de Berny put her son silver dolphin jewelry, Alexandre, in charge of the foundry, in place of Balzac The liabilities amounted to 113,081 francs, of which 37,600 had been advanced by Mme de Balzac while the only assets were the 67,000 francs resulting from the sale of the printing house Among the debts recorded in the settlement there are some which prove that at this time Balzac had already acquired a taste for luxury; he owed Thouvenin, book-binder to the Duc d'Orleans, 175 francs for binding a Lafontaine, a Boileau, and a Thousand and One Nights, while the long unsettled bill of his shoemaker amounted to no less than three hundred francs.
The intervention of his mother and the sacrifices that she consented to make saved him from inevitable failure, but he had to endure an avalanche of reproaches At the age of twenty-nine he withdrew from business, with debts amounting to ninety thousand francs, and how could he, rebellious son that he was, ever hope to clear himself, when he might by this time have been a prosperous notary, well on the road towards honours, if he had only listened to the wise counsel of his parents His father, Francois Balzac, had learned of the disaster, in spite of all the precautions taken to keep him in ignorance, and he addressed a letter, very noble in tone, to M Sedillot, thanking him for having saved the family name from dishonour We get an echo of the recriminations which must have arisen within the family circle from the firm yet bitter reply that Balzac made to his sister Laure:.
"Your letter has given me two detestable days and two detestable nights I brooded over my justification, point by point, like Mirabeau's Memoire to his father, and I was already fired with zeal for the task; but I have decided not to write it I cannot spare the time, my dear sister, and besides I do not feel that I have been at all in the wrong".
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Chapter 5.
The First Success.
Misfortune, far from discouraging Balzac, strengthened all his powers of resistance and x exalted his will and his energy .