Balzac

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Both of these two novels were finished and published in 1834. In the
/Search for the Absolute/, we have Balthazar Claes, a man of wealth
and leisure, living in the ancient town of Douai, and married to a
wife who adores him and who has borne him children. Claes' hobby is
scientific research; his aim, the discovery of the origin of things
which he believes can be given him by his crucible. In his family
mansion, of antique Flemish style, which is admirably described by the
novelist at great length, he pursues his tireless experiments; and,
with less justification than Bernard Palissy, encroaches by degrees on
the capital of his fortune, which melts away in his furnace and
alembics. During the first period of his essays, his wife tries to
have confidence in his final success, herself studies all sorts of
learned treatises, in order to be able to converse with him suitably
and to encourage him in his work; but, at last, unable to delude her
own mind any longer, she weeps with her children over the approaching
destruction of their home, and the grief wears her out and kills her.
Luckily the daughter, Marguerite, is made of sterner stuff than her
mother. And, with her brother, she toils to pay her father's debts and
to keep the home together. At the end, Claes himself dies, still
absorbed in his chimera, and his last words are an endeavour to
formulate the marvellous revelation which his disordered brain
persuades him he has now received.

"'Eureka!' he cried with a shrill voice, and fell back on his bed with
a thud. In passing away, he uttered a frightful groan, and his
convulsed eyes, until the doctors closed them, spoke his regret not to
have been able to bequeath to science the key of a mystery whose veil
had been tardily torn aside under the gaunt fingers of Death."

The /Search for the Absolute/ may be classed with /Eugenie Grandet/ in
the category of the novelist's best creations. Though Claes is, as
much as Grandet, and perhaps more, an abnormal being, his sacrifice of
every duty of life to the pursuit of the irrealizable is common enough
in humanity. By reason of the novelist's intense delineation, his
figure shows out in monstrous proportions; but these are skilfully
relieved by the happier fates of the children. The lengthy
descriptions of the opening chapter he defended against his sister
Laure's strictures, asserting that they had ramifications with the
subject which escaped her. His presentment, too, of Marguerite he said
was not forced, as she thought. Marguerite was a Flemish woman, and
Flemish women followed one idea out and, with phlegm, went
unswervingly towards their goal. The labour the book had cost him he
owned to Madame Hanska. Two members of the Academy of Sciences taught
him chemistry, so that he might be exact in his representation of
Claes' experiments; and he read Berzelius into the bargain. Moreover,
he had revised and modified the proofs of the novel no fewer than a
dozen times.

As Werdet tells, the real work of composition, with Balzac, hardly
commenced until he had a set of galley proofs. What he sent first to
the printer, scribbled with his crow's-quill, was a mere sketch; and
the sketch itself was a sort of Chinese puzzle, largely composed of
scratched-out and interpolated sentences; passages and chapters being
moved about in a curious /chasse-croise/, which the type-setters
deciphered and arranged as they best could. Margins and inter-columnal
spaces they found covered with interpolations; a long trailing line
indicated the way here and the way there to the destination of the
inserted passages. A cobweb was regular in comparison to the task
which the printers had to tackle in the hope of finding beginning,
middle, and end. In the various presses where his books were set up,
the employees would never work longer than an hour on end at his
manuscript. And the indemnity he had to pay for corrections reached
sometimes the figure of forty francs per sixteen pages. Numerous were
the difficulties caused on this score with publishers, editors, and
printers. Balzac justified himself by quoting the examples of
Chateaubriand, Ingres, and Meyerbeer in their various arts. To Buloz,
of the /Revue de Paris/, who expostulated, he impatiently replied: "I
will give up fifty francs per sheet to have my hands free. So say no
more about the matter." It is true that Buloz paid him 250 francs per
sheet for his contributions.

Indeed, the novelist's own method of work was a reversal of the
natural alternation of regular periods of activity and repose. He not
only, as he told all his correspondents with wearisome iteration,
burned the midnight oil, but would keep up these eighteen or twenty
hours' daily labour for weeks altogether, until some novel that he was
engaged on was finished. During these spells of composing he would see
no one, read no letters, but write on and on, eating sparingly,
sipping his coffee, and refreshing his jaded anatomy by taking a bath,
in which he would lie for a whole hour, plunged in meditation. After
his voluntary seclusions, he suddenly reappeared in his usual haunts,
active and feverish as ever, note-book ready to hand, in which he
jotted down his thoughts, discoveries, and observations for future
use. On its pages were primitively outlined the features of most of
the women of his fiction.

One of these prolonged /claustrations/, in October 1834--the day was
Sunday--he interrupted by a call, most unexpected, on Werdet. His face
was sallow and gaunt with vigil. He had been stopped in the
description of a spot, he explained, by the uncertainty of his
recollections, and must go into the city in order to refresh them. So
he invited Werdet to accompany him in playing truant for the day. The
morning was spent in the slums, where he gathered the information
required; and the afternoon they whiled away in listening to a concert
at the /Conservatoire/. Here he was welcomed by the fashionables of
both sexes, notwithstanding his shabby costume, which he had donned in
view of his morning's occupation. On quitting the concert room, he
carried Werdet off to dine with him at Very's, the most expensive and
aristocratic restaurant in Paris. The place was full of guests; and
those who were in proximity to the table where the two newcomers sat
down were astounded to see the following menu ordered and practically
consumed by one man, since Werdet, being on diet, took only a soup and
a little chicken: A hundred oysters; twelve chops; a young duck; a
pair of roast partridges; a sole; hors d'oeuvre; sweets; fruit (more
than a dozen pears being swallowed); choice wines; coffee; liqueurs.
Never since Rabelais' or perhaps Louis XIV.'s time, had such a
Gargantuan appetite been witnessed. Balzac was recouping himself for
his fasting.

When the repast, lengthened out by a flow of humorous conversation,
was at length terminated, the nineteenth-century Johnson asked his
Boswell if he had any available cash, as he himself had none. Werdet
confessing only to forty francs, the novelist borrowed a five-franc
piece from him and thundered out his request for the bill. To the
waiter who presented it he handed the coin, at the same time returning
the bill with a few words scribbled at the foot. "Tell the cashier,"
he cried, "that I am Monsieur Honore de Balzac." And he stalked out
with Werdet, whilst all the diners present stared admiringly after the
great man.

But the evening was not yet finished. In the garden of the Palais-
Royal, then more frequented by society than to-day, they met Jules
Sandeau and Emile Regnault. And, as they were near a gambling-saloon,
Balzac, who had an infallible system for breaking the bank, proposed
to Jules that he should go and try his luck. A twenty-franc piece was
wheedled out of Werdet for the experiment, which proved a fiasco.
Next, the novelist, to convince his companions of the accuracy of his
theory, which he further detailed, went and borrowed forty francs from
his heraldic engraver, and sent Sandeau and Regnault into the saloon
again. Alas! fate was once more unkind. They returned minus their
money. To console themselves, they went to the Funambules Theatre, to
see Debureau act in the /Boeuf Enrage/, and Balzac laughed so loud
that he and his party had to leave the theatre. On the morrow Werdet
was called upon to pay the restaurant-keeper sixty-two francs, and to
reimburse the engraver the forty francs loan, which sums, together
with what he had himself advanced, ran Balzac's debit for the day up
to one hundred and twenty-seven francs.

In /Pere Goriot/, the publication of which came close at the heels of
the /Search for the Absolute/, Balzac traces the gradual
impoverishment of a fond father by his two daughters, married, the one
to a nobleman, the other to a banker, and whose husbands, when they
have received the marriage dowry, give their father-in-law, who is a
plebeian, the cold shoulder, and forbid their wives to see him unless
in secret. Goriot's daughters, losing in their grand surroundings the
little filial affection they ever had, exploit the old man's worship
of them shamelessly. If they visit him in the boarding-house to which
he has retired, after selling his home to endow them more richly, it
is solely to get from him for their pleasures the portion of his
wealth he has retained for his own wants. And he never refuses them,
but sells and sells, until, at last, he is reduced to lodge in the
garret of the boarding-house and eat almost the refuse of the table.
Around this tragic central figure are grouped the commensals of the
Vauquer /pension/, Rastignac, the young law-student, with shallow
purse and aristocratic connections; Bianchon, the future great-gun in
medicine, at present walking the hospitals and attending lectures and
practising dissections; Victorine Taillefer, the rejected daughter of
a guilty millionaire; Mademoiselle Michonneau, the soured spinster,
who ferrets out the identity of her fellow-boarder Vautrin, and
betrays to justice this cynical outlaw installed so quietly, and, to
all appearance, safely, in the /pension/, where Madame Vauquer, the
traipsing widow, lords it serenely, attentive only to her profits.

Of these subsidiary characters, two, Vautrin and Rastignac, furnish a
second interest in the story parallel to that of Goriot and his
daughters, and constituting a foil. Under the influence of Paris
surroundings and experience, Rastignac passes from his naïve illusions
to a state of worldly wisdom, which he reaches all the more speedily
as Vautrin is at his elbow, commenting with Mephistophelian shrewdness
on his fellow-men and the society they form. Himself a man of
education, who has sunk from high to low and is branded with the
convict's mark, Vautrin is yet capable of affection of a certain kind;
but, in the mind and heart of the youth he would fain advantage, he is
capable only of inculcating the law of tooth and claw. "A rapid
fortune is the problem that fifty thousand young men are at present
trying to solve who find themselves in your position," he says to
Rastignac. "You are a single one among this number. Judge of the
efforts you have to make and of the desperateness of the struggle. You
must devour each other like spiders in a pot, seeing there are not
fifty thousand good places. Do you know how one gets on here? By the
brilliance of genius or the adroitness of corruption one must enter
the mass of men like a cannon-ball, or slip into it like the plague.
Honesty is of no use." Having a tempter about him of Vautrin's
calibre, strong, undauntable, as humorous as Dickens' Jingle, but
infinitely more unscrupulous and dangerous, Rastignac is gained over,
in spite of his first repulsion. The nursing and burying of Pere
Goriot are his last acts of charity accorded to the claims of his
higher nature, and even these are sullied by his relations with one of
Goriot's daughters. Standing on the cemetery heights, and looking down
towards the Seine and the Vendome column, he flings a defiance to the
society spread beneath him, the society he despises but still wishes
to conquer.

In this novel many social grades are gathered together, and the
reciprocal actions of their representative members are rendered with
effective contrast and a good deal of dramatic quickness. The chief
theme, though so painful, is developed with less strain and monotony
than in some other of the novelist's works by reason of a larger
application, conscious or unconscious, of Shakespeare's practice of
intermingling the humorous with the tragic. Even the comic is not
entirely absent, Madame Vauquer especially supplying interludes. The
novelist himself chuckled as he put into her mouth a mispronunciation
of the word /tilleul/,[*] and explained to Madame Hanska, whose
foreign accent in speaking French suggested it, that he chose the fat
landlady so that Eve should not be jealous.

[*] English linden, or lime-tree.

Balzac's too great absorption in his writing forced him more than once
in this year to go into the country and recuperate his health. During
the earlier months he spent a short time with the Carrauds at
Frapesle, which was a favourite sojourn of his, and, later on, at
Sache, a pleasant retreat in his native Touraine. His iron
constitution was not able always to resist the demands continually
made upon it; and his abuse of coffee only aggravated the evil. To
Laure he acknowledged, while at Sache, that this beverage refused to
excite his brain for any time longer than a fortnight; and even the
fortnight was paid for by horrible cramps in the stomach, followed by
fits of depression, which he suffered when suddenly deprived of his
beloved drink. In his /Treatise of Modern Stimulants/ he describes its
peculiar operation upon himself. "This coffee," he says, "falls into
your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas
begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army on the
battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive full
gallop, ensign to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a
magnificent, deploying charge; the artillery of logic hurry up with
their train and ammunition; the shafts of wit start up like sharp-
shooters. Similes arise; the paper is covered with ink; for the
struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just
as a battle with powder."

When he tells us how Doctor Minoret, Ursule Mirouet's guardian, used
to regale his friends with a cup of Moka mixed with Bourbon coffee,
and roasted Martinique, which the Doctor insisted on personally
preparing in a silver coffee-pot, it is his own custom that he is
detailing. His Bourbon he bought only in the Rue Mont Blanc (now the
Chaussee d'Antin), the Martinique, in the Rue des Vieilles Audriettes,
the Moka at a grocer's in the Rue de l'Universite. It was half a day's
journey to fetch them.

The /Tigers/ or /Lions/, of the Loge Infernale at the Opera, have
already been spoken of. It was in this year that Balzac, as belonging
to the Club, gave a dinner to its members, the chief guest being
Rossini. Nodier, Sandeau, Bohain, and the witty Lautour-Mezeray were
also present. He doubtless wore on the occasion his coat of broadcloth
blue, made by his tailor-friend Buisson, with its gold buttons
engraved by Gosselin, his jeweller and goldsmith. On his waistcoat of
white English /pique/ twined and glittered the thousand links of the
slender chain of Venice gold. Black trousers, with footstraps, showing
his calves to advantage, patent-leather boots, and his wonderful
stick, which inspired Madame Delphine Gay to write a book, completed
the equipment.

This stick was certainly in existence in 1834, being mentioned in the
correspondence with Madame Hanska during that year. Werdet, however,
connects its origin with the novelist's imprisonment, two years later,
in the Hotel de Bazancourt, popularly known as the Hotel des Haricots,
which was used for confining those citizens who did not comply with
Louis-Philippe's law enrolling them in the National Guard and ordering
them to take their turn in night-patrol of the city. Balzac was
incurably recalcitrant. Nothing would induce him to encase himself in
the uniform and serve; and, whenever the soldiers came for him, he
bribed them to let him alone. Finally, these bribes failed of their
effect, and an arrest-warrant was issued against him. In his ordinary
correspondence two experiences of his being in durance vile at the
Hotel des Haricots are mentioned, one in March 1835, another in August
1836. The latter of these is differently dated in the /Letters to the
Stranger/, the end of April being given, unless, indeed, there were
two confinements close together, which is hardly probable. What is
most likely is, that Werdet has confused two things, the story of the
lock of hair, properly belonging to 1836, and the making of the stick,
which belongs to 1834. Here is his narration:--

The publisher one day received a note requesting him to go at once to
the prison and to take with him some money. He went with two hundred
francs, and found Balzac, in his Dominican's dress, installed in a
small cell on the third story, busily engaged in arranging papers.
Part of the money brought was utilized to order a succulent dinner,
which Werdet stayed and shared in the smoky refectory below. Both
prisoner and visitor were very merry until the door opened and Eugene
Sue, the popular novelist, entered, himself also a victim of the
conscription law. Invited to join in the meal, Sue declined, saying
that his valet and his servant were shortly to bring him his dinner.
This repulse damped Balzac's spirits until the arrival of a third
victim, the Count de Lostange, chief editor of the /Quotidienne/, who
sat down willingly to table. Then Balzac forgot Sue's rudeness, and
the mirth was resumed. Notwithstanding the efforts of the novelist's
influential friends, the Count de Lobau, who was responsible for the
arrest, showed himself inexorable, and a second day was spent in
captivity, which Werdet came again towards evening to enliven. A whole
pile of perfumed epistles sent by feminine sympathizers was lying on
the table, and the publisher had to open them and read them aloud to
his companion. When a third day's confinement was decided on by the
authorities, Werdet arranged to celebrate it by a dinner that should
merit being put on record. He therefore secured the presence of some
intimates of the novelist, among them being Gustave Planche and
Alphonse Karr; and at 5 P.M., eight people were assembled in the cell,
with Auguste, Balzac's valet, to serve them. The restaurant-keeper
Chevet's menu of exquisite dishes was suitably moistened with
excellent champagne sent by a Countess, and, when the feast was in
full progress, Balzac took a scented parcel from among his presents
and asked permission to open it. The authorization being granted, he
undid the parcel, and disclosed a mass of long, fair, silky hair
threaded into a gold ring that was set with an emerald. On the gift
was an inscription in English: /From an unknown friend/. A great
discussion ensued. One irreverent speaker opined that the thing was a
hoax, and that the hair had come from a wig-maker's; but his blasphemy
was shouted down. Another proposed that Balzac should cut off his own
long, flat locks (it was in 1834 that he began to let them grow) and
should send them addressed to the Unknown Fair One. Poste Restante.
But this suggestion, too, was not approved. The locks were proclaimed
to be national property, and to be cut off only by the passing of a
special law. Next, the ring was discussed; and here it was that
Balzac, struck with a brilliant idea, announced his intention of
ordering Gosselin, the goldsmith, to manufacture a marvellous hollow
stick-knob in which a lock of the blond hair should be inserted, and
all over the top of the knob were to be fixed diamonds, sapphires,
emeralds, topazes, rubies, chosen out of the many he had had given him
by his rich lady-enthusiasts. On the morrow, he was released, after
spending, during the few days he had been locked up, five hundred and
seventy francs in refreshment for himself and visitors.

CHAPTER VII

LETTERS TO "THE STRANGER," 1835, 1836

The Rue des Batailles, whither Balzac removed his household goods in
1834, was one of those old landmarks of Paris which have disappeared
in the opening up and beautifying of the city. Commencing at the
fortifications, it penetrated inwards along the waste ground of the
Trocadero, and crossed the Rue Chaillot at a point which has since
become the Place d'Iena. Its direction from there was very nearly the
same as that of the present Avenue d'Iena. No. 12, where Balzac had
his flat, probably occupied the site whereon now stands the mansion of
Prince Roland Bonaparte. From its windows a good view was obtained of
the Seine, the Champ de Mars, the Ecole Militaire, and the Dome of the
Invalides.

As a matter of fact, the house of the Rue des Batailles was for a time
a supplementary dwelling rented by the novelist, so Werdet says, as a
hiding-place from the myrmidons of the law. The flat in the Rue
Cassini was retained, and its furniture also; and an arrangement was
made with the landlord by which a notice-board hung continually on the
door, with the words: "This apartment to let." In reality the tenant
often sojourned there still, and his cook stayed on the premises to
look after them, and serve her master with meals, whenever he wished
to work in his old study without being disturbed. At the Rue des
Batailles he lived under the pseudonym of Widow Brunet, so that
temporarily the sergeant-major of the National Guard was outwitted.

The second flat, when he took it, was composed of five small rooms;
but an army of workmen was summoned; and what with the pulling down of
partitions and their reconstruction on a more commodious plan, the
place was metamorphosed into four luxuriously furnished chambers, the
study being fitted up as a sort of boudoir. One of its walls was a
graceful curve against which rested a large, real Turkish divan in
white cashmere, its drapery being caught and held with lozenge-shaped
bows of black and flame-coloured silk. The opposite wall formed a
straight line broken only by a white marble chimney-piece pinked out
in gold. The entire room was hung in red stuff as a background, and
this was covered with fluted Indian muslin, having a top and bottom
beading of flame-coloured stuff ornamented with elegant black
arabesques. Under the muslin the red assumed a rose tint, which later
was repeated in the window curtains of muslin lined with taffety, and
fringed in black and red. Six silver sconces, each supporting two
candles, projected from the wall above the divan, to light those
sitting or lying there. From the dazzlingly white ceiling was
suspended an unpolished silver-gilt lustre; and the cornice round it
was in gold. The carpets of curious designs were like Eastern shawls;
the furniture was lavishly upholstered. The time-piece and candelabra
were of white marble incrusted with gold; and cashmere covered the
single table, while several flower-stands filled up the corners, with
their roses and other blooms. This study, which Balzac himself has
left us a description of in his novel /The Girl with the Golden Eyes/,
was soon abandoned as a workroom for another more simple and austere,
up under the roof. The latter, however, he likewise began, being
tormented by the desire of change, to adorn almost as fantastically.

Throughout the time that Werdet continued to be Balzac's publisher,
and up to the end of 1836, when their active business relations
ceased, it is difficult to be quite accurate in speaking of their
relations and the things spoken of by both in which they were mutually
concerned. There is frequent discordance in their narration of the
same event, and one is often embarrassed in trying to reconcile them.
On the one hand, it is certain that Balzac was not always exact in his
statements; on the other, Werdet's memory, in the seventies, when he
wrote his /Portrait Intime/ of the novelist, was as certainly now and
again treacherous. An example of such discrepancy is furnished by the
information given concerning /Seraphita/, which Werdet says he bought
from Buloz at the end of 1834, and for which he had to wait till
December 1835. He even makes it a reproach that the novelist, after
being extracted from a dilemma, should have dealt with him so
cavalierly. Now, from documents published by the Viscount de
Lovenjoul, there must be a mistake in Werdet's dates. During the year
of 1835, the /Revue de Paris/ published, after long delay, some
further chapters of /Seraphita/; and not until the end of November in
this same twelvemonth was the treaty signed which rendered Werdet
possessor of the book.

/Seraphita/, or /Seraphitus/--the name is designedly spelt both ways
in different parts of the book--is an attempt on the novelist's part
to represent in fiction the dual sex of the soul. The scene is laid in
the fiords of Norway. There, in a village, we meet with a person of
mysterious nature who is loved simultaneously by a man and a woman,
and who is regarded by each as being of the opposite sex. By whiles
this hermaphrodite seems to respond to the affection of each admirer,
and by whiles to withdraw on to a higher plane of existence whither
their mortality hinders them from following. To the old pastor of the
village, /Seraphita-Seraphitus/ talks with assurance of the essence of
phenomena and the invisible world, but, forsooth, only to initiate the
shades that visit spiritualistic /seances/, and to say what is either
obscure verbiage, or a hash-up of philosophies often digested without
much sustenance derived from them. In the end, this dual personage
vanishes from our mundane atmosphere, translated bodily to heaven; and
leaves his or her lovers to repair their loss--just like a forlorn
widow or widower--by making a match based on rules of conduct laid
down by the departed one.

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