I
haven't an idea which is not the _Physiology_. I dream of it, I am
absorbed by it."
The sale of the book was in a measure due to the sort of scandal it
provoked. Ladies especially bought the volume to find out for
themselves how far they had been maligned; and Levavasseur, who was
pleased with his profits, introduced Balzac to Emile de Girardin, then
chief editor of the _Mode_, to which paper he now began to contribute
light articles, not to speak of other journals, which were only too
glad to receive something from his pen. The extent to which the fair
sex read the _Physiology_ and were affected by it is illustrated by a
story that Werdet tells of a hoax perpetrated at Balzac's expense by a
number of his society friends, who had cause to complain of his
uppishness towards them, a treatment based not merely on the belief he
entertained in his literary superiority, but on his pretensions to
aristocratic descent. The story belongs more properly to the middle
thirties, when he had been using the prefix "de" before his name
already for some years, justifying himself on the ground that his
father claimed issue from an old family that had resisted the Auvergne
invasion and had begotten the d'Entragues stock.
Pages:
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98