There was some truth in what he
said; but he did not sufficiently realize that Sue wrote, for the
market, exciting tales that everybody rushed to read. His own books
were, of course, most of them infinitely superior; but they appealed
to a much smaller public. All the same, he was loth to resign himself
to the depreciation Sue's bargains effected in his own. Feverishly he
strove to demonstrate by his painfully gained successes that they were
masterpieces, as he said, by the side of Sue's chimney-fronts, and as
far above them as Raphael was above Dubufe. Moliere, Lesage, Voltaire,
Walter Scott--these were the only names he acknowledged as rivals to
his own. Sue was nothing but a spangled and satined Paul de Kock.
We can grant him that, in fiction, his proper manner was as far in
advance of his epoch as, in politics, his doctrine was behind it.
George Sand was a medium in both, although she dwelt always a little
too much in the clouds. At a dinner with her towards the end of
January, the antagonism of their principles manifested itself over his
recent visit to Russia.
"If you were to see the Czar," Balzac said to her, "you would fall in
love with him and jump from your _bousingotism_[*] to autocracy.
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