Balzac

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This story is inexact chronologically. Balzac was not a candidate in
1847-48, when Monsieur Vatout was chosen, but at two later elections,
those of the 11th and 18th of January 1849. In each of these he
obtained two votes; and since the second election was to fill the
chair of Monsieur Vatout, who died after occupying it during a
twelvemonth, it would seem that Victor Hugo, deceived by his memory,
confused the two events. As for the conversation with Balzac, it
probably refers to the candidature which the novelist did begin in
1844; and either Hugo's age in 1877, when he told the story, or his
capacity for embellishing was responsible for the interview being
tacked on to the election incident of 1849.

The Pongerville mentioned by Hugo was the same in whose album, in
1844, Balzac wrote a couple of complimentary verses. He happened to
come across the album at his sister's, and, after inserting his
poetry, took the book to Pongerville's house without finding him at
home. He had certainly reckoned, at the close of the preceding year,
on having this Academician's vote, as well as Dupaty's, Hugo's, and
Nodier's. Pongerville may have deemed his own tardy support a
sufficient reward for the verses.

Although Balzac's monetary embarrassments were fated to persist as
long as he lived, the causes being so much in the man, their burden
was somewhat less felt in and from the year 1844. This better state of
things was proved by his looking round for a more commodious
residence. The Passy cottage, picturesque as it was, accorded but ill
with his designs of marrying so grand a dame; and even for his work
was not very suitable, being close to the flats of the Rue Basse,
where families lived with children that disturbed his meditations. He
would have liked to free Les Jardies from its mortgage and keep the
place as a summer resort, while renting a snug mansion in the city
during the winter; but the two abodes were hardly within his means,
unless Eve would loosen her purse-strings. "I will not sell it," he
informed her, referring to his "Folly"; "it was built with my blood
and brains. I will stick to it--if I cannot dispose of it
advantageously," he finished up with, inconsequently. And still she
made no sign; or, rather she proffered no cash. Business advice she
gave in plenty. About each of the Paris houses suggested she had some
objections to make, so that, after fixing successively on a residence
belonging to Madame Delannoy (one of his creditor friends) in the Rue
Neuve-des Mathurins, on the old mansion opposite his Passy abode once
possessed by the Princesse de Lamballe, on the property in the Rue
Ponthieu, and on a plot of land in the Allee des Veuves where he
thought they could build, the end of the year arrived without any
definite solution being reached. The two "louloups," as he called
himself and Eve, filled their correspondence with calculations and
figures, the Paris "louloup" expressing his conviction that figures
were the foundation of their happiness.

If he did not die too soon, she might consider she would marry a
million in giving him her hand, he said. Slily, he now and again
quoted his worth in the estimation of a rival feminine authority. For
example, Madame de Girardin was about to write an article on the great
conversationalists of the day, and had mentioned that she held him to
be one of the most charming. However, when he raised his rate of
exchange in this way, he was always prudent enough to follow up with
concessions. His intimacy with the Englishwoman, Madame Visconti, who
was Eve's bugbear, he broke off completely--at least he swore he had
done so and offered to send his beloved tyrant the cold letter in
which his whilom friend and benefactress bade him good-bye. To let Eve
see it would not be gallant on his part, he confessed; but what could
he deny her, if she persisted. He was her Paris agent, even her Paris
errand-boy, at one time negotiating the entrance of the governess,
Mademoiselle Borel, into the Saint-Thomas-de-Velleneuve nunnery; at
another, purchasing gloves, millinery, and other articles of dress.
Yet she never considered him submissive enough, notwithstanding his
pretty flattery.

"Why shouldn't you have a poet?" he asked, thinking of himself, "as
other people have a dog, a monkey, a parrot--the more so as I have in
me something of these three creatures: I always repeat the same
phrase, I imitate society, I am faithful." And again in a burst of
lyricism, he exclaimed: "Adieu, loved friend, to whom I belong like
the sound to the bell, the dog to his master, the artist to his ideal,
prayer to God, pleasure to cause, colour to the painter, life to the
sun. Love me, for I need your affection, so vivifying, so coloured, so
agreeable, so celestial, so ideally good, of such sweet dominance, and
so constantly vibrating." With comparisons of this sort he was lavish.
"I am like Monsieur de Talleyrand," he told her in another letter.
"Either I show a stolid, tin face and do not speak a word, or else I
chatter like a magpie." Adopting the expression first invented by
Guizot, he characterized their mutual relations as an /entente
cordiale/, impatient, none the less, for the realization of his fancy,
which was to see his idol enter a tabernacle prepared to receive her
on the return from a delightful honeymoon. Meanwhile, he was amassing
furniture and bric-a-brac, just as the bird bits of straw; and he
implored her not to scold him. In the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, he had
ferreted out two Dresden vases, which he bought, resolving to deprive
himself for a time of his grapes at forty sous a pound, in order to
retrieve the money.

The retrieval indeed was not easy, since his passion for collecting
curios led him far, and he generally succumbed to the temptation of
something ancient and rare. In the previous autumn he had bought, for
thirteen hundred and fifty francs, a /secretaire/ and /commode/ in
ebony, with inlaid pearl, that had apparently been manufactured at
Florence in the seventeenth century; these /objets d'art/ he estimated
at values ranging up to forty or fifty thousand francs. A description
of them appeared in the press, and rich amateurs inquired whether he
were willing to sell; but, either because he asked too much or really
did not want to part with them, they were kept, as also his /Christ/
by Bouchardon or Girardon, which he obtained for two hundred francs
and valued at several thousands. If he had no cash for his purchases--
and this frequently happened--he placed one of his already acquired
treasures (possibly unpaid for, too) in the establishment of his
"respectable relative," as he styled the pawnbroker, and thus secured
the coveted object.

In his intercourse with his own family, Madame Hanska was a
continuously troubling factor. The prospect of his alliance with this
foreign aristocrat had less charm for Madame Balzac and Laure than for
Honore. They probably perceived the chimera he was pursuing, and could
not be expected to show enthusiasm. This attitude on their side and a
certain hauteur on his, partly caused by offended dignity, widened the
breach between him and them. "I have now no family," he told "The
Stranger," "and am glad that the coldness should be established before
I am completely happy; for later the reason of it would have been
attributed to you, or to what would have been termed my uppishness.
The isolation, which you wish, will be likewise my dearest desire. My
sister," he proceeded, "has suppressed for ever the literary question
betwixt us, with her blue-stocking whims. I cannot talk to her of my
affairs, nor yet of my mother's. She asserts that her husband is a
greater man than I am." Madame de Berny, he added, had foreseen his
mother's and sister's transformation when she told him he was a flower
that had sprung up on a dunghill! If Madame de Berny told him this, it
was no doubt in a fit of anger against them for endeavouring to sever
the liaison, an endeavour they were perfectly justified in. These
portions of Balzac's confidences, which reflect upon his character
seriously, and besmirch him more than those against whom they were
spoken, cannot be overlooked in a biography. They have to be included
in our judgment of him, and, in a measure, concern the tragic close of
his love romance.

We are fonder of him in the expansive moods when his naïve wonder at
his own performances carries him into self-panegyric, which, not
infrequently, we can endorse, though with some discount. Thus, for
instance, the /Bourgeois of Paris/ he declared to be one of those
masterpieces that leave everything else behind. "It is grand, it is
terrifying in verve, in philosophy, in novelty, in painting, in
style." And yet there was Eugene Sue selling the /Wandering Jew/ to a
newspaper for a hundred thousand francs, while the /Philosophy of
Conjugal Life/, a publication of his own in Hetzel's /Diable a Paris/,
fetched only eight hundred; and the /Peasants/ was paid for only at
the rate of sixty centimes a line. His /Modeste Mignon/ which appeared
in the /Debats/, sold rather dearer, six thousand francs being given,
and for the /Bourgeois/, nine thousand. The explanation of Sue's
getting more than he he imagined to be because Sue lived in grander
style than himself with flunkeys to open the door and overawe the
publishers who flocked to the successful writer, whereas he, living in
a cottage, had to cool his heels in an office ante-chamber, and was
exploited on account of his neediness. There was some truth in what he
said; but he did not sufficiently realize that Sue wrote, for the
market, exciting tales that everybody rushed to read. His own books
were, of course, most of them infinitely superior; but they appealed
to a much smaller public. All the same, he was loth to resign himself
to the depreciation Sue's bargains effected in his own. Feverishly he
strove to demonstrate by his painfully gained successes that they were
masterpieces, as he said, by the side of Sue's chimney-fronts, and as
far above them as Raphael was above Dubufe. Moliere, Lesage, Voltaire,
Walter Scott--these were the only names he acknowledged as rivals to
his own. Sue was nothing but a spangled and satined Paul de Kock.

We can grant him that, in fiction, his proper manner was as far in
advance of his epoch as, in politics, his doctrine was behind it.
George Sand was a medium in both, although she dwelt always a little
too much in the clouds. At a dinner with her towards the end of
January, the antagonism of their principles manifested itself over his
recent visit to Russia.

"If you were to see the Czar," Balzac said to her, "you would fall in
love with him and jump from your /bousingotism/[*] to autocracy."

[*] A word used to characterise the dress and manners of the
Romanticists, who were fond of Robespierre waistcoats, long hair,
and other peculiarities intended to distinguish them from ordinary
mortals.

Madame Dudevant waxed angry. It was not kind in a man who had resisted
her blandishments to make merry over her foibles.

The Russians, he gravely told her, were extremely amiable, easy to get
on with, exceedingly literary, since everything was done on paper, and
Russia was the only country in which people knew how to obey.

The mention of obedience in a people irritated the hostess; but on her
seething he poured a drop of cold water by asking jestingly:

"Would you, in a great danger, wish your servants to deliberate about
what you had ordered them to do?"

The Sandist-Philosophico-Republico-Communico-Pierre-Lerouxico-
Geranico-Deisto train (the epithets are Balzac's) stopped dead at the
question. Then Marliani, one of the guests, remarked that argument was
impossible with poets. Balzac bowed, and added:

"You hear what he says?"

"You are a dreadful satirist," retorted George Sand. "Go on with your
/Comedie Humaine/."

It was not necessary to give the recommendation. He was for ever going
on; and the further he went, the further his horizons receded. The
embracing lines were rather indiscriminate. He came to think himself
capable of reducing every domain to his scale. Men's ambitions,
however, are part of their motive power; and, had his been less
sweeping, the qualities of his work might have diminished with the
defects. "Four men," he cried in one of his vauntings, "have had an
immense life, Napoleon, Cuvier, O'Connell, and--I mean to be the
fourth! The first lived with the life of Europe; he inoculated himself
with armies! The second espoused the globe! The third incarnated in
himself a people! As for me! I shall have borne a whole society in my
head! It is just as well to live thus as every evening to say,
'Spades, hearts, trumps;' or to wonder why Madame such a one has done
such and such a thing."

/Modeste Mignon/, which was published in 1844 with the extra
attraction of some of Auber's music in it is one of Balzac's brighter
and lighter books, and reproduces part of his own last love-story more
objectively treated than in /Albert Savarus/. Its plot was suggested
to him by a short tale which Madame Hanska composed, intending to
submit it for his approval, but which she threw in the fire,
afterwards sending him, in one of her epistles, an outline of what she
had done. Since he utilized her invention, he paid her back by
selecting as his point of departure the adventure of a well-educated
girl of literary tastes, who, through reading the verses of the
celebrated Canalis, at once a poet and a statesman, fell in love with
him and expressed her (literary) admiration in a letter, though she
had never seen him. There were other such cases in the first half of
the nineteenth century besides that of the Polish Countess and the
author of /Eugenie Grandet/. Disdaining to reply to a correspondent
who did not appear to be a person with whom he could take liberties,
Canalis delegated the task to his friend and secretary, La Briere, who
answered under cover of the great man's name and ultimately found out
and, incognito, beheld the lady. She was beautiful and he lost his
heart to her. When later the subterfuge was discovered, Canalis,
interested now, wanted to marry the lady, she being presumably rich.
Through pique, Modeste, for a while, listened to his suit and smiled
on him, albeit, in verity, she was touched by La Briere's sincere
affection. The circumstances leading to the unmasking of Canalis'
selfish character and to Modeste's marriage with La Briere are handled
in a less Balzacian way than the introductory chapters, which,
however, are more than usually tortuous. But the whole story is
pleasing; and, in the discursive paragraphs, there is less dogmatism
and a more delicate sense of contrasts than the novelist is wont to
exhibit when astride a hobby-horse. The following passage has an aroma
of Shelley's /Defence of Poetry/ in it, which merits our attention.
The divine in man says:

"In order to live, thou shalt bend thyself towards earth; in order to
think thou shalt raise thyself heavenwards. We want the life of the
soul as much as that of the body; whence there are two utilities. Thus
it is certain that a book will not serve as foot-gear; an epic, from
the utilitarian point of view, is not worth an economical soup from
the kitchen of a Benevolent Society; and a self-acting boiler, rising
a couple of inches on itself, procures calico a few pence a yard
cheaper; but this machine and the improvements of industry do not
breathe life into a nation, and will not tell the future that it has
existed; whereas Egyptian art, Mexican art, Grecian art, Roman art,
with their masterpieces accused of uselessness, have attested the
existence of these peoples in the vast expanse of time, there where
huge intermediary nations, destitute of great men, have disappeared
without leaving their visiting cards on the globe. All works of genius
are the epitome of a civilization, and presuppose an immense utility.
Forsooth, a pair of boots will not outvie a stage-play in your eyes,
and you will not prefer a windmill to the Church of Saint Ouen. So, a
people is animated with the same sentiment as a man; and man's
favourite idea is to survive himself mentally as he reproduces himself
physically. The survival of a people is the work of its men of
genius."

/Beatrix/, the other completed novel of the year, is a drawn-out, ill-
composed work, which is not redeemed sufficiently by its minute
description of Breton manners and its portrait of George Sand in
Felicite des Touches. Six years separated the publication of the first
part of the book from that of the conclusion, and, in the interval,
the unity of plan suffered. Balzac devoted a good deal of labour to
its execution. In all the conjugal ruses employed by Sabine de
Grandlieu to detach Calyste, her husband, from Beatrix, he displays
his peculiar talent, but the ultimate effect is poor.

CHAPTER XII

LETTERS TO "THE STRANGER," 1845, 1846

Though fertile in incidents, the year of 1845 was, from a literary
point of view, more barren than any in Balzac's past career,
exception, of course, made for the time lost during his printing-house
adventure. Beyond his short, witty sketch, /A Man of Business/,
relating the tricks employed by the princes of bohemianism to pay
their debts and indulge their caprices gratis, no finished work was
published. The /Peasants/, which the author never entirely got
through, was taken up repeatedly, and as often put aside from sheer
inability to proceed.

The deadlock in which he found himself had been preparing since his
visit to Saint Petersburg. Whether the intimacy created there between
Madame Hanska and himself was that of two lovers in the chaster sense,
or, as Monsieur Gabriel Ferry assets, in his /Balzac et ses Amies/,
that of a closer union, it had haunted him during his subsequent
twelvemonth's loneliness. And when Eve, who had come to spend the
winter at Dresden, discouraged, from fear of her society friends'
backbiting, the idea of his going there to see her, he grew incapable
of concentrating his mind on his books; and, even in his letters to
her, chafed and was irritable, scolding her for not stamping her
envelopes, and recommending her to acquire habits of order and
economy! confessing the while that, to escape from his melancholy, he
had been playing lansquenet, dining out, going to the theatres, and
leading a nonchalant life.

The tone was a bold one to assume, but clever. His tyrant, already
repenting the pledges given, had been hinting it would be better not
to carry them out. Her own relatives were quite as much against the
match as Balzac's, she reminded him, while narrating all the malicious
tittle-tattle that mutual acquaintances were constantly telling her.
She defended him, she said. "A mistake!" retorted Balzac. "When, in
your presence, any one attacks me, your best plan is to mock the
slanderers by outdoing them. When some one sneeringly remarked to
Dumas that his father was a nigger, he answered: 'My grandfather was a
monkey.'"

His scolding for once did good. Eve did not like his "wounding prose,"
but she talked no more of breaking with him. On the contrary, she
relented as far as to remove the embargo on his going to Dresden; so
in May he went. And, what was more, she came in August to Paris;
incognito, since the visit was without the Czar's permission, she and
her daughter Anna travelling from the frontier under the names of
Balzac's sister and niece.

In the novelist's correspondence, there is a curious letter written on
the 2nd of August to Madame Emile de Girardin. In it the writer
excuses himself for not calling on her, being obliged to remain at
home on account of the disquieting condition of a lady friend of his
who had hurt herself and was under medical treatment. The inference is
that the lady in question was staying in his house; and a note written
to Madame Hanska, on the 4th of September, with its allusion to the
Passy garden in which they had walked so much together, makes it
sufficiently plain that she was the August guest. Although no proofs
have yet come to light which we can accept as irrefutable, there seems
to be ground for the supposition put forward that a premature
confinement was the illness, carefully concealed from every one.

If the supposition be correct, it explains the convalescent's being
joined by Balzac again in September at Baden-Baden, where the
arrangements were made for Eve and himself to meet in October at
Chalon-sur-Saone and to travel together to Italy. It was during this
second stay in Germany that the play of the /Saltimbanques/ they had
seen suggested to the novelist the amusing nicknames which he
henceforth adopted when writing to Madame Hanska's family. Anna was
dubbed /Zephirine/; her betrothed, /Gringalet/; Eve, /Atala/; and
himself, /Bilboquet/. Georges, the betrothed, who was a Pole bearing
the title of Count Mniszech, was a young man of scientific tastes and
considerable learning, for whom Balzac conceived a great liking, and
whom he helped in his entomological researches.

The ramble southwards was probably the most pleasurable experience in
the novelist's life, being an anticipated honeymoon. From Chalon they
journeyed along the banks of the Rhone, visiting no fewer than twenty-
three towns on the way. At Naples they parted, and the prospective
bridegroom turned Paris-wards, going via Pisa, Civita Vecchia, and
Marseilles; in this last city he comforted himself for the separation
by hunting out further adornments for the home he was still busily
striving to find in the capital.

At Marseilles lived a poet-friend of his named Mery, whom he had
enlisted as a collaborator in his teeming dramatic schemes. Him he
commissioned to bargain for certain articles of vertu which Lazard,
the famous dealer in antiquities, quoted too dear--eight hundred
francs for a mirror, and five hundred for a statuette. "Let Lazard see
that you will give a thousand francs for the two things," he advised
Mery; "but don't offer more than nine. Glance stoically at the
articles when passing by, and joke the dealer. Then send acquaintances
to offer a little less than you. After a fortnight's haggling, Lazard
will let you have them one fine morning." For getting the better of
these sly shopkeepers, Balzac had a good many devices up his sleeve.

Back in Passy, he was seized again by the same restlessness as in the
spring, thwarting his efforts to settle down to his desk. The utmost
he could accomplish was to wander about, note-book in hand, collecting
material for later use. Happening in December to be near the Assize
Courts, he went in to listen to the trial of Madame Colomes, a niece
of Marshal Sebastiani, who was accused of forging bills. He was struck
by her strong resemblance to the dead /Dilecta/, and also by her
attachment, herself being forty-five years of age, to a young man of
twenty. The latter, after wasting in riotous living the money she had
procured him by her forgeries, fled and left her to bear the brunt of
her shame. The most repugnant detail of this unfortunate woman's case
Balzac utilized not long afterwards in his /Cousin Bette/.

Perhaps it was less his ennui than the curiosity for new sensations
which caused him to accept Gautier's invitation to pass an evening
with Baudelaire and one or two others, at the Hotel Pimodan, for the
purpose of eating hashish. He experienced none of the extraordinary
phenomena usually attributed to the consumption of this drug, his
explanation being that the dose was too weak, or his brain too strong.
However, he owned to having heard celestial voices and to having seen
divine paintings while he descended Lauzun's staircase, in a promenade
that seemed to have lasted twenty years. He does not appear to have
repeated the intoxication. Yet, on receiving another unkind epistle
from Eve, shortly afterwards, he mentioned the possibility of arming
himself against his sea of troubles through the drug's lethal
properties.

In anything that had to do with the function of the brain, he was as
interested as if medicine had been his profession. A book of Dr.
Moreau's on madness, which he read during these months of mental
relaxation, drew from him an acknowledgment wherein he foreshadowed
his intention of studying anatomy and myology. "I believe," he said,
"we shall do no good until we have determined the action exercised by
the physical organs of thought in the production of madness. The
organs are the containing sheaths of some fluid or other as yet
inappreciable. I hold this for proved. Well! there are a certain
number of organs which are vitiated by their lack, by their
constitution, others which are vitiated by an excess of afflux.
People, who, like Cuvier and Voltaire, have exercised their organs
early, have rendered them so powerful that no excess can affect them;
whereas those who keep to certain portions of the ideal encephalos,
which we represent as the laboratory of thought--the poets, who leave
deduction and analysis inactive and exploit the heart and imagination
exclusively--may become mad. In short, there would be a fine
experiment to make. I have thought of it for twenty years. This would
be to reconstitute the brain of an idiot, to demonstrate whether a
thinking apparatus can be created by developing its rudiments. Only by
building up a brain shall we know how one is demolished."

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