Balzac

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Had the novelist stayed long enough in this rural retreat, he would
have beautified the interior in accordance with his fanciful tastes.
Friends who were invited out there were astonished to see scrawled in
chalk on the walls:

"Here, a covering of Paros marble; here, a ceiling painted by Eugene
Delacroix; here, a mosaic flooring formed of rare wood from the isles;
here, a chimney-piece in cipolin marble."

Jokingly, Leon Gozlan one day himself inscribed on a convenient space:

"Here, a picture by Raphael, of priceless value, such as was never yet
seen."

Of course, in the early days of his rusticating, he was enthusiastic
about his Italian-looking brick cottage, with its covered platform or
gallery running round the first floor and supported on slender
pillars, Its value, he was sure, would double when he had created the
garden of Eden round about it, planted with poplars, birches, vines,
evergreens, magnolias and sweet peas. His humour-barometer went up to
"set fair." For the moment, no pessimism clouded his sky. Here he
would abide, here he would work or muse until the long-expected and at
last approaching fortune should deign to enter beneath his roof; and
then--well then, he believed he should have had enough of ambition's
spoils, and should be content under the shadow of his vine, and watch
from afar--just twenty minutes or half-an-hour at most--the march of
events without seeking to mingle in them.

The original cost of the homestead was about forty thousand francs.
Other expenses were incurred before the whole of the building and
installation was completed, which made the total cost very
considerably larger; and, as hardly any of the amount had been paid
cash down, Balzac's liabilities, which were heavy enough without this
extra charge, very soon introduced a disturbing element into his
Arcadian existence. Within the twelvemonth, a distraint was levied
upon him for non-payment of moneys that were owing. Lemer, one of his
biographers, narrates that, paying a visit to Les Jardies at this
date, for the purpose of soliciting the novelist's collaboration in an
international album, he not only received a promise of help but an
invitation for himself and a companion to remain and dine off a leg of
mutton. As the two visitors declined, Balzac said: "Ah! you think,
perhaps, I am an ordinary host who invites his guests gratis. On the
contrary, I intend to make you pay for your meal. Aha! You shall aid
me afterwards to flit. To-morrow, the bailiffs are coming to seize my
furniture; and I don't mean them to find anything to carry away. So,
to-night, I am going to put everything in my gardener's cottage. The
gardener will transport all the bigger articles of furniture; but, for
the books, manuscripts, and valuables, I shall be glad to have the
co-operation of men of letters like you."

And the owner of Les Jardies was inconsolable when his visitors again
expressed their inability to comply with his request.

Himself a guest once more of the Carrauds at Frapesle in February
1838, he took advantage of his proximity to Nohant to go and see
George Sand; and spent two or three days with her. On his arrival, he
surprised her clad in her dressing-gown, and smoking a cigar after
dinner, beside the fire, in a huge, solitary room. Beneath the gown,
she had on some red trousers, which allowed her smart stockings and
yellow slippers to be seen. Since he used to meet her in the house of
the Rue Cassini, she had grown stout, and now had a double chin; but
her hair was still unbleached, and her bistre complexion preserved its
tinge as of old. Working hard, she went to bed at six in the morning,
and got up at noon. During the time he was at Nohant, Balzac adopted
her habits. They talked from five in the evening all through the night
and till five o'clock in the morning; and he learnt to know her more
truly in these hours of familiar converse than in the four years of
her liaison with Jules Sandeau. He summed her up as a tomboy, an
artist, a mind great, generous, devoted and chaste (this last term
would need explanation); her characteristic traits were those of a
man, not a woman. She had, so he opined, neither force of conception,
nor gift of constructing plots, nor faculty of reaching the true, nor
the art of the pathetic. The French language she used she did not
thoroughly know, but she had style. Of her glory she made little
account, and despised the public. Her fate was to be duped--and duped
she had been by Bocage, by de Lamennais, by Liszt, by Madame d'Agoult.
Together they discussed the future revolution in manners and morals,
and the influence their books might have in bringing it about. She
suggested to him some subjects that he might develop, and taught him--
up to then opposed to the weed--how to smoke latakia tobacco in a
hookah pipe. Imagining the hookah to be something Russian, he asked
Madame Hanska, to whom he related all this, to purchase him one,
telling her that he would have his wonderful stick-knob, with its
jewels, adapted to it, since he no longer bore the stick about with
him as a fetish.

From Frapesle he returned with the plan matured which he had been
preparing since his excursion to Italy. When at Genoa, in the previous
year, a merchant had talked to him of the existence of huge hills of
refuse metal left in the island of Sardinia by the Romans, who had
worked silver mines there. Aware how defective the Roman methods of
extraction were, Balzac thought there might be profit in treating this
slag by some process that would cause it to yield whatever precious
metal it contained; and he requested the merchant to procure him some
specimens of the slag, and to forward them to Paris for examination,
promising, if the tests were satisfactory, to include the Genoese in
the company which he was sure of being able to float for the
exploitation of the concern. Although the merchant did not forward the
specimens, Balzac consulted some specialists in Paris, Monsieur
Carraud amongst others, who all concurred in pronouncing the
enterprise feasible. Finally, the novelist decided to proceed to the
spot and investigate the matter personally. If success awaited him, he
would gain enough to pay off all his debts; and these he estimated to
be about two hundred thousand francs--a Falstaffian exaggeration, of
course, but the real figures were large. At present, he had no ready
money at all; and had to borrow from his mother, a cousin, and other
friends, in order to get his travelling expenses.

Experience proved that he was correct in his theory. The slag yielded
ten per cent of lead by a first treatment, and the lead ten per cent
of pure silver. Unfortunately, the Genoese merchant had availed
himself of Balzac's hint, and had sold the scheme to a Marseilles
firm, who were already applying for the monopoly to the rulers of the
island, when, in the spring if 1838,[*] he started on his journey
thither; and, before he could do anything, they had obtained the
concession. Once more, he had imprudently thrown out an idea, and lost
his claim on it.

[*] Madame Surville wrongly places the date of the journey in 1833.

On his way south he saw much that was new and novel to him. Passing
through Corsica, he went over the house where the Emperor Napoleon was
born; and, according to his habit of seeking information, he ferreted
out several things that contradicted received history. The /Petit
Caporal's/ father he discovered to have been a fairly rich landowner,
not a sheriff's officer, as tradition said. Moreover, when the Emperor
arrived at Ajaccio from Egypt, instead of being acclaimed and having a
triumphal reception from his countrymen, he was outlawed, a price put
upon his head, and he escaped only through the devotion of a peasant
who hid him in the mountains.

Corsica he considered one of the finest places in the world, with
mountains like those of Switzerland, and needing only the latter
country's lakes. Completely undeveloped, and practically unexplored,
it was inhabited by people that cultivated the /dolce far niente/ to
the utmost. Its population of eight thousand vegetated rather than
lived, ignorant of everything beyond the simplest necessities of
existence. The women disliked strangers, and the men did nothing but
walk about all day, clad in their threadbare velvet coats, smoking to
beguile the hours.

His account of Sardinia is equally curious. It was a wilderness, he
says, with savannas of palm-trees, inhabited by savages. On horseback,
he traversed a virgin forest, obliged to bend over his horse's neck to
avoid the huge branches of holm-oaks and cork-trees, and laurels and
heather that were thirty feet high. In one canton he found people
naked, except for a waist-cloth, and living on coarse bread made from
acorns mixed with clay. Their mud hovels had no chimney, the fire
being lighted on the ground in the middle. There was no agriculture in
the island, and the only work done by the men was tending their flocks
of goats and other animals.

A tour through Genoa, Florence, and Milan made up the rest of this
interesting trip, which lasted from March till June. Disappointed in
the object for which he left home, it furnished him with leisure to
gather fresh subjects for his pen, and even to begin one--the /Diaries
of Two Young Wives/. What he wished to describe in this book was
stated in the following remarks to Madame Hanska: "I have never seen a
novel in which happy love, satisfied love, is depicted. Rousseau puts
too much rhetoric in his attempt, and Richardson too much preaching.
The poets have too many flourishes; the novelists are too much the
slaves of facts. Petrarch is too exclusively occupied with his images
of speech and his /concetti/; he sees the poetry more than the woman.
Pope has given perhaps too many regrets to Heloise; he wanted her to
be better than nature; and the better is an enemy to the good. In
fine, God, who created love with humanity, has alone understood it;
for none of his creatures has described, so as to please me, the
elegies, fantasies, and poems of this divine passion of which each
speaks and which so few have really known."

Did Balzac himself ever know it? By his own confession, never in his
youth. In the years of his adolescence there is no sign of such a
feeling having agitated his breast, where ambition reigned to the
exclusion of everything else. If, then, he thought of marriage, its
prosaic, advantageous side only appears to have entered into count;
and the liaison, which stood him in lieu of it, stirred, beyond sense,
nothing but sentiments of common gratitude. In riper age, his
attachment to Madame Hanska was a bizarre medley of flattered vanity,
artistic appreciation of beauty, and cold calculation. His epistles
reek with each and all of these; and his eternal complaints of
financial embarrassment not infrequently read like the expressions of
a pauper's whining.

That they ultimately wearied out the recipient of them is evident from
the remonstrances he drew upon himself. Eve blamed his lightness of
character, the facility with which he let himself be tempted, his
tendency to waste in travelling the funds he would have done more
wisely to employ in reducing his obligations or avoiding them. At such
moments he defended himself sharply, his tone savouring less of the
boudoir than the forum. Any and every excuse was pressed into service;
everything and everybody were responsible but himself. Even his mother
he accused of causing his indebtedness--his mother who had ruined
herself for him, and from whose remaining pittance he took in this
self-same year the wherewithal to go to Sardinia, although earning
many thousands of francs annually. The truth is that Balzac exploited
all the women that loved him, himself incapable of loving any one of
them with that entire devotion which, if roused, is unique in a man's
life; and, as he was ignorant of it, so he has never described it
adequately, faithfully. In one or two instances, he obtains a glimpse
of it--as Moses obtained a vision of the promised land--from afar;
when he tries to get nearer, he presents us with mere sensualism.

What Madame Hanska probably enjoyed most in his letters were the
/obiter dicta/ which he was never tired of pronouncing on his
contemporaries. Scribe, whose /Camaraderie/ he had been to see, he
summed up as a man who was conversant in his trade but had no
veritable art, who possessed talent but not the higher dramatic
genius, and who, moreover, was altogether lacking in style. Victor
Hugo's /Ruy Blas/ was to him an infamy in verse, and the rest of this
author's pieces miserable melodramas. Theophile Gautier's poetry was
decadent, his style sparkling with great wit; yet the man was wanting
in force of ideas. When, however, he added that Gautier would do
nothing that would last because he was engaged in journalism, he spoke
with all his hatred of a profession that refused him the honour he
deemed his due. Eugene Sue, also, he looked upon with jaundiced eyes,
as being a rival whose material success amazed him--a rival, indeed,
whom no less a critic than Sainte-Beuve erroneously declared to be his
equal. Sue, he informed Madame Hanska, was a man of narrow bourgeois
mind, perceiving merely certain insignificant details of the vulgar
evils of French contemporary society. To Balzac, besides, it was
blasphemy in Sue that he spoke slightingly of the century which to
this Legitimist was the grandest epoch in French history, slightingly
of Louis XIV., who, in the said Legitimist's opinion, was France's
premier king.

The latter half of 1838 was spent at Les Jardies, where the novelist
was busy either with his pen or in improving the interior and exterior
of the property. A scheme for cultivating a pine-apple orchard in his
grounds kept him from fretting over the sorry termination of his
Sardinian dream. He intended to set five thousand plants, and sell the
fruit at five francs a piece, instead of twenty which was the ordinary
price. After deducting the expenses of the undertaking, he reckoned he
could gain twenty thousand francs a year out of his pine-apples. If
they had been willing to grow in the open air, he would undoubtedly
have gone from theory into practice. But, as this difficulty presented
itself in the initial stage, he threw up incontinently his market-
gardening; and, since he was in urgent want of cash, he bethought
himself that, lying by him, he had a collection of Napoleon's sayings,
which he had been making for the past seven years, cutting them out of
books that dealt with the Emperor's life. The number was just then
five hundred. For a sum of five thousand francs he disposed of the
fruits of his industry to a retired hosier named Gandy, who published
them subsequently under the title /Maxims and Thoughts of Napoleon/,
the preface being also supplied by the novelist.

Besides /Gambara/, a second study of the musical art, containing a
lyrically expressed analysis of /Robert le Diable/, Balzac produced in
1837 and 1838 two longer works, the /Employees/ or the /Superior
Woman/ and the /Firm of Nucingen/. The former, with its criticism of
the bureaucratic system, depicted a state of things which has survived
several changes of /regime/ in France, in spite of much in it that
contradicts common sense. Rabourdin, the head clerk in a government
department, seeks to simplify the useless machinery that clogs rather
than advances the administration of the country. Having a practical
mind, he believes that a hundred functionaries at twelve thousand
francs a year would do the same work better than a thousand employees
at twelve hundred francs, and cost no more. As in other of the
novelist's books that preached reform, there are parts in this one
where the main thread of the story disappears like a river in a
canyon; and readers of the /Presse/, in which it came out as a serial,
railed at the author, called his contribution stupid, and threatened
to cease subscribing if it were not withdrawn. Yet, perused in volume
form, it reveals comedy in abundance. The portraits are limned with
master hand; and Celestine Rabourdin, the wife of the head clerk, has,
together with her grace and taste, the gift of amusing by the skill
with which she bamboozles the dissolute des Lupeaulx.

The /Firm of Nucingen/ is a scathing satire of the world of stock-
jobbing, where the money of the small investor is robbed with impunity
under cover of legality. Balzac's Jewish banker, who thrives on
others' ruin is a type that exists to-day, as then, without any
adequate effort made by law to suppress him. Less happy in indicating
a remedy than in branding an evil, the novelist naively held that
France had only to adopt his doctrine of absolute rule for the
suppression to become a fact. An unprejudiced reading of history
should have informed him that /regimes/ have always so far existed for
the benefit of their creators, and that, although constitutional
monarchies and republics have not yet found out a system capable of
defending the interests of all individual citizens, and perhaps never
will, absolute monarchy has shown to satiety its inability to defend
the interests of more than a few.

In perusing such a book as the foregoing, one is led to ask why it was
so inoperative on the life of the country. One reason perhaps is that
Balzac wrote from his head rather than from his heart. Whatever may
be, in other respects, the superiority of the Realistic over the
Romantic school of fiction, it is inferior in this, viz., that its
emotiveness tends to the negation, not to the affirmation, of action.
One cannot but recollect to the novelist's disadvantage, as applying
to this reference, the following statement he made to Madame Hanska
for another purpose: "I have never in my life confused the thoughts of
my heart with those of my head, and, excepting a few lines written
only for you to read (for instance, Madame de Chaulieu's jealous
letter), I have never expressed in my books anything of my heart. It
would have been the most infamous sacrilege." Unconsciously insincere,
like the majority of people in their justificative confessions, Balzac
often allowed his heart to intrude where it had no business to be
present. Nevertheless in his realist pictures he exercised himself
with all the cold delight of the anatomist, and with none of the warm
emotion that might have become communicative. This Brunetiere
implicitly admits when he says that most of Balzac's novels are, so to
speak, inquiries,--collections of documents.

The year 1838 closed questioningly for the hermit at Les Jardies. The
yoke of his treaty with the publishing syndicate was hardly twelve
moons old; and, however, it galled his neck to the extent of his
cogitating how he might pay off the earnest money he had received, and
be his own man again. And how was he to do it unless by increasing his
earnings? All his actual revenue was swallowed up by his debts and
habits of living. Ah! if only he could become a successful dramatic
author! Alone, he did not for the moment feel equal to trying. But
there was the possibility of collaboration. His late secretary, the
Marquis de Belloy, had recently seemed disposed to come and help him
again. But de Belloy desired some acknowledgment in coin; and Balzac,
on the contrary, judged that the honour of collaborating with a
novelist of his celebrity ought to be sufficient wage.

"My dear de Belloy," (he wrote back)--"Not a halfpenny; much work,
your six hours a day, in three shifts, that's what awaits you at
Sevres, if you are in the mind to come and realize things which are
not vague plans but definite arrangements, and the relative result of
which will depend on the brilliant wit that you have had the fatal
imprudence to cast to the winds. I am at the grindstone, and forswear
any one that will not tackle it. I have put my neck in the big collar
because the other one was irksome. Your devoted
Mar / tyr
" / ine
" / ried man
" / about"

he concluded, punning on his nickname. Like his fellow mortals, he was
often most merry when he was most sad.

CHAPTER IX

LETTERS TO "THE STRANGER," 1839, 1840

Sometimes, notwithstanding his affected indifference, Balzac was
provoked by the pleasantries, the fleerings and floutings of satirists
and caricaturists, who, finding so many weak points in his armour--so
much that was ridiculous in his exaggerations, might be excused for
choosing him as a quarry for their wit, if not for the wit's
grossness. In 1839, the /Gazette des Ecoles/ inserted in one of its
numbers a lithograph exhibiting the novelist in the debtors' prison at
Clichy, clad in his monk's gown, and sitting at a table on which there
were bottles of wine and a champagne glass. In his left hand he
grasped a pipe that he was smoking, and his right arm was round a
young woman's waist. Beneath the lithograph was the inscription: "The
Reverend Father Dom Seraphitus, Mysticus Goriot, of the Regular Order
of Clichy Friars, taken in by all those he has himself taken in,
receives amidst his forced solitude the consolations of Sancta
Seraphita (/Scenes of the Hidden Life/, sequel to those of /Private
Life/).

The last sentence being open to the interpretation that the subject of
the caricature was a dishonest man, a complaint was lodged with the
Procureur-General against the proprietor of the paper, and was
supported by the newly-constituted Men of Letters Society.

This Society, of which Balzac may be considered almost the founder,
came into existence during his journey to Italy in the preceding year.
On his return, he at once became a member; and, for a while, took a
prominent part in all its deliberations, being elected on the
committee, as also Victor Hugo, with whom thenceforward his relations
were, at least outwardly, most cordial. In the first lawsuit engaged
by the Society against the /Memorial de Rouen/ for the purpose of
defending the principle of literary property, he pleaded with all the
force of his talent, and composed a /Literary Code/ and some /Notes on
Literary Ownership/ containing not a few excellent suggestions. His,
too, was the initiative for the drawing up of a petition to the King,
with a view to the establishment of literary prizes to be bestowed on
well-deserving authors every ten years. The King, or rather his
advisers, rewarded this zeal but ill. At one of the committee meetings
Balzac was prevented from attending by a three days' confinement in a
dirty lock-up at Sevres, the cause being the old one which had partly
driven him from Paris--his unwillingness to go, as he humorously put
it, into the vineyards of his village, and, dressed in uniform, to see
that truants from Paris were not eating the grapes.

His rural retreat, indeed, was scarcely the safe asylum he had fondly
hoped it would be. Allusion has already been made to one defect--that
of the walls which, unlike those of Jericho, did not wait for the
trumpeters' blast before they fell down. They had an incurable
preference for tumbling down of themselves. Constructed on a subsoil
of sandy nature, their foundations yielded at every spell of rain. In
vain, architect after architect was applied to, and one mode or
another was recommended of relaying and buttressing. At the next
downpour, the servant would disturb his master with the news: "The
walls have toppled over again, sir, into the neighbours' gardens." And
the neighbours' gardens were planted with all kinds of edible
vegetables, which were crushed and pounded out of shape and
succulence, so that the owner of Les Jardies had claims for damage
continually sent in, until, in sheer despair, pledging his credit more
deeply, he purchased the land beyond, content, at length, that his
walls should be able to carry on their freaks in his own demesne,
without let or hindrance or objection from any one. It is said that
the land on which Les Jardies stood was so much on the incline that
Frederick Lemaitre, who once ventured over there, was compelled to
take a couple of stones and place them at each step under his feet in
order to approach the house. This was, no doubt, one of the actor's
jokes. It is probable that, in selecting the site, Balzac had in his
thought the facility the place would afford for reconnoitering when
any one came to his doors. The domestics were directed to keep a sharp
look-out; and, as soon as a figure was seen approaching that appeared
to be a creditor or of the State functionary tribe, the blinds of the
abode were lowered, the dog Turk was dungeoned, and every trace of
there being inhabitants vanished. After ringing uselessly, the
unwelcome visitor generally retreated under the impression that the
place was deserted. Then, when the last echo of his steps had died
away in the distance, the blinds were drawn up again, Turk, barking
with joy, was released from his captivity, and, like the castle of the
Sleeping Beauty, Les Jardies re-awoke to its normal activity. How ever
the tiers of planted beds perched one above the other--a modern
example of the hanging gardens of Babylon--were made to resist the
solicitations of the walls was a puzzle to Balzac's familiars. As for
trees, only one, a walnut, managed, by dint of perpetual acrobatism,
to conserve a stable equilibrium.

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