Balzac

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The /Chouans/, which his two or three months' sojourn at Fougeres
enabled him to get on with rapidly, was completed after his return to
Paris, and was published under his own name in 1829. Charles Vimont,
who accepted and brought it out, paid him no more than a thousand
francs. The book, although it was not badly written, and contained
plenty of incident, very fair characterization, of the minor
personages especially, and local colouring imitated from Walter Scott,
made no great impression. For the ordinary reader it differed too
little from the Romanticism with which he was familiar. Moreover, the
action savoured too much of the melodramatic; and the character of
Mademoiselle de Verneuil, and that of the Chouan chief, whom she had
promised to deliver up to the emissaries of Fouche, were too nebulous
to gain general sympathy, even with the heroine's tragic devotion.
There is, however, a fine sketch of Brittany and of its spirit of
revolt; the numerous figures of the background are vigorously
executed, and nearly all the episodes of the drama are skilfully
presented. A perusal of the /Chouans/ makes us regret that there was
hardly any return to this kind of composition in the author's after-
work.

When embarking on his publishing enterprise, Balzac went to live in an
apartment of the Rue Tournon, No. 2[*] close to the Luxembourg. He
abandoned it for the Rue des Marais in 1826; and, this latter abode
being given up in 1828, he removed on his return from Brittany to No.
4, Rue Cassini, where he remained for some years. A friend of his,
Latouche--soon to become an enemy--helped him to liven up the walls of
his study with the famous blue calico that had adorned his room over
the printing office. Certain busybodies spread the report that he was
furnishing his new apartment extravagantly; and Laure, to whose ear
the tattle had come, ventured to allude to it in a letter reproaching
him with remissness in writing home and to her. The accusation of
extravagance, which later he really merited, was at this moment a
trifle previous, money being scarce and credit also. "Stamps and
omnibus fares are expenses I cannot afford," he assured his sister;
"and I abstain from going out in order to save my clothes."

[*] Some early biographers state that the novelist went to the Rue
Tournon after his bankruptcy. This is a mistake.

However, he was now on the point of scoring a literary success. In the
same year as his /Chouans/ appeared his /Physiology of Marriage/, a
book of satire and caricature having a distinct stamp of his maturer
manner. Werdet, for a number of years his publisher and friend,
relates in his /Portrait Intime/ that Balzac, while still in the
Lesdiguieres Street garret, had gone one day to Alphonse Levavasseur
and offered, in return for a royalty and a cash installment of two
hundred francs, to supply him with a book to be entitled: /Manual of
the Business Man, by a former Notary's Clerk/. It was agreed that the
manuscript should be handed in at the end of the month; and the two
hundred francs were paid down. In vain the publisher waited for his
Manual. Ultimately he hunted out his debtor; and the latter had to
confess that the long-promised manuscript had never been written. In
order to calm the creditor's indignation, Balzac read to him some
fragments of another book which he was really engaged upon. After
listening for a while, Levavasseur's countenance grew serene: "I will
pay you two thousand francs for this production when finished,
Monsieur," he said; "and we will cancel the old transaction. Come with
me. I will give you the first thousand francs now. The rest you shall
have as soon as I get the last corrected proofs." "Dear publisher,
your speech is golden," cried Balzac; "I accept." Nevertheless, the
proofs were not delivered until 1829. The book immediately became
popular. "From the day of its appearance," comments Werdet,
"literature counted another master and France another Moliere."

The verdict is exact only if the /Physiology/ is regarded in
conjunction with the novelist's after achievement in the domain of
realistic fiction. Alone it would not rank so high. Flippant, cynical,
immoral--these epithets, which were freely applied to it, all have
their justification when one looks at the work from any other
standpoint than that of its being a very amusing and clever exposition
of sex relations governed by interest and passion. Both facts and
philosophy are confined within an exceedingly narrow horizon, one in
which the writer was most thoroughly at home, which explains why they
bear the imprint of a mind already /blase/.

From a letter Balzac sent to Levavasseur, while finishing the last
pages of the manuscript, it appears that he commenced his task as a
jest and completed it with more serious purpose: "I intended to dash
off a pleasantry," he told him, "and you came one morning and asked me
to do in three months what Brillat-Savarin took ten years to do. I
haven't an idea which is not the /Physiology/. I dream of it, I am
absorbed by it."

The sale of the book was in a measure due to the sort of scandal it
provoked. Ladies especially bought the volume to find out for
themselves how far they had been maligned; and Levavasseur, who was
pleased with his profits, introduced Balzac to Emile de Girardin, then
chief editor of the /Mode/, to which paper he now began to contribute
light articles, not to speak of other journals, which were only too
glad to receive something from his pen. The extent to which the fair
sex read the /Physiology/ and were affected by it is illustrated by a
story that Werdet tells of a hoax perpetrated at Balzac's expense by a
number of his society friends, who had cause to complain of his
uppishness towards them, a treatment based not merely on the belief he
entertained in his literary superiority, but on his pretensions to
aristocratic descent. The story belongs more properly to the middle
thirties, when he had been using the prefix "de" before his name
already for some years, justifying himself on the ground that his
father claimed issue from an old family that had resisted the Auvergne
invasion and had begotten the d'Entragues stock. His father, moreover,
so he said, had discovered documents in the Charter House establishing
a concession of lands made by a de Balzac in the fifth century; and a
copy of the transaction had been registered by the Paris Parliament.

Between 1833 and 1836 one of the most celebrated Paris "sets" was that
of the Opera "lions," seven young aristocratic sparks composing it,
or, to be precise, six, together with the Chevalier d'Entragues de
Balzac, as his friends jokingly dubbed him--he being an elder. It was
the period of his first flush of prosperity, when he drove about in a
hired carriage resplendent with the d'Entragues coat of arms, which
cost him five hundred francs a month; had a majestic coachman in fine
livery and a Tom Thumb groom; sported himself in gorgeous garments and
strutted about in the Opera /foyer/, amidst the real or feigned
admiration of his fellows.

To revenge themselves for their mentor's superciliousness towards
them, the six other /lions/ induced a dancer at the Opera to play the
part of a supposed Duke's daughter smitten with the great man's
writings and person, a role she undertook the more willingly as, being
well acquainted with the former, she was anxious to prove to him that
he was not so perspicacious as he deemed himself. An Opera ball was
chosen for the adventure; and Balzac was duly baited and taken in tow
by the lady, whose mask only half concealed her beauty. Thus began a
flirtation, with subsequent clandestine meetings, allowing the fair
unknown to fool him to the top of her bent. The author wanted to
propose for her hand to the Duke her father; but, cleverly using her
knowledge of his books, the sly jade showed him that he would have no
chance of being accepted. At last she hinted she would like to visit
him in his author's sanctum; and the delighted novelist went to most
lavish expense in fitting up a boudoir to receive her. The visit was
presumably a secret one. Protected by a young man employed at the
Opera, to whom she was engaged, and who accompanied her in the
disguise of a negro, she went to the Rue des Batailles one evening and
graciously listened to the enraptured conversation of her victim till
towards midnight, when her mother, who was in the plot, came to fetch
her. The novelist's fury and humiliation were extreme on his learning
how neatly he had been tricked, and it was some time before he
ventured to reappear in his accustomed haunts. As narrated by Werdet,
the story is a good deal embellished, and some of the details that he
gives were probably invented; but the main outline he vouches to be
true.

Among the editors of journals who sought Balzac's collaboration after
the publication of the /Physiology/ were Buloz of the /Revue de Paris/
and Victor Ratier of the /Silhouette/. To the latter of them, in 1831,
he wrote from La Grenadiere, where he had gone to recruit, a letter
revealing a curiously mixed state of mind in this dawning period of
fame. He would seem to have been under a presentiment of the long
years of struggle and incessant toil he was about to be involved in,
and to have felt a shrinking of his physical nature from them.

"Oh! if you knew what Touraine is like," he exclaimed. "Here one
forgets everything else. I forgive the inhabitants for being stupid.
They are so happy. Now, you know that people who enjoy much are
naturally stupid. Touraine admirably explains the lazzarone. I have
come to regard glory, the Chamber, politics, the future, literature,
as veritable poison-balls to kill wandering, homeless dogs, and I say
to myself: 'Virtue, happiness, life, are summed up in six hundred
francs income on the bank of the Loire. . . .' My house is situated
half-way up the hill, near a delightful river bordered with flowers,
whence I behold landscapes a thousand times more beautiful than all
those with which rascally travellers bore their readers. Touraine
appears to me like a /pate de foie gras/, in which one plunges up to
the chin; and its wine is delicious. Instead of intoxicating, it makes
you piggy and happy. . . . Just fancy, I have been on the most poetic
trip possible in France--from here to the heart of Brittany by water,
passing between the most ravishing scenery in the world. I felt my
thoughts go with the stream, which, near the sea, becomes immense. Oh,
to lead the life of a Mohican, to run about the rocks, to swim in the
sea, to breathe in the fresh air and sun! Oh, I have realized the
savage! Oh, I have excellently understood the corsair, the adventurer
--their lives of opposition; and I reflected: 'Life is courage, good
rifles, the art of steering in the open ocean, and the hatred of man--
of the Englishman, for example.' (Here Balzac is of his time.) Coming
back hither, the ex-corsair has turned dealer in ideas. Just imagine,
now, a man so vagabond beginning on an article entitled, /Treatise of
Fashionable Life/, and making an octavo volume of it, which the /Mode/
is going to print, and some publisher reprint. . . . Egad! At the
present moment literature is a vile trade. It leads to nothing, and I
itch to go a-wandering and risk my existence in some living
drama. . . . Since I have seen the real splendours of this spot, I
have grown very philosophic, and, putting my foot on an ant-hill, I
exclaim, like the immortal Bonaparte: 'That, or men, what is it all in
presence of Saturn or Venus, or the Pole Star?' And methinks that the
ocean, a brig, and an English vessel to engulf, is better than a
writing-desk, a pen, and the Rue Saint-Denis."

About the events of the 1830 Revolution the novelist was apparently
but little concerned. True, the change was one of dynasty only, not of
/regime/, albeit Louis-Philippe posed rather as a plebiscitary
monarch. Balzac's clericalism and royalism, which ultimately became so
crystallized, were at this date in a position of unstable equilibrium.
At one moment his criticisms have an air of condemning the monarchic
principle, at another they point to his being a pillar of the ancient
system of things. On this occasion he was twitted by Madame Zulma
Carraud, his sister's friend, with whom his relations grew more
intimate as his celebrity augmented; and he defended himself by a
confession of faith which forecast his endeavours--less persistent
than his desires--to add the statesman's laurels to those of the
/litterateur/. His doctrine, following the Machiavellian tradition,
was that the genius of government consists in operating the fusion of
men and things--a method which demonstrated Napoleon and Louis XVIII.
alike to be men of talent. Both of them restrained all the various
parties in France--the one by force, the other by ruse, because the
one rode horseback, the other in a carriage. . . . France, he
continued, ought to be a constitutional monarchy, with an hereditary
Royal Family, a House of Lords extraordinarily powerful and
representing property, etc., with all possible guarantees of heredity
and privilege; then she should have a second, elective assembly to
represent every interest of the intermediary mass separating high
social positions from what was called the people. The bulk of the laws
and their spirit should tend to enlighten the people as much as
possible--the people that had nothing--workmen, proletaries, etc.--so
as to bring the greatest number of men to that condition of well-being
which distinguished the intermediary mass; but the people should be
left under the most puissant yoke, in such a way that the individual
units might find light, aid, and protection, and that no idea, no
form, no transaction might render them turbulent. The richer classes
must enjoy the widest liberty practicable, since they had a stake in
the country. To the Government he wished the utmost force possible,
its interests being the same as those of the rich and the bourgeois,
viz. to render the lowest class happy and to aggrandize the middle
class, in which resided the veritable puissance of States. If rich
people and the hereditary fortunes of the Upper Chamber, corrupted by
their manners and customs, engendered certain abuses, these were
inseparable from all society, and must be accepted with the advantages
they yielded.

This conception of the classes and the masses which he afterwards set
forth more fully in his /Country Doctor/ and /Village Cure/, partly
explains why all his best work, besides being impregnated with
fatalism, has such a constant outlook on the past. It was a dogma with
him rather than a philosophy, and was clung to more from taste than
from reasonable conviction. He believed in aristocratic prerogative,
because he believed in himself, and ranked himself as high as, or
rather higher than, the noble. This was at the bottom of his doctrine;
but he was glad all the same to have his claim supported by such
outward signs of the inward grace as were afforded by vague genealogy
and the homage of the great. Duchesses were his predilection when they
were forthcoming; failing them, countesses were esteemed.

The Duchess d'Abrantes--one of his early admirers--to whom he
dedicated his /Forsaken Woman/, was herself a colleague in letters;
and he was able to render her some service through his relations with
publishers. Their correspondence shows them to have been on very
friendly terms. In one of his letters to her, he insisted on his
inability to submit to any yoke, and rebutted her insinuation that he
permitted himself to be led--possibly the Duchess's hint referred to
Madame de Berny. "My character," he said, "is the most singular one I
have ever come across. I study myself as I might another person. I
comprise in my five feet two every incoherence, every contrast
possible; and those who think me vain, prodigal, headstrong,
frivolous, inconsistent, foppish, careless, idle, unstable, giddy,
wavering, talkative, tactless, ill-bred, impolite, crotchety,
humoursome, will be just as right as those who might affirm me to be
thrifty, modest, plucky, tenacious, energetic, hardworking, constant,
taciturn, cute, polite, merry. Nothing astonishes me more than myself.
I am inclined to conclude I am the plaything of circumstances. Does
this kaleidoscope result from the fact that, into the soul of those
who claim to paint all the affections and the human heart, chance
casts each and every of these same affections in order that by the
strength of their imagination they may feel what they depict? And can
it be that observation is only a sort of memory proper to aid this
mobile imagination? I begin to be of this opinion."

Balzac appears to have been introduced to the Duchess d'Abrantes about
the year 1830, when he was engaged in writing his /Shagreen Skin/,
which, out of the numerous pieces of fiction produced within this and
the next twelve months, added most to his notoriety, though inferior
to such stories as the /House of the Tennis-playing Cat/, and even to
the /Sceaux Ball/ in the more proper qualities of the novel.

The /Shagreen Skin/ is the adventure of a young man who, after sowing
his wild oats and losing his last crown at the gaming table, goes to
end his troubles in the river, but is prevented from carrying out his
intention by being fortuitously presented with a piece of shagreen
skin, which has the marvellous property of gratifying its possessor's
every wish, yet, meanwhile, shrinks with each gratification, and in
the same proportion curtails its possessor's life. On this warp of
fairy tale, the author weaves a woof of romance and reality most oddly
blended. The imitations of predecessors are numerous. The style is
turgid, the thought is shallow, the sentiment is exaggerated. But very
little of the sober characterization soon to be manifested in other
books is displayed in this one. The best that can be said is that the
thing has the same cleverness as the /Physiology/, with here and there
indications--and clear ones--of the novelist's later power. He himself
grossly overestimated it, as, indeed, he overestimated not a few of
his poorer productions--maybe because they cost him greater toil than
his masterpieces, which generally, after long, unconscious gestation,
issued rapidly and painless from him.

An amusing expression of this self-praise has come down to us in the
puff he composed on the occasion of a reprint of the /Shagreen Skin/
by Gosselin in 1832. "The /Philosophic Tales/ of Monsieur de Balzac,"
it announced, "have appeared this week. The /Shagreen Skin/ is judged
as the admirable novels of Anne Radcliffe were judged. Such things
escape annalists and commentators. The eager reader lays hold of these
books. They bring sleeplessness into the mansions of the rich and into
the garret of the poet; they animate the village. In winter they give
a livelier reflection to the sparkling log, great privileges to the
story-teller. It is nature, in sooth, who creates story-tellers.
Vainly are you a learned, grave writer, if you have not been born a
story-teller, and you will never obtain the popularity of the
/Mysteries of Udolpho/ and the /Shagreen Skin/, the /Arabian Nights/,
and Monsieur de Balzac. I have somewhere read that God created Adam,
the nomenclator, saying to him: You are the story-teller. And what a
story-teller! What verve and wit! What indefatigable perseverance in
painting everything, daring everything, branding everything! How the
world is dissected by this man! What an annalist! What passion and
what coolness!

"The /Philosophic Tales/ are the red-hot interpretation of a
civilization ruined by debauch and well-being, which Monsieur de
Balzac exposes in the pillory. The /Arabian Nights/ are the complete
history of the luxurious East in its days of happiness and perfumed
dreams. /Candide/ is the epitome of an epoch in which there were
bastilles, a stag-park, and an absolute king. By thus taking at the
first bound a place beside these formidable or graceful tale-tellers,
Monsieur de Balzac proves one thing that remained to be proved; to
wit, that the drama, which was no longer possible to-day on the stage,
was still possible in the story--that our society, so dangerously
sceptical, /blase/, and scornful, could yet be moved by the galvanic
shocks of this poetry of the senses--full of life and colour, in flesh
and blood, drunk with wine and lust--in which Monsieur de Balzac
revels with such delight. Thus, the surprise was great, when, thanks
to this story-teller, we still found among us something resembling
poetry--feasts, intoxication, the light o' love giving her caresses
amidst an orgie, the brimming punch-bowl crowned with blue flames, the
yellow-gloved politician, scented adultery, the girl indulging in
pleasure and love and dreaming aloud, poverty clean and neat,
surrounded with respectability and happy hazard--we have seen all this
in Balzac. The Opera with its lemans, the pink boudoir and its flossy
hangings, the feast and its surfeits; we have even seen Moliere's
doctor reappear, such need has this man of sarcasm and grotesqueness.
The further you advance in the /Shagreen Skin/--vices, lost virtues,
poverties, boredom, deep silence, dry-as-dust science, angular,
witless scepticism, laughable egotism, puerile vanities, venal loves,
Jewish second-hand dealers, etc.--the more astonished and pained you
will be to recognize that the nineteenth century in which you live is
so made up. The /Shagreen Skin/ is /Candide/ with Beranger's notes; it
is poverty, luxury, faith, mockery; it is the heartless breast, the
brainless cranium of the nineteenth century--the century so bedizened
and scented, so revolutionary, so ill-read, so little worth, the
century of brilliant phantasmagorias, of which in fifty years' time
nothing will be seizable except Monsieur de Balzac's /Shagreen Skin/."

On account of its sensationalism, the /Shagreen Skin/ had a success of
curiosity equal, and, if anything, superior to that of the
/Physiology/. The author, however, had to defend himself against the
charge of copying foreign literature--Hoffman's tales in particular.
One of his correspondents, the Duchess de Castries, who subsequently
flattered him and flirted with him, wrote to him incognito, taking
exception to certain statements he had made in each of his two popular
works. Replying to her, he for the first time spoke of his desire to
develop his fiction into a vast series of volumes destined to make
known to posterity the life of his century.

Great schemes were always to be Balzac's day-dreaming, one chasing the
other in his fancy. They filled his thoughts, and in his heart were
his constant aim, far more than to be loved, for all he asserted of
this last desire. If literature was the one means he resorted to in
his efforts to attain them, this was because every other means
deceived his expectation, and not because he deliberately preferred it
to all others. He owned the fact without reservation. In the case of a
man whose literary achievement was so high, such slighting of letters
has its significance, and is curious. Taken in conjunction with other
evidence furnished by his letters, it proves that genius, though
sometimes clearly the pure, simple moving of a spirit that cannot be
resisted, is also--and perhaps as often--a calculating partnership,
and that the work of art is a compromise. Would Balzac have written
better if his motive had been single? It is not certain.

During these early days of his popularity, a seat in the Chamber of
Deputies was his will o' the wisp. Aided by the /Dilecta's/ friends,
he offered himself as a candidate in two constituencies, Angouleme and
Cambrai, after publishing his pamphlet: /An Inquiry into the Policy of
Two Ministries/. With a view to shining in the future Parliament, he
sharpened his witticisms, rounded his periods, polished his style,
exercised himself in opposing short phrases to others of Ciceronian
length, endeavouring the while to put poetry and observation into a
new subject. At least these things were in his mind, as his
communication to Berthoud of the Cambrai /Gazette/ testified. His
intention was to become an orator, he said. Had he been elected, he
might have become the rival of Thiers. They were about the same age.
Then France might have had two "little bourgeois" instead of one,
unless one of the two had knocked the other out. But whether
conquering or conquered, Balzac the politician would have swallowed up
Balzac the novelist, and /Eugenie Grandet/ would never have been
written. Why he failed at the polls is not clear. Probably he did not
possess enough suppleness to please his party. To tell the truth, we
do not learn definitely to which party he belonged. He was quite
capable of constituting one by himself.

These preoccupations hindered him somewhat in carrying out his
engagements with publishers and editors, so that he did not always get
the money he counted on. Yet he worked hard. His habit, at this time,
was to go to bed at six in the evening and sleep till twelve, and
after, to rise and write for nearly twelve hours at a stretch,
imbibing coffee as a stimulant through these spells of composition.
What recreation he took in Paris was at the theatre or at the houses
of his noble acquaintances, where he went to gossip of an afternoon.
It was exhausting to lead such an existence; and even the transient
fillips given by the coffee were paid for in attacks of indigestion
and in abscesses which threw him into fits of discouragement. When
suffering from these, he poured out his soul to his sister or Madame
Carraud, complaining in his epistles that his destiny compelled him to
run after fame and deprived him of his chance to meet with the ideal
woman. Madame de Berny, with all her devotion, did not satisfy him
now. "Despairing of ever being loved and understood by the woman of my
dreams," he tragically cried, "having met with her only in my heart, I
am plunging again into the tempestuous sphere of political passions
and the stormy, withering atmosphere of literary glory." But the "she"
of his dreams, he added, must be wealthy. He could not conceive of
marriage and love in a cottage. It must be admitted that from his
sources of affection as from his sources of ambition there was a gush
which was rather muddy.

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