II

In attentively rereading La Comédie Humaine when one has

known Balzac personally, one finds there scattered

curious details with regard to his character and his life,

particularly in his first works, where he has not yet

separated out his own personality, and, due to a lack of

subjects, observes and dissects himself. I have said that

he began his rude apprenticeship for the literary life in a

garret on the Rue Lesdiguières, near the Arsenal. The

novel Facino Cane, published in Paris in March, 1836, and

dedicated to Louise, contains some precious information

regarding the life that this young aspirant for glory led in

his aerial nest.

"I lived then in a street which without doubt you do not

know, the Rue Lesdiguières: it begins at the Rue Saint-Antoine,

opposite a fountain, near the Place de la Bastille,

and leads into the Rue de la Cerisaie. The love of science

had thrown me into an attic where I wrote all night, and I

passed the day in a neighboring library, that of Monsieur;

I lived frugally, I had accepted all of the conditions of the

monastic life, so necessary for laborers. When the

weather was fine, I allowed myself a walk on the

Boulevard Bourbon. One sole passion enticed me from

my studious habits; but wasn't this also studying? I went

to observe the manners of the neighborhood, its

inhabitants and their characters. As ill clad as the

workers, indifferent to decorum, I did not put them on

their guard against me: I could mingle in their groups, see

them conclude their deals, and hear them argue about the

time that they would stop working. For me, observation

had already become intuitive, it penetrated the soul

without neglecting the body; in other words it so

thoroughly grasped exterior that it transcended it

immediately; it gave me the ability to live the life of the

individual on which I was focused and permitted me to

substitute myself for him, like the dervish of the Thousand

and One Nights seized the body and the soul of persons

over whom he pronounced certain words.

"When, between eleven o'clock and midnight, I met a

workman and his wife returning from the Ambigu-Comique,

I amused myself by following them from the

Boulevard Pont-aux-Choux to the Boulevard

Beaumarchais. These good people would at first speak of

the play that they had just seen; next they would address

their personal affairs; the mother would pull the child by

the hand without listening to either his complaints or his

questions. The married couple would count up the

money that would be paid to them the next day. They

would spend it in twenty different ways. They would then

move on to household matters, complaints over the

excessive price of potatoes or the length of the winter

and the rise in the cost of butter, energetic discussions on

how much was owed to the baker, and finally onto

discussions where each of them became irritated and

demonstrated his character with picturesque words. In

listening to these people, I could connect with their life, I

felt their rags upon my back, I walked with my feet in

their tattered shoes; their desires, their needs, all

passed into my soul, and my soul passed into theirs; it

was the dream of an awakened man. I became

exasperated with them against the workshop foremen

who tyrannized them or against the unfair practice that

made them return many times without providing them

with their pay. To abandon habits, to become another

through this intoxication of the moral faculties and to

play this game at will, such was my entertainment. To

what do I owe this gift? Is it an extrasensory perception?

Is it one of those qualities whose abuse would lead to

madness? I have never sought the sources of this power;

I possess it and I use it, that is all."

I have transcribed these lines, which are doubly

interesting because they illuminate a little-known side of

Balzac's life, and because they show that he was

conscious of this powerful faculty of intuition that he

already possessed at such a high level and without which

the realization of his work would have been impossible.

Balzac, like Vishnu, the Indian god, possessed the gift of

metamorphosis, that is to say the ability to incarnate

himself into different bodies and live in them as long as

he wished; however, the number of the metamorphoses

of Vishnu is fixed at ten: those of Balzac are countless,

and furthermore he could produce them at will. Although

it may seem extravagant to say this in the heart of the

nineteenth century, Balzac was a seer. His merits as an

observer, his acuteness as a physiologist, his genius as a

writer, do not suffice to explain the infinite variety of the

two or three thousand types which play a more or less

important role in La Comédie Humaine. He did not copy

them, he lived them in an ideal manner, he wore their

clothes, he took on their habits, he immersed himself in

their surroundings, he was them for as long as necessary.

From there come these authentic, logical characters,

never contradicting themselves and never forgetting

themselves, endowed with an intimate and profound

existence, who, to use one of his expressions, took on the

challenge of life in civil society. Truly red blood circulated

in their veins in place of the ink that infused the creations

of ordinary writers.

Balzac did not possess this ability for any time except the

present. He could transport his thought into a marquis,

into a financier, into a middle-class person, into a man of

the people, into a woman of the world, into a courtesan,

but the shadows of the past did not obey his call: he

never knew, like Goethe, how to evoke from the depths

of antiquity the beautiful Hélène and make her dwell in

the Gothic manor of Faust. With two or three

exceptions, all of his work is modern; he has assimilated

the living, he has not resurrected the dead. Even history

seduced him little, as one can see from the preface to La

Comédie Humaine: "In reading the dry and off-putting

catalogues of facts called histories, who has not recognized

that the writers have forgotten in every era, in Egypt, in

Persia, in Greece, in Rome, to give us the history of

manners? The piece by Petronius on the private life of

the Romans irritates rather than satisfies our curiosity."

This void left by the historians of vanished societies,

Balzac proposed to fill for our own, and God knows that

he carefully followed the program that he had planned.

"Society was going to be the historian, I should not be

but the secretary; in constructing the inventory of vices

and of virtues, in assembling the principal features of the

passions, in depicting the characters, in choosing the

principal events of the society, in composing types by the

blending of traits of several homogeneous characters,

perhaps I could succeed in writing the history forgotten

by so many historians, that of manners. With a great deal

of patience and courage, I might be able to complete, on

nineteenth century France, the book that we all regret

that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, India, have

unfortunately not left us on their civilization, and that like

the abbot Bartholomew, the courageous and patient

Monteil had attempted regarding the Middle Ages,

although in a form that was not appealing."

But let us return to the garret on the Rue Lesdiguières.

Balzac had not conceived the plan of the work that

would immortalize him; he was still seeking it with

anxiety, bated breath, and hard labor, trying everything

and succeeding in nothing; however he already possessed

that obstinacy in his work to which Minerva, as surly as

she might be, must one day or another yield; he outlined

comic operas, made plans for comedies, dramas and

romances whose titles Madame de Surville has preserved:

Stella, Coqsigrue, Les Deux Philosophes, without counting the

terrible Cromwell, whose verses had caused him so much

pain and yet were not worth much more than that which

began his epic poem, Incas.

Imagine to yourself young Honoré, his legs wrapped in a

patched coat, his upper body protected by an old shawl

of his mother, his headdress a sort of Dantesque cap and

his hair of a cut that only Madame de Balzac knew, his

coffee pot to his left, his inkwell to his right, working

with a heaving chest and bowed forehead, like an ox at

the plow, the field still stony and not cleared by those

thoughts which would later trace for him such productive

furrows. The lamp shines like a star in the front of the

dark house, the snow falls in silence on the loosened tiles,

the wind blows through the door and window "like

Tulou on his Flute, but less agreeably."

If some dawdling passerby had raised his eyes toward

that little, obstinately flickering glow, he certainly would

not have suspected that it was the dawning of one of the

greatest glories of our age.

Would you like to see a sketch of the place, transposed,

it's true, but very exact, drawn by the author in La Peau de

Chagrin, that work which contains so much of himself?

"… A room which looks down upon the yards of the

neighboring houses, from the windows of which extend

long poles hung with washing; nothing was more horrible

than that garret with those yellow, grimy walls, which

soaked in the misery and called out to its scholar. The

roof slanted in a uniform fashion, and the loosened tiles

permitted a view of the sky; there was room for a bed, a

table, a few chairs, and under the sharp angle of the roof

I could position my piano … I lived in this aerial

sepulcher for almost three years, working night and day,

without rest, with so much pleasure that my studies

seemed to be the most beautiful focus, the happiest

solution to human life. The calm and silence necessary to

the scholar have some elements of the sweetness and

intoxication of love … Study lends a sort of magic to

everything that surrounds us. The meager desk upon

which I wrote and the brown leather that covered it, my

piano, my bed, my armchair, the peculiar wallpaper, my

furniture, all of these things came to life and became for

me humble friends, silent partners in my future. How

many times have I not shared my soul while gazing upon

them? Often, while letting my eyes wander on a crooked

molding, I would encounter new developments, a striking

proof of my system that I believed was able to convey

nearly untranslatable thoughts."

In this same passage, he makes an allusion to his work: "I

had undertaken two great works; a comedy that was in

only a few days to give me fame, a fortune and entry into

that world in which I wanted to reappear while exercising

the kingly rights of a man of genius. You have all seen in

this masterpiece the first error of a young man just out of

college, the nonsense of a child. Your jibes destroyed the

nascent illusions, which since then have not been

awakened …"

One recognizes here the ill-fated Cromwell, which, read in

front of the family and the assembled friends, was a

complete fiasco.

Honoré appealed this sentence before an arbiter whom

he accepted as competent, an honorable old man, a

former professor at the École Polytechnique. The

judgment was that the author should do "anything at all,

except literature."

What a loss for letters, what a void in the human spirit if

the young man had bowed before the experience of the

old man and listened to his counsel, which, certainly, was

most wise, because there was not the least spark of

genius nor even of talent in this rhetorical tragedy!

Happily Balzac, under the pseudonym of Louis Lambert,

had not composed for nothing at the college of Vendôme

the Traité de la Volonté.

He submitted to the sentence, but only for tragedy;

he understood that he should give up trying to walk in

the footsteps of Corneille and Racine, whom he so

admired without being in their debt, for never were

geniuses more contrary to that of himself. The novel

offered him a more suitable model, and he wrote at this

time a great number of volumes which he did not sign

and which he always disavowed. The Balzac that we

know and that we admire was still in limbo and struggled

in vain to extricate himself. Those who had judged him

capable of being nothing but a copyist appeared to be

right; perhaps even this option had failed him, because

his beautiful handwriting had already deteriorated with

the crumpled, crossed out, overwritten, near hieroglyphic

drafts of the writer fighting for the idea and no longer

concerned about the beauty of the character.

Thus, nothing resulted from this rigorous confinement,

this hermetic life in the Thébaïde in which Raphaël

outlines the budget: "Three sous of bread, two sous of

milk, three sous of meat that prevented me from dying of

hunger and kept my mind in a state of singular lucidity.

My lodgings cost me three sous a day; I burned three

sous of oil every night, I took care of my own room, I

wore flannel shirts so that I would spend only two sous a

day for laundry. I warmed myself with coal, whose price

divided by the days in the year never gave more than two

sous for each. I had suits of clothes, linens, and shoes for

three years: I didn't want to get dressed except to go to

certain public lectures and to the libraries; these expenses

combined were only eighteen sous: there remained two

sous for unforeseen things. I do not recall having, during

this long period of work, having passed the Pont des Arts

or ever buying water."

Without doubt, Raphaël exaggerated these economies a

little, but Balzac's correspondence with his sister shows

that the novel does not differ much from the reality. The

old woman referred to in his letters by the name of Iris la

Messagère, who was 70 years-old, could not have been a

very active housekeeper, as Balzac writes: "The news of

my household is disastrous, the work does harm to its

cleanliness. This rascal of Myself neglects himself more

and more, he only descends every three or four days to

make some purchases, he goes to the closest and worst

provisioned merchants in the quarter: the others are too

far, and the fellow economizes even his steps; so that

your brother (destined for so much celebrity) is already

nourished absolutely like a great man, that is to say that

he is dying of hunger."

"Another problem: The coffee is made terribly bitter by

dirt. Lots of water is needed to correct the damage; but

the water does not rise to my celestial garret (it descends

there only on stormy days), it will require, after the

purchase of the piano, the installation of a hydraulic

machine, if the coffee continues to disappear while the

master and the servant daydream."

Elsewhere, continuing the joking, he reprimands the lazy

Myself, the only footman that he has in his service, who

does not fill the basin, leaves dust balls scattered freely

under the bed, the dirt obscuring the windows,

and the spiders spinning their webs in the corners.

In another letter, he writes: "I have eaten two melons …

it will be necessary to pay for them with nuts and dry

bread!"

One of the rare recreations that he permitted himself was

to go to the Jardin des Plantes or Père-Lachaise. At the

summit of the funereal hill, he towered over Paris like

Rastignac at the burial of Père Goriot. His gaze glided

over this ocean of slate and tile that cover up so much

luxury, misery, intrigue and passion. Like a young eagle,

he took in his prey at a glance; but he still had no wings,

no beak, no talons, although his eye could already fix

itself on the sun. He said, contemplating the tombs:

"There are no more beautiful epitaphs than these: La

Fontaine, Masséna, Molière: one single name that says

everything and makes us dream!"

This sentence contains an ill-defined but prophetic

understanding that the future realized, alas!, too soon. On

the slope of the hill, upon a sepulchral stone, beneath a

bust cast in bronze, after the marble of David, the word

BALZAC says everything and makes the solitary

wanderer dream.

The dietary regimen recommended by Raphaël could be

favorable to the lucidity of the brain; but certainly it was

worthless for a young man used to the comfort of family

life. The fifteen months that passed under these intellectual

burdens, sadder, without fail, than those of Venice, had

made the youthful Tourangeau with the soft, glowing

cheeks a Parisian skeleton, haggard and yellow, nearly

unrecognizable. Balzac reentered the paternal home,

where the fatted calf was killed for the return of this only

slightly prodigal child.

I glide lightly over the period of his life when he tried to

ensure independence by speculations in the book trade

and during which only a lack of capital prevented him

from finding success. These ventures put him in debt,

mortgaged his future, and despite the devoted assistance

offered perhaps too late by the family, burdened him

with the rock of Sisyphus that he so many times pushed

just to the edge of the hill, and which always fell back

with more crushing weight upon the shoulders of this

Atlas, overloaded besides by an entire world.

This debt that he made it a sacred duty to discharge,

because it represented the fortune of those who were

dear to him, was Necessity armed with a spiked whip, her

hand bearing bronze nails that harassed him night and

day, with neither truce nor pity, making him regard every

hour of repose or recreation as a theft. She dominated his

entire life painfully, often rendering it inexplicable to he

who did not possess its secret.

Having provided these indispensable biographical details,

I come to my direct and personal impressions of Balzac.

Balzac, that immense brain, that physiologist so

penetrating, that observer so profound, that mind so

intuitive, did not possess the literary gift: within him there

opened an abyss between the thought and the form. That

abyss, particularly in the early years, he despaired of

crossing. He threw himself without fulfillment into

volume upon volume, observation upon observation,

essay upon essay; an entire library of disavowed books

passed through there. A will less robust would have been

discouraged a thousand times; but happily Balzac had an

unshakeable confidence in his genius, unknown to all the

world. He wanted to be a great man, and he was that by

his unrelenting projections of that force that was more

powerful than electricity, and with which he made such

subtle analyses in Louis Lambert.

Unlike the writers of the romantic school, who

distinguished themselves by a boldness and astonishing

facility of execution, and produced their fruits at nearly

the same time as their flowers, in a blossoming that was in

a sense involuntary, Balzac, the equal in genius of them

all, did not find his means of expression, or did not find

it until after infinite suffering. Hugo said in one of his

prefaces, with his Castilian pride: "I do not know the art

of soldering a beauty in the place of a defect, and I

correct myself in another work." But Balzac would cover

a tenth proof with his crossings out, and when he saw me

return to the La Chronique de Paris the proof of an article

written in a hurry, on the corner of a table, with only

typographical corrections, he could not believe, as

content as he was otherwise, that I had applied all of my

talent there. "By reworking it two or three times, it would

have been better," he said to me.

Citing himself as an example, he preached to me a

strange literary lifestyle. I must cloister myself for two or

three years, drink water, eat soggy lupins like Protogène,

go to bed at six o'clock in the evening, get up at

midnight, and work until morning, using the day to

revise, expand, shorten, perfect, polish the nocturnal

work, correct the proofs, take notes, do the necessary

studies, and live most importantly with absolute chastity.

He insisted a great deal upon this last recommendation,

which was very challenging for a young man of twenty-four

or twenty-five years. According to him, true chastity

develops to the highest degree the powers of the mind,

and gives to those who practice it unidentified abilities. I

timidly objected that the greatest geniuses did not forbid

themselves love, passion, or even pleasure, and I cited

some illustrious names. Balzac shook his head and

responded, "They would have done better, without the

women!"

The only concession that he would grant me, and even

then he regretted it, was to see my beloved one half hour

each year. He permitted letters: "These guide the

development of style."

By means of this regimen, he promised to make of me,

with the natural abilities that he was pleased to recognize

in me, a writer of the first order. It is clear from my work

that I have not followed this plan.

It must not be believed that Balzac was joking when he

laid down these conditions that the Trappists or the

Carthusians would have found harsh. He was perfectly

convinced, and spoke with such eloquence that many

times I consciously tried to use this method to develop

genius; I awoke numerous times at midnight, and after

having partaken of the inspirational coffee, acted

according to the formula, seating myself in front of a

table on which sleep caused me to quickly lay my head.

La Morte Amoureuse, published in the La Chronique de Paris,

was my only nocturnal work.

Around this time, Balzac had written for a review Facino

Cane, the story of a noble Venetian who, imprisoned in

the vaults of the ducal palace, had fallen, while digging an

escape tunnel, upon the secret treasure of the Republic, a

good part of which he carried away with the help of a

bribed jailer. Facino Cane, who became blind and played

the clarinet under the common name of Father Canet,

had kept an extrasensory perception for gold; he

recognized it through walls and in vaults, and he offered

to the writer, at a wedding in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine,

to guide him, if he was willing to pay him the

cost of the journey, toward this immense mass of riches

whose location had been lost due to the fall of the

Venetian Republic. Balzac, as I have said, lived his

characters, and at this moment, he was Facino Cane

himself, although without the blindness, for never have

there been eyes more sparkling or scintillating on a

human face. He dreamed of nothing but tons of gold,

heaps of diamonds and garnets, and, by means of

magnetism, with whose practices he had been long

familiar, he sought from these explorations the

location of the buried and lost treasure. He pretended to

have learned in this way, in the most precise manner, the

place where, near the hill of Pointe-à-Pître, Toussaint

Louverture had caused his booty to be buried by negroes

who were immediately shot. The Gold-Bug, of Edgar Poe,

does not equal, in subtlety of reasoning, in clarity of plan,

in divination of details, the fevered rendition that he has

given us of the expedition to attempt to become master

of this treasure, which was far richer than that which was

buried by Tom Kidd at the skull at the foot of the

Talipot.

I implore the reader to not make too much fun of me, if

I confess to him in all humility that I soon shared the

conviction of Balzac. What brain could have resisted his

breathtaking speech? Jules Sandeau was also soon

seduced, and as he needed two dependable friends, two

devoted and robust companions to perform the

nocturnal excavations under the direction of the seer,

Balzac was pleased to grant us one-fourth each of this

prodigious fortune. One-half was to revert to him by

right, as he had made the discovery and directed the

enterprise.

We were to buy pikes, pickaxes and shovels, get them

secretly on board the vessel, and get ourselves to a

designated point by different routes so as not to excite

suspicions, and, the blow being struck, we were to

transport our riches on a brigantine chartered in advance;

in short, it was quite a tale, which would have been

admirable if Balzac had written it instead of speaking it.

There is no need to say that we did not unearth the

treasure of Toussaint Louverture. Money was not

available to pay our passage; the three of us had at most

enough to buy the pickaxes.

The dream of a sudden fortune won by some strange and

marvelous means often haunted the brain of Balzac;

some years before (in 1833), he had made a voyage to

Sardinia to examine the slag of the silver mines

abandoned by the Romans, which, treated by imperfect

processes, must according to him still have contained a

great deal of metal. The idea was reasonable and,

imprudently confided, made the fortune of another.