Custine eventually discovered that his knack was for travel writing. He wrote a decently received account of a trip to Spain and was encouraged by Honoré de Balzac to write accounts of other "half-European" parts of Europe, like southern Italy and Russia. In the late 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" appeared, whose last chapter contained the prophecy that the future belonged to Russia and America. Inspired by Tocqueville's work, Custine decided that Russia would be the subject of his next writing effort. Custine was later dubbed by some historians as "the de Tocqueville of Russia".