It happened that Honore's enlistment in the army oflitterateurscoincided 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 toFacino 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 theArabian Nightsentered 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 respectivelyCoquecigrue(an imaginary animal) andStella, were abandoned before they were begun. A comic opera had the same fate. TheTwo 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 myCromwell. 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 ofKenilworthas 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.
He indulged in a fit of premature discouragement, seeking for some one or something to cast a little brightness over what he deemed his dull existence. "I have none of the flowers of life," he lamented; "and yet I am in the season when they bloom! What is the good of fortune and joys when youth is past? Of what use the actor's garments if one does not play the role? The old man is one who has dined and looks at others eating. I am young and my plate is empty, and I am hungry, Laure. Will ever my two only, immense desires—to be celebrated and to be loved—be satisfied?" They were, but at a cost that was dearly paid.
However great Balzac's potential genius, it was too little developed, too little exercised at this period for him to produce anything of real, permanent worth. The fiction in which he was destined to excel, the only fiction he was peculiarly fitted to write, demanded maturity of experience that he could hardly acquire before another decade had passed over his head. Yet the stories he reeled off had a certain market value.The Heiress of Biraguewas sold for eight hundred francs,Jean-Louis, or theFoundling Girl, for thirteen hundred; and a higher price still was obtained (whether the money was actually received is uncertain) for theHandsome Jew, afterwards republished under a fresh title,The Israelite.
Contemporary critics declined to acknowledge that, in these books and their congeners,[*] there were some traces of a master-hand. To-day the traces are perceptible, because criticism has a better opportunity of discovering them. Here and there, and especially inArgow, the Pirate, is to be noticed a beginning of the realism that was afterwards the novelist's excellence. The theme, that of a brigand purified by love, is, as Monsieur le Breton remarks in his study of Balzac, a romantic one in the manner of Byron, and has things in common with Walter Scott'sHeart of Midlothian, Victor Hugo'sBug-Jargal, and Pixerecourt'sBelveder. There is an atmosphere of imagination in it, the action is quick, and the characters are strongly though distortedly drawn. Moreover, a breath of healthy sentiment runs through the story, which is not always the case in the later and more celebrated novels. Balzac must have learnt much and acquired much that was useful to him during this puddling of his ore in the furnace of his early efforts; and, if in his maturer age he retained certain defects of the Romantic school, it was because a lurking sympathy with them in his nature prevented his shaking himself free of them, when he reformed his manner.
[*] Other youthful productions were The Centenarian, The Last Fairy, Don Gigadas, The Excommunicated Man, Wann-Chlore, or Jane the Pale, The Curate of the Ardennes, and Argow, the Pirate.
The style of his letters at this same period was admirable, sparkling with wit and with a humour that unfortunately grew rarer, bitterer, and even coarser often, in his later career. Some of his rapidly sketched pictures were incidents of home life. This one represents his mother's fidgety disposition:—
"Louise, give me a glass of water."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Ah, my poor Louise, I'm in a bad way; I am indeed!"
"Nonsense, Ma'am!"
"It's worse than other years."
"Lud! . . . Ma'am!"
"My head is splitting. . . . . Oh, Louise! The shutters are slamming; it's enough to break all the panes in the drawing-room."
Already, with the faculty of exaggeration which characterised him all his life, he anticipated gaining within the next twelvemonth no less than twenty thousand francs; forgetting the small result of hisCromwell, he spoke of having a lot of theatrical pieces in hand, plus an historical novel,Odette de Champdivers, and another dealing with the fortunes of the R'hoone family. R'hoone was an anagram of his own name Honore. Lord R'hoone was one of his pseudonyms. And "Lord R'hoone," he told Laure, "will soon be the rage, the most amiable, fertile author; and ladies will regard him as the apple of their eye. Then the little Honore will arrive in a coach with head held up, proud look, and fob well garnished. At his approach, amidst flattering murmurs from the admiring crowd, people will say: 'He is Madame Surville's brother.' Then men, women, and children, and unborn babes will leap as the hills. . . . And I shall be the ladies' man, in view of which event I am saving up my money. Since yesterday I have given up dowagers, and intend to fall back on thirty-year-old widows. Send all you can find to Lord R'hoone, Paris. This address will suffice. He is known at the city gates. N.B.—Send them, carriage paid, free of cracks and soldering. Let them be rich and amiable; as for beauty, it is not asine qua non. Varnish wears off, but the underneath earthenware remains."
Through all these displays of fireworks one fact stands out, that Balzac was in too great a hurry to reap fame and wealth—wealth especially. It was his hurry that inspired his constant complaint: "Ah! if only I had enough bread and cheese, I would soon make my mark and write books to last." This was not altogether true nor just to his parents. He had his bread and cheese and a home to eat it in, which authors have not always enjoyed who have gained immortality by their unaided pen. Although his family were anxious to see him independent, they did not oblige him to depend upon what he earned. Nothing at the moment prevented him from striving to produce something of good quality and spending the time necessary over it. He saw the better, but followed the worse.
"My ideas," he wrote to Laure, "are changing so much that my execution will soon change also. . . . In a short time there will be the same difference between the me of to-day and the me of to-morrow as exists between the young man of twenty and the man of thirty! I am reflecting; my ideas are ripening. I recognize that Nature has treated me favourably in giving me my heart and my head. Believe in me, dear sister, for I need some one to believe in me. I do not despair of doing something one day. I see at present thatCromwellhad not even the merit of being an embryon. As for my novels, they are not up to much."
How could they be when he supplied them, so to speak, machine-made! "Citizen Pollet" button-holed him in August 1822 and induced him to sign an agreement binding him to deliver a couple of these stories by the 1st of October. Six hundred francs were paid cash down, and the rest in deferred bills. The second of the couple was theCurate of the Ardennes, which Laure helped him to write.
It surprises at first sight to read that the demand for this cheap fiction was so great in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The explanation is that, during the last years of the Empire, the article had scarcely been in the market at all, so that, in the Restoration period, which was one of peace and leisure, there was quite a rush for it. On the whole, Balzac did not manage to hit the public fancy with his work in this line. The further he went with it the less he liked it, and such bits of better stuff as he introduced in lieu of the blood and mystery rather lessened than increased the saleableness of his books. For the printing of theLast Fairyhe had to pay, himself; and he was obliged to own, after five years' catering for popular taste, he was no nearer emerging from obscurity than he had been at the commencement. It was discouraging and humiliating; he had started with such confidence and boasting. Now those who had spoken against his literary vocation seemed to be justified, and those who had been most inclined to believe in him were sceptical.
However, there was still one woman who kept her faith in his capacity for soaring above the common pitch. She it was who, understanding him better than his own family, became a second mother to him. Attracted by him, in spite of his weaknesses of conceit, loudness, and vulgarity, she polished his behaviour, guided his perceptions, corrected his pretentiousness, influencing him through the sincerity and strength of her affection.
Twenty-two years his senior, she was the daughter of a German harpist named Henner, in favour at the Court of Louis XVI., whom Marie-Antoinette had married to Mademoiselle Quelpee-Laborde, one of her own ladies-in-waiting. Both King and Queen stood as god-parents to the Henners' little girl, who, when grown up, was married to a Monsieur de Berny, of ancient, noble lineage, and bore him nine children. The date at which Balzac made her acquaintance has been variously stated. Basing themselves upon hisLove-story at School, some writers have supposed he knew her when he was a boy, but there is no evidence to confirm this hypothesis. The first definite mention of her and her family occurs in a gossipy letter he wrote to Laure in 1822 from Villeparisis, where the de Berny family were settled: "I may tell you," he says, "that Mademoiselle de B. has narrowly escaped being broken into three pieces in a fall; that Mademoiselle E. is not so stupid as we imagined; that she has a talent for serious painting and even for caricature; that she is a musician to the tips of her toes; that Monsieur C. continues to swear; that Madame de B(erny) has become a bran, wheat, and fodder merchant, perceiving after forty years' reflection that money is everything."
At this date, the relationship between him and Madame de Berny was one of ordinary friendship, yet with indications of warmer feelings on either side that his parents noticed and disapproved. With a view to discouraging the intimacy, they induced him to pay visits that took him from home for some time; but the object they aimed at was not attained. The intimacy ripened. Madame de Berny was his only confidante. His few male friends were too old or too young for his unbosomings. There was the Abbe de Villers whom he stayed with at Nogent, and there was Theodore Dablin, the retired ironmonger, whom he used to call his "cher petit pere." Besides these two elders, there was the young de Berny, who was considerably his junior. But to none of them could he talk unreservedly of his ambitions literary and political. For a man between twenty and thirty years of age, whose mind is seething with evolving thought, there is no more sympathetic and appreciative adviser than a woman some years his senior. Madame de Berny listened to his expression of Imperialistic opinions tinged with Liberalism, as she listened to his confession of hopes and disappointments; and, in turn, talked with persuasive accents of those pre-Revolution days which she had known as a child. She was able also to draw the curtain aside and show him something of the history of the revolution itself and of the Terror, during which she and her parents' family had been imprisoned. It was his first mingling with the grandeurs that were his delight. Through her narration, he was able to enter the old Court society and watch the intrigues of the personages who had been famous in it. Madame de Berny's mother was still living, and added her own reminiscences to those of her daughter. Later, by their agency he was introduced to some of the aristocratic partisans of the fallen dynasty—the Duke de Fitz-James and the Duchess de Castries. Under Madame de Berny's education, his Imperialism was transformed into Legitimism.
How a matron of her age should have allowed the friendship of the commencement to develop into a liaison is one of those problems of sexual psychology easier to describe in Balzac's own language than to explain rationally. We know that she was not happy with her husband, and can surmise that she entered upon the role she played without clearly foreseeing its dangers. No doubt, her desire to form this genius in the rough carried her away from her moorings, which, indeed, had never been very strong, since she had already once before in her married life had a lover. Besides there was her temperament, sensual and sentimental; and with it the tradition of the eighteenth-century morals, indulgent to illicit amours.
Most likely, the second phase of her relations with Balzac coincided with his temporary abandonment of authorship for business. It was in 1825 that he resolved to embark on publishing,[*] partly urged by the mute reproaches of his parents and partly allured by the prospect of rapidly growing rich. He had likewise some intention of bringing out his own books, both those previously written and those in preparation. Of these latter there were a goodly number sketched out in a sort of note-book or album, which his sister Laure called hisgarde-mangeror pantry. It was full of jottings anent people, places, and things that he had come across in the preceding lustrum.
[*] The initiator of this project was not Balzac, although his early biographers, Madame Surville included, gave him the credit for it.
The idea of taking up business was mooted to him first by a Monsieur d'Assonvillez, an acquaintance of Madame de Berny, whom he used to see and talk with when staying, as he occasionally did, at the small apartment rented by his father in Paris. Just then Urbain Canel, the celebrated publisher of Romantic books, was thinking of putting on the market compact editions of the old French classics, beginning with Moliere and La Fontaine; and Balzac, either already knowing him or being introduced to him by a mutual friend, was admitted to join in the undertaking. The money necessary for the partnership was lent to him by Monsieur d'Assonvillez, who, as a sharp business man, imposed conditions on the loan which secured him from loss in case of failure. The editions were to be library ones, illustrated by the artist Deveria (who about this time painted Balzac's portrait), and were to be published in parts. The price was high, twenty francs for each work; and additional drawbacks were the smallness of the type and the poorness of the engravings. No success attended the experiment; at the end of a twelvemonth not a score of copies had been sold. By common consent the firm, which had been increased to four partners, broke up their association, and Balzac was left sole proprietor of the concern, the assets of which consisted of a large quantity of wastepaper, and the liabilities amounted to a respectable number of thousand francs.
Madame Surville attributes the fiasco to the professional jealousy of competitors, who discouraged the public from buying; but the cause of the discomfiture lay rather in the faulty manner in which the partners carried out their plan. Monsieur d'Assonvillez being still an interested adviser, Balzac now submitted to him a project for retrieving his losses by adding a printing to his publishing business. The stock and goodwill of a printer were to be bought, and a working type-setter, named Barbier, was to be associated as a second principal in the affair, on account of his practical experience. The project was approved, and the elder Balzac was persuaded to come forward with a capital of about thirty thousand francs, this sum being required to pay out the retiring printer, Monsieur Laurens, and obtain the new firm's patent. Madame de Berny had already lent Honore money to help him in the publishing scheme. At present, she induced her husband to intervene with the Government so that the printing licence might be granted without delay.
The printing premises were situated at No. 17, Rue des Marais, Faubourg Saint-Germain, to-day Rue Visconti, near the Quai Malaquais. The street, which is a narrow one, subsists nearly the same as it was a century ago. Older associations, indeed, are attached to it. At No. 19 died Jean Racine in 1699, and Adrienne Lecouvreur in 1730. No. 17 was a new construction when Balzac went to it, having probably been built on the site where Nicolas Vauquelin des Yveteaux used to receive the far-famed Ninon in his gardens. On the impost, where formerly appeared the names Balzac and Barbier, now may be read "A. Herment, successeur de Garnier." The place is still devoted to like uses.
In theLost Illusions, whose part-sequelDavid Sechardreproduces Balzac's life as a printer, there is a description of the ground floor: "a huge room, lighted on the street-side by an old stained-glass window and on the inner yard-side by a casement." The passage in Gothic style led to the office; and on the floor above were the living rooms, one of which was hung with blue calico, was furnished with taste, and was adorned with the owner's first novels, bound by Thouvenin. In this "den," during the two years that he was engaged in the printing trade, were received the daily visits of her he called hisDilecta.
She could not give him the practical business qualities in which he was utterly lacking and for which his wonderful intuitions of commercial possibilities were no compensation; but she could smile at his enthusiasms and sympathize with his disappointments, which had their see-saw pretty regularly in the interval from the 1st of June 1826 to the 3rd of February 1828. A very fair trade was done; and, in fact, some of the books he printed were important: Villemain'sMiscellanies, Merimee'sJacquerie, Madame Roland'sMemoirs, not to speak of his own smallCritical and Anecdotal Dictionary of Paris Signboards, published under a pseudonym, or rather anonymously, since it was signedLe Batteur de Pave, the "Man in the Street." But the senior partner, he who should have financed the concern with all the more wariness as d'Assonvillez, the principal supplier of capital, had a mortgage upon the whole estate, allowed himself to be paid for his printing, more often than not, in bills for which no provision was forthcoming and in securities that were rotten. One debt of twenty-eight thousand francs was settled by the transfer of a lot of old unsaleable literature, which would have been dear at a halfpenny a volume. And then, when everything was in confusion—debtors recalcitrant and creditors pressing—what must he do but launch on another venture, buy the bankrupt stock of a type-founder, and start manufacturing. A fresh partner, Laurent, was admitted into the firm in December 1827, with a view to his exploiting the presumably auxiliary branch; and a prospectus was issued vaunting a process of type-founding, which Balzac was wrongly credited with having invented. Within two months after this spurt, and while a fine album was in preparation, which was to illustrate the firm's improved method, Barbier withdrew from the partnership. His desertion would have at once spelt disaster, if Madame de Berny had not boldly stepped into the vacant place, with a power of attorney conferred on her by her husband, and pledged her credit for nine thousand francs. During three months longer, the tottering house continued to hold up; and then, under the avalanche of writs and claims, it fell. A petition in bankruptcy was filed in April, and the estate was placed in the hands of an official receiver.
On reaching this crisis so big with consequences, Balzac had recourse to his mother, who, though little disposed in the past to humour his bent, consented now to every sacrifice in order to save his credit. Her first step was to get her cousin Monsieur Sedillot to occupy himself with the liquidation, she authorizing him at the same time to make whatever arrangement he should judge best, and promising to accept it. She was most anxious to spare her husband, at present eighty-three years of age, the grief he must feel if informed of the full extent of the disaster. Alas! notwithstanding her precautions, the old man did learn the truth; and the shock hastened his end. Within twelve months after the bankruptcy he met with a slight accident, which, acting on his enfeebled constitution, was fatal to him.
Balzac's liabilities, at the moment of the failure, were one hundred and thirteen thousand francs. The effect of the liquidation was to reduce the number of creditors, so that his indebtedness was restricted to members of his own family and to Madame de Berny. The latter's claims were partly met by her son's taking over the business with Laurent, the other partner. Being thus reconstituted, the firm subsequently prospered. To-day it still carries on its affairs under the control of a Monsieur Charles Tuleu, who succeeded Monsieur de Berny. Madame Surville would have us believe that, if her parents had only supported Honore more unreservedly at the commencement, he could have realized a fortune; but all the facts of her brother's life go to prove the contrary.
Referring, a decade later, to these dark days, which loaded him with a burden of debt that he never shook off but increased by his natural inability to balance receipts and expenditure, he spoke of Madame de Berny's kindness, and declared that he had repaid theDilectain 1836 the last six thousand francs he owed her, together with their five per cent interest. As on many other occasions, Balzac imagined something which had not been done, though he apparently believed what he asserted. The following anecdote re-establishes the facts of the case.
Monsieur Arthur Rhone, a friend of the de Berny family, who used to visit the son Alexander in the office of the Rue des Marais, often admired on the mantelpiece a fine bust of Flora, modelled by Marin. One day the printer said to him: "Do you know how much that bust cost me? . . . Fifteen thousand francs. I got it from Balzac, who owed me a great deal of money. Once when I was at his house in Passy, he exclaimed: 'Since I can't pay you, take what you like from here to reimburse yourself.'" This work of art, a Louis XVI. gilt-bronze time piece, with its two candelabra, once also in Balzac's possession, was part payment of the balance due to the de Berny family, and was surrendered only in the forties.
The novelist, whose memory was so short in money matters, had a longer recollection of his moral obligations. In the letter above referred to, he confessed: "Without her (Madame de Berny) I should have died. She often divined that I had not eaten for several days (here he was probably piling on the agony). She provided for everything with angelic kindness. Her devotion was absolute." It ended only with theDilecta'slife.
In theShagreen Skin, which embodies some of Balzac's youthful experiences, Raphael, the hero, was saved from committing suicide, after ruining himself, by an accident which forms the thread of the story. Possibly, during the bankruptcy proceedings, there may have been a fit of despair which urged the insolvent printer to end his own troubles in the Seine. If so, it was of short duration. A fortnight after he had quitted the Rue des Marais, the letter he wrote to General de Pommereul showed him planning out a fresh future.
"At last has happened," he said in it, "what many persons were able to foresee, and what I myself feared in beginning and courageously supporting an establishment the magnitude of which was colossal (!!!). I have been precipitated, not without the previsions of my conscious mind, from my modest prosperity. . . . For the last month I have been engaged on an historical work of the highest interest; and I hope that, in default of a talent altogether problematic with me, my sketch of national customs will bring me luck. My first thought was for you; and I resolved to write and ask you to shelter me for two or three weeks. A camp-bed, a single mattress, a table, if only it is quadrupedal and not rickety, a chair and a roof are all that I require."
The General replied: "Your room awaits you. Come quick." And he went. It was his definite entrance into literature, and his resumption of the search for wealth withal.
The historical novel that Balzac had set himself to write was theChouans, this name being given to the Vendee Royalists who, under the leadership of the Chevalier de Nougarede, combated the Revolution and Napoleon. The scene being laid in Brittany, it was natural that, apart from health reasons, the author should wish to inspire his pen by a visit to the places he intended to describe.
His hostess at Fougeres has left us a description of her guest: "He was a little, burly man, clad in ill-fitting garments that increased his bulk. His hands were magnificent. He wore a most ugly hat; but, as soon as he took it off, one remarked nothing else besides his head. . . . Beneath his ample forehead, on which seemed to shine the reflection of a lamp, there were brown, gold-spangled eyes which expressed their owner's meaning as clearly as his speech. He had a big, square nose, and a huge mouth, which was perpetually smiling in spite of his ugly teeth. He wore a moustache, and his long hair was brushed back. At the time he came to us he was rather thin, and appeared to be half-starved. He devoured his food, poor fellow! For the rest, there was so much confidence, so much benevolence, so muchnaivete, so much frankness in his demeanour, his gestures, his ways of speaking and behaving that it was impossible to know him and not love him. . . . His good humour was so exuberant as to be contagious. Notwithstanding the misfortunes he had just passed through, he had not been with us a quarter of an hour before he made the General and me laugh till tears came into our eyes."
TheChouans, 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 theChouansmakes 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 hisChouansappeared hisPhysiology 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 hisPortrait Intimethat 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 thePhysiologyis 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 alreadyblase.
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 thePhysiology. 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 theMode, 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 thePhysiologyand 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 Operafoyer, amidst the real or feigned admiration of his fellows.
To revenge themselves for their mentor's superciliousness towards them, the six otherlionsinduced 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 thePhysiologywere Buloz of theRevue de Parisand Victor Ratier of theSilhouette. 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 apate 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 theModeis 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 ofregime, 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 thelitterateur. 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 hisCountry DoctorandVillage 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 hisForsaken 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 hisShagreen 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 theHouse of the Tennis-playing Cat, and even to theSceaux Ballin the more proper qualities of the novel.
TheShagreen Skinis 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 thePhysiology, 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 theShagreen Skinby Gosselin in 1832. "ThePhilosophic Talesof Monsieur de Balzac," it announced, "have appeared this week. TheShagreen Skinis 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 theMysteries of Udolphoand theShagreen Skin, theArabian 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!
"ThePhilosophic Talesare the red-hot interpretation of a civilization ruined by debauch and well-being, which Monsieur de Balzac exposes in the pillory. TheArabian Nightsare the complete history of the luxurious East in its days of happiness and perfumed dreams.Candideis 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 theShagreen 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. TheShagreen SkinisCandidewith 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'sShagreen Skin."
On account of its sensationalism, theShagreen Skinhad a success of curiosity equal, and, if anything, superior to that of thePhysiology. 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 theDilecta'sfriends, 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 CambraiGazettetestified. 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, andEugenie Grandetwould 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.
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 theRevue 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 hisLouis 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, withFaustandManfred. 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—hisalter 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. TheDilecta, 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 yourLamberteverything 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 hisColonel Chabertand theCure of Tours, both of which were published in the same twelvemonth asLouis 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 inColonel Chabertthe 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. TheRed Innwas related to him by a former army surgeon, a friend of the man that was unjustly condemned and executed. AnEpisode under the Terrorwas narrated by the hero himself.A Desert Attachmentwas the outcome of a conversation with Martin, the celebrated tamer of wild beasts. On the other hand,Master Corneliuswas written to correct the false impression of Louis XI. which he considered Walter Scott had given to his readers inQuentin 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 otherlitterateurs, 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 ofThe Three Cardinals,The Battle of Austerlitz(afterwards often alluded to simply as theBattle), andThe 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 theBattle, is incidentally introduced in theCountry 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.