Balzac

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Horace Vernet, he asserted, would never be a great painter. He was a
colourist; he knew how to design and compose, had technical skill,
and, now and again, found sentiment, but did not understand how to
combine these talents in his pictures. He was clever, but had no
genius. His /alter ego/ was Delaroche, to whom he gave his daughter in
marriage. Of the other painters, Boulanger, Delacroix, Ingres,
Decamps, Jules Dupre were his favourites--true artists, he deemed
them. At the /Salon/ he saw hardly anything to please him besides a
canvas by Meissonier and Cogniet's /Tintoretto painting his Dead
Daughter/. He would have liked to see Boulanger's /Death of
Messalina/, but the /Salon/ Committee had refused it.

In music his preferences were as eclectic as in pictures. Liszt, whom
he thought ridiculous as a man, he considered superb as a musician--
the Paganini of the piano, yet inferior to Chopin, since he had not
the genius of composition. And, in singing, Rubini was his idol--
Rubini who triumphed in the role of Othello, giving the suspicion
/air/ in a manner no one could equal. It intoxicated him to hear this
tenor with Tamburini, Lablache, and Madame Grisi; while Nourrit's
song, /Ce Rameau qui donne la Puissance et l'Immortalite/ in /Robert
le Diable/ made his flesh creep. It yielded a glimpse of life with all
its dreams satisfied.

Originally intending to start for St. Petersburg early in June, Balzac
was not able to leave Paris until a month later. As usual, filthy
lucre had to do with his tarrying. In spite of a loan of 11,500 francs
from lawyer Gavault--his guardian, the novelist called him--who for
the privilege of the great man's friendship had been endeavouring
during the two years past to introduce a little order into his
affairs, he had not available cash enough for a trip so far, and
stayed on, hoping to finish his /David Sechard/,* which was running as
a serial in the /Etat/, and his /Esther/,[*] appearing similarly in
the /Parisien/. June he spent at Lagny, where his manuscripts were
being printed, in order to correct the proofs and get his money. But
the /Etat/ ceased issue while he was there; and the /Parisien/, being
in parlous condition, refused likewise to pay up, so that he had to go
off with a thinner-lined pocket than he had expected. Otherwise, he
was in a fitting state of grace to meet his fair tyrant, whose
envelope lectures had brought him into fear of her and at least
outward obedience.

[*] Part of the /Lost Illusions/.

The torrents of coffee by the aid of which he had forced his last pen-
work through, had been reduced to minimum doses; the occasional
mustard foot-baths that cured his cerebral inflammations were replaced
by entire ablutions every other day; he liked hot baths well enough;
but, in the spells of composition, they were often indefinitely
adjourned, so that this season of purification had its /raison
d'etre/. And now, with his gaze turned to the east, he wondered how
long he was going to remain there. His reply to a person who asked him
to pledge himself for some novels on his return reads much as though
he were counting on an offer to fix his residence in the empire of the
czars. "I don't know whether I shall come back," he said. "France
bores me. I am infatuated with Russia. I am in love with absolute
power. I am going to see if it is as fine as I believe it to be. De
Maistre stayed a long time at St. Petersburg. Perhaps I shall stay
also." This he naturally repeated to Madame Hanska. Not that it was
new to her. A similar hint had been given in January, when he capped
his declaration, "I abhor the English; I execrate the Austrians; the
Italians are nothing," with "I would sooner be a Russian than any
other subject." The comic side of this fury is that Madame Hanska was
a Pole, her late husband too; and neither she nor her family were
reconciled to the Russian yoke. To make his renunciation more
complete, he humbly spoke his dread she might turn from him with the
"get away" said to a dog. No! She had no intention of dismissing him.
His outpourings of devotion caressed her woman's pride, even if she
did not accept them as gospel truth. And however tedious she found his
vamping song of sixpence, his sittings in the parlour counting out his
mirage-money, she put up with them in consideration of her privilege.

Sailing from Havre in the /Devonshire/, an English boat, Balzac
arrived at St. Petersburg towards the end of July. He lodged in a
private house not far from Eve's Koutaizoff mansion; but passed the
three months of his sojourn almost entirely in her society. It was the
first opportunity he had had of getting to know her intimately, their
previous meetings being surrounded with too many restrictions to allow
of familiar intercourse. No detailed record has come down to us of
these days of /tete-a-tete/ existence. All we learn from subsequent
allusions is that, together with a good deal of billing and cooing,
more sustained on the novelist's side, there were some lovers' tiffs,
followed by reconciliations. Apparently the friction was mainly caused
by Eve's evasiveness on the subject of their marriage.

It would seem as though there were an attack on her aloofness in the
long criticism he sent her from his lodgings on Madame d'Arnim's
/Bellina/, a French translation of which had been published not long
before he left Paris. After some general remarks on the circumstance
of a girl's fancying herself in love with a great man living at a
distance, he waxed wroth over what he styled Bellina's head-love, and
over head-love in general. To this monster, Merimee, in his /Double
Mistake/, had given a thrust but a thrust that made it bleed only. The
cleverer Madame d'Arnim had poisoned it with opium. "In order for the
literary expression of love to become a work of art and to be
sublime," he continued, "the love that depicts should itself be
complete; it should occur in its triple form, head, heart, and body;
should be a love at once sensual and divine, manifested with wit and
poetry. Who says love says suffering; suffering from separation;
suffering from disagreement. Love in itself is a sublime and pathetic
drama. When happy, it is silent. Now, the cause of the tedium of
Madame d'Arnim's book," he added, "is easily discoverable by a soul
that loves. Goethe did not love Bellina. Put a big stone in Goethe's
place--the Sphinx no power has ever been able to wrest from its desert
sand--and Bellina's letters are understandable. Unlike Pygmalion's
fable, the more Bellina writes, the more petrified Goethe becomes, the
more glacial his letters. True, if Bellina had perceived that her
sheets were falling upon granite, and if she had abandoned herself to
rage or despair, she would have composed a poem. But, as she did not
love Goethe, as Goethe was a pretext for her letters, she went on with
her girl's journal; and we have read some (not intended for print)
much more charming, not in units, but in tens."

In the rest of the criticism, Balzac swirls round his guns and directs
his fire on Goethe's replies to Bellina. The latter's epistles were
accompanied with presents of braces and slippers and flannel
waistcoats, which were much more appreciated by the poet than her
theories on music. Not so did he, Balzac, treat his Lina, his Louloup
--such was the inference suggested. Every one of her, i.e. Eve's
sayings was treasured up, after being duly pondered upon. Such
adulation must have been delicious to Madame Hanska; and yet she sent
her sighing swain back into his loneliness, with his bonds riveted
tighter, his promises to break with all rivals more solemn, and a
disappointment, over his deferred hopes, that brought on an illness
after his return.

The journey back was made by land through Riga, Taurogen, and Berlin.
In the Prussian capital, Von Humboldt came to see him with a message
from the King and Queen; and Shakespeare's /Midsummer Night's Dream/
was seen on the stage, without pleasure being derived from it. To its
poesy the novelist was little open. Instead of pushing on straight to
France, he bent his course southwards to Dresden, where he visited the
Pinakothek. The Saxon town pleased him more than Berlin, both by its
structural picturesqueness and surroundings. The palace, begun by
Augustus, he esteemed the most curious masterpiece of rococo
architecture. The Gallery he thought over-rated; but he none the less
admired Correggio's /Night/, his /Magdalene/ and two /Virgins/, as
also Raphael's /Virgins/, and the Dutch pictures. His highest
enthusiasm was aroused by the theatre, decorated by the three French
artists Desplechin, Sechan, and Dieterle. He reached Passy on the 3rd
of November, having crowded into the preceding week visits to Maintz,
Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, and several places in Belgium.

The form assumed by his malady was arachnitis, an inflammation of the
network of nerves enveloping the brain. For the time being, Nacquart,
his doctor, conjured it away, as he had done in the case of other
seizures from which the patient had suffered. He had known Balzac
since boyhood and was well acquainted with his constitution.
Unfortunately he could not change the novelist's abnormal manner of
living and working. And the mischief was in them.

Balzac's three months' absence from Paris had caused profane tongues
to wag considerably. Notwithstanding his reticence concerning Countess
Hanska, a legend had gathered round about their relations to each
other. More than one paper reported that he had been off on an
expedition, wife, and fortune-hunting--which was true; and one daily,
at least, spoke of his having been engaged by the Czar as a kind of
court /litterateur/. The /Presse/ especially annoyed him by copying
from the /Independance Belge/ a story of his having been surprised by
the Belgian police dining in an hotel with an Italian forger, whose
grand behaviour and abundance of false bank-notes had completely
captivated him. The forger was certainly arrested in the hotel where
he had put up, but the dinner and the chumming were inventions; at any
rate, Balzac affirmed they were, uttering furious anathemas against
the scorpion Girardin, who had allowed so illustrious a name to be
taken in vain.

On the 26th of September, during the St. Petersburg visit, his third
finished theatrical piece, /Pamela Giraud/, was produced at the Gaite
Theatre. Differing essentially from his previous efforts, this play is
an ordinary melodramatic comedy. Pamela, like Richardson's heroine, is
an honest girl, who, occupied in the humble trade of flower-selling,
loves a young man, Jules Rousseau, that she believes to belong to her
own modest rank, whereas, in reality, he is the son of a big
financier. Involved in a Bonapartist conspiracy, which has just been
discovered, Jules comes one night to her room and tries to persuade
her to fly with him. She refuses; and, while he is with her, the
police enter and arrest him. To save him she consents, though opposed
by her parents, to say in Court that her lover had spent the night of
the conspiracy with her; and Jules is acquitted through this false
confession of her being his mistress. Once the happy result obtained,
Jules and his family forget her. The lawyer, however, smitten by her
beauty and virtue, proposes to marry her, and is about to carry his
intention into effect when, remarking that she is pining for the
ungrateful Jules, he contrives to bring him to Pamela's feet again,
and the marriage is celebrated.

/Pamela Giraud/ was written in 1838, but no theatre had been willing
to stage it in its original form. Ultimately two professional
playwrights, Bayard and Jaime, who had already dramatized, the one,
/Eugenie Grandet/ and the /Search for the Absolute/, the other, /Pere
Goriot/, pruned the over-plentifulness of its matter and strengthened
the relief of various parts; and, in the amended guise, it was
performed. Balzac resented the modifications, which explains his
equanimity on hearing, as he travelled homewards, that the piece had
fallen flat. He considered that, presented as he wrote it, the chances
of success would have been greater. He was wrong, and those critics as
well who attributed the failure to enmities arising out of a recent
publication of his, entitled the /Monography of the Press/. Neither of
the two chief /dramatis personae/ was capable of properly interesting
a theatrical audience. The character of Jules is contemptible from
beginning to end, and that of Pamela ceases to attract after the
trial. The conclusion of this play, as that of /Vautrin/, is an
anticlimax and leaves an unsatisfactory impression.

Why did Balzac write his /Monography of the Parisian Press/? Not
altogether from a pure motive, one must own. There is too much gall in
his language, too much satire in the thought. He was sufficiently
acquainted with the inner ring of journalistic life to be able to say
truly what were its blemishes; and, without doubt, at the time when he
composed the chief of his novels, these had a prejudicial effect on
literature as on other phases of activity. But his pamphlet, besides
its indiscriminate condemnations, erred in adopting a style which
rendered the turning of the tables only too easy. And Jules Janin,
whom he had already indisposed by sketching a seeming portrait of him
in the /Provincial Great Man in Paris/, came down heavily on the
daring satirist in the /Debats/ of the 20th of February 1843. The
retort, so he informed Madame Hanska, made him laugh immoderately.
Perhaps; but the laugh must have been somewhat forced--what the French
call "yellow."

In the /Monography/, men of letters, baptized by the novelist
/gendelettres/--one of the few words coined by Balzac which have
become naturalized--may be divided into several categories. First,
there are the /publicistes/, occupied in scratching the pimples of the
body politic. From these pimples they extract a book which is a
mystification. Not far removed from the /publicistes/ are the chief
managing editors and proprietors general, big wigs who sometimes
become prefects, receivers general, or theatrical directors. The type
of this class is glory's porter, speculation's trumpeter, the
electorate's /Bonneau/. He is set in motion by a ballet-dancer, a
cantatrice, an actress; in short, he is a brigand-captain, with other
brigands under him. And of the latter:--There are the /Premiers
Paris/, alias, first tenors. In writing /Premiers Paris/, it is
impossible for a man to avoid mental warp and rapid deterioration. In
such writing, style would be a misfortune. One must know how to speak
jesuitically; and, in order to advance, one must be clever in getting
one's ideas to walk on crutches. Those who engage in the trade confess
themselves corrupt; like diplomatists, they have as a pension the
Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, a few librarianships, even
archiveships.

Next to the /Premiers Paris/ come the /Faits Paris/; then the
/Camarillists/, other banditti commissioned to distort Parliamentary
speeches; then the newspaper Politicians, who have not two ideas in
their heads. If appointed under-officials, they would be unable to
administer the sweeping of the streets. Consequently, the more
incapable a man is, the better he is qualified to become the Grand
Lama of a newspaper. Indeed, nothing is more explicable than politics.
It is a game at ninepins.

In addition to its Politicians, the newspaper has its /Attaches/. The
/Attaches/ of the Republican party are watched very closely. One day
two Republicans meet, and the first says to the second: "You have sold
yourself; people find you are getting fatter." Whence it follows that
any paper knowing its trade will have only exceedingly thin
/Attaches/; otherwise your /Attache/ will be a mere detached
/Attache/, that is to say, a sort of paid spy, who is mostly a
professor of rhetoric or philosophy. He will dine at all tables, with
mission to attack political leaders; he runs in and out of newspaper
offices, like a dog seeking his master; and, when he has bitten
sharply, he becomes the professor of a fantastic science, the private
secretary of some cabinet, or else consul-general.

Afterwards come the /gendelettre/ pamphleteers. According to the
author of the /Monography/, the pamphlet is the brochure masterpiece;
and he himself is its most illustrious exponent. The Abbe de Lamennais
does not know how to speak to the proletariat. He is not Spartacus
enough, not Marat enough, not Calvin enough; he does not understand
how to storm the positions of the ignoble bourgeoisie at present in
power.

Following on are the /gendelettre-vulgarisateurs/, who have invented
Germany. The type of this class is appointed professor in the College
de France. He marches at the head of the Nothingologues; he is the
almighty king of the Sorbonne. Such people are the skin parasites of
France. The Nothingologue is ordinarily /monobible/;[*] and, as the
bourgeoisie are essentially lacking in intelligence, they are
infatuated with him. The /Monobible/ becomes a director of canals,
railways, the defender of negroes, or else the advocate of slavery; in
a word, the Nothingologue is an important man, quite as the convinced
/gendelettre/, who reserves to himself the Council of State, and as
the sceptic /gendelettre/, who becomes Master of Requests or Governor
of the Marquisas Isles.

[*] In Balzac's use of the word: A man who has written only one book
and boasts of it always.

Replying to this diatribe, with its medley of shrewdness and
exaggeration, Janin pointed out that it insulted Quinet, professor at
the College de France; Sainte-Beuve, the poet, novelist, and critic,
the historian of Port-Royal; Philarete Chasles, professor of Foreign
Literature; Loeve Weimars, Consul at Bagdad; not to speak of Planche,
Berlioz, Michel and Chevalier; and that it came amiss from a man who
had lived and still lived on newspapers; who himself had been the
chief managing editor, tenor, Jack-of-all-trades, canard-seller,
camarillist, politician, premier-Paris, fait-Paris, /detache-attache/,
pamphleteer, translator, critic, euphuist, bravo, incense-bearer,
guerillero, angler, humbug, and even, what was more serious, the
banker of a paper of which he was the only, unique, and perpetual
/gendelettre/, and which, so admirably written, cleverly conducted,
and signed with so great a name, did not live six months.

Within a very few years, Janin was to bury the hatchet of polemics
beside Balzac's grave, and, forgetting the soreness generated in him
by the /Monography of the Press/ to constitute himself the dead
author's apologist.

Besides his continuation of Lucien de Rubempre's story in the
/Splendour and Wretchedness of Courtezans/, Balzac published, in the
year 1843, two complete novels, viz. /Honorine/, and /The Muse of the
County/, and a portion of an historical study on Catherine de Medici.
This last work, to which the /Calvinist Martyr/ belongs, was
undertaken with the idea of composing, as he said, a retrospective
history of France treated clairvoyantly, and, as the fragment shows,
with his peculiar bias towards despotism. In the experiment made with
/Catherine de Medici/, he started out thinking to justify and
rehabilitate her memory. Instead, he found himself obliged to exhibit
her committing the worst actions imaginable; and, his conclusions not
concording with his premises, he abandoned further incursions into the
past. History is a dangerous ground for a doctrinaire to investigate.

The former of the two novels is mainly psychological. The wife of a
Count Octave, having quitted her husband for another, has repented of
her fault and separated from her lover, but, through shamefastness,
will not return to her husband. She seeks to gain a livelihood by
flower-making; and her husband, who still loves her and is full of
forgiveness, helps her secretly to obtain orders. At length, by the
good offices of a secretary and the latter's uncle, a priest, he
pleads with his wife more efficaciously, and induces her to return to
him, yet without her pardoning herself; and she dies in giving birth
to a child, dies because she wishes, rather from wounded pride, it
would appear, than on account of her husband, to whose affection she
is strangely insensible. The heroine is not particularly interesting
with her morbidness and hysterical posing; she probably stands for one
of Balzac's principles, and his principles are the most tedious thing
about him.

With the /Muse of the County/, which the author declared to be
Constant's /Adolphe/ treated realistically, we are back in the truer
Balzacian manner. Dinah de la Baudraye--a Sancerre Catherine de
Vivonne--married to an apology for a man, is human flesh and blood;
and her love for the journalist Etienne Lousteau is natural, though
culpable. Indeed, her subsequent devotion to this shallow egotist is
not without greatness. Here the novelist, as much by his wit as by his
denouement, gives perhaps the best practical condemnation of adultery.

"Bah!" says the little de la Baudraye, "do you call it vengeance,
because the Duke of Bracciano will kill his wife for putting him into
a cage and showing herself to him in her lover's arms. Our tribunals
and society are much more cruel."

"In what?" asked Lousteau.

"In letting the woman live with a slender allowance. Every one turns
away from her. She has neither dress nor consideration, two things
which are everything to a woman."

"But she has happiness," replied Madame de la Baudraye grandly.

"No!" replied the husband, lighting his candle to go to bed; "for she
has a lover."

Dinah's punishment is of this kind. Persuaded at length to go back to
the house of her husband, who had been made a peer of France and
accepts Lousteau's children with her, she lives to see her former
lover and father of her children sink so low that she must despise
him, while still occasionally tempted to yield to his caresses.

When Alexandre Dumas, the younger, was received into the French
Academy in 1875, the Count d'Haussonville, who welcomed him, asserted
that the elder Dumas, like Balzac, Beranger, de Lamennais and others,
had preferred to remain an outsider. In the case of Balzac, the Count
was mistaken. The so-called preference was Hobson's choice. He stayed
outside only because he could not get in. Between 1839 and 1849, he
made several attempts to secure the promise of a number of votes
sufficient to elect him. Having stood aside at the earlier date in
favour of Victor Hugo, who was admitted in 1841, he thought he might
count on a reciprocal service from the poet. And, on Bonald's death in
the same year, he asked him, during the visit to Les Jardies, to use
his influence with his colleagues in the Academy. "Hugo promised but
little," says Gozlan; and Balzac had to wait for a better opportunity.
This happened at the end of 1843, when Campenon died, and a vacancy
occurred which he might reasonably claim to fill. Encouraged at
present by Hugo and Charles Nodier, he began the round of visits
required by Academy etiquette; but soon discovered that the members
whose votes he solicited did not consider him rich enough. He
therefore withdrew from the list of candidates, writing to Nodier
that, if he could not succeed in entering the Academy while in
honourable poverty, he would never present himself at the moment when
prosperity should have bestowed her favours on him.

And, so far as personal solicitation was concerned, he never did.
Though not abandoning his desire of belonging to the Forty, and
esteeming rightly that the value of his work entitled him to a place
among them, he felt after this rebuff that, if a fresh proposal were
made, it should come from the other side. He might have done more to
provoke it had not Madame Hanska been against his taking any further
action in the matter, however indirect. Maybe she realized better than
he did the uselessness of his candidature. The enemies he had in the
Academy and its entourage were too powerful for his claims to be
considered. Many years afterwards, Victor Hugo related that the
novelist put himself forward for the vacancy left by Ballanche's death
at the end of 1847, and apropos added the following anecdote.

"I was driving," he said, "down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, when
in front of the Church I perceived Monsieur de Balzac, who beckoned to
me to stop. I was going to get out of the carriage, but he prevented
me, and said: 'I was just coming to see you. You know I am on the list
for the Academy.' 'Really!' 'Yes. What do you think of my chances?'
'You are too late, I fear. You will get only my vote.' 'It is your
vote especially I want.' 'Are you quite in earnest?' 'Quite.' Balzac
quitted me. The election was virtually decided. For political motives.
The candidature of Monsieur Vatout had a majority of supporters. I
tried to canvass for Balzac, but met with no success. It vexed me to
think that a man of Balzac's calibre should have only one vote, and I
reflected that if I could obtain a second one, I might create some
change of opinion. How was I to gain it? On the election day I was
sitting beside the excellent Pongerville, one of the best of men. I
asked him point blank, 'For whom are you voting?' 'For Vatout, as you
know.' 'I know it so little that I ask you to vote for Balzac.'
'Impossible!' 'Why?' 'Because my bulletin is ready. See.' 'Oh! that
makes no matter.' And on two bits of paper I wrote in my best hand:
'Balzac.' 'Well!' quoth Pongerville; 'well! you will see.' The
apparitor who was collecting the votes approached us. I handed him one
of the bulletins I had prepared. Pongerville, in his turn, stretched
out his hand to put Vatout's name in the urn; but, with a friendly tap
on his fingers, I caused his paper to flutter to the floor. He looked,
appeared irresolute for a moment; and, as I presented him with the
second bulletin, on which Balzac's name was inscribed, he smiled, took
it, and gave it with good grace. And that is how Honore de Balzac had
two votes in his favour at the Academy."

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