Balzac

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In the rooms where the pupils worked, the exhalations by which the air
was constantly vitiated mingled with the smells left by the debris of
lunches and teas and by other accumulated dirt. There were also
cupboards and closets where each pupil used to keep his private booty
--pigeons killed on fete days or dishes pilfered from the refectory.
Swept only once a day, the place was always filthy, and was further
rendered disagreeable by odours coming from the wash-house, dressing-
room, pantries, etc. All this with the mud brought in from the outside
playgrounds made the atmosphere insupportable. Moreover, the pupils'
petty ailments and pains were almost entirely unheeded. In winter
chaps and chilblains were Honore's unceasing lot. His woman's
complexion, and especially the skin of his ears and lips, cracked
under the least cold; his soft white hands reddened and swelled.
Constant colds harassed him; and, until he was inured to the Vendome
regimen, pain was his daily portion.

A lively recollection of what he went through in these school-days
persisted during his maturer years. Writing in 1844 to Monsieur
Fontemoing, one of his few boy-companions that he maintained relations
with, he said: "When David is ready to inaugurate his statue of Jean
Bart in Dieppe, I shall perhaps be there to enjoy the spectacle; and
then we will spend one or two days recalling to mind the cages, wooden
breeches and other Vendomoiseries."

His memory was probably less faithful in 1832, when striving to
reproduce the tenour of the lost /Treatise of the Will/. At thirteen
he could scarcely have had such definite notions of intuition and
other operations of the mind; and there must be a fairly long
antedating of reflection in attributing to Louis Lambert, even with
the latter's two years seniority, thoughts like the following:--

"Often amid calm and silence, when our inner faculties are lulled and
we indulge in sweet repose, and darkness hovers round us, and we fall
into a contemplation of other things, straight an idea darts forth,
flashes through the infinite space created by our brain, and then,
like a will-o'-the-wisp, vanishes never to return--an ephemeral
apparition like that of such children as yield boundless joy and grief
to bereaved parents; a species of still-born flower in the fields of
thought. At times also the idea, instead of forcibly gushing and dying
without consistence, dawns and poises in the fathomless limbo of the
organs that give it birth; it tires us by its long parturition; then
it develops and grows, is fertile, rich, and productive in the visible
grace of youth and with all the qualities of longevity; it sustains
the most inquiring glances, invites them, and never wearies them. Now
and again ideas are generated in swarms, one evolves another; they
interlace and entice, they abound and are dalliant; now and again,
they arise pale and looming, and perish through want of strength or
nourishment--the quickening substance is insufficient. And, last of
all, on certain days they plunge into the abysses, lighting up their
depths; they terrify us, and leave us in a soul despair. Our ideas
have their complete system; they are a kingdom of nature, a sort of
efflorescence of which a madman perhaps might give an iconography.
Yes, all attests the existence of these delightful creations I may
compare to flowers. Indeed, their production is no more surprising
than that of perfumes and colour in the plant."

Still, without being a Pascal, Balzac in the first half of his teens,
was evidently not an ordinary child. There was a ferment of thought,
as he said, reacting on itself and seeking to surprise the secrets of
its own being. Fostered by the moral isolation in which he lived
during these six years, his self-analysis grew unwholesome, there
being little or nothing on the physical side to counterbalance it.
Fortunately, the return to saner surroundings occurred before the evil
was irremediable. Running wild for a few months in the open air, he
recovered his natural vivacity and cheerfulness. Every day he went for
a long ramble through one or another of the landscapes of Touraine,
and on his way home enjoyed the magnificent sunsets lighting up the
steeples of his native town and glinting on the river covered with
craft, both large and small. To check his reveries, Madame Balzac
forced him to amuse his two sisters Laure and Laurence and to fly the
kite of his little brother Henry,[*] who had been born while he was at
Vendome.

[*] The name is spelt in the English way.

On Sundays and fete days he regularly accompanied his mother to the
Cathedral of saint-Gatien, where he must have been an observant
spectator if not consistently a devout listener. He prayed by fits and
starts; and in the intervals studied closely and with an eye for
effect the appearance of priestly persons and functions, with altar
and stained-glass window in the background, and gathered materials for
his Abbes Birotteau, Bonnet, and others. The period was one of
compensation and adjustment. What he had been striving to assimilate
had now the leisure to arrange itself in his brain, which was no
longer overheated.

As soon as his health was considered sufficiently strong, he began
attending classes at the institution of a Monsieur Chretien, and
supplemented them by private lessons received at home. His conviction
that he would become a famous man was as strong as ever, and his naïve
assertion of it was frequent enough to provoke great teasing in the
domestic circle. Far from being irritated, he laughed with those that
laughed at him, his sisters saying: "Hail to the great Balzac!" On the
part of his elders the bantering was intended to damp his exalted
notions, which they regarded as ill-founded, judging him, as his
Vendome professors, by the smallness of his Latin and Greek. His
mother in particular had no faith in his prophecies nor yet in his
occasional utterances of deeper things than his years warranted: "You
certainly don't know what you are talking about," was her habitual
snub. And, when Honore, not daring to argue further, took refuge in
his sly, not to say supercilious, smile, she taxed him with
overweeningness--an accusation that had some truth in it. She might
well be excused for her scepticism, for the youth had also large
ignorance in some of the commoner things of life, and, moreover,
allowed himself to be taken in easily. Laure seems to have traded a
good deal on his credulity for the sake of fun. One day she gave him a
so-called cactus seedling, supposed to have come from the land of
Judaea. Honore preserved it preciously in a pot for a fortnight, only
to discover at length that this plant was a vulgar pumpkin.

At the end of 1814, Monsieur Balzac came to reside in Paris, being
placed at the head of the Commissariat of the First Military Division;
and Honore's education was continued in the capital, for a while at
the establishment of a Monsieur Lepitre, Rue Saint-Louis, and then at
another kept by Messieurs Sganzer and Beuzelin, Rue de Thorigny, both
being situated in the Marais Quarter, near his father's house. So far
as the subjects of the curriculum were concerned, he was still a
mediocre pupil. However, literature began to attract his attention and
efforts, and one composition of his for an examination--the speech of
Brutus's wife after the condemnation of her sons--treasured up by his
sister Laure, is mentioned by her as exhibiting some of the energy and
realistic presentment in which he was ultimately to excel.

When he was seventeen, his father, seeing that there was no chance of
his getting into the Ecole Polytechnique, decided to put him into the
legal profession; and, for the purpose of preliminary training,
induced a solicitor friend, Guillonnet de Merville,[*] to take him
into his office in the place of a clerk--no other than Eugene Scribe,
the future dramatist--who had just quitted law for literature. During
the eighteen months passed here, Balzac went to lectures at the
Sorbonne University, and was coached by private tutors. Among the
College professors he heard were Villemain, Guizot, and Cousin. These
great teachers converted his passion for reading into more serious
habits of study; and, in order to profit more by their lessons, he
often spent his leisure hours in the libraries of the city and sought
out old books of value in the cases of the dealers along the Quays.

[*] /An Episode under the Terror/ was dedicated to him.

The pocket-money required for such purchases was principally supplied
by his grandmother, who permitted him to win from her at whist or
boston in the evenings he remained at home. A friend of his
grandmother's that lived in a neighbouring flat was likewise very kind
to him. She was an old maiden lady who had been acquainted with
Beaumarchais, and delighted to chat with her protege about the author
of the /Mariage de Figaro/. Though now a young man, Honore was not
tall; five feet two was his exact height. Retaining his childish love
of laughter and fun of every kind, he showed at present greater
facility in learning, with a faculty of memory that was prodigious.
Having to go with his sisters to balls, he took lessons in dancing;
but, happening to meet with an unlucky fall, and resenting the smiles
and giggling his accident called forth among the girls, he renounced
attempts at tripping on the light, fantastic toe, and devoted
subsequent visits to the task of jotting down notes.

A second period of eighteen months in the office of a notary, Maitre
Passez, completed his law apprenticeship. In the first pages of
/Colonel Chabert/ the novelist gives us a sketch of the interior where
he acquired his knowledge of chicane. Our nostrils are familiarized
with its stove-heated atmosphere, our eyes with the yellow-billed
walls, the dirty floor, the greasy furniture, the bundles of papers,
the chimney-piece covered with bottles and glasses and bits of bread
and cheese; and our ears are assailed by the quips and jokes and puns
of the clerks and office-boys who were his companions for a time. He
lingers over his reminiscences, which, though pleasant from their
connection with his lost youth, had none the less to do with men and
things that settled the foundation of his maturer pessimism. An
article of his in 1839, entitled the /Notary/, says:--

"After five years passed in a notary's office, it is hard for a young
man to conserve his candour. He has seen the hideous origins of all
fortunes, the disputes of heirs over corpses not yet cold, the human
heart in conflict with the Code. . . . A lawyer's office is a
confessional where the various passions come to empty out their bag of
bad ideas and to consult about their cases of conscience while seeking
means of execution."

While we have no conclusive evidence on the point, it is yet probable
that, at least for a while, Balzac had, during these years of legal
training, serious thoughts of adopting law as his career. Otherwise he
would scarcely have troubled to gain such an extensive acquaintance
with everything appertaining to its theory and practice--knowledge
which he afterwards utilized in several of his books, notably in
/Cesar Birotteau/ and the /Marriage Contract/. However, in 1819, he
had definitely made up his mind to follow Scribe's example. At this
date his father informed him that an opportunity offered itself for
him to become a junior partner in a solicitor's practice, which might
be ultimately purchased with money advanced him and the dowry that an
advantageous marriage would bring. When the newly-fledged Bachelor of
Laws declared that it was impossible for him to accept the proposal,
and that he had determined to become a man of letters, trusting to his
pen for a living, the elder Balzac's astonishment was unbounded. If
any echoes of his son's recent cogitations and conversations on the
subject had come to the father's ears, they had been deemed so much
empty talk; and the friends who were consulted in the dilemma had
nothing more encouraging to say. One of them pronounced that Honore
was worth nothing better than to make a scrivener of or a clerk in
some Government department. The poor fellow had a good handwriting--
this, indeed, deteriorated later. Through his parents' influence, it
was thought he might ultimately attain a moderate competency. Perhaps
Laure, the favourite sister and early confidante of the novelist, may
have used persuasion at this juncture with her father and mother. At
any rate, as the issue of a great deal of lively discussion, the
parents agreed to let Honore make a two years' experiment as a free
lance in the ranks of the book-writing tribe. By the end of that time,
they no doubt imagined he would be glad enough to re-enact the parable
of the prodigal son and start in some safer trade.

CHAPTER III

EXPERIMENTS IN LITERATURE AND BUSINESS

It happened that Honore's enlistment in the army of /litterateurs/
coincided with considerable changes in his parents' circumstances. His
father had just been retired on a pension and had recently lost money
in two investments. As there were a couple of daughters to be provided
for, the family, for the sake of economy, quitted Paris and went to
live at Villeparisis, six leagues distant from the capital, where a
modest country-house had been bought. Honore, by dint of insistence,
obtained permission to remain in Paris, where he would be freer to
work and could more easily get into relations with publishers; and a
meagrely furnished attic-study was rented for him at No. 9 Rue
Lesdiguieres, a street near the Arsenal, still bearing the same name.
A small monthly allowance was made him, just enough to keep him from
starving; and an old woman, Mother Comin--the Iris-messenger, he
facetiously called her--who had been in the family's service and was
staying on in the city, undertook to pay him occasional visits and to
report should he be in difficulties.

The novelty of his semi-independence caused him at first to look with
cheerful eye on his narrow surroundings. To his sister he wrote in
April 1819:--

"Here are some details about my way of living. I have taken a servant.

"A servant! What can you be thinking of!

"Yes; a servant. His name is as funny as that of Dr. Nacquart's
domestic. The Doctor's is Tranquil; mine is Myself. He is a bad
acquisition! . . . Myself is idle, clumsy, and improvident. When his
master is hungry and thirsty, he has sometimes neither bread nor water
to give him; he does not know how to protect himself against the wind,
which blows through the door and window like Tulou through his flute,
but less agreeably. As soon as I am awake, I ring for Myself, and he
makes my bed. He sets to sweeping, and is not very deft in the
exercise.

"Myself!

"Yes, Sir.

"Just look at the cobweb where that big fly is buzzing loud enough to
deafen me, and at those bits of fluff under the bed, and at that dust
on the windows blinding me.

"Why, sir, I don't see anything.

"Tut, tut! hold your tongue, impudence!

"And he does, singing while he sweeps and sweeping while he sings,
laughs in talking and talks in laughing. He has arranged my linen in
the cupboard by the chimney, after papering the receptacle white; and,
with a three-penny blue paper and bordering, he has made a screen. The
room he has painted from the book-case to the fireplace. On the whole,
he is a good fellow."

In the introduction to /Facino Cane/, which Balzac wrote some fifteen
years later, there is a return of memory to this sojourn in the
Lesdiguieres garret. "I lived frugally," he says; "I had accepted all
the conditions of monastic life, so needful to the worker. When it was
fine, the utmost I did was to go for a stroll on the Boulevard
Bourdon. One hobby alone enticed me from my studious habits, and even
that was study. I used to observe the manners of the Faubourg, its
inhabitants, and their characters. Dressed as plainly as the workmen,
indifferent to decorum, I aroused no mistrust, and could mix with them
and watch their bargaining and quarrelling with each other as they
went home from their toil. My faculty of observation had become
intuitive; it penetrated the soul without neglecting the body, or
rather it so well grasped exterior details that at once it pierced
beyond. It gave me the power of living the life of the individual in
whom it was exercised, enabling me to put myself in his skin, just at
the dervish of the /Arabian Nights/ entered the body and soul of those
over whom he pronounced certain words."

The would-be man of letters pushed his hobby even to dogging people to
their homes, and to registering in note-book or brain their
conversations--records of joys, sorrows, and interests.

"I could realize their existence," he affirms; "I felt their rags on
my back. I walked with my feet in their worn-out shoes; it was the
dreaming of a man awake. . . . To quit my own habits and become
another by the intoxication of my moral faculties at will, such was my
diversion. To what do I owe this gift? Is it second sight? Is it one
of those possessions of the mind that lead to madness? I have never
sought out the causes of this gift. I have it and use it--that is all
I can say."

Honore's 'prentice attempts at producing a masterpiece oscillated
between the novel and the drama. Two stories, entitled respectively
/Coquecigrue/ (an imaginary animal) and /Stella/, were abandoned
before they were begun. A comic opera had the same fate. The /Two
Philosophers/, a farce in which a couple of sham sages mocked at the
world and quarrelled with each other, while secretly coveting the good
things they affected to despise, appears to have been worked at, but
uselessly. Next a tragedy, tackled with greater resolution, was
composed and entirely finished. Curiously, the subject of it,
/Cromwell/, was the same as that chosen by Victor Hugo, a few years
later, to achieve the overthrow of classicism and the substitution of
Romanticism in its stead.

The drama was written in verse, a form of literary composition foreign
to Balzac's talent. Even during the months he laboured at his task, he
confessed to Laure, 'midst his sallies of joking, that what he was
writing teemed with defective lines. He polished and repolished,
however, hoping to overcome these drawbacks, upheld by his invincible
self-confidence. The piece, as sketched out in his correspondence,
made large alterations in English history. Its interest hinged chiefly
on the dilemma created in Cromwell's mind by his two sons falling into
the hands of a small Royalist force, and by Charles's ordering them to
be given up without conditions to their father, although the King was
a prisoner. Posed in the third act, the dilemma was solved in the
fourth by Cromwell's decision to condemn the King, notwithstanding his
generosity. At the close of the play, the Queen escaped from England,
crying aloud for vengeance, which she intended to seek in all
quarters. France would combat the English, would defeat and crush them
in the end.

"I mean my tragedy to be the breviary of peoples and kings," he
proudly informed his sister. "It is impossible for you not to find the
plan superb. How the interest grows from scene to scene! The incident
of Cromwell's sons is most happily invented. Charles's magnanimity in
restoring to Cromwell his sons is finer than that of Augustus
pardoning Cinna." In blowing his own trumpet Balzac was early an
adept.

To stimulate his imagination and reflection, he transferred his daily
walk from the Jardin des Plantes to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery. "There
I make," he explained, "studies of grief useful for my /Cromwell/.
Real grief is so hard to depict; it requires so much simplicity." His
garret had still its charm. "The time I spend in it will be sweet to
look back upon," he said. "To live as I like, to work in my own way,
to go to sleep conjuring up the future, which I imagine beautiful, to
have Rousseau's Julie as a sweetheart, La Fontaine and Moliere as
friends, Racine as a master, and Pere Lachaise as a promenade ground!
Ah! if it could only last for ever!" His dreaming led him on to wider
anticipations even than those of literary glory. "If I am to be a
grand fellow (which, it's true, we don't yet know), I may add to my
fame as a great author that of being a great citizen. This is a
tempting ambition also."

At the end of April 1820, he went to Villeparisis with his completed
tragedy. Counting on a triumph, he had requested that some
acquaintances should be invited to the house to hear it read aloud.
Among those present was the gentleman who had advised his turning
clerk in the Civil Service. The reading commenced, and, as it
progressed, the youthful author noticed that his audience first showed
signs of being bored, then of being bewildered, and lastly of being
frankly dissatisfied and hostile. Laure was dumbfounded. The candid
gentleman broke out into uncompromising, scathing condemnation; and
those who were most indulgent were obliged to pronounce that the
famous tragedy was a failure. Honore defended his production with
energy; and, to settle the dispute, his father proposed it should be
submitted to an old professor of the Ecole Polytechnique, whom he
knew, and who should act as umpire. This course was adopted; and the
Professor, after careful examination of the manuscript, opined that
Honore would act wisely in preferring any other career to literature.

The verdict was received with more calmness than might have been
expected. Instead of twisting his own neck, as he had hinted he might,
if unsuccessful, the young author quietly remarked that tragedies were
not his forte and that he intended to devote himself to novels.

As the price of their assent to his continuance in writing, Honore's
parents stipulated that he should quit his garret and come home. The
return was all the more advisable as Laure was about to be married to
a Monsieur Surville, who was a civil engineer, and a gap was thus
created in the home circle, which his presence could prevent from
being so much felt.[*] His health besides had suffered during his
fifteen months of self-imposed privations. In after-life he complained
much to some of his friends--Auguste Fessart and Madame Hanska amongst
others--of his parents' or rather his mother's hardness to him while
he was in the Lesdiguieres Street lodgings, and asserted that, if more
liberality had then been displayed, most of his subsequent misfortunes
would have been avoided. This is by no means certain. His troubles and
burdens would seem to have been caused far more by mistakes of
judgment and improvidence than by any stress of circumstance.

[*] Laurence, the younger sister, was married in 1821, twelve months
after her sister. Her husband was Monsieur de Montzaigle. She died
before the close of the decade.

For the next five years he remained with his father and mother,
excepting the occasional visits paid to Touraine, L'Isle-Adam, or
Bayeux, at which last place his sister Laure was settled for a while.
In a letter to her there he banteringly spoke of his desire to enter
the matrimonial state: "Look me out some widow who is a rich heiress,"
he said; "you know what I require. Praise me up to her--twenty-two
years of age, amiable, polite, with eyes of life and fire, the best
husband Heaven has ever made. I will give you fifty per cent on the
dowry and pin-money." He alluded to his mother's worrying disposition
and susceptibility: "We are oddities, forsooth, in our blessed family.
What a pity I cannot put us into novels." This he was to do later.

Beforehand there was his Romantic cycle to be run through, in more
than forty volumes, if Laure's statement could be believed. What she
meant no doubt was sections of volumes or else tales; and even the
composition of forty tales in five years would be a considerable
performance. True, there were partnerships with Le Poitevin de
l'Egreville,[*] Horace Raisson, Etienne Arago. And the material turned
out was of the coarsest kind, generally second-hand, a hash-up of
stories already published, imitations of Monk Lewis, Maturin, Mrs.
Radcliffe, and French writers of the same school, with a little
shuffling of characters and incidents. The preface to the novel that
opened the series--/The Heiress of Birague/--speaks of an old trunk
bequeathed by an uncle and filled with manuscripts, which the author
had merely to edit. And the apology had more truth in it than he meant
it to convey.

[*] Son of Le Poitevin Saint-Alme.

Balzac was quite aware of the small merit of this hack-work. To Laure
he confessed: "My novel is finished. I will send it to you on
condition of your not lending it or boasting of it as a masterpiece."
He could appreciate better achievement, and spoke of /Kenilworth/ as
the finest thing in the world. His excuse was that he had no time to
reflect upon what he wrote. He must write every day to gain the
independence that he sought; and had none but this ignoble way, as he
said, of securing it.

Moreover, there was still the dreaded possibility of his having to
embrace another profession than literature. The notary was dead and
the business had been taken over by some one else, so that this danger
no longer threatened him; but the candid friend was inquiring about a
second sinecure. "What a terrible man!" exclaimed Honore.

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