In Business.
Having started in to be a "literary man-of-all-work," to borrow the
phrase of Hippolyte Auger, his collaborator on the Feuilleton des
Journaux Politiques, who was closely in touch with him in those early
days, Honore de Balzac had formed relations with the second rate
papers, the publishers of novels, the promoters of all sorts of works
that might lend themselves to speculating purposes in the publishing
line. It was undoubtedly due to the chance demands of literary work
that he found himself flung headlong into business. He had reached the
point where he was ready to accept any proposition of a promising
nature, in his eagerness to become free, to escape the strict
surveillance of his family and the reproaches of his mother, and
furthermore he was urged into this path by a certain Mme. de Berny, a
woman who loved him and who wished to see him become a great man, for
she alone recognised his genius.
How and when had they become acquainted? Perhaps at Paris, since the de
Bernys dwelt at No. 3 Rue Portefoin, and the Balzacs at No. 17, perhaps
later on at Villeparisis, as a result of the neighbourly relations
between the two families. However this may be, Mme. de Berny exerted a
profound and decisive influence upon Honore de Balzac; she was his
first love and, it should be added, the only real one, if we may judge
by the length of time that he cherished an unchanging memory of her.
Laure Antoinette Hinner was born at Versailles on May 24th, 1777; she
was the daughter of a German harpist who had been summoned from Wetzlar
to the Court of France, and her mother was Louise Guelpee de Laborde,
lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette. She had no less personages than
the king and queen for her god-father and god-mother, and she grew up
within sound of the festivities of the Trianon, in an atmosphere of
frivolity and exaggerated refinements. Her mother, left a widow when
the child was barely ten years old, took a second husband, Francois
Regnier de Jarjayes, a fervent royalist, involved in all the plots
which had for their object the deliverance of the royal family. After
the brilliant days of court life, she lived through the tragic hours of
the Revolution, in the midst of conspirators, and in an atmosphere of
restlessness and anxiety. In 1793, Laure Hinner, at the age of fifteen
years and ten months, was married at Livry to Gabriel de Berny, who was
himself only twenty. The union seems to have resulted unhappily, in
spite of the fact that it was blessed with nine children; the
sensibility of the wife and her warm-hearted tenderness accorded ill
with the cold and reserved character of the husband.
When Balzac entered into his close friendship with Mme. de Berny, the
latter was forty-five years of age and a grandmother. In spite of her
years and her many children, she was still beautiful, on the order of
tender and mature beauty. Balzac borrowed certain traits from her for
the noblest heroines in his works; and she served successively as model
for Mme. Firmiani, for Mme. de Mortsauf in The Lily in the Valley, and
for Pauline in Louis Lambert; and he spoke constantly of her in his
correspondence with Mme. de Hanska, yet always with a sort of reverence
and passionate gratitude.
She was a woman of almost clairvoyant intelligence, instinctive and
unerring, and was endowed with rich qualities of heart and brain, which
she had never had a chance to use. She treasured letters and souvenirs,
and she held in reserve a store of tenderness of a rather maternal
sort. Balzac, isolated in the midst of his own family, thrust back upon
himself and suffering from the need of expansion, surrendered himself
utterly to this new friend, with the impetuosity born of happiness and
freedom. She was his confidential adviser, his comforter and his
friend. She listened to his dreams, she shared the elation of his
ambitions, she espoused his projects and fostered his genius; and when
he was too cruelly wounded in the struggle, she consoled him with words
of soothing tenderness.
It caused Mme. de Berny actual suffering to see her young friend
toiling for sheer mercenary ends, and squandering the precious years of
his youth in writing novels that were frankly hack-work; and it hurt
her also to see the condition of financial servitude in which his
family kept him. While the father, Francois de Balzac, watched his
son's efforts with indulgent irony, for he held that novels were to the
Europeans what opium is to the Chinese, and while the mother, irritated
at the rebellion of her first-born, maintained her attitude of hostile
distrust, Mme. de Berny alone had confidence in his future,
notwithstanding that appearances were all against him.
Mme. de Berny and Honore de Balzac undoubtedly put their heads
together, to seek for some means of bettering a situation so painful
and humiliating for a young man of twenty-five. Accordingly, when
chance seemed to offer them a good opportunity, they hastened to take
advantage of it.
The publisher, Urbain Canel, had conceived the idea of bringing out the
French classics in single compact octavo volumes, to be issued in
installments. He was to begin this collection with a Lafontaine, for
which he had ordered a preface from Balzac, who had previously done
work for him. We may well believe that he at the same time enlarged
upon his projects and that he aroused Balzac's interest by dwelling
upon the magnitude, the novelty and the large remuneration of his
enterprise. It was a question of nothing more nor less than the
production of an entire library. Balzac's imagination awoke to the
possibilities of this scheme which seemed to him a colossal one,
capable of laying the foundations of numerous fortunes. He calculated
what he might make out of it personally, and decided that at last
destiny had deigned to smile upon him. Canel was far richer in hopes
for the success of his project than in money to carry it out, and he
was ready to accept all offers of co-operation, if not actually to
solicit them. When Mme. de Berny was informed of the scheme by Balzac,
she did not try to dissuade him from joining in it, but, on the
contrary, devoted and trusting friend that she was, offered to aid him
by placing a considerable sum of money at his disposal.
In April, 1825, a partnership for the purpose of publishing French
classics, and more especially a Lafontaine in one octavo volume, to be
issued in installments, was formed between Messrs. Urbain Canel,
publisher, Charles Carron, physician, Honore de Balzac, man of letters,
and Benet de Montcarville, retired officer. It was not long before the
partners quarrelled, and M. Hanotaux has published a letter (La
Jeunesse de Balzac: Balzac Imprimeur, 1825-1828 (The Youth of Balzac:
Balzac as Printer), by G. Hanotaux and G. Vicaire, Paris, 1903.),
written by M. Carron, in which the latter complains of Balzac's
arrogant tone, while at the same time apologising to him for having
called him a liar. At all events, when a second partnership was formed
later in that same month of April, with a view to the publishing of a
Moliere, to form a part of the same collection as the Lafontaine, the
only members left were Canel and Balzac, who agreed each to put up half
the capital and divide the profits and losses equally.
Balzac had taken his role quite seriously, and the first partnership
was barely formed when he set off for Alencon, in order to make
arrangements with a certain engraver, Godart fils, who had been chosen
to reproduce the drawings by Deveria, with which the collection was to
be illustrated. He was the most active of all the partners;
nevertheless, as business ventures, the Lafontaine and the Moliere were
very far from profitable. The volumes were to be issued in four parts
at five francs each, making the cost of the complete work in each case
twenty francs. But when the installments of the Lafontaine were issued,
during the months of April and May, in an edition of three thousand
copies, they met with no success. Urbain Canel declared that he could
go no further with the venture, the partners withdrew, and Balzac was
left alone to bear the whole burden of the enterprise. His share of the
capital had been furnished him by a certain M. d'Assouvillez, and, in
order to buy out Canel's interest, Mme. de Berny endorsed notes to the
amount of nine thousand, two hundred and five francs, between May 15,
1825, and August 31, 1826. Altogether, the net result of the
transaction was a loss to Balzac of fifteen thousand francs. Being
unable to continue by himself the publication of these two works, he
sold the Lafontaine to Baudouin, who paid for it by transferring to
Balzac a number of uncollectable claims. One of these, amounting to
28,840 francs, was a debt owed by a bookseller in Reims, named Fremeau,
who had failed and who cleared off this obligation by turning over to
Balzac an entire shopful of battered old volumes, out of date and
worthless.
Did this first disastrous experience turn him aside from further
business ventures? Not at all. Balzac was by nature dogged and
persevering. Hope illuminated his calculations; he found the best of
reasons to explain the failure of an edition of classic authors; but he
conjured up still better ones for assailing new enterprises. The
edition of the classics had not been a success,--well, no matter! He
would establish himself as a printer. In the course of his
peregrinations among the printing-houses he had made the acquaintance
of a young foreman named Barbier, in whose welfare he had become
interested and whose special ability he had recognised. He decided to
take him into partnership.
Balzac's father, when asked to help his son to establish himself in
business, gave a guarantee of thirty thousand francs, which represented
the invested capital, that had yielded the interest of fifteen hundred
francs, the sum allowed him at an earlier period. Mme. de Berny
interested herself in the proposed venture, and so did M.
d'Assouvillez, the former silent partner. Balzac acquired the
establishment of Laurens Sr., Printer, No. 17, Rue des
Marais-Saint-Germain, now Rue Visconti, at the cost of thirty thousand
francs, plus twelve thousand francs as an indemnity to Barbier, because
he was resigning from an assured position, and fifteen thousand francs
for equipments. On the 12th of April, 1826, he sent in an application
to the Minister of the Interior, and, thanks to two letters of
recommendation from M. de Berny, counsellor to the Royal Court of
Paris, he obtained his license on January 1st, as successor to
Jean-Joseph Laurens, retired.
What was Balzac's life during the two years that he practised the
profession of printer? In his contract of partnership with Barbier he
had reserved for himself the offices of bookkeeper and cashier, signing
papers and soliciting orders, while his associate was to attend to the
technical end of the enterprise. In order to feed his presses with
work, Balzac counted upon his energy, his will power, his spirit of
initiative and his tact; he mentally recapitulated the number of
publishers with whom he had had relations, and who beyond a doubt would
entrust their work to him. The printing house was located on the ground
floor of a distinctly gloomy building in the Rue des Marais, a street
so narrow that two carriages found it difficult to pass each other.
When he had finished his round of calls upon clients, he watched the
busy labour of his workmen in the fetid atmosphere of the composing
room, and he swelled with joy as though he himself were the motor power
of the various parts of a living organism. Nothing discouraged him,
neither physical fatigue nor the mental strain of carrying on so huge
an enterprise. Then, when it seemed as though he was on the point of
bending beneath the burden, a secret consolation caused him once again
to square his shoulders. On the floor above the printing house he had
fitted up a little apartment quite luxuriously, and there each day he
received Mme. de Berny, who came to bring him the comfort of brave and
tender words, which seemed to him to open the golden gates of the
future. For Mme. de Berny these were the hours in which she could lay
bare her ardent and sensitive soul, while for Balzac they were a whole
education in sentiment and social graces at the hands of a woman rich
in sensibility and in memories. At this period she exerted a most
effective influence over the ideas of her young friend; she pictured to
him the conditions of fashionable life prior to the Revolution, with
its great ladies, its court intrigues, and its mysteries of passion and
ambition; and she imbued him with monarchical principles. But, above
all else, it was she herself who was the life-giving flame which fired
his genius. All of Balzac's life seems to have been impregnated with
these first lessons received from her, and he could never recall
without emotion the aid that he received from Mme. de Berny during
those early years of hard struggles. In 1837 he wrote as follows to
Mme. Hanska:
"I should be very unjust if I did not say that from 1823 to 1833 an
angel sustained me through that hideous battle. Mme. de B..., although
married, has been like an angel to me. She has been mother, sweetheart,
family, friend and counsellor; she has formed the writer, she has
consoled the man, she has created my taste; she has wept and laughed
with me like a sister, she has come day after day and every day to lull
my sorrows, like a beneficent sleep. She has done even more, because,
although her finances are in control of her husband, she has found
means to lend me no less than forty-five thousand francs, and I paid
back the last six thousand francs in 1836, including five per cent.
interest, of course. But it was only gradually that she came to speak
of my debt. Without her I should certainly have died. She often became
aware that I had had nothing to eat for several days; and she provided
for all my needs with angelic goodness. She encouraged me in that pride
which preserves a man from all baseness, and which today my enemies
reproach me for, as being a foolish self-satisfaction, and which
Boulanger has perhaps somewhat exaggerated in his portrait of me." (The
original of this portrait of Honore de Balzac is at the chateau of
Wierzchownia; there is a copy of it in the Palace at Versailles.)
The illusions which Balzac cherished of the rapid success of his
printing house vanished very soon, and from the outset he found himself
facing the realities of a difficult situation. In spite of all his
efforts, clients remained rare, and there was no sort of order either
in the business organisation or in the financial management. M. Gabriel
Vicaire has made an investigation to determine how many works issued
from Balzac's presses, and he has been unable to count more than one
hundred and fifty, or thereabouts, which was a small number, during a
space of two years, for an important and well-equipped printing house.
The first order that he filled was a druggist's prospectus, Anti-mucous
Pills for Longevity, or Seeds of Life, for Cure, a Parisian druggist,
of No. 77, Rue Saint-Antoine; it was a four-leaf 8vo pamphlet, dated
July 29, 1826. The average orders seem to have been commonplace enough;
nevertheless, Balzac did print a number of interesting books for
various publishers; among others, The Historical and Literary
Miscellanies of M. Villemain, for Ladvocat, and La Jacquerie, Feudal
Scenes, followed by the Carvajal Family, a drama by the "author of the
dramatic works of Clara Gazul" (Merimee), for Brissot-Thivars. He was
also the printer for two periodicals, the Gymnase, for Carnot and
Hippolyte Auger, the editors of that review of social tendencies, and
the Annales Romantiques, for Urbain Canel. The latter was the publisher
of the younger literary school, and brought out in his magazine the
works of Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Benjamin Constant,
Chateaubriand, Delavigne, etc. Are we to suppose that business cares
had turned Balzac aside from all his literary projects? And what must
his feelings have been when he read on pages still smelling of fresh
ink names already familiar, and some of them long since famous, while
he himself was still only a simple printer? There is reason for
thinking that his business venture, with all its cares and anxieties,
never interrupted the silent but fabulous labour that was shaping
itself inside his brain, and that when he saw new authors becoming
famous he merely said, "My day will come." Meanwhile, he yielded to an
influence absolutely opposed to his natural bent, and contributed to
the Annales two poems perfectly romantic in tone: an Ode to a Young
Girl and Verses Written in an Album.
But in reality Balzac never had the gift of versification, even in his
youth; and later on, when he had need of poems for his Human Comedy, he
applied to his friends, Theophile Gautier, Mme. de Girardin, or
Lassailly, merely indicating the general tone of the verses he wanted
them to write.
In addition to the above-mentioned periodicals, Honore de Balzac
printed the Album of History and Anecdote, from January to April, 1827,
and he seems also to have been its editor. For, as a matter of fact,
subscriptions to it were received at the printing house, No. 17, Rue
des Marais-Saint-Germain, and there are anecdotes to be found in it
which he afterwards repeated in some of his works.
In spite of all his hopes and efforts, the business went from bad to
worse, and Balzac endured all the agonies of a merchant who sees the
dawn of the day when a note falls due and knows that his cash drawer is
empty. We can picture him, anxiously studying his account books, with
his elbows on his desk, and imagining a thousand ingenious means of
meeting his financial troubles. But the hard reality shattered them,
one by one, like thin glass. He was a prey to the money-lenders and the
lawyers, who had no mercy upon a poor wretch who had failed to "make
good," and accomplish his ruin with mathematical indifference. The
sheriffs, the attorneys, the usurers, the intrusive hordes of clerks
and process-servers swooped down upon the printing house and the
printer, eager to share the spoils. Honore de Balzac, alone in his
"horrible struggle," stood at bay against the pack, using all the
stratagems that he had learned in long years of conflict to throw them
off the track and save his last remaining resources. He put forth all
his accumulated cleverness, his fertile spirit of invention, yet he
finally had to yield to superior numbers, and witness the rapid and
steady disintegration of a business on which he had staked so many
hopes.
But a new opportunity presented itself; his imagination caught fire,
and he foresaw a fortune, an assured fortune which nothing could take
from him,--and once again he laughed his deep, sonorous, powerful laugh,
defying destiny. In September, 1827, a type foundry was offered for
sale, after having failed, and Balzac, in conjunction with Barbier and
the assignee Laurent, bought it for the sum of thirty-six thousand
francs. Mme. de Berny, with her inalienable devotion, joined with him
in the new venture, contributing nine thousand francs as her share. The
business of the foundry had hitherto been limited to the production of
fonts of type, but it was the ambition of the partners to extend its
scope to engraving on steel, copper and wood, and to a special method
of stereotyping invented by Pierre Duronchail, to which they had
acquired the rights. A catalogue reproducing the various forms of type
which the foundry could furnish, as well as vignettes, head and tail
pieces and typographical ornaments, was widely circulated, yet the
world at large failed to perceive the advantages offered by the
rejuvenated and improved house of Gille Fils. After a three months'
trial, Barbier withdrew from the partnership formed for the
exploitation of the foundry, and on April 3, 1828, a new association
was formed between Laurent and Balzac, in which Mme. de Berny's name
also figured, but only as a silent partner. But every effort was in
vain, nothing could avert disaster. On the 16th of April, 1828, the
partnership of Laurent and Balzac was dissolved, the former remaining
as assignee.
Balzac was dismayed. The menace of insolvency closed the horizon of all
his hopes. He had wished to triumph without the aid of his family, to
demonstrate that he could carry on a business and achieve a fortune.
Yet now he was obliged to call his family to his assistance, to cry out
for succour. The situation was desperate, and it was necessary to act
quickly, wisely and energetically, for the family honour was at stake.
Mme. de Balzac, who until now had shown herself a suspicious and
dissatisfied mother, sacrificed herself in the presence of imminent
disaster; she offered up all her private fortune to satisfy the
creditors. At her request, one of her cousins, M. Sedillot, undertook
the settlement of the unfortunate business difficulties of her son,
Honore; and, being a prudent and experienced business man, he was able
to limit the extent of the disaster. Barbier bought back the printing
house for sixty-seven thousand francs, and Mme. de Berny put her son,
Alexandre, in charge of the foundry, in place of Balzac. The
liabilities amounted to 113,081 francs, of which 37,600 had been
advanced by Mme. de Balzac while the only assets were the 67,000 francs
resulting from the sale of the printing house. Among the debts recorded
in the settlement there are some which prove that at this time Balzac
had already acquired a taste for luxury; he owed Thouvenin, book-binder
to the Duc d'Orleans, 175 francs for binding a Lafontaine, a Boileau,
and a Thousand and One Nights, while the long unsettled bill of his
shoemaker amounted to no less than three hundred francs!
The intervention of his mother and the sacrifices that she consented to
make saved him from inevitable failure, but he had to endure an
avalanche of reproaches. At the age of twenty-nine he withdrew from
business, with debts amounting to ninety thousand francs, and how could
he, rebellious son that he was, ever hope to clear himself, when he
might by this time have been a prosperous notary, well on the road
towards honours, if he had only listened to the wise counsel of his
parents? His father, Francois Balzac, had learned of the disaster, in
spite of all the precautions taken to keep him in ignorance, and he
addressed a letter, very noble in tone, to M. Sedillot, thanking him
for having saved the family name from dishonour. We get an echo of the
recriminations which must have arisen within the family circle from the
firm yet bitter reply that Balzac made to his sister Laure:
"Your letter has given me two detestable days and two detestable
nights. I brooded over my justification, point by point, like
Mirabeau's Memoire to his father, and I was already fired with zeal for
the task; but I have decided not to write it. I cannot spare the time,
my dear sister, and besides I do not feel that I have been at all in
the wrong." And in the same letter he said further, with calm pride: "I
must live, my dear sister, without asking anything of anybody; I must
live in order to work and pay back every one to whom I am in debt."
Yes, he was nearly twenty-nine years old, his debts amounted to ninety
thousand francs, and he was alone and without resources,--but although
it was a heavy burden he did not consider that it was too heavy for his
shoulders. He had debts, but he meant to pay them, by means of his pen
and his genius; and so we shall see him undertaking the most formidable
task that ever human brain produced,--and that was destined to cease
only at his death.