Battailles, on the heights of Chaillot--the suburb between Paris and
Passy--and that street and the Balzac house have been cut away by the
modern Avenue d'Iéna. Retired and high as it was, with its grand view
over river and town, it was not high enough nor far enough away for
this lover of distance and height. He soon tried again to realize his
ideal of a country home by buying, in 1838, three acres of land at
Ville d'Avray, a quarter near Sèvres, on the road to Versailles. On
the ground was a small cottage called, in Louis XIV.'s time, "_Les
Jardies_," still known by that name, and notable in our time as the
country-home of Léon Gambetta, wherein he died. That home remains
exactly as he left it, at No. 14 Rue Gambetta, Ville d'Avray, and has
been placed among the National Monuments of France. It is a shrine for
the former followers of the great tribune, who visit it on each
anniversary of his death. The statue they have erected to their
leader, alongside the house, may be most kindly passed by in silence.
[Illustration: Les Jardies.]
The glorious view from this spot--embracing the valley of Ville
d'Avray, the slopes opposite, the great city in the distance--was a
delight to Balzac. _Les Jardies_ was a tiny box, having but three
rooms in its two stories, which communicated by a ladder-like
staircase outside. He had tried to improve the place by a partial
rebuilding, and the stairs were forgotten until it was too late to put
them inside. A later tenant has enclosed that absurd outer staircase
within a small addition. His garden walls gave him even more trouble,
for they crumbled and slid down on the grounds of an irate neighbor.
The greater part of that garden has been walled off. Yet the poor
little patch was a domain in his eyes; its one tree and scattered
shrubs grew to a forest in his imagination, and his fancy pictured,
in that confined area, a grand plantation of pineapples, from which he
was to receive a yearly income of 400,000 francs! He had fixed on the
very shop on the boulevards where they were to be sold, and only
Gautier's cold sense prevented the great planter, as he saw himself,
from renting it before he had grown one pineapple!
His rooms were almost bare of furniture, and this was suggested by his
stage directions charcoaled on the plaster walls: "Rosewood panels,"
"Gobelins tapestries," "Venetian mirror," "An inlaid cabinet stands
here," "Here hangs a Raphael." Thus he was content to camp for four or
five years, hoping his house would yet be furnished, and perhaps
believing it was already furnished.
At this time, and for many years, Balzac rented a room over the shop
of his tailor Buisson, at the present No. 112 Rue de Richelieu. His
letters came here always, and he used the place not only for
convenience when in town, but, in connection with other shelters, for
his unceasing evasion of pursuing creditors. A tailor still occupies
that shop, and seems to be prosperous; probably able to collect his
bills from prompter customers than was Balzac.
In 1843, forced to sell _Les Jardies_, he came back into the suburbs,
to a house then No. 19 Rue Basse, at Passy, now No. 47 Rue Raynouard
of that suburb. On the opposite side of the street, at No. 40, is a
modest house, hiding behind its garden-wall. This was the unpretending
home of "_Béranger, poète à Passy_," to quote the Paris _Bottin_. No.
47 is a plain bourgeois dwelling of two stories and attic, wide and
low, standing on the line of the street; in the rear is a court, and
behind that court is the pavilion occupied by Balzac. He had entrance
from the front, and unseen egress by a small gate on the narrow lane
sunk between walls, now named Rue Berton, and so by the quay into
town. This was a need for his furtive goings and comings, at times.
Balzac's work-room here looked out over a superb panorama--across the
winding Seine, over the Champ-de-Mars, and the Invalides' dome, and
all southern Paris, to the hills of Meudon in the distance. This room
he kept austerely furnished, as was his way; while the living
apartments were crowded with the extraordinary collection of rare
furniture, pictures, and costly trifles, which he had begun again to
bring together. To it he gave all the money he could find or get
credit for, and as much thought and labor and time as to his books,
although with little of the knowledge that might have saved him from
frequent swindlers. It was only his intimates who were allowed to
enter these rooms, and they needed, in order to enter them, or the
court or the house on the street, many contrivances and passwords,
constantly changed. He himself posed as "_la Veuve Durand_," or as
"_Madame de Bruguat_," and each visitor had to ask for one of these
fictitious persons; stating, with cheerful irrelevancy: "The season of
plums has arrived," or, "I bring laces from Belgium." Once in, they
found free-hearted greeting and full-handed hospitality, and
occasional little dinners. The good cheer was more toothsome to the
favored _convives_, than were the cheap acrid wines, labelled with
grand names, made drinkable only by the host's fantastic fables of
their vintages and their voyages; believed by _him_, at least, who
dwelt always in his own domain of dreams.
These dinners were not extravagant, and there was no foolish
expenditure in this household at Passy. Balzac wrote later to his
niece, that his cooking there had been done only twice a week, and in
the days between he was content with cold meat and salad, so that each
inmate had cost him only one franc a day. For this man of lavish
outlay for genuine and bogus antiques, this slave to strange
extravagances and colossal debts--partly imaginary--was painfully
economical in his treatment of himself. He thought of money, he wrote
about money. Before him, love had been the only passion allowed in
novels; he put money in its place and found romance in the Code. All
through his life he worked for money to pay his debts, intent on that
one duty. In October, 1844, he wrote two letters, within one week, to
the woman who was to be his wife; in one of them he says that his
dream, almost realized, is to earn before December the paltry twenty
thousand francs that would free him from all debt; in the other he
gloats over recent purchases of _bric-à-brac_, amounting to hundreds
of francs. He saw nothing comically inconsistent in the two letters.
In all his letters, the saddest reading of all letters, there is this
curious commingling of the comic and the sordid. Those, especially,
written to his devoted sister and to the devoted lady who became his
wife at the last, give us most intimate acquaintance with the man;
showing a _man_, indeed, strong and vehement, steadfast and patient;
above all, magnanimous. Self-assertive in his art, eager and insistent
concerning it, he was quite without personal envy or self-seeking.
Said Madame Dudevant: "I saw him often under the shock of great
injustices, literary and personal, and I never heard him say an evil
word of anyone." Nor was there any evil in his life--a life of
sobriety and of chastity, as well as of toil. At the bottom of his
complex nature lay a deep natural affection. This giant of letters,
when nearly fifty years old, signed his letters to his mother, "_Ton
fils soumis_"; so expressing truly his feeling for her, from the day
she had installed him in his mean garret, to that later day, when she
fitted up his grand last mansion. In his letters to those dear to him,
amid clamorous outcries about debts and discomforts, comes a deeper
cry for sympathy and affection. Early in life, he wrote to his sister:
"My two only and immense desires--to be famous and to be loved--will
they ever be satisfied?" To a friend he wrote: "All happiness depends
on courage and work." So, out of his own mouth, we may judge this man
in all fairness.
From this Passy home one night, Balzac and Théophile Gautier went to
the apartment of Roger de Beauvoir, in the Hôtel de Lauzun-Pimodan, on
the Island of Saint-Louis; and thence the three friends took a short
flight into a hashish heaven. Their strange experiences have been
told by their pens, but to us, Balzac's night of drugged dreams is not
so strange as his days of unforced dreams. That which attracts us in
this incident is its scene--one of the grandest of the mansions that
sprang up from the thickets of Île Saint-Louis, as _le Menteur_ has
put it. Built in the middle years of the seventeenth century, it
stands quite unchanged at No. 17 Quai d'Anjou, bearing, simply and
effectively, every mark of Mansart's hand in his later years. Its
first owner followed his friend Fouquet to the Bastille and to
Pignerol; its next tenant came to it from a prison-cell, and went from
it to the very steps of the throne. He was the superb adventurer,
Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Duc de Lauzun, and his family name clings
still to the place, and is cut in gold letters on the black marble
tablet above the door. On that prettiest balcony in Paris, crowded the
prettiest women of Paris, on summer nights, to look at the river fêtes
got up by their showy and braggart Gascon host. Through this portal
have passed Bossuet and Père Lachaise, going in to convert the plain
old Huguenot mother of de Lauzun, who lived retired in her own
isolated chamber through the years of her son's ups and downs. When
her family had gone, came the Marquis de Richelieu, great-nephew of
the great Richelieu, with the bride he had stolen from her convent at
Chaillot--the daughter of Hortense Mancini, niece of Mazarin, and of
her husband, it is alleged. Then came the Pimodan, who was first of
that name, and who gave it to his _hôtel_. It is an admirable relic;
its rooms, with their frescoed ceilings and their panelled walls, are
as remarkable as those of the _château_ of Fontainebleau, and are not
surpassed by any in Paris. The mansion is well worth a visit for
itself and for its memories.
Balzac's Paris--the Paris for which his pen did what Callot and Meryon
did for it with their needles--has been almost entirely pickaxed out
of sight and remembrance. The Revolution, wild-eyed in its mad
"Carmagnole," gave itself time to raze a few houses only, after
clearing the ground of the Bastille, although it had meant much more
destruction; the Empire cut some new streets, and planned some new
quarters; the Bourbons came back and went away again, leaving things
much as they had found them. It remained for Louis-Philippe to begin
"works of public utility," an academic phrase, which being interpreted
signified the tearing down of the old and the building up of the new,
to gratify the grocers and tallow-chandlers whose chosen King he was,
and to fill his own pocket. Yet much of Balzac's stage-setting
remained until it was swept away by Haussmann and his master of the
Second Empire. Such was the wretched Rue du Doyenné, that "narrow
ravine" between the Louvre and Place du Carrousel, where Baron Hulot
first saw _la Marneffe_, and where _la Cousine Bette_ kept guard over
her Polish artist in his squalid garret; doubtless the very garret
known to Balzac in his visits there, when it was tenanted by Arsène
Houssaye, Gautier, Gavarni, and the rest of "Young France, harmless in
its furies." That house, one of a block of black old eighteenth-century
structures, stood where now is the trim little garden behind the
preposterous statue of Gambetta.
History and fiction meet on the steps of Saint-Roch. There César
Birotteau, the ambitious and unlucky perfumer, was "wounded by
Napoleon," on the _13 Vendémiaire_, the day that put the young
Corsican's foot into the stirrup, and gave to the sham-heroic César
that sounding phrase, always thereafter doing duty on his tongue. He
was carried to his shop in Rue Saint-Honoré, on its northern side near
Rue de Castiglione, and hid and bandaged and nursed in his _entresol_.
This part of Rue Saint-Honoré and its length eastward, with its narrow
pavement and its tall, thin houses, is still a part of the picture
Balzac knew and painted; but the business district hereabout has
greatly changed since his day. The Avenue de l'Opéra, and all that
mercantile quarter dear to the American pocket, the Bourse and the
banking-houses about, date from this side of his Paris. Nucingen would
be lost in his old haunts, and Lucien de Rubempré could not recognize
the newspaper world of our day.
The _hôtels_ of the Faubourg Saint-Germain--the splendid mansions of
the splendid eighteenth century, where his Rastignac and his lesser
pet swells lorded it--are now, in many cases, let out in apartments,
their owners content with the one floor that is in keeping with their
diminished fortunes. Undiminished, however, are their traditions and
their prejudices, albeit "_Le Faubourg_" exists no longer, except as
an attitude of mind. Yet, here on the left bank, are still to be
found some of the scenes of the "Comédie Humaine." On Quai Voltaire,
alongside the house in which Voltaire died, is the very same shop of
the antiquary, from whom Raphael de Valentin bought the _peau de
chagrin_. Balzac knew it well, doubtless was swindled there, and
to-day you will find it as crowded with curiosities, as begrimed with
dust, as suggestive of marvels hid in its dusky corners, as when he
haunted it.
Raphael de Valentin lived in the _hôtel-garni_ Saint-Quentin, Rue des
Cordiers. Long before his day, Rousseau had been a tenant of a dirty
room in the same dirty _hôtellerie_, going there because of the
scholarly neighborhood of the place and of its memories, even at that
time. Leibnitz, in 1646, had found it a village inn in a narrow lane,
hardly yet a street. Gustave Planche lived there, and Hégésippe Moreau
died there in 1838--a true poet, starved to death. The old inn and all
its memories and the very street are vanished; and the new buildings
of the Sorbonne cover their site.
[Illustration: The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the house
where Voltaire died.]
"One of the most portentous settings of the scene in all the
literature of fiction. In this case there is nothing superfluous;
there is a profound correspondence between the background and the
action." Such is the judgment of so competent a critic as Mr. Henry
James, concerning the house in which is played the poignant tragedy of
"Père Goriot." You will, if you love Balzac, own to the truth of this
statement, when you look upon this striking bit of salvage. It
stands, absolutely unchanged as to externals, at No. 24 Rue
Tournefort; a street named in honor of the great botanist who cleared
the track for Linnæus. In Balzac's day, this street was known by its
original name of Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève; one of the most ancient and
most isolated streets on the southern bank. Once only, through the
centuries, has its immemorial quiet been broken by unseemly noise,
when, in the days of François I., a rowdy gambling-den there, the
"_Tripôt des 11,000 Diables_," did its utmost to justify its name. The
street seems to creep, in subdued self-effacement, over the brow of
Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, away from the Paris of shops and cabs and
electric light. The house stands narrow on the street, its gable
window giving scanty light to poor old Goriot's wretched garret;
framed in it, one may fancy the patient face of the old man, looking
out in mute bewilderment on his selfish, worldly daughters. The place
no longer holds the "_pension bourgeoise de deux sexes et autres_" of
the naïve description on the cards of Madame Vauquer, _née_ Conflans;
and is now let out to families and single tenants. Its gate-way stands
always open, and you may enter without let or hindrance into the
court, and so through to the tiny garden behind, once the pride of
Madame Vauquer, no longer so carefully kept up. You peep into the
small, shabby _salle-à-manger_, on the entrance floor of the house,
and you seem to see the convict Vautrin, manacled, in the clutch of
the _gens-d'armes_, and, cowering before him, the vicious old maid who
has betrayed him. That colossal conception of the great romancer had
found his ideal hiding-place here, as had the forlorn father his
hiding-place, in his self-inflicted poverty. All told, there is no
more convincing pile of brick and mortar in fiction; sought out and
selected by Balzac with as much care and as many journeys as Dickens
gave to his hunt for exactly the right house for Sampson and Sally
Brass.
[Illustration: The Pension Vauquer.]
While Balzac was still at Passy, after long searching for a new home,
he made purchase, as early as 1846, in the new quarter near the
present Parc Monceaux. That name came from an estate hereabout, once
owned by Philippe Égalité; and his son, the King of the French, and
the shrewdest speculator among the French, was just at this time
exploiting this estate, in company with lesser speculators. The whole
suburb was known as the Quartier Beaujon, from a great banker of the
eighteenth century, whose grand mansion, within its own grounds, had
been partly demolished by the cutting of new streets, leaving only
out-buildings and a pavilion in a small garden. This was the place
bought by Balzac; the house and grounds, dear as they were, costing
much less, as he found, than his furniture, bronzes, porcelains, and
pottery, paintings and their frames--all minutely described in the
collection of _le cousin Pons_. He made a museum, indeed, of this
house, bringing out all his hidden treasures from their various
concealments here and there about town. There was still a pretence of
poverty regarding his new home; he would say to his friends, amazed by
the display: "Nothing of all this is mine. I have furnished this house
for a friend, whom I expect. I am only the guardian and doorkeeper of
this _hôtel_."
The pretty mystery was resolved within a few months, and its solution
explained Balzac's frequent and long absences from Paris after the
winter of 1842-43. These months had been passed at the home of Madame
Ève de Hanska, the Polish widow who was to be his wife. Her home was
in the grand _château_ of Wierzchownie, in the Ukraine, whose present
owner keeps unchanged the furniture of Balzac's apartment, where is
hung his portrait by Boulanger, a gift to Madame de Hanska from her
lover. And from there he brought his bride to Paris in the summer of
1850, their marriage dating from March of that year, after many years
of waiting in patient affection. She had made over--with Balzac's
cordial consent--nearly the whole of her great fortune to her
daughter, her only child, and to that daughter's husband, retaining
but a small income for herself. It was--and the envious world owned
that it was--truly a love-match. They came home to be welcomed, first
of all, by Balzac's aged mother; who had, during his absence, taken
charge of all the preparations, with the same anxious, loving care she
had given to the fitting-up of his garret thirty years before. She had
carried out, in every detail, even to the arrangement of the flowers
in the various rooms, the countless directions he had sent from every
stage of the tedious journey from Wierzchownie.
"And so, the house being finished, death enters," goes the Turkish
proverb. This undaunted mariner, after his stormy voyage, gets into
port and is ship-wrecked there. His premonition of early years,
written to his confidant Dablin in 1830, was proven true: "I foresee
the darkest of destinies for myself; that will be to die when all that
I now wish for shall be about to come to me." As early as in the
preceding summer of 1849, he had ceased to conceal from himself any
longer the malady that others had seen coming since 1843. The long
years of unbroken toil, of combat without pause, of stinted sleep, of
insufficient food, of inadequate exercise, of the steady stimulation
of coffee, had broken the body of this athlete doubled with the monk.
Years before, he had found that the inspiration for work given by
coffee had lessened in length and strength. "It now excites my brain
for only fifteen days consecutively," he had complained; protesting
that Rossini was able to work for the same period on the same
stimulus! So he spurred himself on, listening to none of the warnings
of worn nature nor of watchful friends. "Well, we won't talk about
that now," was always his answer. "In the olden days," says
Sainte-Beuve, "men wrote with their brains; but Balzac wrote, not only
with his brains, but with his blood." And now, he went to pieces all
at once; his heart and stomach could no longer do their work; his
nerves, once of steel and Manila hemp, were torn and jangled, and
snapped at every strain; his very eyesight failed him. The most
pitiful words ever penned by a man-of-letters were scrawled by him, at
the end of a note written by his wife to Gautier, a few weeks after
their home-coming: "_Je ne puis ni lire ni écrire._"
"On the 18th August, 1850"--writes Hugo in "Choses Vues"--"my wife,
who had been during the day to call on Madame Balzac, told me that
Balzac was dying. My uncle, General Louis Hugo, was dining with us,
but as soon as we rose from table, I left him and took a cab to Rue
Fortunée, Quartier Beaujon, where M. de Balzac lived. He had bought
what remained of the _hôtel_ of M. de Beaujon, a few buildings of
which had escaped the general demolition, and out of them he had made
a charming little house, elegantly furnished, with a _porte-cochère_
on the street, and in place of a garden, a long, narrow, paved
court-yard, with flower-beds about it here and there."
[Illustration: Plaque marking place of death of Balzac]
It was to No. 14, Allée Fortunée, that Hugo drove. That suburban lane
is now widened into Rue Balzac, and where it meets Rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Honoré there is a bit of garden-wall, and set in it is
a tablet recording the site of this, Balzac's last home. The house
itself has quite vanished, but one can see, above that wall, the upper
part of a stone pavilion with Greek columns, built by him, it is
believed.
"I rang," continues Hugo; "the moon was veiled by clouds; the street
deserted. No one came. I rang again. The gate opened; a woman came
forward, weeping. I gave my name, and was told to enter the _salon_,
which was on the ground floor. On a pedestal opposite the fireplace
was the colossal bust by David. A wax-candle was burning on a handsome
oval table in the middle of the room.... We passed along a corridor,
and up a staircase carpeted in red, and crowded with works of art of
all kinds--vases, pictures, statues, paintings, brackets bearing
porcelains.... I heard a loud and difficult breathing. I was in M. de
Balzac's bedroom.
"The bed was in the middle of the room. M. de Balzac lay in it, his
head supported by a mound of pillows, to which had been added the red
damask cushions of the sofa. His face was purple, almost black,
inclining to the right. The hair was gray, and cut rather short. His
eyes were open and fixed. I saw his side face only, and thus seen, he
was like Napoleon.... I raised the coverlet and took Balzac's hand. It
was moist with perspiration. I pressed it; he made no answer to the
pressure...."
The bust that Hugo saw was done by David d'Angers; a reduced copy
surmounts Balzac's tomb. His portrait, in water-color, painted, within
an hour after his death, by Eugène Giraud, is a touching portrayal of
the man, truer than any made during life, his widow thought. While
long suffering had wasted, it had refined, his face, and into it had
come youth, strength, majesty. It is the head of the Titan, who
carried a pitiable burden through a life of brave labor.