Balzac

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No account of this macaroni feast figures in his almost daily letters
at this time despatched to Madame Hanska. To her, if he mentioned his
diet, its meagreness was emphasized rather. Being in one of his
chronic hard-up crises, he excused himself for the intervals that had
occurred between some of his previous epistles on the ground of having
no ready money for the postage--the rates for Russia, it is true, were
high; and he spoke of buying a bit of dry bread on the boulevards, or
of intending to beg from Rothschild; then flourished his big debt at
the end, quoting fantastic sums, variable as the barometer, which
would oblige him sooner or later, notwithstanding his constant
devotion to the Countess, whom he loved more than he loved God, to
barter himself away to some agreeable young woman who should be
willing to bestow her person upon him, plus a couple of hundred
thousand francs. Once or twice there was really a question of his
making a match through the good offices of his mother, of whom he none
the less said fretfully that she did not think much about him. But, on
each occasion, the negotiations fell through--why we do not learn.
Such information, maybe, he reserved for the various dames in Paris
whose houses he still frequented. Madame de Girardin had managed to
get him back; and some sort of relations had been re-established
between him and her husband, mostly business, since Monsieur de
Girardin continued to be editor of the /Presse/.

One day, Gozlan met him in the Champs Elysees, just as he had left
Delphine's /salon/. He looked chilly and anxious. The chill he
attributed to the unheated drawing-room that he had quitted; but it
was due mostly to his condition of mind, then much exercised by
something of prime importance to him, the finding of a name for a
story which he had written but could not christen, in spite of
protracted meditation. It was a man's name he wanted--a name unusual,
striking, suggestive of the extraordinary nature of the person he had
created. "Why not try the names you see in the street?" said Gozlan
incautiously. "The very thing," answered Balzac, whose face grew
radiant. "Come along with me. We will seek together." Realizing too
late into what an adventure he had allowed himself to be entangled,
Gozlan tried in vain to escape. Protests were of no use. Balzac
dragged him off; and, with noses in the air and absorbed gaze, the two
men promenaded along the Rue Saint-Honore and a number of other
streets, knocking up against the people they met and provoking a good
deal of profane language from these latter, who regarded them as a
couple of imbeciles. At length, Gozlan, like Columbus' sailors, having
more than enough of the tramp, refused to play follow-my-leader any
longer; and only after a long palaver was he dragged up one last
narrow street dubbed variously the Rue du Bouloi, du Coq Heron, and de
la Jussienne throughout its course. Here, suddenly, Balzac stopped
dead, and pointed to the word /Marcas/, inscribed over a door. "That's
what I've been looking for," he cried. "It exactly suits my man. The
person that owns the name ought to be some one out of the common,--an
artist, a worker in gold, or something of the kind." Inquiry proved
that the real Marcas was a modest tailor. However, his name was
selected, and the initial Z was tacked on to it for the book, Z being
by the novelist's interpretation a letter of mystic import.

Another rather longer tale than this, belonging to the year 1840, was
/Pierrette/, which the author dedicated to Madame Hanska's daughter
Anna, characterizing it as a pearl "sweated through suffering," and
telling her that there was nothing in it improper--he used the English
word. The story is a painful one, and is scarcely suitable for a young
girl's perusal, the heroine, a simple Breton maid, being the victim of
an avaricious Provins family, the Rogrons, who under cover of the law,
inflict on her such terrible ill-treatment that she ultimately dies
from it. /Pierrette/ first appeared as a serial in the /Siecle/. In
the final edition of the novelist's works it is classed under the
/Celibates/; and, apropos of this heading, may be mentioned the fact
that Balzac reproved celibacy as a state injurious to society, and
held the opinion, dear to the hearts of certain Parliamentarians of
to-day, that the unmarried should be taxed for the benefit of those
having large families.

Of course, the agricultural projects entertained for a moment after
the interdiction of /Vautrin/ soon faded from Balzac's mind, which was
still harping on the necessity of his conquering the suffrages of the
public in his character of dramatist. He now set himself to write a
play called /Mercadet/ or the /Faiseur/,[*] the latter word implying
by its meaning the tragi-comedy of a penniless financier--the
novelist's own experience was there to guide him--who invents a
thousand and one stratagems for keeping his creditors at bay, and for
creating the illusion of a wealth which he had not; who deceives
himself as well as others; who is neither entirely a rogue nor
entirely honest; but who, after all, reaches relative tranquillity and
competency more through accident than purpose. The piece was not
performed in its author's life-time; but friends were acquainted with
it already in 1840, when Gautier and the rest of the inner circle were
summoned to Les Jardies to hear the hermit read it, differing
considerably then from the arrangement that was ultimately played.
Balzac read it well, with all the inflections peculiar to each
character and suitable to every change of circumstance. He had in him,
says Gautier, the stuff of a great actor, possessing a full, sonorous,
metallic voice of rich, powerful timbre, and kept his audience under
the spell from the beginning to the end of the recitation. If Vedel
and Desmousseaux, the administrators of the Comedie Francais heard him
interpret his own pieces, they might be excused for having, as he
asserted they had, a high opinion of his dramatic talent.

[*] English, /Jobber/.

The greatest honour done to Les Jardies during the hermit's residence
there was a visit of Victor Hugo, who came to talk over the affairs of
the Men of Letters Society. During lunch, the conversation naturally
turned on literature, and the host waxed bitter against the stupidity
of kings that neglected letters, and against Louis-Philippe in
particular, who had recently put a stop to the evening gatherings--
chimney-gatherings they were called--held by the Duke of Orleans for
the purpose of honouring the arts. In the afternoon the guests were
shown round the domain, and expected to admire its beauties. Hugo was
extremely sober in his praises until they came to the famous walnut-
tree. Encouraged by the notice accorded to his favourite, the master
of Les Jardies repeated to Hugo what he had already affirmed to
Gozlan, to wit, that the tree was worth fifteen hundred francs to him
(to Gozlan he had said two thousand). "In walnuts, I suppose?"
retorted the chief guest quizzingly. "No," replied Balzac, chuckling,
"not in walnuts." And he proceeded to explain that, by an old custom,
the inhabitants of the neighbourhood had been accustomed to make the
shadow of the walnut-tree a "temple of all the gods," and that he had
only to exploit the offerings, in the same way as a guano island is
exploited to-day, for the fifteen hundred francs to be added to his
revenues.

A few months later, in December, Les Jardies, with its walnut-tree and
other advantages, was abandoned in hasty flight; and the hermit took
refuge in the Passy quarter of Paris. On the house and property a
distraint had been levied for moneys due which had not been paid. In
total, his desire to abide under his own vine and under his own fig-
tree had cost him a sum that he estimated between one hundred thousand
and one hundred and twenty thousand francs. Deduction made for his
Falstaffian speech, the amount was probably about eighty thousand.
This might have been gradually saved and the interest meantime given
regularly, if he had been willing to live well within his income. With
his system of spending not only what he earned but hoped to earn each
year, perpetual insolvency was inevitable.

At Les Jardies he had small creditors as well as great, fear of whom
haunted him to the extent of curtailing his walks abroad. Leon Gozlan
relates that, going over to Ville d'Avray early one morning, he found
Balzac taking a constitutional round the asphalt of his house. "Come
and have a stroll in the woods," said the visitor. "I am afraid,"
answered Balzac. "Of what or whom?" "Of the keeper." Not understanding
why the novelist, who would not explain, should be in dread of this
humble functionary, and imagining that much study and labour had made
his friend a little mad, Gozlan took no denial, and, button-holing
Balzac, lugged him off into the leafy avenues. And there, sure enough,
after a while, they saw the bugbear, who, as soon as he perceived the
two pedestrians, bore down on them with plodding but vigorous step.
The shorter of the two turned pale, but tried to put on an air of
dignified indifference. Soon the official ran in under their lee,
passed alongside with slackened pace, and clarioned into the
novelist's ear: "Monsieur de Balzac, this is beginning to get
musical." The owner of Les Jardies quailed in his shoes. He owed the
man thirty francs.

CHAPTER X

LETTERS TO "THE STRANGER," 1841, 1842

The abode that Balzac chose, on coming back to live within the city
walls, was not far from the Rue de Chaillot which had been his address
before he removed to Sevres. It was situated in what is now called the
Rue Raynouard, but then bore the name of the Rue Basse. In reality,
the street is low only at one end, to which it descends from some high
land that forms the Passy and Trocadero quarter, and, for some
distance, overhangs the Seine. The whole of the street is narrow and
winding, and still has an old-time provincial aspect, though the
modern building has begun to make its appearance in it, replacing the
ancient mansions surrounded by gardens with ever-encroaching blocks of
flats.

Balzac's new house was at Number 19 (at present Number 47). It stood--
and the house still stands--in a back garden, on a lower level than
the road, from which it was masked by houses fronting the causeway.
Any one approaching it from the side of the Rue Basse would enter the
common vestibule of one of these houses, go down some stone steps, and
would then find himself in a courtyard, opposite a fairly good-sized,
apparently one-storied cottage, with the tree adorned garden to the
right of him. Once inside the cottage, however, he would notice that
it was built on the extreme upper edge of a precipitous slope, and
that on the farther side the structure had lower stories, with an
issue through them into a lane at the rear leading to the Seine banks
and the lower portion of the Rue Basse. Whoever, therefore, inhabited
the cottage could quit it fore or aft, an advantage which must have
weighed with the incoming tenant, tracked as he was by creditors, and
hiding himself here under the name of Madame de Brugnol.

The insistence of these claimants on his purse was such that, acting
on the advice of his solicitor, Gavault, in the course of the year
1841, he executed a fictitious sale of Les Jardies for the sum of
seventeen thousand five hundred francs, his hope being to preserve his
hermitage for the days of wealth and ease to come. Meanwhile, he took
his mother to live with him. After giving him and her other son,
Henry, all she possessed, and the latter being now in the colonies,
where he ultimately died in poverty, she was dependent on what Honore
could pay her each month. The living-together arrangement was not very
successful. Madame Balzac's nervous, fretful temperament had not been
improved by age and trouble; and her elder son found it hard to bear
with her complainings, excusable and even justifiable though they
might be. It is not pleasant to read the passages in his letters to
Madame Hanska, in which he reiterates the old charge of his
misfortunes being all due to his mother. In some of them he goes so
far as to say that she was a monster and a monstrosity, that she was
hastening the death of his sister Laure--Laure outlived them both--
after hastening those of his sister Laurence and his grandmother, that
she hated him before he was born, that she had a dreadful countenance,
that the doctor affirmed her to be not mad but malicious, that his
father had stated in 1822 he--Honore--would never have a worse enemy
than his mother. Had his mother been all this and more, it would have
been ungenerous and unfilial to blacken her reputation to a stranger.
And, being false, it was odious. Madame Balzac's partiality towards
the second son--heavily enough punished--did not prevent her from
loving the elder, though their characters (hers and his) were not made
to comprehend each other; and her lack of enthusiasm in the days of
his literary apprenticeship was natural enough in a parent who
understood only too well the impractical, improvident mind he
possessed, and feared its consequences. The fact was that Balzac ill
supported remonstrances from his own family, and especially from his
mother, and, when irritated by them, forgot every benefit he had
received from her.

This peculiarity of temperament rendered his feelings toward many of
his friends exceedingly variable. One day he was lauding them to the
skies, another depreciating them to a cipher. Even his sister, Laure,
in spite of her loyalty to him, did not escape attacks from his fickle
humour. Like her mother, she never thoroughly penetrated the nature of
this wayward, excitable, compass-boxing brother of hers, whose gaze
was so much in the clouds and whose feet so often in the mire. But she
defended him to others; and, as far as her purse and her husband's
could possibly afford, she gave him money when he was hard up--and
when he was not!--money which he was never in a hurry to pay back. Yet
her, too, he maligned to "The Stranger," because she now and again
ventured on expostulations.

Madame Balzac made two stays in the Passy cottage, neither of them
very long. After leaving the first time, she asked her son to pay her
a somewhat larger sum per month, which would allow her to live
decently elsewhere. Considering that he had borrowed from her a couple
of thousand pounds--over fifty thousand francs--and that the sum he
had paid her irregularly was not five per cent interest on the money,
this request was not unreasonable. Yet he refused to accede to it on
the ground of being in financial straits; and offered her a home with
him once more, but in language that spoke of strained relations
between them, as well as of a personal discouragement that was real.

"The life I lead," he wrote, "suits no one; it wearies relatives and
friends alike. All leave my melancholy home. . . . It is impossible
for me to work amidst the petty tiffs aroused by surroundings of
discord; and my activity has waned during the past year. . . . You
were in a tolerable situation. I had a trustworthy person who spared
you all household worries. You were not obliged to trouble about
domestic matters; you were in peace and silence. You insisted on
interfering with me when you should have forgotten I existed, and
should have let me have my entire liberty, without which I can do
nothing. This is not your fault; it is in the nature of women. To-day,
everything is changed. If you like to come back, you will have a
little of the weight that will fall on me and that hitherto affected
you only because you wished it."

The conclusion of the letter, in which he assured her of his love,
could not counterbalance the harshness of its contents. Madame Balzac,
be it granted, was cantankerous; but how many sons who have never
sponged on their mothers have supported them cheerfully, gladly, for
long years out of meagre resources, and have borne with a smile the
natural peevishness of old age, not to say its egoisms!

At this period, Balzac's acquaintance with the grand dames of Paris
was considerably diminished. Madame de Castries he seems to have
broken with altogether. Madame Visconti, who lived a good deal at
Versailles, he saw but seldom. In lieu of these, he regularly visited
George Sand, who was at present settled in a small flat of the Rue
Pigalle in Paris, and was there enjoying the society of Chopin. With a
connoisseur's envy, the novelist describes to Eve the interior, the
elegantly furnished dining-room in carved oak, the /café-au-lait/
upholstered drawing-room, with its superb Chinese vases of fragrant
flowers, its cabinet of curiosities, its Delacroix pictures, its
rosewood piano, and the portrait of the authoress by Calamatta. What
struck him as much as anything was the bedroom in brown, with the bed
on the floor in Turkish fashion. He was careful to assure his
correspondent that, Chopin being the /maitre de ceans/, she had no
need to be jealous. But jealous she was, though not of George Sand. As
Paris was a resort for rich Russians, Madame Hanska's cousins among
the number, she had frequent reports of Balzac's doings, distorted by
society gossip, the true and the untrue being fantastically mixed; and
it was no small task to disabuse her mind and persuade her that his
conduct was blameless. Indeed, at bottom she remained sceptical.

In 1841, three books were published which merit attention on the part
of a student of his works. The first, /A Shady Affair/, has the right
to be styled an historical novel. Dealing with the Napoleonic epoch,
its interest gathers chiefly round the person of the brave peasant
Michu, whose devotion to the Legitimist house of Cinq-Cygne brings
him, an innocent victim, to the scaffold. The character of Laurence de
Cinq-Cygne, a girl of the Flora MacDonald type, and the characters
also of the two cousins de Simeuse, who both loved her and conspired
with her, and whose pardon she gained only to lose these faithful
knights dying on a field of battle, are drawn with great power and
naturalness. And the plot, in which, together with other police spies,
the same Corentin reappears that was the evil genius of the /Chouans/,
is more rapid and less cumbered than in the earlier work. When the
/Shady Affair/ came out in the /Commerce/ journal, Balzac was accused
of having identified a certain Monsieur Clement de Ris with his Malin
de Gondreville, who plays an evil role in the story--that of an
unscrupulous, political turncoat, Revolutionary to begin with, Senator
under the Empire, and Peer under the Restoration. The novelist
defended himself against the imputation; but the resemblances between
the fictitious and the real personage were, all the same, too close to
be quite accidental.

Something, however, more important than the question of likeness or
portraiture in the book, is that it gives us Balzac's conception of
what the historical novel should be. His contemporary Dumas, and his
predecessor Walter Scott--the latter in a less degree than Dumas--did
not weave a romance on to a warp of history, but romanced the history
itself. What he tried to do was to keep the historical action exact
and accurate, and to throw its romantic elements into relief without
dislocating them. His opinion was that history might so be written as
to be a sort of novel, which, perhaps, will account for his answer to
Lamartine, who, in 1847, asked him if he could explain how it was that
the /History of the Girondins/ had obtained a greater success than the
most popular novels of the same date. "Gad!" he replied, "the reason
is that you wrote this fine book as a novelist, not as an historian."
The /Shady Affair/ recreates for us the Napoleonic atmosphere, silent
and heavy, yet electrically charged with grudge, hatred, and ambition,
all ready to burst out at one or another point. Underhand plotting was
the order of the day; there was a language of the eye rather than of
the tongue, since no one was sure that in his own family there might
not be eavesdroppers listening to betray him.

/Ursule Mirouet/ is a very different kind of story. We have here the
old Doctor Minoret, who after making a fortune in Paris, returns to
spend the last few years of his life in Nemours, his native town.
Having lost wife and child by death, he brings back with him a baby
niece, who is an orphan, and to whom he devotes himself with tender
care. In Nemours there are other less estimable branches of the
Minoret stock, cousins of the Doctor's, whose hopes of inheriting his
fortune are damped by the presence of little Ursule. Chief of these
relatives is the burly postmaster, Minoret Levrault, whose son Desire
is destined to the law and is sent by his parents to study in Paris.
Although a disciple of Voltaire, and scouting all religious practice
for himself, the Doctor is friendly with the Cure, and allows his
niece to be brought up to Church. At the time the story opens an
unexpected event astonishes the town. The Doctor has become converted,
and goes to Mass. The cause of the change is a wonderful experience of
clairvoyance he meets with in the capital, whither he has been
summoned by a colleague with whom he had quarrelled years before over
the new-fangled doctrines of Mesmerism. What necessary connection
there is between clairvoyance and Catholicism, or indeed any
particular form of religion, the novelist does not attempt to prove.
It suffices for the sceptical old Doctor to be told by a hypnotized
woman in Paris what Ursule is doing at Nemours, and the conversion is
wrought. Soon after, Doctor Minoret dies, bequeathing his fortune in
just and appropriated shares to his various relatives, Ursule
included. She is at the time a fine young woman, beloved by a young
gentleman of the place. The rest of the novel tells how the big
postmaster contrives to destroy the part of the will favourable to
Ursule and to steal certain moneys that belong to her; how Minoret's
ghost appears in dreams and signs to confound the guilty man and his
guilty wife, who are at last induced to confess their ill deeds, the
repentance being hastened by the death of their son Desire; and, in
fine, how Ursule marries Monsieur de Portenduere and is happy.

In its general construction, the book holds well together, and the
characters in the main are depicted without exaggeration, while the
traits of individuality are ingeniously marked. The Doctor and Ursule
are less firmly and informingly delineated. As usual, when Balzac
shows us the figure of a virtuous girl in an ordinary domestic circle,
he represents her with passive rather than active qualities. She has
no strong likes or dislikes, no particular mental bias, and possesses
but small attractiveness. In fact, the novelist seems at a loss to
imagine. In the case of Ursule, we see that she cultivates flowers,
but we do not feel that she is fond of them. As for the Doctor, he
would have or might have been less a puppet, had the author himself
judged with wiser reserve the mysterious forces that exist in the
world of sub-consciousness.

His belief in these forces being alloyed with much superstition, he
was always consulting fortune-tellers, even those that divined by
cards. One of them, a certain Balthazar, who was subsequently
convicted and imprisoned for dishonesty, told him that his past life
had been one series of struggles and victories, a reading too
agreeable to be doubted; and that he would soon have tranquillity, a
prophecy which unhappily was not fulfilled. Concerning the prospects
of a union with Madame Hanska, the cartomancer was mute, though he
described the lady in language sufficiently clever for his client to
acknowledge the likeness. His clairvoyance was exceedingly limited;
otherwise he would have warned his client of the approaching death of
Count Hanski, this event taking place towards the close of the year.

Occupied with her own affairs, which were complicated by her husband's
illness, and perhaps also resenting the falling off in the number of
her distant worshipper's epistles, caused by an indisposition in the
spring and a visit to Brittany to recuperate, she wrote only once or
twice during 1841; and, as chance would have it, these letters were
lost, so that, for nearly twelve months, he had no news from her.
Pathetically he announced that his sister was planning to marry him to
a Mademoiselle Bonnard, god-daughter to King Louis-Philippe; but still
no answer came. On the 1st of November, as he related to his Eve
afterwards, he lost one of the two shirt-studs which Madame de Berny
had given him, and which he wore alternately with another pair
presented to him by Madame Hanska. Beginning on the morrow, he put on
thenceforth only the pair that Eve had given him; and this trifling
occurrence affected him so much that all his familiars noticed it. He
looked upon the loss as a sign from Heaven. Poor Madame de Berny! Now
that the stud from her had disappeared, he had no further tenderness
for her memory. Instead of recalling her kindness to him, he preferred
to speak, in connection with what he styled his horrible youth, of the
years which she--the /Dilecta/--had tarnished. Too opportune to be
sincere, this condemnation of his first liaison cannot but be regarded
as an incense of flattery offered to the coy goddess of his later
vows.

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