Army and of our Great Emperor, by Balzac, our Napoleon of letters?