Dandyism.
After the publication of the Physiology and The Magic Skin, which
followed The Chouans and Scenes from Private Life, Balzac found himself
enrolled among the fashionable novelists. The public did not understand
his ideas, they were incapable of grasping the grandeur of the vast
edifice which he already dreamed of raising to his own glory, but they
enjoyed his penetrating analysis of the human heart, his understanding
of women, and his picturesque, alluring and dramatic power of
narrative. He excited the curiosity of his women readers, who
recognised themselves in his heroines as in so many faithful mirrors;
and the consequence was that he was besieged by a host of feminine
letters. Balzac had a perfumed casket in which he put away the
confidences, avowals and advances of his fair admirers, but he did not
reply to them.
In September, 1831, however, an unsigned letter arrived at the chateau
at Sache, where he had been spending his vacation; but, as he had
already left, it was forwarded to him in Paris. It was distinguished by
its refinement of tone, its cleverness and its frank and discerning
criticisms of the Physiology and The Magic Skin,--so much so, indeed,
that Balzac decided to answer its attacks upon him by defending his
works and explaining his ideas. There followed a second letter and then
others, and before long a correspondence had been established between
Balzac and the unknown lady, so fascinating on her side of it that
Balzac was eager to know her name, and demanded it, under penalty of
breaking off the whole correspondence. She willingly revealed her
identity, she was the Duchesse de Castries. She informed him further
that it would give her pleasure to have him call upon her, in the Rue
de Varennes, on the day when she received her intimate friends. Balzac,
no doubt, gave utterance to his great, joyous, triumphant laugh, in
which there was also mingled a touch of pride.
Mme. de Castries was one of the most highly courted ladies in the
exclusive circle of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, an aristocrat of
aristocrats; she was still young,--her age was thirty-five,--and
beautiful, with pale and delicate features, crowned with masses of hair
of a dazzling Venetian blonde. She was a descendant of the de Maille
family, her husband had been a peer of France under Charles X, and
through marriage with the Duc de Fitz-James, one of the leaders of the
legitimist party, was her brother-in-law, thus connecting her with the
highest nobility of France. To Balzac she represented the doorway to a
world of which he had had only vague glimpses as reflected in the
reminiscences of Mme. de Berny,--and she smiled upon him with a
mysterious smile of welcome.
The novelist hastened to accept the Duchess's invitation, and became
one of the regular frequenters of her salon. She led him on; and he
talked of his ideas, his projects and his dreams. He also talked
discreetly of his heart, and without encouraging him, she allowed him
to understand that she listened to him without displeasure. His
relations with Mme. de Berny had been tinged with a sort of bitterness,
due to the disparity in their ages, and his happiness had never been
complete. These relations were now about to come to a close, yet even
after the rupture they were destined to remain like a single soul,
united by a profound and lasting affection, beyond the reach of any
severance. Be that as it may, Balzac at this period was audaciously
planning another conquest, and a dazzling one, more brilliant than his
most ambitious hopes could have wished. So the pretty game continued,
half in sport and half in earnest.
Whether it was due solely to the influence of the duchess or whether a
certain amount of calculation entered in, since literary success is
judged by the money profits and the expenditures and fashionable
appearance of the writer, or whether he also obeyed his own fondness
for a broad and sumptuous scale of living, no one knows; probably
something of all three entered in; but the fact remains that after he
knew Mme. de Castries Balzac became transformed into a dandy, a man of
fashion. He was a lion in that circle of gilded youth which frequented
the Opera and the Bouffes, that shone in famous salons, that diverted
itself in cabarets, and distinguished itself by wealth, gallantry and
impertinence.
Balzac now had money. He possessed an unusual faculty for disposing of
his copy advantageously. To begin with, he was paid by the magazines to
which he gave the first serial rights, the Revue de Paris and the Revue
des Deux Mondes; and, secondly, in disposing of the book rights he
never gave his publishers more than the right to bring out one edition
and for a limited time; and the result was that frequent new editions,
either of single works or groups of works, taken together with his new
works, formed altogether a considerable production of volumes.
Furthermore, he received advances from publishers and editors, he
trafficked in endorsed notes, he borrowed and lived on credit. This was
in a measure the prosperity that he had so greatly coveted, yet he
gained it at the cost of countless toil, activity and worriment.
Balzac now acquired carriages and horses, he had a cabriolet and a
tilbury painted maroon; his coachman was enormous and was named
Leclercq, while the groom was a dwarf whom he called Anchises. He
engaged servants, a cook and a valet named Paradis. He patronised the
most fashionable tailor of the time, and dressed in accordance with the
decrees of the latest style. Mme. Ancelot states that he ordered no
less than thirty-one waistcoats, and that he had not given up the hope
of some day having three hundred and sixty-five, one for each day in
the year. He abandoned wool in favour of silk. Rings adorned his
fingers; his linen was of the finest quality; and he used perfumes, of
which he was passionately fond.
In the morning he went to the Bois, where the other young men of
fashion congregated; he sauntered up and down and later paid visits; in
the evening, when he had no invitations to social functions, he dined
at the Rocher de Cancale or at Bignon's, or showed himself at the Opera
in the box occupied by an ultra-fashionable set known as the "Tigers."
After the performance he hurried off to cut a brilliant figure at the
salon of the beautiful Delphine Gay, the wife of Emile de Girardin, in
company with Lautour-Mezeray, the "man with the camelia," Alphonse
Karr, Eugene Sue, Dumas, and sometimes Victor Hugo and Lamartine. In
that celebrated apartment, hung in sea-green damask, which formed such
a perfect background for Delphine's blonde beauty, Balzac would arrive
exuberant, resplendent with health and happiness, and there he would
remain for hours, overflowing with wit and brilliance.
In the midst of this worldly life he by no means neglected Mme. de
Castries, but, on the contrary, was assiduous in his attentions to the
fair duchess. At her home he met the Duc de Fitz-James and the other
leaders of militant legitimism, and little by little he gravitated
towards their party. He wrote The Life of a Woman for Le Renovateur,
and also an essay in two parts on The Situation of the Royalist Party;
but it was not long before he quarrelled with Laurentie, the editor in
chief who probably wounded his pride as a man of letters.
The society which he frequented must have reacted on Balzac, for it was
at this time that he conceived the desire of proving himself a
gentleman by descent, the issue of a time-honoured stock, the
d'Antragues family. He adopted their coat-of-arms and had his monogram
surmounted by a coronet. Later on he abandoned these pretensions, and
his forceful and proud reply is well known when some one had proved to
him that he had no connection with any branch of that house:
"Very well, so much the worse for them!"
But meanwhile, how about his work? It is not known by what prodigy
Balzac kept at his task, in spite of this busy life of fashion and
frivolity. He published The Purse, Mme. Firmiani, A Study of a Woman,
The Message, La Grenadiere, The Forsaken Woman, Colonel Chabert (which
appeared in L'Artiste under the title of Transaction), The Vicar of
Tours, and he composed that mystical work which cost him so much pains
that he almost succumbed to it, the Biographical Notice of Louis
Lambert. At the same time he corrected, improved and partly rewrote The
Chouans and the newly published Magic Skin, with a view to new
editions, in accordance with the criticisms of his sister Laure and
Mme. de Berny.
Nevertheless, money continued to evaporate under his prodigal fingers;
he had counted upon revenues which failed to materialise, he could no
longer borrow, for his credit was exhausted, and he found himself
reduced to a keener poverty than that of his mansarde garret. After all
this accumulation of work, all this expenditure of genius, to think
that he did not yet have an assured living! He had frightful attacks of
depression, but they had no sooner passed than his will power was as
strong as ever, his fever for work redoubled, and his visionary gaze
discerned the fair horizons of hope as vividly as though they were
already within reach of his hand. Then he would shut himself into his
room, breaking off all ties with the social world, or else would flee
into the provinces, far from the dizzy whirl of Paris.
Thus it happened that he made several sojourns at Sache in 1831, and
that he set out for it once again in 1832, determined upon a lengthy
absence. Mme. de Castries had left Paris and had asked him to join her
at the waters of Aix in September; but, before he could permit himself
to take this trip, he must needs have the sort of asylum for work that
awaited him in Touraine.
M. de Margonne, his host, welcomed him like a son each time that he
arrived. He had entire liberty to live at the chateau precisely as he
chose. He was not required to be present at meals, nor to conform to
any of the social conventions which might have interfered with the most
profitable employment of his time. If, in the absorption of working out
the scheme of the task which he had in progress, he was sometimes
irritable and sullen, no one took offence at his attitude. When he had
not yet reached the stage of the actual writing, and was merely
composing his drama within his powerful imagination, he arose early in
the morning and set off upon long walks across country, sometimes
solitary and silent, sometimes getting into conversation with the
people he met and asking them all sorts of questions. He had no other
source of amusement, for he did not care for hunting, and, as to
fishing, he made no success of it, for he forgot to pull in the fish
after they had taken the hook!
"The only games that interested him were those that demanded
brain-work," writes a relative to M. de Margonne, M. Salmon de
Maison-Rouge, in a vivid account of Balzac's visits to Sache. "My
father, who prided himself upon playing a very good game of checkers,
on one occasion tried a game with him. After several moves my father
said, "Why, Monsieur de Balzac, we are not playing Give-away! You are
letting me take all your men; you are not playing the game seriously."
"Indeed, I am," rejoined Balzac, "as seriously as possible," and he
continued to let his men be taken. At last he had only one man left,
but he had so managed the moves that, without my father being aware of
it, this last man was in a position to take all the men my father had
left in one single swoop,--and there were a good many, for M. de Balzac
had taken only six up to that move. From that time onward my father
regarded him as one of the keenest minds that had ever lived."
(Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Touraine, Volume XII.)
But Balzac was not staying at Sache for the purpose of playing
checkers, and in the same notice M. Salmon tells of his habits of work,
on the strength of an account given by M. de Margonne:
"He had a big alarm-clock," he writes, "for he slept very well and very
soundly, and he set the alarm for two o'clock in the morning. Then he
prepared himself some coffee over a spirit lamp, together with several
slices of toasted bread; and then started in to write in bed, making
use of a desk so constructed that he could freely draw up his knees
beneath it. He continued to write in this manner until five o'clock in
the evening, taking no other nourishment than his coffee and his slices
of toasted bread.
"At five o'clock he arose, dressed for dinner, and remained with his
hosts in the drawing-room until ten o'clock, the hour at which he
withdrew to go to bed. And he never in the least modified this settled
routine."
These sojourns at Sache were longer or shorter according to the stage
of his work and the state of his purse. The servants at the chateau had
learned to tell from his expression whether he was prosperous or
hard-up; when he felt poor he met them with an affable air and kindly
words, for that was all he had to give them; when he was rich he moved
among them with the air of a prince. They pardoned his haughty manner
because he was generous. M. de Margonne often aided him with loans, but
in order to keep him as long as possible, he never gave him the money
until the moment of his departure.
On leaving Paris for he knew not how long, Honore de Balzac entrusted
his interests to his mother. They were of such opposite temperaments,
the one imaginative and extravagant, staking his whole life and fortune
on fabulous figures, and the other precise, calculating and rather
austere, that they could hardly be expected to understand each other,
and frequent clashes had blunted all their tenderer impulses. Mme. de
Balzac could not understand her son's blunders, and blamed him severely
for them. She suffered from his apparently dissipated life, his love of
luxury, his belief in his own greatness, of which no evidence had yet
been offered to her matter-of-fact mind. Still wholly unaware of his
genius, she could not fail to misjudge him. Yet she had already
sacrificed herself once to save him from bankruptcy; and, with all her
frowning and grumbling, she would never refuse her aid and experience
when he asked for it.
It was Mme. de Balzac who undertook to see the publishers and magazine
editors, to pass upon the contracts, to follow up the negotiations
already under way, and to conclude them; in short, she represented her
son in all respects in his badly involved business relations. From a
distance he supervised operations, with a mathematical keenness of
vision, and his mother assumed the responsibility of carrying out his
wishes, bringing to the contest all her qualities of vigour, clear
perception and crafty dealings. Honore de Balzac did not spare her. For
he estimated her endurance by his own; and no sooner was he installed
at Sache than he began to give her instructions that were little short
of orders. She must copy The Grocer, which the Silhouette had
published, send him a copy of Contes Bruns, obtain from Mme. de Berny a
volume of The Chouans with her corrections, read the article on Bernard
Palissy in the great Biographie Universelle, copy it, and make note of
all the works that Palissy had written or which had been written about
him, then hurry with those notes to M. de Mame, the book-seller,--whom
she was to present with copies of volumes 3 and 4 of Scenes of Private
Life, telling him that Honore had had a fall and could not leave the
house,--and ask him to procure the works on her list,--then go to Laure,
and read the notice on Bernard Palissy in "Papa's Biography," to see
whether any other works are mentioned which were not included in the
Biographie Universelle, and to buy elsewhere whatever M. de Mame did
not have, if they were not too dear, and send them all as soon as
possible. These works were all needed by Balzac as documents for the
Search for the Absolute, which was meant to conclude the fourth volume
of Philosophic Tales, published by Gosselin,--but probably they did not
reach him in time, for the Search for the Absolute did not appear until
1834, and its place in the Tales was taken by the Biographic Notice of
Louis Lambert.
To these express recommendations regarding his work Balzac added orders
relative to his household. He "desired" that Leclercq should take out
the horses half an hour each day; he concerned himself in regard to his
outstanding debts, and he begged his mother to find out what he owed
for June and July, so that he could get her the money.
Those few months of fashionable life and his frequenting aristocratic
clubs had put his affairs in a piteous state. Mme. de Balzac drew up a
balance sheet, without any attempt to spare him, and pointed out just
what sacrifices were necessary. He was in no position to meet the heavy
demands, in spite of his desperate toil. A gleam of hope, however, came
in the midst of his distress, for his friends at Sache held out
prospects of a wealthy marriage; but this hope was an elusive one: the
prospective bride was not expected in Touraine until the month of
October, and how in the meantime was he to pay his pressing debts? He
calculated the utmost that he could earn, he assumed certain advances,
he added up and with the help of his optimism he swelled his
prospective receipts, yet not sufficiently to satisfy his creditors. He
groaned, for he did not wish to sell at a loss what he had acquired
with such difficulty, despoil himself, strip himself bare like a St.
John;--then his energy reawoke and his self-confidence enabled him to
accept the hard test. He consented to give up his horses,--for whose
feed he was still owing, since he could not feed them on poetry, as he
humorously wrote to Mme. de Girardin,--and his cabriolet. What matter?
He was strong enough to rebuild the foundations of his fortune!
From now on Honore de Balzac thought of nothing but his work. He wrote
his Biographical Notice of Louis Lambert in thirty days and fifteen
nights; but this effort was so prodigious that an apoplectic stroke
prostrated him and he came very near dying. He endured his financial
anxieties and empty purse, upheld by the certainty of his own genius.
He knew how much unfinished work there was in the first version of his
books and he had spells of artistic despair, but they were brief, for
he relied on his strength of will to bring his writings to the
perfection of which he dreamed. "This Biographic Notice of Louis
Lambert," he wrote to Laure, "is a work in which I have tried to rival
Goethe and Byron, to out-do Faust and Manfred; and the tilt is not over
yet, for the proof sheets are not yet corrected. I do not know whether
I shall succeed, but this fourth volume of Philosophic Tales ought to
be a final reply to my enemies, and ought to show my incontestable
superiority." When his family became concerned over his precarious
situation, and the complications in which he had entangled himself,
Balzac answered their reproaches by prophesying the future: "Yes, you
are right," he said to Laure, "I shall not stop, I shall go on and on
until I attain my goal, and you will see the day when I shall be
numbered among the great minds of my country." Then, in the same
letter, he added, for his mother's benefit: "Yes, you are right, my
progress is real and my infernal courage will be rewarded. Persuade my
mother to think so too, dear sister; tell her to show me the charity of
a little patience; her devotion will be rewarded! Some day, I hope, a
little glory will pay her for everything! Poor mother! The imagination
with which she endowed me is a perpetual bewilderment to her; she
cannot tell north from south nor east from west; and that sort of
journeying is fatiguing, as I know from experience!
"Tell my mother that I love her as I did when I was a child. Tears
overcome me as I write these lines, tears of tenderness and despair,
for I foresee the future, and I shall need that devoted mother on the
day of my triumph! But when will that day come?"
Lastly, he explained the necessity of his isolation and excused himself
for it: "Some day, when my works are developed, you will realise that
it required many an hour to think out and write so many things; then
you will absolve me for all that has displeased you, and you will
pardon, not the egoism of the man (for he has none), but the egoism of
the thinker and worker."
Towards the middle of July he left Sache in order to go to Angouleme,
to visit Mme. Carraud, whose husband had been appointed Inspector of
the Powder Works, just outside the town. He arrived there on the 17th,
intending to stay five weeks and happy to have reached this friendly
asylum. Mme. Carraud was one of the women who had the most faith in
Balzac; she was the recipient of his confidences, even the most
delicate ones; and when his conduct displeased her she did not hesitate
to take him to task. In her home Honore was treated as a son of the
family, and Commander Carraud also welcomed him with cordial affection.
In their house, just as at Sache, he kept on with his work, for "I must
work" was his life-long cry, which he sometimes uttered blithely, in
the luminous joy of creation, and sometimes with a horrible
breathlessness, as though he was gradually being crushed by the weight
of his superhuman task. But he never succumbed. From the moment of his
arrival at the Powder Works, notwithstanding the fatigue of the
journey, he hardly gave himself time to clasp the hands of his friends
before he plunged into the concluding chapters of Louis Lambert; and
even when he was not writing he gave himself no rest, but set about the
preparation of new works. He led an even more cloistered life here than
at Sache, interrupting all correspondence excepting business letters to
his mother. For he was bent upon gaining two things, money and fame.
Besides, there were the corrections to be made in The Chouans, in the
fourth volume of the Philosophic Tales, and he was writing The Battle
(which never was published), the Contes Drolatiques, the Studies of
Women, the Conversations between Eleven o'Clock and Midnight, La
Grenadiere (written in one night), and The Accursed Child, and at the
same time was planning The Country Doctor, one of his most important
works.
Meanwhile, Mme. Carraud was proud of her guest. She entertained her
friends at the Powder Works, the father and mother of Alberic Second,
and M. Berges, principal of the high school, who was later to support
Balzac's candidacy in Angouleme. The local paper, the Charentais, had
announced the presence of the author of The Magic Skin, and when he
went to have his hair cut by the barber, Fruchet, in the Place du
Marche, he was the object of public attention. The young men of the
democratic club called upon him and assured him that they would support
his candidacy, in spite of his aristocratic opinions. Balzac awoke to a
consciousness of the value of his name, and in the letters to his
mother dealing with business relations with his publishers assumed a
more commanding tone. She need not trouble herself further, he wrote,
in calling on magazine editors; she was to send for M. Pichot, editor
of the Revue de Paris, to come to her house, and she was to lay down
certain conditions, which he could accept or refuse, according to
whether he wanted more of Balzac's copy or not. Pichot must agree in
writing to pay two hundred francs a page, with no reduction for blank
spaces. Balzac was to be at liberty to reprint the published articles
in book form, and no disagreeable paragraph in reference to himself or
his works was to be published in the magazine. So much for M. Pichot!
Next, she was to summon M. Buloz, of the Revue des Deux Mondes, to come
in his turn to her house, and here are the detailed instructions which
Mme. de Balzac was to follow in his case: "You will show him the
manuscript, without letting him take it with him, because you are only
an agent and do not know the usual customs. Be very polite.
"You will tell him that I wish him to write a letter promising not to
print anything displeasing to me in his magazine, either directly or
indirectly;
"That he shall give a receipt for all outstanding accounts, with
settlement in full up to September 1, 1832, between me and the Revue;
"That my contributions are to be printed in the largest sized type;
"And paid at the rate of two hundred francs a page, without deduction
for blank spaces.
"After he has agreed in writing to these terms, let him have The
Orphans (the definitive title of which was La Grenadiere);
"Buloz must have a good article written on the Scenes and the fourth
volume of the Philosophic Tales."
Having taken this masterful tone, Balzac gave his mother this final
practical recommendation, never to give any credit to the periodical
and to demand the money immediately after publication of the article!
Having made all his plans in detail, Balzac left Angouleme on August
22, 1832, in order to join Mme. de Castries at the waters of Aix. It
was an amorous adventure, yet he did not enter into it without certain
misgivings, for he did not know whether the Duchess was sincere or
whether she was playing with his feelings. Nevertheless, he set out
joyously, although lightly equipped in the way of money,--Commander
Carraud was obliged to lend him a hundred and fifty francs,--but with
several stories begun and plenty of work on hand, for nothing, not even
the hope of being loved by a woman of high position, could make him
forget his work. He arrived at Limoges, where he saw Mme. Nivet, Mme.
Carraud's sister, who had bought him some enamels, and to whom he
applied to superintend his orders of porcelain. Faithful to his method
of documentation, he visited the sights of the city rapidly, within a
few hours, and such was his keenness of vision and tenacity of memory
that he was able afterwards to describe it all exactly, down to the
slightest details. On the very evening after his arrival at Angouleme
he set forth for Lyons, but the journey was fated not to be made
without an accident, for in descending from an outside seat of the
coach, at Thiers, Balzac struck his knee against one of the steps so
violently that--in view of his heavy weight--he received a painful wound
on his shin. He was tended at Lyons, the wound healed, and he profited
by his enforced quiet to correct Louis Lambert and to add to it those
"last thoughts" which form one of the highest monuments of human
intelligence.
Honore de Balzac installed himself at Aix, near Mme. de Castries. He
was happy, for she had received him with a thousand charming
coquetries; and he had paid his court to her, yet he did not interrupt
his work for a single day! "I have a simple little chamber," he wrote
to Mme Carraud, "from which I can see the entire valley. I force myself
pitilessly to rise at five o'clock in the morning, and I work beside my
window until five-thirty in the afternoon. My breakfast, an egg, is
sent in from the club. Mme. de Castries has some good coffee made for
me. At six o'clock we dine together, and I pass the evening with her."
Balzac lived economically. His chamber cost him two francs a day and
his breakfast fifteen sous. Yet, after having rendered an account of
his expenses to his mother, he was obliged to ask her for money; and he
played her another of his characteristic neat little tricks. At Aix he
had happened to run across a certain Auguste Sannegou, to whom he owed
eleven hundred francs. And, as the latter had just been losing rather
heavily, he offered to reimburse him, an offer which Sannegou lost no
time in accepting with pleasure. Consequently it became necessary for
Mme. de Balzac to send her son the eleven hundred francs post-haste,
plus two hundred francs which he needed for his personal expenses. His
mother made the sacrifice,--for he sent her a beautiful account of
perspective revenues: 3,000 francs from the Revue de Paris, 2,000
francs for La Bataille, 2,000 francs for a volume of Contes
Drolatiques, 5,000 for four new volumes to be brought out by Mame,
total 9,000 francs,--and after he received the money he acknowledged
that he paid only half the sum due to Sannegou, and kept the rest for a
trip to Italy.
The Fitz-James family came to rejoin the duchess; Balzac was exultant;
he had been exceedingly well treated and had been promised a seat as
deputy, if a general election took place; and he was to go to Rome in
the same pleasant company. But he lacked money, and the sums which his
mother was about to collect in Paris were destined to meet maturing
notes. Besides, he was anxious to finish, without further delay, The
Country Doctor, which he announced to his publisher, Mame, in
triumphant terms:
"Be doubly attentive, Master Mame!" he wrote. "I have been for a long
time imbued with a desire for that form of popular fame which consists
in selling many thousands of copies of a little 18mo volume like Atala,
Paul and Virginia, The Vicar of Wakefield, Manon Lescaut, Perrault,
etc., etc. The multiplicity of editions offsets the lack of a number of
volumes. But the book must be one which can pass into all hands, those
of the young girl, the child, the old man, and even the nun. When the
book once becomes known,--which will take a long or a short time,
according to the talent of the author and the ability of the
publisher,--it becomes a matter of importance. For example: the
Meditations of Lamartine, of which sixty thousand copies were sold; the
Ruins by Volny, etc.
"Accordingly, this is the spirit in which my book is conceived, a book
which the janitor's wife and the fashionable lady can both read. I have
taken the New Testament and the Catechism, two books of excellent
quality, and have wrought my own from them. I have laid the scene in a
village,--and, for the rest, you will read it in its entirety, a thing
which rarely happens to a book of mine,"
for this work Balzac demanded a franc a volume, or seventy-five
centimes at least, and an advance of a thousand francs. This sum was
indispensable if he was to go to Italy. The trip began in October,
under happy auspices, and on the 16th they stopped over at Geneva. From
there Balzac sent his mother two samples of flannel which he had worn
over his stomach. He wanted her to show them to M. Chapelain, a
practitioner of medical magnetism, in order to consult him regarding a
malady which he suspected that he had, and ask him where it was located
and what treatment he should follow. Balzac was a believer in occult
sciences, and once before, during the epidemic of cholera in 1832, he
wrote to M. Chapelain, asking if he could not discover the origin of
the scourge and find remedies capable of stopping it. It was not only
magnetism that interested him, but clairvoyance as well, fortune
tellers and readers of cards, to whom he attributed an acuteness of
perception unknown to ordinary natures.
This enjoyable trip was destined to end at Geneva, so far as Balzac was
concerned. Whether he realised that Mme. de Castries was merely playing
with his affections, or whether his pride was hurt by some unlucky
phrase, no one knows, but he suddenly deserted his companions and
returned to France, offering as a pretext the urgency of his literary
work. This adventure left an open wound, and it took more than five
years to cure him. He suffered cruelly, and we get an echo of his pain
in the line in the Country Doctor, "For wounded hearts, darkness and
silence." He avenged himself on Mme. de Castries by writing the Duchess
of Langeais, in which he showed how a society woman amused herself by
torturing a sensitive and sincere gentleman.