CHAPTER XVI
THE INFLUENCE
Balzac's influence during his lifetime was, with but few exceptions,
exercised outside his own, novelist's profession. The sphere in which
it made itself chiefly felt was that of the cultured reading public,
and the public was, first and foremost, a foreign one. History
repeated itself. To Honore d'Urfe, the author of the _Astree_, in the
sixteenth century, while living in Piedmont, a letter came announcing
that twenty-nine princesses and nineteen lords of Germany had adopted
the names and characters of his heroes and heroines in the _Astree_,
and had founded an academy of true lovers. Almost the same thing
occurred to the nineteenth-century Honore de Balzac. For a while,
certain people in Venetian society assumed the titles and roles of his
chief personages, playing the parts, in some instances, out to their
utmost conclusion.
Sainte-Beuve, who, in 1850, drew attention to this curious historical
analogy, went on to mention that, in Hungary, Poland, and Russia,
Balzac's novels created a fashion. The strange, rich furniture that
was assembled and arranged, according to the novelist's fancy, out of
the artistic productions of many countries and epochs, became an
after-reality.
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