LETTERS TO "THE STRANGER," 1841, 1842
The abode that Balzac chose, on coming back to live within the city
walls, was not far from the Rue de Chaillot which had been his address
before he removed to Sevres. It was situated in what is now called the
Rue Raynouard, but then bore the name of the Rue Basse. In reality,
the street is low only at one end, to which it descends from some high
land that forms the Passy and Trocadero quarter, and, for some
distance, overhangs the Seine. The whole of the street is narrow and
winding, and still has an old-time provincial aspect, though the
modern building has begun to make its appearance in it, replacing the
ancient mansions surrounded by gardens with ever-encroaching blocks of
flats.
Balzac's new house was at Number 19 (at present Number 47). It stood
--and the house still stands--in a back garden, on a lower level than
the road, from which it was masked by houses fronting the causeway.
Any one approaching it from the side of the Rue Basse would enter the
common vestibule of one of these houses, go down some stone steps, and
would then find himself in a courtyard, opposite a fairly good-sized,
apparently one-storied cottage, with the tree adorned garden to the
right of him. Once inside the cottage, however, he would notice that
it was built on the extreme upper edge of a precipitous slope, and
that on the farther side the structure had lower stories, with an
issue through them into a lane at the rear leading to the Seine banks
and the lower portion of the Rue Basse. Whoever, therefore, inhabited
the cottage could quit it fore or aft, an advantage which must have
weighed with the incoming tenant, tracked as he was by creditors, and
hiding himself here under the name of Madame de Brugnol.
The insistence of these claimants on his purse was such that, acting
on the advice of his solicitor, Gavault, in the course of the year
1841, he executed a fictitious sale of Les Jardies for the sum of
seventeen thousand five hundred francs, his hope being to preserve his
hermitage for the days of wealth and ease to come. Meanwhile, he took
his mother to live with him. After giving him and her other son,
Henry, all she possessed, and the latter being now in the colonies,
where he ultimately died in poverty, she was dependent on what Honore
could pay her each month. The living-together arrangement was not very
successful. Madame Balzac's nervous, fretful temperament had not been
improved by age and trouble; and her elder son found it hard to bear
with her complainings, excusable and even justifiable though they
might be. It is not pleasant to read the passages in his letters to
Madame Hanska, in which he reiterates the old charge of his
misfortunes being all due to his mother. In some of them he goes so
far as to say that she was a monster and a monstrosity, that she was
hastening the death of his sister Laure--Laure outlived them both
--after hastening those of his sister Laurence and his grandmother, that
she hated him before he was born, that she had a dreadful countenance,
that the doctor affirmed her to be not mad but malicious, that his
father had stated in 1822 he--Honore--would never have a worse enemy
than his mother. Had his mother been all this and more, it would have
been ungenerous and unfilial to blacken her reputation to a stranger.
And, being false, it was odious. Madame Balzac's partiality towards
the second son--heavily enough punished--did not prevent her from
loving the elder, though their characters (hers and his) were not made
to comprehend each other; and her lack of enthusiasm in the days of
his literary apprenticeship was natural enough in a parent who
understood only too well the impractical, improvident mind he
possessed, and feared its consequences. The fact was that Balzac ill
supported remonstrances from his own family, and especially from his
mother, and, when irritated by them, forgot every benefit he had
received from her.
This peculiarity of temperament rendered his feelings toward many of
his friends exceedingly variable. One day he was lauding them to the
skies, another depreciating them to a cipher. Even his sister, Laure,
in spite of her loyalty to him, did not escape attacks from his fickle
humour. Like her mother, she never thoroughly penetrated the nature of
this wayward, excitable, compass-boxing brother of hers, whose gaze
was so much in the clouds and whose feet so often in the mire. But she
defended him to others; and, as far as her purse and her husband's
could possibly afford, she gave him money when he was hard up--and
when he was not!--money which he was never in a hurry to pay back. Yet
her, too, he maligned to "The Stranger," because she now and again
ventured on expostulations.
Madame Balzac made two stays in the Passy cottage, neither of them
very long. After leaving the first time, she asked her son to pay her
a somewhat larger sum per month, which would allow her to live
decently elsewhere. Considering that he had borrowed from her a couple
of thousand pounds--over fifty thousand francs--and that the sum he
had paid her irregularly was not five per cent interest on the money,
this request was not unreasonable. Yet he refused to accede to it on
the ground of being in financial straits; and offered her a home with
him once more, but in language that spoke of strained relations
between them, as well as of a personal discouragement that was real.
"The life I lead," he wrote, "suits no one; it wearies relatives and
friends alike. All leave my melancholy home. . . . It is impossible
for me to work amidst the petty tiffs aroused by surroundings of
discord; and my activity has waned during the past year. . . . You
were in a tolerable situation. I had a trustworthy person who spared
you all household worries. You were not obliged to trouble about
domestic matters; you were in peace and silence. You insisted on
interfering with me when you should have forgotten I existed, and
should have let me have my entire liberty, without which I can do
nothing. This is not your fault; it is in the nature of women. To-day,
everything is changed. If you like to come back, you will have a
little of the weight that will fall on me and that hitherto affected
you only because you wished it."
The conclusion of the letter, in which he assured her of his love,
could not counterbalance the harshness of its contents. Madame Balzac,
be it granted, was cantankerous; but how many sons who have never
sponged on their mothers have supported them cheerfully, gladly, for
long years out of meagre resources, and have borne with a smile the
natural peevishness of old age, not to say its egoisms!
At this period, Balzac's acquaintance with the grand dames of Paris
was considerably diminished. Madame de Castries he seems to have
broken with altogether. Madame Visconti, who lived a good deal at
Versailles, he saw but seldom. In lieu of these, he regularly visited
George Sand, who was at present settled in a small flat of the Rue
Pigalle in Paris, and was there enjoying the society of Chopin. With a
connoisseur's envy, the novelist describes to Eve the interior, the
elegantly furnished dining-room in carved oak, the _cafe-au-lait_
upholstered drawing-room, with its superb Chinese vases of fragrant
flowers, its cabinet of curiosities, its Delacroix pictures, its
rosewood piano, and the portrait of the authoress by Calamatta. What
struck him as much as anything was the bedroom in brown, with the bed
on the floor in Turkish fashion. He was careful to assure his
correspondent that, Chopin being the _maitre de ceans_, she had no
need to be jealous. But jealous she was, though not of George Sand. As
Paris was a resort for rich Russians, Madame Hanska's cousins among
the number, she had frequent reports of Balzac's doings, distorted by
society gossip, the true and the untrue being fantastically mixed; and
it was no small task to disabuse her mind and persuade her that his
conduct was blameless. Indeed, at bottom she remained sceptical.
In 1841, three books were published which merit attention on the part
of a student of his works. The first, _A Shady Affair_, has the right
to be styled an historical novel. Dealing with the Napoleonic epoch,
its interest gathers chiefly round the person of the brave peasant
Michu, whose devotion to the Legitimist house of Cinq-Cygne brings
him, an innocent victim, to the scaffold. The character of Laurence de
Cinq-Cygne, a girl of the Flora MacDonald type, and the characters
also of the two cousins de Simeuse, who both loved her and conspired
with her, and whose pardon she gained only to lose these faithful
knights dying on a field of battle, are drawn with great power and
naturalness. And the plot, in which, together with other police spies,
the same Corentin reappears that was the evil genius of the _Chouans_,
is more rapid and less cumbered than in the earlier work. When the
_Shady Affair_ came out in the _Commerce_ journal, Balzac was accused
of having identified a certain Monsieur Clement de Ris with his Malin
de Gondreville, who plays an evil role in the story--that of an
unscrupulous, political turncoat, Revolutionary to begin with, Senator
under the Empire, and Peer under the Restoration. The novelist
defended himself against the imputation; but the resemblances between
the fictitious and the real personage were, all the same, too close to
be quite accidental.
Something, however, more important than the question of likeness or
portraiture in the book, is that it gives us Balzac's conception of
what the historical novel should be. His contemporary Dumas, and his
predecessor Walter Scott--the latter in a less degree than Dumas--did
not weave a romance on to a warp of history, but romanced the history
itself. What he tried to do was to keep the historical action exact
and accurate, and to throw its romantic elements into relief without
dislocating them. His opinion was that history might so be written as
to be a sort of novel, which, perhaps, will account for his answer to
Lamartine, who, in 1847, asked him if he could explain how it was that
the _History of the Girondins_ had obtained a greater success than the
most popular novels of the same date. "Gad!" he replied, "the reason
is that you wrote this fine book as a novelist, not as an historian."
The _Shady Affair_ recreates for us the Napoleonic atmosphere, silent
and heavy, yet electrically charged with grudge, hatred, and ambition,
all ready to burst out at one or another point. Underhand plotting was
the order of the day; there was a language of the eye rather than of
the tongue, since no one was sure that in his own family there might
not be eavesdroppers listening to betray him.
_Ursule Mirouet_ is a very different kind of story. We have here the
old Doctor Minoret, who after making a fortune in Paris, returns to
spend the last few years of his life in Nemours, his native town.
Having lost wife and child by death, he brings back with him a baby
niece, who is an orphan, and to whom he devotes himself with tender
care. In Nemours there are other less estimable branches of the
Minoret stock, cousins of the Doctor's, whose hopes of inheriting his
fortune are damped by the presence of little Ursule. Chief of these
relatives is the burly postmaster, Minoret Levrault, whose son Desire
is destined to the law and is sent by his parents to study in Paris.
Although a disciple of Voltaire, and scouting all religious practice
for himself, the Doctor is friendly with the Cure, and allows his
niece to be brought up to Church. At the time the story opens an
unexpected event astonishes the town. The Doctor has become converted,
and goes to Mass. The cause of the change is a wonderful experience of
clairvoyance he meets with in the capital, whither he has been
summoned by a colleague with whom he had quarrelled years before over
the new-fangled doctrines of Mesmerism. What necessary connection
there is between clairvoyance and Catholicism, or indeed any
particular form of religion, the novelist does not attempt to prove.
It suffices for the sceptical old Doctor to be told by a hypnotized
woman in Paris what Ursule is doing at Nemours, and the conversion is
wrought. Soon after, Doctor Minoret dies, bequeathing his fortune in
just and appropriated shares to his various relatives, Ursule
included. She is at the time a fine young woman, beloved by a young
gentleman of the place. The rest of the novel tells how the big
postmaster contrives to destroy the part of the will favourable to
Ursule and to steal certain moneys that belong to her; how Minoret's
ghost appears in dreams and signs to confound the guilty man and his
guilty wife, who are at last induced to confess their ill deeds, the
repentance being hastened by the death of their son Desire; and, in
fine, how Ursule marries Monsieur de Portenduere and is happy.
In its general construction, the book holds well together, and the
characters in the main are depicted without exaggeration, while the
traits of individuality are ingeniously marked. The Doctor and Ursule
are less firmly and informingly delineated. As usual, when Balzac
shows us the figure of a virtuous girl in an ordinary domestic circle,
he represents her with passive rather than active qualities. She has
no strong likes or dislikes, no particular mental bias, and possesses
but small attractiveness. In fact, the novelist seems at a loss to
imagine. In the case of Ursule, we see that she cultivates flowers,
but we do not feel that she is fond of them. As for the Doctor, he
would have or might have been less a puppet, had the author himself
judged with wiser reserve the mysterious forces that exist in the
world of sub-consciousness.
His belief in these forces being alloyed with much superstition, he
was always consulting fortune-tellers, even those that divined by
cards. One of them, a certain Balthazar, who was subsequently
convicted and imprisoned for dishonesty, told him that his past life
had been one series of struggles and victories, a reading too
agreeable to be doubted; and that he would soon have tranquillity, a
prophecy which unhappily was not fulfilled. Concerning the prospects
of a union with Madame Hanska, the cartomancer was mute, though he
described the lady in language sufficiently clever for his client to
acknowledge the likeness. His clairvoyance was exceedingly limited;
otherwise he would have warned his client of the approaching death of
Count Hanski, this event taking place towards the close of the year.
Occupied with her own affairs, which were complicated by her husband's
illness, and perhaps also resenting the falling off in the number of
her distant worshipper's epistles, caused by an indisposition in the
spring and a visit to Brittany to recuperate, she wrote only once or
twice during 1841; and, as chance would have it, these letters were
lost, so that, for nearly twelve months, he had no news from her.
Pathetically he announced that his sister was planning to marry him to
a Mademoiselle Bonnard, god-daughter to King Louis-Philippe; but still
no answer came. On the 1st of November, as he related to his Eve
afterwards, he lost one of the two shirt-studs which Madame de Berny
had given him, and which he wore alternately with another pair
presented to him by Madame Hanska. Beginning on the morrow, he put on
thenceforth only the pair that Eve had given him; and this trifling
occurrence affected him so much that all his familiars noticed it. He
looked upon the loss as a sign from Heaven. Poor Madame de Berny! Now
that the stud from her had disappeared, he had no further tenderness
for her memory. Instead of recalling her kindness to him, he preferred
to speak, in connection with what he styled his horrible youth, of the
years which she--the _Dilecta_--had tarnished. Too opportune to be
sincere, this condemnation of his first liaison cannot but be regarded
as an incense of flattery offered to the coy goddess of his later
vows.
The third of the three principal books of 1841 was the _Diaries of Two
Young Wives_, written, like the _Country Doctor_ and the _Village
Cure_, in a decidedly didactic tone. We have two girl friends, Renee
de Maucombe and Louise de Chaulieu, reared in a convent school, who
marry, each with an ideal of wedlock that differs. The former, a
doctor in stays, as her school companion calls her, seeks in marriage
a calm domestic happiness, the duties and joy of motherhood, and has a
husband worthy but commonplace, to whom she gives herself at first
without much positive attachment on her side. The latter makes of love
a passion, and marries a Spanish exile, plain-looking but virile, whom
she bends to her will. The two wives exchange their impressions during
their early years of matrimony, and we see the happiness of the one
develop while that of the other diminishes. The Spaniard dies and
Louise de Chaulieu takes a second husband, a poor poet, whom she
adores as much as her Spaniard had adored her. Carrying him off to
Ville-d'Avray, she creates there a snug Paradise, where she fondles
him as if he were a toy, until at length her feverish jealousy brings
on her own illness and death.
The novel in its earlier phases was being worked at together with the
_Sister Marie des Anges_, which was promised to Werdet but never
completed, and seems to have had some connection with it. Possibly, in
his primitive plan, the author intended to set in contrast the spouse
and the nun: and certainly, in the original draft, there was only one
bride.
In 1842, at the Odeon Theatre, was performed a dramatic piece from the
novelist's pen, which by some critics has been considered his best
play. There are even critics who hold that Balzac was a born
dramatist, as he was a born novelist, basing their opinion on his
possession of qualities common to dramatist and novelist. His force of
characterization, his handling of plot, his sense of passion were all
sufficient to procure him success on the stage, which explains why
pieces adapted from his novels by other playwrights invariably caught
the public fancy. But, in order to develop character, plot, and
passion in his fiction, he employed interminable detail and slow
action; and his effects were obtained rather by constant pressure
throughout than by sudden impact. The brevity and condensation
required by the drama were foreign to his genius; he could not help
trying to put too much into his stage pieces, and the unity of subject
was compromised.
The _School of Great Men_,[*] as he preferred to call his play at the
Odeon, carries the spectator back to the Spain of Philippe II.
Fontanares, a clever man of science but poor, and without influence,
has discovered the means of navigating by steam. His valet Quinola, a
genius in his way, resolves to aid his master, who, being in love, has
all the greater claim on his pity; and he contrives to present the
King with a petition in favour of Fontanares, and to obtain a ship for
an experiment to be made. But now professional jealousies combine with
love rivalries to thwart the inventor; and when, at last, the ship is
made to move by its own machinery, the honour of the success is
attributed to another. To avenge his wrongs, and the loss of his
betrothed, who is given to his rival and dies, he blows up the steamer
in presence of an assembled multitude, and quits his native land with
a courtezan who has conceived a liking for him and will provide him
with money to recommence his enterprise elsewhere.
[*] More usually called: _The Resources of Quinola_.
Before the first performance, Balzac was just as sanguine about the
result as he had been with _Vautrin_. It followed several pieces,
Felix Pyat's _Cedric the Norwegian_, Dumas' _Lorenzino_, and Scribe's
_Chaine_, which had been coldly received. What if his _Quinola_ should
be the great attraction of the season! And his mind was filled visions
of overflowing houses and showers of gold. Alas! if the
representations went beyond the single one of _Vautrin_, they did not
exceed twenty; and his share of profits was insignificant. The play is
not dull to read, with its flavour of Moliere's comedies, and the
keenness of Balzac's observation. But its colour and poesy do not
compensate for the diffuseness of the plot and the undramatic
conclusion.
Instead of acknowledging the defects of his composition, the unlucky
dramatist was wroth with his public. For a while he caressed the
thought of going to St. Petersburg, taking out letters of
naturalization, and opening a theatre in the Russian capital with a
view to establishing the pre-eminence of French literature--embodied
in his own writings. It must be owned that he was beginning to imagine
himself persecuted. Victor Hugo, he said, had changed towards him and
was creating a conspiracy of silence round about him, so that no one
should speak any more of his works. And he liked better being attacked
than ignored. Later, he asserted that Hugo, after accepting the
dedication of the _Lost Illusions_ to himself, had induced Edouard
Thierry to write an abusive article against him. "He is a great
writer," said the novelist in telling this, "but he is a mean
trickster."
By the death of Count Hanski, the one insuperable obstacle to his
union with Eve had been removed; and now, in his letters to her, there
was a sudden outburst of love protestations. He wanted the widow to
marry him at once, or, at the outside limit, as soon as propriety
would permit. Madame Hanska replied that there was her daughter Anna,
only just in her teens, who would require her mother's entire attention
and care for some years to come; and there were, besides, matters
concerning the inheritance, which would hardly be settled within any
shorter period. Balzac was dismayed. He could not understand the
delay, the prudence, the hesitation. Not to speak of his affection,
his pride was offended. He overwhelmed his Eve with reproaches. Women,
he informed her, loved fools, as a rule, because fools were ever ready
to sit at their feet. Recurring in subsequent letters to a quieter
manner, he strove to shake her resolution by hints at his exhausted
strength, his difficulty of composition,--this was nothing new--his
lessened alertness of thought and his weaker invention. Cleverly he
juxtaposed with these a description of his study, in the little Passy
house, hung with red velvet, on which black silk cords stood out in
agreeable contrast; on one wall was Eve's portrait, and opposite it
was a painting of the Wierzchownia mansion. Here he toiled
unceasingly, creating, always creating. God only created during six
days, he added, while he--the inference was left to be drawn. Feeling
how requisite it was he should put himself right, in every respect,
with the lady of his choice, he made a fresh confession of his
religious faith. His Catholicism, he told her, was outwardly of the
Bossuet and Bonald type, but was esoterically mystical, Saint-Johnian,
which form alone preserved the real Christian tradition. Somewhat
encouraged by vague inquiries from Madame Hanska as to the income
required by a household for living in Paris, he entered into
particulars with gusto; and, stating that he had eighty thousand
francs worth of furniture, he discussed the best manner of arranging
an existence with eight hundred thousand francs capital. With three
hundred thousand francs, a country residence and small estate might be
bought and the means of inhabiting there provided. Another hundred
thousand would buy a house in Paris to spend each winter; and the
residue of four hundred thousand, if invested in French Rentes, would
purchase an additional income of fifteen thousand francs for town
expenses. These latter he subdivided into three thousand francs for
carriage hire; five thousand for cooking; two thousand five hundred
for dress and amusement; and two thousand five hundred for general
charges; the remaining two thousand would go in sundries. Madame de
Berny, he said, spent only eight hundred francs on her wardrobe, and
kept her household with nine hundred francs. Once launched into
detail, he went far. The Countess learnt that he had still the same
carpets, covering seven rooms, that he had bought for fifteen hundred
francs in the Rue Cassini. They had worn well and were economical. The
red velvet in his study had cost him two francs fifty a yard; but then
he would take it away to another house, instead of giving it to the
landlord. Living was slightly dearer in Passy, he concluded. A mutton
chop cost seven sous there, instead of the five charged in the city.
These last details were thrown in by a habit he had grown into of
defending himself against the strictures passed by Madame Hanska on
his expenditure.
They were frequent--such strictures--because Balzac was always
repeating to her that he was penniless; and she, comparing this talk
with other statements about his gaining large sums yearly, argued that
the penury must be his own fault. True, there was the debt. But the
debt grew instead of diminishing. So, apparently, he was not starving
himself to pay it back. The fact was that Balzac did not tell the
truth either about his assets or his liabilities. He neither earned as
much as he affirmed, nor owed as much. According to some of his early
biographers, his average income was not more than twelve thousand
francs a year. But these figures cannot include lump sums he received
at irregular intervals, nor yet all the royalties due to him on
continued sales of his books. Taking one year with another, he
probably made, throughout the greater portion of his literary career,
between twenty and twenty-five thousand francs annually. What must
have increased his embarrassments, in the later Thirties and early
Forties, was his hobby for buying pictures and articles of vertu;
this, with his knack of dropping money in speculations and imprudent
ventures, rendered it impossible for him to live within his means.
It is curious to notice how his impecuniosity reduced him to regard
every goal of his ambition as having merely a cash value. Speaking of
his election to the Academie Francaise, which he reckoned to be near,
he explained to Eve that it would mean six thousand francs a year to
him, since he would be a member of the Dictionary committee; and then
there was the Perpetual Secretaryship, which, falling to him
naturally, would raise his emoluments to more than double that amount.
Emboldened by these calculations--a trifle previous--he confided to
Eve his desire to start on a trip to Naples, Rome, Constantinople, and
Alexandria, unless she should veto the proposal. In that case, his
desire would be hers. Four thousand francs was what the journey would
cost. Would she authorize him to spend so much? At present she was the
arbitress of his actions. As the trip was abandoned, we are obliged to
suppose that Eve was not favourable to it.
Mention has already been made of the novelist's initiative in the
beginnings of the Men of Letters Society, and of his scheme for a
petition to the King. In its details, what he wished to see adopted
was on the same lines as those followed now by the Nobel Prize
distribution--at any rate as regards literature. His idea was to
secure a small independence for prize-takers in tragedy, comedy,
opera, fiction, Christian philosophy, linguistic or archaeological
research, and epic poetry, by awarding them a capital of a hundred
thousand francs, and even two hundred thousand to poets, and to open
thus an easier way to position and fame. Finding that his programme
was not acceptable to the more influential members of the Society, he
resigned his seat on the committee, and ceased his active connection
with the Society itself, continuing, however, to interest himself in
is prosperity.
Later, his bust by David was placed in the Society's Committee Room,
where it may be seen at present presiding silently over the meetings.
Both the bust and the famous daguerreotype of him belong to the
commencement of the Forties. The sculptor Etex had asked him to sit
for a bust; but David had the preference, being a friend. His profile
of the novelist, sketched in view of a medallion, an engraving of
which appeared in 1843 in the _Loire Illustree_ for August, was deemed
by Madame Surville to be the only real likeness of her brother. Not
until 1889 did the Men of Letters Society decide to honour Balzac by a
statue to be erected amidst the life of the capital which he had so
well described. And even then they allowed certain elements of
prejudice and passion to dominate their counsels, with the result that
a magnificent full-length figure of the novelist executed by the first
sculptor in France was rejected; the committee's plighted word was
violated; and in lieu was accepted and placed in one of the streets of
Paris a sorry likeness hastily modelled by a man who, though a good
sculptor, had one foot in the grave, and who had not, besides, the
conception of what was required.[*]
[*] See my _Life of Rodin_ (Fisher Unwin, 1906) or my later and
smaller edition of the same sculptor's life (Grant Richards,
1907).
Of the novels that appeared in 1842, _Albert Savarus_, the first
published, is worthy of attention chiefly as being a continuation of
its author's personal experiences. The hero is the same ideal
personification already seen in _Louis Lambert_ and _Z. Marcas_. A
barrister, he suddenly settles in a provincial town, bringing with him
a past history that no one can penetrate and every one would like to
know. When interviewed in his private consulting-room, he presents
himself in a black merino dressing-gown girt about with a red cord, in
red slippers, a red flannel waistcoat, a red skull-cap. The likeness
is once again Balzac's own--adorned by fancy: a superb head, black
hair sparsely sprinkled with white, hair like that of Saint Peter and
Saint Paul as shown in our pictures, with thick glossy curls, hair of
bristly stiffness; a white round neck, as that of a woman; a splendid
forehead with the puissant furrow in the middle that great plans and
thoughts and deep meditations engrave on the brow of genius; an olive
complexion streaked with red; a square nose; eyes of fire; gaunt
cheeks with two long wrinkles, full of suffering; a mouth with
sardonic smile, and a small, thin, abnormally short chin; crow's feet
at the temples; sunken eyes (he repeats himself a little) rolling
beneath their beetling arches and resembling two burning globes; but,
despite all these signs of violent passions, a calm, profoundly
resigned mien; a voice of thrilling softness, . . . the true voice of
the orator, now pure and cunning, now insinuating, but thunderous when
required, lending itself to sarcasm and then waxing incisive. Monsieur
Albert Savarus (_alias_ Balzac) is of medium height, neither fat nor
slim; to conclude, he has prelate's hands.
The mystery of Savarus' earlier life, revealed as the story goes on,
is his meeting in Switzerland with Francesca, the wife of a rich
Italian, whom he eventually wins to love him and to promise marriage
when she is free and he has acquired wealth and fame. All the details
of the prologue are those of Balzac's first relations with Madame
Hanska. The development of the novel, in which Philomene de Watteville
falls in love with Savarus, surprises his secret attachment to
Francesca, intercepts his letters to her, and ruins his hopes, is less
cleverly told. Savarus' retirement to a Carthusian monastery and
fate's punishment of Philomene, who is mutilated and disfigured in a
railway accident, form the denouement, which is strained to the
improbable. The background of the story, with its glimpses of the
manners and foibles of provincial society, is the most valuable
portion of the book.
Between this relapse into lyricism and a much stronger work came the
amusing _Beginning in Life_, suggested by his sister Laure's tale, _Un
Voyage en Coucou_, and giving the adventures of the young Oscar
Husson, a sort of Verdant Green, whose pretentious foolishness leads
him into scrapes of every kind, until, having made himself the
laughing-stock of all around him, and compromised many, he enlists and
goes to the wars, whence he returns maimed for life. A comic character
in the sketch is the bohemian artist Leon de Lora, nicknamed
Mistigris, with his puns and proverbs that were the rage in the early
Forties. A character of more serious calibre is Joseph Bridau, the
talented painter. He and his scamp of a brother, Philippe, are the
twin prominent figures in the novel above alluded to: _La
Rabouilleuse_.
Originally called the _Two Brothers_, and subsequently _A Bachelor's
Household_, this slice of intensely realistic fiction exhibits the art
of the author at its highest vigour. Philippe Bridau, the mother's
favourite of the two boys, enters the army, sees Waterloo, and, after,
leads the life of an adventurer, with its ups and downs of fortune.
His widowed mother's indulgence, his own innate selfishness, and the
hardening influence of war combine to render him a villain of the
Richard III type, absolutely heartless and conscienceless. He robs his
own family, fixes himself leech-like on that of an uncle, marries the
latter's widow for her money, when he has killed her lover in a duel,
drives his wife into vice, lets her die on a pallet, and refuses to
pay a visit to the deathbed of his mother, whose grey hairs he had
brought down with sorrow to the grave. Like Shakespeare's ideal
villain, he has the philosophy, the humour of his egotism. "I am an
old camel, familiar with genuflections," he exclaims. "What harm have
I done?" he asks, speaking of his robbery of his relative, the old
Madame Descoings. "I have merely cleaned the old lady's mattress." And
he is equally indifferent to what destiny reserves for him. "I am a
_parvenu_, my dear fellow; I don't intend to let my swaddling-clothes
be seen. My son will be luckier than I; he will be a _grand seigneur_.
The rascal will be glad to see me dead. I quite reckon on it;
otherwise he would not be my son."
Most of the other figures are of equal truth to life, and are
presented so as to increase the effect of the complete picture:
Jean-Jacques Rouget, the stupid infatuated uncle, who espouses the
intriguing Flore Brazier; and Flore herself, whose petty vices are
crushed by those of her second husband; Maxime Gilet, the bully of
Issoudun, whose surface bravado is checked and mated by the cooler
scoundrelism of Philippe; Agathe, the foolish mother, whose eyes are
blind to the devotion of her son Joseph; and Girondeau, the old
dragoon, companion to Philippe who casts him off as soon as prosperity
smiles and he has no further need for him. And the narrow-horizoned,
curiously interlaced existences of the county-town add the mass of
their colour-value, sombre but rich. One could have wished in the book
a little more counterbalancing brightness, and less trivial detail;
but neither the defect of the one nor the excess of the other takes
from the novel the right to be considered a masterpiece.