A THOUGHT entered my heart, such as God sends to make us willing to bear our griefs. I resolved to instruct and raise this corner of the earth, as a teacher brings up a child. Do not call it benevolence, my motive was the need I felt to distract my mind. I wanted to spend the remainder of my days in some arduous enterprise The changes to be introduced into this region, which nature had made so rich and man had made so poor, would occupy my whole life; they attracted me by the very difficulty of bringing them about. I wished to be a friend to the poor, expecting nothing in return. I allowed myself no illusions, either as to the character of the country people or the obstacles which hinder those who attempt to ameliorate both men and things. I made no idyls about my poor; I took them for what they were. -THE COUNTRY DOCTOR. Balzac and Madame Hanska ALZAC was born in 1799. The father of Balzac, by a not unusual coincidence, also bore the name of Balzac. And yet there was only one Balzac. This happy father was an officer in the commissary department of Napoleon's army, and so never had an opportunity to win the bauble reputation at the cannon's mouth, nor show his quality in the imminent deadly breech. He died through an earnest but futile effort, filled with the fear of failure, to so regulate his physical life that repair would exactly equal waste, and thus live on earth forever. The mother of our great man was a beauty and an heiress. Her husband was twenty-five years her senior. She ever regarded herself as one robbed of her birthright, and landed at high tide upon a barren and desert domestic isle. Honore, her first child, was born before she was twenty. Napoleon was at that time playing skittles with all Europe, and the woman whom fate robbed of her romance, worshipped at the shrine of the Corsican, because every good woman has to worship something or somebody. She saw Napoleon on several occasions and once he kissed his hand to her when she stood in a balcony and he was riding through the street. And there their intimacy ended-a fact much regretted in print by her gifted son years afterward. Six years of Balzac's life, from his sixth to his LITTLE thirteenth year, were spent in a monastery school, a JOURNEYS place where fond parents were relieved by holy men of their parental responsibilities for a consideration. Not once in the six years' time was the boy allowed to go home or visit his parents. Once a year, on Easter, his mother came to see him and expressed regret at the backward state of his mind. Balzac's education was gotten in spite of his teachers and by setting at naught the minute and painstaking plans of his mother. This mother lived her life a partial invalid, whimsical, querulous, religious overmuch, always fearing a fatal collapse; in this disappointed, for she finally died peacefully of old age, going to bed and forgetting to waken. She was to long survive her son, and realize his greatness only after he was gone, getting the facts from the daily papers, which seems to prove that the newspaper does have a mission. Possibly the admiration of Balzac's mother for the little Corporal had its purpose in God's great economy. In any event her son had some of the Corsican's characteristics. In the big brain of Balzac there was room for many |