All Balzac's hopes of making his
fortune once more crumbled to pieces; yet he refused to succumb, but,
at the same time he wrote the bad news to Laure, announced that he had
hit upon something better! Such was his unconquerable optimism. He
returned by way of Milan, where he remained several weeks, attending to
some business matters for the Visconti family, and, far from his
"phrase-shop," he indulged in bitter reflections. At the age of
thirty-nine his debts amounted to two hundred thousand francs, he had
resorted to every means to clear himself, and, weary of so many useless
efforts, he ceased to look forward to a day of liberation.
But he missed his routine of exhausting labour, he sighed for his
table, his candles, his white paper; he wanted to get back to his
feverish nights, his days of meditation, in his secluded and silent
workroom where, better than anywhere else, all his heroic personages
quivered into being, and he beheld all the various lives of his
creation with a bitter, almost terrible joy. He returned to Paris
during the first half of June, lamenting: "My head refuses to do any
intellectual work; I feel that it is full of ideas, yet it is
impossible to get them out; I am incapable of concentrating my
thoughts, of compelling them to consider a subject from all its sides
and then determine its development.
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