VI

No one could have the ambition to write a complete

biography of Balzac; any relationship with him was

necessarily limited by gaps, absences, disappearances.

Work absolutely ruled the life of Balzac, and if, as he

himself says with touching sensitivity in a letter to his

sister, he has painlessly sacrificed the joys and distractions

of existence to this jealous god, it cost him to renounce

all company that might have led to friendship. To reply with a few

words to a long letter became for him who was

overburdened with labor a prodigality that he could rarely

permit himself; he was the slave of his work and a

voluntary slave. He had, with a very good and very tender

heart, the selfishness of the great worker. And who could

have dreamed of being mad at his pressured negligences

and his apparent forgetfulness, when one saw the results

of his escapes or his seclusions? When, the work

completed, he would reappear, one would have said that

he had left you the day before, and he would take up the

interrupted conversation once again, as if sometimes six

months and more had not passed. He made trips within

France to study localities that he included in Scènes de

Province, and he withdrew to the houses of friends, in

Touraine, or in the Charente, finding there a calm that

the creditors did not always allow him in Paris. After

some great work, he permitted himself, occasionally, a

longer excursion to Germany, northern Italy, or

Switzerland; but these rapid excursions, made with the

preoccupations of bills that were due to be paid,

contracts to fulfill, and limited funds for travel, may have

fatigued him more than they gave him rest. His vast gaze

took in the skies, the horizons, the mountains, the

countryside, the monuments, the houses, the interiors to

commit them to that universal and meticulous memory

that never failed him. Superior in this to descriptive

poets, Balzac saw man at the same time as nature; he

studied the physiognomies, the manners, the passions,

the characters in the same glance as locations, clothing

and furnishings. One detail sufficed for him, as the least

fragment of bone did for Cuvier, to accurately imagine

and reconstitute a personality glimpsed while passing.

Balzac has often been praised, and rightly so, for his

power of observation; but, however great he was, it is not

necessary to imagine that the author of La Comédie

Humaine always drew from nature his portraits whose

truth was so clearly from elsewhere. His process did not

resemble in any way that of Henri Monnier, who

followed in real life an individual in order to make a

sketch with a pencil and a pen, drawing his least gestures,

writing down his most insignificant phrases in order to

obtain at the same time a photographic plate and a page

of shorthand notes. Buried most of the time in the

excavations of his work, Balzac could not materially

observe the two thousand characters who play their role

in his comedy of one hundred acts; but every man, when

he looks inward, contains humanity: it is a microcosm in

which nothing is missing.

He has, not always, but often observed within himself the

numerous types that live in his work. That is why they are

so complete. No one could absolutely comprehend the

life of another; in such a case, there are motives that

remain obscure, unknown details, actions of which one

loses track. In even the most faithful portrait, some

creativity is necessary. Balzac has thus created much

more than he saw. His rare faculties of the analyst, of the

physiologist, of the anatomist, have merely served the

poet in him, just as the assistant serves the professor at

his lectern when he passes him the substances that he

needs for his demonstrations.

Perhaps this could be the place to define the truth as

understood by Balzac; in this time of realism, it is good to

be understood on this point. The truth of art is not that

of nature; everything that is represented through the

means of art necessarily contains some element of the

conventional; make it as small as possible, it still exists, be

it perspective in painting, language in literature. Balzac

accentuates, magnifies, enlarges, prunes, adds, shadows,

illuminates, avoids or approaches men or things

according to the effect that he wants to produce. He is

truthful, without doubt, but with augmentations and

sacrifices for art. He prepares backgrounds that are

somber and darkened with charcoal for his luminous

figures, he puts white backgrounds behind his dark

figures. Like Rembrandt, he sets the light of day on the

brow or nose of the character; sometimes, in his

description, he obtains fantastic and bizarre results, by

placing, without saying anything, a microscope under the

eye of the reader; the details then appear with a

supernatural clarity, an amplified minutia, some

unbelievable and formidable magnifications; the tissues,

the scaliness, the pores, the veins, the blemishes, the

fibers, the capillaries take on an enormous importance,

and turn a visage that is insignificant to the naked eye

into a sort of fanciful mask as amusing as those that were

sculpted under the cornice of the Pont-Neuf and

vermiculated by time. The characters are also pushed to

excess, as it is suited to each type: if Baron Hulot is a

libertine, he additionally personifies lust: he is a man and

a vice, an individual and an abstraction; he unites in

himself all of the scattered traits of the character. Where

a writer of lesser genius would have drawn a portrait,

Balzac has created a figure. Men do not have as many

muscles as Michelangelo gives them to suggest the idea

of strength. Balzac is full of such useful exaggerations, of

those dark strokes that enhance and support the outline;

he dreams while writing, like the masters, and leaves his

mark on everything. As this is not a literary critique, but a

biographical study that I am writing, I will not take these

remarks farther than necessary. Balzac, whom the Realist

school seems to wish to claim as its leader, has no

connection to its features.

Unlike certain literary persons who feed on nothing but

their own genius, Balzac read a great deal and with a

prodigious rapidity. He loved books, and he created a

beautiful library that he intended to leave to the town of

his birth, an idea that the indifference of the townspeople

made him later abandon. He absorbed in a few days the

voluminous works of Swedenborg, which were owned by

his mother, who was rather preoccupied with mysticism

at that time, and that reading was responsible for

Séraphita-Séraphitus, one of the most astonishing products

of modern literature. Never did Balzac approach, or

move closer to ideal beauty than in that book: the

ascension of the mountain has a quality that is ethereal,

supernatural, and luminous that lifts you from the earth.

The only two colors that are employed are celestial blue

and snow white with a few pearlescent tones for shadow.

I know nothing more intoxicating than this beginning.

The panorama of Norway, with its sharply cut coastline

seen from this height, dazzles and gives one vertigo.

Louis Lambert was also influenced by the reading of

Swedenborg; but soon Balzac, who had taken on the

eagle wings of the mystics to soar into the infinite,

descended to the earth that we inhabit, even though his

robust lungs could have breathed indefinitely the thin air

that is deadly for the weak: he abandoned the world

beyond after that flight and returned to real life. Perhaps

his remarkable genius would have gone out of view too

quickly if he had continued to soar toward the

unfathomable immensities of metaphysics, and we should

be happy that he limited himself to Louis Lambert and

Séraphita-Séraphitus, which represent sufficiently, in La

Comédie Humaine, the supernatural side, and open a

door that is sufficiently large into the invisible world.

I now move on to a few more intimate details. The great

Goethe had a horror of three things: one of the things

was tobacco smoke, I am not permitted to say the two

others. Balzac, like the Jupiter of the German poetic

Olympus, could not stand tobacco in any form at all; he

denounced the pipe and forbid the cigar. He did not

tolerate even a light Spanish cigarette; the Asian hookah

alone found favor with him, and yet he only tolerated

that as a curiosity and because of its local color. In his

diatribes against the herb of Nicot, he did not imitate the

doctor who, during a dissertation on the dangers of

tobacco, does not hesitate to take ample doses from a

large box of tobacco near him: he never smoked. His

Théorie des Excitants contains an indictment against

tobacco, and there is no doubt that if he had been Sultan,

like Amurath, he would have beheaded relapsed and

obstinate smokers. He reserved all of his predilections for

coffee, which did him so much harm and might have

killed him, although he was built to become a

centenarian.

Was Balzac wrong or right? Is tobacco, as he maintained,

a deadly poison and does it intoxicate those that it does

not turn stupid? Is it the opium of the Occident that dulls

the will and the intelligence? These are questions that I

cannot answer; but I am going to list here the names of

some celebrated personages of our age, some of whom

smoked while the others did not smoke: Goethe, Heinrich

Heine, uniquely for Germans, did not smoke; Byron

smoked; Victor Hugo does not smoke, neither does

Alexandre Dumas père; on the other hand Alfred de

Musset, Eugène Sue, Georges Sand, Mérimée, Paul de

Saint-Victor, Emile Augier, Ponsard, smoked and still

smoke; however they are not exactly imbeciles.

This aversion, moreover, was shared by nearly all men

who were born in our century or a little before. Only

sailors and soldiers smoked then; at the odor of the pipe

or the cigar, women fainted: they have become much

tougher since then, and more than one pair of rosy lips

has pressed with love the golden tip of a cigar, in a sitting

room turned into a smoking room. Dowagers and

turbaned mothers alone have preserved their old

antipathy, and stoically watch their unfashionable salons

be deserted by the youth.

Every time that Balzac is obliged, for the credibility of

the story, to allow one of his characters to indulge in this

horrible habit, his brief and disdainful sentence betrays a

secret disapproval: "As for de Marsay," he said, "he was

busy smoking cigars." And he must have really loved this

captain of dandyism to permit him to smoke in his work.

A fragile and elegant young woman had without doubt

inspired this aversion in Balzac, although that is a

question that I cannot answer definitively. Still it's true

that the tax collector never earned a sou from him. Regarding

women, Balzac, who described them so well, must have

known them, and one understands the sense that the

Bible attaches to this word. In one of the letters that he

writes to Madame de Surville, his sister, Balzac, quite

young and completely unknown, sets down an ideal for

his life in two words: "To be celebrated and to be loved."

The first part of this program, which all artists map out

for themselves, had been realized in every way. Was the

second also accomplished? The opinion of the most

intimate friends of Balzac is that he practiced the chastity

that he recommended to others, and shared at most

platonic love; but Madame de Surville laughs at this idea,

with a smile of feminine delicacy and full of discreet

reserve. She maintains that her brother was unfailingly

discreet, and that if he had wanted to speak, he would

have had many things to say. This must be true, and

without doubt the safe of Balzac contained more of the

notes with delicate, sloping handwriting than the

lacquered box of Canalis. There is, in his work, the scent

of a woman: odor di femina; when one enters there, one

hears behind the doors that close on the hidden staircase

the rustling of silk and the creaking of shoes. The

semicircular and padded salon on the Rue de Batailles, of

which I have quoted the description inserted by the

author in La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, did not remain

completely virginal, as many of us had assumed. In the

course of our close friendship, which lasted from 1836

until his death, only once did Balzac make allusion, with

the most respectful and the most tender terms, to an

attachment of his early youth, and even then he gave me

only the first name of the person whose memory, after so

many years, still made his eyes moisten. Had he said any

more to me, I certainly would not have abused his

confidences; the genius of a great writer belongs to all of the

world, but his heart is his own. I touch only briefly on

this tender and delicate side of Balzac's life, because I

have nothing to say that does not honor him. This

reserve and this mystery are those of a gentleman. If he

was loved as he wished in the dreams of his youth, the

world knows nothing of it.

Do not imagine after these reflections that Balzac was

austere and prudish in his speech: the author of Les Contes

Drolatiques had been nourished with too much Rabelais

and was too pantagruelistic to be unable to laugh; he

knew good stories and invented them: his broad jokes

interspersed with Gallic crudities would have made the

sanctimonious and horrified members of society cry out

shocking; but his laughing and talkative lips were sealed

like a tomb when there was a question of a serious

sentiment. He scarcely allowed his closest friends to

surmise his love for a foreign woman of distinction, a

love of which one can speak, since it was crowned by

marriage. It was that passion that had been felt for a long

time that necessitated his distant excursions, although

their object remained until the last day a mystery for his

friends.

Absorbed by his work, Balzac did not think until rather

late of the theater, for which the general opinion judged

him, wrongly to my mind, after a few more or less risky

efforts, to be hardly suited. He who created so many

types, analyzed so many characters, gave life to so many

people, should succeed on the stage; but, as I have said,

Balzac was not spontaneous, and one cannot correct the

proofs of a drama. If he had lived, after a dozen works,

he would assuredly have found his form and attained

success; La Marâtre that played at the Théâtre-Historique

was close to a masterpiece. Mercadet, lightly edited by an

intelligent arranger, enjoyed a long posthumous success

at the Gymnase.

Nevertheless, the factor that motivated his efforts was

mostly, I must say, the idea of a windfall that would

liberate him all at once from his financial predicament

rather than a real vocation. Theater, as we know, is much

more profitable than books; the continuing nature of the

performances, on which a rather large royalty is drawn,

produces quickly by accumulation some considerable

sums. If the strategic work is greater, the material labor is

less. Several dramas are necessary to fill a volume, and

while you promenade or rest idly with slippers on your

feet, the footlights are illuminated, the scenery descends

from the ceiling, the actors recite and gesticulate, and you

find yourself having made more money than you would

have by scribbling for an entire week bent painfully over

your desk. Such melodrama has more value to its author

than Notre-Dame de Paris to Victor Hugo and Les Parents

Pauvres to Balzac.

It's curious that Balzac who contemplated, elaborated,

and corrected his novels with such unrelenting

meticulousness, seemed, when it concerned the theater,

to become dizzy from the rapidity of his work. Not only

did he not rewrite his theater pieces eight or ten times

like his books, he really did not write them at all. Having

just come upon his first idea, he chose a day for the

reading and called his friends to request their assistance

in the project; Ourliac, Lassailly, Laurent-Jan, myself and

others, have often been summoned in the middle of the

night or at fabulously early times of the morning. It was

necessary to drop everything; every minute of delay

caused the loss of millions.

A pressing note from Balzac summoned me one day to

come right away to 104 Rue de Richelieu, where he had a

lodging in the house of Buisson the tailor. I found Balzac

wrapped in his monastic frock, and hopping up and

down with impatience on the blue and white rug of a tidy

attic room that had walls upholstered in light brown

percale embellished with blue, because, despite his

apparent neglectfulness, he had an understanding of

interior design, and always prepared a comfortable den

for his laborious vigils; in none of his lodgings was there

the picturesque disorder dear to artists.

"Finally, here is Theo!" he cried when he saw me. "You

are lazy, slow, slothlike, an obstacle, hurry up then; you

should have been here an hour ago. Tomorrow I am

reading Harel a great drama in five acts."

"And you would like to have my advice," I responded

while settling myself into an armchair like a man who is

preparing himself to endure a long lecture.

From my attitude Balzac understood my thought, and he

said to me in the most straightforward way, "The drama

is not written."

"The devil," I said. "Oh well, you will need to delay the

reading for six weeks."

"No. We are going to rush the dramorama to get paid. At

this time I have a heavy debt that is due."

"From now until tomorrow, it's impossible; there would

not be time to copy it."

"Here is how I have arranged things. You will do an act,

Ourliac another, Laurent-Jan the third, de Belloy the

fourth, me the fifth, and I will read at noon as agreed.

One act of a drama has no more than four or five

hundred lines; one can write five hundred lines of

dialogue in a day and in a night."

"Tell me the subject, outline the plan, describe to me in a

few words the characters, and I will get to work," I

responded to him, somewhat alarmed.

"Ah!" he cried with an air of superb weariness and

magnificent disdain, "if I need to tell you the subject, we

will never be finished."

I did not think I was being inappropriate in posing that

question, which seemed quite pointless to Balzac.

After a brief instruction that I obtained with difficulty, I

set to work to put together a scene from which only a

few words remained in the final work, which was not

read the next day, as one might well believe. I do not

know what the other collaborators did; but the only one

who seriously joined in, this was Laurent-Jan, to whom

the play is dedicated.

That play, it was Vautrin. Everyone knows that the

dynastic and pyramidal tuft of hair that Frédérick

Lemaître fantasized wearing in his disguise as a Mexican

general brought down on the work the criticism of the

authorities; Vautrin, forbidden, had only a single

performance, and poor Balzac remained like Perrette in

front of his overturned milk jug. The prodigious

proceeds that he had anticipated as the probable product

of his drama vanished into ciphers, which did not stop

him from refusing very nobly the compensation offered

by the ministry.

At the beginning of this study, I told you about the

tendencies toward dandyism that were demonstrated by

Balzac, I spoke of his blue coat with solid gold buttons,

his monstrous cane topped with a group of turquoise

stones, his appearances in society and in the extravagant

salon; this splendor lasted only for a period of time, and

Balzac recognized that he was not suited to play the role

of Alcibiades or Brummel. Everyone could encounter

him, particularly in the morning, when he rushed to the

printers carrying copy or seeking proofs, in an infinitely

less splendid outfit. I recall the green hunting jacket, with

brass buttons representing the head of a fox, the black

and gray checked pants that extended to his feet, which

were encased in large laced shoes, the red scarf wrapped

around the neck like a rope, and the hat that was at the

same time both bristly and smooth, its blue bleached by

sweat, which covered rather than clothed "the most

fertile of our novelists." Despite the disorder and poverty

of his dress, nobody would have been tempted to take

for an unknown commoner this large man with the

blazing eyes, flaring nostrils, and cheeks struck with

violent tones, all illuminated by genius, who passed while

carried away by his dream like a whirlwind! At the sight

of him, the mocking stopped on the urchin's lips, and the

serious man did not begin to smile. Everyone recognized

one of the kings of thought.

Sometimes, to the contrary, he would be seen walking

with slow steps, his nose in the air, his eyes searching,

following one side of the street then examining the other,

not daydreaming, but looking at the signs. He was

looking for names to christen his characters. He

maintained with some justification that a name could not

be invented any more than a word. According to him,

names arose on their own like languages; besides real

names possessed a life, a meaning, a destiny, a mystical

significance, and it was impossible to place too much

importance on their choice. Léon Gozlan has told in a

charming way, in his Balzac en Pantoufles, how the famous

Z. Marcas of the Revue Parisienne was found.

A sign of a chimney man provided the name of Gubetta

that had long been sought by Victor Hugo, who was no

less careful than Balzac in the names of his characters.

This demanding life of nocturnal work had, despite his

strong constitution, left its traces on the features of

Balzac, and we find in Albert Savarus a portrait of him,

written by himself, that represents him such as he was at

that time (1842), with some minor differences:

"… A superb head, black hair already streaked with some

white, hair like that of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in our

paintings, with thick shining curls, stiff like horsehair, a

round white neck like that of a woman, a magnificent

forehead, divided by the powerful furrows that great

projects, great thoughts, strong reflections inscribe on the

the foreheads of great men; an olive complexion marbled

with red marks, a square nose, eyes of fire, then the

hollow cheeks, with two long lines full of suffering, a

mouth with a sardonic smile and a small chin that was

narrow and too short; crow's feet at his temples, sunken

eyes, rolling under the eyebrow arches like two burning

globes; but despite all of these signs of violent passion, a

calm manner, profoundly accepting, the voice of a

penetrating sweetness which surprised me with its facility,

the true voice of an orator, sometimes pure and astute,

sometimes insinuating, and thunderous when necessary,

then pliant with sarcasm, and then becoming incisive.

Monsieur Albert Savaron is of middle height, neither fat

nor thin; finally, he has the hands of a prelate."

In this portrait, which is incidentally very faithful, Balzac

idealizes himself a little for the needs of the novel, and

subtracts from himself a few kilograms of portliness,

license which is certainly permitted to a beloved hero of

the Duchess d'Argaiolo and Mademoiselle Philomène de

Watteville. This novel of Albert Savarus, one of the least

known and least quoted of Balzac, contains many

transposed details on his habits of life and of work; one

could even see there, if it was permissible to lift those

veils, secrets of another kind.

Balzac had left the Rue des Batailles for Les Jardies; he

then went to live at Passy. The house in which he lived,

situated on a steep slope, offered a unique architectural

layout. One entered there