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[Illustration: Drawing of Balzac]
BALZAC
by
EDGAR EVERTSON SALTUS
Boston
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1884
Copyright, 1884.
By Edgar Evertson Saltus.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
THE VAGARIES OF GENIUS 5
CHAPTER II.
THE COMÉDIE HUMAINE 39
CHAPTER III.
THE BUSKIN AND THE SOCK 69
CHAPTER IV.
THE CHASE FOR GOLD 108
CHAPTER V.
THE THINKER 140
CHAPTER VI.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 165
BALZAC.
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
THE VAGARIES OF GENIUS.
“Great minds are bravely eccentric; they scorn the beaten
track.”—GOLDSMITH.
In the city of Tours, in whose gabled streets there lingers still some
memory of la belle Impéria, Honoré de Balzac was born on the 20th of
May, 1799.
His childhood was in no wise extraordinary, save for the avidity with
which he read the Bible and the keen delight which he took in the
possession of a little red violin. He was indifferent to romps and
games, and when not lost in the mysterious depths of the Scriptures he
played by the hour on his fiddle, and extracted therefrom an enjoyment
which was almost sensual in its intensity. His parents were
well-considered people, in easy circumstances. Honoré was their
first-born, and to him were subsequently given two sisters and a
brother, concerning whom only a passing mention need be made. His
eldest sister, Laure, became the wife of M. de Surville, a civil
engineer, survived her illustrious brother, and published his letters,
together with a weak sketch of his life; his second sister also
married, but died at an early age; while his brother Henri sought his
fortune, after the manner of younger sons, in the colonies, failed to
find it, and was otherwise entirely uninteresting.
At the age of eight, Balzac was placed as boarder at the Collége de
Vendôme, where, through the compression of his dreamy nature by
unaccustomed tasks and rules, he soon lapsed into a careless neglect of
his duties, and became, in consequence, one of the most frequently
punished pupils in his class. Favored, however, by the tacit connivance
of a tutor, he passed most of his time in the library. Science,
philosophy, belles-lettres, religion, history, and even dictionaries,
he read and inwardly digested, and during the six years that he
remained at the school he assimilated the substance of all the books
worth reading.
This absorption of ideas produced a noteworthy effect. His eye embraced
six or eight lines at a time, and his mind appropriated the thought
with a velocity equal to his glance; a single word in a phrase often
sufficing for a clear understanding of the whole.
His memory was like a vise. He remembered not only the ideas which he
had acquired in reading, but also those which conversation and
reflection had suggested. Words, names, figures, and places he not only
recalled at will, but he saw them within himself, brilliant and colored
as they were at the moment when he had first perceived them.
Mentally fortified by his extensive reading, he wrote at the age of
twelve the famous “Traité de la Volonté,” so often mentioned in his
later works, but which was confiscated by the regent as the probable
cause of his neglect of the regular curriculum, and which Balzac says
he doubtless sold for waste paper without recognizing the value of the
scientific treasures whose germs were thus wasted in ignorant hands.
After this loss, more than terrible to a young imagination, Balzac
sought consolation in verse, and wrote a poem on the Incas, commencing:
“O Inca! roi infortuné et malheureux!” which, with the exception of his
subsequent “Cromwell,” was his sole familiarity with the peplum of the
Muse; for, of the four sonnets in the “Illusions Perdues,” the first
and second are by Lassaily, the third is by Madame de Girardin, and the
fourth by Gautier, while the poem in “Modeste Mignon” was the work of
Gérard de Nerval.
From these secret and laborious studies, as well as from possible
fermentation of ideas, Balzac fell into a sort of coma and nervous
fever, which was singularly inexplicable to his masters and teachers.
His parents were hastily summoned, and the precocious boy, now almost
epileptic, was taken home, where rest and quiet gradually calmed the
tumult in his brain, and restored the health and vivacity of boyhood.
Little by little the results of his extraordinary labors became
classified within his troubled mind, and to them were added other ideas
of a less abstract nature; and in wandering on the banks of the Loire,
or in attending the impressive ceremonies at the Cathedral of
Saint-Gatien, he acquired not only a love of the beautiful, but also
the sincere and abiding faith in religion with which he subsequently
enriched the pages of the “Comédie Humaine.” At home, as at school,
however, his intelligence was entirely unsuspected, and his sister,
Madame de Surville, relates that whenever he chanced to make a
brilliant remark his mother would invariably say, “It is impossible,
Honoré, for you to understand what you are talking about;” whereupon
Honoré would laugh, without deigning to enter into any explanations.[1]
His father, however, who was an inoffensive disciple of both Montaigne
and Swift, had his own reasons for thinking well of his son, and
decided that a child of his could never by any chance be a fool; and
while at that time he saw nothing in the boy which promised any
immediate celebrity, he nevertheless cherished a few vague hopes.
But the prescience which the father lacked had already visited the son.
From time to time he stated that he would some day be famous, and this
boast appeared so outrageously insulting to his brother and sisters
that they punished him with every torture which childish ingenuity
could invent.
Balzac’s family soon after moved to Paris, where he again was placed at
school. There, as at Vendôme, he gave no sign of future genius, and as
before was regarded as an idler and a dullard.
His classes completed, he attended the lectures of Guizot, Cousin, and
Villemain, and his degree of bachelier-ès-lettres obtained, he entered
a law office which Scribe had just quitted. Here he acquired that
luminous insight to law and procedure which served him to such
advantage in the varied litigations of his future world, and enabled
him, years after, to plead, as Voltaire did for Calas, in defense of
Sébastien Peytel, a former acquaintance, accused of the murder of his
wife and servant. The case was lost, and his client convicted; but his
oration was none the less superb, and his argument is still cited as
one of the most brilliant efforts in the annals of the French bar.
His legal apprenticeship completed, it was naturally expected that he
would follow the law as a profession, but Balzac had other ideas; he
felt as did Corneille _e tutti quanti_, that his vocation was not such
as is found in courts, and expressed a preference for a purely literary
life.
“But,” objected his father, “do you not know that in literature, to
avoid being a slave, you must be a king?”
“Very well,” Balzac replied, “king I will be.”
After many arguments it was finally agreed that he should be allowed
two years of probation; and as his family were about to return to the
country, he was lodged in the Rue Lesdiguières, near the Bibliothèque
de l’Arsenal, on an allowance of a hundred francs a month. His life
there he has in “Facino Cane” described as follows:—
“I passed my days at the neighboring library. I lived frugally, for I
had accepted all the conditions of that monastic life which is so
necessary to students and thinkers. I seldom went out, and when I did a
simple promenade was converted into a source of study, for I observed
the customs of the faubourg, its inhabitants and their characters. As
badly dressed as the workmen and as careless of decorum, I attracted no
attention from them, and was enabled to mix among them and watch their
bargains and disputes.
“Observation had become to me intuitive. It penetrated the spirit
without neglecting the body, or rather it seized exterior details so
clearly that it immediately went beyond them. It gave me the power of
living the life of any individual upon whom it was exercised, and
permitted me to substitute my personality for his, as did the dervish
in the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ who had the power of occupying the
body and soul of those over whom he pronounced certain words. When,
therefore, between eleven and twelve at night, I encountered a workman
and his wife returning from the theatre, I amused myself in following
them from the Boulevard du Pont-aux-Choux to the Boulevard
Beaumarchais. At first they would speak of the play which they had just
witnessed. From that they would begin to talk of their own affairs, the
mother dragging her child after her, listening neither to its
complaints nor to its demands. The money which was to be paid to them
was added, and then spent in twenty different ways. Then came the
household details, murmurings on the excessive price of potatoes, the
length of the winter, energetic discussions on the baker’s bill, and
finally little quarrels, in which they displayed their characters in
picturesque words. While listening to them I espoused their life. I
felt their rags on my back; my feet marched in their tattered shoes;
their desires, their needs, all passed into my spirit, and mine into
theirs: it was the dream of a waking man. With them I grew angry at
their tyrannical masters or at their customers who made them come again
and again without paying what they owed.
“To relinquish my identity, to become another through the intoxication
of the moral faculties, and to play this game at will, such was my sole
distraction. I have sometimes wondered if this gift was one of those
faculties whose abuse leads to madness, but its causes I have never
sought. I know, merely, that I possess and make use of it.”
This ability to penetrate mentally the individuality of another is the
evident explanation of the minuteness with which all of Balzac’s
characters are drawn, as well as the secret of their logical attitudes;
for as in every-day life, while it is a question whether man is his own
providence or is interwoven in a web of pre-ordained circumstances, yet
in either case certain results are inevitable and a matter of
statistic, so in Balzac there is no dodging of fate or shirking of
consequences, and he is careful, in sending his own blood tingling
through the veins of his creations, to surround them with the same laws
to which he is himself subjected.
During his novitiate Balzac prepared a five-act tragedy in blank verse,
entitled “Cromwell,” a subject which it is curious to note was
simultaneously chosen by Victor Hugo. At its completion, a professor of
the École Polytechnique was requested to decide whether the lines
contained a sufficient promise of genius to warrant a further pursuit
of literary honors on the part of the young aspirant. The play,
conscientiously examined, was deemed simply detestable, and the referee
adjudged that Balzac might do what he would, but that literature was
certainly not his vocation.
From this decision there was no present appeal; and while his mother
and sisters begged him to engage in some other occupation, his father
assured him that he would suppress his allowance should he persist in
his intentions. Another perhaps would have yielded, but his pride and
belief in his destiny made his resolution unalterable, and Balzac was
left in solitary sadness to meditate on the coquetries of the Muse.
“I delighted,” he says in “La Peau de Chagrin,” “in the thought that I
should live in the midst of tumultuous Paris in an inaccessible sphere
of work and silence, in a world of my own, of books and ideas, where
like the chrysalis I should build a tomb only to emerge again brilliant
and famous.
“I took the chances of dying to live. In reducing existence to its
actual needs, I found that three sous for _charcuterie_ prevented me
from dying of hunger and preserved my mind in a state of singular
lucidity, while enabling me at the same time to observe the wonderful
effects which diet produces on the imagination. My lodging cost three
sous a day, I burned at night three sous’ worth of oil, and for two
sous more I heated my room with charcoal: and in this manner I lived in
my aerial sepulchre, working night and day with such pleasure that
study seemed the most beautiful theme, the happiest solution, of
existence. The calm and silence necessary to the student possess an
indescribable something which is as sweet and intoxicating as love, and
study itself seems to lend a sort of magic to all that surrounds us.
The forlorn desk on which I wrote, my piano, my bed, my chair, the
zigzags of the wall-paper,—all these things became as though animated
and humble friends, the silent accomplices of my future. Many a time I
have communicated my soul to them in a glance, and often in looking at
the broken moulding I encountered new developments of thought, some
striking proof of my system, or words which I considered peculiarly
fitted to express ideas almost untranslatable.”
Balzac had not as yet any settled plan of work, but he tried his hand,
while forming his style, at a quantity of comic operas, dramas,
comedies, and romances, none of which, however, were accepted save by
the gutter’s sneering fatalist, the ragpicker.
After many fruitless attempts and knocks at many a door, Balzac
succeeded at last in finding a publisher, but of a type seen only in
opéra bouffe, who proffered in payment of a romance a promissory note
with a year to run. Balzac of course had no choice. He wished to appear
in print. The bargain was concluded, and the “Héritière de Birague” was
produced. Then, under various pseudonyms, such as Lord R’hoone, the
anagram of Honoré, Dom Rago, M. de Viellerglé, and Horace de
Saint-Aubin, he produced a quantity of novels somewhat after the style
of Pegault Lebrun, and yet so diverse in treatment that one of them,
“Wann-Chlore,”[2] was attributed to a luminary of the Romantic school,
and another, “Annette et le Criminel,” was suppressed by the
censorship. Some of these books, whose paternity he always denied, have
since been collected under the title of “Œuvres de Jeunesse,” but of
the greater part no trace remains.
Exhausted by privations and worn with continued study, Balzac was
obliged to return to his family, then established at Villeparisis,
where, broken in mind and health, he sank into an almost hopeless
dejection.
“Is this what you term life,” he wrote[3] to his sister,—“this
involuntary rotation and perpetual return of the same things? I am in
the springtide of a flowerless life, and I long to have some charm
thrown over my chill existence; for of what use is fortune and pleasure
when youth is gone? Of what use is the actor’s gown if he play no
longer his part? Old age is a man who has dined and looks at others
eat; and I, I am young, and I hunger before an empty plate—Laura,
Laura, shall I, then, never realize my two immense desires, to be
celebrated and to be loved?”
But Balzac soon wearied of this plaintive inactivity, and, fertile in
projects, conceived the plan of printing Molière complete in one
volume, and of following it with similar editions of the French
classics. When these had appeared, he proposed, like Richardson, to
produce his own works, and his illuminous imagination immediately
foresaw new Clarissas issuing from the press.
The necessary working capital he procured from his family, who, though
far from rich, were none the less glad to aid him in an enterprise for
which literature would be abandoned and a legitimate business adopted.
But after the publication of Molière and La Fontaine, in each of which
he inserted an elaborate and original introduction, he was obliged,
through the cabals of the other publishers, to relinquish his plan,
while burdened at the same time with a load of debt which oppressed
almost every hour of his after life.
He was now absolutely without resources. The expense of a few sous
attending the carriage of a letter, an omnibus ride, anything, in fact,
which demanded the outlay of ready money, he was obliged to forego, and
even remained in his garret that he might preserve as long as possible
the only shoes which he owned.
“My sole possessions,” he wrote to his sister, “are my books, which I
cannot part with, and my good taste, which unfortunately for the rich
cannot be bought. If I were in prison I should be happier; life then
would cost me nothing, and in any event I could not be more of a
captive than I am.”
But the pecuniary loss which he had sustained, and which amounted to
about 120,000 francs, served but as a stimulus to renewed activity; and
resolving that he would recover from the printing press all that it had
robbed him of, he commenced to seek some undiscovered vein of literary
treasure, and in 1829 brought out “Le Dernier Chouan,” the first
romance which he considered worthy to bear his own name. Its ferocity
and passion attracted great attention, and the public became at once
favorably disposed toward him; but when, a few months later, the
“Physiologie du Mariage” appeared, its success was not only
instantaneous, but Balzac was heralded as a new Molière. He now emerged
from quasi obscurity into the white light of fame. Publishers were
submissive, praise was unstinted. He had realized the first of his
immense desires, and had it not been for his weight of debt he might
perhaps have been able to realize the other, but his time was not his
own. He labored, if possible, more incessantly than ever, conceived the
plan of the “Comédie Humaine,” and from that time up to almost the day
of his death produced a series of masterpieces which in point of
interest and erudition form the most gigantic monument in the history
of modern literature.
His work accompanied him wherever he went. He dreamed of it; he wrote
while he ate; he traveled over the better part of Europe, and wrote
while he traveled; he composed in the omnibus and in the street; and
had he had a mistress he would, in all probability, have followed the
example of Baudelaire, and composed in her arms. Thoroughly
conscientious, he invariably visited the place where the scenes of a
drama were to be located. “I am going to Alençon,” he would say; “you
know Mlle. Cormon[4] lives there;” or, “I am off for Grenoble; there is
where M. Benassis[5] lives:” for it should be remembered that not only
were Balzac’s characters as realistically vivid to him as are the
hallucinations of a neurosthene, but he invariably spoke of them as
another would of friends and acquaintances. “Let us talk of realities,”
he one day said to Jules Sandeau, who had been speaking to him of an
invalid relative, “let us talk about ‘Eugénie Grandet;’” and at another
time, when his sister asked for some information about Captain
Jordy,[6] Balzac replied very simply, “I never knew the man before he
came to Nemours, but if he interests you, I will try to learn something
of him.” It was a long time before he was able to find a suitable
husband for Mlle. Camille Grandlieu, and rejected all who were
suggested to him. “They are not in the same set,” he would say. “Chance
alone can supply her with a husband, and chance is a commodity which a
novelist should use but sparingly. Reality alone justifies the
improbable, and the probable alone is permitted to us.” But Mlle. de
Grandlieu was not destined to braid St. Catherine’s tresses, and
afterwards, to Balzac’s great delight, found a suitable husband in the
person of the young Comte de Restaud,[7] who in spite of his mother’s
derelictions[8] was otherwise a very acceptable suitor.
After the place of his novel had been visited, viewed from every
aspect, the customs noted and the localisms acquired, Balzac would
return to Paris, shut himself up in a garret,—the garret has its
poetry,—and for weeks and sometimes months at a time he would not only
disappear entirely from view, but all trace of him would be lost.
At other times, he would lodge under an assumed name, which he imparted
only to his most intimate friends. “My address,” he wrote to Madame
Carraud in 1834, “is always Madame Veuve Durand, 13, Rue des
Batailles;” and in 1837, he wrote to Dablin, “To see the Widow Durand,
a name must be given. Yours is on the list.”
“The house,” Gautier wrote,[9] “of the Widow Durand was as well guarded
as the Garden of the Hesperides. Two or three passwords were exacted,
and that they might not become vulgarized they were frequently changed.
Among others, I recall the following. On telling the janitor that the
season for prunes had arrived, the visitor was permitted to cross the
threshold; to the servant who prowled about the head of the stairway,
it was necessary to murmur ‘I bring laces from Belgium;’ and on
assuring the valet de chambre that Madame Bertrand was in excellent
health, the visitor was ushered into the great man’s presence.”
It was in the Rue des Batailles that the famous boudoir of the “Fille
aux Yeux d’Or” actually existed; and though its luxury would not appear
unusual to-day, it was, nevertheless, a source of continual wonder to
his Bohemian friends, and his own description of it is not devoid of
interest:[10]—
“One side of the boudoir formed a graceful semicircle, while in the
centre of the other, which was perfectly square, there shone a
mantel-piece of marble and gold. The door, which was concealed behind a
rich portière of tapestry, was directly in front of the window.
“In the horseshoe was a Turkish divan, fifty feet in circumference and
as high as a bed. The covering was of white cashmere tufted with bows
of black and lilac silk, which were disposed as at the angles of a
lozenge.
“The back of this immense bed rose several inches above a pile of
cushions, which added to the general effect by their coloring and
artistic arrangement.
“The boudoir was hung with a red material, over which was draped an
Indian muslin fluted like a Corinthian column by a piping alternately
hollow and round, and bordered at top and bottom by a band of lilac
embroidered with black arabesques. Beneath the muslin the red became
pink, and this delicate shading was repeated in the window curtains,
which were of Indian muslin lined with pink silk and ornamented with a
fringe of black and lilac.
“At equal distances on the wall above the divan were six sockets of
silver-gilt, each of which supported two candles, while from the centre
of the ceiling hung a highly polished lustre of the same material.
“The carpet was like a camel’s-hair shawl, and seemed a mute reminder
of the poetry of Persia. The furniture was covered with white cashmere
relieved by lilac and black. The clock and candelabras were of gold and
marble. The one table which the boudoir contained was covered with
white cashmere, while all about were jardinières of white and red
roses.”
Behind the semicircle was a secret passage, at one end of which was an
iron cot and at the other a desk; and here it was that Balzac, secure
from intrusion, worked and composed at his ease.
To return, however, to the Widow Durand. In 1838 he wrote to Madame
Hanska, the lady who subsequently became his wife:—
“The Widow Durand is dead. She was killed by the contemptible conduct
of the daily papers, who have betrayed a secret which should have been
sacred to every man of honor.”
After this misfortune Balzac installed himself openly at Les Jardies, a
country house which he had built at Ville d’Avray, and where he was, as
he expressed it, “like the lantern of Demosthenes, and not, as every
one else says, of Diogenes;” but when, a year or two later, he took up
his residence in the Rue Basse, at Passy he surrounded himself with all
his former precautions, instituted a series of countersigns which he
changed weekly, and transformed himself into “Madame Bri....”
When guarded in this way from any intrusion, Balzac would work from
twelve to twenty-one hours a day. His usual hours of sleep were from
six in the evening until midnight. Then he would bathe, don the white
robe of a Dominican friar, poise a black skull cap on his head, and,
under the influence of coffee and by the light of a dozen candles,
would work incessantly till he could work no more.
His work completed, the lion would forsake his den, and for an evening
or two he would be seen in the Loge Infernale at the opera, invariably
carrying a massive cane whose head glittered with jewels, and which
Madame de Girardin was pleased to imagine rendered him invisible at
will;[11] or he would make brief apparitions in the salons of the
literati and nobility, and then, suddenly, without a word of warning,
he would shut himself up as impenetrably as before.
His manner of writing was stamped with the same eccentricity which
characterized all his habits. When a subject which he proposed to treat
had been well considered, he would cover thirty or forty sheets with a
scaffolding of ideas and phrases, which he then sent off to the
printer, who returned them in columns wired and centred on large
placards. The work, freed in this way from any personality and its
errors at once apparent, was then strengthened and corrected. On a
second reading the forty pages grew to a hundred, two hundred on the
third, and so on, while on the proof-sheets themselves new lines would
start from the beginning, the middle, or the end of a phrase; and if
the margins were insufficient, other sheets of paper were pinned or
glued to the placards, which were again and again returned, corrected,
and reprinted, until the work was at last satisfactorily completed.
But perhaps the most graphic description of Balzac’s manner of writing
is the one contained in an article by Edouard Ourliac in the “Figaro”
for the 15th of December, 1837, of which the following is a free
translation:—
THE MISFORTUNES AND ADVENTURES OF CÉSAR BIROTTEAU BEFORE HIS BIRTH.
Let us sing, drink, and embrace, like the chorus in an opéra bouffe;
let us waft kisses in the air and turn on our toes, as they do in the
ballet.
Let us rejoice now that we may. The “Figaro,” without appearing to have
done so, has conquered the elements, all the malefactors, and every
sublunary cataclysm.
The “Figaro” has conquered César Birotteau.
Never did the angered gods, never did Juno, Neptune, M. de Rambuteau,
or the prefect of the police, oppose against Jason, Theseus, or the
wayfarers of the capital, greater obstacles, monsters, ruins, dragons,
demolitions, than these two unhappy octavos. We have them at last, and
we know their cost.
The public will have but the trouble to read them, though that should
count as a pleasure.
As to M. de Balzac, twenty days of labor, two reams of paper, another
masterpiece, that counts as nothing.
Whatever else it may be considered, it is at least a typographical
exploit and a worthy example of literary and commercial heroism.
Writer, publisher, and printer, all deserve the praise of their
countrymen.
Posterity will gossip about the binders, and our grand-nephews will
regret that they do not know the names of the apprentices.
I regret it myself,—otherwise I would tell them.
The “Figaro” promised the book for the 15th of December, and M. de
Balzac began it on the 17th of November.
M. de Balzac and the “Figaro” have the singular habit of keeping their
word.
The printing-press was prepared, and pawed the ground like an excited
charger.
M. de Balzac sent immediately two hundred sheets, scribbled in five
nights of fever.
Every one knows how he writes. It was an outline, a chaos, an
apocalypse, a Hindu poem.
The office paled. The time was short, the writing unheard of. The
monster was transformed and translated as nearly as possible into
familiar signs. No one could make head or tail of it. Back it went to
the author. The author sent back the first two proofs glued on enormous
placards.
It was frightful, it was pitiful. From each sign, from each printed
word, shot a penstroke, gleaming and gliding like a sky-rocket, and
bursting at the extremity in a luminous fire of phrases, epithets,
substantives, underlined, crossed, intermingled, erased, and
superposed. Its aspect was simply dazzling.
Fancy four or five hundred arabesques of this kind, interlacing,
knotted together, climbing and slipping from one margin to another and
from the bottom to the top.
Fancy twelve geographical maps entangling cities, rivers, and mountains
in the same confusion, a skein harassed by a cat, all the hieroglyphics
of the Pharonian dynasty, or twenty fireworks exploding at once.
The office then was far from gay. The typesetters beat their breasts,
the presses groaned, the proof-readers tore their hair and the
apprentices became howling idiots. The most intelligent recognized the
Persian alphabet, others the Madagascan, while one or two considered
them to be the symbolic characters of Vishnu.
They worked on chance and by the grace of God.
The next day M. de Balzac sent back two pages of the purest Chinese. It
was then the 1st of December. A generous typesetter offered to blow out
his brains. Then other sheets were brought, written in the most legible
Siamese. Three compositors lost their sight and the little French that
they knew.
The proofs were sent back seven consecutive times; then, a few symptoms
of excellent French appeared, and there was even noticed a certain
connection between the phrases; but the day was fast approaching, and
we felt that the book would never appear.
Desolation was at its height, and it was at this point that the work
became further complicated by an admirable concourse of calamities.
At the time when haste was the greatest, the miserable being who that
night carried the proof-sheets to M. de Balzac was waylaid and robbed.
M. de Balzac had had the forethought to establish himself at Chaillot.
The miserable being screamed and yelled. The bandits took to their
heels. One proof-sheet was found at Neuilly, another in an orchard, a
third descending the Seine. It is certain that they were thrown away
only on account of their illegibility. Misfortune has its advantages.
The proofs were recovered, but the night was lost. There were cries and
gnashing of teeth. The end was fast approaching. However, the
typesetters took courage and the workmen took the bit in their teeth.
The office galloped. The compositors foamed at the mouth, the presses
ravened, the binders were on springs, the apprentices danced with
excitement, the proof-reader shook like an epileptic, and the foreman
had convulsions. The office was a cage of palsied lunatics.
The work was again taken in hand, and M. de Balzac and the “Figaro”
have kept their word.
“César Birotteau” will see the light of day on the 15th of December. We
have it now, and we hold it tight. The office is armed, insured, and
barricaded. Smoking is not permitted. There are lightning-rods on the
roof, and mounted guards at the door.
Every precaution has been taken against accidents and the ardor of our
subscribers.
At this moment “César Birotteau” is a work in two volumes, an immense
tableau, an entire poem, composed, written, and corrected fifteen times
by M. de Balzac in twenty days, and deciphered, disentangled, and
reprinted fifteen times in the same period. It may be added that M. de
Balzac kept forty other workmen busy with something else at another
office.
We will not now consider the value of the work.
It may be everything, or but a masterpiece.
The names of Balzac’s characters are all taken from real life; for,
like Dickens, his theory was that names which were invented gave no
life to imaginary creations, and, as did the English novelist, he
gathered many of them from the signboards in the street. His joy at the
discovery of Matifat was almost as great as his delight in finding
Cardot. He found the former in the Rue de la Perle, in the Marais. “I
can see him now,” he said; “he will have the pallid face of a cat. But
Cardot is different: he will be dry as a bone, hasty and ill-tempered.”
In 1840, Balzac proposed to write for the “Revue Parisienne”—a
periodical which, it may be explained, appeared but three times, and
whose three numbers Balzac wrote entirely—the story of a man of
genius, who, used as a tool by others, died through the ingratitude of
those whom he had raised to magnificent positions, and who had then
abandoned him to poverty and want.
Such a character needed a name proportioned to his destiny; a name
which explained and announced him as clearly as the cannon-ball
announces the cannon; a name which would be peculiarly his own, and
would reflect his face, his figure, his voice, his past, his future,
his genius, his passions, his misfortunes, and his glory.
But this supernatural alliance of man and name was not immediately
discoverable, and Balzac, who had put into circulation as many
cognomens as are contained in the “Almanach de Gotha,” expressed
himself incapable of manufacturing it. A name, he considered, could no
more be fabricated than could granite or marble. They were all three
the work of time and revolutions. They made themselves.
As a last and supreme resource, therefore, he set out one day, in
company with Léon Gozlan, on a journey, in search of a baptismal
signboard for his hero; and from the Barrière de l’Étoile to the
summits of Montmartre they zigzagged across Paris, subjecting every
name they encountered to the closest scrutiny.
Thousands of names were examined, analyzed, and rejected, until at last
Gozlan, utterly worn out, refused to walk another step.
Balzac looked at him, it is to be supposed, very much as Columbus
looked at his mutinous sailors, and by force of entreaties obtained,
not three days’ grace, but three streets more.
In the first two nothing was found, but at the extremity of the third
Balzac suddenly changed color, and cried in a voice broken by emotion,—
“There, there! Read that name!”
Above a narrow, oblong door, which opened on a sombre courtyard, there
hung a sign which bore for device the name of Marcas.
“Our journey is at an end!” Balzac exclaimed; “it terminates in a blaze
of glory. The name of my hero shall be Marcas. Marcas contains the
philosopher, the statesman, and the poet. I will call him Z. Marcas,
and thereby add to his name a flame, a tiara, and a star. Nothing could
be better. I wonder, however, who this Marcas is; surely some great
artist.”
“He is a tailor,” Gozlan brutally replied; “there is another sign of
his in the courtyard.”
Balzac looked deeply chagrined.
“No matter,” he said; “he merited a better fate. If I seem annoyed, it
is not that I am lacking in respect for tailors in general, but because
his calling reminds me of certain debts and a few protested notes.”
A day or two later the “Revue Parisienne” appeared, and with it the
story of Z. Marcas, now forming part of the “Scènes de la Vie
Politique” and containing the following monograph:—
“A certain harmony existed between the man and the name. This Z. with
which Marcas was preceded, which was to be seen on the address of his
letters, and with which he always completed his signature,—this last
letter of the alphabet presented to the imagination a something which
was indescribably fatal.
“Marcas! Repeat over to yourself this name, composed of two syllables:
does it not seem to contain a sinister significance? does it not seem
as though its owner were born to be martyred.
“Though weird and wild, this name has nevertheless the right to descend
to posterity: it is well composed, it is easily pronounced, and
possesses the brevity required of famous names. Is it not as soft as it
is bizarre? but does it not also seem unfinished?
“I would not dare to affirm that destiny is uninfluenced by a name, for
between the deeds of men and their names there are inexplicable
affinities and visible discords which at once astonish and surprise.
But this subject will some day assuredly form part of the occult
sciences.
“Does not the Z. present a thwarted and contradicted appearance? does
it not represent the contingent and fantastic zigzags of a tormented
life? What ill wind can have blown on this letter that in every
language to which it is admitted commands barely fifty words! Marcas’
Christian name was Zépherin. Saint Zépherin is highly venerated in
Brittany. Marcas was a Breton.
“Examine the name again. Z. Marcas! The entire existence of the man is
contained in the fantastic assemblage of these seven letters.
Seven!—the most significant of the cabalistic numbers. Marcas died at
the age of thirty-five; his life therefore was composed of but seven
lustres. Marcas! Does not the sound bring to you the idea of something
precious, broken in a noiseless fall?”
The fatality which Balzac conceived as attaching to Marcas was by no
means limited to this imaginary creation. It followed him into real
life, and was at one time a source of such serious preoccupation that
he stood one evening for two hours in the square of the Château d’Eau
confidently awaiting some fortunate occurrence, and like Gautier in
“Mademoiselle de Maupin” he awoke on certain days in a state of great
agitation, trembling at every noise, and convinced that the happiness
of his life was somehow at stake.
These extraordinary sensations naturally led to a belief in the
supernatural; and as his mother, who was also interested in the
abnormal, was acquainted with all the celebrated mesmerists and mediums
of the day, he was readily furnished with opportunities of
experimenting in magnetism and clairvoyance. His charming story of
“Ursule Mirouët” unquestionably proves that he subsequently became a
firm believer in that occult electricity which is variously known as
the Theopœa of the ancients, the Akâsa of the modern Hindu, and the
psychic force of Sergeant Cox; while his account of the soul-projection
of “Séraphita” is vivid enough to satisfy the most exacting hierophant,
and would have passed him, initiate, into the brotherhood of the
Theosophists.
But perhaps the most curious evidence of his every-day faith in
divination is that contained in the two following extracts from his
correspondence:—
TO M. CHAPELAIN, PHYSICIAN.
PARIS, _May, 1832_.
SIR,—I am attracted by the power of somnambulism, and wonder why you
have not sought to obtain from some lucid subject the causes of this
disaster.[12]
Science is interested therein, and its discovery would be an eternal
honor to us.
Had I not been ill for a week past I would have ascended to the honors
of practice, and endeavored to convince myself whether the power of a
somnambulist was limited or infinite.
The second extract is from a letter addressed to his mother a year
later:—
“I send you herewith two pieces of flannel which I have worn on the
body. Take them to M. Chapelain, and when he has examined the first,
ask of him the cause and position of the malady[13] and how it should
be treated. See that everything is clearly explained. Then with the
second piece ask the why and wherefore of the blister ordered in the
precedent consultation.
“Be careful to keep the flannels well wrapped up, that the emanations
may not be disturbed.”
Balzac’s hatred of journalists was intense, and from Sainte-Beuve down
to the most insignificant penny-a-liner all were enveloped in the same
superb contempt.
No branch of the profession was exempt from this antipathy, and critics
and _feuilletonistes_ shared alike in his wholesale condemnation:—
“They want my scalp, do they, these Mohicans of the press! Bah! I will
drink out of their skulls.”
Drink he did, indeed, and long delicious draughts, at that; and in
picking up with the point of his pen the venality, envy, and petty
spites of the trade, he drew in the “Illusions Perdues,” in which Jules
Janin figures in the transparent disguise of Étienne Lousteau, a
picture of journalism which was as faithfully unpleasant as it was
pitying and contemptuous. In this respect, however, it is well to state
that no one was as indifferent to the opinion of the press as Balzac
himself. He rarely, if ever, read the criticisms on his books, and left
them, in the consciousness of their worth, to find their level unaided.
One of the causes of his disdain of everything which smacked of
journalism was this: He had engaged to write “Séraphita” for the “Revue
des Deux Mondes,” and shortly after the story had been delivered he
learned that it was published at St. Petersburg. Thinking, as was but
natural, that the editor had been the victim of some audacious theft,
he hastened to tell him what he had heard; and his astonishment may be
readily imagined when he was informed that the Russian edition had
appeared with the sanction of the editor himself, who not only insisted
that he had a perfect right to do as he pleased with the manuscript,
but positively refused to make any indemnity. Thereupon, Balzac, in
spite of the remonstrances of his friends, who pointed out that any
contest with the “Revue,” whose word was law, would inevitably result
in the closing of its columns to him, began a lawsuit, alleging that,
independent of the pecuniary loss which he suffered, a precedent of
this kind, once established, would in the future be highly prejudicial,
not only to him, but to all his confrères. Much to his amazement,
however, the defendant appeared in court with a list of signatures of
almost all of those whom he had sought to defend at his own risk and
peril, who attested that from a literary as well as from an ethical
standpoint they considered the action of the editor of the “Revue des
Deux Mondes” as eminently right and proper.
The law was, none the less, perfectly clear. Balzac won the suit, and
with it a host of enemies, whose hatred was so vigorous that it barely
abated, even after his death. Their insults delighted him. “Fire away,”
he would say; “the armor is strong. Your abuse is an advertisement;
your praise would lull the public to sleep, but your diatribes wake
them up. Besides, you hit the mark sometimes, and every fault you
signalize I correct, which in the end is so much gained.”
Among the host of enemies thus aroused were those who, not content with
denying his genius, advanced their artillery into private life, and
painted him in the possession of every vice in the criminal statutes;
and it is from the falsehoods of these guerrilleros that all the
stupidities which have been told concerning him found their primal
gestation. Not only his morality, his honesty, his sobriety, were
attacked, but even his name was denied to him. The _de_ was declared
not only an affectation, but a theft; and when some one said to him, in
allusion thereto, “But you are no connection of the De Balzac
d’Entragues,” “Ah! am I not?” he answered placidly. “Well, then, so
much the worse for them.”
-----
Footnote 1:
_Balzac_, by Madame de Surville. Calmann Lévy, Paris.
Footnote 2:
_Correspondance de H. de Balzac._ Calmann Lévy, Paris, 1877.
Footnote 3:
The present title is _Jane la Pâle_.
Footnote 4:
_Les Rivalités._.
Footnote 5:
_Le Médecin de Campagne._
Footnote 6:
_Ursule Mirouët._
Footnote 7:
_Gobseck._
Footnote 8:
_Le Père Goriot._
Footnote 9:
_Honoré de Balzac_, par Théophile Gautier. Un volume in-18, chez
Poulet-Malanis, 1859.
Footnote 10:
_La Fille aux Yeux d’Or._
Footnote 11:
See _La Canne de M. de Balzac_, par Madame de Girardin. Dumont, 1838.
Footnote 12:
The cholera.
Footnote 13:
Stomachic disorders, caused by the abuse of coffee.