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"Honore de Balzac"

de Berny.
Nevertheless, money continued to evaporate under his prodigal fingers;
he had counted upon revenues which failed to materialise, he could no
longer borrow, for his credit was exhausted, and he found himself
reduced to a keener poverty than that of his mansarde garret. After all
this accumulation of work, all this expenditure of genius, to think
that he did not yet have an assured living! He had frightful attacks of
depression, but they had no sooner passed than his will power was as
strong as ever, his fever for work redoubled, and his visionary gaze
discerned the fair horizons of hope as vividly as though they were
already within reach of his hand. Then he would shut himself into his
room, breaking off all ties with the social world, or else would flee
into the provinces, far from the dizzy whirl of Paris.
Thus it happened that he made several sojourns at Sache in 1831, and
that he set out for it once again in 1832, determined upon a lengthy
absence. Mme. de Castries had left Paris and had asked him to join her
at the waters of Aix in September; but, before he could permit himself
to take this trip, he must needs have the sort of asylum for work that
awaited him in Touraine.


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