Front matter (continued 2)

He was not always so spirited, and on those occasions one of his favorite jokes was to imitate the German jargon of Nucingen or Schmucke, or otherwise to speak in rama, like the clients of the middle class boarding house of Madame Vauquer (née de Conflans). At the time that he wrote Un Début dans la Vie based on an outline of Madame de Surville, he was seeking proverbs that were slightly off for the art student Mistigris, to whom later, having found him to be full of spirit, he gave a fine place in La Comédie Humaine, under the name of the great landscape painter Léon de Lora. Here are some of his nonsensical proverbs: "He is like an ass on a plain." "I am like the hare, I die or I flee." "Good Counts make good sieves." "Extremes become blocked." "The slap always smells the herring"; and so on like this. A discovery of this type put him in a good humor, and he would pleasantly frolic like an elephant through the furniture and around the salon. For her part, Madame de Girardin was in quest of sayings for the the famous lady of the seven little chairs of Le Courrier de Paris. She sometimes required my assistance, and if a stranger had entered, seeing this beautiful Delphine painting spirals through her golden hair with her white fingers, with a profoundly dreamlike air; Balzac, seated on one of the arms of the great upholstered chair on which Monsieur Girardin usually slept, his hands clenched in the bottoms of his pockets, his waistcoat turned back from his stomach, swinging his leg with a uniform rhythm, expressing with the tense muscles of his face an extraordinary mental focus; me planted between two cushions of the divan, like an opium eater seen in a hallucination; that stranger, certainly, could never have suspected what we were doing there, in so great a meditation; he would have supposed that Balzac was thinking of a new Madame Firmiani, Madame de Girardin of a role for Mademoiselle Rachel, and me of some sonnet. But it was nothing of the kind. As for the puns, Balzac, although his secret ambition was to create them, had, after painstaking efforts, recognized his notorious incapacity in this area, and kept to the slightly off proverbs, which preceded the rough puns brought into fashion by the school of good sense. What beautiful evenings that will never return! We were then far from foreseeing that this great and superb woman, carved fully out of marble from antiquity, that this stocky, robust, lively man, who combined in himself the vigor of the boar and the bull, half Hercules, half satyr, built to last longer than one hundred years, would soon sleep, one at Montmartre, the other at Père‑Lachaise, and that, of the three, I alone would remain to preserve those memories that were already so distant and close to being lost.

Like his father, who died accidentally at more than eighty years of age, and who had flattered himself that he would become wealthy from the annuity scheme of Lafarge, Balzac believed in his longevity. Often he planned with me projects for the future. He was going to finish La Comédie Humaine, write the Théorie de la Démarche, compose the Monographie de la Vertu, fifty dramas, attain a great fortune, marry and have two children, "but not more; two children look good," he said, "on the front of a carriage." All of this could not fail to take a long time, and I pointed out that, once these tasks were accomplished, he would be around eighty years of age. "Eighty years!" he cried, "Bah! It's the flower of age." Monsieur Flourens, with his comforting theories, did not say it better.

One day that we dined together at the home of M. E. de Girardin, he told us a story about his father to show us the strength of the stock to which he belonged. Balzac's father, who had been hired to work in a prosecutor's office, ate following the custom of the time at the table of the master with the other clerks. Partridges were served. The prosecutor's wife, who had her eye on the new arrival, said to him: "Monsieur Balzac, do you know how to carve?" "Yes, Madame," responded the young man, blushing up to his ears; and he bravely took hold of the knife and fork. Entirely ignorant of culinary anatomy, he divided the partridge into four pieces, but with so much strength that he split the plate, sliced the tablecloth, and cut into the wood of the table. He was not nimble, but he was strong: the prosecutor's wife smiled, and from that day, Balzac, the young clerk, was treated with great kindness in that house.

This story that I have told seems lukewarm, but it is necessary to see the pantomime of Balzac as he imitated on his own plate his father's actions, with an air that was both frightened and resolute, mimicking the manner in which he seized his knife after having rolled up his sleeves and in which he sunk his fork into an imaginary partridge; Neptune hunting the monsters of the sea did not wield his trident with a more vigorous fist, and with what an immense weight he bore down with it! His cheeks became purple, his eyes left his head, but the operation ended with him casting upon the guests a look of innocent satisfaction trying to conceal itself in the guise of modesty.

Moreover, Balzac had in him the makings of a great actor: he possessed a full, sonorous, resonant voice, with a rich and powerful timbre, that he knew how to moderate and soften as needed, and he read in an admirable manner, a talent that most actors lack. Whatever he related, he performed it with intonations, grimaces and gestures that no comedian has surpassed in my opinion.

I find in Marguerite, by Madame de Girardin, this remembrance of Balzac. It is a character from the book who speaks.

"He related that Balzac had dined at his house on the preceding day, and that he had been more brilliant, more scintillating than ever. He very much amused us with the story of his trip to Austria. What fire! What verve! What power of imitation! It was marvelous. His manner of paying the postilions is an invention that only a novelist of genius could have discovered. ‘I was very embarrassed at each stopping point,' he said, ‘how was I going to pay? I did not know a word of German, I did not know the currency of the country. It was very difficult. Here is what I invented. I had a bag full of small silver coins, some kreuzers … When I arrived at the stopping point, I would take up my bag; the postilion would come to the window of the carriage; I would watch his eyes attentively, and I would put in his hand one kreuzer, … two kreuzer, … then three, then four, etc., until I saw him smile … when he smiled, I understood that I had given him one kreuzer too much … quickly I would take back my coin and my man was paid.'"

At Les Jardies, he read Mercadet to me, the original Mercadet, by far more sweeping, complicated and dense than the piece arranged for the Gymnase by d'Ennery, with so much delicacy and skill. Balzac, who read like Tieck, without indicating acts, scenes, or names, utilized a voice that was particular to and perfectly recognizable for each character; the voices that he gave to the different kinds of creditors were hilariously funny: there were the hoarse, the honeyed, the hasty, the slow, the menacing, the pleading. They shrieked, wailed, scolded, muttered, screamed in every possible and impossible tone. Debt first sang a solo that soon an immense choir took up. He brought out creditors from everywhere, from behind the stove, from below the bed, from the drawers of the commode; they came from the chimney; they passed through the keyhole; others entered through the window like lovers; these sprung from the bottom of a trunk like those devilish toys that take you by surprise, those moved across the walls as if they were passing by an English ambush, it was a mob, an uproar, an invasion, truly a rising tide. Mercadet might well have shaken them off, when others always returned to start an assault, and as far as the horizon one could make out a somber swarm of creditors on the march, arriving like legions of termites to devour their prey. I do not know if this piece was better when performed this way, but no other performance produced such an effect.

Balzac, during this reading of Mercadet, occupied, partially reclining, a long divan in the salon of Les Jardies because he had sprained his ankle when he slipped, like his walls, on the clay of his property. A stray hair, sticking through the fabric, poked the skin of his leg and bothered him. "The fabric is too thin, the hay passes through it; you will need to put a thick canvas beneath it," he said while pulling at the hair that annoyed him.

François, the Caleb of this Ravenswood, would not listen to this mocking of the splendors of the manor. He corrected his master and said: horsehair. "The upholsterer has cheated me?" responded Balzac. "They are all the same. I had insisted that he use hay! Cursed thief!"

The splendors of Les Jardies were mostly imaginary. All of the friends of Balzac remember having seen written in charcoal upon the bare walls or veneer of gray paper: "Rosewood paneling, tapestry of the Gobelins, Venetian mirrors, paintings by Raphaël." Gerard de Nerval had already decorated an apartment in this manner, so this did not shock me. As for Balzac, he believed literally in the gold, the marble and the silk; but, he did not complete Les Jardies and if he led others to laugh at his pipe dreams, he knew at least that he had built himself an eternal home, a monument "more durable than iron," an immense city, populated with his creations and gilded by the rays of his glory.

V

Due to an oddity of nature that he shared with several of the most poetic writers of this age, such as Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, George Sand, Mérimée, Janin, Balzac possessed neither the gift nor the love of verse, despite the effort that he otherwise made to attain them. On this point, his judgment that was so fine, so profound, so sagacious was at fault; he admired work somewhat aimlessly and in a way in line with public notoriety. I did not believe, even though he professed a great respect for Victor Hugo, that he had ever truly appreciated the lyrical qualities of the poet, while at the same time the sculpted and colored prose amazed him. He, who was so laborious and who rewrote a sentence as many times as a versifier could rework an Alexandrine on an anvil, found working on meter to be puerile, tedious, and without utility. He would have voluntarily awarded a bushel of peas to those who could manage to pass an idea through the narrow ring of rhythm, as Alexander did for the Greek who was trained to throw a ball through a ring from a long distance; verse, with its fixed and pure form, its elliptical speech little suited to a multiplicity of details, seemed to him to be an obstacle invented on a whim, an unnecessary difficulty or a mnemonic device taken from primitive times. His doctrine was in that way nearly the same as that of Stendhal: "Does the idea that a work has been made while hopping on one leg add to the pleasure that it produces?" The Romantic school holds in its heart some followers, partisans of the absolute truth, who rejected verse as trivial or unnatural. If Talma said: "I do not want fine verses!" Beyle said: "I do not want verses at all." This was the basis of the sentiments of Balzac, however in order to appear open‑minded, comprehensive, universal, he sometimes in society pretended to admire poetry, just as the middle class simulate great enthusiasm for music that bores them profoundly. He was always shocked to see me write verse and take pleasure from it. "That is not copy," he would say, and if he held me in any esteem, I owed it to my prose. All of the writers, young then, who associated themselves with the literary movement represented by Hugo, used, like the master, the lyre or the pen: Alfred de Vigny, Sainte‑Beuve, Alfred de Musset, spoke interchangeably the language of the gods and the language of men. I too, if I am permitted to mention myself after such glorious names, have had since the beginning this double aptitude. It is always easy for poets to descend to prose. The bird may walk as needed, but the lion cannot fly. Those who are born to write prose never rise to poetry however poetic they may be elsewhere. Rhythmic speech is a particular gift, and one can possess it without being a great genius, while it is often refused to superior minds. Among the proudest who appear to disdain it, more than one keeps to himself a secret resentment to not possess it.

Among the two thousand characters in La Comédie Humaine, one finds two poets: Canalis, of Modeste Mignon, and Lucien de Rubempré, of Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes. Balzac portrayed both of them as having traits that were not particularly favorable. Canalis is dry, cold, sterile, petty, an adroit arranger of words, a maker of imitation jewelry, who sets rhinestones in gilded silver, and makes necklaces of artificial pearls. His volumes, with many blank spaces, wide margins, and large gaps, contain only a melodious nothingness, monotonous music, suitable only to cause young boarders to fall asleep or dream. Balzac, who ordinarily shapes with warmth the interests of his characters, seems to take a secret pleasure in ridiculing this one and putting him in embarrassing positions: he challenges his vanity with a thousand ironies and a thousand sarcasms, and finishes by taking from him Modeste Mignon with her great fortune, to give her to Ernest de la Brière. This conclusion, in contrast to the beginning of the story, sparkles with concealed malice and fine mockery. One would say that Balzac is personally happy at the good trick that he has played on Canalis. He avenges, in his own way, the angels, the sylphs, the lakes, the swans, the willows, the skiffs, the stars and the lyres that had been used so abundantly by the poet.

If in Canalis we have the false poet, reserving his meager inspiration and putting it behind a dam so that it can flow, foam and sound for a few minutes in order to seem like a cascade, the man used to taking advantage of his laboriously wrought literary successes to serve his political ambitions, the man with material interests who is in love with money, medals, pensions and honors, despite his elegiac attitudes and pose as an angel who misses being in heaven, Lucien de Rubempré shows us the poet who is lazy, frivolous, oblivious, capricious, and as nervous as a woman, incapable of prolonged effort, without moral force, living in the hooks of actresses and courtesans, a puppet whose strings the terrible Vautrin, under the pseudonym Carlos Herrera, pulls as he pleases. Despite all of his vices, Lucien is seductive; Balzac has equipped him with spirit, beauty, youth, and elegance; women adore him; but he ends by hanging himself at the Conciergerie. Balzac did everything he could to successfully complete the marriage of Clotilde de Grandlieu with the author of Marguerite; unfortunately the demands of morality intervened, and what would the Faubourg Saint‑Germain have said of La Comédie Humaine if the student of Jacques Collin the convict had married the daughter of a duke?

Regarding the author of Marguerite, I will note here a bit of information that could amuse those who are interested in literature. The few sonnets that Lucien de Rubempré shows as a sample of his volume of verse to the bookseller Dauriat are not the work of Balzac, who did not write verse, and asked his friends for those that he happened to need. The sonnet on the daisy is by Madame de Girardin, the sonnet on the camellia is by de Lassailly, and the one on the tulip is by myself.

Modeste Mignon also contained a piece of verse, but I do not know the author.

As I have said regarding Mercadet, Balzac was an admirable reader, and he very much wanted, one day, to read some of my own verses. He read to me, among others, La Fontaine du Cimitière. Like all prose writers, he read only for the meaning, and tried to conceal the rhythm that poets, when they deliver their verses out loud, in contrast accentuate in a manner intolerable to everyone, but which delights them alone, and we had together, on this point, a long discussion, which, like always, served only to cause each of us to persist in our particular opinion.

The great literary man of La Comédie Humaine is Daniel d'Arthez, a writer who was serious, a hard worker, and for a long time buried, before achieving his success, in immense studies of philosophy, history and linguistics. Balzac feared facility, and he did not believe that a rapidly produced work could be good. In this context, journalism held a singular repugnance for him, and he regarded the time and talent consecrated to it to be wasted; he didn't hold journalists in any higher regard, and he, who was however such a great critic, despised criticism. The unflattering portraits that he has drawn of Etienne Loustau, of Nathan, of Vernisset, of Andoche Finot, represent fairly well his true opinion of the place of the press. Emile Blondet, introduced into that bad company to represent the good writer, is compensated for his articles in the imaginary Débats of La Comédie Humaine with a rich marriage to the widow of a general, which permits him to leave journalism.

Moreover, Balzac never worked toward the point of view of a newspaper. He brought his novels to the magazines and daily newspapers as they had come to him, without preparing any breaks or interesting twists at the end of each installment, to increase the desire for the continuation. His work was broken up into sections that were roughly the same length, and sometimes the description of an armchair would start on one day and finish the next. With justification, he did not want to divide his work into little dramatic or vaudevillian tableaus; he thought of nothing but the book. This working method was often to the detriment of the immediate success that journalism requires of the authors it employs. Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas were more frequently victorious in the battles each morning that then captivated the public. He did not obtain immense popularity, like that of Les Mystères de Paris and Le Juif‑Errant, of Les Mousquetaires and of Monte‑Cristo. Les Paysans, a masterpiece, even caused a great number of readers to cancel their subscriptions to the Presse, where the first installment appeared. Its publication had to be suspended. Every day letters arrived that demanded that it be ended. Balzac was found to be boring!

There was still not a good understanding of the great idea of La Comédie Humaine, to take on modern society and write about Paris and our times the book that sadly no ancient civilization has left for us. The collected edition of La Comédie Humaine, by assembling all of the scattered works, put into relief the philosophical intention of the writer. From that date forward, Balzac grew considerably in public opinion, he finally ceased being considered "the most productive of our novelists," a stereotyped phrase that irritated him as much as "the author of Eugénie Grandet."

There have been a number of critiques on Balzac and he has been discussed in many ways, but in my opinion one very characteristic feature has not been emphasized: this point is the absolute modernity of his genius. Balzac owes nothing to antiquity; for him there are neither Greeks nor Romans, and he has no need to cry for deliverance from them. One does not find in the composition of his talent any trace of Homer, of Virgil, of Horace, not even of De Viris Illustribus; nobody was ever less classical.

Balzac, like Gavarni, observed his contemporaries; and, in art, the supreme difficulty is to portray that which one sees before one's eyes; one can pass through one's time without appreciating it, and that is what many eminent minds have done.

To be of his time, nothing would appear to be simpler but nothing is more difficult! To wear no glasses, neither blue nor green, to think with his own brain, to use the speech of the present day, not stitch together a colorful fabric from the phrases of his predecessors! Balzac possessed this rare merit. The ages have their perspective and their distance; at that distance the great masses move away, the lines end, the flickering details disappear; with the help of classical memories, of melodious names from antiquity, the least rhetorician could create a tragedy, a poem, an historical study. But, to find yourself in the crowd, to be elbowed by it, and to appreciate its features, understand its flow, sort out its personalities, outline the features of so many diverse beings, to show the motives for their actions, that demands an entirely special genius, and this genius, the author of La Comédie Humaine had to a degree that no one has equaled and probably no one will equal.

This profound understanding of modern things rendered Balzac, it must be said, insensitive to sculptural beauty. He read with a careless eye the stanzas of white marble with which Greek art sung the perfection of the human form. In the museum of antiquities, he looked at the Venus de Milo without great ecstasy, but the Parisian woman who has stopped in front of the immortal statue, draped in her long cashmere shawl running without a crease from the neck to the heel, wearing her hat with a veil from Chantilly, gloved with her tight Jouvin gloves, showing from under the hem of her flounced dress the polished tip of her worn boots, made his eyes sparkle with pleasure. He analyzed her coquettish allure, he savored at length her skillful graces, only to find as she did that the goddess was too heavyset and would not be an attractive addition to the homes of Mesdames de Beauséant, de Listomère, or d'Espard. Ideal beauty, with its serene and pure lines, was too simple, too cold, too harmonious for this complicated, exuberant and diverse genius. He also says somewhere: "It is necessary to be Raphaël to portray many virgins." Character pleased him more than style, and he preferred looks to beauty. In his portraits of women, he never fails to put a mark, a crease, a wrinkle, a red blemish, a softened and tired corner, a vein that is too apparent, some detail indicating the bruises of life that a poet, in tracing the same image, would surely have suppressed, mistakenly without a doubt.

I do not intend to criticize Balzac in this. This fault is his principal strength. He accepted nothing of the mythologies and traditions of the past, and he did not know, happily for us, that ideal that was achieved with the verses of the poets, the marbles of Greece and Rome, the paintings of the Renaissance, which stands between the eyes of artists and reality. He loved the woman of our day just as she is, and not as a pale statue; he loved her for her virtues, for her vices, for her fantasies, for her shawls, for her dresses, for her hats, and followed her across her life, far beyond the point in the journey where love abandons her. He prolonged her youth by many seasons, gave her springs with the summers of Saint‑Martin, and gilded her twilight years with the most splendid rays. We are so classical, in France, that we have not perceived, after two thousand years, that roses, in our climate, do not bloom in April as in the descriptions of poets of antiquity, but in June, and that our women begin to be beautiful at the age at which those of Greece, who are more precocious, cease to be. How many charming types he has imagined or reproduced! Madame Firmiani, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, the Princess de Cadignan, Madame de Morsauf, Lady Dudley, the Duchess de Langeais, Madame Jules, Modeste Mignon, Diane de Chaulieu, without counting the middle class women, the seamstresses and the ladies of ill repute.

And how he loved and knew that modern Paris, whose beauty the amateurs of local color and the picturesque of that time appreciated so little! He roamed across it in every direction night and day; there is not a forgotten alley, a foul passage, a narrow, muddy and black street which did not become under his pen an etching of Rembrandt, full of teeming and mysterious darkness or sparkling with a trembling star of light. Wealth and poverty, pleasure and suffering, shame and glory, grace and ugliness, he knew all of his beloved town; it was for him an enormous, hybrid, formidable monster, an octopus with one hundred thousand arms that he heard and saw as a living thing, and which constituted in his eyes an immense individual. See with regard to this the marvelous pages placed at the beginning of La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, in which Balzac, impinging on the art of the musician, had wanted, as in a grand orchestral symphony, to make all of the voices sing together, all of the sobbing, all of the cries, all of the rumors, all of the grinding of Paris at work!

From this modernity on which I purposefully dwell arose, without his suspecting it, a difficulty in labor that Balzac experienced in his efforts to complete his work: the French language as refined by the classics of the seventeenth century is not suitable, when one conforms to it, other than to express general ideas, and to portray conventional figures in a vague setting. To describe this multiplicity of details, of characters, of types, of architectures, of furnishings, Balzac was obliged to create for himself a special language, composed of all of the technical terms, all of the argots of science, of the workshop, of the theater, even of the lecture hall. Every word that said something was welcomed, and the sentence, in order to receive it, opened a space, a parenthetic expression, and lengthened itself obligingly. It is this that made superficial critics say that Balzac did not know how to write. He possessed, even though he did not know it, a style and a very beautiful style, the necessary, inevitable, and mathematical style of his ideas!

VI

No one could have the ambition to write a complete biography of Balzac; any relationship with him was necessarily limited by gaps, absences, disappearances. Work absolutely ruled the life of Balzac, and if, as he himself says with touching sensitivity in a letter to his sister, he has painlessly sacrificed the joys and distractions of existence to this jealous god, it cost him to renounce all company that might have led to friendship. To reply with a few words to a long letter became for him who was overburdened with labor a prodigality that he could rarely permit himself; he was the slave of his work and a voluntary slave. He had, with a very good and very tender heart, the selfishness of the great worker. And who could have dreamed of being mad at his pressured negligences and his apparent forgetfulness, when one saw the results of his escapes or his seclusions? When, the work completed, he would reappear, one would have said that he had left you the day before, and he would take up the interrupted conversation once again, as if sometimes six months and more had not passed. He made trips within France to study localities that he included in Scènes de Province, and he withdrew to the houses of friends, in Touraine, or in the Charente, finding there a calm that the creditors did not always allow him in Paris. After some great work, he permitted himself, occasionally, a longer excursion to Germany, northern Italy, or Switzerland; but these rapid excursions, made with the preoccupations of bills that were due to be paid, contracts to fulfill, and limited funds for travel, may have fatigued him more than they gave him rest. His vast gaze took in the skies, the horizons, the mountains, the countryside, the monuments, the houses, the interiors to commit them to that universal and meticulous memory that never failed him. Superior in this to descriptive poets, Balzac saw man at the same time as nature; he studied the physiognomies, the manners, the passions, the characters in the same glance as locations, clothing and furnishings. One detail sufficed for him, as the least fragment of bone did for Cuvier, to accurately imagine and reconstitute a personality glimpsed while passing. Balzac has often been praised, and rightly so, for his power of observation; but, however great he was, it is not necessary to imagine that the author of La Comédie Humaine always drew from nature his portraits whose truth was so clearly from elsewhere. His process did not resemble in any way that of Henri Monnier, who followed in real life an individual in order to make a sketch with a pencil and a pen, drawing his least gestures, writing down his most insignificant phrases in order to obtain at the same time a photographic plate and a page of shorthand notes. Buried most of the time in the excavations of his work, Balzac could not materially observe the two thousand characters who play their role in his comedy of one hundred acts; but every man, when he looks inward, contains humanity: it is a microcosm in which nothing is missing.

He has, not always, but often observed within himself the numerous types that live in his work. That is why they are so complete. No one could absolutely comprehend the life of another; in such a case, there are motives that remain obscure, unknown details, actions of which one loses track. In even the most faithful portrait, some creativity is necessary. Balzac has thus created much more than he saw. His rare faculties of the analyst, of the physiologist, of the anatomist, have merely served the poet in him, just as the assistant serves the professor at his lectern when he passes him the substances that he needs for his demonstrations.

Perhaps this could be the place to define the truth as understood by Balzac; in this time of realism, it is good to be understood on this point. The truth of art is not that of nature; everything that is represented through the means of art necessarily contains some element of the conventional; make it as small as possible, it still exists, be it perspective in painting, language in literature. Balzac accentuates, magnifies, enlarges, prunes, adds, shadows, illuminates, avoids or approaches men or things according to the effect that he wants to produce. He is truthful, without doubt, but with augmentations and sacrifices for art. He prepares backgrounds that are somber and darkened with charcoal for his luminous figures, he puts white backgrounds behind his dark figures. Like Rembrandt, he sets the light of day on the brow or nose of the character; sometimes, in his description, he obtains fantastic and bizarre results, by placing, without saying anything, a microscope under the eye of the reader; the details then appear with a supernatural clarity, an amplified minutia, some unbelievable and formidable magnifications; the tissues, the scaliness, the pores, the veins, the blemishes, the fibers, the capillaries take on an enormous importance, and turn a visage that is insignificant to the naked eye into a sort of fanciful mask as amusing as those that were sculpted under the cornice of the Pont‑Neuf and vermiculated by time. The characters are also pushed to excess, as it is suited to each type: if Baron Hulot is a libertine, he additionally personifies lust: he is a man and a vice, an individual and an abstraction; he unites in himself all of the scattered traits of the character. Where a writer of lesser genius would have drawn a portrait, Balzac has created a figure. Men do not have as many muscles as Michelangelo gives them to suggest the idea of strength. Balzac is full of such useful exaggerations, of those dark strokes that enhance and support the outline; he dreams while writing, like the masters, and leaves his mark on everything. As this is not a literary critique, but a biographical study that I am writing, I will not take these remarks farther than necessary. Balzac, whom the Realist school seems to wish to claim as its leader, has no connection to its features.

Unlike certain literary persons who feed on nothing but their own genius, Balzac read a great deal and with a prodigious rapidity. He loved books, and he created a beautiful library that he intended to leave to the town of his birth, an idea that the indifference of the townspeople made him later abandon. He absorbed in a few days the voluminous works of Swedenborg, which were owned by his mother, who was rather preoccupied with mysticism at that time, and that reading was responsible for Séraphita‑Séraphitus, one of the most astonishing products of modern literature. Never did Balzac approach, or move closer to ideal beauty than in that book: the ascension of the mountain has a quality that is ethereal, supernatural, and luminous that lifts you from the earth. The only two colors that are employed are celestial blue and snow white with a few pearlescent tones for shadow. I know nothing more intoxicating than this beginning. The panorama of Norway, with its sharply cut coastline seen from this height, dazzles and gives one vertigo.

Louis Lambert was also influenced by the reading of Swedenborg; but soon Balzac, who had taken on the eagle wings of the mystics to soar into the infinite, descended to the earth that we inhabit, even though his robust lungs could have breathed indefinitely the thin air that is deadly for the weak: he abandoned the world beyond after that flight and returned to real life. Perhaps his remarkable genius would have gone out of view too quickly if he had continued to soar toward the unfathomable immensities of metaphysics, and we should be happy that he limited himself to Louis Lambert and Séraphita‑Séraphitus, which represent sufficiently, in La Comédie Humaine, the supernatural side, and open a door that is sufficiently large into the invisible world.

I now move on to a few more intimate details. The great Goethe had a horror of three things: one of the things was tobacco smoke, I am not permitted to say the two others. Balzac, like the Jupiter of the German poetic Olympus, could not stand tobacco in any form at all; he denounced the pipe and forbid the cigar. He did not tolerate even a light Spanish cigarette; the Asian hookah alone found favor with him, and yet he only tolerated that as a curiosity and because of its local color. In his diatribes against the herb of Nicot, he did not imitate the doctor who, during a dissertation on the dangers of tobacco, does not hesitate to take ample doses from a large box of tobacco near him: he never smoked. His Théorie des Excitants contains an indictment against tobacco, and there is no doubt that if he had been Sultan, like Amurath, he would have beheaded relapsed and obstinate smokers. He reserved all of his predilections for coffee, which did him so much harm and might have killed him, although he was built to become a centenarian. Was Balzac wrong or right? Is tobacco, as he maintained, a deadly poison and does it intoxicate those that it does not turn stupid? Is it the opium of the Occident that dulls the will and the intelligence? These are questions that I cannot answer; but I am going to list here the names of some celebrated personages of our age, some of whom smoked while the others did not smoke: Goethe, Heinrich Heine, uniquely for Germans, did not smoke; Byron smoked; Victor Hugo does not smoke, neither does Alexandre Dumas père; on the other hand Alfred de Musset, Eugène Sue, Georges Sand, Mérimée, Paul de Saint‑Victor, Emile Augier, Ponsard, smoked and still smoke; however they are not exactly imbeciles.

This aversion, moreover, was shared by nearly all men who were born in our century or a little before. Only sailors and soldiers smoked then; at the odor of the pipe or the cigar, women fainted: they have become much tougher since then, and more than one pair of rosy lips has pressed with love the golden tip of a cigar, in a sitting room turned into a smoking room. Dowagers and turbaned mothers alone have preserved their old antipathy, and stoically watch their unfashionable salons be deserted by the youth.

Every time that Balzac is obliged, for the credibility of the story, to allow one of his characters to indulge in this horrible habit, his brief and disdainful sentence betrays a secret disapproval: "As for de Marsay," he said, "he was busy smoking cigars." And he must have really loved this captain of dandyism to permit him to smoke in his work.

A fragile and elegant young woman had without doubt inspired this aversion in Balzac, although that is a question that I cannot answer definitively. Still it's true that the tax collector never earned a sou from him. Regarding women, Balzac, who described them so well, must have known them, and one understands the sense that the Bible attaches to this word. In one of the letters that he writes to Madame de Surville, his sister, Balzac, quite young and completely unknown, sets down an ideal for his life in two words: "To be celebrated and to be loved." The first part of this program, which all artists map out for themselves, had been realized in every way. Was the second also accomplished? The opinion of the most intimate friends of Balzac is that he practiced the chastity that he recommended to others, and shared at most platonic love; but Madame de Surville laughs at this idea, with a smile of feminine delicacy and full of discreet reserve. She maintains that her brother was unfailingly discreet, and that if he had wanted to speak, he would have had many things to say. This must be true, and without doubt the safe of Balzac contained more of the notes with delicate, sloping handwriting than the lacquered box of Canalis. There is, in his work, the scent of a woman: odor di femina; when one enters there, one hears behind the doors that close on the hidden staircase the rustling of silk and the creaking of shoes. The semicircular and padded salon on the Rue de Batailles, of which I have quoted the description inserted by the author in La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, did not remain completely virginal, as many of us had assumed. In the course of our close friendship, which lasted from 1836 until his death, only once did Balzac make allusion, with the most respectful and the most tender terms, to an attachment of his early youth, and even then he gave me only the first name of the person whose memory, after so many years, still made his eyes moisten. Had he said any more to me, I certainly would not have abused his confidences; the genius of a great writer belongs to all of the world, but his heart is his own. I touch only briefly on this tender and delicate side of Balzac's life, because I have nothing to say that does not honor him. This reserve and this mystery are those of a gentleman. If he was loved as he wished in the dreams of his youth, the world knows nothing of it.

Do not imagine after these reflections that Balzac was austere and prudish in his speech: the author of Les Contes Drolatiques had been nourished with too much Rabelais and was too pantagruelistic to be unable to laugh; he knew good stories and invented them: his broad jokes interspersed with Gallic crudities would have made the sanctimonious and horrified members of society cry out shocking; but his laughing and talkative lips were sealed like a tomb when there was a question of a serious sentiment. He scarcely allowed his closest friends to surmise his love for a foreign woman of distinction, a love of which one can speak, since it was crowned by marriage. It was that passion that had been felt for a long time that necessitated his distant excursions, although their object remained until the last day a mystery for his friends.

Absorbed by his work, Balzac did not think until rather late of the theater, for which the general opinion judged him, wrongly to my mind, after a few more or less risky efforts, to be hardly suited. He who created so many types, analyzed so many characters, gave life to so many people, should succeed on the stage; but, as I have said, Balzac was not spontaneous, and one cannot correct the proofs of a drama. If he had lived, after a dozen works, he would assuredly have found his form and attained success; La Marâtre that played at the Théâtre‑Historique was close to a masterpiece. Mercadet, lightly edited by an intelligent arranger, enjoyed a long posthumous success at the Gymnase.

Nevertheless, the factor that motivated his efforts was mostly, I must say, the idea of a windfall that would liberate him all at once from his financial predicament rather than a real vocation. Theater, as we know, is much more profitable than books; the continuing nature of the performances, on which a rather large royalty is drawn, produces quickly by accumulation some considerable sums. If the strategic work is greater, the material labor is less. Several dramas are necessary to fill a volume, and while you promenade or rest idly with slippers on your feet, the footlights are illuminated, the scenery descends from the ceiling, the actors recite and gesticulate, and you find yourself having made more money than you would have by scribbling for an entire week bent painfully over your desk. Such melodrama has more value to its author than Notre‑Dame de Paris to Victor Hugo and Les Parents Pauvres to Balzac.

It's curious that Balzac who contemplated, elaborated, and corrected his novels with such unrelenting meticulousness, seemed, when it concerned the theater, to become dizzy from the rapidity of his work. Not only did he not rewrite his theater pieces eight or ten times like his books, he really did not write them at all. Having just come upon his first idea, he chose a day for the reading and called his friends to request their assistance in the project; Ourliac, Lassailly, Laurent‑Jan, myself and others, have often been summoned in the middle of the night or at fabulously early times of the morning. It was necessary to drop everything; every minute of delay caused the loss of millions.

A pressing note from Balzac summoned me one day to come right away to 104 Rue de Richelieu, where he had a lodging in the house of Buisson the tailor. I found Balzac wrapped in his monastic frock, and hopping up and down with impatience on the blue and white rug of a tidy attic room that had walls upholstered in light brown percale embellished with blue, because, despite his apparent neglectfulness, he had an understanding of interior design, and always prepared a comfortable den for his laborious vigils; in none of his lodgings was there the picturesque disorder dear to artists.

"Finally, here is Theo!" he cried when he saw me. "You are lazy, slow, slothlike, an obstacle, hurry up then; you should have been here an hour ago. Tomorrow I am reading Harel a great drama in five acts."

"And you would like to have my advice," I responded while settling myself into an armchair like a man who is preparing himself to endure a long lecture.

From my attitude Balzac understood my thought, and he said to me in the most straightforward way, "The drama is not written."

"The devil," I said. "Oh well, you will need to delay the reading for six weeks."

"No. We are going to rush the dramorama to get paid. At this time I have a heavy debt that is due."

"From now until tomorrow, it's impossible; there would not be time to copy it."

"Here is how I have arranged things. You will do an act, Ourliac another, Laurent‑Jan the third, de Belloy the fourth, me the fifth, and I will read at noon as agreed. One act of a drama has no more than four or five hundred lines; one can write five hundred lines of dialogue in a day and in a night."

"Tell me the subject, outline the plan, describe to me in a few words the characters, and I will get to work," I responded to him, somewhat alarmed.

"Ah!" he cried with an air of superb weariness and magnificent disdain, "if I need to tell you the subject, we will never be finished."

I did not think I was being inappropriate in posing that question, which seemed quite pointless to Balzac.

After a brief instruction that I obtained with difficulty, I set to work to put together a scene from which only a few words remained in the final work, which was not read the next day, as one might well believe. I do not know what the other collaborators did; but the only one who seriously joined in, this was Laurent‑Jan, to whom the play is dedicated.

That play, it was Vautrin. Everyone knows that the dynastic and pyramidal tuft of hair that Frédérick Lemaître fantasized wearing in his disguise as a Mexican general brought down on the work the criticism of the authorities; Vautrin, forbidden, had only a single performance, and poor Balzac remained like Perrette in front of his overturned milk jug. The prodigious proceeds that he had anticipated as the probable product of his drama vanished into ciphers, which did not stop him from refusing very nobly the compensation offered by the ministry.

At the beginning of this study, I told you about the tendencies toward dandyism that were demonstrated by Balzac, I spoke of his blue coat with solid gold buttons, his monstrous cane topped with a group of turquoise stones, his appearances in society and in the extravagant salon; this splendor lasted only for a period of time, and Balzac recognized that he was not suited to play the role of Alcibiades or Brummel. Everyone could encounter him, particularly in the morning, when he rushed to the printers carrying copy or seeking proofs, in an infinitely less splendid outfit. I recall the green hunting jacket, with brass buttons representing the head of a fox, the black and gray checked pants that extended to his feet, which were encased in large laced shoes, the red scarf wrapped around the neck like a rope, and the hat that was at the same time both bristly and smooth, its blue bleached by sweat, which covered rather than clothed "the most fertile of our novelists." Despite the disorder and poverty of his dress, nobody would have been tempted to take for an unknown commoner this large man with the blazing eyes, flaring nostrils, and cheeks struck with violent tones, all illuminated by genius, who passed while carried away by his dream like a whirlwind! At the sight of him, the mocking stopped on the urchin's lips, and the serious man did not begin to smile. Everyone recognized one of the kings of thought.

Sometimes, to the contrary, he would be seen walking with slow steps, his nose in the air, his eyes searching, following one side of the street then examining the other, not daydreaming, but looking at the signs. He was looking for names to christen his characters. He maintained with some justification that a name could not be invented any more than a word. According to him, names arose on their own like languages; besides real names possessed a life, a meaning, a destiny, a mystical significance, and it was impossible to place too much importance on their choice. Léon Gozlan has told in a charming way, in his Balzac en Pantoufles, how the famous Z. Marcas of the Revue Parisienne was found.

A sign of a chimney man provided the name of Gubetta that had long been sought by Victor Hugo, who was no less careful than Balzac in the names of his characters.

This demanding life of nocturnal work had, despite his strong constitution, left its traces on the features of Balzac, and we find in Albert Savarus a portrait of him, written by himself, that represents him such as he was at that time (1842), with some minor differences:

"… A superb head, black hair already streaked with some white, hair like that of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in our paintings, with thick shining curls, stiff like horsehair, a round white neck like that of a woman, a magnificent forehead, divided by the powerful furrows that great projects, great thoughts, strong reflections inscribe on the the foreheads of great men; an olive complexion marbled with red marks, a square nose, eyes of fire, then the hollow cheeks, with two long lines full of suffering, a mouth with a sardonic smile and a small chin that was narrow and too short; crow's feet at his temples, sunken eyes, rolling under the eyebrow arches like two burning globes; but despite all of these signs of violent passion, a calm manner, profoundly accepting, the voice of a penetrating sweetness which surprised me with its facility, the true voice of an orator, sometimes pure and astute, sometimes insinuating, and thunderous when necessary, then pliant with sarcasm, and then becoming incisive. Monsieur Albert Savaron is of middle height, neither fat nor thin; finally, he has the hands of a prelate."

In this portrait, which is incidentally very faithful, Balzac idealizes himself a little for the needs of the novel, and subtracts from himself a few kilograms of portliness, license which is certainly permitted to a beloved hero of the Duchess d'Argaiolo and Mademoiselle Philomène de Watteville. This novel of Albert Savarus, one of the least known and least quoted of Balzac, contains many transposed details on his habits of life and of work; one could even see there, if it was permissible to lift those veils, secrets of another kind.

Balzac had left the Rue des Batailles for Les Jardies; he then went to live at Passy. The house in which he lived, situated on a steep slope, offered a unique architectural layout. One entered there

A little like wine enters bottles

It was necessary to descend three floors to reach the first. The entry door, which was on the side of the house that faced the road, opened nearly into the roof, like a mansard. I dined there once with L. G. It was a strange dinner, with its dishes based on economical recipes invented by Balzac. At my express request, the famous onion purée, endowed with so many healthy and symbolic qualities and which almost killed Lassailly, did not appear. But the wines were marvelous! Each bottle had a story, and Balzac told it with an eloquence, a verve, a conviction without equal. The wine of Bordeaux had gone around the world three times; the Châteauneuf‑du‑Pape traced back to legendary times; the rum came from a barrel rolled for more than a century by the sea, which had to be opened with blows from an axe, because the crust that had been formed around it by shellfish, coral and seaweed was thick. My palate, surprised, irritated by the acidic flavors, protested in vain against these illustrious origins. Balzac maintained the solemnity of a soothsayer, and despite the proverb, I kept my eyes fixed on him, but I did not make him laugh!

For dessert, we had pears of a ripeness, a size, a tenderness and a quality that would do honor to a royal table. Balzac devoured five or six of them with the juice running down his chin; he believed that this fruit was good for him, and he ate them in such a quantity as much for health as for sweetness. Already he felt the first effects of the illness that would take him. Death, with its skeletal fingers, was touching this robust body to know where to attack it, and finding no weakness there, killed it through excess and hypertrophy. The cheeks of Balzac were already lined and marked with those red spots that simulate health to inattentive eyes; but for the observer, the yellow tones of hepatitis surrounded the tired eyelids with their golden halo; the expression, brightened by this warm sepia hue, appeared even more vivacious and shining and lessened anxieties.

At that time, Balzac was very preoccupied with the occult sciences, palmistry, and card reading; he had been told of an oracle even more astonishing than Mademoiselle Lenormand, and he persuaded me, as well as Madame E. de Girardin and Méry, to go and consult her with him. The prophetess lived in Auteuil, I no longer know in which street; that matters little to my story, because the address that was given was false. We came upon an honorable middle class family on holiday: the husband, the wife, and an old mother in whom Balzac, sure of his facts, persisted in finding a mystical air. The good woman, not flattered to have been taken for a sorceress, became angry; the husband took us for tricksters or crooks; the young woman laughed loudly, and the servant hastened prudently to lock up the silver. We had no choice but to withdraw after our blunder; but Balzac maintained that we were in the right place, and having climbed back into the carriage, muttered insults at the old lady: "Demon, harpy, magician, vampire, worm, monster, lemur, ghoul, snake charmer, creature," and all of the bizarre terms that a familiarity with the litanies of Rabelais could suggest to him. I said: "If she is a sorceress, she hides her game well." "Of cards," added Madame de Girardin with a quickness of mind that never failed her. We tried some further explorations, always fruitlessly, and Delphine asserted that Balzac had imagined this resource of Quinola in order to be driven by carriage to Auteuil, where he had business, and to procure some pleasant traveling companions. It is necessary to believe, however, that Balzac alone found that Madame Fontaine that we were all seeking together, because, in Les Comédiens Sans le Savoir, he depicted her between her hen Bilouche and her toad Astaroth with a fantastic and frightening truthfulness, if those two words can go together. Did he consult her seriously? Did he go to see her as a simple observer? Many passages in La Comédie Humaine seem to suggest that Balzac had a kind of faith in the occult sciences, about which the official sciences have still not said their last word.

Around this time, Balzac began to show a taste for old furniture, chests, vases; the least piece of worm‑eaten wood that he bought on the Rue de Lappe always had an illustrious provenance, and he created detailed genealogies for his lesser knickknacks. He hid them here and there, always because of those fantastical creditors that I was starting to doubt. I even amused myself by spreading the rumor that Balzac was a millionaire, that he was buying old stockings from dealers in caterpillars to hide onces, quadruples, génovines, crusades, colonnates, double louis, in the manner of Père Grandet; I said everywhere that he had three cisterns, like Aboul‑Casem, filled to the brim with garnets, dinars and rials. "Théo will get my throat cut with his jokes!" said Balzac, annoyed and charmed.

That which gave some veracity to my jokes was the new house in which Balzac lived, on the Rue Fortunée, in the Beaujon quarter, less populated then than it is today. He occupied a mysterious little house there that would have suited the fantasies of an ostentatious financier. From outside, one saw over the wall a sort of cupola formed by the arched ceiling of a sitting room and fresh paint on the closed shutters.

When one entered this small house, which was not easy, because the master of this dwelling hid himself with extreme care, one discovered a thousand details of luxury and comfort that contradicted the poverty that he affected. He received me however one day, and I could see a dining room adorned with old oak, with a table, a fireplace, some buffets, some sideboards and some chairs of sculpted wood, that would have made Berruguète, Cornejo Duque and Verbruggen envious; a salon of golden yellow damask, with doors, cornices, plinths and window frames of ebony; a library arranged in armoires inlayed with shell and brass in the style of Boule, and whose door, hidden by the shelves, once closed, could not be found; a bathroom in yellow Breccia, with bas‑reliefs of stucco; a domed sitting room, whose old paintings had been restored by Edmond Hédouin; a gallery lit from above, that I recognized later in the collection of Le Cousin Pons. There were on the shelves all sorts of curiosities, porcelain from Dresden and Sèvres, horns of crackled celadon, and on the stairway, which was covered with a rug, some great vases from China and a magnificent lantern suspended by a cable of red silk.

"So have you emptied one of the caches of Aboul‑Casem?" I said to Balzac, laughing, confronted with these splendors. "You can see well that I was right to suggest that you are a millionaire."

"I am poorer than ever," he responded while taking on a humble and pious air. "None of this is mine. I have furnished the house for a friend that I await. I am only the caretaker and porter of the building."

I quote here his exact words. This response, he made it in passing to many people who were as shocked as me. The mystery was soon explained by the marriage of Balzac to the woman whom he had loved for a long time.

There is a Turkish proverb that says: "When the house is finished, death enters." It is for this reason that the sultans always have a palace in the course of construction that they are very careful not to complete. Life seems to want nothing to be complete – except misfortune. Nothing is as dreaded as a wish fulfilled.

The notorious debts were finally paid, the dream union completed, the nest made for happiness padded and covered with down; as if they had foreseen his approaching end, those who envied Balzac started to praise him: Les Parents Pauvres, Le Cousin Pons, where the genius of the author shines in all its radiance, united all opinions. It was too beautiful; nothing more remained for him but to die.

His illness made rapid progress, but nobody believed that there would be a fatal outcome, so much we all trusted in the athletic constitution of Balzac. I thought firmly that he would bury us all.

I was going to take a trip to Italy. And before leaving I wanted to say goodbye to my illustrious friend. He had left in a carriage to collect from customs some exotic curiosity. I drew away reassured, and at the moment that I returned to my carriage, I was given a note from Madame de Balzac, which explained to me obligingly and with polite regrets why I had not found her husband at home. At the bottom of the letter, Balzac had scrawled these words.

"I can neither read, nor write.

"De Balzac."

I have preserved like a relic that ominous line, probably the last that was written by the author of La Comédie Humaine; it was, and I did not understand it right away, the final cry, "My God, why have you forsaken me!" of the thinker and of the worker. The idea that Balzac could die did not even occur to me.

A few days after that, I was eating ice cream at the Café Florian, on the Piazza Saint Marco; in my hand I found the Journal des Débats, one of the few French papers that was available in Venice, and I saw in it the announcement of the death of Balzac. I almost fell from my chair onto the stones of the Piazza at this sudden news, and my pain was quickly mixed with an impulse of indignation and outrage that was not very Christian, because all souls have an equal value before God. I had just visited the insane asylum on the island of San‑Servolo, and I saw there decrepit idiots, doddering octogenarians, human worms who are not even guided by animal instinct, and I asked myself why this luminous brain was extinguished like a flame on which one blows, while tenacious life persisted in these murky heads that were dimly traversed by fickle rays.

Nine years have already passed since that fatal date. Posterity has commenced for Balzac; every day he seems greater. When he was in the company of his contemporaries, he was poorly appreciated, he was seen only in fragments under sometimes unfavorable circumstances: now the edifice that he built rises as one draws further away, like the cathedral of a city that conceals the neighboring houses, and which on the horizon appears immense above the flattened roofs. The monument is not completed, but, such as it is, it terrifies by its enormity, and surprised generations will ask themselves who is the giant who alone has raised these formidable blocks and built so high this Babel that made all of society sing.

Although he is dead, Balzac still has detractors; on his memory are thrown the banal reproach of immorality, the last insult of powerless and jealous mediocrity, or even of total stupidity. The author of La Comédie Humaine not only is not immoral, but he is actually a strict moralist. Monarchical and catholic, he defends authority, exalts religion, preaches duty, reprimands passion, and does not accept happiness except in marriage and the family.

"Man," he says, "is neither good, nor bad; he is born with instincts and aptitudes; society, far from corrupting him, as Rousseau maintained, improves him, makes him better; but self‑interest develops also his evil tendencies. Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, being, as I said in Le Médecin de Campagne, a complete system for the repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the most important component of social order."

And with the ingenuity that suits a great man, anticipating the reproach of immorality that will be addressed to him by shoddy spirits, he numbers the irreproachably virtuous characters who are found in La Comédie Humaine: Pierrette Lorrain, Ursule Mirouët, Constance Birotteau, la Fosseuse, Eugénie Grandet, Marguerite Claës, Pauline de Villenoix, Madame Jules, Madame de la Chanterie, Eve Chardon, Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon, Madame Firmiani, Agathe Rouget, Renée de Maucombe, without counting among the men, Joseph Le Bas, Genestas, Benassis, the cleric Bonnet, Dr. Minoret, Pillerault, David Séchard, the two Birotteaus, the cleric Chaperon, the judge Popinot, Bourgeat, the Sauviats, the Tascherons, etc.

Rogues are not missing, it is true, in La Comédie Humaine. But is Paris populated only with angels?

END