xii INTRODUCTION
appears a little too much in his cartoon manner. "La Péchina" wants fuller working out; but she affords one of the most interesting touches of the comparison above suggested in the scene between her, Nicolas, and Catherine. One turns a little squeamish at the mere thought of what M. Zola would have made of it in the effort to make clear to the lowest apprehension what Balzac, almost without offence, has made clear to all but the very lowest. Michaud is good and not over-done; and of his enemies the Tonsards—enough has been said. They could not be better in their effectiveness; and, I am afraid, they could not be much better in their truth. Here, at least, if the moral picture is grimy enough, Balzac cannot, I think, be charged with having exaggerated it, while he cannot be denied the credit of having presented it in extraordinarily forcible and brilliant colors and outlines.
Les Paysans, owing to the lateness of its appearance, was less pulled about than almost any other of its author's books. It, or rather the first part of it, appeared under the title Qui Terre a guerre a in the Presse for December 1844. Nothing more appeared during the author's life; but in 1855 the Revue de Paris reprinted the previous portion, and finished the book, and the whole was published in four volumes by de Potter in the same year.
