LETTERS TO "THE STRANGER," 1843, 1844
The great event of the year 1843 was Balzac's visit in the summer to
Saint Petersburg, where Madame Hanska had been staying since the
preceding autumn. He had hoped to go there in the January,
commissioned to exploit an important invention for cheaper
shipbuilding, in which his brother-in-law, Monsieur Surville, was
concerned. Like each of his previous schemes for quickly becoming
rich, this invention turned out to be a soap-bubble, bursting as soon
as trial was made of it. What was left intact, however, was his
determination to go to the banks of the Neva; and, throughout the
spring, successive letters announced preparations for departure. The
real motive of his journey was to try to persuade his lady-love to fix
the date of their marriage. Her period of mourning was over, and no
objection could be made now on the ground of propriety. Such
sentimental arguments as Madame Hanska might still put forward, he
trusted to be able to overcome by his presence.
In order that she might be the more anxious to see him, he talked
again of abandoning literature, and sailing for America. This time the
West Indies were his El Dorado. He did not say how the shy millions
were to be coaxed into his purse there, unless he wished her to
understand he intended to export spices, since he added: "If I had
been a grocer for the last ten years, I should have become a
millionaire." Forsooth, these details were mere bluff. His inmost
thought was that Eve would prevent his going across the Atlantic now,
as Madame de Berny had prevented him--so he said--in 1829. Moreover,
there was Balthazar's prediction that he was to be happy with her for
long years. The fortune-teller's sanctum he attended more frequently
than church. Going one day to the house of a magnetizer, a Monsieur
Dupotet, living in the Rue du Bac, he gave his hand to a hypnotized
woman, who placed it on her stomach and immediately loosed it again
with a scared look: "What is that head?" she cried. "It is a world; it
frightens me." "She had not looked at my heart," commented Balzac
proudly. "She has been dazzled by the head. Yet since I was born, my
life has been dominated by my heart--a secret which I conceal with
care." All this he related quite seriously to Eve. Probably, Madame de
Girardin, who accompanied him on this pilgrimage, could have told
Madame Hanska more.
Writing on his birthday, he inserted the prayer he had offered up to
his patron-saint for the accomplishment of his desires, its burden
indicating how near he believed himself to the longed-for goal: "O
great Saint Honore, thou to whom is dedicated a street in Paris at
once so beautiful and so ugly, ordain that the ship may not blow up;
ordain that I may be no more a bachelor, by decree of the Mayor or the
Counsul of France; for thou knowest that I have been spiritually
married for nigh on eleven years. These last fifteen years, I have
lived a martyr's life. God sent me an angel in 1833. May this angel
never quit me again till death! I have lived by my writing. Let me
live a little by love! Take care of her rather than of me; for I would
fain give her all, even my portion in heaven; and especially let us
soon be happy. Ave, Eva."
The love fervour of this prayer was a dominant note throughout the
twelvemonth; we notice after the visit that the familiar _thou_
prevails over the colder _you_; and the letters, both in number and
length, very largely exceed those he had written up to the end of
1842. Funnily, he expresses admiration of himself for this work of
supererogation, informing Eve, on one occasion, that the sixteen
leaves he had recently sent her were worth sixteen hundred francs,
even two thousand, counting extra leaves enclosed to Mademoiselle
Henriette Borel, the governess, for whom he was negotiating an
entrance into a nunnery. Love-letters estimated at five francs a
page!!!
Let us grant that the epistles at present contained more gossip than
ever, so that the recipient of them had her share of amusement. She
was wonderfully well kept up in Paris happenings in society, including
the stage and art galleries. She learnt that Madame d'Agoult--Daniel
Stern[*]--had become Emile de Girardin's mistress, on losing Liszt,
who had fallen into the toils of the Princess de Belgiojoso, the
latter lady achieving her conquest after luring in succession Lord
Normanby from his wife, Mignet from Madame Aubernon, and Alfred de
Musset from George Sand. Going to see Victor Hugo's _Burgraves_, he
reported that it was nothing to speak of as history, altogether poor
as invention, but nevertheless poetic, with a poetry that carried away
the spectator. It was Titian painting on a mud wall. He chiefly
remarked the absence of feeling, which, in Victor Hugo, was more and
more noticeable. The author of the _Burgraves_ lacked the true. As he
did not publish these opinions, he was able to go on dining with the
poet and to praise the beauty of his fourteen-year-old daughter. On
George Sand's _Consuelo_ he pronounced a severer judgment still,
calling it the emptiest, most improbable, most childish thing
conceivable--boredom in sixteen parts. And yet he had conceived
certain improbable plots himself.
[*] Her literary pseudonym
Like Charles Lamb, who left his office earlier in the afternoon to
make up for arriving late in the morning, he counterbalanced these
heavy-handed slatings of his friends by extolling his own performance
past and present. Being engaged in revising the _Chouans_ for a fresh
edition, he was struck by qualities in it that he had hitherto held
too lightly. It was all Scott and all Fenimore Cooper, he said, with a
fire and wit, into the bargain, that neither of these writers ever
possessed. The passion in it was sublime! Its landscapes and scenes of
war were depicted with a perfection and happiness that surprised him.
As a piece of self-praise there is probably nothing surpassing this in
the annals of literature. In a competition, Balzac's blasts of vanity
would beat the Archangel Michael's last trump for loudness.
Horace Vernet, he asserted, would never be a great painter. He was a
colourist; he knew how to design and compose, had technical skill,
and, now and again, found sentiment, but did not understand how to
combine these talents in his pictures. He was clever, but had no
genius. His _alter ego_ was Delaroche, to whom he gave his daughter in
marriage. Of the other painters, Boulanger, Delacroix, Ingres,
Decamps, Jules Dupre were his favourites--true artists, he deemed
them. At the _Salon_ he saw hardly anything to please him besides a
canvas by Meissonier and Cogniet's _Tintoretto painting his Dead
Daughter_. He would have liked to see Boulanger's _Death of
Messalina_, but the _Salon_ Committee had refused it.
In music his preferences were as eclectic as in pictures. Liszt, whom
he thought ridiculous as a man, he considered superb as a musician
--the Paganini of the piano, yet inferior to Chopin, since he had not
the genius of composition. And, in singing, Rubini was his idol
--Rubini who triumphed in the role of Othello, giving the suspicion
_air_ in a manner no one could equal. It intoxicated him to hear this
tenor with Tamburini, Lablache, and Madame Grisi; while Nourrit's
song, _Ce Rameau qui donne la Puissance et l'Immortalite_ in _Robert
le Diable_ made his flesh creep. It yielded a glimpse of life with all
its dreams satisfied.
Originally intending to start for St. Petersburg early in June, Balzac
was not able to leave Paris until a month later. As usual, filthy
lucre had to do with his tarrying. In spite of a loan of 11,500 francs
from lawyer Gavault--his guardian, the novelist called him--who for
the privilege of the great man's friendship had been endeavouring
during the two years past to introduce a little order into his
affairs, he had not available cash enough for a trip so far, and
stayed on, hoping to finish his _David Sechard_,* which was running as
a serial in the _Etat_, and his _Esther_,[*] appearing similarly in
the _Parisien_. June he spent at Lagny, where his manuscripts were
being printed, in order to correct the proofs and get his money. But
the _Etat_ ceased issue while he was there; and the _Parisien_, being
in parlous condition, refused likewise to pay up, so that he had to go
off with a thinner-lined pocket than he had expected. Otherwise, he
was in a fitting state of grace to meet his fair tyrant, whose
envelope lectures had brought him into fear of her and at least
outward obedience.
[*] Part of the _Lost Illusions_.
The torrents of coffee by the aid of which he had forced his last
pen-work through, had been reduced to minimum doses; the occasional
mustard foot-baths that cured his cerebral inflammations were replaced
by entire ablutions every other day; he liked hot baths well enough;
but, in the spells of composition, they were often indefinitely
adjourned, so that this season of purification had its _raison
d'etre_. And now, with his gaze turned to the east, he wondered how
long he was going to remain there. His reply to a person who asked him
to pledge himself for some novels on his return reads much as though
he were counting on an offer to fix his residence in the empire of the
czars. "I don't know whether I shall come back," he said. "France
bores me. I am infatuated with Russia. I am in love with absolute
power. I am going to see if it is as fine as I believe it to be. De
Maistre stayed a long time at St. Petersburg. Perhaps I shall stay
also." This he naturally repeated to Madame Hanska. Not that it was
new to her. A similar hint had been given in January, when he capped
his declaration, "I abhor the English; I execrate the Austrians; the
Italians are nothing," with "I would sooner be a Russian than any
other subject." The comic side of this fury is that Madame Hanska was
a Pole, her late husband too; and neither she nor her family were
reconciled to the Russian yoke. To make his renunciation more
complete, he humbly spoke his dread she might turn from him with the
"get away" said to a dog. No! She had no intention of dismissing him.
His outpourings of devotion caressed her woman's pride, even if she
did not accept them as gospel truth. And however tedious she found his
vamping song of sixpence, his sittings in the parlour counting out his
mirage-money, she put up with them in consideration of her privilege.
Sailing from Havre in the _Devonshire_, an English boat, Balzac
arrived at St. Petersburg towards the end of July. He lodged in a
private house not far from Eve's Koutaizoff mansion; but passed the
three months of his sojourn almost entirely in her society. It was the
first opportunity he had had of getting to know her intimately, their
previous meetings being surrounded with too many restrictions to allow
of familiar intercourse. No detailed record has come down to us of
these days of _tete-a-tete_ existence. All we learn from subsequent
allusions is that, together with a good deal of billing and cooing,
more sustained on the novelist's side, there were some lovers' tiffs,
followed by reconciliations. Apparently the friction was mainly caused
by Eve's evasiveness on the subject of their marriage.
It would seem as though there were an attack on her aloofness in the
long criticism he sent her from his lodgings on Madame d'Arnim's
_Bellina_, a French translation of which had been published not long
before he left Paris. After some general remarks on the circumstance
of a girl's fancying herself in love with a great man living at a
distance, he waxed wroth over what he styled Bellina's head-love, and
over head-love in general. To this monster, Merimee, in his _Double
Mistake_, had given a thrust but a thrust that made it bleed only. The
cleverer Madame d'Arnim had poisoned it with opium. "In order for the
literary expression of love to become a work of art and to be
sublime," he continued, "the love that depicts should itself be
complete; it should occur in its triple form, head, heart, and body;
should be a love at once sensual and divine, manifested with wit and
poetry. Who says love says suffering; suffering from separation;
suffering from disagreement. Love in itself is a sublime and pathetic
drama. When happy, it is silent. Now, the cause of the tedium of
Madame d'Arnim's book," he added, "is easily discoverable by a soul
that loves. Goethe did not love Bellina. Put a big stone in Goethe's
place--the Sphinx no power has ever been able to wrest from its desert
sand--and Bellina's letters are understandable. Unlike Pygmalion's
fable, the more Bellina writes, the more petrified Goethe becomes, the
more glacial his letters. True, if Bellina had perceived that her
sheets were falling upon granite, and if she had abandoned herself to
rage or despair, she would have composed a poem. But, as she did not
love Goethe, as Goethe was a pretext for her letters, she went on with
her girl's journal; and we have read some (not intended for print)
much more charming, not in units, but in tens."
In the rest of the criticism, Balzac swirls round his guns and directs
his fire on Goethe's replies to Bellina. The latter's epistles were
accompanied with presents of braces and slippers and flannel
waistcoats, which were much more appreciated by the poet than her
theories on music. Not so did he, Balzac, treat his Lina, his Louloup
--such was the inference suggested. Every one of her, i.e. Eve's
sayings was treasured up, after being duly pondered upon. Such
adulation must have been delicious to Madame Hanska; and yet she sent
her sighing swain back into his loneliness, with his bonds riveted
tighter, his promises to break with all rivals more solemn, and a
disappointment, over his deferred hopes, that brought on an illness
after his return.
The journey back was made by land through Riga, Taurogen, and Berlin.
In the Prussian capital, Von Humboldt came to see him with a message
from the King and Queen; and Shakespeare's _Midsummer Night's Dream_
was seen on the stage, without pleasure being derived from it. To its
poesy the novelist was little open. Instead of pushing on straight to
France, he bent his course southwards to Dresden, where he visited the
Pinakothek. The Saxon town pleased him more than Berlin, both by its
structural picturesqueness and surroundings. The palace, begun by
Augustus, he esteemed the most curious masterpiece of rococo
architecture. The Gallery he thought over-rated; but he none the less
admired Correggio's _Night_, his _Magdalene_ and two _Virgins_, as
also Raphael's _Virgins_, and the Dutch pictures. His highest
enthusiasm was aroused by the theatre, decorated by the three French
artists Desplechin, Sechan, and Dieterle. He reached Passy on the 3rd
of November, having crowded into the preceding week visits to Maintz,
Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, and several places in Belgium.
The form assumed by his malady was arachnitis, an inflammation of the
network of nerves enveloping the brain. For the time being, Nacquart,
his doctor, conjured it away, as he had done in the case of other
seizures from which the patient had suffered. He had known Balzac
since boyhood and was well acquainted with his constitution.
Unfortunately he could not change the novelist's abnormal manner of
living and working. And the mischief was in them.
Balzac's three months' absence from Paris had caused profane tongues
to wag considerably. Notwithstanding his reticence concerning Countess
Hanska, a legend had gathered round about their relations to each
other. More than one paper reported that he had been off on an
expedition, wife, and fortune-hunting--which was true; and one daily,
at least, spoke of his having been engaged by the Czar as a kind of
court _litterateur_. The _Presse_ especially annoyed him by copying
from the _Independance Belge_ a story of his having been surprised by
the Belgian police dining in an hotel with an Italian forger, whose
grand behaviour and abundance of false bank-notes had completely
captivated him. The forger was certainly arrested in the hotel where
he had put up, but the dinner and the chumming were inventions; at any
rate, Balzac affirmed they were, uttering furious anathemas against
the scorpion Girardin, who had allowed so illustrious a name to be
taken in vain.
On the 26th of September, during the St. Petersburg visit, his third
finished theatrical piece, _Pamela Giraud_, was produced at the Gaite
Theatre. Differing essentially from his previous efforts, this play is
an ordinary melodramatic comedy. Pamela, like Richardson's heroine, is
an honest girl, who, occupied in the humble trade of flower-selling,
loves a young man, Jules Rousseau, that she believes to belong to her
own modest rank, whereas, in reality, he is the son of a big
financier. Involved in a Bonapartist conspiracy, which has just been
discovered, Jules comes one night to her room and tries to persuade
her to fly with him. She refuses; and, while he is with her, the
police enter and arrest him. To save him she consents, though opposed
by her parents, to say in Court that her lover had spent the night of
the conspiracy with her; and Jules is acquitted through this false
confession of her being his mistress. Once the happy result obtained,
Jules and his family forget her. The lawyer, however, smitten by her
beauty and virtue, proposes to marry her, and is about to carry his
intention into effect when, remarking that she is pining for the
ungrateful Jules, he contrives to bring him to Pamela's feet again,
and the marriage is celebrated.
_Pamela Giraud_ was written in 1838, but no theatre had been willing
to stage it in its original form. Ultimately two professional
playwrights, Bayard and Jaime, who had already dramatized, the one,
_Eugenie Grandet_ and the _Search for the Absolute_, the other, _Pere
Goriot_, pruned the over-plentifulness of its matter and strengthened
the relief of various parts; and, in the amended guise, it was
performed. Balzac resented the modifications, which explains his
equanimity on hearing, as he travelled homewards, that the piece had
fallen flat. He considered that, presented as he wrote it, the chances
of success would have been greater. He was wrong, and those critics as
well who attributed the failure to enmities arising out of a recent
publication of his, entitled the _Monography of the Press_. Neither of
the two chief _dramatis personae_ was capable of properly interesting
a theatrical audience. The character of Jules is contemptible from
beginning to end, and that of Pamela ceases to attract after the
trial. The conclusion of this play, as that of _Vautrin_, is an
anticlimax and leaves an unsatisfactory impression.
Why did Balzac write his _Monography of the Parisian Press_? Not
altogether from a pure motive, one must own. There is too much gall in
his language, too much satire in the thought. He was sufficiently
acquainted with the inner ring of journalistic life to be able to say
truly what were its blemishes; and, without doubt, at the time when he
composed the chief of his novels, these had a prejudicial effect on
literature as on other phases of activity. But his pamphlet, besides
its indiscriminate condemnations, erred in adopting a style which
rendered the turning of the tables only too easy. And Jules Janin,
whom he had already indisposed by sketching a seeming portrait of him
in the _Provincial Great Man in Paris_, came down heavily on the
daring satirist in the _Debats_ of the 20th of February 1843. The
retort, so he informed Madame Hanska, made him laugh immoderately.
Perhaps; but the laugh must have been somewhat forced--what the French
call "yellow."
In the _Monography_, men of letters, baptized by the novelist
_gendelettres_--one of the few words coined by Balzac which have
become naturalized--may be divided into several categories. First,
there are the _publicistes_, occupied in scratching the pimples of the
body politic. From these pimples they extract a book which is a
mystification. Not far removed from the _publicistes_ are the chief
managing editors and proprietors general, big wigs who sometimes
become prefects, receivers general, or theatrical directors. The type
of this class is glory's porter, speculation's trumpeter, the
electorate's _Bonneau_. He is set in motion by a ballet-dancer, a
cantatrice, an actress; in short, he is a brigand-captain, with other
brigands under him. And of the latter:--There are the _Premiers
Paris_, alias, first tenors. In writing _Premiers Paris_, it is
impossible for a man to avoid mental warp and rapid deterioration. In
such writing, style would be a misfortune. One must know how to speak
jesuitically; and, in order to advance, one must be clever in getting
one's ideas to walk on crutches. Those who engage in the trade confess
themselves corrupt; like diplomatists, they have as a pension the
Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, a few librarianships, even
archiveships.
Next to the _Premiers Paris_ come the _Faits Paris_; then the
_Camarillists_, other banditti commissioned to distort Parliamentary
speeches; then the newspaper Politicians, who have not two ideas in
their heads. If appointed under-officials, they would be unable to
administer the sweeping of the streets. Consequently, the more
incapable a man is, the better he is qualified to become the Grand
Lama of a newspaper. Indeed, nothing is more explicable than politics.
It is a game at ninepins.
In addition to its Politicians, the newspaper has its _Attaches_. The
_Attaches_ of the Republican party are watched very closely. One day
two Republicans meet, and the first says to the second: "You have sold
yourself; people find you are getting fatter." Whence it follows that
any paper knowing its trade will have only exceedingly thin
_Attaches_; otherwise your _Attache_ will be a mere detached
_Attache_, that is to say, a sort of paid spy, who is mostly a
professor of rhetoric or philosophy. He will dine at all tables, with
mission to attack political leaders; he runs in and out of newspaper
offices, like a dog seeking his master; and, when he has bitten
sharply, he becomes the professor of a fantastic science, the private
secretary of some cabinet, or else consul-general.
Afterwards come the _gendelettre_ pamphleteers. According to the
author of the _Monography_, the pamphlet is the brochure masterpiece;
and he himself is its most illustrious exponent. The Abbe de Lamennais
does not know how to speak to the proletariat. He is not Spartacus
enough, not Marat enough, not Calvin enough; he does not understand
how to storm the positions of the ignoble bourgeoisie at present in
power.
Following on are the _gendelettre-vulgarisateurs_, who have invented
Germany. The type of this class is appointed professor in the College
de France. He marches at the head of the Nothingologues; he is the
almighty king of the Sorbonne. Such people are the skin parasites of
France. The Nothingologue is ordinarily _monobible_;[*] and, as the
bourgeoisie are essentially lacking in intelligence, they are
infatuated with him. The _Monobible_ becomes a director of canals,
railways, the defender of negroes, or else the advocate of slavery; in
a word, the Nothingologue is an important man, quite as the convinced
_gendelettre_, who reserves to himself the Council of State, and as
the sceptic _gendelettre_, who becomes Master of Requests or Governor
of the Marquisas Isles.
[*] In Balzac's use of the word: A man who has written only one book
and boasts of it always.
Replying to this diatribe, with its medley of shrewdness and
exaggeration, Janin pointed out that it insulted Quinet, professor at
the College de France; Sainte-Beuve, the poet, novelist, and critic,
the historian of Port-Royal; Philarete Chasles, professor of Foreign
Literature; Loeve Weimars, Consul at Bagdad; not to speak of Planche,
Berlioz, Michel and Chevalier; and that it came amiss from a man who
had lived and still lived on newspapers; who himself had been the
chief managing editor, tenor, Jack-of-all-trades, canard-seller,
camarillist, politician, premier-Paris, fait-Paris, _detache-attache_,
pamphleteer, translator, critic, euphuist, bravo, incense-bearer,
guerillero, angler, humbug, and even, what was more serious, the
banker of a paper of which he was the only, unique, and perpetual
_gendelettre_, and which, so admirably written, cleverly conducted,
and signed with so great a name, did not live six months.
Within a very few years, Janin was to bury the hatchet of polemics
beside Balzac's grave, and, forgetting the soreness generated in him
by the _Monography of the Press_ to constitute himself the dead
author's apologist.
Besides his continuation of Lucien de Rubempre's story in the
_Splendour and Wretchedness of Courtezans_, Balzac published, in the
year 1843, two complete novels, viz. _Honorine_, and _The Muse of the
County_, and a portion of an historical study on Catherine de Medici.
This last work, to which the _Calvinist Martyr_ belongs, was
undertaken with the idea of composing, as he said, a retrospective
history of France treated clairvoyantly, and, as the fragment shows,
with his peculiar bias towards despotism. In the experiment made with
_Catherine de Medici_, he started out thinking to justify and
rehabilitate her memory. Instead, he found himself obliged to exhibit
her committing the worst actions imaginable; and, his conclusions not
concording with his premises, he abandoned further incursions into the
past. History is a dangerous ground for a doctrinaire to investigate.
The former of the two novels is mainly psychological. The wife of a
Count Octave, having quitted her husband for another, has repented of
her fault and separated from her lover, but, through shamefastness,
will not return to her husband. She seeks to gain a livelihood by
flower-making; and her husband, who still loves her and is full of
forgiveness, helps her secretly to obtain orders. At length, by the
good offices of a secretary and the latter's uncle, a priest, he
pleads with his wife more efficaciously, and induces her to return to
him, yet without her pardoning herself; and she dies in giving birth
to a child, dies because she wishes, rather from wounded pride, it
would appear, than on account of her husband, to whose affection she
is strangely insensible. The heroine is not particularly interesting
with her morbidness and hysterical posing; she probably stands for one
of Balzac's principles, and his principles are the most tedious thing
about him.
With the _Muse of the County_, which the author declared to be
Constant's _Adolphe_ treated realistically, we are back in the truer
Balzacian manner. Dinah de la Baudraye--a Sancerre Catherine de
Vivonne--married to an apology for a man, is human flesh and blood;
and her love for the journalist Etienne Lousteau is natural, though
culpable. Indeed, her subsequent devotion to this shallow egotist is
not without greatness. Here the novelist, as much by his wit as by his
denouement, gives perhaps the best practical condemnation of adultery.
"Bah!" says the little de la Baudraye, "do you call it vengeance,
because the Duke of Bracciano will kill his wife for putting him into
a cage and showing herself to him in her lover's arms. Our tribunals
and society are much more cruel."
"In what?" asked Lousteau.
"In letting the woman live with a slender allowance. Every one turns
away from her. She has neither dress nor consideration, two things
which are everything to a woman."
"But she has happiness," replied Madame de la Baudraye grandly.
"No!" replied the husband, lighting his candle to go to bed; "for she
has a lover."
Dinah's punishment is of this kind. Persuaded at length to go back to
the house of her husband, who had been made a peer of France and
accepts Lousteau's children with her, she lives to see her former
lover and father of her children sink so low that she must despise
him, while still occasionally tempted to yield to his caresses.
When Alexandre Dumas, the younger, was received into the French
Academy in 1875, the Count d'Haussonville, who welcomed him, asserted
that the elder Dumas, like Balzac, Beranger, de Lamennais and others,
had preferred to remain an outsider. In the case of Balzac, the Count
was mistaken. The so-called preference was Hobson's choice. He stayed
outside only because he could not get in. Between 1839 and 1849, he
made several attempts to secure the promise of a number of votes
sufficient to elect him. Having stood aside at the earlier date in
favour of Victor Hugo, who was admitted in 1841, he thought he might
count on a reciprocal service from the poet. And, on Bonald's death in
the same year, he asked him, during the visit to Les Jardies, to use
his influence with his colleagues in the Academy. "Hugo promised but
little," says Gozlan; and Balzac had to wait for a better opportunity.
This happened at the end of 1843, when Campenon died, and a vacancy
occurred which he might reasonably claim to fill. Encouraged at
present by Hugo and Charles Nodier, he began the round of visits
required by Academy etiquette; but soon discovered that the members
whose votes he solicited did not consider him rich enough. He
therefore withdrew from the list of candidates, writing to Nodier
that, if he could not succeed in entering the Academy while in
honourable poverty, he would never present himself at the moment when
prosperity should have bestowed her favours on him.
And, so far as personal solicitation was concerned, he never did.
Though not abandoning his desire of belonging to the Forty, and
esteeming rightly that the value of his work entitled him to a place
among them, he felt after this rebuff that, if a fresh proposal were
made, it should come from the other side. He might have done more to
provoke it had not Madame Hanska been against his taking any further
action in the matter, however indirect. Maybe she realized better than
he did the uselessness of his candidature. The enemies he had in the
Academy and its entourage were too powerful for his claims to be
considered. Many years afterwards, Victor Hugo related that the
novelist put himself forward for the vacancy left by Ballanche's death
at the end of 1847, and apropos added the following anecdote.
"I was driving," he said, "down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, when
in front of the Church I perceived Monsieur de Balzac, who beckoned to
me to stop. I was going to get out of the carriage, but he prevented
me, and said: 'I was just coming to see you. You know I am on the list
for the Academy.' 'Really!' 'Yes. What do you think of my chances?'
'You are too late, I fear. You will get only my vote.' 'It is your
vote especially I want.' 'Are you quite in earnest?' 'Quite.' Balzac
quitted me. The election was virtually decided. For political motives.
The candidature of Monsieur Vatout had a majority of supporters. I
tried to canvass for Balzac, but met with no success. It vexed me to
think that a man of Balzac's calibre should have only one vote, and I
reflected that if I could obtain a second one, I might create some
change of opinion. How was I to gain it? On the election day I was
sitting beside the excellent Pongerville, one of the best of men. I
asked him point blank, 'For whom are you voting?' 'For Vatout, as you
know.' 'I know it so little that I ask you to vote for Balzac.'
'Impossible!' 'Why?' 'Because my bulletin is ready. See.' 'Oh! that
makes no matter.' And on two bits of paper I wrote in my best hand:
'Balzac.' 'Well!' quoth Pongerville; 'well! you will see.' The
apparitor who was collecting the votes approached us. I handed him one
of the bulletins I had prepared. Pongerville, in his turn, stretched
out his hand to put Vatout's name in the urn; but, with a friendly tap
on his fingers, I caused his paper to flutter to the floor. He looked,
appeared irresolute for a moment; and, as I presented him with the
second bulletin, on which Balzac's name was inscribed, he smiled, took
it, and gave it with good grace. And that is how Honore de Balzac had
two votes in his favour at the Academy."
This story is inexact chronologically. Balzac was not a candidate in
1847-48, when Monsieur Vatout was chosen, but at two later elections,
those of the 11th and 18th of January 1849. In each of these he
obtained two votes; and since the second election was to fill the
chair of Monsieur Vatout, who died after occupying it during a
twelvemonth, it would seem that Victor Hugo, deceived by his memory,
confused the two events. As for the conversation with Balzac, it
probably refers to the candidature which the novelist did begin in
1844; and either Hugo's age in 1877, when he told the story, or his
capacity for embellishing was responsible for the interview being
tacked on to the election incident of 1849.
The Pongerville mentioned by Hugo was the same in whose album, in
1844, Balzac wrote a couple of complimentary verses. He happened to
come across the album at his sister's, and, after inserting his
poetry, took the book to Pongerville's house without finding him at
home. He had certainly reckoned, at the close of the preceding year,
on having this Academician's vote, as well as Dupaty's, Hugo's, and
Nodier's. Pongerville may have deemed his own tardy support a
sufficient reward for the verses.
Although Balzac's monetary embarrassments were fated to persist as
long as he lived, the causes being so much in the man, their burden
was somewhat less felt in and from the year 1844. This better state of
things was proved by his looking round for a more commodious
residence. The Passy cottage, picturesque as it was, accorded but ill
with his designs of marrying so grand a dame; and even for his work
was not very suitable, being close to the flats of the Rue Basse,
where families lived with children that disturbed his meditations. He
would have liked to free Les Jardies from its mortgage and keep the
place as a summer resort, while renting a snug mansion in the city
during the winter; but the two abodes were hardly within his means,
unless Eve would loosen her purse-strings. "I will not sell it," he
informed her, referring to his "Folly"; "it was built with my blood
and brains. I will stick to it--if I cannot dispose of it
advantageously," he finished up with, inconsequently. And still she
made no sign; or, rather she proffered no cash. Business advice she
gave in plenty. About each of the Paris houses suggested she had some
objections to make, so that, after fixing successively on a residence
belonging to Madame Delannoy (one of his creditor friends) in the Rue
Neuve-des Mathurins, on the old mansion opposite his Passy abode once
possessed by the Princesse de Lamballe, on the property in the Rue
Ponthieu, and on a plot of land in the Allee des Veuves where he
thought they could build, the end of the year arrived without any
definite solution being reached. The two "louloups," as he called
himself and Eve, filled their correspondence with calculations and
figures, the Paris "louloup" expressing his conviction that figures
were the foundation of their happiness.
If he did not die too soon, she might consider she would marry a
million in giving him her hand, he said. Slily, he now and again
quoted his worth in the estimation of a rival feminine authority. For
example, Madame de Girardin was about to write an article on the great
conversationalists of the day, and had mentioned that she held him to
be one of the most charming. However, when he raised his rate of
exchange in this way, he was always prudent enough to follow up with
concessions. His intimacy with the Englishwoman, Madame Visconti, who
was Eve's bugbear, he broke off completely--at least he swore he had
done so and offered to send his beloved tyrant the cold letter in
which his whilom friend and benefactress bade him good-bye. To let Eve
see it would not be gallant on his part, he confessed; but what could
he deny her, if she persisted. He was her Paris agent, even her Paris
errand-boy, at one time negotiating the entrance of the governess,
Mademoiselle Borel, into the Saint-Thomas-de-Velleneuve nunnery; at
another, purchasing gloves, millinery, and other articles of dress.
Yet she never considered him submissive enough, notwithstanding his
pretty flattery.
"Why shouldn't you have a poet?" he asked, thinking of himself, "as
other people have a dog, a monkey, a parrot--the more so as I have in
me something of these three creatures: I always repeat the same
phrase, I imitate society, I am faithful." And again in a burst of
lyricism, he exclaimed: "Adieu, loved friend, to whom I belong like
the sound to the bell, the dog to his master, the artist to his ideal,
prayer to God, pleasure to cause, colour to the painter, life to the
sun. Love me, for I need your affection, so vivifying, so coloured, so
agreeable, so celestial, so ideally good, of such sweet dominance, and
so constantly vibrating." With comparisons of this sort he was lavish.
"I am like Monsieur de Talleyrand," he told her in another letter.
"Either I show a stolid, tin face and do not speak a word, or else I
chatter like a magpie." Adopting the expression first invented by
Guizot, he characterized their mutual relations as an _entente
cordiale_, impatient, none the less, for the realization of his fancy,
which was to see his idol enter a tabernacle prepared to receive her
on the return from a delightful honeymoon. Meanwhile, he was amassing
furniture and bric-a-brac, just as the bird bits of straw; and he
implored her not to scold him. In the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, he had
ferreted out two Dresden vases, which he bought, resolving to deprive
himself for a time of his grapes at forty sous a pound, in order to
retrieve the money.
The retrieval indeed was not easy, since his passion for collecting
curios led him far, and he generally succumbed to the temptation of
something ancient and rare. In the previous autumn he had bought, for
thirteen hundred and fifty francs, a _secretaire_ and _commode_ in
ebony, with inlaid pearl, that had apparently been manufactured at
Florence in the seventeenth century; these _objets d'art_ he estimated
at values ranging up to forty or fifty thousand francs. A description
of them appeared in the press, and rich amateurs inquired whether he
were willing to sell; but, either because he asked too much or really
did not want to part with them, they were kept, as also his _Christ_
by Bouchardon or Girardon, which he obtained for two hundred francs
and valued at several thousands. If he had no cash for his purchases
--and this frequently happened--he placed one of his already acquired
treasures (possibly unpaid for, too) in the establishment of his
"respectable relative," as he styled the pawnbroker, and thus secured
the coveted object.
In his intercourse with his own family, Madame Hanska was a
continuously troubling factor. The prospect of his alliance with this
foreign aristocrat had less charm for Madame Balzac and Laure than for
Honore. They probably perceived the chimera he was pursuing, and could
not be expected to show enthusiasm. This attitude on their side and a
certain hauteur on his, partly caused by offended dignity, widened the
breach between him and them. "I have now no family," he told "The
Stranger," "and am glad that the coldness should be established before
I am completely happy; for later the reason of it would have been
attributed to you, or to what would have been termed my uppishness.
The isolation, which you wish, will be likewise my dearest desire. My
sister," he proceeded, "has suppressed for ever the literary question
betwixt us, with her blue-stocking whims. I cannot talk to her of my
affairs, nor yet of my mother's. She asserts that her husband is a
greater man than I am." Madame de Berny, he added, had foreseen his
mother's and sister's transformation when she told him he was a flower
that had sprung up on a dunghill! If Madame de Berny told him this, it
was no doubt in a fit of anger against them for endeavouring to sever
the liaison, an endeavour they were perfectly justified in. These
portions of Balzac's confidences, which reflect upon his character
seriously, and besmirch him more than those against whom they were
spoken, cannot be overlooked in a biography. They have to be included
in our judgment of him, and, in a measure, concern the tragic close of
his love romance.
We are fonder of him in the expansive moods when his naive wonder at
his own performances carries him into self-panegyric, which, not
infrequently, we can endorse, though with some discount. Thus, for
instance, the _Bourgeois of Paris_ he declared to be one of those
masterpieces that leave everything else behind. "It is grand, it is
terrifying in verve, in philosophy, in novelty, in painting, in
style." And yet there was Eugene Sue selling the _Wandering Jew_ to a
newspaper for a hundred thousand francs, while the _Philosophy of
Conjugal Life_, a publication of his own in Hetzel's _Diable a Paris_,
fetched only eight hundred; and the _Peasants_ was paid for only at
the rate of sixty centimes a line. His _Modeste Mignon_ which appeared
in the _Debats_, sold rather dearer, six thousand francs being given,
and for the _Bourgeois_, nine thousand. The explanation of Sue's
getting more than he he imagined to be because Sue lived in grander
style than himself with flunkeys to open the door and overawe the
publishers who flocked to the successful writer, whereas he, living in
a cottage, had to cool his heels in an office ante-chamber, and was
exploited on account of his neediness. There was some truth in what he
said; but he did not sufficiently realize that Sue wrote, for the
market, exciting tales that everybody rushed to read. His own books
were, of course, most of them infinitely superior; but they appealed
to a much smaller public. All the same, he was loth to resign himself
to the depreciation Sue's bargains effected in his own. Feverishly he
strove to demonstrate by his painfully gained successes that they were
masterpieces, as he said, by the side of Sue's chimney-fronts, and as
far above them as Raphael was above Dubufe. Moliere, Lesage, Voltaire,
Walter Scott--these were the only names he acknowledged as rivals to
his own. Sue was nothing but a spangled and satined Paul de Kock.
We can grant him that, in fiction, his proper manner was as far in
advance of his epoch as, in politics, his doctrine was behind it.
George Sand was a medium in both, although she dwelt always a little
too much in the clouds. At a dinner with her towards the end of
January, the antagonism of their principles manifested itself over his
recent visit to Russia.
"If you were to see the Czar," Balzac said to her, "you would fall in
love with him and jump from your _bousingotism_[*] to autocracy."
[*] A word used to characterise the dress and manners of the
Romanticists, who were fond of Robespierre waistcoats, long
hair, and other peculiarities intended to distinguish them from
ordinary mortals.
Madame Dudevant waxed angry. It was not kind in a man who had resisted
her blandishments to make merry over her foibles.
The Russians, he gravely told her, were extremely amiable, easy to get
on with, exceedingly literary, since everything was done on paper, and
Russia was the only country in which people knew how to obey.
The mention of obedience in a people irritated the hostess; but on her
seething he poured a drop of cold water by asking jestingly:
"Would you, in a great danger, wish your servants to deliberate about
what you had ordered them to do?"
The
Sandist-Philosophico-Republico-Communico-Pierre-Lerouxico-Geranico-Deisto
train (the epithets are Balzac's) stopped dead at the question. Then
Marliani, one of the guests, remarked that argument was impossible with
poets. Balzac bowed, and added:
"You hear what he says?"
"You are a dreadful satirist," retorted George Sand. "Go on with your
_Comedie Humaine_."
It was not necessary to give the recommendation. He was for ever going
on; and the further he went, the further his horizons receded. The
embracing lines were rather indiscriminate. He came to think himself
capable of reducing every domain to his scale. Men's ambitions,
however, are part of their motive power; and, had his been less
sweeping, the qualities of his work might have diminished with the
defects. "Four men," he cried in one of his vauntings, "have had an
immense life, Napoleon, Cuvier, O'Connell, and--I mean to be the
fourth! The first lived with the life of Europe; he inoculated himself
with armies! The second espoused the globe! The third incarnated in
himself a people! As for me! I shall have borne a whole society in my
head! It is just as well to live thus as every evening to say,
'Spades, hearts, trumps;' or to wonder why Madame such a one has done
such and such a thing."
_Modeste Mignon_, which was published in 1844 with the extra
attraction of some of Auber's music in it is one of Balzac's brighter
and lighter books, and reproduces part of his own last love-story more
objectively treated than in _Albert Savarus_. Its plot was suggested
to him by a short tale which Madame Hanska composed, intending to
submit it for his approval, but which she threw in the fire,
afterwards sending him, in one of her epistles, an outline of what she
had done. Since he utilized her invention, he paid her back by
selecting as his point of departure the adventure of a well-educated
girl of literary tastes, who, through reading the verses of the
celebrated Canalis, at once a poet and a statesman, fell in love with
him and expressed her (literary) admiration in a letter, though she
had never seen him. There were other such cases in the first half of
the nineteenth century besides that of the Polish Countess and the
author of _Eugenie Grandet_. Disdaining to reply to a correspondent
who did not appear to be a person with whom he could take liberties,
Canalis delegated the task to his friend and secretary, La Briere, who
answered under cover of the great man's name and ultimately found out
and, incognito, beheld the lady. She was beautiful and he lost his
heart to her. When later the subterfuge was discovered, Canalis,
interested now, wanted to marry the lady, she being presumably rich.
Through pique, Modeste, for a while, listened to his suit and smiled
on him, albeit, in verity, she was touched by La Briere's sincere
affection. The circumstances leading to the unmasking of Canalis'
selfish character and to Modeste's marriage with La Briere are handled
in a less Balzacian way than the introductory chapters, which,
however, are more than usually tortuous. But the whole story is
pleasing; and, in the discursive paragraphs, there is less dogmatism
and a more delicate sense of contrasts than the novelist is wont to
exhibit when astride a hobby-horse. The following passage has an aroma
of Shelley's _Defence of Poetry_ in it, which merits our attention.
The divine in man says:
"In order to live, thou shalt bend thyself towards earth; in order to
think thou shalt raise thyself heavenwards. We want the life of the
soul as much as that of the body; whence there are two utilities. Thus
it is certain that a book will not serve as foot-gear; an epic, from
the utilitarian point of view, is not worth an economical soup from
the kitchen of a Benevolent Society; and a self-acting boiler, rising
a couple of inches on itself, procures calico a few pence a yard
cheaper; but this machine and the improvements of industry do not
breathe life into a nation, and will not tell the future that it has
existed; whereas Egyptian art, Mexican art, Grecian art, Roman art,
with their masterpieces accused of uselessness, have attested the
existence of these peoples in the vast expanse of time, there where
huge intermediary nations, destitute of great men, have disappeared
without leaving their visiting cards on the globe. All works of genius
are the epitome of a civilization, and presuppose an immense utility.
Forsooth, a pair of boots will not outvie a stage-play in your eyes,
and you will not prefer a windmill to the Church of Saint Ouen. So, a
people is animated with the same sentiment as a man; and man's
favourite idea is to survive himself mentally as he reproduces himself
physically. The survival of a people is the work of its men of
genius."
_Beatrix_, the other completed novel of the year, is a drawn-out,
ill-composed work, which is not redeemed sufficiently by its minute
description of Breton manners and its portrait of George Sand in
Felicite des Touches. Six years separated the publication of the first
part of the book from that of the conclusion, and, in the interval,
the unity of plan suffered. Balzac devoted a good deal of labour to
its execution. In all the conjugal ruses employed by Sabine de
Grandlieu to detach Calyste, her husband, from Beatrix, he displays
his peculiar talent, but the ultimate effect is poor.