Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings - Mary F. Sandars
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[*] "Lettres a L'Etrangere."
From 1822 to 1824 we know little of Balzac's history, except that he
passed the time at home, and was presumably working hard at his
romantic novels; but in 1824 a change came, one no doubt hailed at the
time with eager delight, though it proved unfortunately to be the
foundation of all his subsequent misfortunes.
When he went up to Paris to make arrangements for publishing his
novels, he stayed in the old lodgings of his family in the Rue du Roi
Dore, and here he often met a friend, M. d'Assonvillez, to whom he
confided his fear of being forced into an occupation distasteful to
him. M. d'Assonvillez was sympathetic, advised him to seek for a
business which would make him independent, and, carried away by
Honore's powers of persuasion and eloquence, actually promised to
proved the necessary funds. We can imagine Balzac's joy at this offer,
and the enthusiasm with which he would take up his abode in Paris, and
feel that he was about to earn his living, nay, more, that he would no
doubt become enormously rich, and would then have leisure to give up
his time to literature. What however decided him to become first
publisher and then printer we do not know. He started his publishing
campaign with the idea of bringing out compact editions of the
complete works of different authors in one volume, and began with
Moliere and La Fontaine, carrying on the two publications at the same
time, for fear of competition if his secret should be discovered. The
idea, which had already been thought of by Urbain Canel, was a good
one; but unfortunately Balzac was not able to obtain support from the
trade, and had not sufficient capital for advertising. Therefore by
the end of the year not twenty copies were sold, and he lost 15,000
francs on this affair alone. Consequently, in order to save the rent
of the warehouse in which the books were stored, he was obliged to
part with all the precious compact editions for the price by the
weight of the paper on which they were printed.
Matters now looked very black, as Balzac owed about 70,000 francs; but
M. d'Assonvillez was evidently much impressed by his business
capacity, and was naturally anxious to be repaid the money he had
lent. He therefore introduced Honore to a relation who was making a
large fortune by his printing-press; and Balzac, full of enthusiasm,
dreamt of becoming a second Richardson, and of combining the
occupations of author and printer. His father was persuaded to provide
the necessary funds, and handed him over 30,000 francs--about 1,200
pounds--with which to start the enterprise. In August, 1826, Balzac
began again joyously, first by himself and afterwards with a partner
named Barbier, whom he had noticed as foreman in one of the
printing-offices to which he had taken his novels. Unfortunately a
printing-licence cost 15,000 francs in the time of Charles X.; and
when this had been paid, Barbier had received a bonus of 12,000 francs,
and 15,000 francs had been spent on the necessary materials, there
remained very little capital with which to meet the current expenses
of the undertaking. Nevertheless, the young partners started full of
hope, having bought from Laurent for 30,000 francs the premises at No.
7, Rue des Marais Saint-Germain, now the Rue Visconti, a street so
narrow that two vehicles cannot pass in it. A wooden staircase with an
iron handrail led from a dark passage to the large barrack-like hall
they occupied: an abode which Balzac tried to beautify, possibly for
Madame de Berny's visits, by hangings of blue calico.
There Balzac developed quickly. He learnt the struggle of a business
life, the duel between man and man, through which thousands pass
without gaining anything except business acuteness, but which
introduced the great psychologist to hundreds of new types, and showed
to his keen, observant eyes man, not in society or domesticity, but in
undress, fighting for life itself, or for all that makes life worth
living. In the Rue de Lesdiguieres he had struggled with himself,
striving in cold and hunger to gain the mastery of his art. Here he
battled with others; and since, except on paper, he never possessed
business capacity, he failed and went under; but by his defeat he
paved the way to future triumph. He passed through an experience
possibly unique in the career of a man of letters, one which imparts
the peculiar flavour of business, money, and affairs to his books, and
which fixed on him for all his days the impression of restless,
passionate, thronging humanity which he pictures in his books. The
abyss between his early romantic novels and such a book as the "Peau
de Chagrin" is immeasurable, and cannot be altogether accounted for by
any teaching, however valuable, or even by the strong influence which
intercourse with Madame de Berny exercised. Something else definite
must have happened to him--some great opening out and development,
which caused a sudden appearance on the surface of hitherto latent,
unworkable powers. This forcing-process took place at his first
contact with the war of life; and though he bore the scars of the
encounter as long as he lived, he grew by its clash, ferment, and
disaster to his full stature. In "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote,"
"Illusions Perdues," and "Cesar Birotteau" he gives different phases
of this life, spent partly in the printer's office and partly in the
streets, rushing anxiously from place to place and from person to
person, trying vainly by interviews to avert the impending ruin.
Matters seemed, however, quite hopeless; but when, towards the end of
1827, an opportunity occurred of becoming possessed of a type-foundry,
the partners, perhaps with the desperation of despair, did not
hesitate to avail themselves of it. This new acquisition naturally
only appeared likely to precipitate the catastrophe, and Barbier
prepared to leave the sinking ship. At this juncture Madame de Berny
came forward with substantial help, and allowed her name to appear as
partner in his place. However, even this assistance did not long avert
disaster--bankruptcy was impending, and Madame de Berny and Laure
implored Madame de Balzac to prevent this. The latter, wishing at all
costs to keep the matter from the ears of her husband, now a very old
man and failing in health, begged a cousin, M. Sedillot, to come
forward, and at least to save the honour of the family. M. Sedillot,
who appears to have been a good man of business, at once set gallantly
to work to disentangle the embroglio, and to free Honore from its
meshes. As a result of his efforts, the printing-press was sold to M.
Laurent, and the type-foundry became the property of the De Bernys,
under whom it was highly successful. At the same time, to save Honore
from disgrace, Madame de Balzac lent 37,000 francs and Madame de Berny
45,000, the latter sum being paid back in full by Balzac in 1836, the
year of Madame de Berny's death. "Without her I should be dead," he
tells Madame Hanska. He was most anxious not to sell the type-foundry,
and his parents have been severely criticised for their refusal to
provide further funds for the purpose of carrying on that and the
printing-office.
This blame seems a little unfair. It is true that, after Balzac had
been obliged, to his intense grief, to part with both businesses at a
loss, a fortune was made out of the type-foundry alone. But the
Balzacs had lost money, and had their other children to provide for;
while Honore, though well equipped with hope, enthusiasm, and belief
in himself, had hitherto failed to justify a trust in his business
capacities. In fact, if his parents had been endowed with prophetic
eyesight, and had been enabled to take a bird's-eye view of their
celebrated son's future enterprises, which were always, according to
his own account, destined to fail only by some unfortunate slip at the
last, it seems doubtful whether they would have been wise to alter the
course they adopted.
CHAPTER V
1828 - 1829
Life in the Rue de Tournon--Privations and despair--Friendships
--Auguste Borget--Madame Carraud--The Duchesse d'Abrantes--George
Sand, etc.--Balzac writes "La Peau de Chagrin" and the
"Physiologie du Marriage"--His right to be entitled "De Balzac."
In September, 1828, before the final winding up of affairs, Balzac had
fled from Paris, and had gone to spend three weeks with his friends
the Pommereuls in Brittany. There he began to write "Les Chouans," the
first novel to which he signed his name. With his usual hopefulness,
dreams of future fame filled his brain; and in spite of his
misfortunes, his relief at having obtained temporary escape from his
difficulties and freedom to pursue his literary career was so great,
that his jolly laugh often resounded in the old chateau of Fougeres.
It was certainly a remarkable case of buoyancy of temperament, as the
circumstances in which he found himself were distinctly discouraging.
He was now twenty-nine years old; he owed about 100,000 francs, and
was utterly penniless; while his reputation for commercial capacity
had been completely destroyed. His most pressing liabilities had been
paid by his mother, who was all his life one of his principal
creditors; and he was now firmly under the yoke of that heavy burden
of debt which was destined never again to be lifted from his
shoulders. Once again, as they had done nine years before, his parents
cast off all responsibility for their unsatisfactory son. They had
saved the family honour, which would have been compromised by his
bankruptcy; but they felt that whether he lived or starved was his own
affair. His position was infinitely worse than it had been in those
early days in the Rue Lesdiguieres, when submission would have led to
reinstatement in favour. He was now, as he graphically expressed it,
"thrown into" the Rue de Tournon,[*] and apparently no provision was
made for his wants. His parents, who had moved from Villeparisis to
Versailles the year before, in order to be near Madame Surville,
limited their interference in his affairs to severe criticism on his
want of respect in not coming to see his family, and righteous wrath
at his extravagance in hanging his room with blue calico. These
reproaches he parried with the defence that he had no money to pay
omnibus fares, and could not even write often because of the expense
of postage; while anent the muslin, he stated that he possessed it
before his failure, as La Touche and he had nailed it up to hide the
frightful paper on the walls of the printing-office. Uncrushed by the
scathing comments on his attempts at decoration, curious though
characteristic efforts on the part of a starving man, he writes to his
sister a few days later: "Ah, Laure, if you did but know how
passionately I desire (but, hush! keep the secret) two blue screens
embroidered in black (silence ever!)."[+] He reopens his letter about
the screens to answer one from Madame Surville, written evidently at
the instigation of M. and Mme. de Balzac, to blame his supposed
idleness; and the poor fellow, to whom _this_ fault at least could at
no time be justly imputed, asks her if he is not already unhappy
enough, and tells her pathetically how he suffers from these unjust
suspicions, and that he can never be happy till he is dead. In the
end, however, he returns with childlike persistence to the screens as
a panacea for all his ills, and finishes with: "But my screens--I want
them more than ever, for a little joy in the midst of torment!"
[*] He says himself "Rue Cassini," but this is a mistake.
[+] "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 82.
He had now apparently completely gone under, like many another
promising young man of whom great things are expected; and he had in
his pride and misery hidden himself from every one, except a few
intimate friends. With the death on June 19, 1829, of his father,
whose last days were saddened by the knowledge of his son's disaster,
the world was poorer by one castle in the air the less; for besides
his natural sorrow at the death of the kind old man, who was so much
softer than his wife, the dream of becoming a millionaire by means of
the Tontine capital faded way, like all poor Honore's other visions.
Even Balzac's buoyancy was not always proof against the depressing
influence of two or three days of starvation, and he sometimes
descended to the lowest depths, and groped in those dark places from
which death seems the only escape. When he tells us in "La Peau de
Chagrin" that Raphael walked with an uncertain step in the Tuileries
Gardens, "as if he were in some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not
see, hearing, through all the voices of the crowd, one voice alone,
the voice of Death," it is Balzac himself, who, after glorious
aspirations, after being in imagination raised to heights to which
only a great nature can aspire, now lay bruised and worsted, a
complete failure, and thought that by suicide he would at least obtain
peace and oblivion. He knew to the full the truth of his words:
"Between a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call
a young man to Paris, God only knows what may intervene, what
contending ideas have striven within the soul, what poems have been
set aside, what moans and what despair have been repressed, what
abortive masterpieces and vain endeavours."[*]
[*] Honore de Balzac, "La Peau de Chagrin."
Looking back years afterwards at this terrible time, he can find only
one reason why he did not put an end to himself, and that was the
existence of Madame de Berny: "She was a mother, a woman friend, a
family, a man friend, an adviser," he cries enthusiastically; "she
made the writer, she consoled the young man, she formed his taste, she
cried like a sister, she laughed, she came every day, like a merciful
slumber, to send sorrow to sleep."[*] Certainly there was no woman on
earth to whom Balzac owed so deep a debt of gratitude, and certainly
also he joyfully acknowledged his obligations. "Every day with her was
a fete," he said to Madame Hanska long afterwards.
[*] "Lettres a l'Etrangere."
About this time another friendship was beginning, which, though slower
in growth and not so passionate in character, was as faithful, and was
only terminated by Balzac's death. When Madame Surville went to live
at Versailles, she was delighted to find that an old schoolfellow,
Madame Carraud, was settled there, her husband holding the post of
director of the military school at Saint-Cyr. Honore had known Madame
Carraud since 1819; but he first became intimate with her and her
husband in 1826, and later he was their constant guest at Angouleme,
where Commandant Carraud was in charge of the Government powder-works,
or at Frapesle in Berry, where Madame Carraud had a country house. She
was a woman of much intelligence and ambition, high-principled and
possessing much common sense. Balzac occasionally complained that she
was a little wanting in softness; but, nevertheless, he invariably
turned to her for comfort in the vicissitudes of his more passionate
attachments. He was also much attached to M. Carraud, a man of great
scientific attainments and a good husband, but, to his wife's despair,
utterly lacking in energy and ambition; so that instead of taking the
position to which by his abilities he was entitled, he soon retired
altogether from public life, and Madame Carraud, who should, according
to Balzac, have found scope for her talents in Paris, was buried in
the country. Nevertheless, the Carrauds were a happy couple, genuinely
devoted to each other; and Madame Carraud cited the instance of their
affection, in spite of the difference of their point of view on many
subjects, when in 1833 she wrote to Honore urging him to marry.[*]
"There is no need to tell you that my husband and I are not
sympathetic in everything. We are so unlike each other that the same
objects appear quite differently to us. Yet I know the happiness about
which I speak. We both feel it in the same degree, though in a
different way. I would not give it up for the fullest existence,
according to generally received ideas. I have not an empty moment."
[*] Letter from Madame Carraud in the Vicomte de Spoelberch de
Lovenjoul's collection, published in _La Revue Bleue_, November
21st, 1903.
She was an ardent politician, and we gain much of our knowledge of
Balzac's political views from his letters to her when he wished to
become a deputy; while she also possessed the faculty which he valued
most in his women friends, that of intelligent literary criticism. She
could be critical on other points as well; and, like Madame Hanska,
blamed Balzac for mobility of ideas and inconstancy of resolution,
which she said wasted his intellect. She complained that, in the time
that he might have used to bring one plan successfully to completion,
he generally started ten or twelve new ones, all of which vanished
into smoke, and brought him no advantage.[*]
[*] "L'Ecole des Menages" in "Autour de Honore de Balzac," by the
Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.
Hardly a year passed without Balzac spending some time at the
hospitable house at Frapesle, the doors of which were always open to
him; and there, away from creditors, publishers, journalists, and all
his other enemies, he was able to write in peace and quietness. There,
too, he made many pleasant acquaintances, among them M. Armand Pereme,
the distinguished antiquary, and M. Periollas, who was at one time
under M. Carraud at Saint-Cyr, and afterwards became chief of a
squadron of artillery. To Madame Carraud he also owed an introduction
to his most intimate male friend, Auguste Borget, a genre painter who
travelled in China, and drew many pictures of the scenery there.
Borget lodged in the same house with Balzac in the Rue Cassini, and is
mentioned by him in a letter to Madame Hanska, in 1833, as one of his
three real friends beside her and his sister, Madame de Berny and
Madame Carraud being the other two. It was a very real grief to Balzac
when Borget was away; and he says that even when the painter is
travelling, sketching, and never writes to him, he is constantly in
his remembrance; while in another letter he speaks of his friend's
nobility of soul and beauty of sentiment. To Borget was dedicated the
touching story of "La Messe de l'Athee"; and in case of Balzac's
sudden death it was to this "good, old, and true friend" that the duty
of burning Madame Hanska's letters were entrusted, though eventually
their recipient performed this painful task himself in 1847.
A still older friend was M. Dablin, a rich, retired ironmonger with
artistic tastes, who left his valuable collection of artistic objects
to the Louvre. He was known to Balzac before 1817; and in 1830 the
successful writer remembers with gratitude that M. Dablin used to be
his only visitor during his martyrdom in the Rue Lesdiguieres in 1819.
At that time and later he was most generous in lending Honore money;
and the only cloud that came between them for a long time was his
indignation when Balzac wished to find him further security than his
own life for a loan he had promised. Later on, in 1845, when M.
Dablin, rather hurt by some heedless words from Balzac, and evidently
jealous of his former protege's grand acquaintances, complained that
honours and fortune changed people's hearts--the great novelist found
time, after his daily sixteen hours of work, to write a long letter to
his old benefactor.[*] In this he tells him that nothing will alter
his affection for him, that all his real friends are equal in his
sight; and he makes the true boast that, though he may have the
egotism of the hard worker, he has never yet forsaken any one for whom
he feels affection, and is the same now in heart as when he was a boy.
[*] "Correspondance," vol. ii. p. 115.
Other early and lifelong friendships were with Madame Delannoy, who
lent him money, and was in all ways kind to him, and with M. de
Margonne, who lived at Sache, a chateau on the Indre, in the beautiful
Touraine valley described in "Le Lys dans la Vallee," and who had held
Balzac on his knees when a child. Balzac often paid him visits,
especially when he wanted to meditate over some serious work, as he
found the solitude and pure air, and the fact that he was treated in
the neighbourhood simply as a native of the country and not as a
celebrity, peculiarly stimulating to his imagination and powers of
creation. He wrote "Louis Lambert," among other novels at the house of
this hospitable friend. Madame de Margonne he did not care for: she
was, according to his unflattering portrait of her, intolerant and
devout, deformed, and not at all _spirituelle_. But she did not count
for much; Balzac went to the house for the sake of her husband.
An intimacy was formed about this time between Balzac and La Touche,
the editor of the _Figaro_, who, as has been already mentioned, helped
him in the prosaic task of nailing up draperies. This intimacy must
have been of great value to Balzac's education in the art of
literature, and is remarkable for that reason in the history of a man
in whose writings small trace of outside influence can be descried,
and who, except in the case of Theophile Gautier, seemed little
affected by the thought of his contemporaries. Therefore, though a
long way behind Madame de Berny--without whom Balzac, as we know him,
would hardly have existed--La Touche deserves recognition for his
work, however small, in moulding the literary ideals and forming the
taste of the great writer. Besides this, his friendship with Balzac is
almost unique in the history of the latter, in the fact that, for some
reason we do not know, it was suddenly broken off; and that almost the
only occasion when Balzac showed personal dislike almost amounting to
hatred, in criticism, was when, in 1840, in the _Revue Parisienne_, he
published an article on "Leo," a novel by La Touche. He became, George
Sand says, completely indifferent to his old master, while the latter
--a pathetic, yet thorny and uncomfortable figure, as portrayed by his
contemporaries--continued to belittle and revile his former pupil,
while all the time he loved him, and longed for a reconciliation which
never took place. La Touche had a quick instinct for discovering
genius: he introduced Andre Chenier's posthumous poems to the public,
and launched Jules Sandeau and George Sand. But he was soured by
seeing his pupils enter the promised land only open to genius, while
he was left outside himself. Sooner or later, the eager, affected
little hypochondriacal man with the bright eyes quarrelled with all
his friends, and a rupture would naturally soon take place between the
ultra-sensitive teacher, ready to take offence on the smallest
pretext, and the hearty, robust Tourainean, who, whatever his troubles
might be, faced the world with a laugh, who insisted on his genius
with cheery egotism, and who, in spite of real goodheartedness and
depth of affection, was too full of himself to be always careful about
the feelings of others. How much Balzac owed to La Touche we do not
know; but though, as we have already seen, there were other reasons
for his sudden stride in literature between 1825 and 1828, it is
significant that "Les Chouans," the first book to which he affixed his
name, and in which his genius really shows itself, was written
directly after his intercourse with this literary teacher. No doubt La
Touche, who was cursed with the miserable fate of possessing the
temperament of genius without the electric spark itself, magnified the
help he had given, and felt extreme bitterness at the shortness of
memory shown by the great writer, whom he vainly strove to sting into
feeling by the acerbity of his attacks.
Never at any time did Balzac go out much into society, but his
anonymous novels, though they did not bring him fame, had opened to
him the doors of several literary and artistic salons, and he was a
frequenter of that of Madame Sophie Gay, the author of several novels,
one of which, "Anatole," is said to have been read by Napoleon during
the last night spent at Fontainebleau in 1814. Hers was essentially an
Empire salon, antagonistic to the government of the Bourbons, and
Balzac's feelings were perhaps occasionally ruffled by the talk that
went on around him, though more probably the interest he found in the
study of different phases of opinion outweighed his party
prepossessions. Those evenings must have been an anxious pleasure;
for, with no money to pay a cab fare, there was always the agonising
question as to whether on arrival his boots would be of spotless
cleanliness, while the extravagance of a pair of white gloves meant a
diminution in food which it was not pleasant to contemplate. Then,
too, he felt savage disgust at the elegant costumes and smart
cabriolets owned by empty-headed fops with insufferable airs of
conquest, who looked at him askance, and to whom he could not prove
the genius that was in him, or give voice to his belief that some day
he would dominate them all. The restlessness and discomfort, and at
the same time the sense of unknown and fascinating possibilities which
are the birthright of talented youth, and in the portrayal of which
Balzac is supreme, must have been well known to him by experience; and
his almost Oriental love of beauty and luxury made his life of
grinding poverty peculiarly galling.