I have related the anecdote of the treasure buried by
Toussaint Louverture, not for the pleasure of telling a
strange story, but because it is connected with a
dominant idea of Balzac – money. Certainly, nobody was
less avaricious than the author of La Comédie Humaine, but
his genius made him foresee the immense role that this
metallic hero would play in art, more interesting for
modern society than the Grandissons, the Desgrieux, the
Oswalds, the Werthers, the Malek-Adhels, the Renés, the
Laras, the Waverleys, the Quentin Durwards, etc.
Until then the story had been confined to the portrayal of
a unique passion, love, but love in an ideal sphere and
outside of the necessities and miseries of life. The
personages of these entirely psychological recitals neither
ate, nor drank, nor lodged, nor had an account with their
tailor. They moved in an abstract environment like those
of a tragedy. If they wished to travel, they put, without
obtaining a passport, some handfuls of diamonds into the
bottom of their pocket, and paid with this currency the
postilions, who did not fail at each way station to have
exhausted their horses; some chateaus of indistinct
architecture received them at the end of their journeys,
and with their blood they wrote to their beloveds
interminable epistles dated from the tour of the North.
The heroines, no less immaterial, resembled an aquatint
of Angelica Kauffmann: a large straw hat, hair somewhat
straightened in the English style, a long robe of white
chiffon, held at the waist by an azure sash.
With his profound instinct for reality, Balzac understood
that the modern life he wanted to portray was dominated
by one grand fact, money, and, in La Peau de Chagrin, he
had the courage to present a lover not only anxious to
know if he had touched the heart of the one he loves, but
also if he will have enough money to pay for the carriage
in which he was bringing her home. This audacity is
perhaps one of the greatest that one might permit oneself
in literature, and it alone sufficed to immortalize Balzac.
The consternation was profound, and the purists were
indignant at this infraction of the laws of the genre; but
all the young people who, going out in the evening to the
home of some beautiful woman wearing white gloves ironed
with gum elastic, had traversed Paris as dancers, on the
tips of their shoes, fearing a spot of mud more than the
crack of a pistol, commiserated, having shared these fears,
like the anguishes of Valentin, who cared deeply about a
hat that he could not renew and preserve despite his minute
care. In moments of supreme misery, the discovery of a one
hundred sou piece slid under the papers of the drawer, due
to the discreet pity of Pauline, produced the effect of the
most romantic theatrical strokes or of the intervention of
a Peri in the Arabian tales. Who has not discovered during
days of distress, forgotten in pants or in a vest, a few
glorious coins appearing at just the right time and saving
you from the calamity that youth fears the most: to fail to
provide a beloved woman with a carriage, a bouquet, a small
bench, a show program, a tip to the usherette or some trifles
of this type?
Balzac excels in the portrayal of youth who are poor, as
they almost always are, entering into their first struggles
with life, prey to the temptation of pleasures and luxury,
and experiencing profound miseries due to their high
hopes. Valentin, Rastignac, Bianchon, d'Arthez, Lucien
de Rubempré, Lousteau, have all sunk their beautiful
teeth into the tough meat of the angry cow, fortifying
food for robust stomachs, indigestible for weak
stomachs; he does not lodge them, these beautiful young
ones without a sou, in conventional garrets decorated
with Persian rugs, with windows festooned with sweet
peas and looking out on gardens; he does not have them
eat "some simple dishes, prepared by the hand of nature,"
and does not dress them in luxurious garments, but in
those that are proper and practical; he puts them in the
boarding house of Mother Vauquer, or forces them to
crouch under the sharp angle of a roof, he presses them
into greasy tables at mean little restaurants, dressing them
in black clothing with gray seams, and he is not afraid to
send them to the pawn shop, if they still have, a rare
occurrence, their father's watch.
Oh Corinne, you who allows, upon Cape Misèna, your
snowy arm to dangle across your ivory lyre, while the son
of Albion, draped in a superb new coat, and shod in his
beloved perfectly polished boots, reflects on you and
listens to you in an elegant pose, Corinne, what would
you have said to such heroes? They have however one
small quality that was lacking in Oswald, they live, and of
a life so robust that it seems like one has encountered
them one thousand times; also Pauline, Delphine de
Nucingen, the princess of Cadignan, Madame de
Bargeton, Coralie, Esther, are madly infatuated with
them.
At the time that the first novels signed by Balzac
appeared, one did not have, to the same degree as today,
the preoccupation, or, better said, the fever for gold.
California had not been discovered; there existed perhaps
several leagues of railway whose future one hardly
suspected, and that one saw as a kind of conduit that led up
to the Russian mountains, but that had fallen into disuse;
the public ignored, so to speak, "business," and only
bankers gambled at the Bourse. This movement of
capital, this flow of gold, these calculations, these figures,
this importance given to money in works that one still
took as simple romantic fictions and not as serious
portraits of life, singularly shocked the subscribers to the
reading rooms, and critics added up the total sums spent
or staked by the author. The millions of father Grandet
led to arithmetic discussions, and serious people,
troubled by the enormity of the totals, doubted the
financial abilities of Balzac, very great abilities
nevertheless, and recognized later. Stendhal said with a
sort of disdainful smugness, "Before writing, I always
read three or four pages of the Civil Code to give me the
tone." Balzac, who understood money so well, also
discovered poems and dramas in the Code: Le Contrat de
Mariage, where he places in opposition, in the persons of
Matthias and of Solonnet, the ancient and the modern
notary, has all of the interest of the most eventful
comedy of the cloak and sword. The bankruptcy in
Grandeur et Décadence de César Birotteau makes you quiver
like the story of an empire's fall; the conflict of the
château and the cottage in Les Paysans offers just as much
adventure as the siege of Troy. Balzac knows how to give
life to the soil, to a house, to a heritage, to a capital, and
in fact to heroes and heroines whose adventures are
devoured with anxious avidity.
These new elements introduced into the novel were not
appreciated at first; the philosophical analyses, the
detailed character portraits, the minute descriptions that
seemed to have the future in view, were regarded as
unpleasantly lengthy, and quite often one skipped them
to move on to the story. Later, one recognized that the
goal of the author was not to weave intrigues that were
more or less well-plotted, but to portray society in its
entirety, from the summit to the base, with its characters
and its components, and that one will admire in it the
immense variety of these types. Is it not Alexandre
Dumas who said of Shakespeare: "Shakespeare, the man
who has created the most after God?"; the words might
be even more justly applied to Balzac; never, indeed, did
so many living creatures issue from one human brain.
At this time (1836), Balzac had conceived the plan for his
Comédie Humaine and possessed the full awareness of his
genius. He adroitly connected the works that had already
been published to his general concept and found them a
place in the categories that had been philosophically
outlined. Some novels of pure fantasy did not fit in very
well, despite the connections that were added afterwards;
but these are details that are lost in the immensity of the
ensemble, like ornaments in a differing style on a grand
edifice.
I have said that Balzac worked laboriously, and, being an
obstinate smelter, rejected ten or twelve times from the
crucible the metal that had not perfectly filled the mold;
like Bernard Palissy, he would have burned the furniture,
the flooring and up through the beams of his house
without regret to maintain the fire in his furnace; the
most challenging necessities would never make him
deliver a work on which he had not put the utmost
effort, and he gave admirable examples of literary
conscientiousness. His corrections, so numerous that
they were almost equivalent to different editions on the
same idea, were charged to his account by the editors
who were responsible for earnings, and his
compensation, often modest for the value of the work
and the pain it had cost him, were diminished in
proportion. The promised sums did not always arrive on
time, and to sustain what he laughingly called his floating debt,
Balzac displayed prodigious resources of mind and a
level of activity that would have completely absorbed the
life of an ordinary man. But, when seated before his table
in his friar's frock, in the midst of the nocturnal silence,
he found himself confronted with blank sheets
illuminated by the glow of seven candles, concentrated by
a green shade, in taking pen in hand he forgot
everything, and thus commenced a struggle more terrible
than the conflict of Jacob with the angel, that of form
and idea. In these nightly battles, from which in the
morning he would issue broken but victorious, when the
extinguished hearth chilled the atmosphere of his room
once again, his head steamed and his body exhaled a
visible fog like the body of a horse in wintertime.
Sometimes only a single phrase occupied an entire
evening; it was considered, reconsidered, twisted,
kneaded, pounded, stretched, shortened, written in one
hundred different ways, and, bizarrely, the necessary,
complete, form, would not present itself until after the
exhaustion of the approximate forms; without doubt the
metal often flowed from a fuller and thicker hose, but
there are very few pages in Balzac that stayed identical to
the first draft. His manner of proceeding was this: when
he had for a long time borne and lived a subject, with
writing that was rapid, jumbled, blotted, nearly
hieroglyphic, he would outline a sort of scenario in a few
pages, which he would send to the printer and which was
returned on placards, that is to say as isolated columns in
the middle of large sheets. He read these placards
carefully, which already gave to his embryo of work that
impersonal character that the manuscript does not have,
and he applied to this rough sketch the high critical
faculty that he possessed, acting as if he were another
person. He worked on something; approving or
disapproving, he kept or corrected, but mostly added.
Lines issuing from the beginning, the middle or the end
of phrases, were directed toward the margins, to the
right, to the left, to the top, to the bottom, leading to
some developments, to insertions, to interpolations, to
epithets, to adverbs. At the end of some hours of work,
one would have called his sheet a bouquet of fireworks
drawn by a child. From the primitive text shot forth
rockets of style which exploded on all sides. Then there
were simple crosses, crosses recrossed like a coat of arms,
stars, suns, Arab or Roman numerals, Greek or French
letters, every imaginable sign of reference to mix with the
scratchings. Some strips of paper, fastened with sealing
wafers, stuck on with pins, added to the insufficient
margins, striped with lines of fine characters to conserve
space, themselves full of crossings out, because the
correction that had barely been made had itself already
been corrected. The printed placard nearly disappeared in
what appeared to be a cabalistic book of spells, which the
typographers passed from hand to hand, each not
wanting to work for more than an hour on Balzac.
The following day, they sent back the placards with the
corrections made, and already expanded by half.
Balzac resumed work, always amplifying, adding a trait, a
detail, a description, an observation on manners, a
characteristic word, a phrase for effect, bringing the form
closer to the idea, always moving closer to his internal
outline, choosing like a painter among three or four
contours the definitive line. Often this terrible work
ended with that intensity of attention of which he alone
was capable, as he recognized that a thought had been
poorly expressed, that one incident predominated, that a
figure that he wished to be secondary for general effect
deviated from his plan, and with one stroke of the pen he
would courageously destroy the result of four or five
nights of labor. He was heroic in these circumstances.
Six, seven, and sometimes ten proofs were returned with
crossings out, rewritten, without satisfying the author's
desire for perfection. I have seen at Les Jardies, on the
shelves of a library composed of only his works, each
different proof of the same work bound in a separate
volume from the first sketch to the definitive book; the
comparison of Balzac's thought at these diverse stages
offers a very curious study and contains profitable literary
lessons. Near these volumes a sinister looking book,
bound in black morocco leather, with neither clasps nor
gilding, drew my attention: "Take it," Balzac said to me,
"it is an unpublished work which may have some value."
Its title was Comptes Mélancoliques; it contained lists of
debts, due dates of bills to be paid, notices of purveyors
and all that menacing paperwork that is legalized by a
stamp. This volume, with a kind of mocking contrast,
was placed beside the Contes Drolatiques, "of which it is
not a continuation," added the author of La Comédie
Humaine with a laugh.
Despite this laborious method of execution, Balzac
produced a great deal, thanks to his superhuman will
supplemented by the temperament of an athlete and the
seclusion of a monk. For two or three months in
succession, when he had some important work in
progress, he labored sixteen or eighteen hours out of
twenty-four; he granted to his animal being only six hours
of a heavy, feverish, convulsive sleep, encouraged by the
torpor of digestion after a hastily taken meal. He would
disappear so completely, his best friends would lose all
trace; but he would soon return from underground,
waving a major work above his head, laughing his hearty
laugh, applauding himself with a perfect innocence and
according himself the praise that he demanded from no
one else. No author was more unconcerned than him
regarding reviews and advertising upon the release of his
books; he allowed his reputation to grow by itself,
without putting his hand to it, and he never courted
journalists. Indeed other things consumed his time: he
delivered his copy, took his money and fled to distribute
it to his creditors who often waited in the journal's
courtyard, like, for example, the masons of Les Jardies.
Sometimes, in the morning, he would meet me
breathless, exhausted, giddy from the fresh air, like
Vulcan escaping from his forge, and he would fall upon a
couch; his long vigil had left him starving and he would
blend sardines with butter and make a sort of paste which
reminded him of the rillettes of Tours, and which he
would spread on bread. This was his favorite dish; he had
no sooner eaten than he fell asleep, begging me to
awaken him after one hour. Without regard for his
admonition, I would respect this well-earned sleep, and I
silenced all of the whispers in the house. When Balzac
awoke of his own accord, and he saw that the evening's
twilight was diffusing its gray tints across the sky, he
would leap up from his couch and heap me with abuse,
calling me traitor, thief, assassin: I made him lose ten
thousand francs, because awake he could have had the
idea for a novel that would have earned this sum (without
the reprints). I was the cause of the gravest catastrophes
and unimaginable disorders. I had made him miss
meetings with bankers, editors, duchesses; he would not
be able to repay his debts on time; this fatal sleep would
cost millions. But I was already used to these prodigious
betting systems that Balzac, starting from the lowest
figure, would push excessively to the most monstrous
sums, and I easily consoled myself by seeing the beautiful
colors characteristic in Tours reappear on his rested
cheeks.
Balzac lived then at Chaillot, rue des Batailles, a house
from which one found an admirable view of the course
of the Seine, the Champ de Mars, the École Militaire, the
dome of the Invalides, a large proportion of Paris and
further away the hills of Meudon. He had arranged there
an interior that was luxurious enough, because he knew
that in Paris nobody believed in an impoverished talent,
and that perception often leads to reality. It was during this
period that one hears of his tendencies toward elegance
and dandyism, the famous blue coat with solid gold
buttons, the walking stick with a turquoise head, the
appearances at the Bouffes and at the Opera, and the
more frequent visits into society where his sparkling flair
made him much sought after, visits that were useful for
more than one reason, for he met there more than one
model. It was not easy to penetrate into his home, which
was better guarded than the garden of the Hespérides.
Two or three passwords were required. Balzac, for fear
they might be divulged, changed them often. I remember
these ones: to the porter one said: "Prune season has
arrived," and he would let you cross the threshold; to the
servant who ran to the stairs at the sound of the bell, it
was necessary to whisper: "I bring lace from Belgium,"
and if you could assure the bedroom valet that "Madame
Bertrand was in good health," you were finally
introduced.
This childish behavior very much amused Balzac; it was
necessary to ward off unwanted people and those who
were even more disagreeable.
In La Fille aux Yeux d'Or is found a description of the
salon in the rue des Batailles. It is of the most scrupulous
fidelity, and one will not be displeased to see the lion's
den painted by himself. There is not a detail to add or to
subtract.
"Half of the sitting room described a delicately graceful
circular line, opposite of which the other half was
perfectly square, in the middle of which shined a fireplace
of white marble and gold. One entered through a side
door concealed by a rich tapestry and which faced a
window. The horseshoe-shaped section of the room was
decorated with a real Turkish divan, that is to say with a
mattress placed on the ground, but a mattress as large as
a bed, a divan fifty feet in circumference covered in white
cashmere, embellished with tufts of black and poppy-colored
silk, arranged in a diamond pattern; the back of
this immense bed was elevated several inches higher by
the numerous cushions that enriched it further by their
stylish compatibility. This sitting room was hung with a
red fabric on which was mounted a muslin from the
Indies that was fluted like a Corinthian column by piping
that alternated between hollow and round and stopped at
the top and bottom with a band of poppy-colored fabric,
on which were drawn some black arabesques. Under the
muslin, the poppy color became rose, an amorous color
that repeated in the window curtains, which were of
muslin from the Indies lined with rose-colored taffeta
and ornamented with poppy and black fringes. Six silver
arms each supporting two candles were attached to these
wall coverings at equal distances, to illuminate the divan.
The ceiling, from the center of which hung a lantern of
matte silver, sparkled with whiteness, and the molding
was gilded. The carpet resembled an Oriental shawl, it
presented the designs and recalled the poetry of Persia,
where the hands of slaves had created it. The furniture
was covered in white cashmere, set off by black and
poppy-colored accents. The clock, the candelabras, all
were of white marble and gold. The only table in the
room had a cashmere covering; elegant jardinières
contained roses of every type, and white or red flowers."
I can add that upon the table was placed a magnificent
writing desk in gold and malachite, the gift, without a
doubt, of some admiring stranger.
It was with a childlike satisfaction that Balzac showed me
this sitting room set in a square salon, and by necessity
leaving empty spaces at the angles of the circular half.
When I had admired the stylish splendors of this room
sufficiently, splendors whose luxury would seem less
today, Balzac opened a secret door and made me enter a
shadowy passage that led around the semicircle; at one of
the corners was placed a narrow iron bed, a kind of
working camp bed; in the other, there was a table "with
everything that is necessary to write," as M. Scribe said in
his stage directions: it was there that Balzac took refuge
to be free of all intrusions and all investigations.
Many thicknesses of fabric and paper padded the wall to
block all noise from both sides. To be sure that no
sounds could pass into the salon from outside, Balzac
asked me to return to the room and shout as loudly as I
could; one could still hear a little; it was necessary to add
a few sheets of gray paper to entirely block the sound.
These mysterious actions intrigued me immensely and I
demanded to know their motivation. Balzac gave me a
reason that Stendhal would have approved, but modern
prudery prevents my repeating. The fact is that he was
already developing in his mind the scene of Henry de
Marsay and Paquita, and he was anxious to know if the
cries of the victim in the salon could reach the ears of the
other inhabitants of the house.
He gave me a splendid dinner in the same sitting room,
for which he lit with his own hand all of the candles on
the silver arms, as well as the lantern and the candelabras.
The guests were the Marquis de B. and the painter L. B.:
although very sober and abstemious by habit, Balzac
from time to time did not fear to "indulge in a little good
cheer"; he ate with a jovial gourmandism that inspired the
appetite, and he drank in the manner of Pantagruel. Four
bottles of the white wine of Vouvray, one of the headiest
known, did not affect his powerful brain and gave only a
greater sparkle to his gaiety. What good stories he told us
at dessert! Rabelais, Beroalde de Verville, Eutrapel, le
Pogge, Straparole, the Queen of Navarre and all of the
doctors of the happy science would have recognized in
him a disciple and a master!
Characteristic feature! At this splendid feast provided by
Chevet there was no bread! But when one has excess
then what is the point of necessities?
After dinner, our Amphytrion led us to the Italians in a
superb presentation. The evening was already getting late,
but Balzac did not want to miss "the descent of the
staircase" spectacle, which, according to him, was
eminently instructive.
Weighed down by the good food and fine wines,
enveloped in the warm atmosphere of the room, I should
say that the three of us slept the sleep of the just and only
awakened to offer our final compliments.
Balzac was quite amused by this somnolent trio.
In the same apartment on the rue des Batailles, whose
salon I described using Balzac's own words, I recall
having seen a magnificent sketch of Louis Boulanger
after a bas-relief of Léda and the Swan attributed to
Michelangelo. It was the only picture that it contained,
because the author of La Comédie Humaine did not yet
have the taste for paintings and curiosities that he would
later develop, and his luxury then, as we have seen,
consisted more of sumptuousness than of art. His painter
was Girodet. Some of his first stories show the influence
of this admiration which led me to tease him with jibes
that he accepted with good grace.