He consented to give up his horses,--for whose
feed he was still owing, since he could not feed them on poetry, as he
humorously wrote to Mme. de Girardin,--and his cabriolet. What matter?
He was strong enough to rebuild the foundations of his fortune!
From now on Honore de Balzac thought of nothing but his work. He wrote
his Biographical Notice of Louis Lambert in thirty days and fifteen
nights; but this effort was so prodigious that an apoplectic stroke
prostrated him and he came very near dying. He endured his financial
anxieties and empty purse, upheld by the certainty of his own genius.
He knew how much unfinished work there was in the first version of his
books and he had spells of artistic despair, but they were brief, for
he relied on his strength of will to bring his writings to the
perfection of which he dreamed. "This Biographic Notice of Louis
Lambert," he wrote to Laure, "is a work in which I have tried to rival
Goethe and Byron, to out-do Faust and Manfred; and the tilt is not over
yet, for the proof sheets are not yet corrected.
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