IV

One of the dreams of Balzac was of a heroic and devoted

friendship, two souls, two courages, two intelligences

blended into the same will. Pierre and Jaffier of Otway's

Venice Preserv'd had impressed him greatly and he spoke of

them many times. L'Histoire des Treize is nothing but this

idea enlarged and complicated: one powerful unit

composed of multiple beings acting unquestioningly

toward an accepted and suitable goal. We know what

gripping, mysterious and terrible effects he has drawn

from this starting point in Ferragus, La Duchesse de Langeais,

and La Fille aux Yeux d'Or; but real life and the

intellectual life were not as clearly separated for Balzac as

they were for certain authors, and his creations followed

him outside of his study. He wanted to form an

association after the fashion of that which united

Ferragus, Montriveau, Ronquerolles, and their

companions. Only it was not done in such bold strokes; a

certain number of friends were to lend each other aid and

relief at all times, and to work according to their

strengths for the success or the fortune of the individual

who would be selected, with the understanding that that

person should in turn work for the others. Very much

infatuated with his project, Balzac recruited some

associates whom he put in contact with each other but

took precautions as if it were a political society or a

meeting of Carbonari. This needless mystery amused him

considerably, and he pursued his activities with the

utmost seriousness. When their numbers were complete,

he assembled the adepts and made known the goal of the

society. It need not be said that everyone was in

agreement, and that the statutes were approved with

enthusiasm. No one more than Balzac possessed the

ability to agitate, to overexcite, to intoxicate the coolest

heads, the most considered intellects. He had an

eloquence that was overflowing, tumultuous, rousing,

that carried you off: no objection was possible with him;

he would immediately drown you in such a deluge of

words that you were compelled to be silent. Besides he

had an answer for everything; then he would cast upon

you glances that were so sharp, so brilliant, so full of a

mysterious power that he would infuse you with his own

desire.

The association which counted among its members G. de

C., L. G., L. D., J. S., Merle, who was called Handsome

Merle, myself, and a few others who it is not necessary to

name, was called Le Cheval Rouge. Why Le Cheval Rouge,

you are going to say, rather than Le Lion d'Or or La Croix

de Malte? The first meeting of the members took place at

a restaurant on the Quai de l'Entrepôt, at the end of the

Pont de la Tournelle, whose sign was a carrier’s horse,

and this had given Balzac the idea of that

somewhat bizarre, unintelligible, and cabalistic

designation.

When it was necessary to organize a project, to agree on

certain steps, Balzac, elected by acclamation grandmaster

of the order, sent by one of the members to each horse

(that was the slang name used by the members among

themselves) a letter on which was drawn a small red

horse with the words: "Stable, at such and such a day, at

such and such a location”; the place changed each time, out

of fear of awakening curiosity or suspicion. In the society,

although we all knew each other and for a long time for

the most part, we were to avoid speaking to each other or

approaching each other except in the most distant

manner to avoid any idea of complicity. Often, in the

middle of a salon, Balzac would pretend to meet me for

the first time, and by blinks of the eye and facial

expressions such as actors make in their asides, he would

call my attention to his finesse and seem to say to me:

"See how well I play my game!"

What was the goal of Le Cheval Rouge? Did it wish to

change the government, set forth a new religion, found a

philosophical school, master men, seduce women? Far

less than that. It sought to take control of the

newspapers, take control of the theatres, sit in the seats

of the Academy, receive an array of decorations, and end

modestly as a peer of France, minister and millionaire. All

this was easy, according to Balzac; we had only to work

in harmony with each other, and by such modest

ambition we should prove well the moderation of our

characters. This devil of a man had such a powerful

vision that he described to each of us, in the most minute

details, the splendid and glorious life that the association

would procure for us. As we listened to him, we believed

ourselves already leaning, at the heart of a beautiful

mansion, against the white marble of the fireplace, red

ribbons around our necks, a shining badge over our hearts,

receiving with an affable air the greatest politicians,

artists and writers, who were shocked by our rapid and

mysterious fortune. For Balzac, the future did not exist,

everything was in the present; he drew it out of the mists

and made it palpable; an idea was so vivid that it became

real in a certain way: in speaking of a dinner, he ate it as

he told its story; of a carriage, he felt the soft cushions

under him and the steady ride; a perfect well-being, a

profound jubilation were then shown on his face,

although often he was hungry and walking over a rough

pavement with worn-out shoes.

The whole association would push, praise, and extol, by

articles, advertisements and conversations, any one of its

members who had just published a book or staged a

drama. Whoever showed himself to be hostile to one of

the horses would provoke the kicks of the entire stable; Le

Cheval Rouge would not forgive: the culpable became the

target of insults, cutting remarks, pin pricks, taunts and

other means of driving a man to despair, which are well

known by the smaller newspapers.

I smile while betraying after so many years the innocent

secret of this literary freemasonry, which had no other

result than some persuasive words for a book whose

success did not require them. But, at that time, we

took the thing seriously, we imagined ourselves to be the

Treize themselves in person, and I was surprised to find

that obstacles still existed; but the world is so badly

designed! What an important and mysterious air we had

in challenging other men, poor conventional men who in

no way doubted our power.

After four or five meetings, Le Cheval Rouge ceased to

exist; most of the chevaux could not afford to pay for their

oats in this symbolic manger, and the association which

was going to seize total control was dissolved, because its

members often lacked the fifteen francs to pay their

share. Each one now dove back alone into the chaos of

life, fighting his own fight, and it is this that explains why

Balzac was not a member of the Academy and died a

simple knight of the Legion of Honor.

The idea however was good, for Balzac, as he himself

says of Nucingen, could not have a bad idea. Others who

have succeeded have set to work without surrounding

themselves with the same romantic fantasies.

Thrown off of one chimera, Balzac very quickly mounted

a new one, and he set out for another voyage in the blue

with that childlike innocence which in him was combined

with the profoundest sagacity and the shrewdest intellect.

So many bizarre projects he has described to me, so

many strange paradoxes he has defended to me, always

with the same good faith! Sometimes he would maintain

that one should live on nine sous a day, sometimes he

would require one hundred thousand francs in order to

be most comfortable. Once, when I asked him to

reconcile the accounting, he responded to the objection

that thirty thousand francs still remained unallocated.

"Ah well! That is for the butter and the radishes. In what

even slightly proper house does one not eat thirty

thousand francs of radishes and butter?" I wish I could

portray the look of sovereign disdain he cast on me as he

gave that triumphal reason; that look said: "Decidedly

Theo is nothing but a contemptible person, a skinned rat,

a pitiful spirit; he understands nothing of a grand

existence and he has all his life eaten only the salted

butter of Brittany."

Les Jardies attracted a great deal of attention from the

public when Balzac bought it with the honorable

intention of making an investment for his mother. While

riding on the railway that passes Ville-d'Avray, every

passenger would look with curiosity at that little house,

half cottage, half chalet, which rose in the middle of a

clay slope.

This plot of land, in Balzac's opinion, was the best in the

world; formerly, he asserted, a certain celebrated wine

was grown there, and the grapes, thanks to an

unparalleled exposure, baked like the grapes of Tokaj on

the Bohemian hills. The sun, it is true, had the freedom

to ripen the crop in this place, where there existed only a

single tree. Balzac tried to enclose this property with

walls, which became famous for obstinately collapsing or

sliding all in one piece down the steep escarpment, and

he dreamed of the most fabulous and the most exotic

crops for this heavenly place. Here comes naturally the

anecdote of the pineapples, which has been so often

repeated that I would not tell it again except to add one

truly characteristic trait. Here is the project: one hundred

thousand feet of pineapples were planted within the

boundaries of Les Jardies, transformed into greenhouses

that required only limited heat due to the sunniness of

the site. The pineapples were going to be sold for five

francs instead of the one louis that they ordinarily cost,

for a total of five hundred thousand francs; from this

sum it was necessary to deduct one hundred thousand

francs for the costs of cultivation, equipment, and coal;

there remained therefore a net profit of four hundred

thousand francs which would constitute a splendid profit

for the happy proprietor, "without the least bit of

writing," he added. That was nothing, Balzac had a

thousand projects like this; but the beauty of this was that

we sought together, on the Boulevard Montmartre, a

shop for the sale of the pineapples that were still in the

form of seeds. The shop was to be painted black with

thin gold stripes, and carry on its sign, in enormous

letters: "PINEAPPLES FROM LES JARDIES."

For Balzac, the one hundred thousand pineapples were

already raising their plumes of serrated leaves above their

great lozenged cones under immense glass roofs: he saw

them; he swelled in the high temperature of the

greenhouse, he breathed in the tropical scent through his

passionately open nostrils; and when, having returned to

his home, he watched, while leaning on the window, the

snow descend silently onto the bare slopes, he still only

gave up his illusion with difficulty.

Yet he followed my advice to hold off on renting the

shop until the following year in order to avoid an

unnecessary expense.

I write my reminiscences as they return to me, without

trying to place in order things which are better left apart.

Besides, as Boileau said, transitions are the great difficulty

of poetry, and of newspaper articles too, I will add; but

modern journalists have neither as much conscience nor

even more importantly as much leisure as the legislator of

Parnasse.

Madame de Girardin professed for Balzac a lively

admiration that he appreciated and that he acknowledged

with his frequent visits, he who was so justifiably stingy

with his time and his working hours. Never did a woman

possess to such a high degree as Delphine, as I permitted

myself to call her familiarly when we were together, the

ability to stir the minds of her guests. With her, we always

found ourselves to be particularly eloquent and each left

her salon enthralled with himself. There was no stone so

hard that she could not make a spark fly from it, and with

Balzac, as you would expect, it was not necessary to strike

the stone for very long: he sparkled and then lit up right

away. Balzac was not precisely what one would call a

talker, but he was quick with a reply, throwing a fine and

decisive word into a discussion, changing the thread of

the discourse, touching everything with lightness, and

never going past a half smile: he had a verve, an

eloquence, and an irresistible brio; and, as each person

became silent to listen to him, with him, to the general

satisfaction, the conversation would quickly descend into

a soliloquy. The starting point was soon forgotten and he

passed from an anecdote into a philosophical reflection,

from an observation on manners to a local description; as

he spoke his complexion would redden, his eyes would

develop a distinctive luminosity, his voice would take on

different inflections, and sometimes he would roar with

laughter, amused by comic images that he saw before he

described them. He announced in this way, like a sort of

fanfare, the entry of his characters and his humorous

comments, and his hilarity was soon shared by his

assistants. Although this was the age of dreamers with

hair hanging loosely like a willow, of weepers in their

garrets and of disillusioned Byronians, Balzac had that

robust joy and power that one would attribute to

Rabelais, and that Molière did not show except in his

plays. His loud laugh coming from his sensual lips was

that of a kindly god amused by the spectacle of the

human marionettes, and who is distressed by nothing

because he understands everything and grasps at once

both sides of things. Neither the worries of an often

precarious situation, nor the tedium of money, nor the

fatigue of excessive work, nor the confinement of the

study, nor the renunciation of all of the pleasures of life,

nor even sickness could strike down this Herculean

joviality, in my opinion one of the most striking

characteristics of Balzac. He knocked out the hydras

while laughing, happily tore the lions in two, and carried

as if it were a hare the boar of Erymanthe on the

mountainous muscles of his shoulders. At the least

provocation this gaiety would burst forth and cause his

strong chest to heave, which might surprise a person with

a delicate constitution, but it had to be shared, no matter

how much effort one made to remain serious. Do not

believe however that Balzac was seeking to entertain his

audience: he obeyed, affected by a kind of internal

euphoria and painting with rapid strokes, with a comic

intensity and an incomparable talent for satire, the bizarre

phantasmagoria that danced in the dark chamber of his

brain. I do not know how to better compare the

impression produced by certain of his conversations than

with that which one experiences while leafing through the

strange drawings of Songes Drolatiques, by the master

Alcofribas Nasier. These are of monstrous personages,

composed of the most hybrid elements. Some have for a

head a bellows in which the hole represents the eye, while

others have an alembic flute for a nose; these ones walk

with wheels in place of feet; those ones have the rounded

belly of a cooking pot and wear a lid in place of a hat, but

an intense life animates these fanciful beings, and one

recognizes in their grimacing faces the vices, the follies

and the passions of man. Some, although absurdly

outside the realm of possibility, stop you like a portrait.

One could give them a name.

When one listened to Balzac, a whole carnival of

extravagant and real puppets frolicked before your eyes,

wearing on their shoulders a colorful phrase, waving long

sleeves of epithets, blowing their noses noisily with an

adverb, smacking themselves with a bat of antitheses,

pulling you by the tail of your coat, and whispering into

your ear your secrets in a disguised and nasal voice,

pirouetting, whirling in the midst of a sparkle of lights

and of glitter. Nothing was more vertiginous, and at the

end of one half hour, one felt, like the student after the

speech of Méphistophélès, a millstone turning in the

brain.

He was not always so spirited, and on those occasions

one of his favorite jokes was to imitate the German

jargon of Nucingen or Schmucke, or otherwise to speak

in rama, like the clients of the middle class boarding

house of Madame Vauquer (née de Conflans). At the time

that he wrote Un Début dans la Vie based on an outline of

Madame de Surville, he was seeking proverbs that were

slightly off for the art student Mistigris, to whom later,

having found him to be full of spirit, he gave a fine place

in La Comédie Humaine, under the name of the great

landscape painter Léon de Lora. Here are some of his

nonsensical proverbs: "He is like an ass on a plain." "I am

like the hare, I die or I flee." "Good Counts make good

sieves." "Extremes become blocked." "The slap always

smells the herring"; and so on like this. A discovery of

this type put him in a good humor, and he would

pleasantly frolic like an elephant through the furniture

and around the salon. For her part, Madame de Girardin

was in quest of sayings for the the famous lady of the

seven little chairs of Le Courrier de Paris. She sometimes

required my assistance, and if a stranger had entered,

seeing this beautiful Delphine painting spirals through

her golden hair with her white fingers, with a profoundly

dreamlike air; Balzac, seated on one of the arms of the

great upholstered chair on which Monsieur Girardin

usually slept, his hands clenched in the bottoms of his

pockets, his waistcoat turned back from his stomach,

swinging his leg with a uniform rhythm, expressing with

the tense muscles of his face an extraordinary mental

focus; me planted between two cushions of the divan,

like an opium eater seen in a hallucination; that stranger,

certainly, could never have suspected what we were doing

there, in so great a meditation; he would have supposed

that Balzac was thinking of a new Madame Firmiani,

Madame de Girardin of a role for Mademoiselle Rachel,

and me of some sonnet. But it was nothing of the kind.

As for the puns, Balzac, although his secret ambition was

to create them, had, after painstaking efforts, to recognize

his notorious incapacity in this area, and to keep to the

slightly off proverbs, which preceded the rough puns

brought into fashion by the school of good sense. What

beautiful evenings that will never return! We were then

far from foreseeing that this great and superb woman,

carved fully out of marble from antiquity, that this stocky,

robust, lively man, who combined in himself the vigor of

the boar and the bull, half Hercules, half satyr, built to

last longer than one hundred years, would soon sleep,

one at Montmartre, the other at Père-Lachaise, and that,

of the three, I alone would remain to preserve those

memories that were already so distant and close to being

lost.

Like his father, who died accidentally at more than eighty

years of age, and who had flattered himself that he would

become wealthy from the annuity scheme of Lafarge,

Balzac believed in his longevity. Often he planned with

me projects for the future. He was going to finish La

Comédie Humaine, write the Théorie de la Démarche, compose

the Monographie de la Vertu, fifty dramas, attain a great

fortune, marry and have two children, "but not more;

two children look good," he said, "on the front of a

carriage." All of this could not fail to take a long time,

and I pointed out that, once these tasks were

accomplished, he would be around eighty years of age.

"Eighty years!" he cried, "Bah! It's the flower of age."

Monsieur Flourens, with his comforting theories, did not

say it better.

One day that we dined together at the home of M. E.

de Girardin, he told us a story about his father to show

us the strength of the stock to which he belonged.

Balzac's father, who had been hired to work in a

prosecutor's office, ate following the custom of the time

at the table of the master with the other clerks. Partridges

were served. The prosecutor's wife, who had her eye on

the new arrival, said to him: "Monsieur Balzac, do you

know how to carve?" "Yes, Madame," responded the

young man, blushing up to his ears; and he bravely took

hold of the knife and fork. Entirely ignorant of culinary

anatomy, he divided the partridge into four pieces, but

with so much strength that he split the plate, sliced the

tablecloth, and cut into the wood of the table. He was

not nimble, but he was strong: the prosecutor's wife

smiled, and from that day, Balzac, the young clerk, was

treated with great kindness in that house.

This story that I have told seems lukewarm, but it is

necessary to see the pantomime of Balzac as he imitated

on his own plate his father's actions, with an air that was

both frightened and resolute, mimicking the manner in

which he seized his knife after having rolled up his

sleeves and in which he sunk his fork into an imaginary

partridge; Neptune hunting the monsters of the sea did

not wield his trident with a more vigorous fist, and with

what an immense weight he bore down with it! His

cheeks became purple, his eyes left his head, but the

operation ended with him casting upon the guests a look

of innocent satisfaction trying to conceal itself in the

guise of modesty.

Moreover, Balzac had in him the makings of a great

actor: he possessed a full, sonorous, resonant voice, with

a rich and powerful timbre, that he knew how to

moderate and soften as needed, and he read in an

admirable manner, a talent that most actors lack.

Whatever he related, he performed it with intonations,

grimaces and gestures that no comedian has surpassed in

my opinion.

I find in Marguerite, by Madame de Girardin, this

remembrance of Balzac. It is a character from the book

who speaks.

"He related that Balzac had dined at his house on the

preceding day, and that he had been more brilliant, more

scintillating than ever. He very much amused us with the

story of his trip to Austria. What fire! What verve! What

power of imitation! It was marvelous. His manner of

paying the postilions is an invention that only a novelist

of genius could have discovered. ‘I was very embarrassed

at each stopping point,' he said, ‘how was I going to pay?

I did not know a word of German, I did not know the

currency of the country. It was very difficult. Here is

what I invented. I had a bag full of small silver coins,

some kreuzers … When I arrived at the stopping point, I

would take up my bag; the postilion would come to the

window of the carriage; I would watch his eyes

attentively, and I would put in his hand one kreuzer, …

two kreuzer, … then three, then four, etc., until I saw

him smile … when he smiled, I understood that I had

given him one kreuzer too much … quickly I would take

back my coin and my man was paid.'"

At Les Jardies, he read Mercadet to me, the original

Mercadet, by far more sweeping, complicated and dense

than the piece arranged for the Gymnase by d'Ennery,

with so much delicacy and skill. Balzac, who read like

Tieck, without indicating acts, scenes, or names, utilized a

voice that was particular to and perfectly recognizable for

each character; the voices that he gave to the different

kinds of creditors were hilariously funny: there were the

hoarse, the honeyed, the hasty, the slow, the menacing,

the pleading. They shrieked, wailed, scolded, muttered,

screamed in every possible and impossible tone. Debt

first sang a solo that soon an immense choir took up. He

brought out creditors from everywhere, from behind the

stove, from below the bed, from the drawers of the

commode; they came from the chimney; they passed

through the keyhole; others entered through the window

like lovers; these sprung from the bottom of a trunk like

those devilish toys that take you by surprise, those moved

across the walls as if they were passing by an English

ambush, it was a mob, an uproar, an invasion, truly a

rising tide. Mercadet might well have shaken them off,

when others always returned to start an assault, and as far

as the horizon one could make out a somber swarm of

creditors on the march, arriving like legions of termites to

devour their prey. I do not know if this piece was better

when performed this way, but no other performance

produced such an effect.

Balzac, during this reading of Mercadet, occupied, partially

reclining, a long divan in the salon of Les Jardies because

he had sprained his ankle when he slipped, like his walls,

on the clay of his property. A stray hair, sticking through

the fabric, poked the skin of his leg and bothered him.

"The fabric is too thin, the hay passes through it; you will

need to put a thick canvas beneath it," he said while

pulling at the hair that annoyed him.

François, the Caleb of this Ravenswood, would not listen

to this mocking of the splendors of the manor. He

corrected his master and said: horsehair. "The upholsterer

has cheated me?" responded Balzac. "They are all the

same. I had insisted that he use hay! Cursed thief!"

The splendors of Les Jardies were mostly imaginary. All

of the friends of Balzac remember having seen written in

charcoal upon the bare walls or veneer of gray paper:

"Rosewood paneling, tapestry of the Gobelins, Venetian

mirrors, paintings by Raphaël." Gerard de Nerval had

already decorated an apartment in this manner, so this

did not shock me. As for Balzac, he believed literally in

the gold, the marble and the silk; but, he did not

complete Les Jardies and if he led others to laugh at his

pipe dreams, he knew at least that he had built himself an

eternal home, a monument "more durable than iron," an

immense city, populated with his creations and gilded by

the rays of his glory.

V

Due to an oddity of nature that he shared with several of

the most poetic writers of this age, such as

Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, George Sand, Mérimée,

Janin, Balzac possessed neither the gift nor the love of

verse, despite the effort that he otherwise made to attain

them. On this point, his judgment that was so fine, so

profound, so sagacious was at fault; he admired work

somewhat aimlessly and in a way in line with public

notoriety. I did not believe, even though he professed a

great respect for Victor Hugo, that he had ever truly

appreciated the lyrical qualities of the poet, while at the

same time the sculpted and colored prose amazed him.

He, who was so laborious and who rewrote a sentence as

many times as a versifier could rework an Alexandrine on

an anvil, found working on meter to be puerile, tedious,

and without utility. He would have voluntarily awarded a

bushel of peas to those who could manage to pass an

idea through the narrow ring of rhythm, as Alexander did

for the Greek who was trained to throw a ball through a

ring from a long distance; verse, with its fixed and pure

form, its elliptical speech little suited to a multiplicity of

details, seemed to him to be an obstacle invented on a

whim, an unnecessary difficulty or a mnemonic device

taken from primitive times. His doctrine was in that way

nearly the same as that of Stendhal: "Does the idea that a

work has been made while hopping on one leg add to the

pleasure that it produces?" The Romantic school holds in

its heart some followers, partisans of the absolute truth,

who rejected verse as trivial or unnatural. If Talma said:

"I do not want fine verses!" Beyle said: "I do not want

verses at all." This was the basis of the sentiments of

Balzac, however in order to appear open-minded,

comprehensive, universal, he sometimes in society

pretended to admire poetry, just as the middle class

simulate great enthusiasm for music that bores them

profoundly. He was always shocked to see me write verse

and take pleasure from it. "That is not copy," he would

say, and if he held me in any esteem, I owed it to my

prose. All of the writers, young then, who associated

themselves with the literary movement represented by

Hugo, used, like the master, the lyre or the pen: Alfred de

Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Musset, spoke

interchangeably the language of the gods and the

language of men. I too, if I am permitted to mention

myself after such glorious names, have had since the

beginning this double aptitude. It is always easy for poets

to descend to prose. The bird may walk as needed, but

the lion cannot fly. Those who are born to write prose

never rise to poetry however poetic they may be

elsewhere. Rhythmic speech is a particular gift, and one

can possess it without being a great genius, while it is

often refused to superior minds. Among the proudest

who appear to disdain it, more than one keeps to himself

a secret resentment to not possess it.

Among the two thousand characters in La Comédie

Humaine, one finds two poets: Canalis, of Modeste Mignon,

and Lucien de Rubempré, of Splendeurs et Misères des

Courtisanes. Balzac portrayed both of them as having traits

that were not particularly favorable. Canalis is dry, cold,

sterile, petty, an adroit arranger of words, a maker of

imitation jewelry, who sets rhinestones in gilded silver,

and makes necklaces of artificial pearls. His volumes,

with many blank spaces, wide margins, and large gaps,

contain only a melodious nothingness, monotonous

music, suitable only to cause young boarders to fall asleep

or dream. Balzac, who ordinarily shapes with warmth the

interests of his characters, seems to take a secret pleasure

in ridiculing this one and putting him in embarrassing

positions: he challenges his vanity with a thousand ironies

and a thousand sarcasms, and finishes by taking from

him Modeste Mignon with her great fortune, to give her

to Ernest de la Brière. This conclusion, in contrast to the

beginning of the story, sparkles with concealed malice

and fine mockery. One would say that Balzac is

personally happy at the good trick that he has played on

Canalis. He avenges, in his own way, the angels, the

sylphs, the lakes, the swans, the willows, the skiffs, the

stars and the lyres that had been used so abundantly by

the poet.

If in Canalis we have the false poet, reserving his meager

inspiration and putting it behind a dam so that it can

flow, foam and sound for a few minutes in order to seem

like a cascade, the man used to taking advantage of his

laboriously wrought literary successes to serve his

political ambitions, the man with material interests who is

in love with money, medals, pensions and honors, despite

his elegiac attitudes and pose as an angel who misses

being in heaven, Lucien de Rubempré shows us the poet

who is lazy, frivolous, oblivious, capricious, and as

nervous as a woman, incapable of prolonged effort,

without moral force, living in the hooks of actresses and

courtesans, a puppet whose strings the terrible Vautrin,

under the pseudonym Carlos Herrera, pulls as he

pleases. Despite all of his vices, Lucien is seductive;

Balzac has equipped him with spirit, beauty, youth, and

elegance; women adore him; but he ends by hanging

himself at the Conciergerie. Balzac did everything he

could to successfully complete the marriage of Clotilde

de Grandlieu with the author of Marguerite; unfortunately

the demands of morality intervened, and what would the

Faubourg Saint-Germain have said of La Comédie Humaine

if the student of Jacques Collin the convict had married

the daughter of a duke?

Regarding the author of Marguerite, I will note here a bit

of information that could amuse those who are interested

in literature. The few sonnets that Lucien de Rubempré

shows as a sample of his volume of verse to the

bookseller Dauriat are not the work of Balzac, who did

not write verse, and asked his friends for those that he

happened to need. The sonnet on the daisy is by

Madame de Girardin, the sonnet on the camellia is by de

Lassailly, and the one on the tulip is by myself.

Modeste Mignon also contained a piece of verse, but I do

not know the author.

As I have said regarding Mercadet, Balzac was an

admirable reader, and he very much wanted, one day, to

read some of my own verses. He read to me, among

others, La Fontaine du Cimitière. Like all prose writers, he

read only for the meaning, and tried to conceal the

rhythm that poets, when they deliver their verses out

loud, in contrast accentuate in a manner intolerable to

everyone, but which delights them alone, and we had

together, on this point, a long discussion, which, like

always, served only to cause each of us to persist in our

particular opinion.

The great literary man of La Comédie Humaine is Daniel

d'Arthez, a writer who was serious, a hard worker, and

for a long time buried, before achieving his success, in

immense studies of philosophy, history and linguistics.

Balzac feared facility, and he did not believe that a rapidly

produced work could be good. In this context, journalism

held a singular repugnance for him, and he regarded the

time and talent consecrated to it to be wasted; he didn't

hold journalists in any higher regard, and he, who was

however such a great critic, despised criticism. The

unflattering portraits that he has drawn of Etienne

Loustau, of Nathan, of Vernisset, of Andoche Finot,

represent fairly well his true opinion of the place of the

press. Emile Blondet, introduced into that bad company

to represent the good writer, is compensated for his articles

in the imaginary Débats of La Comédie Humaine with a rich

marriage to the widow of a general, which permits him to

leave journalism.

Moreover, Balzac never worked toward the point of view

of a newspaper. He brought his novels to the magazines

and daily newspapers as they had come to him, without

preparing any breaks or interesting twists at the end of

each installment, to increase the desire for the

continuation. His work was broken up into sections that

were roughly the same length, and sometimes the

description of an armchair would start on one day and

finish the next. With justification, he did not want to

divide his work into little dramatic or vaudevillian

tableaus; he thought of nothing but the book. This

working method was often to the detriment of the

immediate success that journalism requires of the authors

it employs. Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas were more

frequently victorious in the battles each morning that

then captivated the public. He did not obtain

immense popularity, like that of Les Mystères de Paris and

Le Juif-Errant, of Les Mousquetaires and of Monte-Cristo. Les

Paysans, a masterpiece, even caused a great number of

readers to cancel their subscriptions to the Presse, where

the first installment appeared. Its publication had to be

suspended. Every day letters arrived that demanded that

it be ended. Balzac was found to be boring!

There was still not a good understanding of the great idea

of La Comédie Humaine, to take on modern society and

write about Paris and our times the book that sadly no

ancient civilization has left for us. The collected edition

of La Comédie Humaine, by assembling all of the scattered

works, put into relief the philosophical intention of the

writer. From that date forward, Balzac grew considerably

in public opinion, he finally ceased being considered "the

most productive of our novelists," a stereotyped phrase

that irritated him as much as "the author of Eugénie

Grandet."

There have been a number of critiques on Balzac and he

has been discussed in many ways, but in my opinion one

very characteristic feature has not been emphasized: this

point is the absolute modernity of his genius. Balzac

owes nothing to antiquity; for him there are neither

Greeks nor Romans, and he has no need to cry for

deliverance from them. One does not find in the

composition of his talent any trace of Homer, of Virgil,

of Horace, not even of De Viris Illustribus; nobody was

ever less classical.

Balzac, like Gavarni, observed his contemporaries; and,

in art, the supreme difficulty is to portray that which one

sees before one's eyes; one can pass through one's time

without appreciating it, and that is what many eminent

minds have done.

To be of his time, nothing would appear to be simpler

but nothing is more difficult! To wear no glasses, neither

blue nor green, to think with his own brain, to use the

speech of the present day, not stitch together a colorful

fabric from the phrases of his predecessors! Balzac

possessed this rare merit. The ages have their perspective

and their distance; at that distance the great masses move

away, the lines end, the flickering details disappear; with

the help of classical memories, of melodious names from

antiquity, the least rhetorician could create a tragedy, a

poem, an historical study. But, to find yourself in the

crowd, to be elbowed by it, and to appreciate its features,

understand its flow, sort out its personalities, outline the

features of so many diverse beings, to show the motives

for their actions, that demands an entirely special genius,

and this genius, the author of La Comédie Humaine had to

a degree that no one has equaled and probably no one

will equal.

This profound understanding of modern things rendered

Balzac, it must be said, insensitive to sculptural beauty.

He read with a careless eye the stanzas of white marble

with which Greek art sung the perfection of the human

form. In the museum of antiquities, he looked at the

Venus de Milo without great ecstasy, but the Parisian

woman who has stopped in front of the immortal statue,

draped in her long cashmere shawl running without a

crease from the neck to the heel, wearing her hat with a

veil from Chantilly, gloved with her tight Jouvin gloves,

showing from under the hem of her flounced dress the

polished tip of her worn boots, made his eyes sparkle

with pleasure. He analyzed her coquettish allure, he

savored at length her skillful graces, only to find as she

did that the goddess was too heavyset and would not be

an attractive addition to the homes of Mesdames de

Beauséant, de Listomère, or d'Espard. Ideal beauty, with

its serene and pure lines, was too simple, too cold, too

harmonious for this complicated, exuberant and diverse

genius. He also says somewhere: "It is necessary to be

Raphaël to portray many virgins." Character pleased him

more than style, and he preferred looks to beauty. In his

portraits of women, he never fails to put a mark, a crease,

a wrinkle, a red blemish, a softened and tired corner, a

vein that is too apparent, some detail indicating the

bruises of life that a poet, in tracing the same image,

would surely have suppressed, mistakenly without a

doubt.

I do not intend to criticize Balzac in this. This fault is his

principal strength. He accepted nothing of the mythologies

and traditions of the past, and he did not know, happily

for us, that ideal that was achieved with the verses of the

poets, the marbles of Greece and Rome, the paintings of

the Renaissance, which stands between the eyes of artists

and reality. He loved the woman of our day just as she is,

and not as a pale statue; he loved her for her virtues, for

her vices, for her fantasies, for her shawls, for her

dresses, for her hats, and followed her across her life, far

beyond the point in the journey where love abandons

her. He prolonged her youth by many seasons, gave her

springs with the summers of Saint-Martin, and gilded her

twilight years with the most splendid rays. We are so

classical, in France, that we have not perceived, after two

thousand years, that roses, in our climate, do not bloom

in April as in the descriptions of poets of antiquity, but in

June, and that our women begin to be beautiful at the age

at which those of Greece, who are more precocious,

cease to be. How many charming types he has imagined

or reproduced! Madame Firmiani, the Duchesse de

Maufrigneuse, the Princess de Cadignan, Madame de

Morsauf, Lady Dudley, the Duchess de Langeais,

Madame Jules, Modeste Mignon, Diane de Chaulieu,

without counting the middle class women, the

seamstresses and the ladies of ill repute.

And how he loved and knew that modern Paris, whose

beauty the amateurs of local color and the picturesque of

that time appreciated so little! He roamed across it in

every direction night and day; there is not a forgotten

alley, a foul passage, a narrow, muddy and black street

which did not become under his pen an etching of

Rembrandt, full of teeming and mysterious darkness or

sparkling with a trembling star of light. Wealth and

poverty, pleasure and suffering, shame and glory, grace

and ugliness, he knew all of his beloved town; it was for

him an enormous, hybrid, formidable monster, an

octopus with one hundred thousand arms that he heard

and saw as a living thing, and which constituted in his

eyes an immense individual. See with regard to this the

marvelous pages placed at the beginning of La Fille aux

Yeux d'Or, in which Balzac, impinging on the art of the

musician, had wanted, as in a grand orchestral symphony,

to make all of the voices sing together, all of the sobbing,

all of the cries, all of the rumors, all of the grinding of

Paris at work!

From this modernity on which I purposefully dwell arose,

without his suspecting it, a difficulty in labor that Balzac

experienced in his efforts to complete his work: the

French language as refined by the classics of the

seventeenth century is not suitable, when one conforms

to it, other than to express general ideas, and to portray

conventional figures in a vague setting. To describe this

multiplicity of details, of characters, of types, of

architectures, of furnishings, Balzac was obliged to create

for himself a special language, composed of all of the

technical terms, all of the argots of science, of the

workshop, of the theater, even of the lecture hall. Every

word that said something was welcomed, and the

sentence, in order to receive it, opened a space, a

parenthetic expression, and lengthened itself obligingly. It

is this that made superficial critics say that Balzac did not

know how to write. He possessed, even though he did

not know it, a style and a very beautiful style, the

necessary, inevitable, and mathematical style of his ideas!