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Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings

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Title: Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings

Author: Mary Frances Sandars


        
Release date: January 9, 2006 [eBook #9548]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9548

Credits: Produced by John Bickers and Dagny Wilson


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HONORE DE BALZAC, HIS LIFE AND WRITINGS ***




Produced by John Bickers and Dagny Wilson





First published 1904.



                           HONORE DE BALZAC
                        HIS LIFE AND WRITINGS

                                  BY

                           MARY F. SANDARS



                               PREFACE

Books about Balzac would fill a fair-sized library. Criticisms on his
novels abound, and his contemporaries have provided us with several
amusing volumes dealing in a humorous spirit with his eccentricities,
and conveying the impression that the author of "La Cousine Bette" and
"Le Pere Goriot" was nothing more than an amiable buffoon.

Nevertheless, by some strange anomaly, there exists no Life of him
derived from original sources, incorporating the information available
since the appearance of the volume called "Lettres a l'Etrangere."
This book, which is the source of much of our present knowledge of
Balzac, is a collection of letters written by him from 1833 to 1844 to
Madame Hanska, the Polish lady who afterwards became his wife. The
letters are exact copies of the originals, having been made by the
Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, to whom the autographs belong.

It seems curious that no one should yet have made use of this mine of
biographical detail. In English we have a Memoir by Miss Wormeley,
written at a time when little as known about the great novelist, and a
Life by Mr. Frederick Wedmore in the "Great Writers" Series; but this,
like Miss Wormeley's Memoir, appeared before the "Lettres a
l'Etrangere" were published. Moreover, it is a very small book, and
the space in it devoted to Balzac as a man is further curtailed by
several chapters devoted to criticism of his work. The introduction to
the excellent translation of Balzac's novels undertaken by Mr.
Saintsbury, contains a short account of his life, but this only fills
a few pages and does not enter into much detail. Besides these, an
admirable essay on Balzac has appeared in "Main Currents of
Nineteenth-century Literature," by Mr. George Brandes; the scope of
this, however, is mainly criticism of his merits as a writer, not
description of his personality and doings.

Even in the French language, there is no trustworthy or satisfactory
Life of Balzac--a fact on which numerous critical writers make many
comments, though they apparently hesitate to throw themselves into the
breach and to undertake one. Madame Surville's charming Memoir only
professes to treat of Balzac's early life, and even within these
limits she intentionally conceals as much as she reveals. M. Edmond
Bire, in his interesting book, presents Balzac in different aspects,
as Royalist, playwriter, admirer of Napoleon, and so on; but M. Bire
gives no connected account of his life, while MM. Hanotaux and Vicaire
deal solely with Balzac's two years as printer and publisher. The
Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul is the one man who could give a
detailed and minutely correct Life of Balzac, as he has proved by the
stores of biographical knowledge contained in his works the "Roman
d'Amour," "Autour de Honore de Balzac," "La Genese d'un Roman de
Balzac, 'Les Paysans,'" and above all, "L'Histoire des Oeuvres de
Balzac," which has become a classic. The English or American reader
would hardly be able to appreciate these fascinating books, however,
unless he were first equipped with the knowledge of Balzac which would
be provided by a concise Life.

In these circumstances, helped and encouraged by Dr. Emil Reich, whose
extremely interesting lectures I had attended with much enjoyment, and
who very kindly gave me lists of books, and assisted me with advice, I
engaged in the task of writing this book. It is not intended to add to
the mass of criticism of Balzac's novels, being merely an attempt to
portray the man as he was, and to sketch correctly a career which has
been said to be more thrilling than a large proportion of novels.

I must apologise for occasional blank spaces, for when Balzac is with
Madame Hanska, and his letters to her cease, as a general rule all our
information ceases also; and the intending biographer can only glean
from scanty allusions in the letters written afterwards, what happened
at Rome, Naples, Dresden, or any of the other towns, to which Balzac
travelled in hot haste to meet his divinity.

The book has been compiled as far as possible from original sources;
as the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul--whose collection of
documents relating to Balzac, Gautier, and George Sand is unique,
while his comprehensive knowledge of Balzac is the result of many
years of study--has most kindly allowed me to avail myself of his
library at Brussels. There, arranged methodically, according to some
wonderful system which enables the Vicomte to find at once any
document his visitor may ask for, are hundreds of Balzac's autograph
writings, many of them unpublished and of great interest. There, too,
are portraits and busts of the celebrated novelist, letters from his
numerous admirers, and the proofs of nearly all his novels--those
sheets covered with a network of writing, which were the despair of
the printers. The collection is most remarkable, even when we remember
the large sums of money, and the patience and ability, which have for
many years been focussed on its formation. It will one day be
deposited in the museum at Chantilly, near Paris, where it will be at
the disposal of those who wish to study its contents.

The Vicomte has kindly devoted much time to answering my questions,
and has shown me documents and autograph letters, the exact words of
which have been the subject of discussion and dispute, so that I have
been able myself to verify the fact that the copies made by M. de
Spoelberch de Lovenjoul are taken exactly from the originals. He has
warned me to be particularly careful about my authorities, as many of
Balzac's letters--printed as though copied from autographs--are
incorrectly dated, and have been much altered.

He has further added to his kindness by giving me several
illustrations, and by having this book translated to him, in order to
correct it carefully by the information to which he alone has access.
I gladly take this opportunity of acknowledging how deeply I am
indebted to him.

I cannot consider these words of introduction complete without again
expressing my sense of what I owe to Dr. Reich, to whom the initial
idea of this book is due, and without whose energetic impetus it would
never have been written. He has found time, in the midst of a very
busy life, to read through, and to make many valuable suggestions, and
I am most grateful for all he has done to help me.

I must finish by thanking Mr. Curtis Brown most heartily for the
trouble he has taken on my behalf, for the useful hints he has given
me, and for the patience with which he has elucidated the difficulties
of an inexperienced writer.

    MARY F. SANDARS.





                           HONORE DE BALZAC



                              CHAPTER I

  Balzac's claims to greatness--The difficulty in attempting a
  complete Life--His complex character--The intention of this book.

At a time when the so-called Realistic School is in the ascendant
among novelists, it seems strange that little authentic information
should have been published in the English language about the great
French writer, Honore de Balzac. Almost alone among his
contemporaries, he dared to claim the interest of the world for
ordinary men and women solely on the ground of a common humanity. Thus
he was the first to embody in literature the principle of Burns that
"a man's a man for a' that"; and though this fact has now become a
truism, it was a discovery, and an important discovery, when Balzac
wrote. He showed that, because we are ourselves ordinary men and
women, it is really human interest, and not sensational circumstance
which appeals to us, and that material for enthralling drama can be
found in the life of the most commonplace person--of a middle-aged
shopkeeper threatened with bankruptcy, or of an elderly musician with
a weakness for good dinners. At one blow he destroyed the unreal ideal
of the Romantic School, who degraded man by setting up in his place a
fantastic and impossible hero as the only theme worthy of their pen;
and thus he laid the foundation of the modern novel.

His own life is full of interest. He was not a recluse or a bookworm;
his work was to study men, and he lived among men, he fought
strenuously, he enjoyed lustily, he suffered keenly, and he died
prematurely, worn out by the force of his own emotions, and by the
prodigies of labour to which he was impelled by the restless
promptings of his active brain, and by his ever-pressing need for
money. Some of his letters to Madame Hanska have been published during
the last few years; and where can we read a more pathetic love story
than the record of his seventeen years' waiting for her, and of the
tragic ending to his long-deferred happiness? Or where in modern times
can more exciting and often comical tales of adventure be found than
the accounts of his wild and always unsuccessful attempts to become a
millionaire? His friends comprised most of the celebrated French
writers of the day; and though not a lover of society, he was
acquainted with many varieties of people, while his own personality
was powerful, vivid, and eccentric.

Thus he appears at first sight to be a fascinating subject for
biography; but if we examine a little more closely, we shall realise
the web of difficulties in which the writer of a complete and
exhaustive Life of Balzac would involve himself, and shall understand
why the task has never been attempted. The great author's money
affairs alone are so complicated that it is doubtful whether he ever
mastered them himself, and it is certainly impossible for any one else
to understand them; while he managed to shroud his private life,
especially his relations to women, in almost complete mystery. For
some years after his death the monkish habit in which he attired
himself was considered symbolic of his mental attitude; and even now,
though the veil is partially lifted, and we realise the great part
women played in his life, there remain many points which are not yet
cleared up.

Consequently any one who attempts even in the most unambitious way to
give a complete account of the great writer's life, is confronted with
many blank spaces. It is true that the absolutely mysterious
disappearances of which his contemporaries speak curiously are now
partially accounted for, as we know that they were usually connected
with Madame Hanska, and that Balzac's sense of honour would not allow
him to breathe her name, except to his most intimate friends, and
under the pledge of the strictest secrecy. His letters to her have
allowed a flood of light to pour upon his hitherto veiled personality;
but they are almost our only reliable source of information.
Therefore, when they cease, because Balzac is with his ladylove, and
we are suddenly excluded from his confidence, we can only guess what
is happening.

In this way, we possess but the scantiest information about the
journeys which occupied a great part of his time during the last few
years of his life. We know that he travelled, regardless of expense
and exhaustion, as quickly as possible, and by the very shortest
route, to meet Madame Hanska; but this once accomplished, we can
gather little more, and we long for a diary or a confidential
correspondent. In the first rapture of his meeting at Neufchatel, he
did indeed open his heart to his sister, Madame Surville; but his
habitual discretion, and his care for the reputation of the woman he
loved, soon imposed silence upon him, and he ceased to comment on the
great drama of his life.

The great versatility of his mind, and the power he possessed of
throwing himself with the utmost keenness into many absolutely
dissimilar and incongruous enterprises at the same time, add further
to the difficulty of understanding him. An extraordinary number of
subjects had their place in his capacious brain, and the ease with
which he dismissed one and took up another with equal zest the moment
after, causes his doings to seem unnatural to us of ordinary mind.
Leon Gozlan gives a curious instance of this on the occasion of the
first reading of the "Ressources de Quinola."

Balzac had recited his play in the green-room of the Odeon to the
assembled actors and actresses, and before a most critical audience
had gone through the terrible strain of trying to improvise the fifth
act, which was not yet written. He and Gozlan went straight from the
hot atmosphere of the theatre to refresh themselves in the cool air of
the Luxembourg Gardens. Here we should expect one of two things to
happen. Either Balzac would be depressed with the ill-success of his
fifth act, at which, according to Gozlan, he had acquitted himself so
badly that Madame Dorval, the principal actress, refused to take a
role in the play; or, on the other hand, his sanguine temperament
would cause him to overlook the drawbacks, and to think only of the
enthusiasm with which the first four acts had been received. Neither
of these two things took place. Balzac "n'y pensait deja plus." He
talked with the greatest eagerness of the embellishments he had
proposed to M. Decazes for his palace, and especially of a grand
spiral staircase, which was to lead from the centre of the Luxembourg
Gardens to the Catacombs, so that these might be shown to visitors,
and become a source of profit to Paris. But of his play he said
nothing.

The reader of "Lettres a l'Etrangere," which are written to the woman
with whom Balzac was passionately in love, and whom he afterwards
married, may, perhaps, at first sight congratulate himself on at last
understanding in some degree the great author's character and mode of
life. If he dives beneath the surface, however, he will find that
these beautiful and touching letters give but an incomplete picture;
and that, while writing them, Balzac was throwing much energy into
schemes, which he either does not mention to his correspondent, or
touches on in the most cursory fashion. Therefore the perspective of
his life is difficult to arrange, and ordinary rules for gauging
character are at fault. We find it impossible to follow the principle,
that because Balzac possessed one characteristic, he could not also
show a diametrically opposite quality--that, for instance, because
tenderness, delicacy of feeling, and a high sense of reverence and of
honour were undoubtedly integral parts of his personality, the stories
told by his contemporaries of his occasional coarseness must
necessarily be false.

His own words, written to the Duchesse d'Abrantes in 1828, have no
doubt a great element of truth in them: "I have the most singular
character I know. I study myself as I might study another person, and
I possess, shut up in my five foot eight inches, all the incoherences,
all the contrasts possible; and those who think me vain, extravagant,
obstinate, high-minded, without connection in my ideas,--a fop,
negligent, idle, without application, without reflection, without any
constancy; a chatterbox, without tact, badly brought up, impolite,
whimsical, unequal in temper,--are quite as right as those who perhaps
say that I am economical, modest, courageous, stingy, energetic, a
worker, constant, silent, full of delicacy, polite, always gay. Those
who consider that I am a coward will not be more wrong than those who
say that I am extremely brave; in short, learned or ignorant, full of
talent or absurd, nothing astonishes me more than myself. I end by
believing that I am only an instrument played on by circumstances.
Does this kaleidoscope exist, because, in the soul of those who claim
to paint all the affections of the human heart, chance throws all
these affections themselves, so that they may be able, by the force of
their imagination, to feel what they paint? And is observation a sort
of memory suited to aid this lively imagination? I begin to think
so."[*]

[*] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 77.

Certainly Balzac's character proves to the hilt the truth of the rule
that, with few exceptions in the world's history, the higher the
development, the more complex the organisation and the more violent
the clashing of the divers elements of the man's nature; so that his
soul resembles a field of battle, and he wears out quickly.
Nevertheless, because everything in Balzac seems contradictory, when
he is likened by one of his friends to the sea, which is one and
indivisible, we perceive that the comparison is not inapt. Round the
edge are the ever-restless waves; on the surface the foam blown by
fitful gusts of wind, the translucent play of sunbeams, and the
clamour of storms lashing up the billows; but down in the sombre
depths broods the resistless, immovable force which tinges with its
reflection the dancing and play above, and is the genius and
fascination, the mystery and tragedy of the sea.

Below the merriment and herculean jollity, so little represented in
his books, there was deep, gloomy force in the soul of the man who,
gifted with an almost unparalleled imagination, would yet grip the
realities of the pathetic and terrible situations he evolved with
brutal strength and insistence. The mind of the writer of "Le Pere
Goriot," "La Cousine Bette," and "Le Cousin Pons," those terrible
tragedies where the Greek god Fate marches on his victims
relentlessly, and there is no staying of the hand for pity, could not
have been merely a wide, sunny expanse with no dark places.
Nevertheless, we are again puzzled, when we attempt to realise the
personality of a man whose imagination could soar to the mystical and
philosophical conception of "Seraphita," which is full of religious
poetry, and who yet had the power in "Cesar Birotteau" to invest
prosaic and even sordid details with absolute verisimilitude, or in
the "Contes Drolatiques" would write, in Old French, stories of
Rabelaisian breadth and humour. The only solution of these
contradictions is that, partly perhaps by reason of great physical
strength, certainly because of an abnormally powerful brain and
imagination, Balzac's thoughts, feelings, and passions were unusually
strong, and were endowed with peculiar impetus and independence of
each other; and from this resulted a versatility which caused most
unexpected developments, and which fills us of smaller mould with
astonishment.

Nevertheless, steadfastness was decidedly the groundwork of the
character of the man who was not dismayed by the colossal task of the
Comedie Humaine; but pursued his work through discouragement, ill
health, and anxieties. Except near the end of his life, when, owing to
the unreasonable strain to which it had been subjected, his powerful
organism had begun to fail, Balzac refused to neglect his vocation
even for his love affairs--a self-control which must have been a
severe test to one of his temperament.

This absorption in his work cannot have been very flattering to the
ladies he admired; and one plausible explanation of Madame de
Castries' coldness to his suit is that she did not believe in the
devotion of a lover who, while paying her the most assiduous court at
Aix, would yet write from five in the morning till half-past five in
the evening, and only bestow his company on her from six till an early
bedtime. Even the adored Madame Hanska had to take second place where
work was concerned. When they were both at Vienna in 1835, he writes
with some irritation, apparently in answer to a remonstrance on her
part, that he cannot work when he knows he has to go out; and that,
owing to the time he spent the evening before in her society, he must
now shut himself up for fourteen hours and toil at "Le Lys dans la
Vallee." He adds, with his customary force of language, that if he
does not finish the book at Vienna, he will throw himself into the
Danube!

The great psychologist knew his own character well when, in another
letter to Madame Hanska, who has complained of his frivolity, he
cries, indignantly: "Frivolity of character! Why, you speak as a good
_bourgeois_ would have done, who, seeing Napoleon turn to the right,
to the left, and on all sides to examine his field of battle, would
have said, 'This man cannot remain in one place; he has no fixed
idea!'"[*]

[*] "Lettres a l'Etrangere."

This change of posture, though consonant, as Balzac says, with real
stability, is a source of bewilderment to the reader of his sayings
and doings, till it dawns upon him that, through pride, policy, and
the usual shrinking of the sensitive from casting their pearls before
swine, Balzac was a confirmed _poseur_, so that what he tells us is
often more misleading than his silence. Leon Gozlan's books are a
striking instance of the fact that, with all Balzac's jollity, his
camaraderie, and his flow of words, he did not readily reveal himself,
except to those whom he could thoroughly trust to understand him.
Gozlan went about with Balzac very often, and was specially chosen by
him time after time as a companion; but he really knew very little of
the great man. If we compare his account of Balzac's feeling or want
of feeling at a certain crisis, and then read what is written on the
same subject to Madame Hanska, Balzac's enormous power of reserve, and
his habit of deliberately misleading those who were not admitted to
his confidence, may be gauged.

George Sand tells us an anecdote which shows how easily, from his
anxiety not to wear his heart upon his sleeve, Balzac might be
misunderstood. He dined with her on January 29th, 1844, after a visit
to Russia, and related at table, with peals of laughter and apparently
enormous satisfaction, an instance which had come under his notice of
the ferocious exercise of absolute power. Any stranger listening,
would have thought him utterly heartless and brutal, but George Sand
knew better. She whispered to him: "That makes you inclined to cry,
doesn't it?"[*] He answered nothing; left off laughing, as if a spring
in him had broken; was very serious for the rest of the evening, and
did not say a word more about Russia.

[*] "Autour de la Table," by George Sand.

Balzac looked on the world as an arena; and as the occasion and the
audience arose, he suited himself with the utmost aplomb to the part
he intended to play, so that under the costume and the paint the real
Balzac is often difficult to discover. Sometimes he would pretend to
be rich and prosperous, when he thought an editor would thereby be
induced to offer him good terms; and sometimes, when it suited his
purpose, he would make the most of his poverty and of his pecuniary
embarrassments. Madame Hanska, from whom he required sympathy, heard
much of his desperate situation after the failure of Werdet, whom he
likens to the vulture that tormented Prometheus; but as it would not
answer for Emile de Girardin, the editor of _La Presse_, to know much
about Balzac's pecuniary difficulties, Madame de Girardin is assured
that the report of Werdet's supposed disaster is false, and Balzac
virtuously remarks that in the present century honesty is never
believed in.[*] Sometimes his want of candour appears to have its
origin in his hatred to allow that he is beaten, and there is
something childlike and naive in his vanity. We are amused when he
informs Madame Hanska that he is giving up the _Chronique de Paris_
--which, after a brilliant flourish of trumpets at the start, was a
complete failure--because the speeches in the Chambre des Deputes are
so silly that he abandons the idea of taking up politics, as he had
intended to do by means of journalism. In a later letter, however, he
is obliged to own that, though the _Chronique_ has been, of course, a
brilliant success, money is lacking, owing to the wickedness of
several abandoned characters, and that therefore he has been forced to
bring the publication to an end.

[*] "La Genese d'un Roman de Balzac," p. 152, by Le Vicomte de
    Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.

Of one vanity he was completely free. He did not pose to posterity. Of
his books he thought much--each one was a masterpiece, more glorious
than the last; but he never imagined that people would be in the least
interested in his doings, and he did not care about their opinion of
him. Nevertheless there was occasionally a gleam of joy, when some one
unexpectedly showed a spontaneous admiration for his work. For
instance, in a Viennese concert-room, where the whole audience had
risen to do honour to the great author, a young man seized his hand
and put it to his lips, saying, "I kiss the hand that wrote
'Seraphita,'" and Balzac said afterwards to his sister, "They may deny
my talent, if they choose, but the memory of that student will always
comfort me."

His genius would, he hoped, be acknowledged one day by all the world;
but there was a singular and lovable absence of self-consciousness in
his character, and a peculiar humility and childlikeness under his
braggadocio and apparent arrogance. Perhaps this was the source of the
power of fascination he undoubtedly exercised over his contemporaries.
Nothing is more noticeable to any one reading about Balzac than the
difference between the tone of amused indulgence with which those who
knew him personally, speak of his peculiarities, and the contemptuous
or horrified comments of people who only heard from others of his
extraordinary doings.

He had bitter enemies as well as devoted friends; and his fighting
proclivities, his objection to allow that he is ever in the wrong, and
his habit of blaming others for his misfortunes, have had a great
effect in obscuring our knowledge of Balzac's life, as the people he
abused were naturally exasperated, and took up their pens, not to give
a fair account of what really happened, but to justify themselves
against Balzac's aspersions. Werdet's book is an instance of this.
Beneath the extravagant admiration he expresses for the "great
writer," with his "heart of gold," a glint can be seen from time to
time of the animus which inspired him when he wrote, and we feel that
his statements must be received with caution, and do not add much to
our real knowledge of Balzac.

Nevertheless, though there are still blank spaces to be filled, as
well as difficulties to overcome and puzzles to unravel, much fresh
information has lately been discovered about the great writer, notably
the "Lettres a l'Etrangere," published in 1899, a collection of some
of the letters written by Balzac, from 1833 to 1848, to Madame Hanska,
the Polish lady who afterwards became his wife. These letters, which
are the property of the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, give many
interesting details, and alter the earlier view of several points in
Balzac's career and character; but the volume is large, and takes some
time to read. It is therefore thought, that as those who would seem
competent, by their knowledge and skill, to overcome the difficulties
of writing a complete and exhaustive life are silent, a short sketch,
which can claim nothing more than correctness of detail, may not be
unwelcome. It contains no attempt to give what could only be a very
inadequate criticism of the books of the great novelist; for that, the
reader must be referred to the many works by learned Frenchmen who
have made a lifelong study of the subject. It is written, however, in
the hope that the admirers of "Eugenie Grandet" and "Le Pere Goriot"
may like to read something of the author of these masterpieces, and
that even those who only know the great French novelist by reputation
may be interested to hear a little about the restless life of a man
who was a slave to his genius--was driven by its insistent voice to
engage in work which was enormously difficult to him, to lead an
abnormal and unhealthy life, and to wear out his exuberant physical
strength prematurely. He died with his powers at their highest and his
great task unfinished; and a sense of thankfulness for his own
mediocrity fills the reader, when he reaches the end of the life of
Balzac.



                              CHAPTER II

  Balzac's appearance, dress, and personality--His imaginary
  world and schemes for making money--His family, childhood,
  and school-days.

According to Theophile Gautier, herculean jollity was the most
striking characteristic of the great writer, whose genius excels in
sombre and often sordid tragedy. George Sand, too, speaks of Balzac's
"serene soul with a smile in it"; and this was the more remarkable,
because he lived at a time when discontent and despair were considered
the sign-manual of talent.

Physically Balzac was far from satisfying a romantic ideal of fragile
and enervated genius. Short and stout, square of shoulder, with an
abundant mane of thick black hair--a sign of bodily vigour--his whole
person breathed intense vitality. Deep red lips, thick, but finely
curved, and always ready to laugh, attested, like the ruddiness in his
full cheeks, to the purity and richness of his blood. His forehead,
high, broad, and unwrinkled, save for a line between the eyes, and his
neck, thick, round, and columnar, contrasted in their whiteness with
the colour in the rest of the face. His hands were large and dimpled
--"beautiful hands," his sister calls them. He was proud of them, and
had a slight prejudice against any one with ugly extremities. His
nose, about which he gave special directions to David when his bust
was taken, was well cut, rather long, and square at the end, with the
lobes of the open nostrils standing out prominently. As to his eyes,
according to Gautier, there were none like them.[*] They had
inconceivable life, light, and magnetism. They were eyes to make an
eagle lower his lids, to read through walls and hearts, to terrify a
wild beast--eyes of a sovereign, a seer, a conqueror. Lamartine likens
them to "darts dipped in kindliness." Balzac's sister speaks of them
as brown; but, according to other contemporaries, they were like
brilliant black diamonds, with rich reflections of gold, the white of
the eyeballs being tinged with blue. They seemed to be lit with the
fire of the genius within, to read souls, to answer questions before
they were asked, and at the same time to pour out warm rays of
kindliness from a joyous heart.

[*] "Portraits Contemporains--Honore de Balzac," by Theophile Gautier.

At all points Balzac's personality differed from that of his
contemporaries of the Romantic School--those transcendental geniuses
of despairing temper, who were utterly hopeless about the prosaic
world in which, by some strange mistake, they found themselves; and
from which they felt that no possible inspiration for their art could
be drawn. So little attuned were these unfortunates to their
commonplace surroundings that, after picturing in their writings
either fiendish horrors, or a beautiful, impossible atmosphere,
peopled by beings out of whom all likeness to humanity had been
eliminated, they not infrequently lost their mental balance
altogether, or hurried by their own act out of a dull world which
could never satisfy their lively imaginations. Balzac, on the other
hand, loved the world. How, with the acute powers of observation, and
the intuition, amounting almost to second sight, with which he was
gifted, could he help doing so? The man who could at will quit his own
personality, and invest himself with that of another; who would follow
a workman and his wife on their way home at night from a music-hall,
and listen to their discussions on domestic matters till he imbibed
their life, felt their ragged clothing on his back, and their desires
and wants in his soul,--how could he find life dull, or the most
commonplace individual uninteresting?

In dress Balzac was habitually careless. He would rush to the
printer's office, after twelve hours of hard work, with his hat drawn
over his eyes, his hands thrust into shabby gloves, and his feet in
shoes with high sides, worn over loose trousers, which were pleated at
the waist and held down with straps. Even in society he took no
trouble about his appearance, and Lamartine describes him as looking,
in the salon of Madame de Girardin, like a schoolboy who has outgrown
his clothes. Only for a short time, which he describes with glee in
his letters to Madame Hanska, did he pose as a man of fashion. Then he
wore a magnificent white waistcoat, and a blue coat with gold buttons;
carried the famous cane, with a knob studded with turquoises,
celebrated in Madame de Girardin's story, "La Canne de Monsieur de
Balzac"; and drove in a tilbury, behind a high-stepping horse, with a
tiny tiger, whom he christened Anchise, perched on the back seat. This
phase was quickly over, the horses were sold, and Balzac appeared no
more in the box reserved for dandies at the Opera. Of the fashionable
outfit, the only property left was the microscopic groom--an orphan,
of whom Balzac took the greatest care, and whom he visited daily
during the boy's last illness, a year or two after. Thenceforward he
reverted to his usual indifference about appearances, his only vanity
being the spotless cleanliness of his working costume--a loose
dressing-gown of white flannel or cashmere, made like the habit of a
Benedictine monk, which was kept in round the waist by a silk girdle,
and was always scrupulously guarded from ink-stains.

Naive as a child, anxious for sympathy, frankly delighted with his own
masterpieces, yet modest in a fashion peculiar to himself, Balzac gave
a dominant impression of kindliness and bonhomie, which overshadowed
even the idea of intellect. To his friends he is not in the first
place the author of the "Comedie Humaine," designed, as George Sand
rather grandiloquently puts it, to be "an almost universal examination
of the ideas, sentiments, customs, habits, legislation, arts, trades,
costumes, localities--in short, of all that constitutes the lives of
his contemporaries"[*]--that claim to notice recedes into the
background, and what is seen clearly is the _bon camarade_, with his
great hearty laugh, his jollity, his flow of language, and his jokes,
often Rabelaisian in flavour. Of course there was another side to the
picture, and there were times in his hardset and harassing life when
even _his_ vivacity failed him. These moods were, however, never
apparent in society; and even to his intimate men friends, such as
Theophile Gautier and Leon Gozlan, Balzac was always the delightful,
whimsical companion, to be thought of and written of afterwards with
an amused, though affectionate smile. Only to women, his principal
confidantes, who played as important a part in his life as they do in
his books, did he occasionally show the discouragement to which the
artistic nature is prone. Sometimes the state of the weather, which
always had a great effect on him, the difficulty of his work, the
fatigue of sitting up all night, and his monetary embarrassments,
brought him to an extreme state of depression, both physical and
mental. He would arrive at the house of Madame Surville, his sister,
who tells the story, hardly able to drag himself along, in a gloomy,
dejected state, with his skin sallow and jaundiced.

[*] "Autour de la Table," by George Sand.

"Don't console me," he would say in a faint voice, dropping into a
chair; "it is useless--I am a dead man."

The dead man would then begin, in a doleful voice, to tell of his new
troubles; but he soon revived, and the words came forth in the most
ringing tones of his voice. Then, opening his proofs, he would drop
back into his dismal accents and say, by way of conclusion:

"Yes, I am a wrecked man, sister!"

"Nonsense! No man is wrecked with such proofs as those to correct."

Then he would raise his head, his face would unpucker little by
little, the sallow tones of his skin would disappear.

"My God, you are right!" he would say. "Those books will make me live.
Besides, blind Fortune is here, isn't she? Why shouldn't she protect a
Balzac as well as a ninny? And there are always ways of wooing her.
Suppose one of my millionaire friends (and I have some), or a banker,
not knowing what to do with his money, should come to me and say, 'I
know your immense talents, and your anxieties: you want such-and-such
a sum to free yourself; accept it fearlessly: you will pay me; your
pen is worth millions!' That is _all I want_, my dear."[*]

[*] "Balzac, sa Vie et ses Oeuvres, d'apres la Correspondance," by
    Mme. L. Surville (nee de Balzac).

Then the "child-man," as his sister calls him, would imagine himself a
member of the Institute; then in the Chamber of Peers, pointing out
and reforming abuses, and governing a highly prosperous country.
Finally, he would end the interview with, "Adieu! I am going home to
see if my banker is waiting for me"; and would depart, quite consoled,
with his usual hearty laugh.

He lived, his sister tells us, to a great extent in a world of his
own, peopled by the imaginary characters in his books, and he would
gravely discuss its news, as others do that of the real world.
Sometimes he was delighted at the grand match he had planned for his
hero; but often affairs did not go so well, and perhaps it would give
him much anxious thought to marry his heroine suitably, as it was
necessary to find her a husband in her own set, and this might be
difficult to arrange. When asked about the past of one of his
creations, he replied gravely that he "had not been acquainted with
Monsieur de Jordy before he came to Nemours," but added that, if his
questioner were anxious to know, he would try to find out. He had many
fancies about names, declaring that those which are invented do not
give life to imaginary beings, whereas those really borne by some one
endow them with vitality. Leon Gozlan says that he was dragged by
Balzac half over Paris in search of a suitable name for the hero of a
story to be published in the _Revue Parisienne_. After they had
trudged through scores of streets in vain, Balzac, to his intense joy,
discovered "Marcas" over a small tailor's shop, to which he added, as
"a flame, a plume, a star," the initial Z. Z. Marcas conveyed to him
the idea of a great, though unknown, philosopher, poet, or
silversmith, like Benvenuto Cellini; he went no farther, he was
satisfied--he had found "_the_ name of names."[*]

[*] "Balzac en Pantoufles," by Leon Gozlan.

Many are the amusing anecdotes told of Balzac's schemes for becoming
rich. Money he struggled for unceasingly, not from sordid motives, but
because it was necessary to his conception of a happy life. Without
its help he could never be freed from his burden of debt, and united
to the _grande dame_ of his fancy, who must of necessity be posed in
elegant toilette, on a suitable background of costly brocades and
objects of art. Nevertheless, in spite of all his efforts, and of a
capacity and passion for work which seemed almost superhuman, he never
obtained freedom from monetary anxiety. Viewed in this light, there is
pathos in his many impossible plans for making his fortune, and
freeing himself from the strain which was slowly killing him.

Some of his projected enterprises were wildly fantastic, and prove
that the great author was, like many a genius, a child at heart; and
that, in his eyes, the world was not the prosaic place it is to most
men and women, but an enchanted globe, like the world of "Treasure
Island," teeming with the possibility of strange adventure. At one
time he hoped to gain a substantial income by growing pineapples in
the little garden at Les Jardies, and later on he thought money might
be made by transporting oaks from Poland to France. For some months he
believed that, by means of magnetism exercised on somnambulists, he
had discovered the exact spot at Pointe a Pitre where
Toussaint-Louverture hid his treasure, and afterwards shot the negroes
he had employed to bury it, lest they should betray its hiding-place.
Jules Sandeau and Theophile Gautier were chosen to assist in the
enterprise of carrying off the hidden gold, and were each to receive a
quarter of the treasure, Balzac, as leader of the venture, taking the
other half. The three friends were to start secretly and separately
with spades and shovels, and, their work accomplished, were to put the
treasure on a brig which was to be in waiting, and were to return as
millionaires to France. This brilliant plan failed, because none of the
three adventurers had at the moment money to pay his passage out; and no
doubt, by the time that the necessary funds were forthcoming, Balzac's
fertile brain was engaged on other enterprises.[*]

[*] "Portraits Contemporains--Honore de Balzac," by Theophile Gautier.

The foundation of his pecuniary misfortunes was laid before his birth,
when his father, forty-five years old and unmarried, sank the bulk of
his fortune in life annuities, so that his son was in the unfortunate
position of starting life in very comfortable circumstances, and of
finding himself in want of money just when he most needed it.

Balzac's father was born in Languedoc in 1746, and we are told by his
son that he had been Secretary, and by Madame Surville, advocate, of
the Council under Louis XVI. Both these statements however appear to
be incorrect, and may be considered to have been harmless fictions on
the part of the old gentleman, as no record of his name can be found
in the Royal Calendar, which was very carefully kept. Almanacs are
awkward things, and his name _is_ mentioned in the National Calendar
of 1793 as a "lawyer" and "member of the general council for the
section of the rights of man in the Commune." But he evidently
preferred to draw a veil over his revolutionary experiences, and it
seems rather hard that, because he happened to possess a celebrated
son, his little secrets should be exposed to the light of day. Later
on he became an ardent Royalist, and in 1814 he joined with Bertrand
de Molleville to draw up a memoir against the Charter, which Balzac
says was dictated to him, then a boy of fifteen; and he also mentions
that he remembers hearing M. de Molleville cry out, "The Constitution
ruined Louis XVI., and the Charter will kill the Bourbons!" "No
compromise" formed an essential part of the creed of the Royalists at
the Restoration.

When M. de Balzac[*] married, in 1797, he was in charge of the
Commissariat of the Twenty-second Military Division; and in 1798 he
came to live in Tours, where he had bought a house and some land near
the town, and where he remained for nineteen years. Here, on May 16,
1799, St. Honore's day, his son, the celebrated novelist, was born,
and was christened Honore after the saint.

[*] The Balzac family will be accorded the "de" in this account of
    them.

Old M. de Balzac was in his own way literary, and had written two or
three pamphlets, one on his favourite subject--that of health. He
seems to have been a man of much originality, many peculiarities, and
much kindness of heart. He was evidently impulsive, like his
celebrated son, and he certainly made a culpable mistake, and a cruel
one for his family, when he rashly concluded that he would always
remain a bachelor, and arranged that his income should die with him.
He afterwards hoped to repair the wrong he had thus done to his
children, by outliving the other shareholders and obtaining a part of
the immense capital of the Tontine. Fortunately for himself he
possessed extraordinary optimism, and power of excluding from his mind
the possibility of all unpleasant contingencies--qualities which he
handed on in full measure to Honore. He therefore kept himself happy
in the monetary disappointments of his later life, by thinking and
talking of the millions his children would inherit from their
centenarian father. For their sakes it was necessary that he should
take care of his health, and he considered that, by maintaining the
"equilibrium of the vital forces," there was absolutely no doubt that
he would live for a hundred years or more. Therefore he followed a
strict regimen, and gave himself an infinite amount of trouble, as
well as amusement, by his minute arrangements.

Unfortunately, however, the truth of his theories could never be
tested, as he died in 1829, at the age of eighty-three, from the
effects of an operation; and Madame de Balzac and her family were left
to face the stern facts of life, denuded of the rose-coloured haze in
which they had been clothed by the kindly old enthusiast. Balzac's
mother certainly had a hard life, and from what we hear of her
nervous, excitable nature--inherited apparently from her mother,
Madame Sallambier--we can hardly be astonished when Balzac writes to
Madame Hanska, in 1835, that if her misfortunes do not kill her, it is
feared they will destroy her reason. Nevertheless, she outlived her
celebrated son, and is mentioned by Victor Hugo, when he visited
Balzac's deathbed, as the only person in the room, except a nurse and
a servant.[*]

[*] "Choses Vues," by Victor Hugo.

She was many years younger than her husband--a beauty and an heiress;
and she evidently had her own way with the easy-going old M. de
Balzac, and was the moving spirit in the household: so that the ease
and absence of friction in her early life must have made her
subsequent troubles and humiliations especially galling. Besides
Honore, she had three children: Laure, afterwards Madame Surville;
Laurence, who died young; and Henry, the black sheep of the family,
who returned from the colonies, after having made an unsatisfactory
marriage, and who, during the last years of Honore de Balzac's life,
required constant monetary help from his relations.

Her two young children were Madame de Balzac's favourites, and they
and their affairs gave her constant trouble. In 1822 Laurence married
a M. Saint-Pierre de Montzaigle, apparently a good deal older than
herself; and Honore gives a very _couleur de rose_ account of his
future brother-in-law's family, in a letter written at the time of the
engagement to Laure, who was already married. He does not seem so
charmed with the bridegroom, _il troubadouro_, as with his
surroundings, and remarks that he has lost his top teeth, and is very
conceited, but will do well enough--as a husband. Every one is
delighted at the marriage; but Laure can imagine _maman's_ state of
nervous excitement from her recollection of the last few days before
her own wedding, and can fancy that he and Laurence are not enjoying
themselves. "Nature surrounds roses with thorns, and pleasures with a
crowd of troubles. Mamma follows the example of nature."[*]

[*] "H. de Balzac--Correspondence," vol. i. p. 41.

Laurence's death, in 1826, must have been a terrible grief to the poor
mother; but she may have realised later on that her daughter had
escaped much trouble, as in 1836 the Balzac family threatened M. de
Montzaigle with a lawsuit on the subject of his son, who was left to
wander about Paris without food, shoes, or clothes. We cannot suppose
that any one with such sketchy views of the duties of a father could
have been a particularly satisfactory husband; but perhaps Laurence
died before she had time to discover M. de Montzaigle's deficiencies.

Henry, the younger son, appears to have been brought up on a different
method from that pursued with Honore, as we hear in 1821 that Madame
de Balzac considered that the boy was unhappy and bored with school,
that he was with canting people who punished him for nothing, and must
be taken away. Evidently the younger son was the mother's darling; but
her mode of bringing him up was not happy in its effects, as he seems
to have given continual anxiety and trouble. He came back from the
colonies with his wife; and by threatening to blow out his brains, he
worked on his mother's feelings, and induced her to help him with
money, and nearly to ruin herself. In consequence she was obliged for
a time to take up her abode with Honore, an arrangement which did not
work well. Even when Henry was at last shipped off to the Indies, he
continued to agitate his family by sending them pathetic accounts of
his distress and necessities, and these letters from her much-loved
son must have been peculiarly painful to Madame de Balzac.

Honore and his mother seem never to have understood each other very
well; and she was stern with him and Laure in their youth, while she
lavished caresses on her younger children. Likeness to a father is not
always a passport to a mother's favour, and Madame de Balzac does not
appear to have realised her son's genius, and evidently feared that,
without due repression in youth, the paternal type of imaginative
optimist would be repeated.

She was not a tender mother in childhood, when indeed she saw little
of Honore, as she left him out at nurse till he was four years old,
and sent him to school when he was eight; but later on in all
practical matters she did her best for him, lending him money when he
was in difficulties, and looking after his business affairs when he
was away from Paris. She was evidently easily offended, and rather
absurdly tenacious of her maternal dignity; so that sometimes the
deference and submission of the great writer are surprising and rather
touching. On the other hand it must be remembered that Honore made
great demands on his friends, that they were expected to accord
continual sympathy and admiration, to be perfectly tactful in their
criticisms, and were only very occasionally allowed to give advice.
Therefore his opinion of his mother's coldness may have sprung from
her failure to answer to the requirements of his peculiar code of
affection, and not from any real want of love on her part.

Certainly her severity in his youth had the effect of concentrating
the whole devotion of Honore's childish heart on Laure, the _cara
sorella_ of his later years. She was a writer, the author of "Le
Compagnon du Foyer." To her we owe a charming sketch of her celebrated
brother, and she was the confidante of his hopes, ambitions, and
troubles, of his sentimental friendships, and of the faults and
embarrassments which he confided to no one else. Expressions of
affection for her occur constantly in his letters, and in 1837 he
writes to Madame Hanska that Laure is ill, and therefore the whole
universe seems out of gear, and that he passes whole nights in despair
because she is everything to him. The friendship between the brother
and sister was deep, devoted, and faithful, as Balzac's friendships
generally were--he did not care, as he said in one of his letters, for
_amities d'epiderme_--and the restriction put on his intercourse with
his sister by the jealousy of M. Surville was one of the many troubles
which darkened his later years.

Occasionally, indeed, there were disagreements between the brother and
sister, when Honore did not approve of Laure's aspirations for
authorship. The only subject which really caused coldness on both
sides, however--and this was temporary--was Laure's want of sympathy
for Balzac's attachment to Madame Hanska; because she, like many of
his friends, felt doubtful whether his passionate love was returned in
anything like equal measure. Perhaps, too, there may have lurked in
the sister's mind a slight jealousy of this alien _grande dame_, who
had stolen away her brother's heart from France, who moved in a sphere
quite unlike that of the Balzac family, and whose existence prevented
several advantageous and sensible marriages which she could have
arranged for Honore. Balzac, it must be allowed, was not always
tactful in his descriptions of the perfections of the Hanska family,
who were, of course, in his eyes, surrounded with aureoles borrowed
from the light of his "polar star." It must have been distinctly
annoying, when the virtues, talents, and charms of the young Countess
Anna were held up as an object lesson for Madame Surville's two
daughters, who were no doubt, from their mother's point of view, quite
as admirable as Madame Hanska's ewe lamb. Nevertheless, there was
never any real separation between the brother and sister; and it is to
Laure that--certain of her participation in his joy--poor Balzac
penned his delighted letter the day after his wedding, signed "Thy
brother Honore, at the summit of happiness."

Laure's own career was chequered. In 1820 she married an engineer, M.
Midy de la Greneraye Surville, and from the first the marriage was not
very happy, as Honore writes, a month after it took place, to blame
Laure for her melancholy at the separation from her family, and to
counsel philosophy and piano practice. Possibly Balzac's habits of
ascendency over those he loved, and his wonderful gift of fascination
--a gift which often provides its possessor with bitter enemies among
those outside its influence--made matters difficult for his
brother-in-law, and did not tend to promote harmony between Laure and
her husband. M. Surville probably became exasperated by useless attempts
to vie in his wife's eyes with her much-beloved brother--at any rate,
in later years he was tyrannical in preventing their intercourse, and
we hear of the unfortunate Laure coming in secret to see Balzac, on
her birthday in 1836, and holding a watch in her hand, because she did
not dare to stay away longer than twenty minutes. There were other
worries for Laure and her husband, for, like the rest of the Balzac
family, they were in continual difficulty about money matters. M.
Surville seems to have been a man of enterprise, and to have had many
schemes on hand--such as making a lateral canal on the Loire from
Nantes to Orleans, building a bridge in Paris, or constructing a
little railway. Speaking of the canal, Balzac cheerfully and airily
remarked in 1836 that only a capital of twenty-six millions of francs
required collecting, and then the Survilles would be on the high road
to prosperity. This trifling matter was not after all arranged, if we
may judge from the fact that in 1849 the Survilles moved to a cheap
lodging, and were advised by Balzac, in a letter from Russia, to
follow his habit of former days, and to cook only twice a week. In
fact, they were evidently passing through one of those monetary crises
to which we become used when reading the annals of the Balzacs, and
which irresistibly remind the reader of similar affairs in the
Micawber family.

In spite of the friction on the subject of Madame Surville, there was
never any actual breach between Honore and his brother-in-law; indeed,
he speaks several times of working amicably with M. Surville, in the
vain attempt to put in order the hopelessly involved web of family
affairs. He evidently had great faith in his brother-in-law's plans
for making his fortune, and took the keenest interest in them, even
offering to go over to London, to sell an invention for effecting
economy in the construction of inclined planes on railways. But M.
Surville changed his mind at the last, and Balzac never went to
England after all.

Honore and Laure were together during the time of their earliest
childhood, as they were left at the cottage of the same foster-mother,
and did not come home till Honore was four years old. His sister says,
"My recollections of his tenderness date far back. I have not
forgotten the headlong rapidity with which he ran to save me from
tumbling down the three high steps without a railing, which led from
our nurse's room to the garden. His loving protection continued after
we returned to our father's house, where, more than once, he allowed
himself to be punished for my faults, without betraying me. Once, when
I came upon the scene in time to accuse myself of the wrong, he said,
'Don't acknowledge next time--I like to be punished for you.'"[*]

[*] "Balzac, sa vie et ses oeuvres, d'apres sa correspondance," by
    Madame L. Surville (nee de Balzac).

Both children were in great awe of their parents, and Honore's fear of
his mother was extreme. Years after, he told a friend that he was
never able to hear her voice without a trembling which deprived him of
his faculties. Their father treated them with uniform kindness, but
Honore's heart was filled with love for his kind grandparents, to whom
he paid a visit in Paris in 1804. He came back to Tours with wonderful
stories of the beauties of their house, their garden, and their big
dog Mouche, with whom he had made great friends. The news of his
grandfather's death a few months later was a great grief to him, and
made a deep impression on his childish mind. His sister tells us that
long afterwards, when the two were receiving a reprimand from their
mother, and he saw Laure unable to control a wild burst of laughter,
which he knew would lead to serious consequences, he tried to stop her
by whispering in tragic tones, "Think about your grandfather's death!"

He was a child of very deep affections and warmth of heart, but he did
not show any special intelligence. He was lively, merry, and extremely
talkative, but sometimes a silent mood would fall on him, and perhaps,
as his sister says, his imagination was then carrying him to distant
worlds, though the family only thought the chatterbox was tired. In
all ways, however, he was in these days a very ordinary child, devoted
to fairy stories, fond of the popular nursery amusement of making up
plays, and charmed with the excruciating noise he brought out of a
little red violin. This he would sometimes play on for hours, till
even the faithful Laure would remonstrate, and he would be astonished
that she did not realise the beauty of his music.

This happy childish life, chastened only by the tremors which both
children felt when taken by their governess in the morning and at
bedtime into the stern presence of their mother, did not last very
long for Honore. When he was eight years old (his sister says seven,
but this seems to be a mistake), there was a change in his life, as
the home authorities decided that it was time his education should
begin in good earnest. He was therefore taken from the day school at
Tours, and sent to the semi-military college founded by the Oratorians
in the sleepy little town of Vendome. On page 7 of the school record
there is the following notice: "No. 460. Honore Balzac, age de huit
ans un mois. A eu la petite verole, sans infirmites. Caractere
sanguin, s'echauffant facilement, et sujet a quelques fievres de
chaleur. Entre au pensionnat le 22 juin, 1807. Sorti, le 22 aout,
1813. S'adresser a M. Balzac, son pere, a Tours."[*] Thus is summed up
the character of the future writer of the "Comedie Humaine," and there
was apparently nothing remarkable or precocious about the boy, as his
quick temper is his most salient point in the eyes of his masters. It
will be noticed, too, that the "de," about which Balzac was very
particular, and which was the occasion of many scoffing remarks on the
part of his enemies, does not appear on this register.

[*] "Balzac au College," by Champfleury.

Honore was a small boy to have been completely separated from home,
and the whole scheme of education as devised by the Oratorian fathers
appears to have been a strange one. One of the rules forbade outside
holidays, and Honore never left the college once during the six years
he was at school; so that there was no supervision from his parents,
and no chance of complaint if he were unhappy or ill treated. His
family came to see him at Easter and also at the prize-givings; but on
these occasions, to which he looked forward, his sister tells us, with
eager delight, reproaches were generally his portion, on account of
his want of success in school work. In "Louis Lambert" he gives an
interesting account of the college, which was in the middle of the
town on the little river Loir, and contained a chapel, theatre,
infirmary, bakery, and gardens. There were two or three hundred
pupils, divided according to their ages or attainments into four
classes--_les grands_, _les moyens_, les petits_, and _les minimes_
--and each class had its own class-room and courtyard. Balzac was
considered the idlest and most pathetic boy in his division, and was
continually punished. Reproaches, the ferule, the dark cell, were his
portion, and with his quick and delicate senses he suffered intensely
from the want of air in the class-rooms. There, according to the
graphic picture in "Louis Lambert," everything was dirty, and eighty
boys inhabited a hall, in the centre of which were two buckets full of
water, where all washed their faces and hands every morning, the water
being only renewed once in the day. To add to the odours, the air was
vitiated by the smell of pigeons killed for fete days, and of dishes
stolen from the refectory, and kept by the pupils in their lockers.
The boy who, in the future, was to awaken actual physical disgust in
his readers by his description of the stuffy and dingy boarding-house
dining-room in "Le Pere Goriot," was crushed and stupefied by his
surroundings, and would sit for hours with his head on his hand, not
attempting to learn, but gazing dreamily at the clouds, or at the
foliage of the trees in the court below. No wonder that he was the
despair of his masters, and that his famous "Traite de la volonte,"
which he composed instead of preparing the ordinary school work, was
summarily confiscated and destroyed. So many were the punishment lines
given him to write, that his holidays were almost entirely taken up,
and he had not six days of liberty the whole time that he was at
college.

In addition to the troubles incident to Honore's peculiar temperament
and genius, he had in the winter, like the other pupils, to submit to
actual physical suffering. The price of education included also that
of clothing, the parents who sent their children to the Vendome
College paying a yearly sum, and therewith comfortably absolving
themselves from all trouble and responsibility. But the results were
not happy for the boys, who dragged themselves painfully along the icy
roads in miserable remnants of boots, their feet half dead, and
swollen with sores and chilblains. Out of sixty children, not ten
walked without torture, and many of them would cry with rage as they
limped along, each step being a painful effort; but with the
invincible physical pluck and moral cowardice of childhood, would hide
their tears, for fear of ridicule from their companions.

Nevertheless, even to Balzac, who was peculiarly unfitted for it, life
at the college had its pleasures. The food appears to have been good,
and the discipline at meals not very severe, as a regular system of
exchange of helpings to suit the particular tastes of each boy went on
all through dinner, and caused endless amusement. Some one who had
received peas as his portion would prefer dessert, and the proposition
"Un dessert pour des pois" would pass from mouth to mouth till the
bargain had been made. Other pleasures were the pet pigeons, the
gardens, the sweets bought secretly during the walks, the permission
to play cards and to have theatrical performances during the holidays,
the military music, the games, and the slides made in winter. Best of
all, however, was the shop which opened in the class-room every Sunday
during playtime for the sale of boxes, tools, pigeons of all sorts,
mass-books (for these there was not much demand), knives, balls,
pencils--everything a boy could wish for. The proud possessor of six
francs--meant to last for the term--felt that the contents of the
whole shop were at his disposal. Saturday night was passed in anxious
yet rapturous calculations, and the responses at Mass during that
happy Sunday morning mingled themselves with thoughts of the glorious
time coming in the afternoon. Next Sunday was not quite so delightful,
as probably there were only a few sous left, and possibly some of the
purchases were broken, or had not turned out quite satisfactorily.
Then, too, there was a long vista of Sundays in the future, without
any possibility of shopping; but after all a certain amount of
compounding is always necessary in life, and an intense short joy is
worth a grey time before and after.

When Balzac was fourteen years old, his life at the college came
suddenly to an end, as, to the alarm of his masters, he was attacked
by coma with feverish symptoms, and they begged his parents to take
him home at once. It is curious to notice that the Fathers make no
reference to this failure in their educational system in the school
record, where there is no reason given for Honore's departure from
school. Certainly his life at Vendome was not very healthy, as
sometimes for idleness, inattention, or impertinence he was for months
shut up every day in a niche six feet square, with a wooden door
pierced by holes to let in air. When Champfleury visited the college
years afterwards, the only person who remembered Balzac was the old
Father who had charge of these cells, and he spoke of the boy's "great
black eyes." Confinement in these _culottes de bois_, as they were
called, was much dreaded by the boys, and the punishment seems
barbarous and senseless, except from the point of view of getting rid
of troublesome pupils. Balzac, however, welcomed the relief from
ordinary school life, and indeed manoeuvred to be shut up. In the
cells he had leisure to dream as he pleased, he was free from the
drudgery of learning his lessons, and he managed to secrete books in
his cage, and thus to absorb the contents of most of the volumes in
the fine library collected by the learned Oratorian founders of the
college. The ideas in many of the learned tomes were far beyond his
age, but he understood them, remembered them afterwards, and could
recall in later years not only the thought in each book, but also the
disposition of his mind when he read them. Naturally this precocity of
intellect caused brain fatigue, though this would never have been
suspected by the Fathers of their idlest pupil.

Honore, his sister tells us, came home thin and puny, like a
somnambulist sleeping with open eyes, and his grandmother groaned over
the strain of modern education. At first he heard hardly any of the
questions that were put to him, and his mother was obliged to disturb
him in reveries, and to insist on his taking part in games with the
rest of the family; but with the fresh air and the home life he soon
recovered his health and spirits, and became again a lively, merry
boy. He attended lectures at a college near, and had tutors at home;
but great efforts were necessary in order to get into his head the
requisite amount of Greek and Latin. Nevertheless, at times, he was
astonishing, or might have been to any one with powers of observation.
On these occasions he made such extraordinary and sagacious remarks
that Madame de Balzac, in her character of represser, felt obliged to
remark sharply, "You cannot possibly understand what you are saying,
Honore!" When Honore, who dared not argue, looked at her with a smile,
she would, with the ease of absolute authority, escape from the
awkwardness of the situation by remarking that he was impertinent. He
was already ambitious, and would tell his sisters and brother about
his future fame, and accept with a laugh the teasing he received in
consequence.

It must have been during this time that he grew to love with an
enduring love the scenery of his native province of Touraine, with its
undulating stretches of emerald green, through which the Loire or the
Indre wound like a long ribbon of water, while lines of poplars decked
the banks with moving lace. It was a smiling country, dotted with
vineyards and oak woods, while here and there an old gnarled walnut
tree stood in rugged independence. The susceptible boy, lately escaped
from the abominations of the stuffy school-house, drank in with
rapture the warm scented air, and often describes in his novels the
landscape of the province where he was born, which he loves, in his
own words, "as an artist loves art." Another lasting memory[*] was
that of the poetry and splendour of the Cathedral of Saint-Gatien in
Tours, where he was taken every feast-day. There he watched with
delight the beautiful effects of light and shade, the play of colour
produced by the rays of sunlight shining through the old stained
glass, and the strange, fascinating effect of the clouds of incense,
which enveloped the officiating priests, and from which he possibly
derived the idea of the mists which he often introduces into his
descriptions.

[*] See "Balzac, sa Vie et ses Oeuvres, d'apres sa Correspondance" par
    Madame L. Surville (nee de Balzac).



                             CHAPTER III

                             1814 - 1820

  Balzac's tutors and law studies--His youth, as pictured in the
  "Peau de Chagrin"--His father's intention of making him a lawyer
  --He begs to be allowed to become a writer--Is allowed his wish
  --Life in the Rue Lesdiguieres, privations and starvation--He
  writes "Cromwell," a tragedy.

At the end of 1814 the Balzac family moved to Paris, as M. de Balzac
was put in charge of the Commissariat of the First Division of the
Army. Here they took a house in the Rue de Roi-Dore, in the Marais,
and Honore continued his studies with M. Lepitre, Rue Saint-Louis, and
MM. Sganzer and Benzelin, Rue de Thorigny, in the Marais. To the
influence of M. Lepitre, a man who, unlike old M. de Balzac and many
other worthy people, was an ardent Legitimist _before_ as well as
_after_ 1815, we may in part trace the strength of Balzac's Royalist
principles. On the 13th Vendemiaire, M. Lepitre had presided over one
of the sections of Paris which rose against the Convention; and though
on one occasion he failed in nerve, his services during the Revolution
had been most conspicuous. On his reception at the Tuileries by the
Duchesse d'Angouleme, she used these words, never to be forgotten by
him to whom they were addressed: "I have not forgotten, and I shall
never forget, the services you have rendered to my family."[*]

[*] "Biographie Universelle," by De Michaud.

We can imagine the enthusiasm and delight with which the man who,
whatever might be his shortcomings in courage, had always remained
firm to his Royalist principles, and who had been a witness of the
terrible anguish of the prisoners in the Temple, would hear these
words from the lips of the lady who stood to him as Queen--the
Antigone of France--the heroine whose sufferings had made the heart of
every loyal Frenchman bleed, the brave woman who, according to
Napoleon, was the one man of her family. Lepitre's visit to the
Tuileries took place on May 9th, 1814, the year that Balzac began to
take those lessons in rhetoric which first opened his eyes to the
beauty of the French language. During Lepitre's tuition he composed a
speech supposed to be addressed by the wife of Brutus to her husband,
after the condemnation of her sons, in which, Laure tells us, the
anguish of the mother is depicted with great power, and Balzac shows
his wonderful faculty for entering into the souls of his personages.
Lepitre had evidently a powerful influence over his pupil, and as a
master of rhetoric he would naturally be eloquent and have command of
language, and in consequence would be most probably of fiery and
enthusiastic temperament. We can imagine the fervour with which the
impressionable boy drank in stories of the sufferings of the royal
family during their imprisonment in the Temple, and strove not to miss
a syllable of his master's magnificent exordiums, which glowed with
the light and heat of impassioned loyalty.

No doubt Balzac's "Une Vie de Femme," a touching account of the life
of the Duchesse d'Angouleme, which appeared in the _Reformateur_ in
1832, was partly compiled from the reminiscences of his old master;
and when we hear of his ardent defence of the Duchesse de Berry, or
that he treasured a tea-service which was not of any intrinsic value,
because it had belonged to the Duc d'Angouleme, we see traces of his
intense love and admiration for the Bourbon family.

Nevertheless, in that big, well-balanced brain there was room for many
emotions, and for a wide range of sympathies. The many-sidedness which
is a necessary characteristic of every great psychologist, was a
remarkable quality in Balzac. He may have been present at Napoleon's
last review on the Carrousel--at any rate he tells in "La Femme de
Trente Ans" how the man "thus surrounded with so much love,
enthusiasm, devotion, prayer--for whom the sun had driven every cloud
from the sky--sat motionless on his horse, three feet in advance of
the dazzling escort that followed him," and that an old grenadier
said, "My God, yes, it was always so; under fire at Wagram, among the
dead in the Moskowa, he was quiet as a lamb--yes, that's he!" Balzac's
admiration for Napoleon was intense, as he shows in many of his
writings, and his proudest boast is to be found in the words, said to
have been inscribed on a statuette of Napoleon in his room in the Rue
Cassini, "What he has begun with the sword, I shall finish with the
pen."

None of Balzac's masters thought much of his talents, or perceived
anything remarkable about him. He returned home in 1816, full of
health and vigour, the personification of happiness; and his
conscientious mother immediately set to work to repair the
deficiencies of his former education, and sent him to lectures at the
Sorbonne, where he heard extempore speeches from such men as
Villemain, Guizot, and Cousin. Apparently this teaching opened a new
world to him, and he learned for the first time that education can be
more than a dull routine of dry facts, and felt the joy of contact
with eloquence and learning. Possibly he realised, as he had not
realised before--Tours being, as he says, a most unliterary town--that
there were people in the world who looked on things as he did, and who
would understand, and not laugh at him or snub him. He always returned
from these lectures, his sister says, glowing with interest, and would
try as far as he could to repeat them to his family. Then he would
rush out to study in the public libraries, so that he might be able to
profit by the teaching of his illustrious professors, or would wander
about the Latin Quarter, to hunt for rare and precious books. He used
his opportunities in other ways. An old lady living in the house with
the Balzacs had been an intimate friend of the great Beaumarchais.
Honore loved to talk to her, and would ask her questions, and listen
with the greatest interest to her replies, till he could have written
a Life of the celebrated man himself. His powers of acute observation,
interest, and sympathy--in short, his intense faculty for human
fellowship, as well as his capacity for assimilating information from
books--were already at work; and the future novelist was consciously
or unconsciously collecting material in all directions.

In 1816 it was considered necessary that he should be started with
regular work, and he was established for eighteen months with a
lawyer, M. de Guillonnet-Merville, who was, like M. Lepitre, a friend
of the Balzac family, and an ardent Royalist. Eugene Scribe--another
amateur lawyer--as M. de Guillonnet-Merville indulgently remarked, had
just left the office, and Honore was established at the desk and table
vacated by him. He became very fond of his chief, whom he has
immortalised as Derville in "Une Tenebreuse Affaire," "Le Pere
Goriot," and other novels; and he dedicated to this old friend "Un
Episode sous la Terreur," which was published in 1846, and is a
powerful and touching story of the remorse felt by the executioner of
Louis XVI. After eighteen months in this office, he passed the same
time in that of M. Passez, a notary, who lived in the same house with
the Balzacs, and was another of their intimates.

Balzac does not appear to have made any objection to these
arrangements, though his legal studies cannot have been congenial to
him; but they were only spoken of at this time as a finish to his
education--old M. de Balzac, _homme de loi_ himself, remarking that no
man's education can be complete without a knowledge of ancient and
modern legislation, and an acquaintance with the statutes of his own
country. Perhaps Honore, wiser now than in his school-days, had learnt
that all knowledge is equipment for a literary life. He certainly made
good use of his time, and the results can be seen in many of his
works, notably in the "Tenebreuse Affaire," which contains in the
account of the famous trial a masterly exposition of the legislature
of the First Empire, or in "Cesar Birotteau," which shows such
thorough knowledge of the laws of bankruptcy of the time that its
complicated plot cannot be thoroughly understood by any one unversed
in legal matters.

Honore was very well occupied at this time, and his mother must have
felt for once thoroughly satisfied with him. In addition to his study
of law, he had to follow the course of lectures at the Sorbonne and at
the College of France; and these studies were a delightful excuse for
a very fitful occupation of his seat in the lawyer's office. Besides
his multifarious occupations, he managed in the evening to find time
to play cards with his grandmother, who lived with her daughter and
son-in-law. The gentle old lady spoilt Honore, his mother considered,
and would allow him to win money from her, which he joyfully expended
on books. His sister, who tells us this, says, "He always loved those
game in memory of her; and the recollection of her sayings and of her
gestures used to come to him like a happiness which, as he said, he
wrested from a tomb."

Other recollections of this time were not so pleasant. Honore wished
to shine in society. No doubt the two "immense and sole desires--to be
famous and to be loved"--which haunted him continually, till he at
last obtained them at the cost of his life, were already at work
within him, and he longed for the tender glances of some charming
_demoiselle_. At any rate he took dancing-lessons, and prepared
himself to enter with grace into ladies' society. Here, however, a
terrible humiliation awaited him. After all his care and pains, he
slipped and fell in the ball-room, and his mortification at the smiles
of the women round was so great that he never danced again, but looked
on henceforward with cynicism which he expresses in the "Peau de
Chagrin." That wonderful book, side by side with its philosophical
teaching, gives a graphic picture of one side of Balzac's restless,
feverish youth, as "Louis Lambert" does of his repressed childhood.
Neither Louis Lambert nor the morbid and selfish Raphael give,
however, the slightest indication of Balzac's most salient
characteristic both as boy and youth--the healthy _joie de vivre_, the
gaiety and exuberant merriment, of which his contemporaries speak
constantly, and which shone out undimmed even by the wretched health
and terrible worries of the last few years of his life. In his books,
the bitter and melancholy side of things reigns almost exclusively,
and Balzac, using Raphael as his mouthpiece, says: "Women one and all
have condemned me. With tears and mortification I bowed before the
decision of the world; but my distress was not barren. I determined to
revenge myself on society; I would dominate the feminine intellect,
and so have the feminine soul at my mercy; all eyes should be fixed
upon me, when the servant at the door announced my name. I had
determined from my childhood that I would be a great man. I said with
Andre Chenier, as I struck my forehead, 'There is something underneath
that!' I felt, I believed the thought within me that I must express,
the system I must establish, the knowledge I must interpret." In
another place in the same book the bitterness of his social failure
again peeps out: "The incomprehensible bent of women's minds appears
to lead them to see nothing but the weak points in a clever man and
the strong points of a fool."

Reading these words, we can imagine poor Honore, a proud,
supersensitive boy, leaning against the wall in the ball-room, and
watching enviously while agreeable nonentities basked in the smiles he
yearned for. It was a hard lot to feel within him the intuitive
knowledge of his genius; to hear the insistent voice of his vocation
calling him not to be as ordinary men, but to give his message to the
world; and yet to have the miserable consciousness that no one
believed in his talents, and that there was a huge discrepancy between
his ambition and his actual attainments.

In 1820 Honore attained his majority and finished his legal studies.
Unfortunately the pecuniary misfortunes which were to haunt all this
generation of the Balzac family were beginning--as old M. de Balzac
had lost money in two speculations, and now at the age of seventy-four
was put on the retired list, a change which meant a considerable
diminution of income. He therefore explained to his son--Madame
Surville tells us--that M. Passez, to whom he had formerly been of
service, had in gratitude offered to take Honore into his office, and
at the end of a few years would leave him his business, when, with the
additional arrangement of a rich marriage, a prosperous future would
be assured to him. Old M. de Balzac did not specify the nature of the
service which was to meet with so rich a reward; and as he was a
gentleman with a distinct liking for talking of his own doings, we may
amuse ourselves by supposing that it had to do with those Red
Republican days which he was not fond of recalling.

Great was Honore's consternation at this news. In the first place,
owing to M. de Balzac's constant vapourings about the enormous wealth
he would leave to his children, it is doubtful whether Honore, who was
probably not admitted to his parents' confidence, had realised up to
this time that he would have to earn his own living. Then, if it
_were_ necessary for him to work for his bread, he now knew enough of
the routine of a lawyer's office to look with horror on the prospect
of drawing up wills, deeds of sale, and marriage settlements for the
rest of his life. He never forgave the legal profession the shock and
the terror he experienced at this time, and his portraits of lawyers,
with some notable exceptions, are marked by decided animus. For
instance, in "Les Francais peints par eux-memes," edited by Cunmer,
the notary, as described by Balzac, has a flat, expressionless face
and wears a mask of bland silliness; and in "Pamela Giraud" one of the
characters remarks, "A lawyer who talks to himself--that reminds me of
a pastrycook who eats his own cakes." It was rather unfair to decry
all lawyers, because of the deadly fear he felt at the prospect of
being forced into their ranks, as there is little doubt that he would
have shrunk with like abhorrence from any business proposed to him.
His childish longing for fame had developed and taken shape, and for
him, if he lacked genius, there was no alternative but the dragging
out of a worthless and wearying existence. Conscious of his powers, it
was a time of struggle, of passionate endeavour, possibly of
bewilderment; with the one great determination standing firm in the
midst of a chaos of doubt and difficulty--the determination to
persevere, and to become a writer at any cost.

He therefore, to his father's consternation, announced his objection
to following a legal career, and begged to be allowed an opportunity
of proving his literary powers. Thereupon there were lively
discussions in the family; but at last the kindly M. de Balzac,
apparently against his wife's wishes, yielded to his son's earnest
entreaties, and allowed him two years in which to try his fortune as a
writer. The friends of the family were loud in their exclamations of
disapproval at the folly of this proceeding, which would, they said,
waste two of the best years of Honore's life. As far as they could
see, he possessed no genius; and even if he _were_ to succeed in a
literary career, he would certainly not gain a fortune, which after
all was the principal thing to be considered. However, either the
strenuousness and force of Honor's arguments, or the softness of his
father's heart, prevailed in his favour; and in spite of the
opposition of the whole of his little world, he was allowed to have
his own way, and to make trial of his powers. The rest of the family
retired to Villeparisis, about sixteen miles from Paris, and he was
established in a small attic at No. 9, Rue Lesdiguieres, which was
chosen by him for its nearness to the Bibliotheque de l'Arsenal, the
only public library of which the contents were unknown to him. At the
same time, appearances, always all-important in the Balzac family,
were observed, by the fiction that Honore was at Alby, on a visit to a
cousin; and in this way his literary venture was kept secret, in case
it proved unsuccessful.

Having arranged this, and asserted himself to the extent of insisting
that his son should be allowed a certain amount of freedom in choosing
his career, even if he fixed on a course which seemed suicidal, old M.
de Balzac appears to have retired from the direction of affairs, and
to have left his energetic wife to follow her own will about details.
There was no doubt in that lady's mind as to the methods to be
pursued. Her husband had been culpably weak, and had allowed himself
to be swayed by the freak of a boy who hated work and wanted an excuse
for idleness. Honore must be brought to reason, and be taught that
"the way of transgressors is hard," and that people who refuse to take
their fair share of life's labour must of necessity suffer from
deprivation of their butter, if not of their bread. Her husband was an
old man, and had lost money, and it was most exasperating that Honore
should refuse a splendid chance of securing his own future, and one
which would most probably never occur again. To a good business woman,
who did not naturally share in the boundless optimistic views of M. de
Balzac for the future, the crass folly of yielding to the wishes of a
boy who could not possibly know what was best for him, was glaringly
apparent. However, being a practical woman, when she had done her duty
in making the household--except the placid M. de Balzac--thoroughly
uncomfortable, and had most probably driven Honore almost wild with
suppressed irritation, she embarked on the plan of campaign which was
to bring the culprit back, repentant and submissive, to the lawyer's
desk.

To accomplish this as quickly as possible, it was necessary to make
him extremely uncomfortable; so having furnished his attic with the
barest necessities--a bed, a table, and a few chairs--she gave him
such a scanty allowance that he would have starved if an old woman,
_la mere Comin_, whom he termed his Iris, had not been told to go
occasionally to look after him. In spite of the gaiety of Balzac's
letters from his garret, the hardships he went through were terrible,
and in later years he could not speak of his sufferings at this time
without tears coming to his eyes. Apparently he could not even afford
to have a fire; and the attic was extremely draughty, blasts coming
from the door and window; so that in a letter to his sister he begs
her, when sending the coverlet for which he has already asked, to let
him have a _very_ old shawl, which he can wear at night. His legs,
where he feels the cold most, are wrapped in an ancient coat made by a
small tailor of Tours, who to his disgust used to alter his father's
garments to fit him, and was a dreadful bungler; but the upper half of
his body is only protected by the roof and a flannel waistcoat from
the frost, and he needs a shawl badly. He also hopes for a Dantesque
cap, the kind his mother always makes for him; and this pattern of cap
from the hands of Madame de Balzac figures in the accounts of his
attire later on in his life. It is not surprising that he has a cold,
and later on a terrible toothache; but it _is_ astonishing that, in
spite of cold, hunger, and discomfort, he preserves his gaiety, pluck,
and power of making light of hardships, traits of character which were
to be strikingly salient all through his hard, fatiguing career. In
spite of the misery of his surroundings, he had many compensations. He
had gained the wish of his heart, life was before him, beautiful
dreams of future fame floated in the air, and at present he had no
hateful burden of debt to weigh him down. Therefore he managed to
ignore to a great extent the physical pain and discomfort he went
through, as he ignored them all through his life, except when ill
health interfered with the accomplishment of his work.

Another characteristic which might also be amazing, did we not meet it
constantly in Balzac's life, is his longing for luxury and beauty, and
his extraordinary faculty for embarking in a perfectly business-like
way on wildly unreasonable schemes. With hardly enough money to
provide himself with scanty meals, he intends to economise, in order
to buy a piano. "The garret is not big enough to hold one," as he
casually remarks; but this fact, which, apart from the starving
process necessary in order to obtain funds, would appear to the
ordinary mind an insurmountable obstacle to the project, does not
daunt the ever-hopeful Honore.

He has taken the dimensions, he says; and if the landlord objects to
the expense of moving back the wall, he will pay the money himself,
and add it to the price of the piano. Here we recognise exactly the
same Balzac whose vagrant schemes later on were listened to by his
friends with a mixture of fascination and bewilderment, and who, in
utter despair about his pecuniary circumstances at the beginning of a
letter, talks airily towards the end of buying a costly picture, or
acquiring an estate in the country.

There is a curious and striking contrast in Balzac between the
backwardness in the expression of his literary genius, and the early
development and crystallisation of his character and powers of mind in
other directions. Even when he realised his vocation, forsook verse,
and began to write novels, he for long gave no indication of his
future powers; while, on the other hand, at the age of twenty, his
views on most points were formed, and his judgments matured.
Therefore, unlike most men, in whom, even if there be no violent
changes, age gradually and imperceptibly modifies the point of view,
Balzac, a youth in his garret, differed little in essentials from
Balzac at forty-five or fifty, a man of world-wide celebrity. He never
appears to have passed through those phases of belief and unbelief
--those wild enthusiasms, to be rejected later in life--which generally
fall to the lot of young men of talent. Perhaps his reasoning and
reflective powers were developed unusually early, so that he sowed his
mental wild oats in his boyhood. At any rate, in his garret in 1819 he
was the same Balzac that we know in later life. Large-minded and
far-seeing--except about his business concerns--he was from his youth
a _voyant_, who discerned with extraordinary acuteness the trend of
political events; and with an intense respect for authority, he was
yet independent, and essentially a strong man.

This absolute stability--a fact Balzac often comments on--is very
remarkable, especially as his was a life full of variety, during which
he was brought into contact with many influences. He studied the men
around him, and gauged their characters--though it must be allowed
that he did not make very good practical use of his knowledge; but
owing to his strength and breadth of vision, he was himself in all
essentials immovable.

The same ambitions, desires, and opinions can be traced all through
his career. The wish to enter political life, which haunted him
always, was already beginning to stir in 1819, when he wrote at the
time of the elections to a friend, M. Theodore Dablin, that he dreamt
of nothing but him and the deputies; and his last book, "L'Envers de
l'Histoire contemporaine," accentuated, if possible more than any work
that had preceded it, the extreme Royalist principles which he showed
in his garret play, the ill-fated "Cromwell."

He never swerved from the two great ambitions of his life--to be
loved, and to be famous. He was faithful in his friendships; and when
once he had found the woman whom he felt might be all in all to him,
and who possessed besides personal advantages the qualifications of
birth and money--for which he had always craved--no difficulties were
allowed to stand in the way, and no length of weary waiting could tire
out his patience. He was constant even to his failures. He began his
literary career by writing a play, and all through his life the idea
of making his fortune by means of a successful drama recurred to him
constantly. Several times he went through that most trying of
experiences, a failure which only just missed being a brilliant
success, and once this affected him so much that he became seriously
ill; but, with his usual spirit and courage, he tried again and again.
His friend Theophile Gautier, writing of him in _La Presse_ of
September 30th, 1843, after the failure of "Pamela Giraud," said truly
that Balzac intended to go on writing plays, even if he had to get
through a hundred acts before he could find his proper form.

One part of Balzac never grew up--he was all his life the "child-man"
his sister calls him. After nights without sleep he would come out of
his solitude with laughter, joy, and excitement to show a new
masterpiece; and this was always more wonderful than anything which
had preceded it. He was more of a child than his nieces, Madame
Surville tells us: "laughed at puns, envied the lucky being who had
the 'gift' of making them, tried to do so himself, and failed, saying
regretfully, 'No, that doesn't make a pun.' He used to cite with
satisfaction the only two he had ever made, 'and not much of a success
either,' he avowed in all humility, 'for I didn't know I was making
them,' and we even suspected him of embellishing them afterwards."[*]
He was delightfully simple, even to the end of his life. In 1849 he
wrote from Russia, where he was confined to his room with illness, to
describe minutely a beautiful new dressing-gown in which he marched
about the room like a sultan, and was possessed with one of those
delightful joys which we only have at eighteen. "I am writing to you
now in my termolana,"[+] he adds for the satisfaction of his
correspondent.

[*] "Balzac, sa Vie et ses Oeuvres, d'apres sa Correspondance," by
    Madame L. Surville (nee de Balzac).

[+] "H. de Balzac--Correspondance," vol. ii. P. 418.

We must now return to Honore in his attic, where, as in later years,
he drank much coffee, and was unable to resist the passion for fruit
which was always his one gourmandise. He records one day that he has
eaten two melons, and must pay for the extravagance with a diet of dry
bread and nuts, but contemplates further starvation to pay for a seat
to see Talma in "Cinna."

He writes to his sister: "I feel to-day that riches do not make
happiness, and that the time I shall pass here will be to me a source
of pleasant memories. To live according to my fancy; to work as I wish
and in my own way; to do nothing if I wish it; to dream of a beautiful
future; to think of you and to know you are happy; to have as ladylove
the Julie of Rousseau; to have La Fontaine and Moliere as friends,
Racine for a master, and Pere-Lachaise to walk to,--oh! if it would
only last always."[*]

[*] "Correspondance," vol. i.

Pere-Lachaise was a favourite resort when he was not working very
hard; and it was from there that he obtained his finest inspirations,
and decided that, of all the feelings of the soul, sorrow is the most
difficult to express, because of its simplicity. Curiously enough, he
abandoned the Jardin des Plantes because he thought it melancholy, and
apparently found his reflections among the tombs more cheerful. He
decided that the only beautiful epitaphs are single names--such as La
Fontaine, Massena, Moliere, "which tell all, and make one dream."

When he returned home to his garret, fresh interests awaited him.
Sometimes, he tells us in the "Peau de Chagrin," he would "study the
mosses, with their colours revived by showers, or transformed by the
sun into a brown velvet that fitfully caught the light. Such things as
these formed my recreations: the passing poetic moods of daylight, the
melancholy mists, sudden gleams of sunlight, the silence and the magic
of night, the mysteries of dawn, the smoke-wreaths from each chimney;
every chance event, in fact, in my curious world became familiar to
me."

Occasionally on Sundays he would go to a friend's house, ostensibly to
play cards--a pastime which he hated. He generally, however, managed
to escape from the eye of his hostess; and comfortably ensconced in a
window behind thick curtains, or hidden behind a high armchair, he
would pour into the ear of a congenial companion some of the thoughts
which surged through his impetuous brain. All his life he needed this
outlet after concentrated mental labour; and sometimes in a friend's
drawing-room, if he knew himself to be surrounded only by intimates,
he would give full vent to his conversational powers. On these
occasions he would carry his hearers away with him, often against
their better judgment, by his eloquence and verve; would send them
into fits of hearty laughter by his sallies; his store of droll
anecdotes, his jollity and gaiety; and would display his consummate
gifts as a dramatic raconteur. Later in life, after he had raised the
enmity of a large section of the writing world, and knew that there
were many watching eagerly to immortalise in print--with gay malice
and wit on the surface, and bitter spite and hatred below--the
heedless and possibly arrogant words their enemy had uttered in
moments of excitement and expansion, he grew cautious; and sometimes
because of this, and sometimes because he was collecting material for
his work, he would often be silent in general society. To the end,
however, he loved a tete-a-tete with a sympathetic listener--one, it
must be conceded, who would be content, except for the occasional
comment, to remain himself in the background, as the great man wanted
a safety-valve for his own impetuous thoughts, and did not generally
care to hear the paler, less interesting impressions of his companion.

With what longing, in the midst of his harassing life in Paris, he
would look back to the charming long fireside chats he had had with
Madame Hanska; and as the time to meet her again came nearer, with
what satisfaction special tit-bits of gossip were reserved to be
talked over and explained during the long evenings at Wierzchownia!
How he loved to rush in to his sister with the latest news of the
personages of his novels, as well as with brilliant plans to improve
his general prospects; and with what enthusiasm he poured out to
Theophile Gautier, or even to Leon Gozlan, his confidences of all
sorts! Plans, absurd and impossible, but worked out with a
business-like arrangement of detail which, when mingled with
somnambulists and magnetisers, had a weird yet apparently fascinating
effect on his hearers; magnificent diatribes against the wickedness of
his special enemies, journalists, editors, and the Press in general;
strange fancies to do with the world where Eugenie Grandet or Le Pere
Goriot had their dwelling,--all these ideas, opinions, and feelings
came from his lips with an eloquence, a force, and a life which were
all convincing. Yet by a strange anomaly, which is sometimes seen in
talkative and apparently unreserved people, Balzac in reality revealed
very little of himself--in fact, we may often suspect him of using a
flow of apparently spontaneous words as a screen to mask some hidden
feeling. Therefore, when people who had considered themselves his
intimate friends tried to write about him after his death, they found
that they really knew little of the essentials of the man, and could
only string together amusing anecdotes, proving him to have been
eccentric, amusing, and essentially _bon camarade_, but giving little
idea of his real personality and genius.

Even in these early days at the card-parties--where sometimes the
hostess noticed the defection of the two young guests, and, holding a
card in each delicate hand, would beckon them to take their place at
the game, which they would do with humble and discomfited faces, like
schoolboys surprised at a forbidden amusement--M. de Petigny, Balzac's
companion, must have been struck by his openness in some respects and
the absolute mystery with which he surrounded himself in others. Where
he lived, what he was doing, what his life was like--all these facts
were hidden from his companion, till he revealed himself at last, on
the verge of his hoped-for triumph. But, on the other hand, the
sentiments and impressions of which M. de Petigny read afterwards in
Balzac's books seemed to him only a pale, distant echo of the rich and
vivid expressions which fell from his lips in these intimate talks.
Magnetism, in which he had a strong faith all his life, was exercising
his thoughts greatly. It was "the irresistible ascendency of mind over
matter, of a strong and immovable will over a soul open to all
impressions."[*] Before long he would have mastered its secrets, and
would be able to compel every man to obey him and every woman to love
him. He had already, he announced, begun to occupy his fixed position
in life, and was on the threshold of a millennium.

[*] Article by M. Jules de Petigny.

Balzac's glimpses of society were, however, rare, and ceased
altogether during the last few months of his stay in the Rue
Lesdiguieres. However, other more satisfying pleasures were his:
"Unspeakable joys are showered on us by the exertion of our mental
faculties; the quest of ideas, and the tranquil contemplation of
knowledge; delights indescribable, because purely intellectual and
impalpable to our senses. So we are obliged to use material terms to
express the mysteries of the soul. The pleasure of striking out in
some lonely lake of clear water, with forests, rocks, and flowers
around, and the soft stirring of the warm breeze--all this would give
to those who knew them not a very faint idea of the exultation with
which my soul bathed itself in the beams of an unknown light,
hearkened to the awful and uncertain voice of inspiration, as vision
upon vision poured from some unknown source through my throbbing
brain."[*]

[*] "La Peau de Chagrin," by Honore de Balzac.

There was another side to the picture, and perhaps in this
description, written in 1830, Balzac has slightly antedated his joy in
his creative powers, and describes more correctly his feelings when he
wrote "Les Chouans," "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote," and the "Peau de
Chagrin" itself, than those of this earlier period of his life, when
the difficulties of expressing himself often seemed insurmountable,
and the hiatus between his ideas and the form in which to clothe them
was almost impossible to bridge over.

Writing did not at any time come easily to him, and "Stella" and
"Coqsigrue," his first novels, were never finished; while a comedy,
"Les Deux Philosophes," was also abandoned in despair. Next he set to
work at "Cromwell," a tragedy in five acts, which was to be his
passport to fame. At this play he laboured for months, shutting
himself up completely, and loving his self-imposed slavery--though his
want of faculty for versification, and the intense difficulty he
experienced in finding words for the ideas which crowded into his
imaginative brain were decided drawbacks. While engaged on this work,
he may indeed have experienced some of the feelings he describes in
the "Peau de Chagrin," quoted above; for, curiously enough,
"Cromwell," his first finished production, was the only one of his
early works about which he was deceived, and which he imagined to be a
_chef d'oeuvre_. It was well he had this happy faith to sustain him,
as, according to the account of M. Jules de Petigny, the circumstances
under which the play was composed must, to put the matter mildly, have
been distinctly depressing.

This gentleman says: "I entered a narrow garret, furnished with a
bottomless chair, a rickety table and a miserable pallet bed, with two
dirty curtains half drawn round it. On the table were an inkstand, a
big copybook scribbled all over, a jug of lemonade, a glass, and a
morsel of bread. The heat in this wretched hole was stifling, and one
breathed a mephitic air which would have given cholera, if cholera had
then been invented!" Balzac was in bed, with a cotton cap of
problematic colour on his head. "You see," he said, "the abode I have
not left except once for two months--the evening when you met me.
During all this time I have not got up from the bed where I work at
the great work, for the sake of which I have condemned myself to this
hermit's life, and which happily I have just finished, for my powers
have come to an end." It must have been during these last months in
his garret, when he neglected everything for his projected
masterpiece, that, covered with vermin from the dirt of his room, he
would creep out in the evening to buy a candle, which, as he possessed
no candlestick, he would put in an empty bottle.

The almost insane ardour for and absorption in his work, which were
his salient characteristics, had already possession of him; and we see
that he laboured as passionately now for fame and for love of his art,
as he did later on, when the struggle to free himself from debt, and
to gain a home and womanly companionship were additional incentives to
effort. At the time of which M. de Petigny speaks, however, his
troubles appeared to be over, as the masterpiece for which he had
suffered so much was completed; and joyfully confident that triumph
awaited him, Honore took it home with him to Villeparisis at the end
of April, 1820. He was so certain, poor fellow, of success, that he
had specially begged that among those invited to the reading of the
tragedy, should be the insulting person who told his father fifteen
months before, that he was fit for nothing but a post as copying
clerk.



                              CHAPTER IV

                             1820 - 1828

  Reading of "Cromwell"--Balzac is obliged to live at home
  --Unhappiness--Writes romantic novels--Friendship with Madame
  de Berny--Starts in Paris as publisher and afterwards as printer
  --Impending bankruptcy only prevented by help from his parents
  and Madame de Berny.

Evidently Balzac's happy faith in the beauty of "Cromwell" had
impressed his parents, as, apparently without having seen the play,
they had assembled a large concourse of friends for the reading; and
between happy pride in his boy's genius, and satisfaction at his own
acuteness in discerning it, old M. de Balzac was no doubt nearly as
joyous as Honore himself. The Balzac family were prepared for triumph,
the friends were amused or incredulous, and the solemn trial began.[*]
The tragedy, strongly Royalist in principles, opens, according to the
plot as given by Balzac in a letter to his sister,[+] with the
entrance of Queen Henrietta Maria into Westminster. She is utterly
exhausted, and, disguised in humble garments, has returned from taking
her children for safety into Holland, and from begging for the help of
the King of France. Strafford, in tears, tells her of late events, and
of the King's imprisonment and future trial; but during this
conversation Cromwell and Ireton enter, and the Queen, in terror,
hides behind a tomb, till, horrified at the discussion as to whether
or not the King shall be put to death, she comes out, and, as Balzac
remarks, "makes them a famous discourse." Act II. sounds a little
dull, though no doubt it is highly instructive, as a great part of it
is taken up with a monologue by the King detailing the events of his
past reign. Later on Charles, instead of keeping Cromwell's son who
has fallen into his hands, as a hostage for his own life, gives him up
to his father without condition; but Cromwell, unmoved by this
generosity, still plots for his King's death. The fifth Act, which
Balzac remarks is the most difficult of all, opens with a scene in
which the King tells the Queen his last wishes, which Balzac
interpolates with (Quelle scene!); then Strafford informs the King of
his condemnation (Quelle scene!); the King and Queen say good-bye
--(Quelle scene!) again; and the play ends with the Queen vowing
eternal vengeance upon England, declaring that enemies will rise
everywhere against her, and that one day France will fight against
her, conquer her, and crush her.

[*] The original MS., beautifully written out, and tied with faded
    blue ribbon, is in the possession of the Vicomte de Spoelberch
    de Lovenjoul.

[+] "Honore de Balzac--Correspondance," vol. i, p. 28.

Honore began his reading with the utmost enthusiasm, modulating his
sonorous voice to suit the different characters, and even contriving
for a time to impart by his expressive reading a fictitious interest
to the dull, tedious tragedy. Gradually, however, the feeling of
disappointment and boredom among his audience communicated itself to
him. He lost confidence; his beautiful reading began to decline in
pathos and interest; and when at last he finished, and, glancing at
the downcast faces round him, found that even Laure could not look up
at him with a smile of congratulation, he felt a chill at his heart,
and knew that he had not triumphed after all. Nevertheless, he very
naturally rebelled against the strongly expressed adverse judgment of
his enemy of the copying-clerk proposal, and begged to be allowed to
appeal to a competent and impartial critic. To this request his father
assented, and M. Surville, who was now engaged to Laure, proposed that
M. Andrieux, of the Academie Francaise, formerly his own master at the
Ecole Polytechnique, should be asked to give an opinion. Honore, his
sister says, "accepted this literary elder as sovereign judge," no
doubt hoping against hope that a really cultured man would see the
beauties which were unfortunately hidden from the eyes of the
unintellectual inhabitants of Villeparisis. However, the verdict of M.
Andrieux was, if possible, more crushing than any of the events which
had preceded it. In the honest opinion of this expert, the author of
"Cromwell" ought to do anything, no matter what, _except literature_.

Honore had asked for an impartial judgment, and had promised to abide
by it. His discomfiture and sense of failure ought therefore to have
been complete. Genius does not, however, follow the ordinary road; and
with a mixture of pluck, confidence in himself, and pride which always
characterised him, Honore did not allow that he was beaten, and would
not show the feelings of grief and disappointment which must have
filled his heart. "Tragedies are not my line"--that is all he said;
and if he had been allowed to follow his own bent, he would at once
have returned to his garret, and have begun to write again with
unabated ardour.

Naturally, however, the Balzac family refused to allow him to continue
the course of senseless folly which was already beginning to ruin his
health. Madame de Balzac was specially strong on this point; and
though he had only been allowed fifteen months, instead of the two
years promised for his trial, she insisted that he should come home at
once, and remain under the maternal eye. Indeed, this seemed quite
necessary, after the privations he had gone through. His sufferings
never made him thin at any period of his life; but now his face was
pale and his eyes hollow, and his lifelong friend, Dr. Nacquart, sent
him at once to recruit in the air of his native Touraine.

After this followed a time of bitter trial for poor Honore. His sister
Laure married M. Surville in May, 1820, about a month after his return
home, and went to live at Bayeux, so that he was deprived of her
congenial companionship; and, in spite of his fun and buoyancy, his
letters to her show his extreme wretchedness. Years afterwards he told
the Duchesse d'Abrantes that the cruel weight of compulsion under
which he was crushed till 1822 made his struggles for existence, when
once he was free, seem comparatively light. Continually worried by his
nervous, irritable mother, deprived of independence, of leisure, of
quiet, he saw his dreams of future fame vanish like smoke, and the
hated lawyer's office become a certainty, if he failed to make money
by writing. In deadly fear of this, and with the paralysing
consciousness that his present circumstances were peculiarly
unpropitious as a literary education, he rebelled against the hard
fate which denied him opportunity to work for fame. "Laure, Laure," he
cries at this time, "my two only and immense desires--to be loved and
to be celebrated--will they ever be satisfied?"

Whatever his aspirations might be, it was necessary that he should do
something to support himself, as his parents firmly refused to grant
him the 1,500 francs--about sixty pounds--a year for which he begged,
to enable him to live in Paris and to carry out his vocation. He was
therefore obliged to write at his home at Villeparisis in the midst of
distractions and discouragements. In these unpropitious circumstances
he produced in five years--with different collaborators, whose names
are now rescued from absolute oblivion by their transitory connection
with him--eight novels in thirty-one volumes. That he managed to find
a publisher for most of his novels, and to make forty pounds, sixty
pounds, or eighty pounds out of each, is according to his sister, a
remarkable proof of his strength of will, and also of his power of
fascination. The payment generally took the form of a bill payable at
some distant period--a form of receiving money which does not seem
very satisfying; but at any rate Balzac could prove to his family that
he was earning something, and was himself cheered by his small
successes. We can imagine his feverish anxiety, and the cunning with
which he would exert every wile to induce the publisher--himself a
struggling man--to accept his wares, when he knew that a refusal would
mean mingled scoffs and lamentations at home, and possibly a menace
that not much longer leisure would be allowed him for idling. There is
pathos in the fate of one whose genius is unrecognised till his day on
earth is over, but far harder seems the lot of the man who longs and
struggles, feeling that the power is in him, and who yet, by some
strange gulf between thought and expression, can only produce what he
knows to be worthless. It speaks much for Balzac's courage, patience,
and determination, or perhaps for the intuitive force of a genius
which refused to be denied outlet, that he struggled through this
weary time, and in spite of opposition kept to his fixed purpose of
becoming a writer.

These early works--"L'Heritiere de Birague," "Jean-Louis," "Le
Centenaire," "Le Vicaire des Ardennes," "La Derniere Fee," "Wann
Chlore," and others, published in 1822 and the three following years
--were written under the pseudonyms of Lord R'hoone, Viellergle, and
Horace de Saint-Aubin, and are generally wild tales of adventure in
the style of Mrs. Radcliffe. Though occasionally the reader comes
across a paragraph faintly reminiscent of the Balzac of later years,
these youthful attempts are certainly not worthy of the great man who
wrote them, and he consistently refused to acknowledge their
authorship. The two first, "L'Heritiere de Birague" and "Jean-Louis,"
were written with the collaboration of M. Auguste le Poitevin de
l'Egreville, who took the name of Viellergle, while Balzac adopted
that of Lord R'hoone, an anagram of Honore, so that these two novels
are signed with both pseudonyms.[*] It is amusing to find that the
sage Honore, in 1820, prudently discourages a passing fancy on the
part of his sister Laurence for his collaborator, by remarking that
writers are very bad _partis_, though he hastens to add that he only
means this from a pecuniary point of view! Laure, at Bayeux, is made
useful as an amateur advertising agent, and is carefully told that,
though she is to talk about the novels a great deal, she is never to
lend her copies to any one, because people must buy the books to read
them. "L'Heritiere" brought in about thirty-two pounds, and
"Jean-Louis" fifty-three pounds, unfortunately both in bills at long
date; but it was the first money Honore had ever earned, and he was
naturally excited. However, with "La Derniere Fee" he was not so
fortunate, as both versions--one of which appeared in 1823 and the
other in 1824--were published at his own cost. Nevertheless, he has no
illusions about the worth of his books, "L'Heritiere" being, he says,
a "veritable cochonnerie litteraire," while "Jean-Louis" has "several
rather funny jokes, and some not bad attempts at character, but a
detestable plot."

[*] See "Une Page perdue de Honore de Balzac," by the Vicomte de
    Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.

In the same year, 1822, he writes one of his droll, beseeching letters
to beg M. and Mme. Surville to help him out of a great difficulty, and
to write one volume of "Le Vicaire des Ardennes" while he writes the
other, and afterwards fits the two together. The matter is most
important, as he has promised Pollet to have two novels, "Le Vicaire"
and "Le Savant"--the latter we never hear of again--ready by October
1st. It is necessary to be specially quick about "Le Vicaire," partly
because Auguste, his collaborator, is writing a novel of the same
name, and Balzac's production _must_ come out first, and also for the
joyful reason that he will actually receive twenty-four pounds in
ready money for the two books, the further fifty-six pounds following
in bills payable at eight months. What do the Survilles think about
it? He throws himself on their generosity, though he is afraid Laure
will never manage to write sixty pages of a novel every day.
Apparently the Survilles, or at least M. Surville--for it is certain
that the devoted Laure would have worked herself to death to help
Honore--did not see their way to proceeding at this rate of
composition, as the next letter from Balzac, written on August 20th,
is full of reproaches because the manuscript has not been at once
returned to him, that he may go on with it himself. Perhaps this want
of help prevented the carrying out of the contract, and was the reason
that the world has not been enriched by the appearance of "Le Savant."
Honore, however, judging by his next letter, did not bear malice: he
was accustomed to make continual requests, reasonable and sometimes
_very_ unreasonable, to his family; and the large good-humour which
was one of the foundations of his robust character, prevented him from
showing any irritation when they were refused.

From 1821 to 1824 he wrote thirty-one volumes, and it is an
extraordinary proof of his versatility, that in 1824, in the midst of
the production of these romantic novels, he published a pamphlet
entitled "Du Droit d'Ainesse" which argues with singular force, logic,
and erudition against the revolutionary and Napoleonic theories on the
division of property; and a small volume entitled "Histoire impartiale
des Jesuites," which is an impassioned defence of religion and the
monarchy. "The Bourbons are the preservers of the sublime religion of
Christ, and they have never betrayed the trust which confided
Christianity to them," he cries. No one reading these political essays
would think it likely that they were the work of the romantic writer
of "La Derniere Fee" or "Argow the Pirate," which were employing
Balzac's pen at the same time.

Young men are often very severe critics of the doings of their family;
and Balzac, cursed with the sensitiveness of genius, and smarting
under the bitter disappointment of disillusionment and of thwarted and
compressed powers, was not likely to be an indulgent critic; but
making due allowance for these facts, it does not appear that his home
was a particularly comfortable place at this time. Old M. de Balzac
was as placid as an Egyptian pyramid and perennially cheerful; but the
restless Madame de Balzac was now following in the footsteps of her
nervous mother and becoming a _malade imaginaire_. This did not add to
the comfort of her family, while the small excitements she roused
perpetually were peculiarly trying to her eldest son, who was himself
not of a placid nature.

However, there were compensations, though the discreet Honore does not
mention these in his letters to Laure, as in 1821 his friendship with
Madame de Berny began, and only ceased in 1836 with her death, which
in spite of his affection for Madame Hanska, was a lifelong sorrow to
him. One of Honore's home duties was to act as tutor to his younger
brother Henry--the spoilt child of the family--who, owing to supposed
delicacy, was educated at home; and as the Bernys lived near
Villeparisis, it was arranged that he should at the same time give
lessons to one of M. and Madame de Berny's boys. This may have helped
to bring about the intimacy between the two houses, and Honore was
struck by Madame de Berny's patience and sweetness to a morose husband
many years older than herself. Later on, the Bernys left the
neighbourhood of Villeparisis, and divided their time between the
village of Saint-Firmin, near Chantilly, and Paris; and Balzac
occasionally paid them visits in the country, and saw Madame de Berny
continually in Paris. She was twenty-two years older than Honore, and
no doubt supplied the element of motherliness which was conspicuously
absent in Madame de Balzac.

She was a gentle and pathetic figure, the woman who understood Balzac
as Madame Hanska did not; who made light of her troubles and
sufferings for fear of grieving him in the midst of his own struggles;
and who, while performing her duties conscientiously as devoted wife
and mother, for twelve years gave up two hours every day to his
society. She lent him money, interceded with his parents on his
behalf, corrected his proofs, acted as a severe and candid though
sympathetic critic, and above all cheered and encouraged him, and
prevented him from committing suicide in his dark days of distress. On
the other hand, the friendship of a man like Balzac must have been of
absorbing interest to a woman of great delicacy of feeling, and
evidently considerable literary powers, whose surroundings were
uncongenial; and his warm and enduring affection helped her to tide
over many of the troubles of a sad life.

Recent researches have discovered several interesting facts about the
origin of the woman to whom may be ascribed the merit of "creating"
the writer who was destined to exercise so great an influence on his
own and succeeding generations.[*] Curiously enough, Louise Antoinette
Laure Hinner, destined at the age of fifteen years and ten months to
become Madame de Berny, was, like Madame Hanska, a foreigner, being
the daughter of Joseph Hinner, a German musician, who was brought by
Turgot to France. Here he became harpist to Marie Antoinette, and
married Madame Quelpee de Laborde, one of the Queen's ladies in
waiting. Two years later, on May 23rd, 1777, the future Madame de
Berny came into the world, and made her debut with a great flourish of
trumpets, Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, represented by the Duc de
Fronsac and Laure Auguste de Fitz-James, Princesse de Chimay, being
her god-parents. When in 1784 her father died, her mother married the
Chevalier de Jarjayes, one of Marie Antoinette's most loyal adherents
during the Revolution. It was he who conceived the project of carrying
off Louis XVII. from the Temple, and who was entrusted with the
precious duty of carrying the seal, ring, and hair belonging to the
Royal Family to the exiled Monsieur and Comte d'Artois.[*]

[*] See "Balzac, Imprimeur," in "La Jeunesse de Balzac," by MM.
    Hanotaux et Vicaire.

We can easily see whence Balzac derived his strong Royalist principles
--how from boyhood the lessons taught him by his masters, M. Lepitre
and M. Guillonnet de Merville, would be insisted on, only with much
greater effect and insistence, by this charming woman of the world.
Her mother, still living, had passed her time in the disturbed and
exciting atmosphere of plots and counterplots; and she herself could
tell him story after story of heartrending tragedies and of
hairbreadth escapes, which had happened to her own relations and
friends. From her he acquired those aristocratic longings which always
characterised him, and through her influence he made acquaintance with
several people of high position and importance, and thus was enabled
to make an occasional appearance in the _beau-monde_ of Paris.

Her portrait gives the idea of an elegant rather than pretty woman,
with a long neck, sloping shoulders, black curls on the temples, at
each side of a high forehead, and large, languishing dark eyes, under
pencilled eyebrows. The oval face has a character of gentle
melancholy, and there is something subdued and suffering in the whole
expression which invites our pity. She wears in the portrait an Empire
dress, confined under the arms by a yellow ribbon.

"La dilecta," as Balzac calls her, cannot have been a very happy
woman. Of her nine children, watched with the most tender solicitude,
only four lived to grow up; and of these her favourite son, "beautiful
as the day, like her tender and spiritual, like her full of noble
sentiments," as Balzac says, died the year before her; and only an
insane daughter and a wild, unsatisfactory son survived her. This
terrible blow broke her heart, and she shut herself up and refused to
see even Balzac during the last year of her life. The end must at any
rate have been peaceful, as, in order to prolong her existence as much
as possible, it had been found necessary to separate her from the
irritable husband with whose vagaries she had borne patiently during
thirty tedious years; but perhaps she was sorry in the end that this
was necessary. Madame de Mortsauf, in the "Lys dans la Vallee," is
intended to be a portrait of her, though Balzac says that he has only
managed to give a faint reflection of her perfections. However this
may be, Henriette de Mortsauf is a charming and ethereal creation, and
from her we can understand the fascination Madame de Berny exerted
over Balzac, and can realise that, as he says to Madame Hanska, her
loss can never be made up to him. It is possible also to sympathise
with the feeling, perhaps unacknowledged even to himself, which peeps
out in a letter to Madame Hanska in 1840.[*] In this he reproaches his
correspondent for her littleness in not writing to him because he
cannot answer her letters quickly, and tells her that he has lately
been in such straits that he has not been able to pay for franking his
letters, and has several times eaten a roll on the Boulevards for his
dinner. He goes on: "Ah! I implore you, do not make comparisons
between yourself and Madame de Berny. She was of infinite goodness and
of absolute devotion; she was what she was. You are complete on your
side as she on hers. One never compares two great things. They are
what they are." Certainly Balzac never found a second Madame de Berny.

[*] "Lettres a L'Etrangere."

From 1822 to 1824 we know little of Balzac's history, except that he
passed the time at home, and was presumably working hard at his
romantic novels; but in 1824 a change came, one no doubt hailed at the
time with eager delight, though it proved unfortunately to be the
foundation of all his subsequent misfortunes.

When he went up to Paris to make arrangements for publishing his
novels, he stayed in the old lodgings of his family in the Rue du Roi
Dore, and here he often met a friend, M. d'Assonvillez, to whom he
confided his fear of being forced into an occupation distasteful to
him. M. d'Assonvillez was sympathetic, advised him to seek for a
business which would make him independent, and, carried away by
Honore's powers of persuasion and eloquence, actually promised to
proved the necessary funds. We can imagine Balzac's joy at this offer,
and the enthusiasm with which he would take up his abode in Paris, and
feel that he was about to earn his living, nay, more, that he would no
doubt become enormously rich, and would then have leisure to give up
his time to literature. What however decided him to become first
publisher and then printer we do not know. He started his publishing
campaign with the idea of bringing out compact editions of the
complete works of different authors in one volume, and began with
Moliere and La Fontaine, carrying on the two publications at the same
time, for fear of competition if his secret should be discovered. The
idea, which had already been thought of by Urbain Canel, was a good
one; but unfortunately Balzac was not able to obtain support from the
trade, and had not sufficient capital for advertising. Therefore by
the end of the year not twenty copies were sold, and he lost 15,000
francs on this affair alone. Consequently, in order to save the rent
of the warehouse in which the books were stored, he was obliged to
part with all the precious compact editions for the price by the
weight of the paper on which they were printed.

Matters now looked very black, as Balzac owed about 70,000 francs; but
M. d'Assonvillez was evidently much impressed by his business
capacity, and was naturally anxious to be repaid the money he had
lent. He therefore introduced Honore to a relation who was making a
large fortune by his printing-press; and Balzac, full of enthusiasm,
dreamt of becoming a second Richardson, and of combining the
occupations of author and printer. His father was persuaded to provide
the necessary funds, and handed him over 30,000 francs--about 1,200
pounds--with which to start the enterprise. In August, 1826, Balzac
began again joyously, first by himself and afterwards with a partner
named Barbier, whom he had noticed as foreman in one of the
printing-offices to which he had taken his novels. Unfortunately a
printing-licence cost 15,000 francs in the time of Charles X.; and
when this had been paid, Barbier had received a bonus of 12,000 francs,
and 15,000 francs had been spent on the necessary materials, there
remained very little capital with which to meet the current expenses
of the undertaking. Nevertheless, the young partners started full of
hope, having bought from Laurent for 30,000 francs the premises at No.
7, Rue des Marais Saint-Germain, now the Rue Visconti, a street so
narrow that two vehicles cannot pass in it. A wooden staircase with an
iron handrail led from a dark passage to the large barrack-like hall
they occupied: an abode which Balzac tried to beautify, possibly for
Madame de Berny's visits, by hangings of blue calico.

There Balzac developed quickly. He learnt the struggle of a business
life, the duel between man and man, through which thousands pass
without gaining anything except business acuteness, but which
introduced the great psychologist to hundreds of new types, and showed
to his keen, observant eyes man, not in society or domesticity, but in
undress, fighting for life itself, or for all that makes life worth
living. In the Rue de Lesdiguieres he had struggled with himself,
striving in cold and hunger to gain the mastery of his art. Here he
battled with others; and since, except on paper, he never possessed
business capacity, he failed and went under; but by his defeat he
paved the way to future triumph. He passed through an experience
possibly unique in the career of a man of letters, one which imparts
the peculiar flavour of business, money, and affairs to his books, and
which fixed on him for all his days the impression of restless,
passionate, thronging humanity which he pictures in his books. The
abyss between his early romantic novels and such a book as the "Peau
de Chagrin" is immeasurable, and cannot be altogether accounted for by
any teaching, however valuable, or even by the strong influence which
intercourse with Madame de Berny exercised. Something else definite
must have happened to him--some great opening out and development,
which caused a sudden appearance on the surface of hitherto latent,
unworkable powers. This forcing-process took place at his first
contact with the war of life; and though he bore the scars of the
encounter as long as he lived, he grew by its clash, ferment, and
disaster to his full stature. In "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote,"
"Illusions Perdues," and "Cesar Birotteau" he gives different phases
of this life, spent partly in the printer's office and partly in the
streets, rushing anxiously from place to place and from person to
person, trying vainly by interviews to avert the impending ruin.

Matters seemed, however, quite hopeless; but when, towards the end of
1827, an opportunity occurred of becoming possessed of a type-foundry,
the partners, perhaps with the desperation of despair, did not
hesitate to avail themselves of it. This new acquisition naturally
only appeared likely to precipitate the catastrophe, and Barbier
prepared to leave the sinking ship. At this juncture Madame de Berny
came forward with substantial help, and allowed her name to appear as
partner in his place. However, even this assistance did not long avert
disaster--bankruptcy was impending, and Madame de Berny and Laure
implored Madame de Balzac to prevent this. The latter, wishing at all
costs to keep the matter from the ears of her husband, now a very old
man and failing in health, begged a cousin, M. Sedillot, to come
forward, and at least to save the honour of the family. M. Sedillot,
who appears to have been a good man of business, at once set gallantly
to work to disentangle the embroglio, and to free Honore from its
meshes. As a result of his efforts, the printing-press was sold to M.
Laurent, and the type-foundry became the property of the De Bernys,
under whom it was highly successful. At the same time, to save Honore
from disgrace, Madame de Balzac lent 37,000 francs and Madame de Berny
45,000, the latter sum being paid back in full by Balzac in 1836, the
year of Madame de Berny's death. "Without her I should be dead," he
tells Madame Hanska. He was most anxious not to sell the type-foundry,
and his parents have been severely criticised for their refusal to
provide further funds for the purpose of carrying on that and the
printing-office.

This blame seems a little unfair. It is true that, after Balzac had
been obliged, to his intense grief, to part with both businesses at a
loss, a fortune was made out of the type-foundry alone. But the
Balzacs had lost money, and had their other children to provide for;
while Honore, though well equipped with hope, enthusiasm, and belief
in himself, had hitherto failed to justify a trust in his business
capacities. In fact, if his parents had been endowed with prophetic
eyesight, and had been enabled to take a bird's-eye view of their
celebrated son's future enterprises, which were always, according to
his own account, destined to fail only by some unfortunate slip at the
last, it seems doubtful whether they would have been wise to alter the
course they adopted.



                              CHAPTER V

                             1828 - 1829

  Life in the Rue de Tournon--Privations and despair--Friendships
  --Auguste Borget--Madame Carraud--The Duchesse d'Abrantes--George
  Sand, etc.--Balzac writes "La Peau de Chagrin" and the
  "Physiologie du Marriage"--His right to be entitled "De Balzac."

In September, 1828, before the final winding up of affairs, Balzac had
fled from Paris, and had gone to spend three weeks with his friends
the Pommereuls in Brittany. There he began to write "Les Chouans," the
first novel to which he signed his name. With his usual hopefulness,
dreams of future fame filled his brain; and in spite of his
misfortunes, his relief at having obtained temporary escape from his
difficulties and freedom to pursue his literary career was so great,
that his jolly laugh often resounded in the old chateau of Fougeres.
It was certainly a remarkable case of buoyancy of temperament, as the
circumstances in which he found himself were distinctly discouraging.
He was now twenty-nine years old; he owed about 100,000 francs, and
was utterly penniless; while his reputation for commercial capacity
had been completely destroyed. His most pressing liabilities had been
paid by his mother, who was all his life one of his principal
creditors; and he was now firmly under the yoke of that heavy burden
of debt which was destined never again to be lifted from his
shoulders. Once again, as they had done nine years before, his parents
cast off all responsibility for their unsatisfactory son. They had
saved the family honour, which would have been compromised by his
bankruptcy; but they felt that whether he lived or starved was his own
affair. His position was infinitely worse than it had been in those
early days in the Rue Lesdiguieres, when submission would have led to
reinstatement in favour. He was now, as he graphically expressed it,
"thrown into" the Rue de Tournon,[*] and apparently no provision was
made for his wants. His parents, who had moved from Villeparisis to
Versailles the year before, in order to be near Madame Surville,
limited their interference in his affairs to severe criticism on his
want of respect in not coming to see his family, and righteous wrath
at his extravagance in hanging his room with blue calico. These
reproaches he parried with the defence that he had no money to pay
omnibus fares, and could not even write often because of the expense
of postage; while anent the muslin, he stated that he possessed it
before his failure, as La Touche and he had nailed it up to hide the
frightful paper on the walls of the printing-office. Uncrushed by the
scathing comments on his attempts at decoration, curious though
characteristic efforts on the part of a starving man, he writes to his
sister a few days later: "Ah, Laure, if you did but know how
passionately I desire (but, hush! keep the secret) two blue screens
embroidered in black (silence ever!)."[+] He reopens his letter about
the screens to answer one from Madame Surville, written evidently at
the instigation of M. and Mme. de Balzac, to blame his supposed
idleness; and the poor fellow, to whom _this_ fault at least could at
no time be justly imputed, asks her if he is not already unhappy
enough, and tells her pathetically how he suffers from these unjust
suspicions, and that he can never be happy till he is dead. In the
end, however, he returns with childlike persistence to the screens as
a panacea for all his ills, and finishes with: "But my screens--I want
them more than ever, for a little joy in the midst of torment!"

[*] He says himself "Rue Cassini," but this is a mistake.

[+] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 82.

He had now apparently completely gone under, like many another
promising young man of whom great things are expected; and he had in
his pride and misery hidden himself from every one, except a few
intimate friends. With the death on June 19, 1829, of his father,
whose last days were saddened by the knowledge of his son's disaster,
the world was poorer by one castle in the air the less; for besides
his natural sorrow at the death of the kind old man, who was so much
softer than his wife, the dream of becoming a millionaire by means of
the Tontine capital faded way, like all poor Honore's other visions.
Even Balzac's buoyancy was not always proof against the depressing
influence of two or three days of starvation, and he sometimes
descended to the lowest depths, and groped in those dark places from
which death seems the only escape. When he tells us in "La Peau de
Chagrin" that Raphael walked with an uncertain step in the Tuileries
Gardens, "as if he were in some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not
see, hearing, through all the voices of the crowd, one voice alone,
the voice of Death," it is Balzac himself, who, after glorious
aspirations, after being in imagination raised to heights to which
only a great nature can aspire, now lay bruised and worsted, a
complete failure, and thought that by suicide he would at least obtain
peace and oblivion. He knew to the full the truth of his words:
"Between a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call
a young man to Paris, God only knows what may intervene, what
contending ideas have striven within the soul, what poems have been
set aside, what moans and what despair have been repressed, what
abortive masterpieces and vain endeavours."[*]

[*] Honore de Balzac, "La Peau de Chagrin."

Looking back years afterwards at this terrible time, he can find only
one reason why he did not put an end to himself, and that was the
existence of Madame de Berny: "She was a mother, a woman friend, a
family, a man friend, an adviser," he cries enthusiastically; "she
made the writer, she consoled the young man, she formed his taste, she
cried like a sister, she laughed, she came every day, like a merciful
slumber, to send sorrow to sleep."[*] Certainly there was no woman on
earth to whom Balzac owed so deep a debt of gratitude, and certainly
also he joyfully acknowledged his obligations. "Every day with her was
a fete," he said to Madame Hanska long afterwards.

[*] "Lettres a l'Etrangere."

About this time another friendship was beginning, which, though slower
in growth and not so passionate in character, was as faithful, and was
only terminated by Balzac's death. When Madame Surville went to live
at Versailles, she was delighted to find that an old schoolfellow,
Madame Carraud, was settled there, her husband holding the post of
director of the military school at Saint-Cyr. Honore had known Madame
Carraud since 1819; but he first became intimate with her and her
husband in 1826, and later he was their constant guest at Angouleme,
where Commandant Carraud was in charge of the Government powder-works,
or at Frapesle in Berry, where Madame Carraud had a country house. She
was a woman of much intelligence and ambition, high-principled and
possessing much common sense. Balzac occasionally complained that she
was a little wanting in softness; but, nevertheless, he invariably
turned to her for comfort in the vicissitudes of his more passionate
attachments. He was also much attached to M. Carraud, a man of great
scientific attainments and a good husband, but, to his wife's despair,
utterly lacking in energy and ambition; so that instead of taking the
position to which by his abilities he was entitled, he soon retired
altogether from public life, and Madame Carraud, who should, according
to Balzac, have found scope for her talents in Paris, was buried in
the country. Nevertheless, the Carrauds were a happy couple, genuinely
devoted to each other; and Madame Carraud cited the instance of their
affection, in spite of the difference of their point of view on many
subjects, when in 1833 she wrote to Honore urging him to marry.[*]
"There is no need to tell you that my husband and I are not
sympathetic in everything. We are so unlike each other that the same
objects appear quite differently to us. Yet I know the happiness about
which I speak. We both feel it in the same degree, though in a
different way. I would not give it up for the fullest existence,
according to generally received ideas. I have not an empty moment."

[*] Letter from Madame Carraud in the Vicomte de Spoelberch de
    Lovenjoul's collection, published in _La Revue Bleue_, November
    21st, 1903.

She was an ardent politician, and we gain much of our knowledge of
Balzac's political views from his letters to her when he wished to
become a deputy; while she also possessed the faculty which he valued
most in his women friends, that of intelligent literary criticism. She
could be critical on other points as well; and, like Madame Hanska,
blamed Balzac for mobility of ideas and inconstancy of resolution,
which she said wasted his intellect. She complained that, in the time
that he might have used to bring one plan successfully to completion,
he generally started ten or twelve new ones, all of which vanished
into smoke, and brought him no advantage.[*]

[*] "L'Ecole des Menages" in "Autour de Honore de Balzac," by the
    Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.

Hardly a year passed without Balzac spending some time at the
hospitable house at Frapesle, the doors of which were always open to
him; and there, away from creditors, publishers, journalists, and all
his other enemies, he was able to write in peace and quietness. There,
too, he made many pleasant acquaintances, among them M. Armand Pereme,
the distinguished antiquary, and M. Periollas, who was at one time
under M. Carraud at Saint-Cyr, and afterwards became chief of a
squadron of artillery. To Madame Carraud he also owed an introduction
to his most intimate male friend, Auguste Borget, a genre painter who
travelled in China, and drew many pictures of the scenery there.
Borget lodged in the same house with Balzac in the Rue Cassini, and is
mentioned by him in a letter to Madame Hanska, in 1833, as one of his
three real friends beside her and his sister, Madame de Berny and
Madame Carraud being the other two. It was a very real grief to Balzac
when Borget was away; and he says that even when the painter is
travelling, sketching, and never writes to him, he is constantly in
his remembrance; while in another letter he speaks of his friend's
nobility of soul and beauty of sentiment. To Borget was dedicated the
touching story of "La Messe de l'Athee"; and in case of Balzac's
sudden death it was to this "good, old, and true friend" that the duty
of burning Madame Hanska's letters were entrusted, though eventually
their recipient performed this painful task himself in 1847.

A still older friend was M. Dablin, a rich, retired ironmonger with
artistic tastes, who left his valuable collection of artistic objects
to the Louvre. He was known to Balzac before 1817; and in 1830 the
successful writer remembers with gratitude that M. Dablin used to be
his only visitor during his martyrdom in the Rue Lesdiguieres in 1819.
At that time and later he was most generous in lending Honore money;
and the only cloud that came between them for a long time was his
indignation when Balzac wished to find him further security than his
own life for a loan he had promised. Later on, in 1845, when M.
Dablin, rather hurt by some heedless words from Balzac, and evidently
jealous of his former protege's grand acquaintances, complained that
honours and fortune changed people's hearts--the great novelist found
time, after his daily sixteen hours of work, to write a long letter to
his old benefactor.[*] In this he tells him that nothing will alter
his affection for him, that all his real friends are equal in his
sight; and he makes the true boast that, though he may have the
egotism of the hard worker, he has never yet forsaken any one for whom
he feels affection, and is the same now in heart as when he was a boy.

[*] "Correspondance," vol. ii. p. 115.

Other early and lifelong friendships were with Madame Delannoy, who
lent him money, and was in all ways kind to him, and with M. de
Margonne, who lived at Sache, a chateau on the Indre, in the beautiful
Touraine valley described in "Le Lys dans la Vallee," and who had held
Balzac on his knees when a child. Balzac often paid him visits,
especially when he wanted to meditate over some serious work, as he
found the solitude and pure air, and the fact that he was treated in
the neighbourhood simply as a native of the country and not as a
celebrity, peculiarly stimulating to his imagination and powers of
creation. He wrote "Louis Lambert," among other novels at the house of
this hospitable friend. Madame de Margonne he did not care for: she
was, according to his unflattering portrait of her, intolerant and
devout, deformed, and not at all _spirituelle_. But she did not count
for much; Balzac went to the house for the sake of her husband.

An intimacy was formed about this time between Balzac and La Touche,
the editor of the _Figaro_, who, as has been already mentioned, helped
him in the prosaic task of nailing up draperies. This intimacy must
have been of great value to Balzac's education in the art of
literature, and is remarkable for that reason in the history of a man
in whose writings small trace of outside influence can be descried,
and who, except in the case of Theophile Gautier, seemed little
affected by the thought of his contemporaries. Therefore, though a
long way behind Madame de Berny--without whom Balzac, as we know him,
would hardly have existed--La Touche deserves recognition for his
work, however small, in moulding the literary ideals and forming the
taste of the great writer. Besides this, his friendship with Balzac is
almost unique in the history of the latter, in the fact that, for some
reason we do not know, it was suddenly broken off; and that almost the
only occasion when Balzac showed personal dislike almost amounting to
hatred, in criticism, was when, in 1840, in the _Revue Parisienne_, he
published an article on "Leo," a novel by La Touche. He became, George
Sand says, completely indifferent to his old master, while the latter
--a pathetic, yet thorny and uncomfortable figure, as portrayed by his
contemporaries--continued to belittle and revile his former pupil,
while all the time he loved him, and longed for a reconciliation which
never took place. La Touche had a quick instinct for discovering
genius: he introduced Andre Chenier's posthumous poems to the public,
and launched Jules Sandeau and George Sand. But he was soured by
seeing his pupils enter the promised land only open to genius, while
he was left outside himself. Sooner or later, the eager, affected
little hypochondriacal man with the bright eyes quarrelled with all
his friends, and a rupture would naturally soon take place between the
ultra-sensitive teacher, ready to take offence on the smallest
pretext, and the hearty, robust Tourainean, who, whatever his troubles
might be, faced the world with a laugh, who insisted on his genius
with cheery egotism, and who, in spite of real goodheartedness and
depth of affection, was too full of himself to be always careful about
the feelings of others. How much Balzac owed to La Touche we do not
know; but though, as we have already seen, there were other reasons
for his sudden stride in literature between 1825 and 1828, it is
significant that "Les Chouans," the first book to which he affixed his
name, and in which his genius really shows itself, was written
directly after his intercourse with this literary teacher. No doubt La
Touche, who was cursed with the miserable fate of possessing the
temperament of genius without the electric spark itself, magnified the
help he had given, and felt extreme bitterness at the shortness of
memory shown by the great writer, whom he vainly strove to sting into
feeling by the acerbity of his attacks.

Never at any time did Balzac go out much into society, but his
anonymous novels, though they did not bring him fame, had opened to
him the doors of several literary and artistic salons, and he was a
frequenter of that of Madame Sophie Gay, the author of several novels,
one of which, "Anatole," is said to have been read by Napoleon during
the last night spent at Fontainebleau in 1814. Hers was essentially an
Empire salon, antagonistic to the government of the Bourbons, and
Balzac's feelings were perhaps occasionally ruffled by the talk that
went on around him, though more probably the interest he found in the
study of different phases of opinion outweighed his party
prepossessions. Those evenings must have been an anxious pleasure;
for, with no money to pay a cab fare, there was always the agonising
question as to whether on arrival his boots would be of spotless
cleanliness, while the extravagance of a pair of white gloves meant a
diminution in food which it was not pleasant to contemplate. Then,
too, he felt savage disgust at the elegant costumes and smart
cabriolets owned by empty-headed fops with insufferable airs of
conquest, who looked at him askance, and to whom he could not prove
the genius that was in him, or give voice to his belief that some day
he would dominate them all. The restlessness and discomfort, and at
the same time the sense of unknown and fascinating possibilities which
are the birthright of talented youth, and in the portrayal of which
Balzac is supreme, must have been well known to him by experience; and
his almost Oriental love of beauty and luxury made his life of
grinding poverty peculiarly galling.

Conspicuous in her mother's salon, queen of conversationalists,
reciting verses in honour of the independence of Greece, exciting
peals of laughter by her wit and her power to draw out that of others,
was a brilliant figure--that of the beautiful Delphine Gay, who was,
in 1831, to become Madame de Girardin. She is a charming figure, a
woman with unfailing tact and a singular lack of literary jealousy, so
that all her contemporaries speak of her with affection. She made
strenuous efforts to keep the peace between Balzac and her husband,
the autocratic editor of _La Presse_; and till 1847, when the final
rupture took place, Balzac's real liking for her conquered his
resentment at what he considered unjustifiable proceedings on the part
of her husband. Once indeed there was a complete cessation of friendly
relations, and even dark hints about a duel; but usually Madame de
Girardin prevailed; and though there were many recriminations on both
sides, and several times nearly an explosion, Balzac wrote for _La
Presse_, visited her salon, and was generally on terms of politeness
with her husband. She was proud of her beautiful complexion, and had a
drawing-room hung with pale green satin to show it to the best
advantage; while, like her mother, she wrote novels, one of which she
called "La Canne de M. de Balzac," after the novelist's famous cane
adorned with turquoises.

One of the habituees of Madame Gay's salon was the Duchesse
d'Abrantes; and between her and Balzac there existed a literary
comradeship, possibly cemented by the impecunious condition which was
common to both. In 1827 she lived at Versailles; and whenever Balzac
went to see his parents, he also paid her a visit; when long talks
took place about their mutual struggles, misfortunes and hopes of
gaining money by writing. The poor woman was always in monetary
difficulties. After the fall of the Empire and the death of her
husband, whom she courageously followed throughout his campaign in
Spain, she continued to live in the same luxury that had surrounded
her during her days of splendour; and as the Bourbon Government
refused to help her, she was soon reduced to a state of destitution,
and turned to her pen to pay off her creditors. She wrote several
novels, which at this time are completely forgotten; but in 1831 she
began to bring out her Memoirs, and these give a graphic account of
the social life under the Empire, and have become a classic. These
Memoirs were first published in sixteen volumes, and it must have been
a relief to the public when a second edition, consisting of only
twelve volumes, was brought out three years later.

In 1829, the time of which we are now writing, Balzac could only
sympathise when the poor Duchess, formerly raised to great heights and
now fallen very low, felt depressed at her reverses, and took a gloomy
view of life. He would assure her that happiness could not possibly be
over for ever, and would predict a bright dawn some future day; while
as soon as he began to prosper himself, he did his best to lend her a
helping hand. He effected an introduction to Charles Rabou, so that
her articles were received by the _Revue de Paris_, and he assisted as
intermediary between her and the publishers, taking infinite trouble
on her behalf, and in the end gaining most advantageous terms for her.
No assistance, however, was of permanent use. She, who knew so much,
had never learnt to manage money, and, helped by her eldest son,
Napoleon d'Abrantes, she spent every penny she earned. On July 7th,
1838, she died in the utmost poverty in a miserable room in the Rue
des Batailles, having been turned out of the hospital, where she had
hoped to end her days in peace, because she could not pay her expenses
in advance. Balzac writes to Madame Hanska: "The papers will have told
you about the Duchesse d'Abrantes' deplorable death. She ended as the
Empire ended. Some day I will explain this woman to you; it will be a
nice evening's occupation at Wierzchownia."[*]

[*] "Lettres a l'Etrangere."

Another of Balzac's friendships, rather different in character from
those already mentioned, was that with George Sand, "his brother
George" he used to call her. He first made her acquaintance in 1831,
and would often go puffing up the stairs of the five-storied house on
the Quai Saint-Michel, at the top of which she lived. His ostensible
object was to give advice about her writing, but in reality he would
leave this comparatively uninteresting subject very quickly, and pour
out floods of talk about his own novels. "Ah, I have found something
else! You will see! You will see! A splendid idea! A situation! A
dialogue! No one has ever seen anything like it!" "It was joy,
laughter, and a superabundance of enthusiasm, of which one cannot give
any idea. And this after nights without slumber and days without
repose,"[*] remarks George Sand.

[*] "Autour de la Table," by George Sand.

There were limitations in his view of her, as he never fully realised
the scope of her genius, and looked on her as half a man, so that he
would sometimes shock her by the breadth of his conversation. After
her rupture with Jules Sandeau, whose side in the affair he espoused
vehemently, he disapproved of her for some time, and contrasted rather
contemptuously the versatility of her affairs of the heart with the
ideal of passionate, enduring love portrayed in her novels. However,
later on, when he himself had been disappointed in Sandeau, and when
the latter had further roused his indignation by writing a novel
called "Marianna," which was intended to drag George Sand's name
through the mud, Balzac defended her energetically. About the same
time (1839) he brought out his novel "Beatrix," in which she is
portrayed as Mlle. de Touches, with "the beauty of Isis, more serious
than gracious, and as if struck with the sadness of constant
meditation." Her eyes, according to Balzac, were her great beauty, and
all her expression was in them, otherwise her face was stupid; but
with her splendid black hair and her complexion--olive by day and
white in artificial light--she must have been a striking and
picturesque figure. Later on Balzac appears to have partly reconciled
himself to her moral irregularities, on the convenient ground that
she, like himself, was an exceptional being; and we hear of several
visits he paid to Nohant, where he delighted in long hours of talk on
social questions with a comrade to whom he need not show the
_galanteries d'epiderme_ necessary in intercourse with ordinary women.
He says of her: "She had no littleness of soul, and none of those low
jealousies which obscure so much contemporary talent. Dumas is like
her on this point. George Sand is a very noble friend."[*]

[*] "Lettres a l'Etrangere."

This is all anticipation; we must now go back to 1828 and 1829, and
picture Balzac's existence first in the Rue de Tournon and then in one
room at the Rue Cassini. Insufficiently clad and wretchedly fed, he
occasionally went to evening parties to collect material for his
writing; at other times he visited some sympathising friend, and
poured out his troubles to her; but he had only one real support--the
sympathy and affection of Madame de Berny. It was a frightfully hard
life. He took coffee to keep himself awake, and he wrote and wrote
till he was exhausted; all the time being in the condition of a
"tracked hare," harassed and pursued by his creditors, and knowing
that all his gains must go to them.

His only relaxations were little visits. He went to Tours, where he
danced at a ball with a girl with red hair, and with another so little
"that a man would only marry her that she might act as a pin for his
shirt."[*] He travelled to Sache, to see M. de Margonne; to
Champrosay, where he met his sister; and to Fougeres in Brittany, at
the invitation of the Baron de Pommereul. During the last-named visit,
as we have already seen, he not only collected the material, but also
wrote the greater part of his novel "Les Chouans," which proved the
turning-point of his career.

[*] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 82.

This novel, the first signed with his name, Honore Balzac, was
published by Canel and Levavasseur in March, 1829, and in December of
the same year the "Physiologie du Mariage by a Celibataire," appeared,
and excited general attention; though many people, Madame Carraud
among the number, were much shocked by it. Each of these books brought
in about fifty pounds--not a large sum, especially when we think that
Balzac must at this time have owed about two thousand pounds; but he
had now his foot upon the first rung of the ladder of fame, and
editors and publishers began to apply to him for novels and articles.

It is a curious fact that Balzac, who answered a question put to him
during his lawsuit against the _Revue de Paris_ on the subject of his
right to the prefix "de," with the rather grandiloquent words, "My
name is on my certificate of birth, as that of the Duke of Fitz-James
is on his,"[*] should on the title-page of "Les Chouans" have called
himself simply M. H. Balzac, and on that of the "Scenes de la Vie
Privee," which appeared in April, 1830, M. Balzac, still without the
"de." In 1826 he gives his designation and title as "H. Balzac,
imprimeur, Rue des Marais, St.-Germain, 31," and we have already seen
that he was entered on the school register as Honore Balzac, and that
his parents at that time called themselves M. and Mme. Balzac.
Occasionally, however, as early as 1822, in letters to his sister
Honore insists on the particle "de," and all his life he claimed to be
a member of a very old Gaulish family--a pretension which gave his
enemies a famous opportunity for deriding him.

[*] First Preface to the "Lys dans la Vallee," p 482, vol. xxii. of
    "Oeuvres Completes de H. de Balzac," Edition definitive.

In 1836, during his lawsuit with the _Revue de Paris_, he certainly
spoke on the subject with no doubtful voice:

"Even if my name sounds too well in certain ears, even if it is envied
by those who are not pleased with their own, I cannot give it up. My
father was quite within his rights on this subject, having consulted
the records in the Archive Office. He was proud of being one of the
conquered race, of a family which in Auvergne had resisted the
invasion, and from which the D'Entragues took their origin. He
discovered in the Archive Office the notice of a grant of land made by
the Balzacs to establish a monastery in the environs of the little
town of Balzac, and a copy of this was, he told me, registered by his
care at the Parliament of Paris."[*]

[*] See First Preface to the "Lys dans la Vallee."

Balzac continues for some time in this strain, giving his enemies a
fresh handle for ridicule. After the loss of the lawsuit, the _Revue
de Paris_, raging with indignation, answered him with "Un dernier mot
a M. de Balzac," an article which the writer, after a reflection full
of venom, must have dashed off with set teeth and a sardonic smile,
and in which there is a most scathing paragraph on the vexed question
of the "de":

"He [Balzac] tells us that he _is of an old Gaulish family_ (You
understand, 'Gaulish'--one of Charlemagne's peers! A French family,
what is that? Gaulish!) It is not his own fault, poor man! Further, M.
de Balzac will prove to you that the Bourbons and the Montmorencies
and other French gentlemen must lower their armorial bearings before
him, who is a Gaul, and more--a Gaul of an old family! In fact, this
name 'De Balzac' is a patronymic name (patronymically ridiculous and
Gaulish). He has always been De Balzac, only that! while the
Montmorencies--those unfortunate Montmorencies--were formerly called
Bouchard; and the Bourbons--a secondary family who are neither
patronymic nor Gaulish (of old Gaulish family is of course understood)
were called Capet. M. de Balzac is therefore more noble than the
King!"

Towards the end, rage renders the talented writer slightly incoherent,
and we can imagine a blotted and illegible manuscript; but the
question raised is an interesting one, and Balzac attached great
importance to it. A favourite form of spite with his enemies was to
adopt the same measures as did this writer, who, except in the title,
calls him throughout "M. Balzac," a form of insult which possessed the
double advantage of imposing no strain on the mind of the attacking
party, and yet of hitting the victim on a peculiarly tender spot.

Balzac's statement that he was entered "De Balzac" on the register of
his birth is on the face of it untrue, as he was born on the 2nd
Prairial of the year VII., a time when all titles were proscribed; so
that the omission of the "de" means nothing, while his contention that
he dropped the "de" in 1826, because he would not soil his noble name
by associating it with trade, might very easily be correct.
Unfortunately, however, for Balzac's argument, when old M. Balzac
died, on June 19th, 1829, he was described in the register as Bernard
Francois Balzac, without the "de." He does not even seem to have stood
on his rights during his lifetime, as in 1826, after the death of
Laurence, who had become Madame de Montzaigle--it must have been a
satisfaction to the Balzac family to have one indisputable "de" among
them--cards were sent out in the names of M. and Madame Balzac, M. and
Madame Surville, and MM. Honore and Henri Balzac.

Still, it might be possible for us to maintain, if it so pleased us,
that, in spite of certain evidence to the contrary, the Balzacs were
simple, unpretentious people, who, having dropped the "de" at the time
of the Revolution, did not care to resume it; but here M. Edmond Bire,
who furnishes us with the information already given, completely cuts
the ground away from under our feet. It appears that M. Charles
Portal, the well-known antiquary, has in his researches discovered the
birth register of old M. Balzac. He was born on July 22nd, 1746, at La
Nougarie, in the parish of Saint-Martin de Canezac, and is described
in this document, not as Balzac at all, but as Bernard Francois
Balssa, the son of a labourer! At what date he took the name of
Balzac, and whether his celebrated son knew of the harmless deception,
we do not know; but possibly his change of name was another of the
little reserves which the clever old gentleman thought it necessary to
maintain about his past life, and Honore really considered himself a
member of an old family.

At any rate, as M. Bire says, he certainly earned by his pen the right
to nobility, and in this account of him he will be known by his usual
appellation of "De Balzac."



                              CHAPTER VI

                             1829 - 1832

  Work and increasing fame--Emile de Girardin--Balzac's early
  relations with the _Revue de Paris_ and quarrel with Amedee
  Pinchot--First letters from Madame Hanska and the Marquise de
  Castries--Balzac's extraordinary mode of writing--Burlesque
  account of it from the _Figaro_.

The record of the next few years of Balzac's life is a difficult one,
so many and varied were the interests crowded into them, so short the
hours of sleep, and so long the nights of work, followed without rest
by an eight hours' day of continual rush. Visits to printers,
publishers, and editors, worrying interviews with creditors, and
letters on business, politics, and literature, followed each other in
bewilderingly quick succession, and the only respite was to be found
in occasional talks with such friends as Madame de Berny, Madame
Carraud, or the Duchesse d'Abrantes.

Success was arriving. But success with Balzac never meant leisure, or
relief from a heavy burden of debt; it merely gave scope for enormous
prodigies of labour. His passion for work amounted to a disease; and
who can measure the gamut of emotion, ranging from rapture down to
straining effort, which was gone through in those silent hours of
darkness, when the man, the best part of whom lived only in solitude
and night, sat in his monk's habit, before a writing-table littered
with papers? Then, impelled by the genius of creation, he would allow
his imagination full sway, and would turn to account the material
collected by his keen powers of observation and his unparalleled
intuition. It was strenuous labour, with the attendant joy of calling
every faculty, including the highest of all--that of creation--into
activity, and the hours no doubt often passed like moments. But the
fierce battling with expression, the effort to tax super-abundant
powers to the utmost, left their mark; and in the morning Balzac would
drag himself to the printer or publisher, with his hair in disorder,
his lips dry, and his forehead lined.

Jules Sandeau, who had been taken by Balzac to live with him, and who
remarked that he would rather die than work as he did, says that
sometimes, when the passion and inspiration for writing were strong on
him, he would shut himself up for three weeks in his closely curtained
room, never breathing the outside air or knowing night from day. When
utterly exhausted, he would throw himself on his pallet-bed for a few
hours, and slumber heavily and feverishly; and when he could fast no
longer, he would call for a meal, which must, however, be scanty,
because digestion would divert the blood from his brain. Otherwise,
hour after hour, he sat before his square table, and concentrated his
powerful mind on his work, utterly oblivious of the fact that there
was anything in the world save the elbowing, crushing throng of
phantom--yet to him absolutely real--personages, whom he took into his
being, and in whose life he lived. For the time he felt with their
feelings, saw with their eyes, became possessed by them, as the great
actor becomes possessed by the personality he represents. "C'etait un
voyant, non un observateur," as Philarete Chasles said with truth.

In 1829 Balzac was introduced by the publisher M. Levavasseur to Emile
de Girardin, who became--and the connection was life-long--what Mme.
de Girardin called La Touche,--an "intimate enemy." At first all was
harmony. Emile de Girardin's letters, beginning in 1830 with "Mon
tres-cher Monsieur," are addressed in 1831 to "Mon cher Balzac"; but
it is doubtful whether the finish of one written in October, 1830, and
ending with "Amitie d'ambition!!!"[*] is exactly flattering to the
recipient--it savours rather strongly of what is termed in vulgar
parlance "cupboard love." However, Girardin was the first to recognise
the great writer's talents, and at the end of 1829, or the beginning
of 1830, after having inserted an article by Balzac in _La Mode_, of
which he was editor, he invited his collaboration, as well as that of
Victor Varaigne, Hippolyte Auger, and Bois le Comte, in forming a
bibliographical supplement to the daily papers, which was to be
entitled "Le feuilleton des journaux politiques." This was a failure,
but Balzac was associated with Emile de Girardin in several other
literary enterprises; and it was through the agency of this energetic
editor that he wrote his letters on Paris in the _Voleur_, which,
extending from September 26th, 1830, to March 29th, 1831, would form a
volume in themselves. After the Revolution of 1830 stories went out of
fashion, the reviews and magazines being completely occupied with the
task of discussing the political situation; and Balzac wrote
numberless articles in the _Silhouette_, which was edited by Victor
Ratier, and in the _Caricature_, edited by M. Philippon. A few years
later, the latter journal became violently political; but at this time
it consisted merely of witty and amusing articles, ridiculing all
parties impartially.

[*] "La Genese d'un Roman de Balzac," p. 105, by the Vicomte de
    Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.

With Victor Ratier, Balzac contemplated a partnership in writing for
the theatre, though he thought Ratier hardly sufficiently industrious
to make a satisfactory collaborator. However, he threatened him in
case of laziness with a poor and honest young man as a rival, and, to
rouse Ratier to energy, remarked that the unnamed prodigy was, like
himself, full of courage, whereas Ratier resembled "an Indian on his
mat."[*] Balzac's imaginative brain was to supply the plot and
characters of each drama; but he was careful, as in the case of his
early novels, that his name should not appear, as the plays were to be
mere vaudevilles written to gain money, and would certainly not
increase their author's reputation. Ratier was therefore to pose as
their sole author, and was to undertake the actual writing of the
play, unless he were too lazy for the effort, when the honest and
unfortunate young man would take his place. The pecuniary part of the
bargain was not mentioned, except the fact that both partners would
become enormously rich; and that result is so invariable a
characteristic of Balzac's schemes that it need hardly be noticed.
However, this brilliant plan came to nothing, not, as we may suppose,
from any failure on the part of the indolent Ratier--as there was in
this case his unnamed rival to fall back upon--but most probably
because its promoter had not a moment's leisure in which to think of
it again.

[*] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 115.

Towards the end of 1830 he began to write for the _Revue de Paris_, a
journal with which his relations, generally inharmonious, culminated
in the celebrated lawsuit of 1836. The review was at this time the
property of a company; and the sole object of the shareholders being
to obtain large dividends, they adopted the short-sighted policy of
cutting down their payment to authors, a course which led to continual
recriminations, and naturally made the office of chief editor very
difficult. When Balzac first wrote for the review, Charles Rabou held
this post, following Dr. Veron; but he resigned in a few months, and
was succeeded in his turn by Amedee Pichot. With him Balzac waged
continual war, finally dealing a heavy blow to the review by deserting
it altogether in 1833.

The cause of the dispute, in the first instance, was one which often
reappears in the history of Balzac's relations with different editors.
Being happily possessed of devoted friends, who allowed him complete
freedom while he stayed with them, he found it easier to write in the
quiet of the country than amidst the worries and distractions of
Paris. In 1830, after travelling in Brittany, he spent four months,
from July to November, at La Grenadiere, that pretty little house near
to Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, which he coveted continually, but never
succeeded in acquiring. In 1834 he thought the arrangements for its
purchase were at last settled. After three years of continual
refusals, the owners had consented to sell, and he already imagined
himself surrounded with books, and established for six months at a
time at this studious retreat. However, pecuniary difficulties came as
usual in the way, and except as a visitor, Balzac never tasted the
joys of a country life.

From La Grenadiere he wrote a remarkable letter to Ratier,[*] full of
love for the beauty of nature, a feeling which filled him with a sense
of the littleness of man, and expressing also that uncomfortable doubt
which must occasionally assail the mind of any man possessed of
powerful physique as well as imagination--the doubt whether the
existence of the thinker is not after all a poor thing compared with
that of the active worker, who is tossed about, risks his life, and
himself creates a living drama. He finishes with the words: "And it
seems to me that the sea, a man-of-war, and an English boat to
destroy, with a chance of drowning, are better than an inkpot, and a
pen, and the Rue Saint-Denis."

[*] "Correspondance," vol. i. p 98.

In May, 1831, Balzac was again away from Paris, this time taking up
his abode in Nemours, where he describes himself as living alone in a
tent in the depths of the earth, subsisting on coffee, and working day
and night at "La Peau de Chagrin," with "L'Auberge Rouge," which he
was writing for the _Revue de Paris_, as his only distraction.

These absences did not apparently cause any friction; but when, in
November, 1831, Balzac went to Sache to stay with M. de Margonne, and
then moved on to the Carrauds, he left "Le Maitre Cornelius," which he
was writing for the _Revue de Paris_, in an unfinished and uncorrected
condition. Thereupon, Amedee Pichot, who naturally wanted consecutive
numbers of the story for his magazine, committed what was in Balzac's
eyes an unpardonable breach of trust, by publishing the uncorrected
proofs, leaving out or altering what he did not understand. Balzac was
furious at his signature being appended to what he considered
unfinished work. Amedee Pichot was also very angry, because Balzac had
unduly lengthened the first part of the story, and had kept him two
months waiting for the finish. Therefore, as diligence was the only
mode of transit, and it was necessary that "Le Maitre Cornelius"
should end with the year, it was impossible to send the proofs before
printing for correction to Angouleme. Nevertheless, as he had
undoubtedly exceeded his rights as editor, he thought it wise to
temporise, and wrote an explanatory and conciliatory letter; and as
this did not pacify Balzac, he dispatched a second of similar tenor.
However, a few days later, on January 9th, 1832, he felt compelled by
the tone of Balzac's correspondence to send a third beginning: "Sir, I
find from the tone of your letter that I am guilty of doing you a
great wrong. I have treated on an equality and as a comrade a superior
person, whom I should have been contented to admire. I therefore beg
your pardon humbly for the 'My dear Balzac' of my preceding letters. I
will preserve the distance of 'Monsieur' between you and me."[*]

[*] "Une Page Perdue de Honore de Balzac," by the Vicomte de
    Spoelberch de Lovenjoul; from which the whole account of the
    dispute between Balzac and Pichot is taken.

However, Balzac was furious. His respect for his own name and his
intense literary conscientiousness were stronger even than his desire
for money, and it was a very black crime in his eyes for any one to
produce one of his works before the public until it had been brought
to the highest possible pitch of perfection. This intense anxiety to
do his best, which caused him the most painstaking labour, often
pressed very hardly on managers of magazines. He was generally paid in
advance, so that his money was safe; and though he could be absolutely
trusted to finish sooner or later what he had undertaken, he showed a
lofty indifference to the exigencies of monthly publication. Moreover,
as is shown in the evidence given later on during his lawsuit with the
_Revue de Paris_, he would sometimes, in his haste for money, accept
new engagements when he already had a plethora of work in hand.
Nevertheless, whatever the failures to fulfil a contract on his part
might be, he was implacable towards those who did not rightly
discharge their obligations to him; and Pichot was never forgiven. In
September, 1832, after endless disputes about the rate and terms of
payment, the most fertile source of recriminations between Balzac and
his various publishers and editors, a formal treaty was drawn up
between the great writer, who was at Sache, and Amedee Pichot, as
director of the _Revue de Paris_. By this, with the option of breaking
the connection after six months, Balzac undertook to write for the
_Revue_ for a year, being still entitled during that time to furnish
articles to the _Renovateur_, the _Journal Quotidienne Politique_, and
_L'Artiste_. In spite of this legal document, there were many disputed
points; and the letters which passed between the two men, and which
now began with the formal "Monsieur," were full of bickerings about
money matters, about Balzac's delay in furnishing copy, and about the
length of his contributions. On one occasion Pichot is severe in his
rebukes, because Balzac has prevented the Duchesse d'Abrantes from
providing a promised article, by telling her that his own writing will
fill two whole numbers of the _Revue_. On another, it is curious to
find that Balzac, who was rather ashamed of the immoral reputation of
his works, thanks M. Pichot quite humbly for suppressing a passage in
the "Voyage de Paris a Java," which the director considered unfit for
family perusal, and excuses himself on the subject with the naive
explanation that he was at the same time writing the "Contes
Drolatiques"![*] Finally, in March, 1833, after six months of the
treaty had expired, Balzac withdrew altogether from the _Revue de
Paris_. He gave no explicit explanation for this step; but in 1836, at
the time of his lawsuit with the _Revue de Paris_, he stated as the
reason for his desertion that he considered Pichot to be the author,
under different pseudonyms, of the adverse criticism of his novels
which appeared in its pages. In the _Revue_ he had, among other
novels, brought out the beginning of "L'Histoire des Treize," and the
parsimonious shareholders now had the mortification of seeing the
great man carry his wares to _L'Europe Litteraire_; while the _Revue
de Paris_, in consequence of his desertion, declined in popularity.

[*] "Autour de Honore de Balzac," by the Vicomte de Spoelberch de
    Lovenjoul.

Balzac was now fairly launched on the road of literary fame, and some
of his writings at this time had a momentous influence on his life. In
April, 1830, Madame Hanska, his future wife, read with delight, in her
far-off chateau in Ukraine, the "Scenes de la Vie Privee," containing
the "Vendetta," "Les Dangers de l'Inconduite," "Le Bal de Sceaux, ou
Le Pair de France," "Gloire et Malheur," "La Femme Vertueuse" and "La
Paix de Menage"--two volumes which Balzac had published as quickly as
he could, to counteract the alienation of his women-readers by the
"Physiologie du Mariage." In August, 1831, appeared "La Peau de
Chagrin," which so disappointed Madame Hanska by its cynical tone,
that she was impelled to write the first letter from L'Etrangere,
which reached Balzac on February 28th, 1832, a date never to be
forgotten in the annals of his life. He was not, however, very exact
in remembering it himself, and in later life sometimes became confused
in his calculations between the number of years since he had received
this letter, and the time which had elapsed since he first had the joy
of meeting her. "La Peau de Chagrin" greatly increased Balzac's fame,
and in October, 1831, another anonymous correspondent, Madame la
Marquise de Castries, also destined to exercise a strong, though
perhaps transitory, influence over Balzac, had written to deprecate
its moral tone, as well as that of the "Physiologie du Mariage."
Balzac answered her that "La Peau de Chagrin" was only intended to be
part of a whole, and must not be judged alone; and the same idea is
enlarged upon in a letter to the Comte de Montalembert,[*] written in
August, 1831, which shows Balzac's extreme anxiety not to dissociate
his writings from the cause of religion. In it he explains, with much
insistence, that, in site of the apparent scepticism of "La Peau de
Chagrin," the idea of God is really the mainspring of the whole book,
and on these grounds he begs for a review in _L'Avenir_. The letter
also contains an announcement which is interesting as a proof that two
years before the date given by his sister, the idea of his great
systematic work was already formulated, and that in his imagination it
had assumed colossal proportions. He says: "'La Peau de Chagrin' is
the formula of human life, an abstraction made from individualities,
and, as M. Ballanche says, everything in it is myth and allegory. It
is therefore the point of departure for my work. Afterwards
individualities and particular existences, from the most humble to
those of the King and of the Priest, the highest expressions of our
society, will group themselves according to their rank. In these
pictures I shall follow the effect of Thought on Life. Then another
work, entitled 'History of the Succession of the Marquis of Carabas,'
will formulate the life of nations, the phases of their governments,
and will show decidedly that politics turn in one circle, and are
evidently stationary; and that repose can only be found in the strong
government of a hierarchy."

[*] Letters sent by the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul to the
    _Revue Bleue_, November 14th, 1903.

The "Peau de Chagrin," which is a powerful satire on the vice and
selfishness of the day, suffers in its allegorical, though not in its
humanly interesting side, by the vivid picture it gives of Balzac's
youth; as, in spite of the introduction of the influence of the magic
Ass Skin, the account of Raphael in the early part of the book, as the
frugal, determined genius with high intellectual aspirations, does not
harmonise with his weak, despicable character as it unfolds itself
subsequently. The critics exercised their minds greatly about the
identity of the heroines, the beautiful and heartless Fedora--in whom
apparently many ladies recognised their own portrait--and the humble
and exquisite Pauline, type of devoted and self-forgetting love.
Mademoiselle Pelissier, who possessed an income of twenty-five
thousand francs, and had a house in the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg, where
she held a salon much frequented by political personalities of the
day, was identified by popular gossip as the model of Fedora. It was
said by Parisian society that Balzac was anxious to marry her, but
that the lady, who afterwards became Madame Rossini, refused to listen
to his suit, though she confessed to a great admiration for his
fascinating black eyes.

The original of Pauline has never been discovered, but, possibly with
a few traits borrowed from Madame de Berny, she is what Balzac
describes in the last pages of "La Peau de Chagrin" as an "ideal, as a
visionary face in the fire, a face with unimaginable delicate
outlines, a floating apparition, which no chance will ever bring back
again."

Since the year 1830 Balzac had lodged in the Rue Cassini, a little,
unfrequented street near the Observatory, with a wall running along
one side, on which was written "L'Absolu, marchand de briques," a name
which Theophile Gautier fancies may have suggested to him the title of
his novel "La Recherche de l'Absolu." Borget, Balzac's great friend
and confidant, had rooms in the same house; and later on, when Borget
was on one of his frequent journeys, these rooms were occupied by
Jules Sandeau, after his parting with George Sand. In despair at her
desertion, he tried to commit suicide; and Balzac, touched with pity
at his forlorn condition, proposed that he should come to Borget's
rooms, and took complete and kindly charge of him--a generosity which
Sandeau, after having lived at Balzac's expense for two years, repaid
in 1836, by deserting his benefactor when he was in difficulties.

Balzac was now in the full swing of work. He writes to the Duchesse
d'Abrantes in 1831:[*] "Write, I cannot! The fatigue is too great. You
do not know that I owed in 1828, above what I possessed. I had only my
pen with which to earn my living, and to pay a hundred and twenty
thousand francs. In several months I shall have paid everything, and I
shall have arranged my poor little household; but for six months I
have all the troubles of poverty, I enjoy my last miseries. I have
begged from nobody, I have not held out my hand for a penny; I have
hidden my sorrows, and my wounds."

[*] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 131.

Poor Balzac! over and over again we hear the same story about the
beautiful time in the future, which he saw coming nearer and nearer,
but which always evaded his grasp at the last. Very often, when he
appears grasping and dictatorial in his business dealings, we may
trace his want of urbanity to some pressing pecuniary anxiety, which
he was too proud to reveal. No doubt these difficulties often sprang
from his extraordinary want of reflection and prudence, as his desire
to make a dashing appearance before the world led him frequently into
the most senseless extravagance. For instance, when he went out of
Paris in June, 1832, intending to travel for several months, he left
behind him two horses with nothing to do, but naturally requiring a
groom, food, and stabling; and it was not till the end of July that,
on his mother's recommendation, he sent orders that they were to be
sold. His money affairs are so complicated, and his own accounts of
them so conflicting, that it is impossible to understand them
thoroughly. Apparently, however, from 1827 to 1836 he could not
support himself and satisfy his creditors without drawing bills. These
he often could not meet, and had to renew; and the accumulated
interest on these obligations formed a floating debt, which was from
time to time increased by some new extravagance.

In his vain struggles to escape, he worked as surely no man has ever
worked before or since. In 1830 he brought out about seventy, and in
1831 about seventy-five publications, including novels, and articles
serious and satirical, on politics and general topics; and in twelve
years, from 1830 to 1842, he wrote seventy-nine novels alone, not
counting his shorter compositions. Werdet, who became his publisher in
1834, gives a curious account of his doings; and this may, with slight
modifications, be accepted as a picture of his usual mode of life when
in the full swing of composition.

He usually went to bed at eight o'clock, after a light dinner,
accompanied by a glass or two of Vouvray, his favourite wine; and he
was seated at his desk by two o'clock in the morning. He wrote from
that time till six, only occasionally refreshing himself with coffee
from a coffee-pot which was permanently in the fireplace. At six he
had his bath, in which he remained for an hour, and his servant
afterwards brought him more coffee. Werdet was then admitted to bring
proofs, take away the corrected ones, and wrest, if possible, fresh
manuscript from him. From nine he wrote till noon, when he breakfasted
on two boiled eggs and some bread, and from one till six the labour of
correction went on again. This unnatural life lasted for six weeks or
two months, during which time he refused to see even his most intimate
friends; and then he plunged again into the ordinary affairs of life,
or mysteriously and suddenly disappeared--to be next heard of in some
distant part of France, or perhaps in Corsica, Sardinia, or Italy. It
is not surprising that even in these early days, and in spite of
Balzac's exuberant vitality, there are frequent mentions of terrible
fatigue and lassitude, and that the services of his lifelong friend,
Dr. Nacquart, were often in requisition, though his warnings about the
dangers of overwork were generally unheeded.

Even with Balzac's extraordinary power of work, the number of his
writings is remarkable, when we consider the labour their composition
cost him. Sometimes, according to Theophile Gautier, he bestowed a
whole night's labour on one phrase, and wrote it over and over again a
hundred times, the exact words that he wanted only coming to him after
he had exhausted all the possible approximate forms. When he intended
to begin a novel, and had thought of and lived in a subject for some
time, he wrote a plan of his proposed work in several pages, and
dispatched this to the printer, who separated the different headings,
and sent them back, each on a large sheet of blank paper. Balzac read
these headings attentively, and applied to them his critical faculty.
Some he rejected altogether, others he corrected, but everywhere he
made additions. Lines were drawn from the beginning, the middle, and
the end of each sentence towards the margin of the paper; each line
leading to an interpolation, a development, an added epithet or an
adverb. At the end of several hours the sheet of paper looked like a
plan of fireworks, and later on the confusion was further complicated
by signs of all sorts crossing the lines, while scraps of paper
covered with amplifications were pinned or stuck with sealing-wax to
the margin. This sheet of hieroglyphics was sent to the
printing-office, and was the despair of the typographers; who, as
Balzac overheard, stipulated for only an hour each in turn at the
correction of his proofs. Next day the amplified placards came back,
and Balzac added further details, and laboured to fit the expression
exactly to the idea, and to attain perfection of outline and symmetry
of proportion. Sometimes one episode dwarfed the rest, or a secondary
figure usurped the central position on his canvas, and then he would
heroically efface the results of four or five nights' labour. Six,
seven, even ten times, were the proofs sent backwards and forwards,
before the great writer was satisfied.

In the _Figaro_ of December 15th, 1837, Edouard Ourliac gives a
burlesque account of the confusion caused in the printing-offices by
Balzac's peculiar methods of composition. This is an extract from the
article:


"Let us sing, drink and embrace, like the chorus of an _opera
comique_. Let us stretch our calves, and turn on our toes like
ballet-dancers. Let us at last rejoice: the _Figaro_, without getting
the credit of it, has overcome the elements and all sublunary
cataclysms.

"Hercules is only a rascal, the apples of Hesperides only turnips, the
siege of Troy but a revolt of the national guard. The _Figaro_ has
just conquered 'Cesar Birotteau'!

"Never have the angry gods, never have Juno, Neptune, M. de Rambuteau,
or the Prefect of Police, opposed to Jason, Theseus, or walkers in
Paris, more obstacles, monsters, ruins, dragons, demolitions, than
these two unfortunate octavos have fought against.

"We have them at last, and we know what they have cost. The public
will only have the trouble of reading them. That will be a pleasure.
As to M. de Balzac--twenty days' work, two handfuls of paper, one more
beautiful book: that counts for nothing.

"However it may be, it is a typographical exploit, a literary and
industrial _tour de force_ worthy to be remembered. Writer, editor,
and printer have deserved more or less from their country. Posterity
will talk of the compositors, and our descendants will regret that
they do not know the names of the apprentices. I already, like them,
regret it; otherwise I would mention them.

"The _Figaro_ had promised the book on December 15th, and M. de Balzac
began it on November 17th. M. de Balzac and the _Figaro_ both have the
strange habit of keeping their word. The printing-office was ready,
and stamping its foot like a restive charger.

"M. de Balzac sends two hundred pages pencilled in five nights of
fever. One knows his way. It was a sketch, a chaos, an apocalypse, a
Hindoo poem.

"The printing-office paled. The delay is short, the writing unheard
of. They transform the monster; they translate it as much as possible
into known signs. The cleverest still understand nothing. They take it
to the author.

"The author sends back the first proofs, glued on to enormous pages,
posters, screens. It is now that you may shiver and feel pity. The
appearance of these sheets is monstrous. From each sign, from each
printed word, go pen lines, which radiate and meander like a Congreve
rocket, and spread themselves out at the margin in a luminous rain of
phrases, epithets, and substantives, underlined, crossed, mixed,
erased, superposed: the effect is dazzling.

"Imagine four or five hundred arabesques of this sort, interlaced,
knotted, climbing and sliding from one margin to another, and from the
south to the north. Imagine twelve maps on the top of each other,
entangling towns, rivers, and mountains--a skein tangled by a cat, all
the hieroglyphics of the dynasty of Pharaoh, or the fireworks of
twenty festivities.

"At this sight the printing-office does not rejoice. The compositors
strike their breasts, the printing-presses groan, the foremen tear
their hair, their apprentices lose their heads. The most intelligent
attack the proofs, and recognise Persian, others Malagash, some the
symbolic characters of Vishnu. They work by chance and by the grace of
God.

"Next day M. de Balzac returns two pages of pure Chinese. The delay is
only fifteen days. A generous foreman offers to blow out his brains.

"Two new sheets arrive, written very legibly in Siamese. Two workmen
lose their sight and the small command of language they possessed.

"The proofs are thus sent backwards and forwards seven times.

"Several symptoms of excellent French begin to be recognised, even
some connection between the phrases is observed."


So the article proceeds; always in a tone of comic good-temper, but
pointing to a very real grievance and point of dispute; and helping
the reader to realise the long friction which went on, and finally
resulted in the unanimity with which publishers and editors turned
against Balzac after his famous lawsuit, and showed a vindictive hate
which at first sight is surprising. However, in this case the matter
ends happily, as the article closes with:


"It ['Cesar Birotteau'] is now merely a work in two volumes, an
immense picture, a whole poem, composed, written, and corrected
fifteen times in the same number of days--composed in twenty days by
M. de Balzac in spite of the printer's office, composed in twenty days
by the printer's office in spite of M. de Balzac.

"It is true that at the same time M. de Balzac was employing forty
printers at another printing-office. We do not examine here the value
of the book. It was made marvellously and marvellously quickly.
Whatever it is, it can only be a _chef d'oeuvre_!"



                             CHAPTER VII

                                 1832

  Crisis in Balzac's private life--"Contes Drolatiques"--Madame
  Hanska's life before she met Balzac--Description of her appearance
  --"Louis Lambert"--Disinterested conduct on the part of Madame de
  Berny--Relations between Balzac and his mother--Balzac and the
  Marquise de Castries--His despair.

The year 1832 was a crisis and a turning-point in the history of
Balzac's private life.

Old relations changed their aspect; he received a terrible and
mortifying wound to his heart and to his vanity; and while he
staggered under this blow, a new interest, not in the beginning
absorbing, but destined in 

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