Excerpt from The Rise and Fall of C�sar Birotteau: Grandeur Et D�cadence De C�sar Birotteau

The action and characters also are interesting, if not, on the whole, quite artistically probable. It will be observed that the here does a little underlie the constant objection of the Devil's Advocate to Balzac, that almost every one of his good characters is more or less of a fool. Even a keen man of business may, of course, be easily outwitted in a game of pure speculation - a proposition which we need not go to France, or examine the long list of crashes from the ficti tious terrains de la Madeleine to the real Panama, in order to establish. And a very keen man of business may be im prudently expensive in a combined fit of personal vanity and affection for his family. But it is a little of a stretch on the credulity of the reader to represent a plodding tradesman like Birotteau, who, as we are expressly told, had an old fashioned horror of paper, as not merely incurring large speculative obligations, but as stripping himself of every rap of ready money while exposing himself to an unusual demand for it. The picture of his going a-borrowing and a-sorrowing is drawn with great power and with much vivacity but here, too, his simplicity is a thought exaggerated. And Con stance's affection for, and fidelity to, an unattractive man, whom she saw to be little better than a fool, may be thought improbable in an ideal beauty with a clear head, while some may even say that ideal beauties are almost always extremely stupid. Yet, again, in C�sarine, Momus may point to that superficiality and vagueness which usually, if not always, mar Balzac's treatment of an honest girl.

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