FIRST SUCCESSES AND FAME
The historical novel that Balzac had set himself to write was the
_Chouans_, this name being given to the Vendee Royalists who, under
the leadership of the Chevalier de Nougarede, combated the Revolution
and Napoleon. The scene being laid in Brittany, it was natural that,
apart from health reasons, the author should wish to inspire his pen
by a visit to the places he intended to describe.
His hostess at Fougeres has left us a description of her guest: "He
was a little, burly man, clad in ill-fitting garments that increased
his bulk. His hands were magnificent. He wore a most ugly hat; but, as
soon as he took it off, one remarked nothing else besides his
head. . . . Beneath his ample forehead, on which seemed to shine the
reflection of a lamp, there were brown, gold-spangled eyes which
expressed their owner's meaning as clearly as his speech. He had a
big, square nose, and a huge mouth, which was perpetually smiling in
spite of his ugly teeth. He wore a moustache, and his long hair was
brushed back. At the time he came to us he was rather thin, and
appeared to be half-starved. He devoured his food, poor fellow! For
the rest, there was so much confidence, so much benevolence, so much
_naivete_, so much frankness in his demeanour, his gestures, his ways
of speaking and behaving that it was impossible to know him and not
love him. . . . His good humour was so exuberant as to be contagious.
Notwithstanding the misfortunes he had just passed through, he had not
been with us a quarter of an hour before he made the General and me
laugh till tears came into our eyes."
The _Chouans_, which his two or three months' sojourn at Fougeres
enabled him to get on with rapidly, was completed after his return to
Paris, and was published under his own name in 1829. Charles Vimont,
who accepted and brought it out, paid him no more than a thousand
francs. The book, although it was not badly written, and contained
plenty of incident, very fair characterization, of the minor
personages especially, and local colouring imitated from Walter Scott,
made no great impression. For the ordinary reader it differed too
little from the Romanticism with which he was familiar. Moreover, the
action savoured too much of the melodramatic; and the character of
Mademoiselle de Verneuil, and that of the Chouan chief, whom she had
promised to deliver up to the emissaries of Fouche, were too nebulous
to gain general sympathy, even with the heroine's tragic devotion.
There is, however, a fine sketch of Brittany and of its spirit of
revolt; the numerous figures of the background are vigorously
executed, and nearly all the episodes of the drama are skilfully
presented. A perusal of the _Chouans_ makes us regret that there was
hardly any return to this kind of composition in the author's
after-work.
When embarking on his publishing enterprise, Balzac went to live in an
apartment of the Rue Tournon, No. 2[*] close to the Luxembourg. He
abandoned it for the Rue des Marais in 1826; and, this latter abode
being given up in 1828, he removed on his return from Brittany to No.
4, Rue Cassini, where he remained for some years. A friend of his,
Latouche--soon to become an enemy--helped him to liven up the walls of
his study with the famous blue calico that had adorned his room over
the printing office. Certain busybodies spread the report that he was
furnishing his new apartment extravagantly; and Laure, to whose ear
the tattle had come, ventured to allude to it in a letter reproaching
him with remissness in writing home and to her. The accusation of
extravagance, which later he really merited, was at this moment a
trifle previous, money being scarce and credit also. "Stamps and
omnibus fares are expenses I cannot afford," he assured his sister;
"and I abstain from going out in order to save my clothes."
[*] Some early biographers state that the novelist went to the Rue
Tournon after his bankruptcy. This is a mistake.
However, he was now on the point of scoring a literary success. In the
same year as his _Chouans_ appeared his _Physiology of Marriage_, a
book of satire and caricature having a distinct stamp of his maturer
manner. Werdet, for a number of years his publisher and friend,
relates in his _Portrait Intime_ that Balzac, while still in the
Lesdiguieres Street garret, had gone one day to Alphonse Levavasseur
and offered, in return for a royalty and a cash installment of two
hundred francs, to supply him with a book to be entitled: _Manual of
the Business Man, by a former Notary's Clerk_. It was agreed that the
manuscript should be handed in at the end of the month; and the two
hundred francs were paid down. In vain the publisher waited for his
Manual. Ultimately he hunted out his debtor; and the latter had to
confess that the long-promised manuscript had never been written. In
order to calm the creditor's indignation, Balzac read to him some
fragments of another book which he was really engaged upon. After
listening for a while, Levavasseur's countenance grew serene: "I will
pay you two thousand francs for this production when finished,
Monsieur," he said; "and we will cancel the old transaction. Come with
me. I will give you the first thousand francs now. The rest you shall
have as soon as I get the last corrected proofs." "Dear publisher,
your speech is golden," cried Balzac; "I accept." Nevertheless, the
proofs were not delivered until 1829. The book immediately became
popular. "From the day of its appearance," comments Werdet,
"literature counted another master and France another Moliere."
The verdict is exact only if the _Physiology_ is regarded in
conjunction with the novelist's after achievement in the domain of
realistic fiction. Alone it would not rank so high. Flippant, cynical,
immoral--these epithets, which were freely applied to it, all have
their justification when one looks at the work from any other
standpoint than that of its being a very amusing and clever exposition
of sex relations governed by interest and passion. Both facts and
philosophy are confined within an exceedingly narrow horizon, one in
which the writer was most thoroughly at home, which explains why they
bear the imprint of a mind already _blase_.
From a letter Balzac sent to Levavasseur, while finishing the last
pages of the manuscript, it appears that he commenced his task as a
jest and completed it with more serious purpose: "I intended to dash
off a pleasantry," he told him, "and you came one morning and asked me
to do in three months what Brillat-Savarin took ten years to do. I
haven't an idea which is not the _Physiology_. I dream of it, I am
absorbed by it."
The sale of the book was in a measure due to the sort of scandal it
provoked. Ladies especially bought the volume to find out for
themselves how far they had been maligned; and Levavasseur, who was
pleased with his profits, introduced Balzac to Emile de Girardin, then
chief editor of the _Mode_, to which paper he now began to contribute
light articles, not to speak of other journals, which were only too
glad to receive something from his pen. The extent to which the fair
sex read the _Physiology_ and were affected by it is illustrated by a
story that Werdet tells of a hoax perpetrated at Balzac's expense by a
number of his society friends, who had cause to complain of his
uppishness towards them, a treatment based not merely on the belief he
entertained in his literary superiority, but on his pretensions to
aristocratic descent. The story belongs more properly to the middle
thirties, when he had been using the prefix "de" before his name
already for some years, justifying himself on the ground that his
father claimed issue from an old family that had resisted the Auvergne
invasion and had begotten the d'Entragues stock. His father, moreover,
so he said, had discovered documents in the Charter House establishing
a concession of lands made by a de Balzac in the fifth century; and a
copy of the transaction had been registered by the Paris Parliament.
Between 1833 and 1836 one of the most celebrated Paris "sets" was that
of the Opera "lions," seven young aristocratic sparks composing it,
or, to be precise, six, together with the Chevalier d'Entragues de
Balzac, as his friends jokingly dubbed him--he being an elder. It was
the period of his first flush of prosperity, when he drove about in a
hired carriage resplendent with the d'Entragues coat of arms, which
cost him five hundred francs a month; had a majestic coachman in fine
livery and a Tom Thumb groom; sported himself in gorgeous garments and
strutted about in the Opera _foyer_, amidst the real or feigned
admiration of his fellows.
To revenge themselves for their mentor's superciliousness towards
them, the six other _lions_ induced a dancer at the Opera to play the
part of a supposed Duke's daughter smitten with the great man's
writings and person, a role she undertook the more willingly as, being
well acquainted with the former, she was anxious to prove to him that
he was not so perspicacious as he deemed himself. An Opera ball was
chosen for the adventure; and Balzac was duly baited and taken in tow
by the lady, whose mask only half concealed her beauty. Thus began a
flirtation, with subsequent clandestine meetings, allowing the fair
unknown to fool him to the top of her bent. The author wanted to
propose for her hand to the Duke her father; but, cleverly using her
knowledge of his books, the sly jade showed him that he would have no
chance of being accepted. At last she hinted she would like to visit
him in his author's sanctum; and the delighted novelist went to most
lavish expense in fitting up a boudoir to receive her. The visit was
presumably a secret one. Protected by a young man employed at the
Opera, to whom she was engaged, and who accompanied her in the
disguise of a negro, she went to the Rue des Batailles one evening and
graciously listened to the enraptured conversation of her victim till
towards midnight, when her mother, who was in the plot, came to fetch
her. The novelist's fury and humiliation were extreme on his learning
how neatly he had been tricked, and it was some time before he
ventured to reappear in his accustomed haunts. As narrated by Werdet,
the story is a good deal embellished, and some of the details that he
gives were probably invented; but the main outline he vouches to be
true.
Among the editors of journals who sought Balzac's collaboration after
the publication of the _Physiology_ were Buloz of the _Revue de Paris_
and Victor Ratier of the _Silhouette_. To the latter of them, in 1831,
he wrote from La Grenadiere, where he had gone to recruit, a letter
revealing a curiously mixed state of mind in this dawning period of
fame. He would seem to have been under a presentiment of the long
years of struggle and incessant toil he was about to be involved in,
and to have felt a shrinking of his physical nature from them.
"Oh! if you knew what Touraine is like," he exclaimed. "Here one
forgets everything else. I forgive the inhabitants for being stupid.
They are so happy. Now, you know that people who enjoy much are
naturally stupid. Touraine admirably explains the lazzarone. I have
come to regard glory, the Chamber, politics, the future, literature,
as veritable poison-balls to kill wandering, homeless dogs, and I say
to myself: 'Virtue, happiness, life, are summed up in six hundred
francs income on the bank of the Loire. . . .' My house is situated
half-way up the hill, near a delightful river bordered with flowers,
whence I behold landscapes a thousand times more beautiful than all
those with which rascally travellers bore their readers. Touraine
appears to me like a _pate de foie gras_, in which one plunges up to
the chin; and its wine is delicious. Instead of intoxicating, it makes
you piggy and happy. . . . Just fancy, I have been on the most poetic
trip possible in France--from here to the heart of Brittany by water,
passing between the most ravishing scenery in the world. I felt my
thoughts go with the stream, which, near the sea, becomes immense. Oh,
to lead the life of a Mohican, to run about the rocks, to swim in the
sea, to breathe in the fresh air and sun! Oh, I have realized the
savage! Oh, I have excellently understood the corsair, the adventurer
--their lives of opposition; and I reflected: 'Life is courage, good
rifles, the art of steering in the open ocean, and the hatred of man
--of the Englishman, for example.' (Here Balzac is of his time.) Coming
back hither, the ex-corsair has turned dealer in ideas. Just imagine,
now, a man so vagabond beginning on an article entitled, _Treatise of
Fashionable Life_, and making an octavo volume of it, which the _Mode_
is going to print, and some publisher reprint. . . . Egad! At the
present moment literature is a vile trade. It leads to nothing, and I
itch to go a-wandering and risk my existence in some living
drama. . . . Since I have seen the real splendours of this spot, I
have grown very philosophic, and, putting my foot on an ant-hill, I
exclaim, like the immortal Bonaparte: 'That, or men, what is it all in
presence of Saturn or Venus, or the Pole Star?' And methinks that the
ocean, a brig, and an English vessel to engulf, is better than a
writing-desk, a pen, and the Rue Saint-Denis."
About the events of the 1830 Revolution the novelist was apparently
but little concerned. True, the change was one of dynasty only, not of
_regime_, albeit Louis-Philippe posed rather as a plebiscitary
monarch. Balzac's clericalism and royalism, which ultimately became so
crystallized, were at this date in a position of unstable equilibrium.
At one moment his criticisms have an air of condemning the monarchic
principle, at another they point to his being a pillar of the ancient
system of things. On this occasion he was twitted by Madame Zulma
Carraud, his sister's friend, with whom his relations grew more
intimate as his celebrity augmented; and he defended himself by a
confession of faith which forecast his endeavours--less persistent
than his desires--to add the statesman's laurels to those of the
_litterateur_. His doctrine, following the Machiavellian tradition,
was that the genius of government consists in operating the fusion of
men and things--a method which demonstrated Napoleon and Louis XVIII.
alike to be men of talent. Both of them restrained all the various
parties in France--the one by force, the other by ruse, because the
one rode horseback, the other in a carriage. . . . France, he
continued, ought to be a constitutional monarchy, with an hereditary
Royal Family, a House of Lords extraordinarily powerful and
representing property, etc., with all possible guarantees of heredity
and privilege; then she should have a second, elective assembly to
represent every interest of the intermediary mass separating high
social positions from what was called the people. The bulk of the laws
and their spirit should tend to enlighten the people as much as
possible--the people that had nothing--workmen, proletaries, etc.--so
as to bring the greatest number of men to that condition of well-being
which distinguished the intermediary mass; but the people should be
left under the most puissant yoke, in such a way that the individual
units might find light, aid, and protection, and that no idea, no
form, no transaction might render them turbulent. The richer classes
must enjoy the widest liberty practicable, since they had a stake in
the country. To the Government he wished the utmost force possible,
its interests being the same as those of the rich and the bourgeois,
viz. to render the lowest class happy and to aggrandize the middle
class, in which resided the veritable puissance of States. If rich
people and the hereditary fortunes of the Upper Chamber, corrupted by
their manners and customs, engendered certain abuses, these were
inseparable from all society, and must be accepted with the advantages
they yielded.
This conception of the classes and the masses which he afterwards set
forth more fully in his _Country Doctor_ and _Village Cure_, partly
explains why all his best work, besides being impregnated with
fatalism, has such a constant outlook on the past. It was a dogma with
him rather than a philosophy, and was clung to more from taste than
from reasonable conviction. He believed in aristocratic prerogative,
because he believed in himself, and ranked himself as high as, or
rather higher than, the noble. This was at the bottom of his doctrine;
but he was glad all the same to have his claim supported by such
outward signs of the inward grace as were afforded by vague genealogy
and the homage of the great. Duchesses were his predilection when they
were forthcoming; failing them, countesses were esteemed.
The Duchess d'Abrantes--one of his early admirers--to whom he
dedicated his _Forsaken Woman_, was herself a colleague in letters;
and he was able to render her some service through his relations with
publishers. Their correspondence shows them to have been on very
friendly terms. In one of his letters to her, he insisted on his
inability to submit to any yoke, and rebutted her insinuation that he
permitted himself to be led--possibly the Duchess's hint referred to
Madame de Berny. "My character," he said, "is the most singular one I
have ever come across. I study myself as I might another person. I
comprise in my five feet two every incoherence, every contrast
possible; and those who think me vain, prodigal, headstrong,
frivolous, inconsistent, foppish, careless, idle, unstable, giddy,
wavering, talkative, tactless, ill-bred, impolite, crotchety,
humoursome, will be just as right as those who might affirm me to be
thrifty, modest, plucky, tenacious, energetic, hardworking, constant,
taciturn, cute, polite, merry. Nothing astonishes me more than myself.
I am inclined to conclude I am the plaything of circumstances. Does
this kaleidoscope result from the fact that, into the soul of those
who claim to paint all the affections and the human heart, chance
casts each and every of these same affections in order that by the
strength of their imagination they may feel what they depict? And can
it be that observation is only a sort of memory proper to aid this
mobile imagination? I begin to be of this opinion."
Balzac appears to have been introduced to the Duchess d'Abrantes about
the year 1830, when he was engaged in writing his _Shagreen Skin_,
which, out of the numerous pieces of fiction produced within this and
the next twelve months, added most to his notoriety, though inferior
to such stories as the _House of the Tennis-playing Cat_, and even to
the _Sceaux Ball_ in the more proper qualities of the novel.
The _Shagreen Skin_ is the adventure of a young man who, after sowing
his wild oats and losing his last crown at the gaming table, goes to
end his troubles in the river, but is prevented from carrying out his
intention by being fortuitously presented with a piece of shagreen
skin, which has the marvellous property of gratifying its possessor's
every wish, yet, meanwhile, shrinks with each gratification, and in
the same proportion curtails its possessor's life. On this warp of
fairy tale, the author weaves a woof of romance and reality most oddly
blended. The imitations of predecessors are numerous. The style is
turgid, the thought is shallow, the sentiment is exaggerated. But very
little of the sober characterization soon to be manifested in other
books is displayed in this one. The best that can be said is that the
thing has the same cleverness as the _Physiology_, with here and there
indications--and clear ones--of the novelist's later power. He himself
grossly overestimated it, as, indeed, he overestimated not a few of
his poorer productions--maybe because they cost him greater toil than
his masterpieces, which generally, after long, unconscious gestation,
issued rapidly and painless from him.
An amusing expression of this self-praise has come down to us in the
puff he composed on the occasion of a reprint of the _Shagreen Skin_
by Gosselin in 1832. "The _Philosophic Tales_ of Monsieur de Balzac,"
it announced, "have appeared this week. The _Shagreen Skin_ is judged
as the admirable novels of Anne Radcliffe were judged. Such things
escape annalists and commentators. The eager reader lays hold of these
books. They bring sleeplessness into the mansions of the rich and into
the garret of the poet; they animate the village. In winter they give
a livelier reflection to the sparkling log, great privileges to the
story-teller. It is nature, in sooth, who creates story-tellers.
Vainly are you a learned, grave writer, if you have not been born a
story-teller, and you will never obtain the popularity of the
_Mysteries of Udolpho_ and the _Shagreen Skin_, the _Arabian Nights_,
and Monsieur de Balzac. I have somewhere read that God created Adam,
the nomenclator, saying to him: You are the story-teller. And what a
story-teller! What verve and wit! What indefatigable perseverance in
painting everything, daring everything, branding everything! How the
world is dissected by this man! What an annalist! What passion and
what coolness!
"The _Philosophic Tales_ are the red-hot interpretation of a
civilization ruined by debauch and well-being, which Monsieur de
Balzac exposes in the pillory. The _Arabian Nights_ are the complete
history of the luxurious East in its days of happiness and perfumed
dreams. _Candide_ is the epitome of an epoch in which there were
bastilles, a stag-park, and an absolute king. By thus taking at the
first bound a place beside these formidable or graceful tale-tellers,
Monsieur de Balzac proves one thing that remained to be proved; to
wit, that the drama, which was no longer possible to-day on the stage,
was still possible in the story--that our society, so dangerously
sceptical, _blase_, and scornful, could yet be moved by the galvanic
shocks of this poetry of the senses--full of life and colour, in flesh
and blood, drunk with wine and lust--in which Monsieur de Balzac
revels with such delight. Thus, the surprise was great, when, thanks
to this story-teller, we still found among us something resembling
poetry--feasts, intoxication, the light o' love giving her caresses
amidst an orgie, the brimming punch-bowl crowned with blue flames, the
yellow-gloved politician, scented adultery, the girl indulging in
pleasure and love and dreaming aloud, poverty clean and neat,
surrounded with respectability and happy hazard--we have seen all this
in Balzac. The Opera with its lemans, the pink boudoir and its flossy
hangings, the feast and its surfeits; we have even seen Moliere's
doctor reappear, such need has this man of sarcasm and grotesqueness.
The further you advance in the _Shagreen Skin_--vices, lost virtues,
poverties, boredom, deep silence, dry-as-dust science, angular,
witless scepticism, laughable egotism, puerile vanities, venal loves,
Jewish second-hand dealers, etc.--the more astonished and pained you
will be to recognize that the nineteenth century in which you live is
so made up. The _Shagreen Skin_ is _Candide_ with Beranger's notes; it
is poverty, luxury, faith, mockery; it is the heartless breast, the
brainless cranium of the nineteenth century--the century so bedizened
and scented, so revolutionary, so ill-read, so little worth, the
century of brilliant phantasmagorias, of which in fifty years' time
nothing will be seizable except Monsieur de Balzac's _Shagreen Skin_."
On account of its sensationalism, the _Shagreen Skin_ had a success of
curiosity equal, and, if anything, superior to that of the
_Physiology_. The author, however, had to defend himself against the
charge of copying foreign literature--Hoffman's tales in particular.
One of his correspondents, the Duchess de Castries, who subsequently
flattered him and flirted with him, wrote to him incognito, taking
exception to certain statements he had made in each of his two popular
works. Replying to her, he for the first time spoke of his desire to
develop his fiction into a vast series of volumes destined to make
known to posterity the life of his century.
Great schemes were always to be Balzac's day-dreaming, one chasing the
other in his fancy. They filled his thoughts, and in his heart were
his constant aim, far more than to be loved, for all he asserted of
this last desire. If literature was the one means he resorted to in
his efforts to attain them, this was because every other means
deceived his expectation, and not because he deliberately preferred it
to all others. He owned the fact without reservation. In the case of a
man whose literary achievement was so high, such slighting of letters
has its significance, and is curious. Taken in conjunction with other
evidence furnished by his letters, it proves that genius, though
sometimes clearly the pure, simple moving of a spirit that cannot be
resisted, is also--and perhaps as often--a calculating partnership,
and that the work of art is a compromise. Would Balzac have written
better if his motive had been single? It is not certain.
During these early days of his popularity, a seat in the Chamber of
Deputies was his will o' the wisp. Aided by the _Dilecta's_ friends,
he offered himself as a candidate in two constituencies, Angouleme and
Cambrai, after publishing his pamphlet: _An Inquiry into the Policy of
Two Ministries_. With a view to shining in the future Parliament, he
sharpened his witticisms, rounded his periods, polished his style,
exercised himself in opposing short phrases to others of Ciceronian
length, endeavouring the while to put poetry and observation into a
new subject. At least these things were in his mind, as his
communication to Berthoud of the Cambrai _Gazette_ testified. His
intention was to become an orator, he said. Had he been elected, he
might have become the rival of Thiers. They were about the same age.
Then France might have had two "little bourgeois" instead of one,
unless one of the two had knocked the other out. But whether
conquering or conquered, Balzac the politician would have swallowed up
Balzac the novelist, and _Eugenie Grandet_ would never have been
written. Why he failed at the polls is not clear. Probably he did not
possess enough suppleness to please his party. To tell the truth, we
do not learn definitely to which party he belonged. He was quite
capable of constituting one by himself.
These preoccupations hindered him somewhat in carrying out his
engagements with publishers and editors, so that he did not always get
the money he counted on. Yet he worked hard. His habit, at this time,
was to go to bed at six in the evening and sleep till twelve, and
after, to rise and write for nearly twelve hours at a stretch,
imbibing coffee as a stimulant through these spells of composition.
What recreation he took in Paris was at the theatre or at the houses
of his noble acquaintances, where he went to gossip of an afternoon.
It was exhausting to lead such an existence; and even the transient
fillips given by the coffee were paid for in attacks of indigestion
and in abscesses which threw him into fits of discouragement. When
suffering from these, he poured out his soul to his sister or Madame
Carraud, complaining in his epistles that his destiny compelled him to
run after fame and deprived him of his chance to meet with the ideal
woman. Madame de Berny, with all her devotion, did not satisfy him
now. "Despairing of ever being loved and understood by the woman of my
dreams," he tragically cried, "having met with her only in my heart, I
am plunging again into the tempestuous sphere of political passions
and the stormy, withering atmosphere of literary glory." But the "she"
of his dreams, he added, must be wealthy. He could not conceive of
marriage and love in a cottage. It must be admitted that from his
sources of affection as from his sources of ambition there was a gush
which was rather muddy.
Altogether, the year of 1832 was an irritating one for Balzac. A rich
match he had hoped to make fell through. A second attempt of his to
enter the Chamber of Deputies ended in defeat. His books, after their
first season or two of favour, were selling but poorly in France,
although pirated editions were issued and had a large circulation
abroad. Impatiently he meditated plans for doubling and tripling his
revenue. He would emigrate--he would recommence publishing--he would
turn playwright. Amid these three solicitations he moved in a circle
without reaching a conclusion. And fortune, while he was hesitating,
did not come to his door. In default of her visit, not all the
flattering epistles he received from ladies in Russia and Germany
--three and four a day, he asserted--were an adequate compensation. A
journey undertaken for the benefit of his health to Sache, Angouleme,
and Aix forced him to borrow from his mother again, instead of paying
back the capital he owed her. His unfinished manuscripts he had taken
with him, but he found it difficult to get on with them: "I was going
to start work this morning with courage," he wrote to her, "when your
letter came to upset me completely. Do you think it possible for me to
have artistic thoughts when I see all at once the tableau of my
miseries displayed before me as you display them? Do you think I
should toil thus, if I did not feel it?"
The novelist's relations with his mother force the attention of any
one that studies his life. Their two natures were contrary; there were
often conflicts between them. As a child, he seems not to have
comprehended the affection underlying the maternal severity, and to
have entertained a dread of the latter which never entirely left him.
According to his friend Fessart, he used to confess he always
experienced a nervous trembling whenever he heard his mother speak;
and the effect was in some sort the numbing of his faculties when he
was in her presence. Her generous abnegation at the time of his
bankruptcy was a revelation to him; his gratitude for it was sincere;
and from that date onwards, during a number of years, his letters to
her evinced it, yet not consistently; the old distrust recurs, and
also a growing tendency to utilize her as a servant in his concerns.
Having once dipped in her purse, he did not hesitate to hold out his
hand, on each occasion that his needs, real or fancied, prompted him,
being confident of requiting her in the future. His refrain was ever
the same: "Sooner or later, politics, journalism, a marriage, or a big
piece of business luck will make me a Croesus. We must suffer a little
longer." And he finished by exhausting her last penny of capital, and
reduced her to depend on an allowance he gave her, irregularly--an
allowance which, when he died, had to be continued to her from the
purse of another. Madame Balzac was sacrificed to his improvidence and
stupendous egotism; nor can the tenderness of his language--more
frequently than not called forth by some fresh immolation of her
comfort to his interests--disguise this unpleasing side of his
character and action. While he was recouping his strength and spirits,
on the 1832 holiday, she was in Paris negotiating with Pichot of the
_Revue de Paris_, with Gosselin and other publishers, arranging for
proofs, and also for an advance of cash. Even his epistolary good-byes
were odd mixtures of business with sentiment. After casting himself
--through the post--on her bosom and embracing her with effusion, he
terminated by: "Pay everything as you say. On my side, I will gain
money by force, and we will balance the expenses by the receipts."
The book that cost him the greatest efforts during the year of 1832
was his _Louis Lambert_, already mentioned in the second chapter.
Writing about it to his family from Angouleme he explained that he was
attempting in it to vie with Goethe and Byron, with _Faust_ and
_Manfred_. It was to be a conclusive reply to his enemies, and would
make his superiority manifest. Some day or other it would lead science
into new paths. Meantime it would produce a deep impression and
astonish the Swedenborgians. Whether the members of this sect were
astonished, history does not record. Those who were most so were the
novelist's friends, and Madame de Berny among the number. But their
wonder was not a eulogium. First of all, the hero--his _alter ego_--is
a very poor replica of Pascal; and the exalting of Lambert's
intelligence, which was mere self-praise, jarred on them the more, as
they truly loved him. The _Dilecta_, whom he had asked to pass her
frank opinion on it, did not hesitate to tell him some hard truths:
"Goethe and Byron," she said, "have admirably painted the desires of a
superior mind; when reading them, one aggrandizes them by all the
space they have perceived; one admires the scope of their view; one
would fain give them one's soul to help theirs to cover the distance
that separates them from the goal they aspire to reach. But, if an
author comes and tells me he has attained this goal, I no longer see
in him, however great he may be, more than a presumptuous man; his
vanity shocks me, and I diminish him by all the height to which he has
tried to raise himself. . . . I would therefore beg you, dearest, to
cut out of your _Lambert_ everything that might suggest these singular
ideas; for instance: 'The admirable combat of thought arrived at its
greatest force, at its vastest expression' . . . 'The moral world,
whose limits he had thrown back for himself,' cannot be tolerated.
Write, dearest, in such a manner that the whole crowd may perceive you
from everywhere, by the height at which you will have placed yourself;
but do not cry out for people to admire you; for, on all sides, the
largest magnifying-glasses would be directed towards you; and what
becomes of the most delicious object seen by the microscope!"
The lesson was a severe one. Though it did not cure Balzac of his
author's vanity--nothing could cure him of that--it did, for a while
at least, direct his endeavours towards fiction of a more objective
kind.
What he was now capable of in characterization treated objectively he
showed in his _Colonel Chabert_ and the _Cure of Tours_, both of which
were published in the same twelvemonth as _Louis Lambert_. These
stories are exceedingly simple in construction. The Cure is a priest
whose joys and ambitions are modest and innocent. Having reached the
age when indulgence in ease and comfort is excusable, he finds himself
suddenly deprived of them through unwittingly offending his landlady.
She, an old maid, as inwardly shrewish as outwardly pious, utilizes
the Abbe Birotteau and another clergyman, who both lodge with her, to
attract the good society folk of Tours to her evening receptions.
After due experience of these gatherings, the Abbe plays truant,
finding it more agreeable to spend his leisure with friends elsewhere.
His absence causes the landlady's guests to grow remiss and finally to
desert her; so, to revenge herself, the slighted dame, proceeding by
petty pin-pricks, makes the Abbe's life a burden to him, and,
ultimately enlisting the brother clergyman in her schemes of
annoyance, works on his jealousy with such cleverness that their
victim's career is blasted and blighted. Dependent on the development
of the characters, the plot is adroitly and naturally elaborated.
Nowhere is there any forcing of the note; and, in alternate flow,
humour and pathos, of a saner sort than in some of the author's
previous work, run and ripple throughout. With deeper pathos the
novelist tells in _Colonel Chabert_ the virtues of a man of obscure
origin, whose nobleness meets with but scanty recognition, since it
conducts him to the almshouse in his old age. So vivid is the sober
realism of this fine story that the public believed the relation to be
plain, unvarnished facts, and were astonished at the writer's daring
to reveal them in all their detail.
Balzac's autumn trip was prolonged as far as Annecy and Geneva. He had
intended going on to Italy in company with the Duke de Fitz-James. The
latter journey, however, was ultimately abandoned, as he did not
succeed in raising the thousand crowns it required. Travelling on the
top of a coach, he had rather a serious accident when going to Aix. He
was climbing up to the front seat just as the horses set off, and,
having missed his footing, fell with all his weight against the iron
step. The strap, which he clutched in his fall, saved him from coming
to the ground; but the impact of his eighty-four kilograms caused the
sharp iron to enter the flesh of his leg pretty deeply. This wound
took some time to heal, and the annoyance it cause him was aggravated
by an additional malady in his stomach which he tried to deal with by
consulting a mysterious quack in Paris, sending him through his
mother, two pieces of flannel that he had been wearing next his skin.
The doctor was to examine No. 1 flannel, and by it to determine the
seat and the cause of the affection, as well as the treatment to be
followed; then he was to examine No. 2, and to give certain
instructions as to its further use. Balzac asked his mother to touch
the flannels only with paper, so as not to interfere with their
effluvia. This belief of his in magnetism of an occult kind was an
inheritance. His mother, it has already been said, was a mystic. Her
books of this doctrine comprised more than a hundred volumes of
Saint-Martin, Swedenborg, Madame Guyon, Jacob Boehm, and others. All
these writers he was familiar with. Throughout his life, the influence
of their teaching and his mother's firm belief remained with him. On
his conduct and practice their effect was harmless; but in his literary
work they were a disturbance, and, wherever they intruded, detracted
from its quality.
Happily, he was beginning to be tempted more and more by the artistic
side of things in his daily experience. Of the lesser novels composed
before the end of 1832, several were directly inspired by incidents
brought to his knowledge. The _Red Inn_ was related to him by a former
army surgeon, a friend of the man that was unjustly condemned and
executed. An _Episode under the Terror_ was narrated by the hero
himself. _A Desert Attachment_ was the outcome of a conversation with
Martin, the celebrated tamer of wild beasts. On the other hand,
_Master Cornelius_ was written to correct the false impression of
Louis XI. which he considered Walter Scott had given to his readers in
_Quentin Durward_, this making him very angry. His curiosity
concerning facts and realities of every description led him to seek an
interview with Samson the executioner. Calling one day to see the
Director of Prisons, he found himself in presence of a pale,
melancholy-looking man of noble countenance, whose manners, language,
and apparent education were those of one polished and cultured. It was
Samson. Entering into conversation with this strange personage, the
novelist listened to the particulars of his life. Samson was a
royalist. On the morrow of Louis XVI.'s execution he had suffered the
utmost remorse, and had paid for what was probably the only expiatory
mass said on that day for the repose of the King's soul.
Like other _litterateurs_, Balzac took up many subjects which he did
not go on with. He had this peculiarity besides, that he often
asserted some book to be completed which was either not begun at all
or was in a most unfinished condition. While on the Angouleme and Aix
excursion, he spoke especially of _The Three Cardinals_, _The Battle
of Austerlitz_ (afterwards often alluded to simply as the _Battle_),
and _The Marquis of Carrabas_. Not one of these was ever written. They
were abandoned perhaps on account of other work, or else because the
execution was less easy than the conception. Napoleon, who would have
been a central figure in the _Battle_, is incidentally introduced in
the _Country Doctor_, which was begun in 1832.
Probably, also, to this same date should be assigned the bizarre and
even comical expression of hopes and fears for the future which Balzac
confided to his sister Laure. In order to force himself to take
exercise, he used to correct his proofs either at the printer's or at
her house. Sometimes the weather, to the influence of which he was
very susceptible, sometimes his money-tightness, or his fatigue from
protracted work would cause him to arrive with lack-lustre eyes,
sallow complexion, glum expression and irritable temper. Laure essayed
to console and brighten him.
"Now don't try to comfort me," he answered on one occasion. "I'm a
dead man."
And the dead man began to drawl out his tale of woe, gradually rousing
up as he talked, and, at last, speaking excitedly. But the dolent
accents returned as he opened his proofs and read them.
"I shall never make a name, sis."
"Nonsense! with such books, any one could make a name."
He raised his head; his features relaxed; the sombre tints vanished
from his face.
"You are right, by Jove! . . . these books must live. . . . Besides,
there is Chance. It can protect a Balzac as well as it can a fool.
Indeed, one has only to invent this chance. Let some one of my
millionaire friends (and I have a few), or a banker not knowing what
to do with his money, come and say to me: 'I am aware of your immense
talent and your anxieties; you need such and such a sum to be free;
accept it without scruple; you will pay it back some day or other;
your pen is worth my millions!' That's all I require, my dear sister."
Laure, being accustomed to the appearance of these illusions which
brought back his cheerfulness, never exhibited any surprise at such
soaring notes. Having created the fable, her imaginative brother
continued:
"Those people spend such sums on whims. . . . A handsome deed is a
whim, like any other, and gives joy perpetually. It is something to
say: 'I have saved a Balzac.' Humanity has good impulses of the sort;
and there are people who, without being English, are capable of like
eccentricities. 'Either a millionaire or a banker,' he cried, thumping
on his chest, 'one of them I will have.'"
By dint of talking he had come to accredit the thing, and gleefully
strode about the room, lifting and waving his arms.
"Ah! Balzac is free! You shall see, my dear friends, and my dear
enemies, what his progress is."
In fancy, he entered the Academy! From there it was only a step to the
House of Peers. He beheld himself admitted thither. Why shouldn't he
be a member of the Upper Chamber? This and that person had been
created a peer. Then he was appointed a minister. There was nothing
extraordinary about it. Presidents existed. Were not people who had
boxed the compass of ideas the fittest to govern their fellows? A
programme, a policy was evolved and carried out; and, as everything
was going on smoothly, he had time to think of the millionaire friend
or banker who had assisted him. The generous Maecenas should be
rewarded. He understood the novelist, had lent him money on the
security of his talent, had enabled him to obtain his well-deserved
honours. The benefactor should now have his share in the honour, a
share in the immortality.
After a peregrination of this magnitude and dreams to match, he
alighted from his Pegasus, and spoke as an ordinary mortal--he had
enjoyed himself, and his fit of the dumps was exorcised. Putting the
last touch to his proof-correcting, he left the house with his face
wreathed in smiles.
"Good-bye," he said to his sister, at the door; "I am off home to see
if the banker is there, waiting for me. If he isn't, I shall find some
work to do all the same; and work is my real money-lender."