ABSTRACT
Balzac's will to world conquest did not at once find a suitable field of operations. He could not make up his mind on the choice of profession. Had he been born two years earlier, he would automatically have entered the Napoleonic armies as soon as he reached his eighteenth year; he might then have fought at Waterloo and faced the fire of the British squares. He could not make up his mind on the choice of profession. Public life ran to seed, the foamy torrent of events quieted down to the calm of a mill-pond. The world was no longer to be conquered by feats of arms. Napoleon, the exemplar of the few, had become the bugbear of the many. Art remained. Balzac began to write. He devotes himself heart and soul to the process of sifting phenomena, so that everything irrelevant may be excluded.
