Read Ebook: Honoré de Balzac by Gautier Th Ophile Desmond David Translator

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 213 lines and 29574 words, and 5 pages

"When, between eleven o'clock and midnight, I met a workman and his wife returning from the Ambigu-Comique, I amused myself by following them from the Boulevard Pont-aux-Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. These good people would at first speak of the play that they had just seen; next they would address their personal affairs; the mother would pull the child by the hand without listening to either his complaints or his questions. The married couple would count up the money that would be paid to them the next day. They would spend it in twenty different ways. They would then move on to household matters, complaints over the excessive price of potatoes or the length of the winter and the rise in the cost of butter, energetic discussions on how much was owed to the baker, and finally onto discussions where each of them became irritated and demonstrated his character with picturesque words. In listening to these people, I could connect with their life, I felt their rags upon my back, I walked with my feet in their tattered shoes; their desires, their needs, all passed into my soul, and my soul passed into theirs; it was the dream of an awakened man. I became exasperated with them against the workshop foremen who tyrannized them or against the unfair practice that made them return many times without providing them with their pay. To abandon habits, to become another through this intoxication of the moral faculties and to play this game at will, such was my entertainment. To what do I owe this gift? Is it an extrasensory perception? Is it one of those qualities whose abuse would lead to madness? I have never sought the sources of this power; I possess it and I use it, that is all."

I have transcribed these lines, which are doubly interesting because they illuminate a little-known side of Balzac's life, and because they show that he was conscious of this powerful faculty of intuition that he already possessed at such a high level and without which the realization of his work would have been impossible. Balzac, like Vishnu, the Indian god, possessed the gift of metamorphosis, that is to say the ability to incarnate himself into different bodies and live in them as long as he wished; however, the number of the metamorphoses of Vishnu is fixed at ten: those of Balzac are countless, and furthermore he could produce them at will. Although it may seem extravagant to say this in the heart of the nineteenth century, Balzac was a seer. His merits as an observer, his acuteness as a physiologist, his genius as a writer, do not suffice to explain the infinite variety of the two or three thousand types which play a more or less important role in La Com?die Humaine. He did not copy them, he lived them in an ideal manner, he wore their clothes, he took on their habits, he immersed himself in their surroundings, he was them for as long as necessary. From there come these authentic, logical characters, never contradicting themselves and never forgetting themselves, endowed with an intimate and profound existence, who, to use one of his expressions, took on the challenge of life in civil society. Truly red blood circulated in their veins in place of the ink that infused the creations of ordinary writers.

Balzac did not possess this ability for any time except the present. He could transport his thought into a marquis, into a financier, into a middle-class person, into a man of the people, into a woman of the world, into a courtesan, but the shadows of the past did not obey his call: he never knew, like Goethe, how to evoke from the depths of antiquity the beautiful H?l?ne and make her dwell in the Gothic manor of Faust. With two or three exceptions, all of his work is modern; he has assimilated the living, he has not resurrected the dead. Even history seduced him little, as one can see from the preface to La Com?die Humaine: "In reading the dry and off-putting catalogues of facts called histories, who has not recognized that the writers have forgotten in every era, in Egypt, in Persia, in Greece, in Rome, to give us the history of manners? The piece by Petronius on the private life of the Romans irritates rather than satisfies our curiosity."

This void left by the historians of vanished societies, Balzac proposed to fill for our own, and God knows that he carefully followed the program that he had planned.

"Society was going to be the historian, I should not be but the secretary; in constructing the inventory of vices and of virtues, in assembling the principal features of the passions, in depicting the characters, in choosing the principal events of the society, in composing types by the blending of traits of several homogeneous characters, perhaps I could succeed in writing the history forgotten by so many historians, that of manners. With a great deal of patience and courage, I might be able to complete, on nineteenth century France, the book that we all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, India, have unfortunately not left us on their civilization, and that like the abbot Bartholomew, the courageous and patient Monteil had attempted regarding the Middle Ages, although in a form that was not appealing."

But let us return to the garret on the Rue Lesdigui?res. Balzac had not conceived the plan of the work that would immortalize him; he was still seeking it with anxiety, bated breath, and hard labor, trying everything and succeeding in nothing; however he already possessed that obstinacy in his work to which Minerva, as surly as she might be, must one day or another yield; he outlined comic operas, made plans for comedies, dramas and romances whose titles Madame de Surville has preserved: Stella, Coqsigrue, Les Deux Philosophes, without counting the terrible Cromwell, whose verses had caused him so much pain and yet were not worth much more than that which began his epic poem, Incas.

Imagine to yourself young Honor?, his legs wrapped in a patched coat, his upper body protected by an old shawl of his mother, his headdress a sort of Dantesque cap and his hair of a cut that only Madame de Balzac knew, his coffee pot to his left, his inkwell to his right, working with a heaving chest and bowed forehead, like an ox at the plow, the field still stony and not cleared by those thoughts which would later trace for him such productive furrows. The lamp shines like a star in the front of the dark house, the snow falls in silence on the loosened tiles, the wind blows through the door and window "like Tulou on his Flute, but less agreeably."

If some dawdling passerby had raised his eyes toward that little, obstinately flickering glow, he certainly would not have suspected that it was the dawning of one of the greatest glories of our age.

Would you like to see a sketch of the place, transposed, it's true, but very exact, drawn by the author in La Peau de Chagrin, that work which contains so much of himself?

"... A room which looks down upon the yards of the neighboring houses, from the windows of which extend long poles hung with washing; nothing was more horrible than that garret with those yellow, grimy walls, which soaked in the misery and called out to its scholar. The roof slanted in a uniform fashion, and the loosened tiles permitted a view of the sky; there was room for a bed, a table, a few chairs, and under the sharp angle of the roof I could position my piano ... I lived in this aerial sepulcher for almost three years, working night and day, without rest, with so much pleasure that my studies seemed to be the most beautiful focus, the happiest solution to human life. The calm and silence necessary to the scholar have some elements of the sweetness and intoxication of love ... Study lends a sort of magic to everything that surrounds us. The meager desk upon which I wrote and the brown leather that covered it, my piano, my bed, my armchair, the peculiar wallpaper, my furniture, all of these things came to life and became for me humble friends, silent partners in my future. How many times have I not shared my soul while gazing upon them? Often, while letting my eyes wander on a crooked molding, I would encounter new developments, a striking proof of my system that I believed was able to convey nearly untranslatable thoughts."

In this same passage, he makes an allusion to his work: "I had undertaken two great works; a comedy that was in only a few days to give me fame, a fortune and entry into that world in which I wanted to reappear while exercising the kingly rights of a man of genius. You have all seen in this masterpiece the first error of a young man just out of college, the nonsense of a child. Your jibes destroyed the nascent illusions, which since then have not been awakened ..."

One recognizes here the ill-fated Cromwell, which, read in front of the family and the assembled friends, was a complete fiasco.

Honor? appealed this sentence before an arbiter whom he accepted as competent, an honorable old man, a former professor at the ?cole Polytechnique. The judgment was that the author should do "anything at all, except literature."

What a loss for letters, what a void in the human spirit if the young man had bowed before the experience of the old man and listened to his counsel, which, certainly, was most wise, because there was not the least spark of genius nor even of talent in this rhetorical tragedy! Happily Balzac, under the pseudonym of Louis Lambert, had not composed for nothing at the college of Vend?me the Trait? de la Volont?.

He submitted to the sentence, but only for tragedy; he understood that he should give up trying to walk in the footsteps of Corneille and Racine, whom he so admired without being in their debt, for never were geniuses more contrary to that of himself. The novel offered him a more suitable model, and he wrote at this time a great number of volumes which he did not sign and which he always disavowed. The Balzac that we know and that we admire was still in limbo and struggled in vain to extricate himself. Those who had judged him capable of being nothing but a copyist appeared to be right; perhaps even this option had failed him, because his beautiful handwriting had already deteriorated with the crumpled, crossed out, overwritten, near hieroglyphic drafts of the writer fighting for the idea and no longer concerned about the beauty of the character.

Thus, nothing resulted from this rigorous confinement, this hermetic life in the Th?ba?de in which Rapha?l outlines the budget: "Three sous of bread, two sous of milk, three sous of meat that prevented me from dying of hunger and kept my mind in a state of singular lucidity. My lodgings cost me three sous a day; I burned three sous of oil every night, I took care of my own room, I wore flannel shirts so that I would spend only two sous a day for laundry. I warmed myself with coal, whose price divided by the days in the year never gave more than two sous for each. I had suits of clothes, linens, and shoes for three years: I didn't want to get dressed except to go to certain public lectures and to the libraries; these expenses combined were only eighteen sous: there remained two sous for unforeseen things. I do not recall having, during this long period of work, having passed the Pont des Arts or ever buying water."

Without doubt, Rapha?l exaggerated these economies a little, but Balzac's correspondence with his sister shows that the novel does not differ much from the reality. The old woman referred to in his letters by the name of Iris la Messag?re, who was 70 years-old, could not have been a very active housekeeper, as Balzac writes: "The news of my household is disastrous, the work does harm to its cleanliness. This rascal of Myself neglects himself more and more, he only descends every three or four days to make some purchases, he goes to the closest and worst provisioned merchants in the quarter: the others are too far, and the fellow economizes even his steps; so that your brother is already nourished absolutely like a great man, that is to say that he is dying of hunger."

"Another problem: The coffee is made terribly bitter by dirt. Lots of water is needed to correct the damage; but the water does not rise to my celestial garret , it will require, after the purchase of the piano, the installation of a hydraulic machine, if the coffee continues to disappear while the master and the servant daydream."

Elsewhere, continuing the joking, he reprimands the lazy Myself, the only footman that he has in his service, who does not fill the basin, leaves dust balls scattered freely under the bed, the dirt obscuring the windows, and the spiders spinning their webs in the corners.

In another letter, he writes: "I have eaten two melons ... it will be necessary to pay for them with nuts and dry bread!"

One of the rare recreations that he permitted himself was to go to the Jardin des Plantes or P?re-Lachaise. At the summit of the funereal hill, he towered over Paris like Rastignac at the burial of P?re Goriot. His gaze glided over this ocean of slate and tile that cover up so much luxury, misery, intrigue and passion. Like a young eagle, he took in his prey at a glance; but he still had no wings, no beak, no talons, although his eye could already fix itself on the sun. He said, contemplating the tombs: "There are no more beautiful epitaphs than these: La Fontaine, Mass?na, Moli?re: one single name that says everything and makes us dream!"

This sentence contains an ill-defined but prophetic understanding that the future realized, alas!, too soon. On the slope of the hill, upon a sepulchral stone, beneath a bust cast in bronze, after the marble of David, the word BALZAC says everything and makes the solitary wanderer dream.

The dietary regimen recommended by Rapha?l could be favorable to the lucidity of the brain; but certainly it was worthless for a young man used to the comfort of family life. The fifteen months that passed under these intellectual burdens, sadder, without fail, than those of Venice, had made the youthful Tourangeau with the soft, glowing cheeks a Parisian skeleton, haggard and yellow, nearly unrecognizable. Balzac reentered the paternal home, where the fatted calf was killed for the return of this only slightly prodigal child.

I glide lightly over the period of his life when he tried to ensure independence by speculations in the book trade and during which only a lack of capital prevented him from finding success. These ventures put him in debt, mortgaged his future, and despite the devoted assistance offered perhaps too late by the family, burdened him with the rock of Sisyphus that he so many times pushed just to the edge of the hill, and which always fell back with more crushing weight upon the shoulders of this Atlas, overloaded besides by an entire world.

This debt that he made it a sacred duty to discharge, because it represented the fortune of those who were dear to him, was Necessity armed with a spiked whip, her hand bearing bronze nails that harassed him night and day, with neither truce nor pity, making him regard every hour of repose or recreation as a theft. She dominated his entire life painfully, often rendering it inexplicable to he who did not possess its secret.

Having provided these indispensable biographical details, I come to my direct and personal impressions of Balzac.

Balzac, that immense brain, that physiologist so penetrating, that observer so profound, that mind so intuitive, did not possess the literary gift: within him there opened an abyss between the thought and the form. That abyss, particularly in the early years, he despaired of crossing. He threw himself without fulfillment into volume upon volume, observation upon observation, essay upon essay; an entire library of disavowed books passed through there. A will less robust would have been discouraged a thousand times; but happily Balzac had an unshakeable confidence in his genius, unknown to all the world. He wanted to be a great man, and he was that by his unrelenting projections of that force that was more powerful than electricity, and with which he made such subtle analyses in Louis Lambert.

Citing himself as an example, he preached to me a strange literary lifestyle. I must cloister myself for two or three years, drink water, eat soggy lupins like Protog?ne, go to bed at six o'clock in the evening, get up at midnight, and work until morning, using the day to revise, expand, shorten, perfect, polish the nocturnal work, correct the proofs, take notes, do the necessary studies, and live most importantly with absolute chastity. He insisted a great deal upon this last recommendation, which was very challenging for a young man of twenty-four or twenty-five years. According to him, true chastity develops to the highest degree the powers of the mind, and gives to those who practice it unidentified abilities. I timidly objected that the greatest geniuses did not forbid themselves love, passion, or even pleasure, and I cited some illustrious names. Balzac shook his head and responded, "They would have done better, without the women!"

The only concession that he would grant me, and even then he regretted it, was to see my beloved one half hour each year. He permitted letters: "These guide the development of style."

It must not be believed that Balzac was joking when he laid down these conditions that the Trappists or the Carthusians would have found harsh. He was perfectly convinced, and spoke with such eloquence that many times I consciously tried to use this method to develop genius; I awoke numerous times at midnight, and after having partaken of the inspirational coffee, acted according to the formula, seating myself in front of a table on which sleep caused me to quickly lay my head. La Morte Amoureuse, published in the La Chronique de Paris, was my only nocturnal work.

Around this time, Balzac had written for a review Facino Cane, the story of a noble Venetian who, imprisoned in the vaults of the ducal palace, had fallen, while digging an escape tunnel, upon the secret treasure of the Republic, a good part of which he carried away with the help of a bribed jailer. Facino Cane, who became blind and played the clarinet under the common name of Father Canet, had kept an extrasensory perception for gold; he recognized it through walls and in vaults, and he offered to the writer, at a wedding in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, to guide him, if he was willing to pay him the cost of the journey, toward this immense mass of riches whose location had been lost due to the fall of the Venetian Republic. Balzac, as I have said, lived his characters, and at this moment, he was Facino Cane himself, although without the blindness, for never have there been eyes more sparkling or scintillating on a human face. He dreamed of nothing but tons of gold, heaps of diamonds and garnets, and, by means of magnetism, with whose practices he had been long familiar, he sought from these explorations the location of the buried and lost treasure. He pretended to have learned in this way, in the most precise manner, the place where, near the hill of Pointe-?-P?tre, Toussaint Louverture had caused his booty to be buried by negroes who were immediately shot. The Gold-Bug, of Edgar Poe, does not equal, in subtlety of reasoning, in clarity of plan, in divination of details, the fevered rendition that he has given us of the expedition to attempt to become master of this treasure, which was far richer than that which was buried by Tom Kidd at the skull at the foot of the Talipot.

I implore the reader to not make too much fun of me, if I confess to him in all humility that I soon shared the conviction of Balzac. What brain could have resisted his breathtaking speech? Jules Sandeau was also soon seduced, and as he needed two dependable friends, two devoted and robust companions to perform the nocturnal excavations under the direction of the seer, Balzac was pleased to grant us one-fourth each of this prodigious fortune. One-half was to revert to him by right, as he had made the discovery and directed the enterprise.

We were to buy pikes, pickaxes and shovels, get them secretly on board the vessel, and get ourselves to a designated point by different routes so as not to excite suspicions, and, the blow being struck, we were to transport our riches on a brigantine chartered in advance; in short, it was quite a tale, which would have been admirable if Balzac had written it instead of speaking it.

There is no need to say that we did not unearth the treasure of Toussaint Louverture. Money was not available to pay our passage; the three of us had at most enough to buy the pickaxes.

The dream of a sudden fortune won by some strange and marvelous means often haunted the brain of Balzac; some years before , he had made a voyage to Sardinia to examine the slag of the silver mines abandoned by the Romans, which, treated by imperfect processes, must according to him still have contained a great deal of metal. The idea was reasonable and, imprudently confided, made the fortune of another.

I have related the anecdote of the treasure buried by Toussaint Louverture, not for the pleasure of telling a strange story, but because it is connected with a dominant idea of Balzac - money. Certainly, nobody was less avaricious than the author of La Com?die Humaine, but his genius made him foresee the immense role that this metallic hero would play in art, more interesting for modern society than the Grandissons, the Desgrieux, the Oswalds, the Werthers, the Malek-Adhels, the Ren?s, the Laras, the Waverleys, the Quentin Durwards, etc.

Until then the story had been confined to the portrayal of a unique passion, love, but love in an ideal sphere and outside of the necessities and miseries of life. The personages of these entirely psychological recitals neither ate, nor drank, nor lodged, nor had an account with their tailor. They moved in an abstract environment like those of a tragedy. If they wished to travel, they put, without obtaining a passport, some handfuls of diamonds into the bottom of their pocket, and paid with this currency the postilions, who did not fail at each way station to have exhausted their horses; some chateaus of indistinct architecture received them at the end of their journeys, and with their blood they wrote to their beloveds interminable epistles dated from the tour of the North. The heroines, no less immaterial, resembled an aquatint of Angelica Kauffmann: a large straw hat, hair somewhat straightened in the English style, a long robe of white chiffon, held at the waist by an azure sash.

With his profound instinct for reality, Balzac understood that the modern life he wanted to portray was dominated by one grand fact, money, and, in La Peau de Chagrin, he had the courage to present a lover not only anxious to know if he had touched the heart of the one he loves, but also if he will have enough money to pay for the carriage in which he was bringing her home. This audacity is perhaps one of the greatest that one might permit oneself in literature, and it alone sufficed to immortalize Balzac. The consternation was profound, and the purists were indignant at this infraction of the laws of the genre; but all the young people who, going out in the evening to the home of some beautiful woman wearing white gloves ironed with gum elastic, had traversed Paris as dancers, on the tips of their shoes, fearing a spot of mud more than the crack of a pistol, commiserated, having shared these fears, like the anguishes of Valentin, who cared deeply about a hat that he could not renew and preserve despite his minute care. In moments of supreme misery, the discovery of a one hundred sou piece slid under the papers of the drawer, due to the discreet pity of Pauline, produced the effect of the most romantic theatrical strokes or of the intervention of a Peri in the Arabian tales. Who has not discovered during days of distress, forgotten in pants or in a vest, a few glorious coins appearing at just the right time and saving you from the calamity that youth fears the most: to fail to provide a beloved woman with a carriage, a bouquet, a small bench, a show program, a tip to the usherette or some trifles of this type?

Balzac excels in the portrayal of youth who are poor, as they almost always are, entering into their first struggles with life, prey to the temptation of pleasures and luxury, and experiencing profound miseries due to their high hopes. Valentin, Rastignac, Bianchon, d'Arthez, Lucien de Rubempr?, Lousteau, have all sunk their beautiful teeth into the tough meat of the angry cow, fortifying food for robust stomachs, indigestible for weak stomachs; he does not lodge them, these beautiful young ones without a sou, in conventional garrets decorated with Persian rugs, with windows festooned with sweet peas and looking out on gardens; he does not have them eat "some simple dishes, prepared by the hand of nature," and does not dress them in luxurious garments, but in those that are proper and practical; he puts them in the boarding house of Mother Vauquer, or forces them to crouch under the sharp angle of a roof, he presses them into greasy tables at mean little restaurants, dressing them in black clothing with gray seams, and he is not afraid to send them to the pawn shop, if they still have, a rare occurrence, their father's watch.

Oh Corinne, you who allows, upon Cape Mis?na, your snowy arm to dangle across your ivory lyre, while the son of Albion, draped in a superb new coat, and shod in his beloved perfectly polished boots, reflects on you and listens to you in an elegant pose, Corinne, what would you have said to such heroes? They have however one small quality that was lacking in Oswald, they live, and of a life so robust that it seems like one has encountered them one thousand times; also Pauline, Delphine de Nucingen, the princess of Cadignan, Madame de Bargeton, Coralie, Esther, are madly infatuated with them.

At the time that the first novels signed by Balzac appeared, one did not have, to the same degree as today, the preoccupation, or, better said, the fever for gold. California had not been discovered; there existed perhaps several leagues of railway whose future one hardly suspected, and that one saw as a kind of conduit that led up to the Russian mountains, but that had fallen into disuse; the public ignored, so to speak, "business," and only bankers gambled at the Bourse. This movement of capital, this flow of gold, these calculations, these figures, this importance given to money in works that one still took as simple romantic fictions and not as serious portraits of life, singularly shocked the subscribers to the reading rooms, and critics added up the total sums spent or staked by the author. The millions of father Grandet led to arithmetic discussions, and serious people, troubled by the enormity of the totals, doubted the financial abilities of Balzac, very great abilities nevertheless, and recognized later. Stendhal said with a sort of disdainful smugness, "Before writing, I always read three or four pages of the Civil Code to give me the tone." Balzac, who understood money so well, also discovered poems and dramas in the Code: Le Contrat de Mariage, where he places in opposition, in the persons of Matthias and of Solonnet, the ancient and the modern notary, has all of the interest of the most eventful comedy of the cloak and sword. The bankruptcy in Grandeur et D?cadence de C?sar Birotteau makes you quiver like the story of an empire's fall; the conflict of the ch?teau and the cottage in Les Paysans offers just as much adventure as the siege of Troy. Balzac knows how to give life to the soil, to a house, to a heritage, to a capital, and in fact to heroes and heroines whose adventures are devoured with anxious avidity.

These new elements introduced into the novel were not appreciated at first; the philosophical analyses, the detailed character portraits, the minute descriptions that seemed to have the future in view, were regarded as unpleasantly lengthy, and quite often one skipped them to move on to the story. Later, one recognized that the goal of the author was not to weave intrigues that were more or less well-plotted, but to portray society in its entirety, from the summit to the base, with its characters and its components, and that one will admire in it the immense variety of these types. Is it not Alexandre Dumas who said of Shakespeare: "Shakespeare, the man who has created the most after God?"; the words might be even more justly applied to Balzac; never, indeed, did so many living creatures issue from one human brain.

At this time , Balzac had conceived the plan for his Com?die Humaine and possessed the full awareness of his genius. He adroitly connected the works that had already been published to his general concept and found them a place in the categories that had been philosophically outlined. Some novels of pure fantasy did not fit in very well, despite the connections that were added afterwards; but these are details that are lost in the immensity of the ensemble, like ornaments in a differing style on a grand edifice.

I have said that Balzac worked laboriously, and, being an obstinate smelter, rejected ten or twelve times from the crucible the metal that had not perfectly filled the mold; like Bernard Palissy, he would have burned the furniture, the flooring and up through the beams of his house without regret to maintain the fire in his furnace; the most challenging necessities would never make him deliver a work on which he had not put the utmost effort, and he gave admirable examples of literary conscientiousness. His corrections, so numerous that they were almost equivalent to different editions on the same idea, were charged to his account by the editors who were responsible for earnings, and his compensation, often modest for the value of the work and the pain it had cost him, were diminished in proportion. The promised sums did not always arrive on time, and to sustain what he laughingly called his floating debt, Balzac displayed prodigious resources of mind and a level of activity that would have completely absorbed the life of an ordinary man. But, when seated before his table in his friar's frock, in the midst of the nocturnal silence, he found himself confronted with blank sheets illuminated by the glow of seven candles, concentrated by a green shade, in taking pen in hand he forgot everything, and thus commenced a struggle more terrible than the conflict of Jacob with the angel, that of form and idea. In these nightly battles, from which in the morning he would issue broken but victorious, when the extinguished hearth chilled the atmosphere of his room once again, his head steamed and his body exhaled a visible fog like the body of a horse in wintertime. Sometimes only a single phrase occupied an entire evening; it was considered, reconsidered, twisted, kneaded, pounded, stretched, shortened, written in one hundred different ways, and, bizarrely, the necessary, complete, form, would not present itself until after the exhaustion of the approximate forms; without doubt the metal often flowed from a fuller and thicker hose, but there are very few pages in Balzac that stayed identical to the first draft. His manner of proceeding was this: when he had for a long time borne and lived a subject, with writing that was rapid, jumbled, blotted, nearly hieroglyphic, he would outline a sort of scenario in a few pages, which he would send to the printer and which was returned on placards, that is to say as isolated columns in the middle of large sheets. He read these placards carefully, which already gave to his embryo of work that impersonal character that the manuscript does not have, and he applied to this rough sketch the high critical faculty that he possessed, acting as if he were another person. He worked on something; approving or disapproving, he kept or corrected, but mostly added. Lines issuing from the beginning, the middle or the end of phrases, were directed toward the margins, to the right, to the left, to the top, to the bottom, leading to some developments, to insertions, to interpolations, to epithets, to adverbs. At the end of some hours of work, one would have called his sheet a bouquet of fireworks drawn by a child. From the primitive text shot forth rockets of style which exploded on all sides. Then there were simple crosses, crosses recrossed like a coat of arms, stars, suns, Arab or Roman numerals, Greek or French letters, every imaginable sign of reference to mix with the scratchings. Some strips of paper, fastened with sealing wafers, stuck on with pins, added to the insufficient margins, striped with lines of fine characters to conserve space, themselves full of crossings out, because the correction that had barely been made had itself already been corrected. The printed placard nearly disappeared in what appeared to be a cabalistic book of spells, which the typographers passed from hand to hand, each not wanting to work for more than an hour on Balzac.

The following day, they sent back the placards with the corrections made, and already expanded by half.

Balzac resumed work, always amplifying, adding a trait, a detail, a description, an observation on manners, a characteristic word, a phrase for effect, bringing the form closer to the idea, always moving closer to his internal outline, choosing like a painter among three or four contours the definitive line. Often this terrible work ended with that intensity of attention of which he alone was capable, as he recognized that a thought had been poorly expressed, that one incident predominated, that a figure that he wished to be secondary for general effect deviated from his plan, and with one stroke of the pen he would courageously destroy the result of four or five nights of labor. He was heroic in these circumstances.

Six, seven, and sometimes ten proofs were returned with crossings out, rewritten, without satisfying the author's desire for perfection. I have seen at Les Jardies, on the shelves of a library composed of only his works, each different proof of the same work bound in a separate volume from the first sketch to the definitive book; the comparison of Balzac's thought at these diverse stages offers a very curious study and contains profitable literary lessons. Near these volumes a sinister looking book, bound in black morocco leather, with neither clasps nor gilding, drew my attention: "Take it," Balzac said to me, "it is an unpublished work which may have some value." Its title was Comptes M?lancoliques; it contained lists of debts, due dates of bills to be paid, notices of purveyors and all that menacing paperwork that is legalized by a stamp. This volume, with a kind of mocking contrast, was placed beside the Contes Drolatiques, "of which it is not a continuation," added the author of La Com?die Humaine with a laugh.

Despite this laborious method of execution, Balzac produced a great deal, thanks to his superhuman will supplemented by the temperament of an athlete and the seclusion of a monk. For two or three months in succession, when he had some important work in progress, he labored sixteen or eighteen hours out of twenty-four; he granted to his animal being only six hours of a heavy, feverish, convulsive sleep, encouraged by the torpor of digestion after a hastily taken meal. He would disappear so completely, his best friends would lose all trace; but he would soon return from underground, waving a major work above his head, laughing his hearty laugh, applauding himself with a perfect innocence and according himself the praise that he demanded from no one else. No author was more unconcerned than him regarding reviews and advertising upon the release of his books; he allowed his reputation to grow by itself, without putting his hand to it, and he never courted journalists. Indeed other things consumed his time: he delivered his copy, took his money and fled to distribute it to his creditors who often waited in the journal's courtyard, like, for example, the masons of Les Jardies.

Sometimes, in the morning, he would meet me breathless, exhausted, giddy from the fresh air, like Vulcan escaping from his forge, and he would fall upon a couch; his long vigil had left him starving and he would blend sardines with butter and make a sort of paste which reminded him of the rillettes of Tours, and which he would spread on bread. This was his favorite dish; he had no sooner eaten than he fell asleep, begging me to awaken him after one hour. Without regard for his admonition, I would respect this well-earned sleep, and I silenced all of the whispers in the house. When Balzac awoke of his own accord, and he saw that the evening's twilight was diffusing its gray tints across the sky, he would leap up from his couch and heap me with abuse, calling me traitor, thief, assassin: I made him lose ten thousand francs, because awake he could have had the idea for a novel that would have earned this sum . I was the cause of the gravest catastrophes and unimaginable disorders. I had made him miss meetings with bankers, editors, duchesses; he would not be able to repay his debts on time; this fatal sleep would cost millions. But I was already used to these prodigious betting systems that Balzac, starting from the lowest figure, would push excessively to the most monstrous sums, and I easily consoled myself by seeing the beautiful colors characteristic in Tours reappear on his rested cheeks.

Balzac lived then at Chaillot, rue des Batailles, a house from which one found an admirable view of the course of the Seine, the Champ de Mars, the ?cole Militaire, the dome of the Invalides, a large proportion of Paris and further away the hills of Meudon. He had arranged there an interior that was luxurious enough, because he knew that in Paris nobody believed in an impoverished talent, and that perception often leads to reality. It was during this period that one hears of his tendencies toward elegance and dandyism, the famous blue coat with solid gold buttons, the walking stick with a turquoise head, the appearances at the Bouffes and at the Opera, and the more frequent visits into society where his sparkling flair made him much sought after, visits that were useful for more than one reason, for he met there more than one model. It was not easy to penetrate into his home, which was better guarded than the garden of the Hesp?rides. Two or three passwords were required. Balzac, for fear they might be divulged, changed them often. I remember these ones: to the porter one said: "Prune season has arrived," and he would let you cross the threshold; to the servant who ran to the stairs at the sound of the bell, it was necessary to whisper: "I bring lace from Belgium," and if you could assure the bedroom valet that "Madame Bertrand was in good health," you were finally introduced.

This childish behavior very much amused Balzac; it was necessary to ward off unwanted people and those who were even more disagreeable.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet