If This
Were The Case, I Would Willingly Have Crossed Its
Threshold; Not For The Sake Of Any Relic Of
The great
novelist which it may possibly contain, nor even for
that of any mystic virtue which may be supposed
To
reside within its walls, but simply because to look at
those four modest walls can hardly fail to give one a
strong impression of the force of human endeavour.
Balzac, in the maturity of his vision, took in more of
human life than any one, since Shakspeare, who has
attempted to tell us stories about it; and the very
small scene on which his consciousness dawned is one
end of the immense scale that he traversed. I confess
it shocked me a little to find that he was born in a
house "in a row," - a house, moreover, which at the
date of his birth must have been only about twenty
years old. All that is contradictory. If the tenement
selected for this honour could not be ancient and em-
browned, it should at least have been detached.
There is a charming description, in his little tale
of "La Grenadiere," of the view of the opposite side
of the Loire as you have it from the square at the end
of the Rue Royale, - a square that has some preten-
sions to grandeur, overlooked as it is by the Hotel de
Ville and the Musee, a pair of edifices which directly
contemplate the river, and ornamented with marble
images of Francois Rabelais and Rene Descartes.
The former, erected a few years since, is a very honor-
able production; the pedastal of the latter could, as
a matter of course, only be inscribed with the _Cogito
ergo Sum._ The two statues mark the two opposite
poles to which the brilliant French mind has travelled;
and if there were an effigy of Balzac at Tours, it ought
to stand midway between them.
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