Balzac

CHAPTER I.

THE VAGARIES OF GENIUS

“Great minds are bravely eccentric; they scorn the beaten track.” – Goldsmith.

In the city of Tours, in whose gabled streets there lingers still some memory of la belle Impéria, Honoré de Balzac was born on the 20th of May, 1799.

His childhood was in no wise extraordinary, save for the avidity with which he read the Bible and the keen delight which he took in the possession of a little red violin. He was indifferent to romps and games, and when not lost in the mysterious depths of the Scriptures he played by the hour on his fiddle, and extracted therefrom an enjoyment which was almost sensual in its intensity. His parents were well-considered people, in easy circumstances. Honoré was their first-born, and to him were subsequently given two sisters and a brother, concerning whom only a passing mention need be made. His eldest sister, Laure, became the wife of M. de Surville, a civil engineer, survived her illustrious brother, and published his letters, together with a weak sketch of his life; his second sister also married, but died at an early age; while his brother Henri sought his fortune, after the manner of younger sons, in the colonies, failed to find it, and was otherwise entirely uninteresting.

At the age of eight, Balzac was placed as boarder at the Collége de Vendôme, where, through the compression of his dreamy nature by unaccustomed tasks and rules, he soon lapsed into a careless neglect of his duties, and became, in consequence, one of the most frequently punished pupils in his class. Favored, however, by the tacit connivance of a tutor, he passed most of his time in the library. Science, philosophy, belles-lettres, religion, history, and even dictionaries, he read and inwardly digested, and during the six years that he remained at the school he assimilated the substance of all the books worth reading.

This absorption of ideas produced a noteworthy effect. His eye embraced six or eight lines at a time, and his mind appropriated the thought with a velocity equal to his glance; a single word in a phrase often sufficing for a clear understanding of the whole.

His memory was like a vise. He remembered not only the ideas which he had acquired in reading, but also those which conversation and reflection had suggested. Words, names, figures, and places he not only recalled at will, but he saw them within himself, brilliant and colored as they were at the moment when he had first perceived them.

Mentally fortified by his extensive reading, he wrote at the age of twelve the famous “Traité de la Volonté,” so often mentioned in his later works, but which was confiscated by the regent as the probable cause of his neglect of the regular curriculum, and which Balzac says he doubtless sold for waste paper without recognizing the value of the scientific treasures whose germs were thus wasted in ignorant hands.

After this loss, more than terrible to a young imagination, Balzac sought consolation in verse, and wrote a poem on the Incas, commencing: “O Inca! roi infortuné et malheureux!” which, with the exception of his subsequent “Cromwell,” was his sole familiarity with the peplum of the Muse; for, of the four sonnets in the “Illusions Perdues,” the first and second are by Lassaily, the third is by Madame de Girardin, and the fourth by Gautier, while the poem in “Modeste Mignon” was the work of Gérard de Nerval.

From these secret and laborious studies, as well as from possible fermentation of ideas, Balzac fell into a sort of coma and nervous fever, which was singularly inexplicable to his masters and teachers. His parents were hastily summoned, and the precocious boy, now almost epileptic, was taken home, where rest and quiet gradually calmed the tumult in his brain, and restored the health and vivacity of boyhood. Little by little the results of his extraordinary labors became classified within his troubled mind, and to them were added other ideas of a less abstract nature; and in wandering on the banks of the Loire, or in attending the impressive ceremonies at the Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, he acquired not only a love of the beautiful, but also the sincere and abiding faith in religion with which he subsequently enriched the pages of the “Comédie Humaine.” At home, as at school, however, his intelligence was entirely unsuspected, and his sister, Madame de Surville, relates that whenever he chanced to make a brilliant remark his mother would invariably say, “It is impossible, Honoré, for you to understand what you are talking about;” whereupon Honoré would laugh, without deigning to enter into any explanations.1 His father, however, who was an inoffensive disciple of both Montaigne and Swift, had his own reasons for thinking well of his son, and decided that a child of his could never by any chance be a fool; and while at that time he saw nothing in the boy which promised any immediate celebrity, he nevertheless cherished a few vague hopes.

But the prescience which the father lacked had already visited the son. From time to time he stated that he would some day be famous, and this boast appeared so outrageously insulting to his brother and sisters that they punished him with every torture which childish ingenuity could invent.

Balzac’s family soon after moved to Paris, where he again was placed at school. There, as at Vendôme, he gave no sign of future genius, and as before was regarded as an idler and a dullard.

His classes completed, he attended the lectures of Guizot, Cousin, and Villemain, and his degree of bachelier-ès-lettres obtained, he entered a law office which Scribe had just quitted. Here he acquired that luminous insight to law and procedure which served him to such advantage in the varied litigations of his future world, and enabled him, years after, to plead, as Voltaire did for Calas, in defense of Sébastien Peytel, a former acquaintance, accused of the murder of his wife and servant. The case was lost, and his client convicted; but his oration was none the less superb, and his argument is still cited as one of the most brilliant efforts in the annals of the French bar.

His legal apprenticeship completed, it was naturally expected that he would follow the law as a profession, but Balzac had other ideas; he felt as did Corneille e tutti quanti, that his vocation was not such as is found in courts, and expressed a preference for a purely literary life.

“But,” objected his father, “do you not know that in literature, to avoid being a slave, you must be a king?”

“Very well,” Balzac replied, “king I will be.”

After many arguments it was finally agreed that he should be allowed two years of probation; and as his family were about to return to the country, he was lodged in the Rue Lesdiguières, near the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, on an allowance of a hundred francs a month. His life there he has in “Facino Cane” described as follows: —

“I passed my days at the neighboring library. I lived frugally, for I had accepted all the conditions of that monastic life which is so necessary to students and thinkers. I seldom went out, and when I did a simple promenade was converted into a source of study, for I observed the customs of the faubourg, its inhabitants and their characters. As badly dressed as the workmen and as careless of decorum, I attracted no attention from them, and was enabled to mix among them and watch their bargains and disputes.

“Observation had become to me intuitive. It penetrated the spirit without neglecting the body, or rather it seized exterior details so clearly that it immediately went beyond them. It gave me the power of living the life of any individual upon whom it was exercised, and permitted me to substitute my personality for his, as did the dervish in the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ who had the power of occupying the body and soul of those over whom he pronounced certain words. When, therefore, between eleven and twelve at night, I encountered a workman and his wife returning from the theatre, I amused myself in following them from the Boulevard du Pont-aux-Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. At first they would speak of the play which they had just witnessed. From that they would begin to talk of their own affairs, the mother dragging her child after her, listening neither to its complaints nor to its demands. The money which was to be paid to them was added, and then spent in twenty different ways. Then came the household details, murmurings on the excessive price of potatoes, the length of the winter, energetic discussions on the baker’s bill, and finally little quarrels, in which they displayed their characters in picturesque words. While listening to them I espoused their life. I felt their rags on my back; my feet marched in their tattered shoes; their desires, their needs, all passed into my spirit, and mine into theirs: it was the dream of a waking man. With them I grew angry at their tyrannical masters or at their customers who made them come again and again without paying what they owed.

“To relinquish my identity, to become another through the intoxication of the moral faculties, and to play this game at will, such was my sole distraction. I have sometimes wondered if this gift was one of those faculties whose abuse leads to madness, but its causes I have never sought. I know, merely, that I possess and make use of it.”

This ability to penetrate mentally the individuality of another is the evident explanation of the minuteness with which all of Balzac’s characters are drawn, as well as the secret of their logical attitudes; for as in every-day life, while it is a question whether man is his own providence or is interwoven in a web of pre-ordained circumstances, yet in either case certain results are inevitable and a matter of statistic, so in Balzac there is no dodging of fate or shirking of consequences, and he is careful, in sending his own blood tingling through the veins of his creations, to surround them with the same laws to which he is himself subjected.

During his novitiate Balzac prepared a five-act tragedy in blank verse, entitled “Cromwell,” a subject which it is curious to note was simultaneously chosen by Victor Hugo. At its completion, a professor of the École Polytechnique was requested to decide whether the lines contained a sufficient promise of genius to warrant a further pursuit of literary honors on the part of the young aspirant. The play, conscientiously examined, was deemed simply detestable, and the referee adjudged that Balzac might do what he would, but that literature was certainly not his vocation.

From this decision there was no present appeal; and while his mother and sisters begged him to engage in some other occupation, his father assured him that he would suppress his allowance should he persist in his intentions. Another perhaps would have yielded, but his pride and belief in his destiny made his resolution unalterable, and Balzac was left in solitary sadness to meditate on the coquetries of the Muse.

“I delighted,” he says in “La Peau de Chagrin,” “in the thought that I should live in the midst of tumultuous Paris in an inaccessible sphere of work and silence, in a world of my own, of books and ideas, where like the chrysalis I should build a tomb only to emerge again brilliant and famous.

“I took the chances of dying to live. In reducing existence to its actual needs, I found that three sous for charcuterie prevented me from dying of hunger and preserved my mind in a state of singular lucidity, while enabling me at the same time to observe the wonderful effects which diet produces on the imagination. My lodging cost three sous a day, I burned at night three sous’ worth of oil, and for two sous more I heated my room with charcoal: and in this manner I lived in my aerial sepulchre, working night and day with such pleasure that study seemed the most beautiful theme, the happiest solution, of existence. The calm and silence necessary to the student possess an indescribable something which is as sweet and intoxicating as love, and study itself seems to lend a sort of magic to all that surrounds us. The forlorn desk on which I wrote, my piano, my bed, my chair, the zigzags of the wall-paper, – all these things became as though animated and humble friends, the silent accomplices of my future. Many a time I have communicated my soul to them in a glance, and often in looking at the broken moulding I encountered new developments of thought, some striking proof of my system, or words which I considered peculiarly fitted to express ideas almost untranslatable.”

Balzac had not as yet any settled plan of work, but he tried his hand, while forming his style, at a quantity of comic operas, dramas, comedies, and romances, none of which, however, were accepted save by the gutter’s sneering fatalist, the ragpicker.

After many fruitless attempts and knocks at many a door, Balzac succeeded at last in finding a publisher, but of a type seen only in opéra bouffe, who proffered in payment of a romance a promissory note with a year to run. Balzac of course had no choice. He wished to appear in print. The bargain was concluded, and the “Héritière de Birague” was produced. Then, under various pseudonyms, such as Lord R’hoone, the anagram of Honoré, Dom Rago, M. de Viellerglé, and Horace de Saint-Aubin, he produced a quantity of novels somewhat after the style of Pegault Lebrun, and yet so diverse in treatment that one of them, “Wann-Chlore,”2 was attributed to a luminary of the Romantic school, and another, “Annette et le Criminel,” was suppressed by the censorship. Some of these books, whose paternity he always denied, have since been collected under the title of “Œuvres de Jeunesse,” but of the greater part no trace remains.

Exhausted by privations and worn with continued study, Balzac was obliged to return to his family, then established at Villeparisis, where, broken in mind and health, he sank into an almost hopeless dejection.

“Is this what you term life,” he wrote3 to his sister, – “this involuntary rotation and perpetual return of the same things? I am in the springtide of a flowerless life, and I long to have some charm thrown over my chill existence; for of what use is fortune and pleasure when youth is gone? Of what use is the actor’s gown if he play no longer his part? Old age is a man who has dined and looks at others eat; and I, I am young, and I hunger before an empty plate – Laura, Laura, shall I, then, never realize my two immense desires, to be celebrated and to be loved?”

But Balzac soon wearied of this plaintive inactivity, and, fertile in projects, conceived the plan of printing Molière complete in one volume, and of following it with similar editions of the French classics. When these had appeared, he proposed, like Richardson, to produce his own works, and his illuminous imagination immediately foresaw new Clarissas issuing from the press.

The necessary working capital he procured from his family, who, though far from rich, were none the less glad to aid him in an enterprise for which literature would be abandoned and a legitimate business adopted.

But after the publication of Molière and La Fontaine, in each of which he inserted an elaborate and original introduction, he was obliged, through the cabals of the other publishers, to relinquish his plan, while burdened at the same time with a load of debt which oppressed almost every hour of his after life.

He was now absolutely without resources. The expense of a few sous attending the carriage of a letter, an omnibus ride, anything, in fact, which demanded the outlay of ready money, he was obliged to forego, and even remained in his garret that he might preserve as long as possible the only shoes which he owned.

“My sole possessions,” he wrote to his sister, “are my books, which I cannot part with, and my good taste, which unfortunately for the rich cannot be bought. If I were in prison I should be happier; life then would cost me nothing, and in any event I could not be more of a captive than I am.”

But the pecuniary loss which he had sustained, and which amounted to about 120,000 francs, served but as a stimulus to renewed activity; and resolving that he would recover from the printing press all that it had robbed him of, he commenced to seek some undiscovered vein of literary treasure, and in 1829 brought out “Le Dernier Chouan,” the first romance which he considered worthy to bear his own name. Its ferocity and passion attracted great attention, and the public became at once favorably disposed toward him; but when, a few months later, the “Physiologie du Mariage” appeared, its success was not only instantaneous, but Balzac was heralded as a new Molière. He now emerged from quasi obscurity into the white light of fame. Publishers were submissive, praise was unstinted. He had realized the first of his immense desires, and had it not been for his weight of debt he might perhaps have been able to realize the other, but his time was not his own. He labored, if possible, more incessantly than ever, conceived the plan of the “Comédie Humaine,” and from that time up to almost the day of his death produced a series of masterpieces which in point of interest and erudition form the most gigantic monument in the history of modern literature.

His work accompanied him wherever he went. He dreamed of it; he wrote while he ate; he traveled over the better part of Europe, and wrote while he traveled; he composed in the omnibus and in the street; and had he had a mistress he would, in all probability, have followed the example of Baudelaire, and composed in her arms. Thoroughly conscientious, he invariably visited the place where the scenes of a drama were to be located. “I am going to Alençon,” he would say; “you know Mlle. Cormon4 lives there;” or, “I am off for Grenoble; there is where M. Benassis5 lives:” for it should be remembered that not only were Balzac’s characters as realistically vivid to him as are the hallucinations of a neurosthene, but he invariably spoke of them as another would of friends and acquaintances. “Let us talk of realities,” he one day said to Jules Sandeau, who had been speaking to him of an invalid relative, “let us talk about ‘Eugénie Grandet;’” and at another time, when his sister asked for some information about Captain Jordy,6 Balzac replied very simply, “I never knew the man before he came to Nemours, but if he interests you, I will try to learn something of him.” It was a long time before he was able to find a suitable husband for Mlle. Camille Grandlieu, and rejected all who were suggested to him. “They are not in the same set,” he would say. “Chance alone can supply her with a husband, and chance is a commodity which a novelist should use but sparingly. Reality alone justifies the improbable, and the probable alone is permitted to us.” But Mlle. de Grandlieu was not destined to braid St. Catherine’s tresses, and afterwards, to Balzac’s great delight, found a suitable husband in the person of the young Comte de Restaud,7 who in spite of his mother’s derelictions8 was otherwise a very acceptable suitor.

After the place of his novel had been visited, viewed from every aspect, the customs noted and the localisms acquired, Balzac would return to Paris, shut himself up in a garret, – the garret has its poetry, – and for weeks and sometimes months at a time he would not only disappear entirely from view, but all trace of him would be lost.

At other times, he would lodge under an assumed name, which he imparted only to his most intimate friends. “My address,” he wrote to Madame Carraud in 1834, “is always Madame Veuve Durand, 13, Rue des Batailles;” and in 1837, he wrote to Dablin, “To see the Widow Durand, a name must be given. Yours is on the list.”

“The house,” Gautier wrote,9 “of the Widow Durand was as well guarded as the Garden of the Hesperides. Two or three passwords were exacted, and that they might not become vulgarized they were frequently changed. Among others, I recall the following. On telling the janitor that the season for prunes had arrived, the visitor was permitted to cross the threshold; to the servant who prowled about the head of the stairway, it was necessary to murmur ‘I bring laces from Belgium;’ and on assuring the valet de chambre that Madame Bertrand was in excellent health, the visitor was ushered into the great man’s presence.”

It was in the Rue des Batailles that the famous boudoir of the “Fille aux Yeux d’Or” actually existed; and though its luxury would not appear unusual to-day, it was, nevertheless, a source of continual wonder to his Bohemian friends, and his own description of it is not devoid of interest:10 —

“One side of the boudoir formed a graceful semicircle, while in the centre of the other, which was perfectly square, there shone a mantel-piece of marble and gold. The door, which was concealed behind a rich portière of tapestry, was directly in front of the window.

“In the horseshoe was a Turkish divan, fifty feet in circumference and as high as a bed. The covering was of white cashmere tufted with bows of black and lilac silk, which were disposed as at the angles of a lozenge.

“The back of this immense bed rose several inches above a pile of cushions, which added to the general effect by their coloring and artistic arrangement.

“The boudoir was hung with a red material, over which was draped an Indian muslin fluted like a Corinthian column by a piping alternately hollow and round, and bordered at top and bottom by a band of lilac embroidered with black arabesques. Beneath the muslin the red became pink, and this delicate shading was repeated in the window curtains, which were of Indian muslin lined with pink silk and ornamented with a fringe of black and lilac.

“At equal distances on the wall above the divan were six sockets of silver-gilt, each of which supported two candles, while from the centre of the ceiling hung a highly polished lustre of the same material.

“The carpet was like a camel’s-hair shawl, and seemed a mute reminder of the poetry of Persia. The furniture was covered with white cashmere relieved by lilac and black. The clock and candelabras were of gold and marble. The one table which the boudoir contained was covered with white cashmere, while all about were jardinières of white and red roses.”

Behind the semicircle was a secret passage, at one end of which was an iron cot and at the other a desk; and here it was that Balzac, secure from intrusion, worked and composed at his ease.

To return, however, to the Widow Durand. In 1838 he wrote to Madame Hanska, the lady who subsequently became his wife: —

“The Widow Durand is dead. She was killed by the contemptible conduct of the daily papers, who have betrayed a secret which should have been sacred to every man of honor.”

After this misfortune Balzac installed himself openly at Les Jardies, a country house which he had built at Ville d’Avray, and where he was, as he expressed it, “like the lantern of Demosthenes, and not, as every one else says, of Diogenes;” but when, a year or two later, he took up his residence in the Rue Basse, at Passy he surrounded himself with all his former precautions, instituted a series of countersigns which he changed weekly, and transformed himself into “Madame Bri…”

When guarded in this way from any intrusion, Balzac would work from twelve to twenty-one hours a day. His usual hours of sleep were from six in the evening until midnight. Then he would bathe, don the white robe of a Dominican friar, poise a black skull cap on his head, and, under the influence of coffee and by the light of a dozen candles, would work incessantly till he could work no more.

His work completed, the lion would forsake his den, and for an evening or two he would be seen in the Loge Infernale at the opera, invariably carrying a massive cane whose head glittered with jewels, and which Madame de Girardin was pleased to imagine rendered him invisible at will;11 or he would make brief apparitions in the salons of the literati and nobility, and then, suddenly, without a word of warning, he would shut himself up as impenetrably as before.

His manner of writing was stamped with the same eccentricity which characterized all his habits. When a subject which he proposed to treat had been well considered, he would cover thirty or forty sheets with a scaffolding of ideas and phrases, which he then sent off to the printer, who returned them in columns wired and centred on large placards. The work, freed in this way from any personality and its errors at once apparent, was then strengthened and corrected. On a second reading the forty pages grew to a hundred, two hundred on the third, and so on, while on the proof-sheets themselves new lines would start from the beginning, the middle, or the end of a phrase; and if the margins were insufficient, other sheets of paper were pinned or glued to the placards, which were again and again returned, corrected, and reprinted, until the work was at last satisfactorily completed.