But, if an
author comes and tells me he has attained this goal, I no longer see
in him, however great he may be, more than a presumptuous man; his
vanity shocks me, and I diminish him by all the height to which he has
tried to raise himself. . . . I would therefore beg you, dearest, to
cut out of your _Lambert_ everything that might suggest these singular
ideas; for instance: 'The admirable combat of thought arrived at its
greatest force, at its vastest expression' . . . 'The moral world,
whose limits he had thrown back for himself,' cannot be tolerated.
Write, dearest, in such a manner that the whole crowd may perceive you
from everywhere, by the height at which you will have placed yourself;
but do not cry out for people to admire you; for, on all sides, the
largest magnifying-glasses would be directed towards you; and what
becomes of the most delicious object seen by the microscope!"
The lesson was a severe one. Though it did not cure Balzac of his
author's vanity--nothing could cure him of that--it did, for a while
at least, direct his endeavours towards fiction of a more objective
kind.
What he was now capable of in characterization treated objectively he
showed in his _Colonel Chabert_ and the _Cure of Tours_, both of which
were published in the same twelvemonth as _Louis Lambert_.
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