him transformed the dreary street! To a lost traveller he changed the whole face of things in an instant. A picture of that street without him would have been nothing more than a conventional picture of light and shade. My turbaned sentinel filled it with vitality and interest. The point needs no emphasis, yet it is interesting to consider how one is perpetually coming back to it, disregardful of that background of which we are all inclined, and not unreasonably inclined, to make so much.

He

I suppose no one was ever more
disposed than was Balzac to get all
that could be got out of the back-
ground. His novels are rich in
passages-some of them so long
that they fill a good part of the
chapter-in which the characters
of streets are established with a
profound feeling for the individu-
ality of inanimate things.
loved to ramble about the city,
and wherever he went he made
the very stones tell him tales of
human life, and this not through
what we might call their specific
historical associations, but through the peculiar signs of wear
and tear they showed, with such differences, in each locality.
Balzac is unique in finding in a building, in some single edifice.
or in a group of houses, the personal atmosphere, the human
atmosphere, that hangs, let us say, about an old garment. But
he was the first to turn from the background to the figures.
Listen to one of his confessions:

If I met a working man and his wife in the streets between eleven o'clock and midnight on their way home from the Ambigu Comique, I