Balzac

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Altogether, the year of 1832 was an irritating one for Balzac. A rich
match he had hoped to make fell through. A second attempt of his to
enter the Chamber of Deputies ended in defeat. His books, after their
first season or two of favour, were selling but poorly in France,
although pirated editions were issued and had a large circulation
abroad. Impatiently he meditated plans for doubling and tripling his
revenue. He would emigrate--he would recommence publishing--he would
turn playwright. Amid these three solicitations he moved in a circle
without reaching a conclusion. And fortune, while he was hesitating,
did not come to his door. In default of her visit, not all the
flattering epistles he received from ladies in Russia and Germany--
three and four a day, he asserted--were an adequate compensation. A
journey undertaken for the benefit of his health to Sache, Angouleme,
and Aix forced him to borrow from his mother again, instead of paying
back the capital he owed her. His unfinished manuscripts he had taken
with him, but he found it difficult to get on with them: "I was going
to start work this morning with courage," he wrote to her, "when your
letter came to upset me completely. Do you think it possible for me to
have artistic thoughts when I see all at once the tableau of my
miseries displayed before me as you display them? Do you think I
should toil thus, if I did not feel it?"

The novelist's relations with his mother force the attention of any
one that studies his life. Their two natures were contrary; there were
often conflicts between them. As a child, he seems not to have
comprehended the affection underlying the maternal severity, and to
have entertained a dread of the latter which never entirely left him.
According to his friend Fessart, he used to confess he always
experienced a nervous trembling whenever he heard his mother speak;
and the effect was in some sort the numbing of his faculties when he
was in her presence. Her generous abnegation at the time of his
bankruptcy was a revelation to him; his gratitude for it was sincere;
and from that date onwards, during a number of years, his letters to
her evinced it, yet not consistently; the old distrust recurs, and
also a growing tendency to utilize her as a servant in his concerns.
Having once dipped in her purse, he did not hesitate to hold out his
hand, on each occasion that his needs, real or fancied, prompted him,
being confident of requiting her in the future. His refrain was ever
the same: "Sooner or later, politics, journalism, a marriage, or a big
piece of business luck will make me a Croesus. We must suffer a little
longer." And he finished by exhausting her last penny of capital, and
reduced her to depend on an allowance he gave her, irregularly--an
allowance which, when he died, had to be continued to her from the
purse of another. Madame Balzac was sacrificed to his improvidence and
stupendous egotism; nor can the tenderness of his language--more
frequently than not called forth by some fresh immolation of her
comfort to his interests--disguise this unpleasing side of his
character and action. While he was recouping his strength and spirits,
on the 1832 holiday, she was in Paris negotiating with Pichot of the
/Revue de Paris/, with Gosselin and other publishers, arranging for
proofs, and also for an advance of cash. Even his epistolary good-byes
were odd mixtures of business with sentiment. After casting himself--
through the post--on her bosom and embracing her with effusion, he
terminated by: "Pay everything as you say. On my side, I will gain
money by force, and we will balance the expenses by the receipts."

The book that cost him the greatest efforts during the year of 1832
was his /Louis Lambert/, already mentioned in the second chapter.
Writing about it to his family from Angouleme he explained that he was
attempting in it to vie with Goethe and Byron, with /Faust/ and
/Manfred/. It was to be a conclusive reply to his enemies, and would
make his superiority manifest. Some day or other it would lead science
into new paths. Meantime it would produce a deep impression and
astonish the Swedenborgians. Whether the members of this sect were
astonished, history does not record. Those who were most so were the
novelist's friends, and Madame de Berny among the number. But their
wonder was not a eulogium. First of all, the hero--his /alter ego/--is
a very poor replica of Pascal; and the exalting of Lambert's
intelligence, which was mere self-praise, jarred on them the more, as
they truly loved him. The /Dilecta/, whom he had asked to pass her
frank opinion on it, did not hesitate to tell him some hard truths:
"Goethe and Byron," she said, "have admirably painted the desires of a
superior mind; when reading them, one aggrandizes them by all the
space they have perceived; one admires the scope of their view; one
would fain give them one's soul to help theirs to cover the distance
that separates them from the goal they aspire to reach. But, if an
author comes and tells me he has attained this goal, I no longer see
in him, however great he may be, more than a presumptuous man; his
vanity shocks me, and I diminish him by all the height to which he has
tried to raise himself. . . . I would therefore beg you, dearest, to
cut out of your /Lambert/ everything that might suggest these singular
ideas; for instance: 'The admirable combat of thought arrived at its
greatest force, at its vastest expression' . . . 'The moral world,
whose limits he had thrown back for himself,' cannot be tolerated.
Write, dearest, in such a manner that the whole crowd may perceive you
from everywhere, by the height at which you will have placed yourself;
but do not cry out for people to admire you; for, on all sides, the
largest magnifying-glasses would be directed towards you; and what
becomes of the most delicious object seen by the microscope!"

The lesson was a severe one. Though it did not cure Balzac of his
author's vanity--nothing could cure him of that--it did, for a while
at least, direct his endeavours towards fiction of a more objective
kind.

What he was now capable of in characterization treated objectively he
showed in his /Colonel Chabert/ and the /Cure of Tours/, both of which
were published in the same twelvemonth as /Louis Lambert/. These
stories are exceedingly simple in construction. The Cure is a priest
whose joys and ambitions are modest and innocent. Having reached the
age when indulgence in ease and comfort is excusable, he finds himself
suddenly deprived of them through unwittingly offending his landlady.
She, an old maid, as inwardly shrewish as outwardly pious, utilizes
the Abbe Birotteau and another clergyman, who both lodge with her, to
attract the good society folk of Tours to her evening receptions.
After due experience of these gatherings, the Abbe plays truant,
finding it more agreeable to spend his leisure with friends elsewhere.
His absence causes the landlady's guests to grow remiss and finally to
desert her; so, to revenge herself, the slighted dame, proceeding by
petty pin-pricks, makes the Abbe's life a burden to him, and,
ultimately enlisting the brother clergyman in her schemes of
annoyance, works on his jealousy with such cleverness that their
victim's career is blasted and blighted. Dependent on the development
of the characters, the plot is adroitly and naturally elaborated.
Nowhere is there any forcing of the note; and, in alternate flow,
humour and pathos, of a saner sort than in some of the author's
previous work, run and ripple throughout. With deeper pathos the
novelist tells in /Colonel Chabert/ the virtues of a man of obscure
origin, whose nobleness meets with but scanty recognition, since it
conducts him to the almshouse in his old age. So vivid is the sober
realism of this fine story that the public believed the relation to be
plain, unvarnished facts, and were astonished at the writer's daring
to reveal them in all their detail.

Balzac's autumn trip was prolonged as far as Annecy and Geneva. He had
intended going on to Italy in company with the Duke de Fitz-James. The
latter journey, however, was ultimately abandoned, as he did not
succeed in raising the thousand crowns it required. Travelling on the
top of a coach, he had rather a serious accident when going to Aix. He
was climbing up to the front seat just as the horses set off, and,
having missed his footing, fell with all his weight against the iron
step. The strap, which he clutched in his fall, saved him from coming
to the ground; but the impact of his eighty-four kilograms caused the
sharp iron to enter the flesh of his leg pretty deeply. This wound
took some time to heal, and the annoyance it cause him was aggravated
by an additional malady in his stomach which he tried to deal with by
consulting a mysterious quack in Paris, sending him through his
mother, two pieces of flannel that he had been wearing next his skin.
The doctor was to examine No. 1 flannel, and by it to determine the
seat and the cause of the affection, as well as the treatment to be
followed; then he was to examine No. 2, and to give certain
instructions as to its further use. Balzac asked his mother to touch
the flannels only with paper, so as not to interfere with their
effluvia. This belief of his in magnetism of an occult kind was an
inheritance. His mother, it has already been said, was a mystic. Her
books of this doctrine comprised more than a hundred volumes of Saint-
Martin, Swedenborg, Madame Guyon, Jacob Boehm, and others. All these
writers he was familiar with. Throughout his life, the influence of
their teaching and his mother's firm belief remained with him. On his
conduct and practice their effect was harmless; but in his literary
work they were a disturbance, and, wherever they intruded, detracted
from its quality.

Happily, he was beginning to be tempted more and more by the artistic
side of things in his daily experience. Of the lesser novels composed
before the end of 1832, several were directly inspired by incidents
brought to his knowledge. The /Red Inn/ was related to him by a former
army surgeon, a friend of the man that was unjustly condemned and
executed. An /Episode under the Terror/ was narrated by the hero
himself. /A Desert Attachment/ was the outcome of a conversation with
Martin, the celebrated tamer of wild beasts. On the other hand,
/Master Cornelius/ was written to correct the false impression of
Louis XI. which he considered Walter Scott had given to his readers in
/Quentin Durward/, this making him very angry. His curiosity
concerning facts and realities of every description led him to seek an
interview with Samson the executioner. Calling one day to see the
Director of Prisons, he found himself in presence of a pale,
melancholy-looking man of noble countenance, whose manners, language,
and apparent education were those of one polished and cultured. It was
Samson. Entering into conversation with this strange personage, the
novelist listened to the particulars of his life. Samson was a
royalist. On the morrow of Louis XVI.'s execution he had suffered the
utmost remorse, and had paid for what was probably the only expiatory
mass said on that day for the repose of the King's soul.

Like other /litterateurs/, Balzac took up many subjects which he did
not go on with. He had this peculiarity besides, that he often
asserted some book to be completed which was either not begun at all
or was in a most unfinished condition. While on the Angouleme and Aix
excursion, he spoke especially of /The Three Cardinals/, /The Battle
of Austerlitz/ (afterwards often alluded to simply as the /Battle/),
and /The Marquis of Carrabas/. Not one of these was ever written. They
were abandoned perhaps on account of other work, or else because the
execution was less easy than the conception. Napoleon, who would have
been a central figure in the /Battle/, is incidentally introduced in
the /Country Doctor/, which was begun in 1832.

Probably, also, to this same date should be assigned the bizarre and
even comical expression of hopes and fears for the future which Balzac
confided to his sister Laure. In order to force himself to take
exercise, he used to correct his proofs either at the printer's or at
her house. Sometimes the weather, to the influence of which he was
very susceptible, sometimes his money-tightness, or his fatigue from
protracted work would cause him to arrive with lack-lustre eyes,
sallow complexion, glum expression and irritable temper. Laure essayed
to console and brighten him.

"Now don't try to comfort me," he answered on one occasion. "I'm a
dead man."

And the dead man began to drawl out his tale of woe, gradually rousing
up as he talked, and, at last, speaking excitedly. But the dolent
accents returned as he opened his proofs and read them.

"I shall never make a name, sis."

"Nonsense! with such books, any one could make a name."

He raised his head; his features relaxed; the sombre tints vanished
from his face.

"You are right, by Jove! . . . these books must live. . . . Besides,
there is Chance. It can protect a Balzac as well as it can a fool.
Indeed, one has only to invent this chance. Let some one of my
millionaire friends (and I have a few), or a banker not knowing what
to do with his money, come and say to me: 'I am aware of your immense
talent and your anxieties; you need such and such a sum to be free;
accept it without scruple; you will pay it back some day or other;
your pen is worth my millions!' That's all I require, my dear sister."

Laure, being accustomed to the appearance of these illusions which
brought back his cheerfulness, never exhibited any surprise at such
soaring notes. Having created the fable, her imaginative brother
continued:

"Those people spend such sums on whims. . . . A handsome deed is a
whim, like any other, and gives joy perpetually. It is something to
say: 'I have saved a Balzac.' Humanity has good impulses of the sort;
and there are people who, without being English, are capable of like
eccentricities. 'Either a millionaire or a banker,' he cried, thumping
on his chest, 'one of them I will have.'"

By dint of talking he had come to accredit the thing, and gleefully
strode about the room, lifting and waving his arms.

"Ah! Balzac is free! You shall see, my dear friends, and my dear
enemies, what his progress is."

In fancy, he entered the Academy! From there it was only a step to the
House of Peers. He beheld himself admitted thither. Why shouldn't he
be a member of the Upper Chamber? This and that person had been
created a peer. Then he was appointed a minister. There was nothing
extraordinary about it. Presidents existed. Were not people who had
boxed the compass of ideas the fittest to govern their fellows? A
programme, a policy was evolved and carried out; and, as everything
was going on smoothly, he had time to think of the millionaire friend
or banker who had assisted him. The generous Maecenas should be
rewarded. He understood the novelist, had lent him money on the
security of his talent, had enabled him to obtain his well-deserved
honours. The benefactor should now have his share in the honour, a
share in the immortality.

After a peregrination of this magnitude and dreams to match, he
alighted from his Pegasus, and spoke as an ordinary mortal--he had
enjoyed himself, and his fit of the dumps was exorcised. Putting the
last touch to his proof-correcting, he left the house with his face
wreathed in smiles.

"Good-bye," he said to his sister, at the door; "I am off home to see
if the banker is there, waiting for me. If he isn't, I shall find some
work to do all the same; and work is my real money-lender."

CHAPTER V

LETTERS TO "THE STRANGER," 1831, 1832

One has little doubt in deciding that, of the two spurs which goaded
Balzac's labours, his desire for wealth acted more persistently and
energetically than his desire for glory. In his conversations, in his
correspondence, money was the eternal theme; in his novels it is
almost always the hinge on which the interest, whether of character,
plot, or passion, depends. Money was his obsession, day and night;
and, in his dormant visions, it must have loomed largely.

Henry Monnier, the caricaturist, used to relate that, meeting him once
on the Boulevard, the novelist tapped him on the shoulder and said:

"I have a sublime idea. In a month I shall have gained five hundred
thousand francs."

"The deuce, you will," replied Monnier; "let's hear how."

"Listen, then," returned his interlocutor. "I will rent a shop on the
Boulevard des Italiens. All Paris is bound to pass by. That's so,
isn't it?"

"Yes. Well, what next?"

"Next, I will establish a store for colonial produce; and, over the
window, I will have printed, in letters of gold: 'Honore de Balzac,
Grocer.' This will create a scandal; everybody will want to see me
serving the customers, with the classical counter-skipper's smock on.
I shall gain my five hundred thousand francs; it's certain. Just
follow my argument. Every day these many people pass along the
Boulevard, and will not fail to enter the shop. Suppose that each
person spends only a sou, since half of it will be profit to me I
shall gain so much a day; consequently, so much a week; so much a
month."

And thereupon, the novelist, launched into transcendental
calculations, soaring with his enthusiasm into the clouds.

It was the same Henry Monnier who, meeting him another time on the
Place de la Bourse, and having had to listen to another of such
mirific demonstrations about a scheme from which both were to derive
millions, answered drily:

"Then lend me five francs on strength of the affair."

Noticing this sort of monomania, in an article which he wrote in the
short-lived /Diogenes/, during the month of August 1856, Amedee Roland
said of Balzac:

"His ambition was to vie in luxury with Alexandre Dumas and Lamartine,
who, before the Revolution of 1848, were the most prodigal and
extravagant authors in the five continents. For anything like a chance
of finding his elusive millions, he would have gone to China. Indeed,
on one occasion, he took it into his head he would start, together
with his friend, Laurent Jan, and go to see the great Mogul,
maintaining that the latter would give him tons of gold in exchange
for a ring he possessed, which came, so he asserted, right down from
Mahomet. It was three o'clock in the morning when he knocked at
Laurent Jan's door to inform his sleeping friend of his project; and
the latter had the greatest difficulty in dissuading him from setting
off forthwith in a post-chaise for India, of course, at the expense of
the monarch in question."

In justice, however, to Balzac, it should be stated that not a few of
his suggestions were sensible enough, and contained ideas which, if
properly put into execution, could have yielded profitable results. As
a matter of fact, some were subsequently exploited by people who
listened to them, or heard of them. A scheme of his for making paper
by an improved process, which he tried to realize in 1833, and which
he induced his mother, his sister's husband, and other friends to
support with their capital, anticipated the employment of esparto
grass and wood, which since has been adopted successfully by others
and has yielded large fortunes to them. The scheme was perhaps
premature in Balzac's day, not to speak of his small business
capacity, which was in an inverse ration to his inventiveness.

From one of his conceptions, at least, there issued an important
benefit to the entire literary profession. Already, in the previous
century, Beaumarchais had attempted to establish a society of authors,
whose aim should be to protect the rights of men of letters. His
efforts then met with no response. Balzac revived the proposal, and
coupled with it others tending to improve the material and style of
printing of books. He had to contend with the hostility of certain
publishers and the indifference of many authors. But his endeavours
were ultimately understood and appreciated; and, not long afterwards,
in 1838, the Societe des Gens de Lettres was founded.

In connection with this campaign, which he waged for a while alone,
there was also his elaboration of the arrangement, first accepted by
Charpentier, which consisted in fixing the percentage of the author's
royalty on the octavo, three-franc-fifty volume at one-tenth of the
published price. One of his discussions with Charpentier on the
subject was overheard in the Café of the Palais Royal by Jules
Sandeau's cousin, who happened to be playing a game of billiards
there. After the departure of Balzac and the publisher, the cousin
remarked that a paper had been forgotten; and, on reading it through,
with his partner in the game, saw a crowd of figures that were so many
hieroglyphics to them. When the paper was restored to the novelist by
Jules Sandeau, who lived in the same set of flats as Balzac, it
transpired that the figures were the calculation of the sum that the
writer might obtain on the decimal basis, if a hundred thousand copies
of any one of his works were sold.

Two of the novelist's most important books appeared in 1833, his
/Country Doctor/ and /Eugenie Grandet/. The former he disposed of to a
new publisher, Mame, who was to print it, at first, unsigned, his old
publisher Gosselin having pre-emption rights, that had not been
redeemed. Referring to it in a letter to Mame, towards the end of
1832, he said: "I have long been desirous of the popular glory which
consists in selling numerous thousands of a small volume like /Atala/,
/Paul and Virginia/, the /Vicar of Wakefield/, /Manon Lescaut/, etc.
The book should go into all hands, those of the child, the girl, the
old man, and even the devotee. Then once, when the book is known, it
will have a large sale, like the /Meditations/ of Lamartine, for
instance, sixty thousand copies. My book is conceived in this spirit;
it is something which the porter and the grand lady can both read. I
have taken the Gospel and the Catechism, two books that sell well, and
so I have made mine. I have laid the scene in a village, and the whole
of the story will be readable, which is rare with me." How high his
hopes of its quality and saleableness were (the two things were oddly
mixed up in his mind), he imparted to Zulma Carraud. "The /Country
Doctor/ has cost me ten times more labour than /Louis Lambert/," he
informed her. "There is not a sentence or an idea in it that has not
been revised, re-read, corrected again and again. It's terrible. But
when one wishes to attain the simple beauty of the Gospel, surpass the
/Vicar of Wakefield/ and put the /Imitation of Jesus Christ/ into
action, one must spare no effort. Emile de Girardin and our good
Borget (his co-tenant at the time) wager the sale will be four hundred
thousand copies. Emile intends to bring out a franc edition, so that
it may be sold like a Prayer Book."

What with his writing for the /Revue de Paris/, to which he was
contributing /Ferragus/, and the pains he gave himself with the
/Country Doctor/, he was unable to deliver the latter work to Mame at
the date stipulated, and the publisher brought a lawsuit against him,
the first of a series of legal disputes he was destined to wage with
publishing firms and magazine editors during his agitated life.

Notwithstanding the advertisement produced him by the lawsuit, the
/Country Doctor/ fell flat in the market. Most of the newspapers spoke
contemptuously of it. One reason given was its loose construction,
there being no plot, and the two love stories being thrust in towards
the end to explain the doctor's altruism and the vicarious paternity
of the Commandant Genestas.

This officer, who is stationed not far from the village close to the
Grande-Chartreuse, pays a few days' visit to a Doctor Benassis there,
under pretext of consulting him professionally. While on the visit he
is initiated into the transformation that has been wrought by the
doctor in the habits of the people and their homes and surroundings--a
regeneration accomplished quietly and gradually, vanquishing hostility
and lethargy and converting the peasant's distrust into love. The
placing of the Commandant's adopted child under the doctor's care, and
Benassis' death, which occurs shortly after, form rather a lame
conclusion to the love stories, which are mysteriously withheld to
tempt the reader to go on with his perusal. For all its dogmatism in
religion and politics, its long arguments in defence of the author's
favourite opinions, and its defective construction, the novel, if one
can call it a novel, is one of Balzac's best creations. The pictures
of country scenes are presented with close fidelity to nature and also
with real artistic arrangement. There are, moreover, delineations of
rustic character that are truer to life than many of the more
celebrated ones in the rest of the novelist's fiction; and, in the
episode entitled the Napoleon of the people,--the narration of an old
soldier of the First Empire,--there is a topical realism that makes
one regret the never-achieved /Battle/. Add to these excellences the
writer's having put into his work, for the nonce, a sincere aspiration
towards the idea; and, despite flaws, the whole can be pronounced
admirable.

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