  HONORÉ DE BALZAC BY THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION
PARIS POULET‑MALASSIS ET DE BROISE BOOKSELLERS‑PUBLISHERS 9, rue des Beaux‑Arts 1859
Translated by David Desmond
I
Around 1835, I lived in two small rooms in the Impasse du DoyennÉ, not far from the current location of the Pavillon Mollien. Although it was located in the center of Paris facing the Tuilleries and just a few steps from the Louvre, the location was deserted and wild, and it required a certain persistence for me to be found. However, one morning a young man with a distinguished look and a cordial and spiritual air approached my front door and excused himself while making his introduction; he was Jules Sandeau: he had come to recruit me on behalf of Balzac for La Chronique de Paris, a weekly journal that one will certainly remember, but which had not been as financially successful as it deserved. Balzac, Sandeau told me, had read Mademoiselle de Maupin, then very recently published, and he had very much admired its style; thus he wished to request my collaboration on the journal that he sponsored and directed. A date was set for us to get together, and from that date forward there was between us a friendship that only death could break. If I have told this story, it is not because it is flattering for me, but because it honors Balzac, who, already famous, sought out a young, obscure writer to collaborate in a spirit of of camaraderie and complete equality. At that time, it's true, Balzac was not yet the author of La ComÉdie Humaine, but he had completed, besides several novellas, La Physiologie du Mariage, La Peau de Chagrin, Louis Lambert, Seraphita, EugÉnie Grandet, l'Histoire des Treize, Le MÉdecin de Campagne, PÈre Goriot, that is to say, in ordinary times, enough to solidify five or six reputations. His nascent glory, strengthened each month with new rays, shined with all of the splendors of the aurora; certainly he shined brightly like his contemporaries Lamartine, Victor Hugo, de Vigny, de Musset, Sainte‑Beuve, Alexandre Dumas, MÉrimÉe, George Sand, and many others; but at no time in his life did Balzac carry himself as the Grand Lama of literature, and he was always good company; he had pride, but he was entirely free of vanity. He lived at that time at the end of the Jardin du Luxembourg, near the Observatoire, on a little frequented road given the name of Cassini, without doubt because of its astronomical neighbor. On the garden wall which occupied almost the entire side, and at the end of which was found the house in which Balzac lived, one read: Labsolu, brick merchant. That strange sign, which is still there, if I am not wrong, is very striking; La Recherche de l'Absolu can have no other inspiration. This fateful name probably suggested to the author the idea of Balthasar ClaËs in the pursuit of his impossible dream. When I saw him for the first time, Balzac, one year older than the century, was around thirty‑six, and his face was one of those that one would never forget. In his presence, one is reminded of Shakespeare's lines about Julius Caesar: "Before him, nature stands up boldly and says to the world, 'This is a man!'" My heart beat strongly because never had I approached without trembling a master of thought, and all the speeches I had prepared on the way stayed in my throat, allowing nothing to pass other than a stupid phrase like this: "The temperature is nice today." Heinrich Heine, when he went to visit Goethe, could find nothing to say except that the plums that have fallen from the trees on the route from IÉna to Weimar are excellent for thirst, which made the Jupiter of German poetry laugh gently. Balzac, seeing my embarrassment, soon put me at my ease, and during breakfast I became calm enough to examine him in detail. He wore, in the form of a dressing gown, a robe of white cashmere or flannel held at the waist by a cord, in which, some time later, he was painted by Louis Boulanger. What whim had pushed him to choose, ahead of any other, this costume that he never took off? Could it be that it symbolized in his eyes the cloistered life to which his labors condemned him, and, Benedictine of the novel, he had thus taken the robe? This robe always suited him marvelously. He boasted, showing me the intact sleeves, to have never sullied its purity with the least stain of ink, "because," he said, "the true writer should always be neat while at his work." His robe, thrown back, revealed the neck of an athlete or a bull, round as a section of a column, without apparent muscles, and of a satiny whiteness which contrasted with the deeper hue of his face. At this time, Balzac, in the prime of his life, gave the impression of a robust health, little in harmony with the romantic pallors then in fashion. The pure Tourainian blood left his cheeks a bright purple and warmly colored his lips, thick and sinuous, easy to laugh; a light mustache and a small beard just below his lower lip accentuated the contours of his mouth, without concealing them; the nose, square at the end, divided into two lobes, pierced by very open nostrils, of a character entirely original and unique; Balzac, in posing for his bust, told the sculptor, David d'Angers, "Be careful about my nose, my nose is a world!" The forehead was beautiful, vast, noble, much whiter than the face, with no creases other than a perpendicular furrow along the ridge of the nose; there was a very pronounced ridge above the eyebrows; the hair, abundant, long, strong and black, stood up in back like a lion's mane. As for the eyes, there have never existed anything comparable. They had a life, a light, an inconceivable magnetism. Despite the nightly vigils, their whites were pure, limpid, bluish, like that of a child or a virgin, and encased two black diamonds that shined at times with rich reflections of gold: they were eyes to make eagles avert their gaze, to penetrate walls and hearts, to strike down a furious wild beast, the eyes of the sovereign, the seer, the conqueror. Mme. Emile de Girardin, in her novel entitled La Canne de M. de Balzac, speaks of these shining eyes: "Tancred then perceived at the front of the club, turquoise, gold, marvelous carvings; and behind all of that two large black eyes more brilliant than the stones." Those extraordinary eyes, once one had met their gaze, made it difficult to notice other features that might have been trivial or irregular. The habitual expression of the face was a sort of powerful hilarity, a Rabelaisian and monkish joy — the robe no doubt contributing to the birth of this idea — which made you think of Brother Jean des Entommeures, but it was enlarged and elevated by a mind of the first order. According to his habit, Balzac had risen at midnight, and had written until my arrival. His features betrayed no fatigue, aside from a slight darkening beneath the eyelids, and during the entire breakfast he demonstrated a wild gaiety. Little by little the conversation drifted toward literature, and he complained of the enormous difficulties of the French language. Style preoccupied him a great deal, and he sincerely believed that he had none at all. It is true that he was then generally thought to be lacking this quality. The school of Victor Hugo, in love with the sixteenth century and the Middle Ages, specialized in patterns, in rhythms, in structure, rich in words, breaking prose with the gymnastics of verse, and modeling itself on a master confident in his methods, would do nothing other than that which was well written, that is to say worked and toned beyond measure, and found the portrayal of modern manners to be useless, conventional, and lacking in lyricism. Balzac, despite the popularity that he had begun to enjoy among the public, was not admitted among the gods of Romanticism, and he knew it. While devouring his books, people did not pause to regard their serious side, and even for his admirers, he remained for a long time the most productive of our novelists and nothing else; this surprises today, but I can vouch for the truth of my assertion. He tortured himself in trying to achieve a style, and, in his anxiety to make corrections, he consulted people who were a hundred times his inferiors. Before signing his name to anything, he had written under different pseudonyms (Horace de Saint‑Aubin, L. de ViellerglÉ, etc.) one hundred volumes just "to free his hand." However he already possessed a style of his own without being conscious of it. But let me return to our breakfast. While talking, Balzac played with his knife or his fork, and I noted that his hands were of a rare beauty, the true hands of a prelate, white, with fingers both slender and plump, and nails that were pink and shiny; he was proud of them and smiled with pleasure as I looked at them. He considered his hands to be evidence of breeding and aristocratic birth. Lord Byron, in a note, says with evident satisfaction, that Ali Pacha complimented him on the smallness of his ears, and inferred from them that he was a true gentleman. A similar remark upon his hands would have equally flattered Balzac, even more than the praise of one his books. He had a sort of prejudice against those whose extremities lacked finesse. The meal was rather fine, a patÉ de foie gras was part of it, but this was a deviation from his habitual frugality, as he remarked while laughing, and that for "this solemn occasion" he had borrowed his silver plates from his library! I retired after having promised some articles for La Chronique de Paris, where Le Tour en Belgique, La Morte Amoureuse, La Chaine d'Or, and other literary works had appeared. Charles de Bernard, who had also been called by Balzac, contributed La Femme de Quarante Ans, La Rose Jaune, and some new work since collected into volumes. Balzac, as one knows, had invented the woman of thirty years; his imitator added ten years to that already venerable age and his heroine obtained no less success. Before going further, let's pause for a moment and give some details of Balzac's life prior to my acquaintance with him. My authorities will be Madame de Surville, his sister, and himself. Balzac was born in Tours, May 16, 1799, on the day of the celebration of Saint HonorÉ who gave him his name, which sounded good and augured well. Little HonorÉ was not a child prodigy; he did not announce prematurely that he would write La ComÉdie Humaine. He was a fresh, rosy, healthy boy, fond of play, with gentle, sparkling eyes, but in no way distinguished from other boys of his age, at least upon casual observation. At seven, upon leaving a day school in Tours, he attended a secondary school in VendÔme run by the Oratoriens, where he was thought to be a very mediocre student. The first part of Louis Lambert contains curious information regarding this period of Balzac's life. Dividing his own personality, he describes himself as an old classmate of Louis Lambert, sometimes speaking in his name, and sometimes lending his own sentiments to this person who is imaginary, yet very real, since he is a sort of lens into the writer's very soul. "Situated in the middle of the town, upon the little river Loire that bathes its walls, the college forms a vast enclosure containing the establishments necessary for an institution of this kind: a chapel, a theater, an infirmary, a bakery, some streams of water. This college, the most celebrated seat of instruction of the central provinces, is populated by those provinces and by our colonies. The distance does not allow parents to come here often to see their children; the rules forbid vacations away from the institution. Once they have entered, the pupils do not leave the college until the end of their studies. With the exception of walks taken outside under the supervision of the Fathers, everything had been planned to give to this house all of the advantages of monastic discipline. In my time, the corrector was still a living memory, and the leather strap played with honor its terrible role." It is in this way that Balzac described this formidable college, which left in his imagination such persistent memories. It would be intriguing to compare the novella titled William Wilson, in which Edgar Allen Poe describes, with the strange exaggerations of childhood, the old building from the time of Queen Elizabeth where his hero was raised with a companion who was no less strange than Louis Lambert; but this is not the place to make this comparison, thus I must content myself only to point it out. Balzac suffered prodigiously in this college, where his tendency to daydream was assaulted every instant by some inflexible rule. He neglected his studies; but, benefitting from the tacit complicity of a tutor of mathematics, who was at the same time a librarian and occupied in studies that were outside of the realm of ordinary experience, he did not take his lessons and borrowed all of the books he wished. He passed all of his time in secret reading. Soon he became the most punished student in the class. Extra work and detentions occupied his recreation time. For certain schoolchildren, punishments inspire a sort of stoic rebellion, and they oppose the exasperated professors with the same disdainful impassivity that captive savage warriors display toward the enemy who tortures them. Isolation, starvation, and the leather strap will not elicit the least complaint; there are thus between the master and the student some horrible conflicts, unknown to the parents, in which the steadfastness of the martyrs and the skills of the executioner are found equally. Some nervous teachers cannot bear the expressions full of hate, scorn, and threat with which a child of eight or ten years defies them. Let us consider here some characteristic details that, under the name of Louis Lambert, also describe Balzac. "Accustomed to the open air, the independence of an education left to chance, the tender care of an old man who cherished him, and thinking while being warmed by the rays of the sun, it was very difficult for him to conform to the rules of the college, to march in line, to live within the four walls of a room in which twenty‑four young boys were silent, seated on a wooden bench, each before his desk. His senses possessed a perfection which gave them an exquisite fragility, and they all suffered from this communal life; the exhalations that left the air corrupted, mixed with the odor of a class that was always dirty and encumbered by the remains of our lunches and our snacks, affected his sense of smell, that sense which, connected more directly than the others to the cerebral system, should cause by its derangements some unavoidable shocks to the organ of thought; apart from these atmospheric corruptions, he found in our study halls some spots where each would put his booty, pigeons killed for the feast days or plates stolen from the refectory. Finally our rooms contained an immense stone on which two buckets of water rested where on a rotating basis we went each morning to wash our face and hands, in the presence of the master. Washed only once each day before our awakening, our premises were always dirty. Then, despite the number of windows and the height of the door, the air was always fouled by the emanations of the wash house, the garbage dump, by the thousand activities of every schoolboy, without counting our eighty bodies when assembled. This kind of a collective humidity, when combined with the dirt that we would carry back from our travels, resulted in an unbearable stench. The deprivation of air that was pure and scented with the countryside in which he had until then lived, the change in his routines, and the discipline all saddened Lambert. His head always leaning on his left hand and his arm supported by his desk, he passed his study time by looking at the foliage of the trees or the clouds in the sky. He seemed to be studying his lessons; but seeing his pen immovably fixed and his page remaining blank, the professor would cry out to him: 'You are doing nothing, Lambert.'" To this vivid and truthful description of the miseries of life at school, let me add an extract in which Balzac characterizes himself as a duality under the double sobriquet Pythagoras and the Poet, one carried by the half of himself personified in Louis Lambert and the other by the half of himself that was his true identity, and which explains admirably why he was seen by his teachers as being an incapable child: "Our independence, our illicit occupations, our apparent indolence, the torpor in which we remained, our constant punishments, our repugnance toward homework and chores, won us the reputation of being useless and incorrigible boys: our masters despised us, and we similarly fell into the most terrible discredit among our classmates, from whom we concealed our contraband studies for fear of their mockeries. This double low regard, unjust on the part of the Fathers, was a natural sentiment on the part of our classmates; we didn't know how to play ball, run, or walk on stilts on those days of amnesty when by chance we obtained a moment of freedom; we didn't take part in any of the amusements then in style at the school; strangers to the pleasures of our comrades, we remained alone, seated sadly under a tree in the courtyard. The Poet and Pythagoras were an exception, living a life separate from that of the community. The penetrating instinct, the fragile self‑regard of schoolboys, gave them a greater sensitivity with regard to minds that were higher or lower than their own; from there, for some, was hatred of our mute aristocracy; for others, scorn for our uselessness. We held these sentiments between us without our full knowledge, and it's possible that I didn't understand them until today. We lived therefore exactly like two rats skulking in the corner of the room that held our desks, bound there equally during the hours of study and during those of recreation." The result of these hidden labors, of these meditations which used up study time, was the famous TraitÉ de la VolontÉ about which he spoke many times in La ComÉdie Humaine. Balzac always regretted the loss of this first work that he describes in Louis Lambert, and he speaks with an emotion that time has not diminished of the confiscation of the box that held the precious manuscript; some jealous schoolmates tried to snatch the box that two friends fiercely defended: "Suddenly, attracted by the noise of the battle, Father Haugoult roughly intervened and quieted the dispute. This terrible Haugoult ordered us to give the box to him; Lambert handed him the key, the teacher took the papers and flipped through them; then he said while confiscating them: 'So this is the foolishness for which you neglect your work!' Large tears fell from Lambert's eyes, caused as much by the consciousness of his offended sense of moral superiority as by the gratuitous insult and the betrayal that overwhelmed him. Father Haugoult probably sold the TraitÉ de la VolontÉ to a grocer of VendÔme without knowing the importance of the scientific treasures whose seeds were left to die in ignorant hands." After this passage he adds, "It was in memory of the catastrophe that had happened to Louis's book that in the work with which these studies begin I used for a piece of fiction the title truly invented by Lambert, and that I gave the name (Pauline) of a woman who was dear to him to a young girl who was full of devotion." In effect, if I open La Peau de Chagrin, I find in the confession of Raphael the following words: "You alone admired my ThÉorie de la VolontÉ, that long work for which I learned the Oriental languages, anatomy, physiology, and to which I dedicated the greatest part of my time, work which, if I am not mistaken, will complete the studies of Mesmer, of Lavater, of Gall, of Bichat, by opening a new path to the human science; there stops my beautiful life, this sacrifice of all of those days, this silkworm's work, unknown to the world, and whose only compensation could be in the work itself; since the end of childhood until the day that I finished my TheoriÉ, I have observed, learned, written, read without rest, and my life has seemed like a long chore; a gentle lover of Oriental idleness, enthralled with my dreams, sensual, I have always worked, denying myself the delights of Parisian life; a gourmand, I have been temperate; fond of hikes and journeys on the water, hoping to visit foreign countries, still finding a child's pleasure in skipping stones on the water, I stayed constantly seated with pen in hand; talkative, I went to listen in silence to the public courses at the library and the museum; I slept in my solitary bunk like a devotee of the order of Saint Benedict, and women were however my only fantasy, a fantasy that I caressed but which always escaped me!" If Balzac regretted the TraitÉ de la VolontÉ, he was less sensitive to the loss of his epic poem on the Incas, which began thusly:
Oh Inca, oh ill‑fated and unhappy king!
This unfortunate inspiration earned him, for all of the remaining time that he stayed at the school, the derisory nickname of poet. Balzac, it must be confessed, never had a gift for poetry, at least for meter; his complex thoughts rebelled against rhythm. From these intense meditations, from these truly prodigious intellectual efforts of a child of twelve or fourteen years, there resulted a bizarre malady, a nervous fever, a sort of coma entirely inexplicable for the professors, who were not in on the secret of the readings and the works of young HonorÉ, who appeared to be so lazy and stupid. No one at the school suspected this precocious excess of intelligence, no one knew that in the cell in which he caused himself to be put daily so as to be at liberty, this student who was thought to be lazy had absorbed an entire library of serious books that were beyond the typical understanding of his age. Let me here tie together several curious lines related to the reading ability attributed to Louis Lambert, that is to say, Balzac: "In three years, Louis had assimilated the substance of the books in his uncle's library that deserved to be read. His absorption of ideas by reading had become a curious phenomenon: his eye took in seven or eight lines at a time, and his mind appreciated their meaning at an equal speed. Often a single word in a phrase sufficed for him to appreciate its substance. His memory was prodigious. He remembered with the same fidelity the thoughts acquired by reading as those which reflection or conversation had suggested to him. Ultimately he retained all of those memories: those of places, of names, of words, of things, of figures; not only did he recall objects at will, but he remembered them again lit and colored as they were at the moment that he first perceived them. This power applied equally to the most imperceptible elements of understanding. He remembered not only the placement of thoughts in the book from which he had derived them, but even the disposition of his soul at those distant times." Balzac retained this marvelous gift of his youth throughout his life, even in larger measure as the years passed, and it is through this that his immense work can be explained, truly the work of Hercules. The anxious teachers wrote to Balzac's parents to come for him as soon as possible. His mother hurried to him and picked him up to take him back to Tours. The astonishment of the family was great when they saw the thin and sickly child that the school had returned to them in place of the cherub it had received, and it was distressing for HonorÉ's grandmother. Not only had he lost his beautiful colors and his youthful sturdiness, but, struck by a congestion of ideas, he appeared to be an imbecile. His manner was that of an ecstatic, of a somnambulist who sleeps with his eyes open: lost in a profound reverie, he did not hear that which was said to him, or his mind, returning from afar, arrived too late to respond. But the open air, rest, the nurturing environment of the family, the recreations they forced him to take and the vigorous juices of adolescence soon triumphed over this sickly state. The tumult caused in that young brain by the whirring of ideas diminished. Little by little, the muddled readings became organized; abstractions came to be blended into real images, observations made silently on life; while walking and playing, he studied the pretty landscapes of the Loire, the provincial types, the cathedral of Saint‑Gatien and the characteristic physiognomies of the priests and canons; many of the images which later served in the grand fresco of the ComÉdie were sketched during this period of fruitful inaction. However, the intelligence of Balzac was not perceived or understood any more in his family than at school. Even if something clever escaped his lips, his mother, despite being a superior woman, would say to him: "Without a doubt, HonorÉ, you don't understand what you are saying." And Balzac would laugh, without further explanation, that wonderful laugh that he had. Balzac's father, who shared qualities at that time with Montaigne, Rabelais, and Uncle Toby, by his philosophy, his originality, and his goodness (it's Madame de Surville who is speaking), had a little better opinion of his son, believing due to certain genetic theories that he held that a child created by himself could not be stupid: nevertheless, he had no suspicion of the great man that he would become in the future. Balzac's family having returned to Paris, he was entered into the boarding school of Monsieur Lepitre, Rue Saint‑Louis, and Messieurs Sganzer and Beuzelin, Rue Thoringy in the Marais. There as at the school in VendÔme, his genius did not reveal itself, and he remained in the midst of the troop of ordinary students. No prefect exclaimed to him: "You will be Marcellus!" or "Thus you shall go to the stars!" His classes finished, Balzac gave himself that second education which is the true one; he studied, perfected himself, attended the courses of the Sorbonne, and studied law while working with an attorney and a notary. This time, apparently lost, since Balzac became neither an attorney, nor a notary, nor a lawyer, nor a judge, gave him a personal acquaintance with the personnel of the Bazoche and led him to later write what I might call the litigations of La ComÉdie Humaine in the style of a man marvelously versed in that profession. The examinations passed, the great question of which career to select presented itself. His family wanted to make a notary of Balzac; but the future great writer, who, even though no one believed in his genius, had a consciousness of it himself, refused in a most respectful manner, although they had organized a position on the most favorable terms. His father gave him two years to prove himself, and as the family had returned to the provinces, Madame Balzac installed HonorÉ in a garret, allowing him a stipend sufficient for only his most pressing needs, hoping that a little hardship would make him wiser. This garret was perched on the Rue de LesdiguiÈres, number nine, near the Arsenal, whose library offered its resources to the young laborer. Without a doubt, to pass from an abundant and luxurious house to a miserable hovel would be difficult at any age other than 21, which was the age of Balzac; but if the dream of every child is to have boots, that of every young man is to have a room, a room all to himself, whose key he carries in his pocket, although he can stand upright only at its center: a room, it's the trappings of virility, it's independence, personality, love! Behold then master HonorÉ perched near the sky, seated before his table, and trying to create a work that would justify the indulgence of his father and disprove the unfavorable predictions of his friends. It is a remarkable thing that Balzac debuted with a tragedy, with a Cromwell! Around that same time, Victor Hugo also put the last touches on his Cromwell, whose preface became the manifesto of all young dramatists.
II
In attentively rereading La ComÉdie Humaine when one has known Balzac personally, one finds there scattered curious details with regard to his character and his life, particularly in his first works, where he has not yet separated out his own personality, and, due to a lack of subjects, observes and dissects himself. I have said that he began his rude apprenticeship for the literary life in a garret on the Rue LesdiguiÈres, near the Arsenal. The novel Facino Cane, published in Paris in March, 1836, and dedicated to Louise, contains some precious information regarding the life that this young aspirant for glory led in his aerial nest. "I lived then in a street which without doubt you do not know, the Rue LesdiguiÈres: it begins at the Rue Saint‑Antoine, opposite a fountain, near the Place de la Bastille, and leads into the Rue de la Cerisaie. The love of science had thrown me into an attic where I wrote all night, and I passed the day in a neighboring library, that of Monsieur; I lived frugally, I had accepted all of the conditions of the monastic life, so necessary for laborers. When the weather was fine, I allowed myself a walk on the Boulevard Bourbon. One sole passion enticed me from my studious habits; but wasn't this also studying? I went to observe the manners of the neighborhood, its inhabitants and their characters. As ill clad as the workers, indifferent to decorum, I did not put them on their guard against me: I could mingle in their groups, see them conclude their deals, and hear them argue about the time that they would stop working. For me, observation had already become intuitive, it penetrated the soul without neglecting the body; in other words it so thoroughly grasped exterior that it transcended it immediately; it gave me the ability to live the life of the individual on which I was focused and permitted me to substitute myself for him, like the dervish of the Thousand and One Nights seized the body and the soul of persons over whom he pronounced certain words. "When, between eleven o'clock and midnight, I met a workman and his wife returning from the Ambigu‑Comique, I amused myself by following them from the Boulevard Pont‑aux‑Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. These good people would at first speak of the play that they had just seen; next they would address their personal affairs; the mother would pull the child by the hand without listening to either his complaints or his questions. The married couple would count up the money that would be paid to them the next day. They would spend it in twenty different ways. They would then move on to household matters, complaints over the excessive price of potatoes or the length of the winter and the rise in the cost of butter, energetic discussions on how much was owed to the baker, and finally onto discussions where each of them became irritated and demonstrated his character with picturesque words. In listening to these people, I could connect with their life, I felt their rags upon my back, I walked with my feet in their tattered shoes; their desires, their needs, all passed into my soul, and my soul passed into theirs; it was the dream of an awakened man. I became exasperated with them against the workshop foremen who tyrannized them or against the unfair practice that made them return many times without providing them with their pay. To abandon habits, to become another through this intoxication of the moral faculties and to play this game at will, such was my entertainment. To what do I owe this gift? Is it an extrasensory perception? Is it one of those qualities whose abuse would lead to madness? I have never sought the sources of this power; I possess it and I use it, that is all." I have transcribed these lines, which are doubly interesting because they illuminate a little‑known side of Balzac's life, and because they show that he was conscious of this powerful faculty of intuition that he already possessed at such a high level and without which the realization of his work would have been impossible. Balzac, like Vishnu, the Indian god, possessed the gift of metamorphosis, that is to say the ability to incarnate himself into different bodies and live in them as long as he wished; however, the number of the metamorphoses of Vishnu is fixed at ten: those of Balzac are countless, and furthermore he could produce them at will. Although it may seem extravagant to say this in the heart of the nineteenth century, Balzac was a seer. His merits as an observer, his acuteness as a physiologist, his genius as a writer, do not suffice to explain the infinite variety of the two or three thousand types which play a more or less important role in La ComÉdie Humaine. He did not copy them, he lived them in an ideal manner, he wore their clothes, he took on their habits, he immersed himself in their surroundings, he was them for as long as necessary. From there come these authentic, logical characters, never contradicting themselves and never forgetting themselves, endowed with an intimate and profound existence, who, to use one of his expressions, took on the challenge of life in civil society. Truly red blood circulated in their veins in place of the ink that infused the creations of ordinary writers. Balzac did not possess this ability for any time except the present. He could transport his thought into a marquis, into a financier, into a middle‑class person, into a man of the people, into a woman of the world, into a courtesan, but the shadows of the past did not obey his call: he never knew, like Goethe, how to evoke from the depths of antiquity the beautiful HÉlÈne and make her dwell in the Gothic manor of Faust. With two or three exceptions, all of his work is modern; he has assimilated the living, he has not resurrected the dead. Even history seduced him little, as one can see from the preface to La ComÉdie Humaine: "In reading the dry and off‑putting catalogues of facts called histories, who has not recognized that the writers have forgotten in every era, in Egypt, in Persia, in Greece, in Rome, to give us the history of manners? The piece by Petronius on the private life of the Romans irritates rather than satisfies our curiosity." This void left by the historians of vanished societies, Balzac proposed to fill for our own, and God knows that he carefully followed the program that he had planned. "Society was going to be the historian, I should not be but the secretary; in constructing the inventory of vices and of virtues, in assembling the principal features of the passions, in depicting the characters, in choosing the principal events of the society, in composing types by the blending of traits of several homogeneous characters, perhaps I could succeed in writing the history forgotten by so many historians, that of manners. With a great deal of patience and courage, I might be able to complete, on nineteenth century France, the book that we all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, India, have unfortunately not left us on their civilization, and that like the abbot Bartholomew, the courageous and patient Monteil had attempted regarding the Middle Ages, although in a form that was not appealing." But let us return to the garret on the Rue LesdiguiÈres. Balzac had not conceived the plan of the work that would immortalize him; he was still seeking it with anxiety, bated breath, and hard labor, trying everything and succeeding in nothing; however he already possessed that obstinacy in his work to which Minerva, as surly as she might be, must one day or another yield; he outlined comic operas, made plans for comedies, dramas and romances whose titles Madame de Surville has preserved: Stella, Coqsigrue, Les Deux Philosophes, without counting the terrible Cromwell, whose verses had caused him so much pain and yet were not worth much more than that which began his epic poem, Incas. Imagine to yourself young HonorÉ, his legs wrapped in a patched coat, his upper body protected by an old shawl of his mother, his headdress a sort of Dantesque cap and his hair of a cut that only Madame de Balzac knew, his coffee pot to his left, his inkwell to his right, working with a heaving chest and bowed forehead, like an ox at the plow, the field still stony and not cleared by those thoughts which would later trace for him such productive furrows. The lamp shines like a star in the front of the dark house, the snow falls in silence on the loosened tiles, the wind blows through the door and window "like Tulou on his Flute, but less agreeably." If some dawdling passerby had raised his eyes toward that little, obstinately flickering glow, he certainly would not have suspected that it was the dawning of one of the greatest glories of our age. Would you like to see a sketch of the place, transposed, it's true, but very exact, drawn by the author in La Peau de Chagrin, that work which contains so much of himself? "… A room which looks down upon the yards of the neighboring houses, from the windows of which extend long poles hung with washing; nothing was more horrible than that garret with those yellow, grimy walls, which soaked in the misery and called out to its scholar. The roof slanted in a uniform fashion, and the loosened tiles permitted a view of the sky; there was room for a bed, a table, a few chairs, and under the sharp angle of the roof I could position my piano … I lived in this aerial sepulcher for almost three years, working night and day, without rest, with so much pleasure that my studies seemed to be the most beautiful focus, the happiest solution to human life. The calm and silence necessary to the scholar have some elements of the sweetness and intoxication of love … Study lends a sort of magic to everything that surrounds us. The meager desk upon which I wrote and the brown leather that covered it, my piano, my bed, my armchair, the peculiar wallpaper, my furniture, all of these things came to life and became for me humble friends, silent partners in my future. How many times have I not shared my soul while gazing upon them? Often, while letting my eyes wander on a crooked molding, I would encounter new developments, a striking proof of my system that I believed was able to convey nearly untranslatable thoughts." In this same passage, he makes an allusion to his work: "I had undertaken two great works; a comedy that was in only a few days to give me fame, a fortune and entry into that world in which I wanted to reappear while exercising the kingly rights of a man of genius. You have all seen in this masterpiece the first error of a young man just out of college, the nonsense of a child. Your jibes destroyed the nascent illusions, which since then have not been awakened …" One recognizes here the ill‑fated Cromwell, which, read in front of the family and the assembled friends, was a complete fiasco. HonorÉ appealed this sentence before an arbiter whom he accepted as competent, an honorable old man, a former professor at the École Polytechnique. The judgment was that the author should do "anything at all, except literature." What a loss for letters, what a void in the human spirit if the young man had bowed before the experience of the old man and listened to his counsel, which, certainly, was most wise, because there was not the least spark of genius nor even of talent in this rhetorical tragedy! Happily Balzac, under the pseudonym of Louis Lambert, had not composed for nothing at the college of VendÔme the TraitÉ de la VolontÉ. He submitted to the sentence, but only for tragedy; he understood that he should give up trying to walk in the footsteps of Corneille and Racine, whom he so admired without being in their debt, for never were geniuses more contrary to that of himself. The novel offered him a more suitable model, and he wrote at this time a great number of volumes which he did not sign and which he always disavowed. The Balzac that we know and that we admire was still in limbo and struggled in vain to extricate himself. Those who had judged him capable of being nothing but a copyist appeared to be right; perhaps even this option had failed him, because his beautiful handwriting had already deteriorated with the crumpled, crossed out, overwritten, near hieroglyphic drafts of the writer fighting for the idea and no longer concerned about the beauty of the character. Thus, nothing resulted from this rigorous confinement, this hermetic life in the ThÉbaÏde in which RaphaËl outlines the budget: "Three sous of bread, two sous of milk, three sous of meat that prevented me from dying of hunger and kept my mind in a state of singular lucidity. My lodgings cost me three sous a day; I burned three sous of oil every night, I took care of my own room, I wore flannel shirts so that I would spend only two sous a day for laundry. I warmed myself with coal, whose price divided by the days in the year never gave more than two sous for each. I had suits of clothes, linens, and shoes for three years: I didn't want to get dressed except to go to certain public lectures and to the libraries; these expenses combined were only eighteen sous: there remained two sous for unforeseen things. I do not recall having, during this long period of work, having passed the Pont des Arts or ever buying water." Without doubt, RaphaËl exaggerated these economies a little, but Balzac's correspondence with his sister shows that the novel does not differ much from the reality. The old woman referred to in his letters by the name of Iris la MessagÈre, who was 70 years old, could not have been a very active housekeeper, as Balzac writes: "The news of my household is disastrous, the work does harm to its cleanliness. This rascal of Myself neglects himself more and more, he only descends every three or four days to make some purchases, he goes to the closest and worst provisioned merchants in the quarter: the others are too far, and the fellow economizes even his steps; so that your brother (destined for so much celebrity) is already nourished absolutely like a great man, that is to say that he is dying of hunger." "Another problem: The coffee is made terribly bitter by dirt. Lots of water is needed to correct the damage; but the water does not rise to my celestial garret (it descends there only on stormy days), it will require, after the purchase of the piano, the installation of a hydraulic machine, if the coffee continues to disappear while the master and the servant daydream." Elsewhere, continuing the joking, he reprimands the lazy Myself, the only footman that he has in his service, who does not fill the basin, leaves dust balls scattered freely under the bed, the dirt obscuring the windows, and the spiders spinning their webs in the corners. In another letter, he writes: "I have eaten two melons … it will be necessary to pay for them with nuts and dry bread!" One of the rare recreations that he permitted himself was to go to the Jardin des Plantes or PÈre‑Lachaise. At the summit of the funereal hill, he towered over Paris like Rastignac at the burial of PÈre Goriot. His gaze glided over this ocean of slate and tile that cover up so much luxury, misery, intrigue and passion. Like a young eagle, he took in his prey at a glance; but he still had no wings, no beak, no talons, although his eye could already fix itself on the sun. He said, contemplating the tombs: "There are no more beautiful epitaphs than these: La Fontaine, MassÉna, MoliÈre: one single name that says everything and makes us dream!" This sentence contains an ill‑defined but prophetic understanding that the future realized, alas!, too soon. On the slope of the hill, upon a sepulchral stone, beneath a bust cast in bronze, after the marble of David, the word BALZAC says everything and makes the solitary wanderer dream. The dietary regimen recommended by RaphaËl could be favorable to the lucidity of the brain; but certainly it was worthless for a young man used to the comfort of family life. The fifteen months that passed under these intellectual burdens, sadder, without fail, than those of Venice, had made the youthful Tourangeau with the soft, glowing cheeks a Parisian skeleton, haggard and yellow, nearly unrecognizable. Balzac reentered the paternal home, where the fatted calf was killed for the return of this only slightly prodigal child. I glide lightly over the period of his life when he tried to ensure independence by speculations in the book trade and during which only a lack of capital prevented him from finding success. These ventures put him in debt, mortgaged his future, and despite the devoted assistance offered perhaps too late by the family, burdened him with the rock of Sisyphus that he so many times pushed just to the edge of the hill, and which always fell back with more crushing weight upon the shoulders of this Atlas, overloaded besides by an entire world. This debt that he made it a sacred duty to discharge, because it represented the fortune of those who were dear to him, was Necessity armed with a spiked whip, her hand bearing bronze nails that harassed him night and day, with neither truce nor pity, making him regard every hour of repose or recreation as a theft. She dominated his entire life painfully, often rendering it inexplicable to he who did not possess its secret. Having provided these indispensable biographical details, I come to my direct and personal impressions of Balzac. Balzac, that immense brain, that physiologist so penetrating, that observer so profound, that mind so intuitive, did not possess the literary gift: within him there opened an abyss between the thought and the form. That abyss, particularly in the early years, he despaired of crossing. He threw himself without fulfillment into volume upon volume, observation upon observation, essay upon essay; an entire library of disavowed books passed through there. A will less robust would have been discouraged a thousand times; but happily Balzac had an unshakeable confidence in his genius, unknown to all the world. He wanted to be a great man, and he was that by his unrelenting projections of that force that was more powerful than electricity, and with which he made such subtle analyses in Louis Lambert. Unlike the writers of the romantic school, who distinguished themselves by a boldness and astonishing facility of execution, and produced their fruits at nearly the same time as their flowers, in a blossoming that was in a sense involuntary, Balzac, the equal in genius of them all, did not find his means of expression, or did not find it until after infinite suffering. Hugo said in one of his prefaces, with his Castilian pride: "I do not know the art of soldering a beauty in the place of a defect, and I correct myself in another work." But Balzac would cover a tenth proof with his crossings out, and when he saw me return to the La Chronique de Paris the proof of an article written in a hurry, on the corner of a table, with only typographical corrections, he could not believe, as content as he was otherwise, that I had applied all of my talent there. "By reworking it two or three times, it would have been better," he said to me. Citing himself as an example, he preached to me a strange literary lifestyle. I must cloister myself for two or three years, drink water, eat soggy lupins like ProtogÈne, go to bed at six o'clock in the evening, get up at midnight, and work until morning, using the day to revise, expand, shorten, perfect, polish the nocturnal work, correct the proofs, take notes, do the necessary studies, and live most importantly with absolute chastity. He insisted a great deal upon this last recommendation, which was very challenging for a young man of twenty‑four or twenty‑five years. According to him, true chastity develops to the highest degree the powers of the mind, and gives to those who practice it unidentified abilities. I timidly objected that the greatest geniuses did not forbid themselves love, passion, or even pleasure, and I cited some illustrious names. Balzac shook his head and responded, "They would have done better, without the women!" The only concession that he would grant me, and even then he regretted it, was to see my beloved one half hour each year. He permitted letters: "These guide the development of style." By means of this regimen, he promised to make of me, with the natural abilities that he was pleased to recognize in me, a writer of the first order. It is clear from my work that I have not followed this plan. It must not be believed that Balzac was joking when he laid down these conditions that the Trappists or the Carthusians would have found harsh. He was perfectly convinced, and spoke with such eloquence that many times I consciously tried to use this method to develop genius; I awoke numerous times at midnight, and after having partaken of the inspirational coffee, acted according to the formula, seating myself in front of a table on which sleep caused me to quickly lay my head. La Morte Amoureuse, published in the La Chronique de Paris, was my only nocturnal work. Around this time, Balzac had written for a review Facino Cane, the story of a noble Venetian who, imprisoned in the vaults of the ducal palace, had fallen, while digging an escape tunnel, upon the secret treasure of the Republic, a good part of which he carried away with the help of a bribed jailer. Facino Cane, who became blind and played the clarinet under the common name of Father Canet, had kept an extrasensory perception for gold; he recognized it through walls and in vaults, and he offered to the writer, at a wedding in the Faubourg Saint‑Antoine, to guide him, if he was willing to pay him the cost of the journey, toward this immense mass of riches whose location had been lost due to the fall of the Venetian Republic. Balzac, as I have said, lived his characters, and at this moment, he was Facino Cane himself, although without the blindness, for never have there been eyes more sparkling or scintillating on a human face. He dreamed of nothing but tons of gold, heaps of diamonds and garnets, and, by means of magnetism, with whose practices he had been long familiar, he sought from these explorations the location of the buried and lost treasure. He pretended to have learned in this way, in the most precise manner, the place where, near the hill of Pointe‑À‑PÎtre, Toussaint Louverture had caused his booty to be buried by negroes who were immediately shot. The Gold‑Bug, of Edgar Poe, does not equal, in subtlety of reasoning, in clarity of plan, in divination of details, the fevered rendition that he has given us of the expedition to attempt to become master of this treasure, which was far richer than that which was buried by Tom Kidd at the skull at the foot of the Talipot. I implore the reader to not make too much fun of me, if I confess to him in all humility that I soon shared the conviction of Balzac. What brain could have resisted his breathtaking speech? Jules Sandeau was also soon seduced, and as he needed two dependable friends, two devoted and robust companions to perform the nocturnal excavations under the direction of the seer, Balzac was pleased to grant us one‑fourth each of this prodigious fortune. One‑half was to revert to him by right, as he had made the discovery and directed the enterprise. We were to buy pikes, pickaxes and shovels, get them secretly on board the vessel, and get ourselves to a designated point by different routes so as not to excite suspicions, and, the blow being struck, we were to transport our riches on a brigantine chartered in advance; in short, it was quite a tale, which would have been admirable if Balzac had written it instead of speaking it. There is no need to say that we did not unearth the treasure of Toussaint Louverture. Money was not available to pay our passage; the three of us had at most enough to buy the pickaxes. The dream of a sudden fortune won by some strange and marvelous means often haunted the brain of Balzac; some years before (in 1833), he had made a voyage to Sardinia to examine the slag of the silver mines abandoned by the Romans, which, treated by imperfect processes, must according to him still have contained a great deal of metal. The idea was reasonable and, imprudently confided, made the fortune of another.
III
I have related the anecdote of the treasure buried by Toussaint Louverture, not for the pleasure of telling a strange story, but because it is connected with a dominant idea of Balzac – money. Certainly, nobody was less avaricious than the author of La ComÉdie Humaine, but his genius made him foresee the immense role that this metallic hero would play in art, more interesting for modern society than the Grandissons, the Desgrieux, the Oswalds, the Werthers, the Malek‑Adhels, the RenÉs, the Laras, the Waverleys, the Quentin Durwards, etc. Until then the story had been confined to the portrayal of a unique passion, love, but love in an ideal sphere and outside of the necessities and miseries of life. The personages of these entirely psychological recitals neither ate, nor drank, nor lodged, nor had an account with their tailor. They moved in an abstract environment like those of a tragedy. If they wished to travel, they put, without obtaining a passport, some handfuls of diamonds into the bottom of their pocket, and paid with this currency the postilions, who did not fail at each way station to have exhausted their horses; some chateaus of indistinct architecture received them at the end of their journeys, and with their blood they wrote to their beloveds interminable epistles dated from the tour of the North. The heroines, no less immaterial, resembled an aquatint of Angelica Kauffmann: a large straw hat, hair somewhat straightened in the English style, a long robe of white chiffon, held at the waist by an azure sash. With his profound instinct for reality, Balzac understood that the modern life he wanted to portray was dominated by one grand fact, money, and, in La Peau de Chagrin, he had the courage to present a lover not only anxious to know if he had touched the heart of the one he loves, but also if he will have enough money to pay for the carriage in which he was bringing her home. This audacity is perhaps one of the greatest that one might permit oneself in literature, and it alone sufficed to immortalize Balzac. The consternation was profound, and the purists were indignant at this infraction of the laws of the genre; but all the young people who, going out in the evening to the home of some beautiful woman wearing white gloves ironed with gum elastic, had traversed Paris as dancers, on the tips of their shoes, fearing a spot of mud more than the crack of a pistol, commiserated, having shared these fears, like the anguishes of Valentin, who cared deeply about a hat that he could not renew and preserve despite his minute care. In moments of supreme misery, the discovery of a one hundred sou piece slid under the papers of the drawer, due to the discreet pity of Pauline, produced the effect of the most romantic theatrical strokes or of the intervention of a Peri in the Arabian tales. Who has not discovered during days of distress, forgotten in pants or in a vest, a few glorious coins appearing at just the right time and saving you from the calamity that youth fears the most: to fail to provide a beloved woman with a carriage, a bouquet, a small bench, a show program, a tip to the usherette or some trifles of this type? Balzac excels in the portrayal of youth who are poor, as they almost always are, entering into their first struggles with life, prey to the temptation of pleasures and luxury, and experiencing profound miseries due to their high hopes. Valentin, Rastignac, Bianchon, d'Arthez, Lucien de RubemprÉ, Lousteau, have all sunk their beautiful teeth into the tough meat of the angry cow, fortifying food for robust stomachs, indigestible for weak stomachs; he does not lodge them, these beautiful young ones without a sou, in conventional garrets decorated with Persian rugs, with windows festooned with sweet peas and looking out on gardens; he does not have them eat "some simple dishes, prepared by the hand of nature," and does not dress them in luxurious garments, but in those that are proper and practical; he puts them in the boarding house of Mother Vauquer, or forces them to crouch under the sharp angle of a roof, he presses them into greasy tables at mean little restaurants, dressing them in black clothing with gray seams, and he is not afraid to send them to the pawn shop, if they still have, a rare occurrence, their father's watch. Oh Corinne, you who allows, upon Cape MisÈna, your snowy arm to dangle across your ivory lyre, while the son of Albion, draped in a superb new coat, and shod in his beloved perfectly polished boots, reflects on you and listens to you in an elegant pose, Corinne, what would you have said to such heroes? They have however one small quality that was lacking in Oswald, they live, and of a life so robust that it seems like one has encountered them one thousand times; also Pauline, Delphine de Nucingen, the princess of Cadignan, Madame de Bargeton, Coralie, Esther, are madly infatuated with them. At the time that the first novels signed by Balzac appeared, one did not have, to the same degree as today, the preoccupation, or, better said, the fever for gold. California had not been discovered; there existed perhaps several leagues of railway whose future one hardly suspected, and that one saw as a kind of conduit that led up to the Russian mountains, but that had fallen into disuse; the public ignored, so to speak, "business," and only bankers gambled at the Bourse. This movement of capital, this flow of gold, these calculations, these figures, this importance given to money in works that one still took as simple romantic fictions and not as serious portraits of life, singularly shocked the subscribers to the reading rooms, and critics added up the total sums spent or staked by the author. The millions of father Grandet led to arithmetic discussions, and serious people, troubled by the enormity of the totals, doubted the financial abilities of Balzac, very great abilities nevertheless, and recognized later. Stendhal said with a sort of disdainful smugness, "Before writing, I always read three or four pages of the Civil Code to give me the tone." Balzac, who understood money so well, also discovered poems and dramas in the Code: Le Contrat de Mariage, where he places in opposition, in the persons of Matthias and of Solonnet, the ancient and the modern notary, has all of the interest of the most eventful comedy of the cloak and sword. The bankruptcy in Grandeur et DÉcadence de CÉsar Birotteau makes you quiver like the story of an empire's fall; the conflict of the chÂteau and the cottage in Les Paysans offers just as much adventure as the siege of Troy. Balzac knows how to give life to the soil, to a house, to a heritage, to a capital, and in fact to heroes and heroines whose adventures are devoured with anxious avidity. These new elements introduced into the novel were not appreciated at first; the philosophical analyses, the detailed character portraits, the minute descriptions that seemed to have the future in view, were regarded as unpleasantly lengthy, and quite often one skipped them to move on to the story. Later, one recognized that the goal of the author was not to weave intrigues that were more or less well‑plotted, but to portray society in its entirety, from the summit to the base, with its characters and its components, and that one will admire in it the immense variety of these types. Is it not Alexandre Dumas who said of Shakespeare: "Shakespeare, the man who has created the most after God?"; the words might be even more justly applied to Balzac; never, indeed, did so many living creatures issue from one human brain. At this time (1836), Balzac had conceived the plan for his ComÉdie Humaine and possessed the full awareness of his genius. He adroitly connected the works that had already been published to his general concept and found them a place in the categories that had been philosophically outlined. Some novels of pure fantasy did not fit in very well, despite the connections that were added afterwards; but these are details that are lost in the immensity of the ensemble, like ornaments in a differing style on a grand edifice. I have said that Balzac worked laboriously, and, being an obstinate smelter, rejected ten or twelve times from the crucible the metal that had not perfectly filled the mold; like Bernard Palissy, he would have burned the furniture, the flooring and up through the beams of his house without regret to maintain the fire in his furnace; the most challenging necessities would never make him deliver a work on which he had not put the utmost effort, and he gave admirable examples of literary conscientiousness. His corrections, so numerous that they were almost equivalent to different editions on the same idea, were charged to his account by the editors who were responsible for earnings, and his compensation, often modest for the value of the work and the pain it had cost him, were diminished in proportion. The promised sums did not always arrive on time, and to sustain what he laughingly called his floating debt, Balzac displayed prodigious resources of mind and a level of activity that would have completely absorbed the life of an ordinary man. But, when seated before his table in his friar's frock, in the midst of the nocturnal silence, he found himself confronted with blank sheets illuminated by the glow of seven candles, concentrated by a green shade, in taking pen in hand he forgot everything, and thus commenced a struggle more terrible than the conflict of Jacob with the angel, that of form and idea. In these nightly battles, from which in the morning he would issue broken but victorious, when the extinguished hearth chilled the atmosphere of his room once again, his head steamed and his body exhaled a visible fog like the body of a horse in wintertime. Sometimes only a single phrase occupied an entire evening; it was considered, reconsidered, twisted, kneaded, pounded, stretched, shortened, written in one hundred different ways, and, bizarrely, the necessary, complete, form, would not present itself until after the exhaustion of the approximate forms; without doubt the metal often flowed from a fuller and thicker hose, but there are very few pages in Balzac that stayed identical to the first draft. His manner of proceeding was this: when he had for a long time borne and lived a subject, with writing that was rapid, jumbled, blotted, nearly hieroglyphic, he would outline a sort of scenario in a few pages, which he would send to the printer and which was returned on placards, that is to say as isolated columns in the middle of large sheets. He read these placards carefully, which already gave to his embryo of work that impersonal character that the manuscript does not have, and he applied to this rough sketch the high critical faculty that he possessed, acting as if he were another person. He worked on something; approving or disapproving, he kept or corrected, but mostly added. Lines issuing from the beginning, the middle or the end of phrases, were directed toward the margins, to the right, to the left, to the top, to the bottom, leading to some developments, to insertions, to interpolations, to epithets, to adverbs. At the end of some hours of work, one would have called his sheet a bouquet of fireworks drawn by a child. From the primitive text shot forth rockets of style which exploded on all sides. Then there were simple crosses, crosses recrossed like a coat of arms, stars, suns, Arab or Roman numerals, Greek or French letters, every imaginable sign of reference to mix with the scratchings. Some strips of paper, fastened with sealing wafers, stuck on with pins, added to the insufficient margins, striped with lines of fine characters to conserve space, themselves full of crossings out, because the correction that had barely been made had itself already been corrected. The printed placard nearly disappeared in what appeared to be a cabalistic book of spells, which the typographers passed from hand to hand, each not wanting to work for more than an hour on Balzac. The following day, they sent back the placards with the corrections made, and already expanded by half. Balzac resumed work, always amplifying, adding a trait, a detail, a description, an observation on manners, a characteristic word, a phrase for effect, bringing the form closer to the idea, always moving closer to his internal outline, choosing like a painter among three or four contours the definitive line. Often this terrible work ended with that intensity of attention of which he alone was capable, as he recognized that a thought had been poorly expressed, that one incident predominated, that a figure that he wished to be secondary for general effect deviated from his plan, and with one stroke of the pen he would courageously destroy the result of four or five nights of labor. He was heroic in these circumstances. Six, seven, and sometimes ten proofs were returned with crossings out, rewritten, without satisfying the author's desire for perfection. I have seen at Les Jardies, on the shelves of a library composed of only his works, each different proof of the same work bound in a separate volume from the first sketch to the definitive book; the comparison of Balzac's thought at these diverse stages offers a very curious study and contains profitable literary lessons. Near these volumes a sinister looking book, bound in black morocco leather, with neither clasps nor gilding, drew my attention: "Take it," Balzac said to me, "it is an unpublished work which may have some value." Its title was Comptes MÉlancoliques; it contained lists of debts, due dates of bills to be paid, notices of purveyors and all that menacing paperwork that is legalized by a stamp. This volume, with a kind of mocking contrast, was placed beside the Contes Drolatiques, "of which it is not a continuation," added the author of La ComÉdie Humaine with a laugh. |
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