It was necessary to descend three floors to reach the first.
The entry door, which was on the side of the house that
faced the road, opened nearly into the roof, like a
mansard. I dined there once with L. G. It was a strange
dinner, with its dishes based on economical recipes
invented by Balzac. At my express request, the famous
onion purée, endowed with so many healthy and
symbolic qualities and which almost killed Lassailly, did
not appear. But the wines were marvelous! Each bottle
had a story, and Balzac told it with an eloquence, a verve,
a conviction without equal. The wine of Bordeaux had
gone around the world three times; the Châteauneuf-du-Pape
traced back to legendary times; the rum came from
a barrel rolled for more than a century by the sea, which
had to be opened with blows from an axe, because the
crust that had been formed around it by shellfish, coral
and seaweed was thick. My palate, surprised, irritated by
the acidic flavors, protested in vain against these
illustrious origins. Balzac maintained the solemnity of a
soothsayer, and despite the proverb, I kept my eyes fixed
on him, but I did not make him laugh!
For dessert, we had pears of a ripeness, a size, a
tenderness and a quality that would do honor to a royal
table. Balzac devoured five or six of them with the juice
running down his chin; he believed that this fruit was
good for him, and he ate them in such a quantity as much
for health as for sweetness. Already he felt the first
effects of the illness that would take him. Death, with its
skeletal fingers, was touching this robust body to know
where to attack it, and finding no weakness there, killed it
through excess and hypertrophy. The cheeks of Balzac
were already lined and marked with those red spots that
simulate health to inattentive eyes; but for the observer,
the yellow tones of hepatitis surrounded the tired eyelids
with their golden halo; the expression, brightened by this
warm sepia hue, appeared even more vivacious and
shining and lessened anxieties.
At that time, Balzac was very preoccupied with the occult
sciences, palmistry, and card reading; he had been told of
an oracle even more astonishing than Mademoiselle
Lenormand, and he persuaded me, as well as Madame E.
de Girardin and Méry, to go and consult her with him.
The prophetess lived in Auteuil, I no longer know in
which street; that matters little to my story, because the
address that was given was false. We came upon an
honorable middle class family on holiday: the husband,
the wife, and an old mother in whom Balzac, sure of his
facts, persisted in finding a mystical air. The good
woman, not flattered to have been taken for a sorceress,
became angry; the husband took us for tricksters or
crooks; the young woman laughed loudly, and the servant
hastened prudently to lock up the silver. We had no
choice but to withdraw after our blunder; but Balzac
maintained that we were in the right place, and having
climbed back into the carriage, muttered insults at the old
lady: "Demon, harpy, magician, vampire, worm, monster,
lemur, ghoul, snake charmer, creature," and all of the
bizarre terms that a familiarity with the litanies of
Rabelais could suggest to him. I said: "If she is a
sorceress, she hides her game well." "Of cards," added
Madame de Girardin with a quickness of mind that never
failed her. We tried some further explorations, always
fruitlessly, and Delphine asserted that Balzac had
imagined this resource of Quinola in order to be driven by
carriage to Auteuil, where he had business, and to
procure some pleasant traveling companions. It is
necessary to believe, however, that Balzac alone found
that Madame Fontaine that we were all seeking together,
because, in Les Comédiens Sans le Savoir, he depicted her
between her hen Bilouche and her toad Astaroth with a
fantastic and frightening truthfulness, if those two words
can go together. Did he consult her seriously? Did he go
to see her as a simple observer? Many passages in La
Comédie Humaine seem to suggest that Balzac had a kind
of faith in the occult sciences, about which the official
sciences have still not said their last word.
Around this time, Balzac began to show a taste for old
furniture, chests, vases; the least piece of worm-eaten
wood that he bought on the Rue de Lappe always had an
illustrious provenance, and he created detailed
genealogies for his lesser knickknacks. He hid them here
and there, always because of those fantastical creditors
that I was starting to doubt. I even amused myself by
spreading the rumor that Balzac was a millionaire, that he
was buying old stockings from dealers in caterpillars to
hide onces, quadruples, génovines, crusades, colonnates,
double louis, in the manner of Père Grandet; I said
everywhere that he had three cisterns, like Aboul-Casem,
filled to the brim with garnets, dinars and rials. "Théo will
get my throat cut with his jokes!" said Balzac, annoyed
and charmed.
That which gave some veracity to my jokes was the new
house in which Balzac lived, on the Rue Fortunée, in the
Beaujon quarter, less populated then than it is today. He
occupied a mysterious little house there that would have
suited the fantasies of an ostentatious financier. From
outside, one saw over the wall a sort of cupola formed by
the arched ceiling of a sitting room and fresh paint on the
closed shutters.
When one entered this small house, which was not easy,
because the master of this dwelling hid himself with
extreme care, one discovered a thousand details of luxury
and comfort that contradicted the poverty that he
affected. He received me however one day, and I could
see a dining room adorned with old oak, with a table, a
fireplace, some buffets, some sideboards and some chairs
of sculpted wood, that would have made Berruguète,
Cornejo Duque and Verbruggen envious; a salon of
golden yellow damask, with doors, cornices, plinths and
window frames of ebony; a library arranged in armoires
inlayed with shell and brass in the style of Boule, and
whose door, hidden by the shelves, once closed, could
not be found; a bathroom in yellow Breccia, with bas-reliefs
of stucco; a domed sitting room, whose old
paintings had been restored by Edmond Hédouin; a
gallery lit from above, that I recognized later in the
collection of Le Cousin Pons. There were on the shelves all
sorts of curiosities, porcelain from Dresden and Sèvres,
horns of crackled celadon, and on the stairway, which
was covered with a rug, some great vases from China and
a magnificent lantern suspended by a cable of red silk.
"So have you emptied one of the caches of Aboul-Casem?"
I said to Balzac, laughing, confronted with these
splendors. "You can see well that I was right to suggest
that you are a millionaire."
"I am poorer than ever," he responded while taking on a
humble and pious air. "None of this is mine. I have
furnished the house for a friend that I await. I am only
the caretaker and porter of the building."
I quote here his exact words. This response, he made it in
passing to many people who were as shocked as me. The
mystery was soon explained by the marriage of Balzac to
the woman whom he had loved for a long time.
There is a Turkish proverb that says: "When the house is
finished, death enters." It is for this reason that the
sultans always have a palace in the course of construction
that they are very careful not to complete. Life seems to
want nothing to be complete – except misfortune.
Nothing is as dreaded as a wish fulfilled.
The notorious debts were finally paid, the dream union
completed, the nest made for happiness padded and
covered with down; as if they had foreseen his
approaching end, those who envied Balzac started to
praise him: Les Parents Pauvres, Le Cousin Pons, where the
genius of the author shines in all its radiance, united all
opinions. It was too beautiful; nothing more remained
for him but to die.
His illness made rapid progress, but nobody believed that
there would be a fatal outcome, so much we all trusted in
the athletic constitution of Balzac. I thought firmly that
he would bury us all.
I was going to take a trip to Italy. And before leaving I
wanted to say goodbye to my illustrious friend. He had
left in a carriage to collect from customs some exotic
curiosity. I drew away reassured, and at the moment that
I returned to my carriage, I was given a note from
Madame de Balzac, which explained to me obligingly and
with polite regrets why I had not found her husband at
home. At the bottom of the letter, Balzac had scrawled
these words.
"I can neither read, nor write.
"De Balzac."
I have preserved like a relic that ominous line, probably
the last that was written by the author of La Comédie
Humaine; it was, and I did not understand it right away,
the final cry, "My God, why have you forsaken me!" of
the thinker and of the worker. The idea that Balzac could
die did not even occur to me.
A few days after that, I was eating ice cream at the Café
Florian, on the Piazza Saint Marco; in my hand I found
the Journal des Débats, one of the few French papers that
was available in Venice, and I saw in it the announcement
of the death of Balzac. I almost fell from my chair onto
the stones of the Piazza at this sudden news, and my pain
was quickly mixed with an impulse of indignation and
outrage that was not very Christian, because all souls
have an equal value before God. I had just visited the
insane asylum on the island of San-Servolo, and I saw
there decrepit idiots, doddering octogenarians, human
worms who are not even guided by animal instinct, and I
asked myself why this luminous brain was extinguished
like a flame on which one blows, while tenacious life
persisted in these murky heads that were dimly traversed
by fickle rays.
Nine years have already passed since that fatal date.
Posterity has commenced for Balzac; every day he seems
greater. When he was in the company of his
contemporaries, he was poorly appreciated, he was seen
only in fragments under sometimes unfavorable
circumstances: now the edifice that he built rises as one
draws further away, like the cathedral of a city that
conceals the neighboring houses, and which on the
horizon appears immense above the flattened roofs. The
monument is not completed, but, such as it is, it terrifies
by its enormity, and surprised generations will ask
themselves who is the giant who alone has raised these
formidable blocks and built so high this Babel that made
all of society sing.
Although he is dead, Balzac still has detractors; on his
memory are thrown the banal reproach of immorality,
the last insult of powerless and jealous mediocrity, or
even of total stupidity. The author of La Comédie Humaine
not only is not immoral, but he is actually a strict
moralist. Monarchical and catholic, he defends authority,
exalts religion, preaches duty, reprimands passion, and
does not accept happiness except in marriage and the
family.
"Man," he says, "is neither good, nor bad; he is born with
instincts and aptitudes; society, far from corrupting him,
as Rousseau maintained, improves him, makes him
better; but self-interest develops also his evil tendencies.
Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, being, as I said
in Le Médecin de Campagne, a complete system for the
repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the
most important component of social order."
And with the ingenuity that suits a great man, anticipating
the reproach of immorality that will be addressed to him
by shoddy spirits, he numbers the irreproachably virtuous
characters who are found in La Comédie Humaine: Pierrette
Lorrain, Ursule Mirouët, Constance Birotteau, la
Fosseuse, Eugénie Grandet, Marguerite Claës, Pauline de
Villenoix, Madame Jules, Madame de la Chanterie, Eve
Chardon, Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon, Madame Firmiani,
Agathe Rouget, Renée de Maucombe, without counting
among the men, Joseph Le Bas, Genestas, Benassis, the
cleric Bonnet, Dr. Minoret, Pillerault, David Séchard, the
two Birotteaus, the cleric Chaperon, the judge Popinot,
Bourgeat, the Sauviats, the Tascherons, etc.
Rogues are not missing, it is true, in La Comédie Humaine.
But is Paris populated only with angels?