Thus it is that Balzac was able to pack into a short book--he never
wrote a long one--such an effect of crowds and events, above all such
an effect of time. Nobody knows how to compress so much experience
into two or three hundred pages as Balzac did unfailingly. I cannot
think that this is due in the least to the laborious interweaving of
his books into a single scheme; I could believe that in general a book
of Balzac's suffers, rather than gains, by the recurrence of the old
names that he has used already elsewhere. It is an amusing trick, but
exactly what is its object? I do not speak of the ordinary "sequel,"
where the fortunes of somebody are followed for another stage, and
where the second part is simply the continuation of the first in a
direct line. But what of the famous idea of making book after book
overlap and encroach and entangle itself with the rest, by the device
of setting the hero of one story to figure more or less obscurely in a
dozen others? The theory is, I suppose, that the characters in the
background and at the corners of the action, if they are Rastignac and
Camusot and Nucingen, retain the life they have acquired elsewhere,
and thereby swell the life of the story in which they reappear. We are
occupied for the moment with some one else, and we discover among his
acquaintances a number of people whom we already know; that fact, it
is implied, will add weight and authority to the story of the man in
the foreground--who is himself, very likely, a man we have met
casually in another book.
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