But he
suffered bitter disillusions when the work was finally printed; the
creator never found his creation sufficiently perfect. Balzac suffered
with all the sensibility of his artistic conscience from blemishes
which he regarded as glaring faults, and which he followed up and
corrected with unparalleled ardour. He was aided in this task by Mme.
de Berny, his sister Laure, Charles Lemesle and Denoyers; and he
himself, a literary giant, who did not hesitate to write to Mme.
Carraud that his work was in its own line a greater achievement than
the Cathedral at Bourges was in architecture, spent whole days in
shaping and reshaping a phrase, like some sublime mason who--by a
prodigy--had built a cathedral single-handed and whose heart bled upon
discovering a neglected carving in the shadow of some buttress and
expended infinite pains to perfect it, although it was almost invisible
amidst the vastness and the beauty of the whole structure.
Accordingly his work became steadily more laborious to Balzac, and from
time to time we can hear him grumbling and groaning; we can see him at
his task, his broad face contracted, his black eyes bloodshot, his skin
bathed in perspiration and showing dark, almost greenish, in the
candle-light, while his whole body trembled and quivered with the
unseen effort of creation.
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