Are you a confirmed _Balzacian_?--to employ a former expression of
Gautier in _Jeune France_ on the morrow following the appearance of
that mystic Rabelaisian epic, _The Magic Skin_. Have you experienced,
while reading at school or clandestinely some stray volume of the
_Comedie Humaine_, a sort of exaltation such as no other book had
aroused hitherto, and few have caused since? Have you dreamed at an
age when one plucks in advance all the fruit from the tree of life
--yet in blossom--I repeat, have you dreamed of being a Daniel d'Arthez,
and of covering yourself with glory by the force of your achievements,
in order to be requited, some day, for all the sufferings of your
poverty-stricken youth, by the sublime Diane, Duchesse de
Maufrigneuse, Princesse de Cadignan?
Or, perchance, being more ambitious and less literary, you have
desired to see--like a second Rastignac, the doors of high society
opened to your eager gaze by means of the golden key suspended from
Delphine de Nucingen's bracelet?
Romancist, have you sighed for the angelic tenderness of a Henriette
de Mortsauf, and realized in your dreams the innocent emotions excited
by culling nosegays, by listening to tales of grief, by furtive
hand-clasps on the banks of a narrow river, blue and placid, in a
valley where your friendship flourishes like a fair, delicate lily,
the ideal, the chaste flower?
Misanthrope, have you caressed the chimera, to ward off the dark hours
of advancing age, of a friendship equal to that with which the good
Schmucke enveloped even the whims of his poor Pons? Have you
appreciated the sovereign power of secret societies, and deliberated
with yourself as to which of your acquaintances would be most worthy
to enter The Thirteen? In your mind's eye has the map of France ever
appeared to be divided into as many provinces as the _Comedie Humaine_
has stories? Has Tours stood for Birotteau, La Gamard, for the
formidable Abbe Troubert; Douai, Claes; Limoges, Madame Graslin;
Besancon, Savarus and his misguided love; Angouleme, Rubempre;
Sancerre, Madame de la Baudraye; Alencon, that touching, artless old
maid to whom her uncle, the Abbe de Sponde, remarked with gentle
irony: "You have too much wit. You don't need so much to be happy"?
Oh, sorcery of the most wonderful magician of letters the world has
seen since Shakespeare! If you have come under the spell of his
enchantments, be it only for an hour, here is a book that will delight
you, a book that would have pleased Balzac himself--Balzac, who was
more the victim of his work than his most fanatical readers, and whose
dream was to compete with the civil records. This volume of nearly six
hundred pages is really the civil record of all the characters in the
_Comedie Humaine_, by which you may locate, detail by detail, the
smallest adventures of the heroes who pass and repass through the
various novels, and by which you can recall at a moment's notice the
emotions once awakened by the perusal of such and such a masterpiece.
More modestly, it is a kind of table of contents, of a unique type; a
table of living contents!
Many Balzacians have dreamed of compiling such a civil record. I
myself have known of five or six who attempted this singular task. To
cite only two names out of the many, the idea of this unusual Vapereau
ran through the head of that keen and delicate critic, M. Henri
Meilhac, and of that detective in continued stories, Emile Gaboriau. I
believe that I also have among the papers of my eighteenth year some
sheets covered with notes taken with the same intention. But the labor
was too exhaustive. It demanded an infinite patience, combined with an
inextinguishable ardor and enthusiasm. The two faithful disciples of
the master who have conjoined their efforts to uprear this monument,
could not perhaps have overcome the difficulties of the undertaking if
they had not supported each other, bringing to the common work, M.
Christophe his painstaking method, M. Cerfberr his accurate memory,
his passionate faith in the genius of the great Honore, a faith that
carried unshakingly whole mountains of documents.
A pleasing chapter of literary gossip might be written about this
collaboration; a melancholy chapter, since it brings with it the
memory of a charming man, who first brought Messieurs Cerfberr and
Christophe together, and who has since died under mournful
circumstances. His name was Albert Allenet, and he was chief editor of
a courageous little review, _La Jeune France_, which he maintained for
some years with a perseverance worthy of the Man of Business in the
_Comedie Humaine_. I can see him yet, a feverish fellow, wan and
haggard, but with his face always lit up by enthusiasm, stopping me in
a theatre lobby to tell me about a plan of M. Cerfberr's; and almost
immediately we discovered that the same plan had been conceived by M.
Christophe. The latter had already prepared a cabinet of pigeon-holes,
arranged and classified by the names of Balzacian characters. When two
men encounter in the same enterprise as compilers, they will either
hate each other or unite their efforts. Thanks to the excellent
Allenet, the two confirmed Balzacians took to each other wonderfully.
Poor Allenet! It was not long afterwards that we accompanied his body
to the grave, one gloomy afternoon towards the end of autumn--all of
us who had known and loved him. He is dead also, that other Balzacian
who was so much interested in this work, and for whom the _Comedie
Humaine_ was an absorbing thought, Honore Granoux. He was a merchant
of Marseilles, with a wan aspect and already an invalid when I met
him. But he became animated when speaking of Balzac; and with what a
mysterious, conspiratorlike veneration did he pronounce these words:
"The Vicomte"--meaning, of course, to the thirty-third degree
Balzacolatrites, that incomparable bibliophile to whom we owe the
history of the novelist's works, M. de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul!--"The
Vicomte will approve--or disapprove." That was the unvarying formula
for Granoux, who had devoted himself to the enormous task of
collecting all the articles, small or great, published about Balzac
since his entry as a writer. And just see what a fascination this
_devil of a man_--as Theophile Gautier once called him--exercises over
his followers; I am fully convinced that these little details of
Balzacian mania will cause the reader to smile. As for me, I have
found them, and still find them, as natural as Balzac's own remark to
Jules Sandeau, who was telling him about a sick sister: "Let us go
back to reality. Who is going to marry Eugenie Grandet?"
Fascination! That is the only word that quite characterizes the sort
of influence wielded by Balzac over those who really enjoy him; and it
is not to-day that the phenomenon began. Vallies pointed it out long
ago in an eloquent page of the _Refractaires_ concerning "book
victims." Saint Beuve, who can scarcely be suspected of fondness
towards the editor-in-chief of the _Revue Parisienne_, tells a story
stranger and more significant than every other. At one time an entire
social set in Venice, and the most aristocratic, decided to give out
among its members different characters drawn from the _Comedie
Humaine_; and some of these roles, the critic adds, mysteriously, were
artistically carried out to the very end;--a dangerous experiment, for
we are well aware that the heroes and heroines of Balzac often skirt
the most treacherous abysses of the social Hell.
All this happened about 1840. The present year is 1887, and there
seems no prospect of the sorcery weakening. The work to which these
notes serve as an introduction may be taken as proof. Indeed, somebody
has said that the men of Balzac have appeared as much in literature as
in life, especially since the death of the novelist. Balzac seems to
have observed the society of his day less than he contributed to form
a new one. Such and such personages are truer to life in 1860 than in
1835. When one considers a phenomenon of such range and intensity, it
does not suffice to employ words like infatuation, fashion, mania. The
attraction of an author becomes a psychological fact of prime
importance and subject to analysis. I think I can see two reasons for
this particular strength of Balzac's genius. One dwells in the special
character of his vision, the other in the philosophical trend which he
succeeded in giving to all his writing.
As to the scope of his vision, this _Repertory_ alone will suffice to
show. Turn over the leaves at random and estimate the number of
fictitious deeds going to make up these two thousand biographies, each
individual, each distinct, and most of them complete--that is to say,
taking the character at his birth and leaving him only at his death.
Balzac not only knows the date of birth or of death, he knows as well
the local coloring of the time and the country and profession to which
the man belongs. He is thoroughly conversant with questions of
taxation and income and the agricultural conditions. He is not
ignorant of the fact that Grandet cannot make his fortune by the same
methods employed by Gobseck, his rival in avarice; nor Ferdinand du
Tillet, that jackal, with the same magnitude of operations worked out
by that elephant of a Nucingen. He has outlined and measured the exact
relation of each character to his environment in the same way he has
outlined and measured the bonds uniting the various characters; so
well that each individual is defined separately as to his personal and
his social side, and in the same manner each family is defined. It is
the skeleton of these individuals and of these families that is laid
bare for your contemplation in these notes of Messieurs Cerfberr and
Christophe. But this structure of facts, dependent one upon another by
a logic equal to that of life itself, is the smallest effort of
Balzac's genius. Does a birth-certificate, a marriage-contract or an
inventory of wealth represent a person? Certainly not. There is still
lacking, for a bone covering, the flesh, the blood, the muscles and
the nerves. A glance from Balzac, and all these tabulated facts become
imbued with life; to this circumstantial view of the conditions of
existence with certain beings is added as full a view of the beings
themselves.
And first of all he knows them physiologically. The inner workings of
their corporeal mechanism is no mystery for him. Whether it is
Birotteau's gout, or Mortsauf's nervousness, or Fraisier's skin
trouble, or the secret reason for Rouget's subjugation by Flore, or
Louis Lambert's catalepsy, he is as conversant with the case as though
he were a physician; and he is as well informed, also, as a confessor
concerning the spiritual mechanism which this animal machine supports.
The slightest frailties of conscience are perceptible to him. From the
portress Cibot to the Marquise d'Espard, not one of his women has an
evil thought that he does not fathom. With what art, comparable to
that of Stendhal, or Laclos, or the most subtle analysts, does he note
--in _The Secrets of a Princess_--the transition from comedy to
sincerity! He knows when a sentiment is simple and when it is complex,
when the heart is a dupe of the mind and when of the senses. And
through it all he hears his characters speak, he distinguishes their
voices, and we ourselves distinguish them in the dialogue. The
growling of Vautrin, the hissing of La Gamard, the melodious tones of
Madame de Mortsauf still linger in our ears. For such intensity of
evocation is as contagious as an enthusiasm or a panic.
There is abundant testimony going to show that with Balzac this
evocation is accomplished, as in the mystic arts by releasing it, so
to speak, from the ordinary laws of life. Pray note in what terms M.
le Docteur Fournier, the real mayor of Tours, relates incidents of the
novelist's method of work, according to the report of a servant
employed at the chateau of Sache: "Sometimes he would shut himself up
in his room and stay there several days. Then it was that, plunged
into a sort of ecstasy and armed with a crow quill, he would write
night and day, abstaining from all food and merely contenting himself
with decoctions of coffee which he himself prepared." [Brochure of M.
le Docteur Fournier in regard to the statue of Balzac, that statue a
piece of work to which M. Henry Renault--another devotee who had
established _Le Balzac_--had given himself so ardently. In this
brochure is found a very curious portrait of Balzac, after a sepia by
Louis Boulanger belonging to M. le Baron Larrey.]
In the opening pages of _Facino Cane_ this phenomenon is thus
described: "With me observation had become intuitive from early youth.
It penetrated the soul without neglecting the body, or rather it
seized so completely the external details that it went beyond them. It
gave me the faculty of living the life of the individual over whom it
obtained control, and allowed me to substitute myself for him like the
dervish in _Arabian Nights_ assumed the soul and the body of persons
over whom he pronounced certain words." And he adds, after describing
how he followed a workman and his wife along the street: "I could
espouse their very life, I felt their rags on my back. I trod in their
tattered shoes. Their desires, their needs, all passed into my soul,
or my soul passed into them. It was the dream of a man awakened." One
day while he and a friend of his were watching a beggar pass by, the
friend was so astonished to see Balzac touch his own sleeve; he seemed
to feel the rent which gaped at the elbow of the beggar.
Am I wrong in connecting this sort of imagination with that which one
witnesses in fanatics of religious faith? With such a faculty Balzac
could not be, like Edgar Poe, merely a narrator of nightmares. He was
preserved from the fantastic by another gift which seems contradictory
to the first. This visionary was in reality a philosopher, that is to
say, an experimenter and a manipulator of general ideas. Proof of this
may be found in his biography, which shows him to us, during his
college days at Vendome, plunged into a whirl of abstract reading. The
entire theological and occult library which he discovered in the old
Oratorian institution was absorbed by the child, till he had to quit
school sick, his brain benumbed by this strange opium. The story of
Louis Lambert is a monograph of his own mind. During his youth and in
the moments snatched from his profession, to what did he turn his
attention? Still to general ideas. We find him an interested onlooker
at the quarrel of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, troubling himself
about the hypothesis of the unity of creation, and still dealing with
mysticism; and, in fact, his romances abound in theories. There is not
one of his works from which you cannot obtain abstract thoughts by the
hundreds. If he describes, as in _The Vicar of Tours_, the woes of an
old priest, he profits by the opportunity to exploit a theory
concerning the development of sensibility, and a treatise on the
future of Catholicism. If he describes, as in _The Firm of Nucingen_,
a supper given to Parisian _blases_, he introduces a system of credit,
reports of the Bank and Bureau of Finance, and--any number of other
things! Speaking of Daniel d'Arthez, that one of his heroes who, with
Albert Savarus and Raphael, most nearly resembles himself, he writes:
"Daniel would not admit the existence of talent without profound
metaphysical knowledge. At this moment he was in the act of despoiling
both ancient and modern philosophy of all their wealth in order to
assimilate it. He desired, like Moliere, to become a profound
philosopher first of all, a writer of comedies afterwards." Some
readers there are, indeed, who think that philosophy superabounds with
Balzac, that the surplus of general hypotheses overflows at times, and
that the novels are too prone to digressions. Be that as it may, it
seems incontestible that this was his master faculty, the virtue and
vice of his thought. Let us see, however, by what singular detour this
power of generalization--the antithesis, one might say, of the
creative power--increased in him the faculty of the poetic visionary.
It is important, first of all, to note that this power of the
visionary could not be put directly into play. Balzac had not long
enough to live. The list of his works, year by year, prepared by his
sister, shows that from the moment he achieved his reputation till the
day of his death he never took time for rest or observation or the
study of mankind by daily and close contact, like Moliere or
Saint-Simon. He cut his life in two, writing by night, sleeping by day,
and after sparing not a single hour for calling, promenades or sentiment.
Indeed, he would not admit this troublesome factor of sentiment,
except at a distance and through letters--"because it forms one's
style"! At any rate, that is the kind of love he most willingly
admitted--unless an exception be made of the mysterious intimacies of
which his correspondence has left traces. During his youth he had
followed this same habit of heavy labor, and as a result the
experience of this master of exact literature was reduced to a
minimum; but this minimum sufficed for him, precisely because of the
philosophical insight which he possessed to so high a degree. To this
meagre number of positive faculties furnished by observation, he
applied an analysis so intuitive that he discovered, behind the small
facts amassed by him in no unusual quantity, the profound forces, the
generative influences, so to speak.
He himself describes--once more in connection with Daniel d'Arthez
--the method pursued in this analytical and generalizing work. He
calls it a "retrospective penetration." Probably he lays hold of the
elements of experience and casts them into a seeming retort of
reveries. Thanks to an alchemy somewhat analogous to that of Cuvier,
he was enabled to reconstruct an entire temperament from the smallest
detail, and an entire class from a single individual; but that which
guided him in his work of reconstruction was always and everywhere the
habitual process of philosophers: the quest and investigation of
causes.
It is due to this analysis that this dreamer has defined almost all
the great principles of the psychological changes incident to our
time. He saw clearly, while democracy was establishing itself with us
on the ruins of the ancient regime, the novelty of the sentiments
which these transfers from class to class were certain to produce. He
fathomed every complication of heart and mind in the modern woman by
an intuition of the laws which control her development. He divined the
transformation in the lives of artists, keeping pace with the change
in the national situation; and to this day the picture he has drawn of
journalism in _Lost Illusions_ ("A Distinguished Provincial at Paris")
remains strictly true. It seems to me that this same power of locating
causes, which has brought about such a wealth of ideas in his work,
has also brought about the magic of it all. While other novelists
describe humanity from the outside, he has shown man to us both from
within and without. The characters which crowd forth from his brain
are sustained and impelled by the same social waves which sustain and
impel us. The generative facts which created them are the same which
are always in operation about us. If many young men have taken as a
model a Rastignac, for instance, it is because the passions by which
this ambitious pauper was consumed are the same which our age of
unbridled greed multiplies around disinherited youth. Add to this that
Balzac was not content merely to display the fruitful sources of a
modern intellect, but that he cast upon them the glare of the most
ardent imagination the world has ever known. By a rare combination
this philosopher was also a man, like the story-tellers of the Orient,
to whom solitude and the over-excitement of night-work had
communicated a brilliant and unbroken hallucination. He was able to
impart this fever to his readers, and to plunge them into a sort of
_Arabian Nights_ country, where all the passions, all the desires of
real life appear, but expanded to the point of fantasy, like the
dreams brought on by laudanum or hasheesh. Why, then, should we not
understand the reason that, for certain readers, this world of
Balzac's is more real than the actual world, and that they devoted
their energies to imitating it?
It is possible that to-day the phenomenon is becoming rarer, and that
Balzac, while no less admired, does not exercise the same fascinating
influence. The cause for this is that the great social forces which he
defined have almost ended their work. Other forces now shape the
oncoming generations and prepare them for further sensitive
influences. It is none the less a fact that, to penetrate the central
portions of the nineteenth century in France, one must read and reread
the _Comedie Humaine_. And we owe sincere thanks to Messieurs Cerfberr
and Christophe for this _Repertory_. Thanks to them, we shall the more
easily traverse the long galleries, painted and frescoed, of this
enormous palace,--a palace still unfinished, inasmuch as it lacks
those Scenes of Military Life whose titles awaken dreams within us:
_Forced Marches_; _The Battle of Austerlitz_; _After Dresden_.
Incontestably, Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ is an admirable book, but how
can we help regretting the loss of the painting of the Grand Army and
of our Great Emperor, by Balzac, our Napoleon of letters?