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Book, page 31 / 264 whom it was exercised, enabling me to put myself in his skin, just at the dervish of the /Arabian Nights/ entered the body and soul of those over whom he pronounced certain words." The would-be man of letters pushed his hobby even to dogging people to their homes, and to registering in note-book or brain their conversations--records of joys, sorrows, and interests. "I could realize their existence," he affirms; "I felt their rags on my back. I walked with my feet in their worn-out shoes; it was the dreaming of a man awake. . . . To quit my own habits and become another by the intoxication of my moral faculties at will, such was my diversion. To what do I owe this gift? Is it second sight? Is it one of those possessions of the mind that lead to madness? I have never sought out the causes of this gift. I have it and use it--that is all I can say." Honore's 'prentice attempts at producing a masterpiece oscillated between the novel and the drama. Two stories, entitled respectively /Coquecigrue/ (an imaginary animal) and /Stella/, were abandoned before they were begun. A comic opera had the same fate. The /Two Philosophers/, a farce in which a couple of sham sages mocked at the world and quarrelled with each other, while secretly coveting the good things they affected to despise, appears to have been worked at, but uselessly. Next a tragedy, tackled with greater resolution, was composed and entirely finished. Curiously, the subject of it, /Cromwell/, was the same as that chosen by Victor Hugo, a few years later, to achieve the overthrow of classicism and the substitution of Romanticism in its stead. The drama was written in verse, a form of literary composition foreign to Balzac's talent. Even during the months he laboured at his task, he confessed to Laure, 'midst his sallies of joking, that what he was writing teemed with defective lines. He polished and repolished, however, hoping to overcome these drawbacks, upheld by his invincible self-confidence. The piece, as sketched out in his correspondence, made large alterations in English history. Its interest hinged chiefly on the dilemma created in Cromwell's mind by his two sons falling into the hands of a small Royalist force, and by Charles's ordering them to be given up without conditions to their father, although the King was
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