Balzac | Page 3

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Prepared by Dagny, [email protected] and John Bickers, [email protected]

Balzac
By Frederick Lawton

DEDICATED,
In remembrance of many pleasant and instructive hours spent in his society, to the sculptor
AUGUSTE RODIN,
whose statue of Balzac, with its fine, synthetic portraiture, first tempted the author to write this book.
PASSY, PARIS, 1910.

PREFACE

Excusing himself for not undertaking to write a life of Balzac, Monsieur Brunetiere, in his study of the novelist published shortly before his death, refused somewhat disdainfully to admit that acquaintance with a celebrated man's biography has necessarily any value. "What do we know of the life of Shakespeare?" he says, "and of the circumstances in which /Hamlet/ or /Othello/ was produced? If these circumstances were better known to us, is it to be believed and will it be seriously asserted that our admiration for one or the other play would be augmented?" In penning this quirk, the eminent critic would seem to have wilfully overlooked