A few months later, in December, Les Jardies, with its walnut-tree and other advantages, was abandoned in hasty flight; and the hermit took refuge in the Passy quarter of Paris. On the house and property a distraint had been levied for moneys due which had not been paid. In total, his desire to abide under his own vine and under his own fig-tree had cost him a sum that he estimated between one hundred thousand and one hundred and twenty thousand francs. Deduction made for his Falstaffian speech, the amount was probably about eighty thousand. This might have been gradually saved and the interest meantime given regularly, if he had been willing to live well within his income. With his system of spending not only what he earned but hoped to earn each year, perpetual insolvency was inevitable.
At Les Jardies he had small creditors as well as great, fear of whom haunted him to the extent of curtailing his walks abroad. Leon Gozlan relates that, going over to Ville d'Avray early one morning, he found Balzac taking a constitutional round the asphalt of his house. "Come and have a stroll in the woods," said the visitor. "I am afraid," answered Balzac. "Of what or whom?" "Of the keeper." Not understanding why the novelist, who would not explain, should be in dread of this humble functionary, and imagining that much study and labour had made his friend a little mad, Gozlan took no denial, and, button-holing Balzac, lugged him off into the leafy avenues. And there, sure enough, after a while, they saw the bugbear, who, as soon as he perceived the two pedestrians, bore down on them with plodding but vigorous step. The shorter of the two turned pale, but tried to put on an air of dignified indifference. Soon the official ran in under their lee, passed alongside with slackened pace, and clarioned into the novelist's ear: "Monsieur de Balzac, this is beginning to get musical." The owner of Les Jardies quailed in his shoes. He owed the man thirty francs.
The abode that Balzac chose, on coming back to live within the city walls, was not far from the Rue de Chaillot which had been his address before he removed to Sevres. It was situated in what is now called the Rue Raynouard, but then bore the name of the Rue Basse. In reality, the street is low only at one end, to which it descends from some high land that forms the Passy and Trocadero quarter, and, for some distance, overhangs the Seine. The whole of the street is narrow and winding, and still has an old-time provincial aspect, though the modern building has begun to make its appearance in it, replacing the ancient mansions surrounded by gardens with ever-encroaching blocks of flats.
Balzac's new house was at Number 19 (at present Number 47). It stood —and the house still stands—in a back garden, on a lower level than the road, from which it was masked by houses fronting the causeway. Any one approaching it from the side of the Rue Basse would enter the common vestibule of one of these houses, go down some stone steps, and would then find himself in a courtyard, opposite a fairly good-sized, apparently one-storied cottage, with the tree adorned garden to the right of him. Once inside the cottage, however, he would notice that it was built on the extreme upper edge of a precipitous slope, and that on the farther side the structure had lower stories, with an issue through them into a lane at the rear leading to the Seine banks and the lower portion of the Rue Basse. Whoever, therefore, inhabited the cottage could quit it fore or aft, an advantage which must have weighed with the incoming tenant, tracked as he was by creditors, and hiding himself here under the name of Madame de Brugnol.
The insistence of these claimants on his purse was such that, acting on the advice of his solicitor, Gavault, in the course of the year 1841, he executed a fictitious sale of Les Jardies for the sum of seventeen thousand five hundred francs, his hope being to preserve his hermitage for the days of wealth and ease to come. Meanwhile, he took his mother to live with him. After giving him and her other son, Henry, all she possessed, and the latter being now in the colonies, where he ultimately died in poverty, she was dependent on what Honore could pay her each month. The living-together arrangement was not very successful. Madame Balzac's nervous, fretful temperament had not been improved by age and trouble; and her elder son found it hard to bear with her complainings, excusable and even justifiable though they might be. It is not pleasant to read the passages in his letters to Madame Hanska, in which he reiterates the old charge of his misfortunes being all due to his mother. In some of them he goes so far as to say that she was a monster and a monstrosity, that she was hastening the death of his sister Laure—Laure outlived them both —after hastening those of his sister Laurence and his grandmother, that she hated him before he was born, that she had a dreadful countenance, that the doctor affirmed her to be not mad but malicious, that his father had stated in 1822 he—Honore—would never have a worse enemy than his mother. Had his mother been all this and more, it would have been ungenerous and unfilial to blacken her reputation to a stranger. And, being false, it was odious. Madame Balzac's partiality towards the second son—heavily enough punished—did not prevent her from loving the elder, though their characters (hers and his) were not made to comprehend each other; and her lack of enthusiasm in the days of his literary apprenticeship was natural enough in a parent who understood only too well the impractical, improvident mind he possessed, and feared its consequences. The fact was that Balzac ill supported remonstrances from his own family, and especially from his mother, and, when irritated by them, forgot every benefit he had received from her.
This peculiarity of temperament rendered his feelings toward many of his friends exceedingly variable. One day he was lauding them to the skies, another depreciating them to a cipher. Even his sister, Laure, in spite of her loyalty to him, did not escape attacks from his fickle humour. Like her mother, she never thoroughly penetrated the nature of this wayward, excitable, compass-boxing brother of hers, whose gaze was so much in the clouds and whose feet so often in the mire. But she defended him to others; and, as far as her purse and her husband's could possibly afford, she gave him money when he was hard up—and when he was not!—money which he was never in a hurry to pay back. Yet her, too, he maligned to "The Stranger," because she now and again ventured on expostulations.
Madame Balzac made two stays in the Passy cottage, neither of them very long. After leaving the first time, she asked her son to pay her a somewhat larger sum per month, which would allow her to live decently elsewhere. Considering that he had borrowed from her a couple of thousand pounds—over fifty thousand francs—and that the sum he had paid her irregularly was not five per cent interest on the money, this request was not unreasonable. Yet he refused to accede to it on the ground of being in financial straits; and offered her a home with him once more, but in language that spoke of strained relations between them, as well as of a personal discouragement that was real.
"The life I lead," he wrote, "suits no one; it wearies relatives and friends alike. All leave my melancholy home. . . . It is impossible for me to work amidst the petty tiffs aroused by surroundings of discord; and my activity has waned during the past year. . . . You were in a tolerable situation. I had a trustworthy person who spared you all household worries. You were not obliged to trouble about domestic matters; you were in peace and silence. You insisted on interfering with me when you should have forgotten I existed, and should have let me have my entire liberty, without which I can do nothing. This is not your fault; it is in the nature of women. To-day, everything is changed. If you like to come back, you will have a little of the weight that will fall on me and that hitherto affected you only because you wished it."
The conclusion of the letter, in which he assured her of his love, could not counterbalance the harshness of its contents. Madame Balzac, be it granted, was cantankerous; but how many sons who have never sponged on their mothers have supported them cheerfully, gladly, for long years out of meagre resources, and have borne with a smile the natural peevishness of old age, not to say its egoisms!
At this period, Balzac's acquaintance with the grand dames of Paris was considerably diminished. Madame de Castries he seems to have broken with altogether. Madame Visconti, who lived a good deal at Versailles, he saw but seldom. In lieu of these, he regularly visited George Sand, who was at present settled in a small flat of the Rue Pigalle in Paris, and was there enjoying the society of Chopin. With a connoisseur's envy, the novelist describes to Eve the interior, the elegantly furnished dining-room in carved oak, thecafe-au-laitupholstered drawing-room, with its superb Chinese vases of fragrant flowers, its cabinet of curiosities, its Delacroix pictures, its rosewood piano, and the portrait of the authoress by Calamatta. What struck him as much as anything was the bedroom in brown, with the bed on the floor in Turkish fashion. He was careful to assure his correspondent that, Chopin being themaitre de ceans, she had no need to be jealous. But jealous she was, though not of George Sand. As Paris was a resort for rich Russians, Madame Hanska's cousins among the number, she had frequent reports of Balzac's doings, distorted by society gossip, the true and the untrue being fantastically mixed; and it was no small task to disabuse her mind and persuade her that his conduct was blameless. Indeed, at bottom she remained sceptical.
In 1841, three books were published which merit attention on the part of a student of his works. The first,A Shady Affair, has the right to be styled an historical novel. Dealing with the Napoleonic epoch, its interest gathers chiefly round the person of the brave peasant Michu, whose devotion to the Legitimist house of Cinq-Cygne brings him, an innocent victim, to the scaffold. The character of Laurence de Cinq-Cygne, a girl of the Flora MacDonald type, and the characters also of the two cousins de Simeuse, who both loved her and conspired with her, and whose pardon she gained only to lose these faithful knights dying on a field of battle, are drawn with great power and naturalness. And the plot, in which, together with other police spies, the same Corentin reappears that was the evil genius of theChouans, is more rapid and less cumbered than in the earlier work. When theShady Affaircame out in theCommercejournal, Balzac was accused of having identified a certain Monsieur Clement de Ris with his Malin de Gondreville, who plays an evil role in the story—that of an unscrupulous, political turncoat, Revolutionary to begin with, Senator under the Empire, and Peer under the Restoration. The novelist defended himself against the imputation; but the resemblances between the fictitious and the real personage were, all the same, too close to be quite accidental.
Something, however, more important than the question of likeness or portraiture in the book, is that it gives us Balzac's conception of what the historical novel should be. His contemporary Dumas, and his predecessor Walter Scott—the latter in a less degree than Dumas—did not weave a romance on to a warp of history, but romanced the history itself. What he tried to do was to keep the historical action exact and accurate, and to throw its romantic elements into relief without dislocating them. His opinion was that history might so be written as to be a sort of novel, which, perhaps, will account for his answer to Lamartine, who, in 1847, asked him if he could explain how it was that theHistory of the Girondinshad obtained a greater success than the most popular novels of the same date. "Gad!" he replied, "the reason is that you wrote this fine book as a novelist, not as an historian." TheShady Affairrecreates for us the Napoleonic atmosphere, silent and heavy, yet electrically charged with grudge, hatred, and ambition, all ready to burst out at one or another point. Underhand plotting was the order of the day; there was a language of the eye rather than of the tongue, since no one was sure that in his own family there might not be eavesdroppers listening to betray him.
Ursule Mirouetis a very different kind of story. We have here the old Doctor Minoret, who after making a fortune in Paris, returns to spend the last few years of his life in Nemours, his native town. Having lost wife and child by death, he brings back with him a baby niece, who is an orphan, and to whom he devotes himself with tender care. In Nemours there are other less estimable branches of the Minoret stock, cousins of the Doctor's, whose hopes of inheriting his fortune are damped by the presence of little Ursule. Chief of these relatives is the burly postmaster, Minoret Levrault, whose son Desire is destined to the law and is sent by his parents to study in Paris. Although a disciple of Voltaire, and scouting all religious practice for himself, the Doctor is friendly with the Cure, and allows his niece to be brought up to Church. At the time the story opens an unexpected event astonishes the town. The Doctor has become converted, and goes to Mass. The cause of the change is a wonderful experience of clairvoyance he meets with in the capital, whither he has been summoned by a colleague with whom he had quarrelled years before over the new-fangled doctrines of Mesmerism. What necessary connection there is between clairvoyance and Catholicism, or indeed any particular form of religion, the novelist does not attempt to prove. It suffices for the sceptical old Doctor to be told by a hypnotized woman in Paris what Ursule is doing at Nemours, and the conversion is wrought. Soon after, Doctor Minoret dies, bequeathing his fortune in just and appropriated shares to his various relatives, Ursule included. She is at the time a fine young woman, beloved by a young gentleman of the place. The rest of the novel tells how the big postmaster contrives to destroy the part of the will favourable to Ursule and to steal certain moneys that belong to her; how Minoret's ghost appears in dreams and signs to confound the guilty man and his guilty wife, who are at last induced to confess their ill deeds, the repentance being hastened by the death of their son Desire; and, in fine, how Ursule marries Monsieur de Portenduere and is happy.
In its general construction, the book holds well together, and the characters in the main are depicted without exaggeration, while the traits of individuality are ingeniously marked. The Doctor and Ursule are less firmly and informingly delineated. As usual, when Balzac shows us the figure of a virtuous girl in an ordinary domestic circle, he represents her with passive rather than active qualities. She has no strong likes or dislikes, no particular mental bias, and possesses but small attractiveness. In fact, the novelist seems at a loss to imagine. In the case of Ursule, we see that she cultivates flowers, but we do not feel that she is fond of them. As for the Doctor, he would have or might have been less a puppet, had the author himself judged with wiser reserve the mysterious forces that exist in the world of sub-consciousness.
His belief in these forces being alloyed with much superstition, he was always consulting fortune-tellers, even those that divined by cards. One of them, a certain Balthazar, who was subsequently convicted and imprisoned for dishonesty, told him that his past life had been one series of struggles and victories, a reading too agreeable to be doubted; and that he would soon have tranquillity, a prophecy which unhappily was not fulfilled. Concerning the prospects of a union with Madame Hanska, the cartomancer was mute, though he described the lady in language sufficiently clever for his client to acknowledge the likeness. His clairvoyance was exceedingly limited; otherwise he would have warned his client of the approaching death of Count Hanski, this event taking place towards the close of the year.
Occupied with her own affairs, which were complicated by her husband's illness, and perhaps also resenting the falling off in the number of her distant worshipper's epistles, caused by an indisposition in the spring and a visit to Brittany to recuperate, she wrote only once or twice during 1841; and, as chance would have it, these letters were lost, so that, for nearly twelve months, he had no news from her. Pathetically he announced that his sister was planning to marry him to a Mademoiselle Bonnard, god-daughter to King Louis-Philippe; but still no answer came. On the 1st of November, as he related to his Eve afterwards, he lost one of the two shirt-studs which Madame de Berny had given him, and which he wore alternately with another pair presented to him by Madame Hanska. Beginning on the morrow, he put on thenceforth only the pair that Eve had given him; and this trifling occurrence affected him so much that all his familiars noticed it. He looked upon the loss as a sign from Heaven. Poor Madame de Berny! Now that the stud from her had disappeared, he had no further tenderness for her memory. Instead of recalling her kindness to him, he preferred to speak, in connection with what he styled his horrible youth, of the years which she—theDilecta—had tarnished. Too opportune to be sincere, this condemnation of his first liaison cannot but be regarded as an incense of flattery offered to the coy goddess of his later vows.
The third of the three principal books of 1841 was theDiaries of Two Young Wives, written, like theCountry Doctorand theVillage Cure, in a decidedly didactic tone. We have two girl friends, Renee de Maucombe and Louise de Chaulieu, reared in a convent school, who marry, each with an ideal of wedlock that differs. The former, a doctor in stays, as her school companion calls her, seeks in marriage a calm domestic happiness, the duties and joy of motherhood, and has a husband worthy but commonplace, to whom she gives herself at first without much positive attachment on her side. The latter makes of love a passion, and marries a Spanish exile, plain-looking but virile, whom she bends to her will. The two wives exchange their impressions during their early years of matrimony, and we see the happiness of the one develop while that of the other diminishes. The Spaniard dies and Louise de Chaulieu takes a second husband, a poor poet, whom she adores as much as her Spaniard had adored her. Carrying him off to Ville-d'Avray, she creates there a snug Paradise, where she fondles him as if he were a toy, until at length her feverish jealousy brings on her own illness and death.
The novel in its earlier phases was being worked at together with theSister Marie des Anges, which was promised to Werdet but never completed, and seems to have had some connection with it. Possibly, in his primitive plan, the author intended to set in contrast the spouse and the nun: and certainly, in the original draft, there was only one bride.
In 1842, at the Odeon Theatre, was performed a dramatic piece from the novelist's pen, which by some critics has been considered his best play. There are even critics who hold that Balzac was a born dramatist, as he was a born novelist, basing their opinion on his possession of qualities common to dramatist and novelist. His force of characterization, his handling of plot, his sense of passion were all sufficient to procure him success on the stage, which explains why pieces adapted from his novels by other playwrights invariably caught the public fancy. But, in order to develop character, plot, and passion in his fiction, he employed interminable detail and slow action; and his effects were obtained rather by constant pressure throughout than by sudden impact. The brevity and condensation required by the drama were foreign to his genius; he could not help trying to put too much into his stage pieces, and the unity of subject was compromised.
TheSchool of Great Men,[*] as he preferred to call his play at the Odeon, carries the spectator back to the Spain of Philippe II. Fontanares, a clever man of science but poor, and without influence, has discovered the means of navigating by steam. His valet Quinola, a genius in his way, resolves to aid his master, who, being in love, has all the greater claim on his pity; and he contrives to present the King with a petition in favour of Fontanares, and to obtain a ship for an experiment to be made. But now professional jealousies combine with love rivalries to thwart the inventor; and when, at last, the ship is made to move by its own machinery, the honour of the success is attributed to another. To avenge his wrongs, and the loss of his betrothed, who is given to his rival and dies, he blows up the steamer in presence of an assembled multitude, and quits his native land with a courtezan who has conceived a liking for him and will provide him with money to recommence his enterprise elsewhere.
[*] More usually called:The Resources of Quinola.
Before the first performance, Balzac was just as sanguine about the result as he had been withVautrin. It followed several pieces, Felix Pyat'sCedric the Norwegian, Dumas'Lorenzino, and Scribe'sChaine, which had been coldly received. What if hisQuinolashould be the great attraction of the season! And his mind was filled visions of overflowing houses and showers of gold. Alas! if the representations went beyond the single one ofVautrin, they did not exceed twenty; and his share of profits was insignificant. The play is not dull to read, with its flavour of Moliere's comedies, and the keenness of Balzac's observation. But its colour and poesy do not compensate for the diffuseness of the plot and the undramatic conclusion.
Instead of acknowledging the defects of his composition, the unlucky dramatist was wroth with his public. For a while he caressed the thought of going to St. Petersburg, taking out letters of naturalization, and opening a theatre in the Russian capital with a view to establishing the pre-eminence of French literature—embodied in his own writings. It must be owned that he was beginning to imagine himself persecuted. Victor Hugo, he said, had changed towards him and was creating a conspiracy of silence round about him, so that no one should speak any more of his works. And he liked better being attacked than ignored. Later, he asserted that Hugo, after accepting the dedication of theLost Illusionsto himself, had induced Edouard Thierry to write an abusive article against him. "He is a great writer," said the novelist in telling this, "but he is a mean trickster."
By the death of Count Hanski, the one insuperable obstacle to his union with Eve had been removed; and now, in his letters to her, there was a sudden outburst of love protestations. He wanted the widow to marry him at once, or, at the outside limit, as soon as propriety would permit. Madame Hanska replied that there was her daughter Anna, only just in her teens, who would require her mother's entire attention and care for some years to come; and there were, besides, matters concerning the inheritance, which would hardly be settled within any shorter period. Balzac was dismayed. He could not understand the delay, the prudence, the hesitation. Not to speak of his affection, his pride was offended. He overwhelmed his Eve with reproaches. Women, he informed her, loved fools, as a rule, because fools were ever ready to sit at their feet. Recurring in subsequent letters to a quieter manner, he strove to shake her resolution by hints at his exhausted strength, his difficulty of composition,—this was nothing new—his lessened alertness of thought and his weaker invention. Cleverly he juxtaposed with these a description of his study, in the little Passy house, hung with red velvet, on which black silk cords stood out in agreeable contrast; on one wall was Eve's portrait, and opposite it was a painting of the Wierzchownia mansion. Here he toiled unceasingly, creating, always creating. God only created during six days, he added, while he—the inference was left to be drawn. Feeling how requisite it was he should put himself right, in every respect, with the lady of his choice, he made a fresh confession of his religious faith. His Catholicism, he told her, was outwardly of the Bossuet and Bonald type, but was esoterically mystical, Saint-Johnian, which form alone preserved the real Christian tradition. Somewhat encouraged by vague inquiries from Madame Hanska as to the income required by a household for living in Paris, he entered into particulars with gusto; and, stating that he had eighty thousand francs worth of furniture, he discussed the best manner of arranging an existence with eight hundred thousand francs capital. With three hundred thousand francs, a country residence and small estate might be bought and the means of inhabiting there provided. Another hundred thousand would buy a house in Paris to spend each winter; and the residue of four hundred thousand, if invested in French Rentes, would purchase an additional income of fifteen thousand francs for town expenses. These latter he subdivided into three thousand francs for carriage hire; five thousand for cooking; two thousand five hundred for dress and amusement; and two thousand five hundred for general charges; the remaining two thousand would go in sundries. Madame de Berny, he said, spent only eight hundred francs on her wardrobe, and kept her household with nine hundred francs. Once launched into detail, he went far. The Countess learnt that he had still the same carpets, covering seven rooms, that he had bought for fifteen hundred francs in the Rue Cassini. They had worn well and were economical. The red velvet in his study had cost him two francs fifty a yard; but then he would take it away to another house, instead of giving it to the landlord. Living was slightly dearer in Passy, he concluded. A mutton chop cost seven sous there, instead of the five charged in the city. These last details were thrown in by a habit he had grown into of defending himself against the strictures passed by Madame Hanska on his expenditure.
They were frequent—such strictures—because Balzac was always repeating to her that he was penniless; and she, comparing this talk with other statements about his gaining large sums yearly, argued that the penury must be his own fault. True, there was the debt. But the debt grew instead of diminishing. So, apparently, he was not starving himself to pay it back. The fact was that Balzac did not tell the truth either about his assets or his liabilities. He neither earned as much as he affirmed, nor owed as much. According to some of his early biographers, his average income was not more than twelve thousand francs a year. But these figures cannot include lump sums he received at irregular intervals, nor yet all the royalties due to him on continued sales of his books. Taking one year with another, he probably made, throughout the greater portion of his literary career, between twenty and twenty-five thousand francs annually. What must have increased his embarrassments, in the later Thirties and early Forties, was his hobby for buying pictures and articles of vertu; this, with his knack of dropping money in speculations and imprudent ventures, rendered it impossible for him to live within his means.
It is curious to notice how his impecuniosity reduced him to regard every goal of his ambition as having merely a cash value. Speaking of his election to the Academie Francaise, which he reckoned to be near, he explained to Eve that it would mean six thousand francs a year to him, since he would be a member of the Dictionary committee; and then there was the Perpetual Secretaryship, which, falling to him naturally, would raise his emoluments to more than double that amount. Emboldened by these calculations—a trifle previous—he confided to Eve his desire to start on a trip to Naples, Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria, unless she should veto the proposal. In that case, his desire would be hers. Four thousand francs was what the journey would cost. Would she authorize him to spend so much? At present she was the arbitress of his actions. As the trip was abandoned, we are obliged to suppose that Eve was not favourable to it.
Mention has already been made of the novelist's initiative in the beginnings of the Men of Letters Society, and of his scheme for a petition to the King. In its details, what he wished to see adopted was on the same lines as those followed now by the Nobel Prize distribution—at any rate as regards literature. His idea was to secure a small independence for prize-takers in tragedy, comedy, opera, fiction, Christian philosophy, linguistic or archaeological research, and epic poetry, by awarding them a capital of a hundred thousand francs, and even two hundred thousand to poets, and to open thus an easier way to position and fame. Finding that his programme was not acceptable to the more influential members of the Society, he resigned his seat on the committee, and ceased his active connection with the Society itself, continuing, however, to interest himself in is prosperity.
Later, his bust by David was placed in the Society's Committee Room, where it may be seen at present presiding silently over the meetings. Both the bust and the famous daguerreotype of him belong to the commencement of the Forties. The sculptor Etex had asked him to sit for a bust; but David had the preference, being a friend. His profile of the novelist, sketched in view of a medallion, an engraving of which appeared in 1843 in theLoire Illustreefor August, was deemed by Madame Surville to be the only real likeness of her brother. Not until 1889 did the Men of Letters Society decide to honour Balzac by a statue to be erected amidst the life of the capital which he had so well described. And even then they allowed certain elements of prejudice and passion to dominate their counsels, with the result that a magnificent full-length figure of the novelist executed by the first sculptor in France was rejected; the committee's plighted word was violated; and in lieu was accepted and placed in one of the streets of Paris a sorry likeness hastily modelled by a man who, though a good sculptor, had one foot in the grave, and who had not, besides, the conception of what was required.[*]
[*] See myLife of Rodin(Fisher Unwin, 1906) or my later and smaller edition of the same sculptor's life (Grant Richards, 1907).
Of the novels that appeared in 1842,Albert Savarus, the first published, is worthy of attention chiefly as being a continuation of its author's personal experiences. The hero is the same ideal personification already seen inLouis LambertandZ. Marcas. A barrister, he suddenly settles in a provincial town, bringing with him a past history that no one can penetrate and every one would like to know. When interviewed in his private consulting-room, he presents himself in a black merino dressing-gown girt about with a red cord, in red slippers, a red flannel waistcoat, a red skull-cap. The likeness is once again Balzac's own—adorned by fancy: a superb head, black hair sparsely sprinkled with white, hair like that of Saint Peter and Saint Paul as shown in our pictures, with thick glossy curls, hair of bristly stiffness; a white round neck, as that of a woman; a splendid forehead with the puissant furrow in the middle that great plans and thoughts and deep meditations engrave on the brow of genius; an olive complexion streaked with red; a square nose; eyes of fire; gaunt cheeks with two long wrinkles, full of suffering; a mouth with sardonic smile, and a small, thin, abnormally short chin; crow's feet at the temples; sunken eyes (he repeats himself a little) rolling beneath their beetling arches and resembling two burning globes; but, despite all these signs of violent passions, a calm, profoundly resigned mien; a voice of thrilling softness, . . . the true voice of the orator, now pure and cunning, now insinuating, but thunderous when required, lending itself to sarcasm and then waxing incisive. Monsieur Albert Savarus (aliasBalzac) is of medium height, neither fat nor slim; to conclude, he has prelate's hands.
The mystery of Savarus' earlier life, revealed as the story goes on, is his meeting in Switzerland with Francesca, the wife of a rich Italian, whom he eventually wins to love him and to promise marriage when she is free and he has acquired wealth and fame. All the details of the prologue are those of Balzac's first relations with Madame Hanska. The development of the novel, in which Philomene de Watteville falls in love with Savarus, surprises his secret attachment to Francesca, intercepts his letters to her, and ruins his hopes, is less cleverly told. Savarus' retirement to a Carthusian monastery and fate's punishment of Philomene, who is mutilated and disfigured in a railway accident, form the denouement, which is strained to the improbable. The background of the story, with its glimpses of the manners and foibles of provincial society, is the most valuable portion of the book.
Between this relapse into lyricism and a much stronger work came the amusingBeginning in Life, suggested by his sister Laure's tale,Un Voyage en Coucou, and giving the adventures of the young Oscar Husson, a sort of Verdant Green, whose pretentious foolishness leads him into scrapes of every kind, until, having made himself the laughing-stock of all around him, and compromised many, he enlists and goes to the wars, whence he returns maimed for life. A comic character in the sketch is the bohemian artist Leon de Lora, nicknamed Mistigris, with his puns and proverbs that were the rage in the early Forties. A character of more serious calibre is Joseph Bridau, the talented painter. He and his scamp of a brother, Philippe, are the twin prominent figures in the novel above alluded to:La Rabouilleuse.
Originally called theTwo Brothers, and subsequentlyA Bachelor's Household, this slice of intensely realistic fiction exhibits the art of the author at its highest vigour. Philippe Bridau, the mother's favourite of the two boys, enters the army, sees Waterloo, and, after, leads the life of an adventurer, with its ups and downs of fortune. His widowed mother's indulgence, his own innate selfishness, and the hardening influence of war combine to render him a villain of the Richard III type, absolutely heartless and conscienceless. He robs his own family, fixes himself leech-like on that of an uncle, marries the latter's widow for her money, when he has killed her lover in a duel, drives his wife into vice, lets her die on a pallet, and refuses to pay a visit to the deathbed of his mother, whose grey hairs he had brought down with sorrow to the grave. Like Shakespeare's ideal villain, he has the philosophy, the humour of his egotism. "I am an old camel, familiar with genuflections," he exclaims. "What harm have I done?" he asks, speaking of his robbery of his relative, the old Madame Descoings. "I have merely cleaned the old lady's mattress." And he is equally indifferent to what destiny reserves for him. "I am aparvenu, my dear fellow; I don't intend to let my swaddling-clothes be seen. My son will be luckier than I; he will be agrand seigneur. The rascal will be glad to see me dead. I quite reckon on it; otherwise he would not be my son."
Most of the other figures are of equal truth to life, and are presented so as to increase the effect of the complete picture: Jean-Jacques Rouget, the stupid infatuated uncle, who espouses the intriguing Flore Brazier; and Flore herself, whose petty vices are crushed by those of her second husband; Maxime Gilet, the bully of Issoudun, whose surface bravado is checked and mated by the cooler scoundrelism of Philippe; Agathe, the foolish mother, whose eyes are blind to the devotion of her son Joseph; and Girondeau, the old dragoon, companion to Philippe who casts him off as soon as prosperity smiles and he has no further need for him. And the narrow-horizoned, curiously interlaced existences of the county-town add the mass of their colour-value, sombre but rich. One could have wished in the book a little more counterbalancing brightness, and less trivial detail; but neither the defect of the one nor the excess of the other takes from the novel the right to be considered a masterpiece.
The great event of the year 1843 was Balzac's visit in the summer to Saint Petersburg, where Madame Hanska had been staying since the preceding autumn. He had hoped to go there in the January, commissioned to exploit an important invention for cheaper shipbuilding, in which his brother-in-law, Monsieur Surville, was concerned. Like each of his previous schemes for quickly becoming rich, this invention turned out to be a soap-bubble, bursting as soon as trial was made of it. What was left intact, however, was his determination to go to the banks of the Neva; and, throughout the spring, successive letters announced preparations for departure. The real motive of his journey was to try to persuade his lady-love to fix the date of their marriage. Her period of mourning was over, and no objection could be made now on the ground of propriety. Such sentimental arguments as Madame Hanska might still put forward, he trusted to be able to overcome by his presence.
In order that she might be the more anxious to see him, he talked again of abandoning literature, and sailing for America. This time the West Indies were his El Dorado. He did not say how the shy millions were to be coaxed into his purse there, unless he wished her to understand he intended to export spices, since he added: "If I had been a grocer for the last ten years, I should have become a millionaire." Forsooth, these details were mere bluff. His inmost thought was that Eve would prevent his going across the Atlantic now, as Madame de Berny had prevented him—so he said—in 1829. Moreover, there was Balthazar's prediction that he was to be happy with her for long years. The fortune-teller's sanctum he attended more frequently than church. Going one day to the house of a magnetizer, a Monsieur Dupotet, living in the Rue du Bac, he gave his hand to a hypnotized woman, who placed it on her stomach and immediately loosed it again with a scared look: "What is that head?" she cried. "It is a world; it frightens me." "She had not looked at my heart," commented Balzac proudly. "She has been dazzled by the head. Yet since I was born, my life has been dominated by my heart—a secret which I conceal with care." All this he related quite seriously to Eve. Probably, Madame de Girardin, who accompanied him on this pilgrimage, could have told Madame Hanska more.
Writing on his birthday, he inserted the prayer he had offered up to his patron-saint for the accomplishment of his desires, its burden indicating how near he believed himself to the longed-for goal: "O great Saint Honore, thou to whom is dedicated a street in Paris at once so beautiful and so ugly, ordain that the ship may not blow up; ordain that I may be no more a bachelor, by decree of the Mayor or the Counsul of France; for thou knowest that I have been spiritually married for nigh on eleven years. These last fifteen years, I have lived a martyr's life. God sent me an angel in 1833. May this angel never quit me again till death! I have lived by my writing. Let me live a little by love! Take care of her rather than of me; for I would fain give her all, even my portion in heaven; and especially let us soon be happy. Ave, Eva."
The love fervour of this prayer was a dominant note throughout the twelvemonth; we notice after the visit that the familiarthouprevails over the colderyou; and the letters, both in number and length, very largely exceed those he had written up to the end of 1842. Funnily, he expresses admiration of himself for this work of supererogation, informing Eve, on one occasion, that the sixteen leaves he had recently sent her were worth sixteen hundred francs, even two thousand, counting extra leaves enclosed to Mademoiselle Henriette Borel, the governess, for whom he was negotiating an entrance into a nunnery. Love-letters estimated at five francs a page!!!
Let us grant that the epistles at present contained more gossip than ever, so that the recipient of them had her share of amusement. She was wonderfully well kept up in Paris happenings in society, including the stage and art galleries. She learnt that Madame d'Agoult—Daniel Stern[*]—had become Emile de Girardin's mistress, on losing Liszt, who had fallen into the toils of the Princess de Belgiojoso, the latter lady achieving her conquest after luring in succession Lord Normanby from his wife, Mignet from Madame Aubernon, and Alfred de Musset from George Sand. Going to see Victor Hugo'sBurgraves, he reported that it was nothing to speak of as history, altogether poor as invention, but nevertheless poetic, with a poetry that carried away the spectator. It was Titian painting on a mud wall. He chiefly remarked the absence of feeling, which, in Victor Hugo, was more and more noticeable. The author of theBurgraveslacked the true. As he did not publish these opinions, he was able to go on dining with the poet and to praise the beauty of his fourteen-year-old daughter. On George Sand'sConsuelohe pronounced a severer judgment still, calling it the emptiest, most improbable, most childish thing conceivable—boredom in sixteen parts. And yet he had conceived certain improbable plots himself.
[*] Her literary pseudonym
Like Charles Lamb, who left his office earlier in the afternoon to make up for arriving late in the morning, he counterbalanced these heavy-handed slatings of his friends by extolling his own performance past and present. Being engaged in revising theChouansfor a fresh edition, he was struck by qualities in it that he had hitherto held too lightly. It was all Scott and all Fenimore Cooper, he said, with a fire and wit, into the bargain, that neither of these writers ever possessed. The passion in it was sublime! Its landscapes and scenes of war were depicted with a perfection and happiness that surprised him. As a piece of self-praise there is probably nothing surpassing this in the annals of literature. In a competition, Balzac's blasts of vanity would beat the Archangel Michael's last trump for loudness.
Horace Vernet, he asserted, would never be a great painter. He was a colourist; he knew how to design and compose, had technical skill, and, now and again, found sentiment, but did not understand how to combine these talents in his pictures. He was clever, but had no genius. Hisalter egowas Delaroche, to whom he gave his daughter in marriage. Of the other painters, Boulanger, Delacroix, Ingres, Decamps, Jules Dupre were his favourites—true artists, he deemed them. At theSalonhe saw hardly anything to please him besides a canvas by Meissonier and Cogniet'sTintoretto painting his Dead Daughter. He would have liked to see Boulanger'sDeath of Messalina, but theSalonCommittee had refused it.
In music his preferences were as eclectic as in pictures. Liszt, whom he thought ridiculous as a man, he considered superb as a musician —the Paganini of the piano, yet inferior to Chopin, since he had not the genius of composition. And, in singing, Rubini was his idol —Rubini who triumphed in the role of Othello, giving the suspicionairin a manner no one could equal. It intoxicated him to hear this tenor with Tamburini, Lablache, and Madame Grisi; while Nourrit's song,Ce Rameau qui donne la Puissance et l'ImmortaliteinRobert le Diablemade his flesh creep. It yielded a glimpse of life with all its dreams satisfied.
Originally intending to start for St. Petersburg early in June, Balzac was not able to leave Paris until a month later. As usual, filthy lucre had to do with his tarrying. In spite of a loan of 11,500 francs from lawyer Gavault—his guardian, the novelist called him—who for the privilege of the great man's friendship had been endeavouring during the two years past to introduce a little order into his affairs, he had not available cash enough for a trip so far, and stayed on, hoping to finish hisDavid Sechard,* which was running as a serial in theEtat, and hisEsther,[*] appearing similarly in theParisien. June he spent at Lagny, where his manuscripts were being printed, in order to correct the proofs and get his money. But theEtatceased issue while he was there; and theParisien, being in parlous condition, refused likewise to pay up, so that he had to go off with a thinner-lined pocket than he had expected. Otherwise, he was in a fitting state of grace to meet his fair tyrant, whose envelope lectures had brought him into fear of her and at least outward obedience.
[*] Part of theLost Illusions.
The torrents of coffee by the aid of which he had forced his last pen-work through, had been reduced to minimum doses; the occasional mustard foot-baths that cured his cerebral inflammations were replaced by entire ablutions every other day; he liked hot baths well enough; but, in the spells of composition, they were often indefinitely adjourned, so that this season of purification had itsraison d'etre. And now, with his gaze turned to the east, he wondered how long he was going to remain there. His reply to a person who asked him to pledge himself for some novels on his return reads much as though he were counting on an offer to fix his residence in the empire of the czars. "I don't know whether I shall come back," he said. "France bores me. I am infatuated with Russia. I am in love with absolute power. I am going to see if it is as fine as I believe it to be. De Maistre stayed a long time at St. Petersburg. Perhaps I shall stay also." This he naturally repeated to Madame Hanska. Not that it was new to her. A similar hint had been given in January, when he capped his declaration, "I abhor the English; I execrate the Austrians; the Italians are nothing," with "I would sooner be a Russian than any other subject." The comic side of this fury is that Madame Hanska was a Pole, her late husband too; and neither she nor her family were reconciled to the Russian yoke. To make his renunciation more complete, he humbly spoke his dread she might turn from him with the "get away" said to a dog. No! She had no intention of dismissing him. His outpourings of devotion caressed her woman's pride, even if she did not accept them as gospel truth. And however tedious she found his vamping song of sixpence, his sittings in the parlour counting out his mirage-money, she put up with them in consideration of her privilege.
Sailing from Havre in theDevonshire, an English boat, Balzac arrived at St. Petersburg towards the end of July. He lodged in a private house not far from Eve's Koutaizoff mansion; but passed the three months of his sojourn almost entirely in her society. It was the first opportunity he had had of getting to know her intimately, their previous meetings being surrounded with too many restrictions to allow of familiar intercourse. No detailed record has come down to us of these days oftete-a-teteexistence. All we learn from subsequent allusions is that, together with a good deal of billing and cooing, more sustained on the novelist's side, there were some lovers' tiffs, followed by reconciliations. Apparently the friction was mainly caused by Eve's evasiveness on the subject of their marriage.
It would seem as though there were an attack on her aloofness in the long criticism he sent her from his lodgings on Madame d'Arnim'sBellina, a French translation of which had been published not long before he left Paris. After some general remarks on the circumstance of a girl's fancying herself in love with a great man living at a distance, he waxed wroth over what he styled Bellina's head-love, and over head-love in general. To this monster, Merimee, in hisDouble Mistake, had given a thrust but a thrust that made it bleed only. The cleverer Madame d'Arnim had poisoned it with opium. "In order for the literary expression of love to become a work of art and to be sublime," he continued, "the love that depicts should itself be complete; it should occur in its triple form, head, heart, and body; should be a love at once sensual and divine, manifested with wit and poetry. Who says love says suffering; suffering from separation; suffering from disagreement. Love in itself is a sublime and pathetic drama. When happy, it is silent. Now, the cause of the tedium of Madame d'Arnim's book," he added, "is easily discoverable by a soul that loves. Goethe did not love Bellina. Put a big stone in Goethe's place—the Sphinx no power has ever been able to wrest from its desert sand—and Bellina's letters are understandable. Unlike Pygmalion's fable, the more Bellina writes, the more petrified Goethe becomes, the more glacial his letters. True, if Bellina had perceived that her sheets were falling upon granite, and if she had abandoned herself to rage or despair, she would have composed a poem. But, as she did not love Goethe, as Goethe was a pretext for her letters, she went on with her girl's journal; and we have read some (not intended for print) much more charming, not in units, but in tens."
In the rest of the criticism, Balzac swirls round his guns and directs his fire on Goethe's replies to Bellina. The latter's epistles were accompanied with presents of braces and slippers and flannel waistcoats, which were much more appreciated by the poet than her theories on music. Not so did he, Balzac, treat his Lina, his Louloup —such was the inference suggested. Every one of her, i.e. Eve's sayings was treasured up, after being duly pondered upon. Such adulation must have been delicious to Madame Hanska; and yet she sent her sighing swain back into his loneliness, with his bonds riveted tighter, his promises to break with all rivals more solemn, and a disappointment, over his deferred hopes, that brought on an illness after his return.
The journey back was made by land through Riga, Taurogen, and Berlin. In the Prussian capital, Von Humboldt came to see him with a message from the King and Queen; and Shakespeare'sMidsummer Night's Dreamwas seen on the stage, without pleasure being derived from it. To its poesy the novelist was little open. Instead of pushing on straight to France, he bent his course southwards to Dresden, where he visited the Pinakothek. The Saxon town pleased him more than Berlin, both by its structural picturesqueness and surroundings. The palace, begun by Augustus, he esteemed the most curious masterpiece of rococo architecture. The Gallery he thought over-rated; but he none the less admired Correggio'sNight, hisMagdaleneand twoVirgins, as also Raphael'sVirgins, and the Dutch pictures. His highest enthusiasm was aroused by the theatre, decorated by the three French artists Desplechin, Sechan, and Dieterle. He reached Passy on the 3rd of November, having crowded into the preceding week visits to Maintz, Cologne, Aix-la-Chapelle, and several places in Belgium.
The form assumed by his malady was arachnitis, an inflammation of the network of nerves enveloping the brain. For the time being, Nacquart, his doctor, conjured it away, as he had done in the case of other seizures from which the patient had suffered. He had known Balzac since boyhood and was well acquainted with his constitution. Unfortunately he could not change the novelist's abnormal manner of living and working. And the mischief was in them.
Balzac's three months' absence from Paris had caused profane tongues to wag considerably. Notwithstanding his reticence concerning Countess Hanska, a legend had gathered round about their relations to each other. More than one paper reported that he had been off on an expedition, wife, and fortune-hunting—which was true; and one daily, at least, spoke of his having been engaged by the Czar as a kind of courtlitterateur. ThePresseespecially annoyed him by copying from theIndependance Belgea story of his having been surprised by the Belgian police dining in an hotel with an Italian forger, whose grand behaviour and abundance of false bank-notes had completely captivated him. The forger was certainly arrested in the hotel where he had put up, but the dinner and the chumming were inventions; at any rate, Balzac affirmed they were, uttering furious anathemas against the scorpion Girardin, who had allowed so illustrious a name to be taken in vain.
On the 26th of September, during the St. Petersburg visit, his third finished theatrical piece,Pamela Giraud, was produced at the Gaite Theatre. Differing essentially from his previous efforts, this play is an ordinary melodramatic comedy. Pamela, like Richardson's heroine, is an honest girl, who, occupied in the humble trade of flower-selling, loves a young man, Jules Rousseau, that she believes to belong to her own modest rank, whereas, in reality, he is the son of a big financier. Involved in a Bonapartist conspiracy, which has just been discovered, Jules comes one night to her room and tries to persuade her to fly with him. She refuses; and, while he is with her, the police enter and arrest him. To save him she consents, though opposed by her parents, to say in Court that her lover had spent the night of the conspiracy with her; and Jules is acquitted through this false confession of her being his mistress. Once the happy result obtained, Jules and his family forget her. The lawyer, however, smitten by her beauty and virtue, proposes to marry her, and is about to carry his intention into effect when, remarking that she is pining for the ungrateful Jules, he contrives to bring him to Pamela's feet again, and the marriage is celebrated.
Pamela Giraudwas written in 1838, but no theatre had been willing to stage it in its original form. Ultimately two professional playwrights, Bayard and Jaime, who had already dramatized, the one,Eugenie Grandetand theSearch for the Absolute, the other,Pere Goriot, pruned the over-plentifulness of its matter and strengthened the relief of various parts; and, in the amended guise, it was performed. Balzac resented the modifications, which explains his equanimity on hearing, as he travelled homewards, that the piece had fallen flat. He considered that, presented as he wrote it, the chances of success would have been greater. He was wrong, and those critics as well who attributed the failure to enmities arising out of a recent publication of his, entitled theMonography of the Press. Neither of the two chiefdramatis personaewas capable of properly interesting a theatrical audience. The character of Jules is contemptible from beginning to end, and that of Pamela ceases to attract after the trial. The conclusion of this play, as that ofVautrin, is an anticlimax and leaves an unsatisfactory impression.
Why did Balzac write hisMonography of the Parisian Press? Not altogether from a pure motive, one must own. There is too much gall in his language, too much satire in the thought. He was sufficiently acquainted with the inner ring of journalistic life to be able to say truly what were its blemishes; and, without doubt, at the time when he composed the chief of his novels, these had a prejudicial effect on literature as on other phases of activity. But his pamphlet, besides its indiscriminate condemnations, erred in adopting a style which rendered the turning of the tables only too easy. And Jules Janin, whom he had already indisposed by sketching a seeming portrait of him in theProvincial Great Man in Paris, came down heavily on the daring satirist in theDebatsof the 20th of February 1843. The retort, so he informed Madame Hanska, made him laugh immoderately. Perhaps; but the laugh must have been somewhat forced—what the French call "yellow."
In theMonography, men of letters, baptized by the novelistgendelettres—one of the few words coined by Balzac which have become naturalized—may be divided into several categories. First, there are thepublicistes, occupied in scratching the pimples of the body politic. From these pimples they extract a book which is a mystification. Not far removed from thepublicistesare the chief managing editors and proprietors general, big wigs who sometimes become prefects, receivers general, or theatrical directors. The type of this class is glory's porter, speculation's trumpeter, the electorate'sBonneau. He is set in motion by a ballet-dancer, a cantatrice, an actress; in short, he is a brigand-captain, with other brigands under him. And of the latter:—There are thePremiers Paris, alias, first tenors. In writingPremiers Paris, it is impossible for a man to avoid mental warp and rapid deterioration. In such writing, style would be a misfortune. One must know how to speak jesuitically; and, in order to advance, one must be clever in getting one's ideas to walk on crutches. Those who engage in the trade confess themselves corrupt; like diplomatists, they have as a pension the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, a few librarianships, even archiveships.
Next to thePremiers Pariscome theFaits Paris; then theCamarillists, other banditti commissioned to distort Parliamentary speeches; then the newspaper Politicians, who have not two ideas in their heads. If appointed under-officials, they would be unable to administer the sweeping of the streets. Consequently, the more incapable a man is, the better he is qualified to become the Grand Lama of a newspaper. Indeed, nothing is more explicable than politics. It is a game at ninepins.
In addition to its Politicians, the newspaper has itsAttaches. TheAttachesof the Republican party are watched very closely. One day two Republicans meet, and the first says to the second: "You have sold yourself; people find you are getting fatter." Whence it follows that any paper knowing its trade will have only exceedingly thinAttaches; otherwise yourAttachewill be a mere detachedAttache, that is to say, a sort of paid spy, who is mostly a professor of rhetoric or philosophy. He will dine at all tables, with mission to attack political leaders; he runs in and out of newspaper offices, like a dog seeking his master; and, when he has bitten sharply, he becomes the professor of a fantastic science, the private secretary of some cabinet, or else consul-general.
Afterwards come thegendelettrepamphleteers. According to the author of theMonography, the pamphlet is the brochure masterpiece; and he himself is its most illustrious exponent. The Abbe de Lamennais does not know how to speak to the proletariat. He is not Spartacus enough, not Marat enough, not Calvin enough; he does not understand how to storm the positions of the ignoble bourgeoisie at present in power.
Following on are thegendelettre-vulgarisateurs, who have invented Germany. The type of this class is appointed professor in the College de France. He marches at the head of the Nothingologues; he is the almighty king of the Sorbonne. Such people are the skin parasites of France. The Nothingologue is ordinarilymonobible;[*] and, as the bourgeoisie are essentially lacking in intelligence, they are infatuated with him. TheMonobiblebecomes a director of canals, railways, the defender of negroes, or else the advocate of slavery; in a word, the Nothingologue is an important man, quite as the convincedgendelettre, who reserves to himself the Council of State, and as the scepticgendelettre, who becomes Master of Requests or Governor of the Marquisas Isles.
[*] In Balzac's use of the word: A man who has written only one book and boasts of it always.
Replying to this diatribe, with its medley of shrewdness and exaggeration, Janin pointed out that it insulted Quinet, professor at the College de France; Sainte-Beuve, the poet, novelist, and critic, the historian of Port-Royal; Philarete Chasles, professor of Foreign Literature; Loeve Weimars, Consul at Bagdad; not to speak of Planche, Berlioz, Michel and Chevalier; and that it came amiss from a man who had lived and still lived on newspapers; who himself had been the chief managing editor, tenor, Jack-of-all-trades, canard-seller, camarillist, politician, premier-Paris, fait-Paris,detache-attache, pamphleteer, translator, critic, euphuist, bravo, incense-bearer, guerillero, angler, humbug, and even, what was more serious, the banker of a paper of which he was the only, unique, and perpetualgendelettre, and which, so admirably written, cleverly conducted, and signed with so great a name, did not live six months.
Within a very few years, Janin was to bury the hatchet of polemics beside Balzac's grave, and, forgetting the soreness generated in him by theMonography of the Pressto constitute himself the dead author's apologist.
Besides his continuation of Lucien de Rubempre's story in theSplendour and Wretchedness of Courtezans, Balzac published, in the year 1843, two complete novels, viz.Honorine, andThe Muse of the County, and a portion of an historical study on Catherine de Medici. This last work, to which theCalvinist Martyrbelongs, was undertaken with the idea of composing, as he said, a retrospective history of France treated clairvoyantly, and, as the fragment shows, with his peculiar bias towards despotism. In the experiment made withCatherine de Medici, he started out thinking to justify and rehabilitate her memory. Instead, he found himself obliged to exhibit her committing the worst actions imaginable; and, his conclusions not concording with his premises, he abandoned further incursions into the past. History is a dangerous ground for a doctrinaire to investigate.
The former of the two novels is mainly psychological. The wife of a Count Octave, having quitted her husband for another, has repented of her fault and separated from her lover, but, through shamefastness, will not return to her husband. She seeks to gain a livelihood by flower-making; and her husband, who still loves her and is full of forgiveness, helps her secretly to obtain orders. At length, by the good offices of a secretary and the latter's uncle, a priest, he pleads with his wife more efficaciously, and induces her to return to him, yet without her pardoning herself; and she dies in giving birth to a child, dies because she wishes, rather from wounded pride, it would appear, than on account of her husband, to whose affection she is strangely insensible. The heroine is not particularly interesting with her morbidness and hysterical posing; she probably stands for one of Balzac's principles, and his principles are the most tedious thing about him.
With theMuse of the County, which the author declared to be Constant'sAdolphetreated realistically, we are back in the truer Balzacian manner. Dinah de la Baudraye—a Sancerre Catherine de Vivonne—married to an apology for a man, is human flesh and blood; and her love for the journalist Etienne Lousteau is natural, though culpable. Indeed, her subsequent devotion to this shallow egotist is not without greatness. Here the novelist, as much by his wit as by his denouement, gives perhaps the best practical condemnation of adultery.
"Bah!" says the little de la Baudraye, "do you call it vengeance, because the Duke of Bracciano will kill his wife for putting him into a cage and showing herself to him in her lover's arms. Our tribunals and society are much more cruel."
"In what?" asked Lousteau.
"In letting the woman live with a slender allowance. Every one turns away from her. She has neither dress nor consideration, two things which are everything to a woman."
"But she has happiness," replied Madame de la Baudraye grandly.
"No!" replied the husband, lighting his candle to go to bed; "for she has a lover."
Dinah's punishment is of this kind. Persuaded at length to go back to the house of her husband, who had been made a peer of France and accepts Lousteau's children with her, she lives to see her former lover and father of her children sink so low that she must despise him, while still occasionally tempted to yield to his caresses.
When Alexandre Dumas, the younger, was received into the French Academy in 1875, the Count d'Haussonville, who welcomed him, asserted that the elder Dumas, like Balzac, Beranger, de Lamennais and others, had preferred to remain an outsider. In the case of Balzac, the Count was mistaken. The so-called preference was Hobson's choice. He stayed outside only because he could not get in. Between 1839 and 1849, he made several attempts to secure the promise of a number of votes sufficient to elect him. Having stood aside at the earlier date in favour of Victor Hugo, who was admitted in 1841, he thought he might count on a reciprocal service from the poet. And, on Bonald's death in the same year, he asked him, during the visit to Les Jardies, to use his influence with his colleagues in the Academy. "Hugo promised but little," says Gozlan; and Balzac had to wait for a better opportunity. This happened at the end of 1843, when Campenon died, and a vacancy occurred which he might reasonably claim to fill. Encouraged at present by Hugo and Charles Nodier, he began the round of visits required by Academy etiquette; but soon discovered that the members whose votes he solicited did not consider him rich enough. He therefore withdrew from the list of candidates, writing to Nodier that, if he could not succeed in entering the Academy while in honourable poverty, he would never present himself at the moment when prosperity should have bestowed her favours on him.
And, so far as personal solicitation was concerned, he never did. Though not abandoning his desire of belonging to the Forty, and esteeming rightly that the value of his work entitled him to a place among them, he felt after this rebuff that, if a fresh proposal were made, it should come from the other side. He might have done more to provoke it had not Madame Hanska been against his taking any further action in the matter, however indirect. Maybe she realized better than he did the uselessness of his candidature. The enemies he had in the Academy and its entourage were too powerful for his claims to be considered. Many years afterwards, Victor Hugo related that the novelist put himself forward for the vacancy left by Ballanche's death at the end of 1847, and apropos added the following anecdote.
"I was driving," he said, "down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, when in front of the Church I perceived Monsieur de Balzac, who beckoned to me to stop. I was going to get out of the carriage, but he prevented me, and said: 'I was just coming to see you. You know I am on the list for the Academy.' 'Really!' 'Yes. What do you think of my chances?' 'You are too late, I fear. You will get only my vote.' 'It is your vote especially I want.' 'Are you quite in earnest?' 'Quite.' Balzac quitted me. The election was virtually decided. For political motives. The candidature of Monsieur Vatout had a majority of supporters. I tried to canvass for Balzac, but met with no success. It vexed me to think that a man of Balzac's calibre should have only one vote, and I reflected that if I could obtain a second one, I might create some change of opinion. How was I to gain it? On the election day I was sitting beside the excellent Pongerville, one of the best of men. I asked him point blank, 'For whom are you voting?' 'For Vatout, as you know.' 'I know it so little that I ask you to vote for Balzac.' 'Impossible!' 'Why?' 'Because my bulletin is ready. See.' 'Oh! that makes no matter.' And on two bits of paper I wrote in my best hand: 'Balzac.' 'Well!' quoth Pongerville; 'well! you will see.' The apparitor who was collecting the votes approached us. I handed him one of the bulletins I had prepared. Pongerville, in his turn, stretched out his hand to put Vatout's name in the urn; but, with a friendly tap on his fingers, I caused his paper to flutter to the floor. He looked, appeared irresolute for a moment; and, as I presented him with the second bulletin, on which Balzac's name was inscribed, he smiled, took it, and gave it with good grace. And that is how Honore de Balzac had two votes in his favour at the Academy."
This story is inexact chronologically. Balzac was not a candidate in 1847-48, when Monsieur Vatout was chosen, but at two later elections, those of the 11th and 18th of January 1849. In each of these he obtained two votes; and since the second election was to fill the chair of Monsieur Vatout, who died after occupying it during a twelvemonth, it would seem that Victor Hugo, deceived by his memory, confused the two events. As for the conversation with Balzac, it probably refers to the candidature which the novelist did begin in 1844; and either Hugo's age in 1877, when he told the story, or his capacity for embellishing was responsible for the interview being tacked on to the election incident of 1849.
The Pongerville mentioned by Hugo was the same in whose album, in 1844, Balzac wrote a couple of complimentary verses. He happened to come across the album at his sister's, and, after inserting his poetry, took the book to Pongerville's house without finding him at home. He had certainly reckoned, at the close of the preceding year, on having this Academician's vote, as well as Dupaty's, Hugo's, and Nodier's. Pongerville may have deemed his own tardy support a sufficient reward for the verses.
Although Balzac's monetary embarrassments were fated to persist as long as he lived, the causes being so much in the man, their burden was somewhat less felt in and from the year 1844. This better state of things was proved by his looking round for a more commodious residence. The Passy cottage, picturesque as it was, accorded but ill with his designs of marrying so grand a dame; and even for his work was not very suitable, being close to the flats of the Rue Basse, where families lived with children that disturbed his meditations. He would have liked to free Les Jardies from its mortgage and keep the place as a summer resort, while renting a snug mansion in the city during the winter; but the two abodes were hardly within his means, unless Eve would loosen her purse-strings. "I will not sell it," he informed her, referring to his "Folly"; "it was built with my blood and brains. I will stick to it—if I cannot dispose of it advantageously," he finished up with, inconsequently. And still she made no sign; or, rather she proffered no cash. Business advice she gave in plenty. About each of the Paris houses suggested she had some objections to make, so that, after fixing successively on a residence belonging to Madame Delannoy (one of his creditor friends) in the Rue Neuve-des Mathurins, on the old mansion opposite his Passy abode once possessed by the Princesse de Lamballe, on the property in the Rue Ponthieu, and on a plot of land in the Allee des Veuves where he thought they could build, the end of the year arrived without any definite solution being reached. The two "louloups," as he called himself and Eve, filled their correspondence with calculations and figures, the Paris "louloup" expressing his conviction that figures were the foundation of their happiness.
If he did not die too soon, she might consider she would marry a million in giving him her hand, he said. Slily, he now and again quoted his worth in the estimation of a rival feminine authority. For example, Madame de Girardin was about to write an article on the great conversationalists of the day, and had mentioned that she held him to be one of the most charming. However, when he raised his rate of exchange in this way, he was always prudent enough to follow up with concessions. His intimacy with the Englishwoman, Madame Visconti, who was Eve's bugbear, he broke off completely—at least he swore he had done so and offered to send his beloved tyrant the cold letter in which his whilom friend and benefactress bade him good-bye. To let Eve see it would not be gallant on his part, he confessed; but what could he deny her, if she persisted. He was her Paris agent, even her Paris errand-boy, at one time negotiating the entrance of the governess, Mademoiselle Borel, into the Saint-Thomas-de-Velleneuve nunnery; at another, purchasing gloves, millinery, and other articles of dress. Yet she never considered him submissive enough, notwithstanding his pretty flattery.
"Why shouldn't you have a poet?" he asked, thinking of himself, "as other people have a dog, a monkey, a parrot—the more so as I have in me something of these three creatures: I always repeat the same phrase, I imitate society, I am faithful." And again in a burst of lyricism, he exclaimed: "Adieu, loved friend, to whom I belong like the sound to the bell, the dog to his master, the artist to his ideal, prayer to God, pleasure to cause, colour to the painter, life to the sun. Love me, for I need your affection, so vivifying, so coloured, so agreeable, so celestial, so ideally good, of such sweet dominance, and so constantly vibrating." With comparisons of this sort he was lavish. "I am like Monsieur de Talleyrand," he told her in another letter. "Either I show a stolid, tin face and do not speak a word, or else I chatter like a magpie." Adopting the expression first invented by Guizot, he characterized their mutual relations as anentente cordiale, impatient, none the less, for the realization of his fancy, which was to see his idol enter a tabernacle prepared to receive her on the return from a delightful honeymoon. Meanwhile, he was amassing furniture and bric-a-brac, just as the bird bits of straw; and he implored her not to scold him. In the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, he had ferreted out two Dresden vases, which he bought, resolving to deprive himself for a time of his grapes at forty sous a pound, in order to retrieve the money.
The retrieval indeed was not easy, since his passion for collecting curios led him far, and he generally succumbed to the temptation of something ancient and rare. In the previous autumn he had bought, for thirteen hundred and fifty francs, asecretaireandcommodein ebony, with inlaid pearl, that had apparently been manufactured at Florence in the seventeenth century; theseobjets d'arthe estimated at values ranging up to forty or fifty thousand francs. A description of them appeared in the press, and rich amateurs inquired whether he were willing to sell; but, either because he asked too much or really did not want to part with them, they were kept, as also hisChristby Bouchardon or Girardon, which he obtained for two hundred francs and valued at several thousands. If he had no cash for his purchases —and this frequently happened—he placed one of his already acquired treasures (possibly unpaid for, too) in the establishment of his "respectable relative," as he styled the pawnbroker, and thus secured the coveted object.
In his intercourse with his own family, Madame Hanska was a continuously troubling factor. The prospect of his alliance with this foreign aristocrat had less charm for Madame Balzac and Laure than for Honore. They probably perceived the chimera he was pursuing, and could not be expected to show enthusiasm. This attitude on their side and a certain hauteur on his, partly caused by offended dignity, widened the breach between him and them. "I have now no family," he told "The Stranger," "and am glad that the coldness should be established before I am completely happy; for later the reason of it would have been attributed to you, or to what would have been termed my uppishness. The isolation, which you wish, will be likewise my dearest desire. My sister," he proceeded, "has suppressed for ever the literary question betwixt us, with her blue-stocking whims. I cannot talk to her of my affairs, nor yet of my mother's. She asserts that her husband is a greater man than I am." Madame de Berny, he added, had foreseen his mother's and sister's transformation when she told him he was a flower that had sprung up on a dunghill! If Madame de Berny told him this, it was no doubt in a fit of anger against them for endeavouring to sever the liaison, an endeavour they were perfectly justified in. These portions of Balzac's confidences, which reflect upon his character seriously, and besmirch him more than those against whom they were spoken, cannot be overlooked in a biography. They have to be included in our judgment of him, and, in a measure, concern the tragic close of his love romance.