and polishing his letters and occasional treatises, political, religious, and critical, of which the most ambitious were Le Prince (1632) and the Socrate Chrestien (1652). His letters had begun to attract attention as early as 1618, and they were the admiration of the Hôtel Rambouillet long before the author was introduced there. The first collection appeared in 1624.
Balzac was as devoted to style for its own sake as Malherbe, and had the same narrow oratorical ideal of correctness, the same devotion to order, dignity, and sonorous rhythm. "Ce n'est pas assez," he says in the Socrate Chrestien, "de savoir la Théologie: il faut encore savoir écrire, qui est une seconde science." It was to this "seconde science" that Balzac dedicated his life as steadily as did Descartes to the rational explanation of the universe; and the result was that in his letters and dissertations French oratorical prose attained almost at once to formal perfection of structure and rhythm. It owed this development in some measure to the very barrenness of Balzac's thought. It is well for a writer to have something to say, but for one whose chief function is to attune his medium it is also well not to have too much. Balzac could hardly have made his periods so uniformly musical if he had been striving to utter the thoughts of Montaigne or Descartes. But by Montaigne Balzac's work would have been described as "Lettres vuides et descharnées qui ne se soustiennient que par un délicat chois de mots entassez et rengez à une juste cadence." He excelled in just those
