of sunny Tours, a tablet records the birth of Balzac in that house, on
the _27 Floréal, An VII._ of the Republic--May 16, 1799--the day of
Saint-Honoré, a saint whose name happened to hit the fancy of the
parents, and they gave it to their son. Many a secluded corner of the
town, many a nook within and about its Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, many
a portrait of its priests, has been brought into his books. And he has
portrayed, with his artist hand, the country round about of the broad
Loire and of bright Touraine, always vivid in his boyish
reminiscences. In his life and his work, however, he was, first and
always, a Parisian. To the great town, with all its mysteries and its
possibilities, his favorite creations surely found their way, however
far from it they started, drawn thither, as was drawn and held their
creator, by its unconquerable authority.
His father had been a lawyer, forced for safety during the Revolution
into army service, and when he was ordered from Tours, in 1814, to
take charge of the commissariat of the First Division of the Army in
Paris, he brought his family with him. Their abode was in Rue de
Thorigny, one of the old Marais streets, and the boy, nearly fifteen,
was put to school in the same street, and later in Rue Saint-Louis,
hard by. Transformed as is this quarter, there yet remain many of the
magnificent mansions with which it was built up in the days of its
grandeur, and their ample halls and rooms and gardens serve admirably
now as schools for boys and for girls. The young Honoré and his Louis
Lambert are one in their pitiful memories of these schools and of
their earlier schooling at the Seminary of Vendôme.
To please his father, the boy, when almost eighteen, went through the
law course of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France. To please
himself he listened, for the sake of their literary charm, to the
lectures of Villemain and Cousin and Guizot, and would rehearse them
with passion when he got home. But he had no love for the arid
literature of the law, and was wont to linger, in his daily walks
along the quays and across the bridges to and from his lecture-rooms,
over the bookstalls, spending his modest allowance for old books,
which he had learned already to select for their worth.
These studies ended, he entered the law office of M. de Merville, a
friend of his father, with whom Eugène Scribe had just before finished
his time, and to whom Jules Janin came for his training a little
later. And these three, unknown to one another, were, as it happened,
of the same mind in their revolt against the drudgery of the desk, and
against the servitude of the attorney, coupled with certain competence
as it might be; and in their preference for that career of letters,
which might mean greater toil, but which brought immediate freedom and
promised not far-off fame, and perhaps fortune, too.
The elder Balzac, severely practical, dreamed no dreams, and was
horrified by his son's refusal to pursue the profession appointed for
him. He foretold speedy starvation, and--perhaps to prepare Honoré for
it--allowed him to try his experiment, for two years, on a hundred
francs or less a month. So, the family having to leave Paris early in
1820, a garret--literally--was rented for the young author, and poorly
furnished by his mother; a painstaking, hard-working, fussy old lady,
who looked on him as a little boy all her life long, who drudged for
him to his last days, and who felt it to be her duty to discipline him
to hardship in these early days! This attic-room was at the top of the
old house No. 9 Rue Lesdiguières, which was swept away by the cutting
of broad Boulevard Henri IV. in 1866-67, its site being in the very
middle of this new street. To wax sentimental--as has a recent
writer--over the present No. 9 as Balzac's abode is touching, but
hardly worth while, that house having no interest for us beyond that
of being of the style and the period of Balzac's house, and serving to
show the shabbiness of his surroundings. These did not touch the young
author, whose garret's rental was within his reach, as was the
_Librairie de Monsieur_; for he gives it the old Bourbon name, and how
it got that name shall be told in our last chapter. It was the Library
of the Arsenal, still open to students as in his days there, in the
building begun by François I. for the casting of cannon, which he made
lighter and easier of carriage, and the casting of which exploded the
Arsenal within twenty years, and with it part of the adjacent Marais.
The Valois kings rebuilt it, Henri IV. enlarged it, and gave it for a
residence to his Grand Master of artillery, Sully, for whom he
decorated the _salons_ as we see them to-day. You may climb the grand
staircase, and stand in the rooms--their gildings fresh, their
paintings bright--occupied by the great minister. In the cabinet that
contains his furniture and fittings is an admirable bust of the King.
And you seem to see the man himself, as he enters, his debonair
swagger covering his secret shamefacedness for fear of a refusal of
his stern treasurer to make the little loan for which he has again
come to beg, to pay his last night's gambling or other debt of honor!
In this library by day, and in his garret by night, Balzac began that
life of terrific toil from which he never ceased until death stopped
his unresting hand. The novels he produced during these years were
hardly noticed then, are quite unknown now; showing no art, giving no
promise. He never owned them, and put them forth under grotesque
pen-names, such as "Horace de Saint-Aubin," "Lord R'hoone"--an anagram
of Honoré--and others equally absurd, all telling of his fondness for
titles.
This garret, in which he lived for fifteen months, is vividly pictured
in "La Peau de Chagrin," written in 1830, as Raphael's room in his
early days, before he became rich and wretched. Balzac's letters to
his sister Laure (Madame Laure de Surville) detail, with delightful
gayety, his exposure to wind and wet within these weather-worn walls;
and his ingenious shifts in daily small expenditure of _sous_ to make
his income serve. He relates how he shopped, how he brought home in
his pockets his scant provender, how he fetched up from the court-pump
his large allowance of water. For he used it lavishly in making his
coffee, that stimulation supplying the place of insufficient food, and
carrying him through his nights of pen-work. Excessive excitation and
excessive toil, begun thus early, went on through all his life, and he
dug his too early grave with his implacable pen. His only outings, by
day or by night, were the long walks that gave him his amazing
acquaintance with every corner of Paris, and his solitary strolls
through the great graveyard of Paris, near at hand. "_Je vais m'égayer
au Père-Lachaise_," he writes to his sister; and there he would climb
to the upper slopes, from which he saw the vast city stretched out.
For he was fond of height and space, and we shall see how he sought
for them in his later dwelling-places.
And in this storm-swept attic he had his first dreams of dwelling in
marble halls. Extreme in everything, he could imagine no half-way
house between a garret and a palace; he began in the one, he ended in
the other, unable to find pause or repose in either!
Dreaming the dreams of Midas, he loved to plunge his favorite young
heroes into floods of sudden soft opulence, and his longings for
luxury found expression in those unceasing schemes for instant wealth
which made him a kindly mock to his companions. His first practical
project was started in 1826, during a temporary sojourn for needed
rest and proper food at his father's new home in Villeparisis,
eighteen miles from Paris, on the edge of the forest of Bondy. He
speedily hurried back to Paris and turned printer and publisher;
bringing out, among other reprints, the complete works of Molière and
of La Fontaine, each with his own introduction, each in one
volume--compact and inconvenient--and, at the end of the year which
saw twenty copies of either sold, the entire editions were got rid of,
to save storage, at the price by weight of their paper. This and other
failures left him in debt, and to pay this debt and to gain quick
fortune, he set up a type-foundry in partnership with a foreman of his
printing-office. The young firm took the establishment at No. 17 Rue
des Marais-Saint-Germain, now Rue Visconti; named for the famous
archæologist who had lived, and in 1818 had died, in that venerable
mansion hard by on the corner of Rue de Seine and Quai Malaquais. We
have already found our way to this short and narrow Rue Visconti, to
visit Jean Cousin and Baptiste du Cerceau, and, last of all, the rival
houses of Racine.
Balzac's establishment, now entirely rebuilt, was as typical a setting
of the scene as any ever invented by that master of scene-setting in
fiction. It may be seen, as it stood until very lately, in its
neighbor No. 15, an exact copy of this vanished No. 17. Its frowning
front, receding as it rises, is pierced with infrequent windows, and
hollowed out by a huge, wide doorway, within which you may see men
casting plates for the press, albeit the successors of "_Balzac et
Barbier_" no longer set type nor print.
"_Balzac H. et Barbier A., Imprimeurs, Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, 17_;"
so appears the firm in the Paris directory for 1827. The senior partner
had not yet assumed the particle "_de_," so proudly worn in later years
when, too, he is labelled in the directory "_homme-de-lettres_," the
title of "_imprimeur_," on which he prided himself because it meant
wealth, having lasted only until the end of 1827 or the beginning of
1828. Printing-office and type-foundry were sold at a ruinous
sacrifice, and Balzac was left with debts of about 120,000 francs; a
burden that nearly broke his back and his heart for many years. He
never went through that narrow street without groaning for its
memories; and for a long time, he told his sister, he had been tempted
to kill himself, as was tempted his hero of "La Peau de Chagrin." In
his "Illusions Perdues" he has painted, in relentless detail, the
cruel capacity of unpaid, or partially paid, debts for piling up
interest. But the helpless despair of David Séchard was, in Balzac
himself, redeemed by a buoyant confidence that never deserted him for
long. To pay his debts, he toiled as did Walter Scott, whom Balzac
admired for this bondage to rectitude, as he admired his genius. All
through the "Comédie Humaine" he dwells on the burden of debt, the
ceaseless struggle to throw it off, by desperate, by dishonorable,
expedients.
On an upper floor of his establishment, Balzac had fitted up a small
but elegant apartment for his living-place, his first attempt to
realize that ideal of a bachelor residence such as those in which he
installed his heroes. This was furnished, of course, on credit, and
when failure came, he removed his belongings to a room at No. 2 Rue de
Tournon, a house quite unchanged to-day. Here his neighbor was the
editor of the "Figaro," Henri de la Touche--his intimate friend then,
later his intimate enemy; a poor creature eaten by envy, whose
specialty it was to turn against former friends and to sneer at old
allies.
Here Balzac finished the book begun in his former room over his works,
"Les Chouans." It was published in 1829, and was the first to bear his
real name as author, the first to show to the reading world of what
sterling stuff he was made. That stuff was not content with the book,
good as it was, and he retouched and bettered it in after years. It
brought him not only readers but editors and publishers; and before
the end of 1830, he had poured forth a flood of novels, tales, and
studies; among them such works as "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote,"
"Physiologie du Mariage," "Gobseck," "Étude de Femme," "Une Passion
dans le Désert," "Un Épisode sous la Terreur," "Catherine de Médicis,"
"Lettres sur Paris"--with "Les Chouans," seventy in all!
Werdet, one of Balzac's publishers--his sole publisher from 1834 to
1837--lived and had his shop near by, at No. 49 Rue de Seine. To his
house, just as it stands to-day, the always impecunious young author
used to come, morning, noon, and night for funds, in payment of work
unfinished, of work not yet begun, often of work never to be done.
From Rue de Tournon he removed, early in 1831, to Rue Cassini, No. 1,
as we find it given in the Paris _Bottin_ of that year. It is a short
street of one block, running from Avenue de l'Observatoire to Rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, and takes its name appropriately from the
Italian astronomer, who was installed in the Observatory, having been
made a citizen of France by Colbert, Louis XIV.'s great Finance Minister.
It is a secluded quarter still, with its own air of isolation and its
own village atmosphere. In 1831 it was really a village, far from
town, and these streets were only country lanes, bordered by infrequent
cottages, dear to the weary Parisian seeking distance and quiet. Three
of them, near together here, harbored famous men at about this period,
and all three have remained intact until lately for the delight of the
pilgrim--that of Châteaubriand, No. 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, that of
Victor Hugo, No. 27 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and this one of Balzac.
His house, destroyed only in 1899, was on the southwest corner of Rue
du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques and Rue Cassini. It was a little cottage of
two stories, with two wings and a small central body, giving on a tiny
court. A misguided Paris journal has claimed, with copious letterpress
and illustrations, the large building at No. 6 Rue Cassini for
Balzac's abode. This is a lamentable error, one of the many met with
in topographical research, by which the traditions of a demolished
house are transplanted to an existing neighbor. This characterless No.
6 carries its own proof that Balzac could never have chosen it, even
were we without the decisive proof given by the _cadastre_ of the
city, lately unearthed by M. G. Lenôtre among the buried archives of
the _Bureau des Contributions Directes_.
In the sunny apartment of the left wing dwelt Balzac and his friend,
Auguste Borget; in the other wing, Jules Sandeau lived alone and
lonely in his recent separation from George Sand. Their separation was
not so absolute as to prevent an occasional visit from her, and an
occasional dinner to her by the three men. She has described one of
these wonderful dinners with much humor; telling how Balzac, when she
started for her home--then on Quai Malaquais--arrayed himself in a
fantastically gorgeous dressing-gown to accompany her; boasting, as
they went, of the four Arabian horses he was about to buy; which he
never bought, but which he quite convinced himself, if not her, that
he already owned! Says Madame Dudevant: "He would, if we had permitted
him, have thus escorted us from one end of Paris to the other." He so
far realized his vision as to set up a tilbury and horse at this
period--about 1832--and exulted in the sensation created by his
magnificence as he drove, clad in his famous blue coat with shining
buttons, and attended by his tiny groom, "_Grain-de-mil_."
This equipage and that gorgeous dressing-gown were but a portion of
the bizarre splendor with which Balzac loved to relieve the squalor of
his debt-ridden days. Here, his creditors forgetting, by them
forgotten, as he fondly hoped, hiding from his friends the furniture
he had salvaged from his wreck, he wantoned in silver toilet-appliances,
in dainty porcelain and _bric-à-brac_; willing to go without soup and
meat--never without his coffee--that he might fill, with egregious
_bibelots_, his "nest of boudoirs _à la marquise_, hung with silk and
edged with lace," to use George Sand's words; boudoirs which he has
described in minute detail, placing them in the preposterous apartment
of "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or."
In his work-room, apart and markedly simple and severe, he began that
series of volumes, amazing in number and vigor, with which he was
resolute to pay his enormous debts. Here, in this little wing, in the
years between 1831 and 1838, he produced, among over sixty others of
less note, such masterpieces as "La Peau de Chagrin," "Le Chef
d'Oeuvre Inconnu," "Le Curé de Tours," "Louis Lambert," "Eugénie
Grandet," "Le Médecin de Campagne," "Le Père Goriot," "La Duchesse de
Langeais," "Illusion Perdues" (first part only), "Le Lys dans la
Vallée," "L'Enfant Maudit," "César Birotteau," "Cent Contes
Drôlatiques" (in three sections), "Séraphita," "La Femme de Trente
Ans," and "Jésus-Christ en Flandres."
In addition to his books, he did journalistic writing, chiefly for
weekly papers; and in 1835 he bought up and took charge of the
"Chronique de Paris," aided by a gallant staff of the cleverest men of
the day. It lived only a few months. In 1840 he started "La Revue
Parisienne," written entirely by himself. It lived three months.
When once at work, Balzac shut himself in his room, often seeing no
one but his faithful servant for many weeks. His work-room was
darkened from all daylight, his table lit only by steady-flamed
candles, shaded with green. A cloistered monk of fiction, he was clad
in his favorite robe of white cashmere, lined with white silk, open at
the throat, with a silken cord about the waist, as we see him on the
canvas of Louis Boulanger. He would get to his table at two in the
morning and leave it at six in the evening; the entire time spent in
writing new manuscript, and in his endless correction of proofs,
except for an hour at six in the morning, for his bath and coffee, an
hour at noon for his frugal breakfast, with frequent coffee
between-times. At six in the evening he dined most simply, and was in
bed and asleep by eight o'clock.
[Illustration: Honoré de Balzac.
(From the portrait by Louis Boulanger.)]
With no inborn literary facility, with an inborn artistic conscience
that drove him on in untiring pursuit of perfection, he filled the
vast chasm between his thought and its expression with countless
pen-strokes, and by methods of composition all his own: the exact
reverse of those of Dumas, writing at white heat, never rewriting; or
of Hugo, who said: "I know not the art of soldering an excellence in
the place of a defect, and I correct myself in another work." Balzac
began with a short and sketchy and slip-shod skeleton, making no
attempt toward sequence or style, and sent it, with all its errors, to
the printer. Proofs were returned to him in small sections pasted in
the centre of huge sheets; around whose wide borders soon shot from
the central text rockets and squibs of the author's additions and
corrections, fired by his infuriated fist. The new proofs came back on
similar sheets, to be returned to the printer, again like the web and
tracks of a tipsy spider. This was repeated a dozen or, it is said, a
score of times, always with amplifications, until his type-setters
became palsied lunatics. He overheard one of them, as he entered the
office one day, say: "I've done my hour of Balzac; who takes him
next?" Type-setter, publisher, author were put out of misery only when
the last proof came in, at its foot the magic "_Bon à tirer_."
This stupendous work had been preceded and was accompanied by as
stupendous preparation of details. He dug deep to set the solid
foundations for each structure he meant to build. "I have had to read
_so many_ books," he says, referring to his preliminary toil on
"Louis Lambert." So real were his creations to him--more alive to his
vision than visible creatures about--that he must needs name them
fittingly, and house them appropriately. Invented nomenclature gave no
vitality to them, in his view, and he hunted, on signs and shop-fronts
wherever he went, for real names that meant life, and a special life.
"A name," as he said, "which explains and pictures and proclaims him;
a name that shall be his, that could not possibly belong to any
other." He revelled in his discovery of "Matifat," and "Cardot," and
like oddities. He dragged Léon Gozlan through miles of streets on such
a search, refusing every name they found, until he quivered and
colored before "Marcas" on a tailor's sign; it was the name he had
dreamed of, and he put "Z" before it, "to add a flame, a plume, a star
to the name of names!"
His scenes, too, were set for his personages with appalling care, so
that, as has been well said, he sometimes chokes one with brick and
mortar. He knew his Paris as Dickens knew his London, and found in
unknown streets or unfrequented quarters the scenes he searched long
for, the surroundings demanded by his characters. If his story were
placed in a provincial town, he would write to a friend living there
for a map of the neighborhood, and for accurate details of certain
houses. Or, he would make hurried journeys to distant places: "I am
off to Grenoble," or, "to Alençon"--he wrote to his sister--"where
So-and-so lives:" one of his new personages, already a living
acquaintance to him. In his artistic frenzy for fitting atmosphere he
has, unconsciously, breathed his spirit of unrest into much of his
narrative, and the reader plunges on, out-of-breath, through
chapterless pages of fatiguing detail.
These excursions were not his only outings in later years. He got away
from his desk during the summer months, for welcome journeys to his
own Touraine, and to other lands, and for visits to old family
friends. Always and everywhere he carried his work with him.
And he began to see the world of Paris, and to be seen in that world,
notably in the famous _salon_ of Emile de Girardin and his young wife,
Delphine Gay de Girardin, where the watchword was "Admiration, more
admiration, and still more admiration." He met well-bred women and
illustrious men, whose familiar intercourse polished him, whose
attentions gratified him. The pressure of his present toil removed for
a while, he was fond of emerging from his solitude, and of flashing in
the light of publicity. He was an interested and an interesting
talker, earnest and vehement and often excited in his utterances; yet
frank and merry, and vivid with a "Herculean joviality." His thick
fine black hair was tossed back like a mane from his noble, towering
brow; his nose was square at the end, his lips full and curved, and
hidden partly by a small mustache. His most notable features were his
eyes, brown, spotted with gold, glowing with life and light--"the eyes
of a sovereign, a seer, a subjugator." A great soul shone out of them,
and they redeemed and triumphed over all that was heavy in face and
vulgar in body; for, with a thickness of torso like Mirabeau, and the
neck of a bull, he had his own corpulence. Lamartine says that the
personal impression made by Balzac was that of an element in nature;
he gripped one's brain when speaking, and one's heart when silent.
Moreover, it was an element good as well as strong, unable to be other
than good; and his expression, we know from all who saw it, told of
courage, patience, gentleness, kindliness.
He was commonly as careless of costume as a vagrant school-boy in
outgrown clothes. He would rush from his desk to the printer's or race
away in search of names, clad in his green hunting-jacket with its
copper buttons of foxes' heads, black and gray checked trousers,
pleated at the waist, and held down by straps passing under the huge
high-quartered shoes, tied or untied as might happen, a red silk
kerchief cord-like about his neck, his hat, shaggy and faded, crushed
over his eyes--altogether a grotesque creature! In contrast, he was
gorgeous in his gala toilet of the famous blue coat and massive gold
buttons, and the historic walking-stick, always carried _en grande
tenue_, its great knob aglow with jewels sent him by his countless
feminine adorers.
When Balzac removed with Sandeau, in 1838, to new quarters, he kept
this apartment in Rue Cassini for an occasional retreat, perhaps for a
friendly refuge against the creditors, who became more and more
clamorous in their attentions. The two comrades furnished the lower
floor of their new home most handsomely; mainly with the view of
dazzling urgent publishers, who, as said Balzac, "would give me
nothing for my books if they found me in a garret." Coming to drive a
bargain, these guileless gentry found themselves too timid to haggle
with the owners of such luxury. They could not know that that luxury
was merely hired under cover of a friend's name, and lit up only by
night to blind and bewilder them, while the haughty authors lived by
day in bare discomfort, on a half-furnished upper floor.