I
Around 1835, I lived in two small rooms in the Impasse
du Doyenné, not far from the current location of the
Pavillon Mollien. Although it was located in the center of
Paris facing the Tuilleries and just a few steps from the
Louvre, the location was deserted and wild, and it
required a certain persistence for me to be found.
However, one morning a young man with a distinguished
look and a cordial and spiritual air approached my front
door and excused himself while making his introduction;
he was Jules Sandeau: he had come to recruit me on
behalf of Balzac for La Chronique de Paris, a weekly journal
that one will certainly remember, but which had not been
as financially successful as it deserved. Balzac, Sandeau
told me, had read Mademoiselle de Maupin, then very
recently published, and he had very much admired its
style; thus he wished to request my collaboration on the
journal that he sponsored and directed. A date was set for
us to get together, and from that date forward there was
between us a friendship that only death could break.
If I have told this story, it is not because it is flattering for
me, but because it honors Balzac, who, already famous,
sought out a young, obscure writer to collaborate in a
spirit of of camaraderie and complete equality. At that
time, it's true, Balzac was not yet the author of La Comédie
Humaine, but he had completed, besides several novellas,
La Physiologie du Mariage, La Peau de Chagrin, Louis Lambert,
Seraphita, Eugénie Grandet, l'Histoire des Treize, Le Médecin de
Campagne, Père Goriot, that is to say, in ordinary times,
enough to solidify five or six reputations. His nascent
glory, strengthened each month with new rays, shined
with all of the splendors of the aurora; certainly he shined
brightly like his contemporaries Lamartine, Victor Hugo,
de Vigny, de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Alexandre Dumas,
Mérimée, George Sand, and many others; but at no time
in his life did Balzac carry himself as the Grand Lama of
literature, and he was always good company; he had
pride, but he was entirely free of vanity.
He lived at that time at the end of the Jardin du
Luxembourg, near the Observatoire, on a little
frequented road given the name of Cassini, without
doubt because of its astronomical neighbor. On the
garden wall which occupied almost the entire side, and at
the end of which was found the house in which Balzac
lived, one read: Labsolu, brick merchant. That strange sign,
which is still there, if I am not wrong, is very striking; La
Recherche de l'Absolu can have no other inspiration. This
fateful name probably suggested to the author the idea of
Balthasar Claës in the pursuit of his impossible dream.
When I saw him for the first time, Balzac, one year older
than the century, was around thirty-six, and his face was
one of those that one would never forget. In his
presence, one is reminded of Shakespeare's lines about
Julius Caesar: "Before him, nature stands up boldly and
says to the world, 'This is a man!'"
My heart beat strongly because never had I approached
without trembling a master of thought, and all the
speeches I had prepared on the way stayed in my throat,
allowing nothing to pass other than a stupid phrase like
this: "The temperature is nice today." Heinrich Heine,
when he went to visit Goethe, could find nothing to say
except that the plums that have fallen from the trees on
the route from Iéna to Weimar are excellent for thirst,
which made the Jupiter of German poetry laugh gently.
Balzac, seeing my embarrassment, soon put me at my
ease, and during breakfast I became calm enough to
examine him in detail.
He wore, in the form of a dressing gown, a robe of white
cashmere or flannel held at the waist by a cord, in which,
some time later, he was painted by Louis Boulanger.
What whim had pushed him to choose, ahead of any
other, this costume that he never took off? Could it be
that it symbolized in his eyes the cloistered life to which
his labors condemned him, and, Benedictine of the novel,
he had thus taken the robe? This robe always suited him
marvelously. He boasted, showing me the intact sleeves,
to have never sullied its purity with the least stain of ink,
"because," he said, "the true writer should always be neat
while at his work."
His robe, thrown back, revealed the neck of an athlete or
a bull, round as a section of a column, without apparent
muscles, and of a satiny whiteness which contrasted with
the deeper hue of his face. At this time, Balzac, in the
prime of his life, gave the impression of a robust health,
little in harmony with the romantic pallors then in
fashion. The pure Tourainian blood left his cheeks a
bright purple and warmly colored his lips, thick and
sinuous, easy to laugh; a light mustache and a small beard
just below his lower lip accentuated the contours of his
mouth, without concealing them; the nose, square at the
end, divided into two lobes, pierced by very open
nostrils, of a character entirely original and unique;
Balzac, in posing for his bust, told the sculptor, David
d'Angers, "Be careful about my nose, my nose is a
world!" The forehead was beautiful, vast, noble, much
whiter than the face, with no creases other than a
perpendicular furrow along the ridge of the nose; there
was a very pronounced ridge above the eyebrows; the
hair, abundant, long, strong and black, stood up in back
like a lion's mane. As for the eyes, there have never
existed anything comparable. They had a life, a light, an
inconceivable magnetism. Despite the nightly vigils, their
whites were pure, limpid, bluish, like that of a child or a
virgin, and encased two black diamonds that shined at
times with rich reflections of gold: they were eyes to
make eagles avert their gaze, to penetrate walls and
hearts, to strike down a furious wild beast, the eyes of the
sovereign, the seer, the conqueror.
Mme. Emile de Girardin, in her novel entitled La Canne
de M. de Balzac, speaks of these shining eyes:
"Tancred then perceived at the front of the club,
turquoise, gold, marvelous carvings; and behind all of
that two large black eyes more brilliant than the stones."
Those extraordinary eyes, once one had met their gaze,
made it difficult to notice other features that might have
been trivial or irregular.
The habitual expression of the face was a sort of
powerful hilarity, a Rabelaisian and monkish joy — the
robe no doubt contributing to the birth of this idea —
which made you think of Brother Jean des
Entommeures, but it was enlarged and elevated by a
mind of the first order.
According to his habit, Balzac had risen at midnight, and
had written until my arrival. His features betrayed no
fatigue, aside from a slight darkening beneath the eyelids,
and during the entire breakfast he demonstrated a wild
gaiety. Little by little the conversation drifted toward
literature, and he complained of the enormous difficulties
of the French language. Style preoccupied him a great
deal, and he sincerely believed that he had none at all. It
is true that he was then generally thought to be lacking
this quality. The school of Victor Hugo, in love with the
sixteenth century and the Middle Ages, specialized in
patterns, in rhythms, in structure, rich in words, breaking
prose with the gymnastics of verse, and modeling itself
on a master confident in his methods, would do nothing
other than that which was well written, that is to say
worked and toned beyond measure, and found the
portrayal of modern manners to be useless, conventional,
and lacking in lyricism. Balzac, despite the popularity that
he had begun to enjoy among the public, was not
admitted among the gods of Romanticism, and he knew
it. While devouring his books, people did not pause to
regard their serious side, and even for his admirers, he
remained for a long time the most productive of our
novelists and nothing else; this surprises today, but I can
vouch for the truth of my assertion. He tortured himself
in trying to achieve a style, and, in his anxiety to make
corrections, he consulted people who were a hundred
times his inferiors. Before signing his name to anything,
he had written under different pseudonyms (Horace de
Saint-Aubin, L. de Viellerglé, etc.) one hundred volumes
just "to free his hand." However he already possessed a
style of his own without being conscious of it.
But let me return to our breakfast. While talking, Balzac
played with his knife or his fork, and I noted that his
hands were of a rare beauty, the true hands of a prelate,
white, with fingers both slender and plump, and nails that
were pink and shiny; he was proud of them and smiled
with pleasure as I looked at them. He considered his
hands to be evidence of breeding and aristocratic birth.
Lord Byron, in a note, says with evident satisfaction, that
Ali Pacha complimented him on the smallness of his ears,
and inferred from them that he was a true gentleman. A
similar remark upon his hands would have equally
flattered Balzac, even more than the praise of one his
books. He had a sort of prejudice against those whose
extremities lacked finesse. The meal was rather fine, a
paté de foie gras was part of it, but this was a deviation
from his habitual frugality, as he remarked while
laughing, and that for "this solemn occasion" he had
borrowed his silver plates from his library!
I retired after having promised some articles for La
Chronique de Paris, where Le Tour en Belgique, La Morte
Amoureuse, La Chaine d'Or, and other literary works had
appeared. Charles de Bernard, who had also been called
by Balzac, contributed La Femme de Quarante Ans, La Rose
Jaune, and some new work since collected into volumes.
Balzac, as one knows, had invented the woman of thirty
years; his imitator added ten years to that already
venerable age and his heroine obtained no less success.
Before going further, let's pause for a moment and give
some details of Balzac's life prior to my acquaintance
with him. My authorities will be Madame de Surville, his
sister, and himself.
Balzac was born in Tours, May 16, 1799, on the day of
the celebration of Saint Honoré who gave him his name,
which sounded good and augured well. Little Honoré was
not a child prodigy; he did not announce prematurely that
he would write La Comédie Humaine. He was a fresh, rosy,
healthy boy, fond of play, with gentle, sparkling eyes, but
in no way distinguished from other boys of his age, at
least upon casual observation. At seven, upon leaving a
day school in Tours, he attended a secondary school in
Vendôme run by the Oratoriens, where he was thought
to be a very mediocre student.
The first part of Louis Lambert contains curious
information regarding this period of Balzac's life.
Dividing his own personality, he describes himself as an
old classmate of Louis Lambert, sometimes speaking in
his name, and sometimes lending his own sentiments to
this person who is imaginary, yet very real, since he is a
sort of lens into the writer's very soul.
"Situated in the middle of the town, upon the little river
Loire that bathes its walls, the college forms a vast
enclosure containing the establishments necessary for an
institution of this kind: a chapel, a theater, an infirmary, a
bakery, some streams of water. This college, the most
celebrated seat of instruction of the central provinces, is
populated by those provinces and by our colonies. The
distance does not allow parents to come here often to see
their children; the rules forbid vacations away from the
institution. Once they have entered, the pupils do not
leave the college until the end of their studies. With the
exception of walks taken outside under the supervision of
the Fathers, everything had been planned to give to this
house all of the advantages of monastic discipline. In my
time, the corrector was still a living memory, and the
leather strap played with honor its terrible role."
It is in this way that Balzac described this formidable
college, which left in his imagination such persistent
memories.
It would be intriguing to compare the novella titled
William Wilson, in which Edgar Allen Poe describes, with
the strange exaggerations of childhood, the old building
from the time of Queen Elizabeth where his hero was
raised with a companion who was no less strange than
Louis Lambert; but this is not the place to make this
comparison, thus I must content myself only to point it
out.
Balzac suffered prodigiously in this college, where his
tendency to daydream was assaulted every instant by
some inflexible rule. He neglected his studies; but,
benefitting from the tacit complicity of a tutor of
mathematics, who was at the same time a librarian and
occupied in studies that were outside of the realm of
ordinary experience, he did not take his lessons and
borrowed all of the books he wished. He passed all of his
time in secret reading. Soon he became the most
punished student in the class. Extra work and detentions
occupied his recreation time.
For certain schoolchildren, punishments inspire a sort of
stoic rebellion, and they oppose the exasperated
professors with the same disdainful impassivity that
captive savage warriors display toward the enemy who
tortures them. Isolation, starvation, and the leather strap
will not elicit the least complaint; there are thus between
the master and the student some horrible conflicts,
unknown to the parents, in which the steadfastness of the
martyrs and the skills of the executioner are found
equally. Some nervous teachers cannot bear the
expressions full of hate, scorn, and threat with which a
child of eight or ten years defies them.
Let us consider here some characteristic details that,
under the name of Louis Lambert, also describe Balzac.
"Accustomed to the open air, the independence of an
education left to chance, the tender care of an old man
who cherished him, and thinking while being warmed by
the rays of the sun, it was very difficult for him to
conform to the rules of the college, to march in line, to
live within the four walls of a room in which twenty-four
young boys were silent, seated on a wooden bench, each
before his desk. His senses possessed a perfection which
gave them an exquisite fragility, and they all suffered
from this communal life; the exhalations that left the air
corrupted, mixed with the odor of a class that was always
dirty and encumbered by the remains of our lunches and
our snacks, affected his sense of smell, that sense which,
connected more directly than the others to the cerebral
system, should cause by its derangements some
unavoidable shocks to the organ of thought; apart from
these atmospheric corruptions, he found in our study
halls some spots where each would put his booty,
pigeons killed for the feast days or plates stolen from the
refectory. Finally our rooms contained an immense stone
on which two buckets of water rested where on a rotating
basis we went each morning to wash our face and hands,
in the presence of the master. Washed only once each day
before our awakening, our premises were always dirty.
Then, despite the number of windows and the height of
the door, the air was always fouled by the emanations of
the wash house, the garbage dump, by the thousand
activities of every schoolboy, without counting our eighty
bodies when assembled. This kind of a collective
humidity, when combined with the dirt that we would
carry back from our travels, resulted in an unbearable
stench. The deprivation of air that was pure and scented
with the countryside in which he had until then lived, the
change in his routines, and the discipline all saddened
Lambert. His head always leaning on his left hand and his
arm supported by his desk, he passed his study time by
looking at the foliage of the trees or the clouds in the sky.
He seemed to be studying his lessons; but seeing his pen
immovably fixed and his page remaining blank, the
professor would cry out to him: 'You are doing nothing,
Lambert.'"
To this vivid and truthful description of the miseries of
life at school, let me add an extract in which Balzac
characterizes himself as a duality under the double
sobriquet Pythagoras and the Poet, one carried by the
half of himself personified in Louis Lambert and the other
by the half of himself that was his true identity, and
which explains admirably why he was seen by his teachers
as being an incapable child:
"Our independence, our illicit occupations, our apparent
indolence, the torpor in which we remained, our constant
punishments, our repugnance toward homework and
chores, won us the reputation of being useless and
incorrigible boys: our masters despised us, and we
similarly fell into the most terrible discredit among our
classmates, from whom we concealed our contraband
studies for fear of their mockeries. This double low
regard, unjust on the part of the Fathers, was a natural
sentiment on the part of our classmates; we didn't know
how to play ball, run, or walk on stilts on those days of
amnesty when by chance we obtained a moment of
freedom; we didn't take part in any of the amusements
then in style at the school; strangers to the pleasures of
our comrades, we remained alone, seated sadly under a
tree in the courtyard. The Poet and Pythagoras were an
exception, living a life separate from that of the
community. The penetrating instinct, the fragile self-regard
of schoolboys, gave them a greater sensitivity with
regard to minds that were higher or lower than their own;
from there, for some, was hatred of our mute aristocracy;
for others, scorn for our uselessness. We held these
sentiments between us without our full knowledge, and
it's possible that I didn't understand them until today. We
lived therefore exactly like two rats skulking in the corner
of the room that held our desks, bound there equally
during the hours of study and during those of
recreation."
The result of these hidden labors, of these meditations
which used up study time, was the famous Traité de la
Volonté about which he spoke many times in La Comédie
Humaine. Balzac always regretted the loss of this first
work that he describes in Louis Lambert, and he speaks
with an emotion that time has not diminished of the
confiscation of the box that held the precious
manuscript; some jealous schoolmates tried to snatch the
box that two friends fiercely defended: "Suddenly,
attracted by the noise of the battle, Father Haugoult
roughly intervened and quieted the dispute. This terrible
Haugoult ordered us to give the box to him; Lambert
handed him the key, the teacher took the papers and
flipped through them; then he said while confiscating
them: 'So this is the foolishness for which you neglect
your work!' Large tears fell from Lambert's eyes, caused
as much by the consciousness of his offended sense of
moral superiority as by the gratuitous insult and the
betrayal that overwhelmed him. Father Haugoult
probably sold the Traité de la Volonté to a grocer of
Vendôme without knowing the importance of the
scientific treasures whose seeds were left to die in
ignorant hands."
After this passage he adds, "It was in memory of the
catastrophe that had happened to Louis's book that in the
work with which these studies begin I used for a piece of
fiction the title truly invented by Lambert, and that I
ave the name (Pauline) of a woman who was dear to him to
a young girl who was full of devotion."
In effect, if I open La Peau de Chagrin, I find in the
confession of Raphael the following words: "You alone
admired my Théorie de la Volonté, that long work for which
I learned the Oriental languages, anatomy, physiology,
and to which I dedicated the greatest part of my time,
work which, if I am not mistaken, will complete the
studies of Mesmer, of Lavater, of Gall, of Bichat, by
opening a new path to the human science; there stops my
beautiful life, this sacrifice of all of those days, this
silkworm's work, unknown to the world, and whose only
compensation could be in the work itself; since the end
of childhood until the day that I finished my Theorié, I
have observed, learned, written, read without rest, and
my life has seemed like a long chore; a gentle lover of
Oriental idleness, enthralled with my dreams, sensual, I
have always worked, denying myself the delights of
Parisian life; a gourmand, I have been temperate; fond of
hikes and journeys on the water, hoping to visit foreign
countries, still finding a child's pleasure in skipping stones
on the water, I stayed constantly seated with pen in hand;
talkative, I went to listen in silence to the public courses
at the library and the museum; I slept in my solitary bunk
like a devotee of the order of Saint Benedict, and women
were however my only fantasy, a fantasy that I caressed
but which always escaped me!"
If Balzac regretted the Traité de la Volonté, he was less
sensitive to the loss of his epic poem on the Incas, which
began thusly:
Oh Inca, oh ill-fated and unhappy king!
This unfortunate inspiration earned him, for all of the
remaining time that he stayed at the school, the derisory
nickname of poet. Balzac, it must be confessed, never had
a gift for poetry, at least for meter; his complex thoughts
rebelled against rhythm.
From these intense meditations, from these truly
prodigious intellectual efforts of a child of twelve or
fourteen years, there resulted a bizarre malady, a nervous
fever, a sort of coma entirely inexplicable for the
professors, who were not in on the secret of the readings
and the works of young Honoré, who appeared to be so
lazy and stupid. No one at the school suspected this
precocious excess of intelligence, no one knew that in the
cell in which he caused himself to be put daily so as to be
at liberty, this student who was thought to be lazy had
absorbed an entire library of serious books that were
beyond the typical understanding of his age.
Let me here tie together several curious lines related to
the reading ability attributed to Louis Lambert, that is to
say, Balzac:
"In three years, Louis had assimilated the substance of
the books in his uncle's library that deserved to be read.
His absorption of ideas by reading had become a curious
phenomenon: his eye took in seven or eight lines at a
time, and his mind appreciated their meaning at an equal
speed. Often a single word in a phrase sufficed for him to
appreciate its substance. His memory was prodigious. He
remembered with the same fidelity the thoughts acquired
by reading as those which reflection or conversation had
suggested to him. Ultimately he retained all of those
memories: those of places, of names, of words, of things,
of figures; not only did he recall objects at will, but he
remembered them again lit and colored as they were at
the moment that he first perceived them. This power
applied equally to the most imperceptible elements of
understanding. He remembered not only the placement
of thoughts in the book from which he had derived
them, but even the disposition of his soul at those distant
times."
Balzac retained this marvelous gift of his youth
throughout his life, even in larger measure as the years
passed, and it is through this that his immense work can
be explained, truly the work of Hercules.
The anxious teachers wrote to Balzac's parents to come
for him as soon as possible. His mother hurried to him
and picked him up to take him back to Tours. The
astonishment of the family was great when they saw the
thin and sickly child that the school had returned to them
in place of the cherub it had received, and it was
distressing for Honoré's grandmother. Not only had he
lost his beautiful colors and his youthful sturdiness, but,
struck by a congestion of ideas, he appeared to be an
imbecile. His manner was that of an ecstatic, of a
somnambulist who sleeps with his eyes open: lost in a
profound reverie, he did not hear that which was said to
him, or his mind, returning from afar, arrived too late to
respond. But the open air, rest, the nurturing
environment of the family, the recreations they forced
him to take and the vigorous juices of adolescence soon
triumphed over this sickly state. The tumult caused in
that young brain by the whirring of ideas diminished.
Little by little, the muddled readings became organized;
abstractions came to be blended into real images,
observations made silently on life; while walking and
playing, he studied the pretty landscapes of the Loire, the
provincial types, the cathedral of Saint-Gatien and the
characteristic physiognomies of the priests and canons;
many of the images which later served in the grand fresco
of the Comédie were sketched during this period of fruitful
inaction. However, the intelligence of Balzac was not
perceived or understood any more in his family than at
school. Even if something clever escaped his lips, his
mother, despite being a superior woman, would say to
him: "Without a doubt, Honoré, you don't understand
what you are saying." And Balzac would laugh, without
further explanation, that wonderful laugh that he had.
Balzac's father, who shared qualities at that time with
Montaigne, Rabelais, and Uncle Toby, by his philosophy,
his originality, and his goodness (it's Madame de Surville
who is speaking), had a little better opinion of his son,
believing due to certain genetic theories that he held that
a child created by himself could not be stupid:
nevertheless, he had no suspicion of the great man that
he would become in the future.
Balzac's family having returned to Paris, he was entered
into the boarding school of Monsieur Lepitre, Rue Saint-Louis,
and Messieurs Sganzer and Beuzelin, Rue
Thoringy in the Marais. There as at the school in
Vendôme, his genius did not reveal itself, and he
remained in the midst of the troop of ordinary students.
No prefect exclaimed to him: "You will be Marcellus!" or
"Thus you shall go to the stars!"
His classes finished, Balzac gave himself that second
education which is the true one; he studied, perfected
himself, attended the courses of the Sorbonne, and
studied law while working with an attorney and a notary.
This time, apparently lost, since Balzac became neither an
attorney, nor a notary, nor a lawyer, nor a judge, gave him
a personal acquaintance with the personnel of the
Bazoche and led him to later write what I might call the
litigations of La Comédie Humaine in the style of a man
marvelously versed in that profession.
The examinations passed, the great question of which
career to select presented itself. His family wanted to
make a notary of Balzac; but the future great writer, who,
even though no one believed in his genius, had a
consciousness of it himself, refused in a most respectful
manner, although they had organized a position on the
most favorable terms. His father gave him two years to
prove himself, and as the family had returned to the
provinces, Madame Balzac installed Honoré in a garret,
allowing him a stipend sufficient for only his most
pressing needs, hoping that a little hardship would make
him wiser.
This garret was perched on the Rue de Lesdiguières,
number nine, near the Arsenal, whose library offered its
resources to the young laborer. Without a doubt, to pass
from an abundant and luxurious house to a miserable
hovel would be difficult at any age other than 21, which
was the age of Balzac; but if the dream of every child is
to have boots, that of every young man is to have a
room, a room all to himself, whose key he carries in his
pocket, although he can stand upright only at its center: a
room, it's the trappings of virility, it's independence,
personality, love!
Behold then master Honoré perched near the sky, seated
before his table, and trying to create a work that would
justify the indulgence of his father and disprove the
unfavorable predictions of his friends. It is a remarkable
thing that Balzac debuted with a tragedy, with a Cromwell!
Around that same time, Victor Hugo also put the last
touches on his Cromwell, whose preface became the
manifesto of all young dramatists.