At last, however, owing to the mingling of one personality
with another, identification is increasingly difficult, unless the
novelist comes to our assistance, as in the story _Cousin Bette_,
where he confesses Lisbeth the old maid, to be made up out of three
persons, Madame Valmore, Madame Hanska's aunt, and his own mother.
Summing up Balzac's entire literary production, which in Monsieur de
Lovenjoul's catalogue occupies no fewer than fourteen pages, we find
that it comprises, besides the ninety-six different works of the
_Comedie Humaine_ properly so called, ten volumes of his early novels;
six complete dramatic pieces--one, the _School for Husbands and Wives_
recently published;[*] thirty _Contes Drolatiques_; and three hundred
and fourteen articles and opuscles, some of them fairly long, since
the _Reminiscences of a Pariah_ has a hundred and eighty-four pages
octavo, the _Theory of Walking_ fifty, the _Code of Honest People_ a
hundred and twelve, the _Impartial History of the Jesuits_ eighty;
these exclusive of the _Revue Parisienne_ with its two hundred and
twenty pages, which, as we have seen, was written entirely by himself.
When we remember that the whole of this, with the exception of the
early novels and six of the opuscles, was produced in twenty years, we
can better appreciate the man's industry, which, as Monsieur Le Breton
calculates, yielded an average of some two thousand pages, or four to
five volumes a year.
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