Honore de Balzac
by
Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
Translated from the French by
FREDERIC TABER COOPER
with illustrations from photographs
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY, PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1914 by Frederick A. Stokes Company
GENERAL NOTE
Of all the books perhaps the one best designed for training
the mind and forming the character is "Plutarch." The lives
of great men are object-lessons. They teach effort, devotion,
industry, heroism and sacrifice.
Even one who confines his reading solely to biographies of
thinkers, writers, inventors, poets of the spirit or poets of
science, will in a short time have acquired an understanding
of the whole History of Humanity.
And what novel or what drama could be compared to such a
history? Accurate biographies record narratives which no
romancer's imagination could hope to rival. Researches,
sufferings, labors, triumphs, agonies and disasters, the
defeats of destiny, glory, which is the "sunlight of the
dead," illuminating the past, whether fortunate or
tragic,--such is what the lives of Great Men reveal to us,
or, if the phrase be allowed, paint for us in a series of
fascinating and dramatic pictures.
This series of biographies is accordingly intended to form a
sort of gallery, a museum of the great servants of Art,
Science, Thought and Action.
It was Emerson who wrote a volume devoted to the
Representatives of Humanity. Here we have still another
collection of "Representative Men." This collection of
profoundly interesting studies is entrusted to the care of
two writers, Mr. Albert Keim and Mr. Louis Lumet, both of
whom have already earned their laurels, the former as poet,
novelist, playwright, historian and philosopher, and author
of a definitive work upon Helvetius which deserves to become
a classic, and the latter as publicist, art critic and
scholar of rare and profound erudition. An acquaintance with
the successive volumes in this series will give ample
evidence of the value of such able collaborators.
On the mountain tops we breathe a purer and more vivifying
air. And it is like ascending to a moral mountain top when we
live, if only for a moment, with the dead who, in their lives
did honour to mankind, and attain the level of those whose
eyes now closed, once glowed like beacon-lights, leading
humanity on its eternal march through night-time towards the
light.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 :: The Treatise on the Human Will.
Chapter 2 :: The Garret.
Chapter 3 :: His Apprenticeship.
Chapter 4 :: In Business.
Chapter 5 :: The First Success.
Chapter 6 :: Dandyism.
Chapter 7 :: The "Foreign Lady."
Chapter 8 :: At Les Jardies.
Chapter 9 :: In Retirement.
Chapter 1.
The Treatise on the Human Will.
At Balzac's funeral, the glorious yet bitter seal upon his destiny,
Victor Hugo delivered a magnificent address, and in his capacity as
poet and seer proclaimed with assurance the judgment of posterity:
"His life has been brief yet full, and richer in works than
in days.
"Alas! This powerful and indefatigable worker, this
philosopher, this thinker, this poet, this genius has lived
amongst us that life of storms, of struggles, of quarrels, of
combats, which has always been the common lot of all great
men. Today we see him at peace. He has escaped from
controversies and enmities. He has entered, on the selfsame
day, into glory and into the tomb. Henceforward he will shine
far above all those clouds which float over our heads, among
the brightest stars of his native land."
This discourse was admirable for its truth, its justice and its
far-sightedness, a golden palm branch laid upon the author's tomb,
around which there still arose clamours and bitter arguments, denying
the greatness of his works, and rumours which veiled the features of
the man behind a haze of absurd legends. A star of his country he
certainly was, as Victor Hugo proclaimed him, one of those enduring
stars which time--so cruel to others--fails to change, except to purify
their light and augment their brilliance, to the greater pride of the
nation. His life was indeed short, but it was one which set a salutary
example, because, stripped of idle gossip, it teaches us the inner
discipline, the commanding will and the courage of this hero who, in
the midst of joy and sorrow alike, succeeded in creating an entire
world.
Honore de Balzac was born at Tours on the 20th of March, 1799, on the
ground floor of a building belonging to a tailor named Damourette, in
the Rue de l'Armee d'Italie, No. 25,--now No. 35, Rue Nationale. The
majority of his biographers have confused it with the dwelling which
his father bought later on, No. 29 in the same street according to the
old numbering, and the acacia which is there pointed out as having been
planted at the date of his birth really celebrated that of his brother
Henri, who was several years the younger.
Although born in Touraine, Balzac was not of Tourainian stock, for his
birthplace was due merely to chance. His father, Bernard Francois
Balssa or Balsa, came originally from the little village of Nougaire,
in the commune of Montirat and district of Albi. He descended from a
peasant family, small land-owners or often simple day labourers. It was
he who first added a "c" to his patronymic and who later prefixed the
particle for which the great novelist was afterwards so often
reproached. Bernard Balssa, born July 22, 1746, left his native village
at the age of fourteen years, never to return. What was his career, and
what functions did he fulfil? Honore de Balzac says that his father was
secretary to the Grand Council under Louis XV, and Laure Surville, his
sister, wrote that under Louis XVI he was attorney to the Council. He
himself, in an invitation to the marriage of his second daughter,
Laurence, described himself as former secretary to the King's Council.
During the revolution he was secretary to the minister of the navy,
Bertrant de Molleville, and later was director of the commissary
department in the first division of the Armee du Nord, stationed at
Lille.
It is impossible to follow him through all the different wanderings
necessitated by his functions, but it is known that upon returning to
Paris he there married the daughter of one of his superior officers,
Sallambier, attached to the Ministry of War and at the same time
director of the Paris hospitals. At the time of the marriage, January
30, 1797, he was fifty-one years of age; his bride, Laure, was only
eighteen, a young girl possessed of culture, beauty and distinction of
manner. The first fruit of this union was a son, who, although nursed
by the mother, died at an early age. Through the influence of his
father-in-law, the elder Balzac obtained in 1799 the direction of the
commissary department of the twenty-second military division, and
installed himself at Tours, where the division was stationed, in the
early months of the same year.
Francois soon had a reputation throughout the province. He was a sort
of philosopher and reformer, a man with ideas. He despised the
currently accepted opinions, and proclaimed his own boldly, indifferent
to the consternation of his fellow townsmen. A large head emerging from
the high, thick collar of his blue, white-braided coat, which opened to
disclose an ample cravat, a smooth-shaven face and florid complexion, a
powerful chin and full cheeks, framed in short, brown "mutton-chop"
whiskers, a small mouth with thick lips, a long straight, slightly
bulbous nose, an energetic face lit up by black eyes, brilliant and
slightly dreamy, beneath a broad, determined forehead overhung with
stray locks of hair, gathered back in the fashion of the Republic,--all
these features proclaimed a rugged personality, a dominant character,
conspicuously at variance with the placid bourgeoisie of Touraine.
Francois Balzac had furthermore an agreeable presence and a
self-satisfied manner, and it pleased him to boast of his southern
origin.
The citizens of Tours spoke of him as "an eccentric," but he was
greatly annoyed when the term reached his ears, for, good Gascon that
he was, and proud of himself, body and mind, he felt that it was
singularly humiliating to be treated with so little respect. In point
of fact, he was quite justified in refusing to accept an appellation
which, however well it might fit his manners as a well-intentioned
fault-finder, caustic and whimsical in speech, in no way applied to his
unusually broad and penetrating intelligence, teeming with new and
strictly original ideas.
He was a disciple of Rousseau; he held certain social theories, and he
was unsparing in his criticisms of existing governments. He had his own
views as to how society at large should be governed and improved. The
first of these views consisted in cultivating mankind, by applying the
method of eugenic selection to marriage, in such a manner that after a
few years there would be no human beings left save those who were
strong, robust and healthy. He could not find sufficient sarcasm to
express his scorn of governments which, in civilised countries, allowed
the development of weaklings, cripples and invalids. Perhaps he based
his theory upon his own example. Francois Balzac had the constitution
of an athlete and believed himself destined to live to the age of a
hundred years and upward. According to his calculations, a man did not
reach his perfect development until after completing his first century;
and, in order to do this, he took the most minute care of himself. He
studied the Chinese people, celebrated for their longevity, and he
sought for the best methods of maintaining what he called the
equilibrium of vital forces. When any event contradicted his theories,
he found no trouble in turning it to his own advantage.
"He was never," related his daughter, Mme. Laure Surville, in her
article upon Balzac, "under any circumstances at a loss for a retort.
One day, when a newspaper article relating to a centenarian was being
read aloud (an article not likely to escape notice in our family, as
may well be imagined) he interrupted the reader, contrary to his habit,
in order to say enthusiastically, 'There is a man who has lived wisely
and has never squandered his strength in all sorts of excesses, as so
many imprudent young people do!' It turned out, on the contrary, that
this wise old man frequently became drunk, and that he took a late
supper every evening, which, according to my father, was one of the
greatest enormities that one could perpetrate against one's health.
'Well,' resumed my father imperturbably, 'the man has shortened his
life, no doubt about it.'"
Francois Balzac was not to be shaken in his opinions. Furthermore, he
was not satisfied with asserting them in the course of conversation,
but in spite of his lack of confidence in the influence of books upon
prejudiced readers (for he considered that the sole exception was the
reaction against chivalry brought about by Cervantes's Don Quixote), he
wrote a number of pamphlets in which the vigour and originality of his
mind are revealed. He published successively: An Essay regarding Two
Great Obligations to be fulfilled by the French (1804), An Essay on the
Methods of preventing Thefts and Assassinations (1807), A Pamphlet
regarding the Equestrian Statue which the French People ought to raise
to perpetuate the Memory of Henry IV (1815), The History of Hydrophobia
(1819), etc. In the first of these works Francois Balzac proposed that
a monument should be raised to commemorate the glory of Napoleon and
the French army. Might that not be almost called the origin of the
Arc-de-Triomphe?
The singularities of Francois Balzac in no wise hurt him in the
estimation of the inhabitants of Touraine. He served as administrator
of the General Hospice from 1804 to 1812, and introduced there a
practical reform in providing remunerative work for the old men. As an
attache of the Mayor's office, he had the mayoralty offered him in
1808, but he refused it in order to consecrate himself entirely to the
sick and convalescent.
At Tours the Balzac household led the life of prosperous bourgeois
folk. The father had acquired a house with grounds and farm lands. The
Balzacs entertained and were received in society. People enjoyed--
perhaps with some secret smiles--the unexpected outbursts of the
husband, and they liked him for his kindly ironies which had no touch
of malice. As for the subtle and witty Madame Laure Balzac, who had
preserved all the graces of the eighteenth century, she was found
delightful by all those whom she admitted to the honour of entering her
circle of acquaintances.
She was a young woman of distinguished manner, with a somewhat oval
face and small, delicate features, overcast at times with a shade of
melancholy. She had a somewhat distant manner which she redeemed by a
gesture of charming welcome, or a gracious phrase. She was pious, but
without bigotry, a mystic whose religion was that of St. John, all
gentleness and impulse. She read Swedenborg, St. Martin, and Jacob
Boehm. She had an ardent and untrammelled imagination, but her
character was firm. Her decisions were promptly taken and she knew how
to enforce their execution. She was a woman of principle; she respected
social rules and customs and demanded that the members of her family
should observe them.
Four more children were born to this marriage, two sons and two
daughters: Honore, Laure, Laurence, and Henri, all of whom had widely
different destinies. Laure became the wife of an engineer of bridges
and highways, M. Midy de la Greneraye Surville, and was intimately
associated with the life of her older brother, whom she survived down
to 1854; Laurence died a few years after her marriage in 1821 to M. de
Montzaigle; Henri, the youngest, went through divers ups and downs; but
finding himself unable to achieve a position of independence, he
finally went into exile in the Colonies.
Madame de Balzac's first son having died, as was thought, in
consequence of the mother's attempt to nurse him herself, Honore was
placed with a nurse in the country district outside of Tours. He
remained there until four years of age, together with his sister Laure,
and it is there, no doubt, that they formed that tender and trusting
friendship which never wavered. When he returned to the paternal roof,
Honore was a plump, chubby-cheeked little boy with brown hair falling
in masses of curls, a contented disposition and laughing eyes. People
noticed him when out walking in his short vest of brown silk and blue
belt, and mothers would turn around to say, "What a pretty child!"
Honore was impulsive, with a heart overflowing with affection, but the
training he received at home was rigorous and severe. Entrusted to the
hands of servants, under the high and mighty surveillance of his
governess, Mlle. Delahaye, he received from his father, who was already
an old man, nothing more than an indulgent and often absent-minded
affection, while, as for his mother, she carried out with great
firmness her theories regarding the relation between children and
parents. She received hers each evening in her large drawing room with
cold dignity. Before kissing them she recapitulated all the faults they
had committed during the day, which she had learned from the governess,
and her reproofs were reinforced with punishments. Honore never
approached her without fear, repressing all his feelings and his need
of affection. He suffered in secret. Then he would take refuge with his
sister Laure, his only friend and comforter.
Before he was five years old he was sent to a day-school in Tours known
as the Leguay Institution. He had a taste for reading, indeed it was
more than a taste, it was a sort of mental starvation which made him
throw himself hungrily upon every book he encountered. Otherwise,
Honore was frankly a mediocre and negligent. But concentrated in
himself and deprived of the caresses which would have meant so much to
him, he created a whole world out of his readings and sometimes gave
glimpses of it to Laure by acting out before her dramas and comedies of
his own manufacture and of which he was the hero. His exuberance made
him a good comrade; yet he also loved solitude. When alone, he could
give himself up to the fantasies born of his own imagination, and he
invented his own games and used to play upon a cheap toy violin made of
red wood airs which he enjoyed to the point of ecstasy and of which no
one else could bear the sound.
At the age of eight years and some months, on the 22d of June, 1807,
Honore entered a college school at Vendome. It was an institution
celebrated throughout the districts of central France and directed by
the Oratorian Fathers. Prior to the Revolution, cadets used to be
trained there for the army, and it had preserved the military severity
of its discipline. After their admission, the pupils were never allowed
outside vacations and never left its walls until their course of study
was terminated. Honore lived there until April 22, 1813,--and in Louis
Lambert he has described his sufferings, his hopes and the tumultuous
and confused awakening of his genius, throughout those long years of
convent-like imprisonment. He had passed from the cold discipline of
the family circle, which had nevertheless been tempered by an
atmosphere of kindliness, to the hard and impersonal discipline of the
college school. The warm-hearted and melancholy child must needs
undergo this second severe test, and he was destined to come out from
it in a state of self-intoxication, a bewilderment of dreams and ideas.
The college buildings, surrounded by walls, contained everything that
would seem calculated to render existence laborious and gloomy for the
students. The latter were divided into four sections, the Minions, the
Smalls, the Mediums, and the Greats, to which they were assigned
according to the grade of their studies. For diversion, they had a
narrow garden which they could cultivate and a cabin; they had
permission to raise pigeons and to eat them, in addition to the
ordinary fare. The classrooms were dirty, being either muddy or covered
with dust, according to the season, and evil-smelling as a result of
crowding together within narrow spaces too many young folks who were
none too clean and to whom the laws of hygiene were unknown. The
masters were either overbearing or neglectful, incapable of
distinguishing the individual from the crowd and concerned only with
seeing that the rules were obeyed and discipline maintained. The pupils
themselves were often cruel to each other.
It was here that Honore de Balzac formed his own character, alone, and
suffered alone, sensitive and repressed child that he was. From the
very first months of the sojourn in the College of Vendome, he was
classed among the apathetic and lazy pupils, among those of whom
nothing could be made, who would never be an honour to the school that
trained them and could be ignored excepting for the purposes of
punishment. Honore had an insurmountable aversion for all the required
tasks, he was indifferent to the charms of Greek themes or Latin
translations, and history alone had the power of stirring him and
awakening his appetite for knowledge. He was habitually sluggish and
stupid in the eyes of his masters, but what a formidable, unknown work
was going on in the brain of this child!
We may picture him in the classroom, during study hour, leaning on his
left elbow and holding an open book with his right hand, while he rubs
his shoes one against the other, with a mechanical movement. What is he
reading? Morality in Action and in Example. His obscure desires are
taking definite form. To become a great man, a hero, one of those whose
names are transmitted from age to age, such from choice will be his own
destiny. He seizes his pen and rapidly writes "Balzac, Balzac, Balzac"
over all the white margins of the book on morality. (This book passed
into the possession of M. Jules Claretie.) Then once more he leans upon
his elbow, gazing out of the window at a corner of verdure which he can
just glimpse, and forthwith he is off again in one of his interminable
reveries.
The harsh voice of his teacher interrupts him:
"You are doing nothing, M. Balzac."
The boy falls back from his dreams into the classroom. The reproof has
hurt him keenly. He fixes his magnetic black eyes upon the teacher. Is
it bitterness, disdain or anger towards him for having destroyed those
fruitful meditations? At all events, the teacher feels something like a
shock. He says:
"If you look at me like that, M. Balzac, you will receive the ferrule."
The ferrule! The thong of leather that cut so painfully when it fell
with dreaded rhythm, one, two, three, on the tips of the fingers or the
palm of the hand.
Punishments rained heavily on Balzac, the bad pupil, who seems to have
been perpetually in disgrace over his tasks and lessons. These
punishments included the extra copying of lines in such numbers that he
has been declared the inventor of the three-pointed pen; and then there
was imprisonment in the dormitory, "the wooden breeches," as it was
called in the college, and where he remained for weeks at a time.
Whether he suffered from these punishments and from the contempt of his
teachers, Honore at least never complained; for whatever left his mind
free to follow its own self-cultivation was a welcome opportunity.
He had a tutor, the librarian of the rich Oratorian library, who during
those rare recreation hours, when he had no extra lines to copy, was
supposed to give him special lessons in mathematics. But by a tacit
agreement the teacher paid no attention to the pupil, and the latter
was permitted to read and carry away any books which took his fancy. In
point of fact, no book seemed to him too austere or too repellent or
too obscure for his youthful understanding. He absorbed pell-mell works
upon religion, treatises of chemistry and physics, and historical and
philosophical works. He even developed a special taste for
dictionaries, dreaming over the exact sense of words, the adventures
that befall them in the course of time and their final destinies.
"The absorption of ideas through reading had become in his case a
curious phenomenon," so Honore de Balzac has recorded in Louis Lambert,
in which he has painted in the person of his hero his own formative
years in the college school of Vendome. "His eye would take in seven or
eight lines at once, and his mind would grasp the meaning with a
velocity equal to that of his glance; sometimes even a single word in a
phrase was enough to give him the essence of it. His memory was
prodigious. He retained thoughts acquired through reading with the same
fidelity as those suggested to him in the course of reflection or
conversation. In short, he possessed every kind of memory: that of
places, of names, of things, and of faces. Not only could he recall
objects at will, but he could see them again within himself under the
same conditions of position and light and colour as they had been at
the moment when he first perceived them. This same power applied
equally to the most intangible processes of the understanding. He could
remember, according to his own expression, not merely the exact spot
from which he had gleaned a thought in any given book, but also the
conditions of his own mind at far-off periods. By an undreamed-of
privilege, his memory could thus retrace the progress and entire life
history of his mind from the earliest acquired ideas down to the latest
ones to unfold, from the most confused down to the most lucid. His
brain, which while still young was habituated to the difficult
mechanism of the concentration of human forces, drew from this rich
storehouse a multitude of images admirable for their reality and
freshness, and which supplied him with mental nutriment through all his
periods of clear-sighted contemplation."
Such was the mental condition of Honore at the time when he was
regarded by his masters as a dullard, a mediocre pupil who might as
well be left to reap the consequences of his own laziness. Clad in his
grey uniform, ill shod and with hands red and swollen from chilblains,
he held aloof from his comrades, indifferent alike to their games and
their taunts. The ruddy colour of well-rounded cheeks, due to long
walks in the open air of the countryside around Tours, had disappeared
and his face was now as white and delicate as a young girl's, while his
eyes had become blacker and more mysterious than ever.
Honore de Balzac received visits from his parents at Easter and at the
time of the distribution of prizes. It was a joyous occasion, long
awaited by the boy, who retained the warmest affection for his family.
But his joy was short-lived. The pupil Balzac had won no prizes, he had
received black marks, he had done no work; consequently, instead of the
loving greeting that he expected, he was met only with words of
disappointment and censure; he was told that he did not appreciate the
sacrifices that were being made to educate him, he was idle and lazy;
they hoped that next year he would do better and at last give them some
little satisfaction.
Honore listened to these reproofs with bowed head, and probably he made
promises, in his desire to bring a smile to their faces and to receive
some of those endearments that he had hungered for, through long days
of solitude. But each year he again took up his interrupted dream, more
laboriously and more fiercely than before.
The college school at Vendome possesses a literary society whose
membership is confined to the Greats, and which gives performances of
scenes from tragedies and comedies, poetic recitations, etc. Honore
conceived the ambition to have some writing of his own produced by this
society. He practised rhyming, composed poems, and undertook an epic,
one line of which has remained famous,
"O Inca! luckless and unhappy king,"
for it made him the butt and by-word of the entire school. He was
nicknamed "The Poet," and laughed at for his formless efforts. The
director of the school, M. Mareschal, told him a fable, with the
charitable intent of turning him aside from his ambitions. There was
once upon a time a young linnet in a soft and downy nest; but the young
linnet longed for the free and open air and the blue sky. Its wings had
not yet grown, and yet the imprudent bird made up its mind to fly. What
happened? Why, simply that the young linnet fell from the tree in which
the nest was built, and hurt itself pitifully. Warning to poets who
presume too far upon their powers. Honore disregarded the fable, just
as he had disregarded reproofs, mockery and punishment, and burrowed
deeper than ever into the Oratorian library, in a sort of somber
phrensy. He neglected his studies and assigned tasks for the sake of
the secret and forbidden work that constituted what he called later on,
in Louis Lambert, his contraband studies. Although he continued to
write poetry, his mind as it ripened and gathered strength in its
singular solitude aspired to still loftier works, based upon
metaphysics and pure reason.
While his comrades translated Virgil and Demosthenes, he had begun to
write a Treatise upon the Will, a symbolic work which contained the
germs of his entire destiny. His fellow students, rendered curious by
his sustained application, continuing month after month, tried in vain
to steal glimpses over his shoulder, but Honore de Balzac would permit
no profane eye to fall upon his manuscript. He eluded their persistence
and entrusted the precious pages to a box which he could secure under
lock and key. A conspiracy was formed. They wanted to know what he had
been writing all this time with such serious intent that nothing could
take his attention from it. During a recreation period Honore was
copying, as usual, some extra lines as a punishment. A turbulent troupe
invaded the classroom and flung themselves upon the box which concealed
the manuscript. They wanted to know and they were going to know! Honore
defended the box energetically, for it was his heart and brain which
they wanted to know, it was all his knowledge and beautiful dreams that
they wished to lay bare to the light of day. There followed a veritable
battle around that little wooden casket. Attracted by the outcries of
the assailants, one of the masters, Father Haugoult, arrived in the
midst of the tumult. Balzac's crime was proclaimed, he was hiding
papers in his box and refused to show them. The master straightway
ordered this bad pupil to surrender these secret and forbidden
writings. Honore could not do otherwise than obey, for the box would be
broken open if he did not unlock it of his own accord; so, with
trembling hands, he despoiled himself of his treasures.
With careless fingers the master fumbled over the manuscript and with
an air of disdain and a voice of severity summed up the case against
this bad pupil:
"And it was for the sake of such nonsense that you have been neglecting
your duties!"
Honore held back his tears, profoundly hurt at this blow to his dreams
and his creative pride; but he retained a confused sense of injustice
and a conviction of the superior quality of his work.
He had now been at the Vendome school for more than six years, and had
given himself up to a prodigious amount of work, the extent of which no
one even suspected. He had grown thin and pallid and half dazed,
intoxicated with the ideas which whirled within his brain without
system or order. He seemed to be attacked by some grave malady, the
cause of which could not be explained. The director of the school, M.
Mareschal Duplessis, became anxious and wrote to the boy's parents to
come and take him out of school. They came post-haste. Honore was
apparently in a somnambulistic state, hardly answering the questions
put to him; his features were drawn and haggard, for he had been
carrying too heavy a burden of readings, feelings and thoughts. His
family could no more understand than his masters did the origin of his
strange disorder. And Mme. Sallambier, who had come to live with her
daughter at Tours, after the death of her husband in 1804, summed up
the opinion of the family:
"That is the state in which the schools give us back the fine children
that we send them!"