Margins and inter-columnal
spaces they found covered with interpolations; a long trailing line
indicated the way here and the way there to the destination of the
inserted passages. A cobweb was regular in comparison to the task
which the printers had to tackle in the hope of finding beginning,
middle, and end. In the various presses where his books were set up,
the employees would never work longer than an hour on end at his
manuscript. And the indemnity he had to pay for corrections reached
sometimes the figure of forty francs per sixteen pages. Numerous were
the difficulties caused on this score with publishers, editors, and
printers. Balzac justified himself by quoting the examples of
Chateaubriand, Ingres, and Meyerbeer in their various arts. To Buloz,
of the _Revue de Paris_, who expostulated, he impatiently replied: "I
will give up fifty francs per sheet to have my hands free. So say no
more about the matter." It is true that Buloz paid him 250 francs per
sheet for his contributions.
Indeed, the novelist's own method of work was a reversal of the
natural alternation of regular periods of activity and repose. He not
only, as he told all his correspondents with wearisome iteration,
burned the midnight oil, but would keep up these eighteen or twenty
hours' daily labour for weeks altogether, until some novel that he was
engaged on was finished.
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