The Project Gutenberg eBook, Balzac, by Edgar Saltus

Copyright, 1884.

By EDGAR EVERTSON SALTUS.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge.

Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

CONTENTS.

BALZAC.

CHAPTER I.
THE VAGARIES OF GENIUS.

“Great minds are bravely eccentric; they scorn the beaten track.”—Goldsmith.

In the city of Tours, in whose gabled streets there lingers still some memory of la belle Impéria, Honoré de Balzac was born on the 20th of May, 1799.

His childhood was in no wise extraordinary, save for the avidity with which he read the Bible and the keen delight which he took in the possession of a little red violin. He was indifferent to romps and games, and when not lost in the mysterious depths of the Scriptures he played by the hour on his fiddle, and extracted therefrom an enjoyment which was almost sensual in its intensity. His parents were well-considered people, in easy circumstances. Honoré was their first-born, and to him were subsequently given two sisters and a brother, concerning whom only a passing mention need be made. His eldest sister, Laure, became the wife of M. de Surville, a civil engineer, survived her illustrious brother, and published his letters, together with a weak sketch of his life; his second sister also married, but died at an early age; while his brother Henri sought his fortune, after the manner of younger sons, in the colonies, failed to find it, and was otherwise entirely uninteresting.

At the age of eight, Balzac was placed as boarder at the Collége de Vendôme, where, through the compression of his dreamy nature by unaccustomed tasks and rules, he soon lapsed into a careless neglect of his duties, and became, in consequence, one of the most frequently punished pupils in his class. Favored, however, by the tacit connivance of a tutor, he passed most of his time in the library. Science, philosophy, belles-lettres, religion, history, and even dictionaries, he read and inwardly digested, and during the six years that he remained at the school he assimilated the substance of all the books worth reading.

This absorption of ideas produced a noteworthy effect. His eye embraced six or eight lines at a time, and his mind appropriated the thought with a velocity equal to his glance; a single word in a phrase often sufficing for a clear understanding of the whole.

His memory was like a vise. He remembered not only the ideas which he had acquired in reading, but also those which conversation and reflection had suggested. Words, names, figures, and places he not only recalled at will, but he saw them within himself, brilliant and colored as they were at the moment when he had first perceived them.

Mentally fortified by his extensive reading, he wrote at the age of twelve the famous “Traité de la Volonté,” so often mentioned in his later works, but which was confiscated by the regent as the probable cause of his neglect of the regular curriculum, and which Balzac says he doubtless sold for waste paper without recognizing the value of the scientific treasures whose germs were thus wasted in ignorant hands.

After this loss, more than terrible to a young imagination, Balzac sought consolation in verse, and wrote a poem on the Incas, commencing: “O Inca! roi infortuné et malheureux!” which, with the exception of his subsequent “Cromwell,” was his sole familiarity with the peplum of the Muse; for, of the four sonnets in the “Illusions Perdues,” the first and second are by Lassaily, the third is by Madame de Girardin, and the fourth by Gautier, while the poem in “Modeste Mignon” was the work of Gérard de Nerval.

From these secret and laborious studies, as well as from possible fermentation of ideas, Balzac fell into a sort of coma and nervous fever, which was singularly inexplicable to his masters and teachers. His parents were hastily summoned, and the precocious boy, now almost epileptic, was taken home, where rest and quiet gradually calmed the tumult in his brain, and restored the health and vivacity of boyhood. Little by little the results of his extraordinary labors became classified within his troubled mind, and to them were added other ideas of a less abstract nature; and in wandering on the banks of the Loire, or in attending the impressive ceremonies at the Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, he acquired not only a love of the beautiful, but also the sincere and abiding faith in religion with which he subsequently enriched the pages of the “Comédie Humaine.” At home, as at school, however, his intelligence was entirely unsuspected, and his sister, Madame de Surville, relates that whenever he chanced to make a brilliant remark his mother would invariably say, “It is impossible, Honoré, for you to understand what you are talking about;” whereupon Honoré would laugh, without deigning to enter into any explanations.[^[1]] His father, however, who was an inoffensive disciple of both Montaigne and Swift, had his own reasons for thinking well of his son, and decided that a child of his could never by any chance be a fool; and while at that time he saw nothing in the boy which promised any immediate celebrity, he nevertheless cherished a few vague hopes.

But the prescience which the father lacked had already visited the son. From time to time he stated that he would some day be famous, and this boast appeared so outrageously insulting to his brother and sisters that they punished him with every torture which childish ingenuity could invent.

Balzac’s family soon after moved to Paris, where he again was placed at school. There, as at Vendôme, he gave no sign of future genius, and as before was regarded as an idler and a dullard.

His classes completed, he attended the lectures of Guizot, Cousin, and Villemain, and his degree of bachelier-ès-lettres obtained, he entered a law office which Scribe had just quitted. Here he acquired that luminous insight to law and procedure which served him to such advantage in the varied litigations of his future world, and enabled him, years after, to plead, as Voltaire did for Calas, in defense of Sébastien Peytel, a former acquaintance, accused of the murder of his wife and servant. The case was lost, and his client convicted; but his oration was none the less superb, and his argument is still cited as one of the most brilliant efforts in the annals of the French bar.

His legal apprenticeship completed, it was naturally expected that he would follow the law as a profession, but Balzac had other ideas; he felt as did Corneille e tutti quanti, that his vocation was not such as is found in courts, and expressed a preference for a purely literary life.

“But,” objected his father, “do you not know that in literature, to avoid being a slave, you must be a king?”

“Very well,” Balzac replied, “king I will be.”

After many arguments it was finally agreed that he should be allowed two years of probation; and as his family were about to return to the country, he was lodged in the Rue Lesdiguières, near the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, on an allowance of a hundred francs a month. His life there he has in “Facino Cane” described as follows:—

“I passed my days at the neighboring library. I lived frugally, for I had accepted all the conditions of that monastic life which is so necessary to students and thinkers. I seldom went out, and when I did a simple promenade was converted into a source of study, for I observed the customs of the faubourg, its inhabitants and their characters. As badly dressed as the workmen and as careless of decorum, I attracted no attention from them, and was enabled to mix among them and watch their bargains and disputes.

“Observation had become to me intuitive. It penetrated the spirit without neglecting the body, or rather it seized exterior details so clearly that it immediately went beyond them. It gave me the power of living the life of any individual upon whom it was exercised, and permitted me to substitute my personality for his, as did the dervish in the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ who had the power of occupying the body and soul of those over whom he pronounced certain words. When, therefore, between eleven and twelve at night, I encountered a workman and his wife returning from the theatre, I amused myself in following them from the Boulevard du Pont-aux-Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. At first they would speak of the play which they had just witnessed. From that they would begin to talk of their own affairs, the mother dragging her child after her, listening neither to its complaints nor to its demands. The money which was to be paid to them was added, and then spent in twenty different ways. Then came the household details, murmurings on the excessive price of potatoes, the length of the winter, energetic discussions on the baker’s bill, and finally little quarrels, in which they displayed their characters in picturesque words. While listening to them I espoused their life. I felt their rags on my back; my feet marched in their tattered shoes; their desires, their needs, all passed into my spirit, and mine into theirs: it was the dream of a waking man. With them I grew angry at their tyrannical masters or at their customers who made them come again and again without paying what they owed.

“To relinquish my identity, to become another through the intoxication of the moral faculties, and to play this game at will, such was my sole distraction. I have sometimes wondered if this gift was one of those faculties whose abuse leads to madness, but its causes I have never sought. I know, merely, that I possess and make use of it.”

This ability to penetrate mentally the individuality of another is the evident explanation of the minuteness with which all of Balzac’s characters are drawn, as well as the secret of their logical attitudes; for as in every-day life, while it is a question whether man is his own providence or is interwoven in a web of pre-ordained circumstances, yet in either case certain results are inevitable and a matter of statistic, so in Balzac there is no dodging of fate or shirking of consequences, and he is careful, in sending his own blood tingling through the veins of his creations, to surround them with the same laws to which he is himself subjected.

During his novitiate Balzac prepared a five-act tragedy in blank verse, entitled “Cromwell,” a subject which it is curious to note was simultaneously chosen by Victor Hugo. At its completion, a professor of the École Polytechnique was requested to decide whether the lines contained a sufficient promise of genius to warrant a further pursuit of literary honors on the part of the young aspirant. The play, conscientiously examined, was deemed simply detestable, and the referee adjudged that Balzac might do what he would, but that literature was certainly not his vocation.

From this decision there was no present appeal; and while his mother and sisters begged him to engage in some other occupation, his father assured him that he would suppress his allowance should he persist in his intentions. Another perhaps would have yielded, but his pride and belief in his destiny made his resolution unalterable, and Balzac was left in solitary sadness to meditate on the coquetries of the Muse.

“I delighted,” he says in “La Peau de Chagrin,” “in the thought that I should live in the midst of tumultuous Paris in an inaccessible sphere of work and silence, in a world of my own, of books and ideas, where like the chrysalis I should build a tomb only to emerge again brilliant and famous.

“I took the chances of dying to live. In reducing existence to its actual needs, I found that three sous for charcuterie prevented me from dying of hunger and preserved my mind in a state of singular lucidity, while enabling me at the same time to observe the wonderful effects which diet produces on the imagination. My lodging cost three sous a day, I burned at night three sous’ worth of oil, and for two sous more I heated my room with charcoal: and in this manner I lived in my aerial sepulchre, working night and day with such pleasure that study seemed the most beautiful theme, the happiest solution, of existence. The calm and silence necessary to the student possess an indescribable something which is as sweet and intoxicating as love, and study itself seems to lend a sort of magic to all that surrounds us. The forlorn desk on which I wrote, my piano, my bed, my chair, the zigzags of the wall-paper,—all these things became as though animated and humble friends, the silent accomplices of my future. Many a time I have communicated my soul to them in a glance, and often in looking at the broken moulding I encountered new developments of thought, some striking proof of my system, or words which I considered peculiarly fitted to express ideas almost untranslatable.”

Balzac had not as yet any settled plan of work, but he tried his hand, while forming his style, at a quantity of comic operas, dramas, comedies, and romances, none of which, however, were accepted save by the gutter’s sneering fatalist, the ragpicker.

After many fruitless attempts and knocks at many a door, Balzac succeeded at last in finding a publisher, but of a type seen only in opéra bouffe, who proffered in payment of a romance a promissory note with a year to run. Balzac of course had no choice. He wished to appear in print. The bargain was concluded, and the “Héritière de Birague” was produced. Then, under various pseudonyms, such as Lord R’hoone, the anagram of Honoré, Dom Rago, M. de Viellerglé, and Horace de Saint-Aubin, he produced a quantity of novels somewhat after the style of Pegault Lebrun, and yet so diverse in treatment that one of them, “Wann-Chlore,”[^[2]] was attributed to a luminary of the Romantic school, and another, “Annette et le Criminel,” was suppressed by the censorship. Some of these books, whose paternity he always denied, have since been collected under the title of “Œuvres de Jeunesse,” but of the greater part no trace remains.

Exhausted by privations and worn with continued study, Balzac was obliged to return to his family, then established at Villeparisis, where, broken in mind and health, he sank into an almost hopeless dejection.

“Is this what you term life,” he wrote[^[3]] to his sister,—“this involuntary rotation and perpetual return of the same things? I am in the springtide of a flowerless life, and I long to have some charm thrown over my chill existence; for of what use is fortune and pleasure when youth is gone? Of what use is the actor’s gown if he play no longer his part? Old age is a man who has dined and looks at others eat; and I, I am young, and I hunger before an empty plate—Laura, Laura, shall I, then, never realize my two immense desires, to be celebrated and to be loved?”

But Balzac soon wearied of this plaintive inactivity, and, fertile in projects, conceived the plan of printing Molière complete in one volume, and of following it with similar editions of the French classics. When these had appeared, he proposed, like Richardson, to produce his own works, and his illuminous imagination immediately foresaw new Clarissas issuing from the press.

The necessary working capital he procured from his family, who, though far from rich, were none the less glad to aid him in an enterprise for which literature would be abandoned and a legitimate business adopted.

But after the publication of Molière and La Fontaine, in each of which he inserted an elaborate and original introduction, he was obliged, through the cabals of the other publishers, to relinquish his plan, while burdened at the same time with a load of debt which oppressed almost every hour of his after life.

He was now absolutely without resources. The expense of a few sous attending the carriage of a letter, an omnibus ride, anything, in fact, which demanded the outlay of ready money, he was obliged to forego, and even remained in his garret that he might preserve as long as possible the only shoes which he owned.

“My sole possessions,” he wrote to his sister, “are my books, which I cannot part with, and my good taste, which unfortunately for the rich cannot be bought. If I were in prison I should be happier; life then would cost me nothing, and in any event I could not be more of a captive than I am.”

But the pecuniary loss which he had sustained, and which amounted to about 120,000 francs, served but as a stimulus to renewed activity; and resolving that he would recover from the printing press all that it had robbed him of, he commenced to seek some undiscovered vein of literary treasure, and in 1829 brought out “Le Dernier Chouan,” the first romance which he considered worthy to bear his own name. Its ferocity and passion attracted great attention, and the public became at once favorably disposed toward him; but when, a few months later, the “Physiologie du Mariage” appeared, its success was not only instantaneous, but Balzac was heralded as a new Molière. He now emerged from quasi obscurity into the white light of fame. Publishers were submissive, praise was unstinted. He had realized the first of his immense desires, and had it not been for his weight of debt he might perhaps have been able to realize the other, but his time was not his own. He labored, if possible, more incessantly than ever, conceived the plan of the “Comédie Humaine,” and from that time up to almost the day of his death produced a series of masterpieces which in point of interest and erudition form the most gigantic monument in the history of modern literature.

His work accompanied him wherever he went. He dreamed of it; he wrote while he ate; he traveled over the better part of Europe, and wrote while he traveled; he composed in the omnibus and in the street; and had he had a mistress he would, in all probability, have followed the example of Baudelaire, and composed in her arms. Thoroughly conscientious, he invariably visited the place where the scenes of a drama were to be located. “I am going to Alençon,” he would say; “you know Mlle. Cormon[^[4]] lives there;” or, “I am off for Grenoble; there is where M. Benassis[^[5]] lives:” for it should be remembered that not only were Balzac’s characters as realistically vivid to him as are the hallucinations of a neurosthene, but he invariably spoke of them as another would of friends and acquaintances. “Let us talk of realities,” he one day said to Jules Sandeau, who had been speaking to him of an invalid relative, “let us talk about ‘Eugénie Grandet;’” and at another time, when his sister asked for some information about Captain Jordy,[^[6]] Balzac replied very simply, “I never knew the man before he came to Nemours, but if he interests you, I will try to learn something of him.” It was a long time before he was able to find a suitable husband for Mlle. Camille Grandlieu, and rejected all who were suggested to him. “They are not in the same set,” he would say. “Chance alone can supply her with a husband, and chance is a commodity which a novelist should use but sparingly. Reality alone justifies the improbable, and the probable alone is permitted to us.” But Mlle. de Grandlieu was not destined to braid St. Catherine’s tresses, and afterwards, to Balzac’s great delight, found a suitable husband in the person of the young Comte de Restaud,[^[7]] who in spite of his mother’s derelictions[^[8]] was otherwise a very acceptable suitor.

After the place of his novel had been visited, viewed from every aspect, the customs noted and the localisms acquired, Balzac would return to Paris, shut himself up in a garret,—the garret has its poetry,—and for weeks and sometimes months at a time he would not only disappear entirely from view, but all trace of him would be lost.

At other times, he would lodge under an assumed name, which he imparted only to his most intimate friends. “My address,” he wrote to Madame Carraud in 1834, “is always Madame Veuve Durand, 13, Rue des Batailles;” and in 1837, he wrote to Dablin, “To see the Widow Durand, a name must be given. Yours is on the list.”

“The house,” Gautier wrote,[^[9]] “of the Widow Durand was as well guarded as the Garden of the Hesperides. Two or three passwords were exacted, and that they might not become vulgarized they were frequently changed. Among others, I recall the following. On telling the janitor that the season for prunes had arrived, the visitor was permitted to cross the threshold; to the servant who prowled about the head of the stairway, it was necessary to murmur ‘I bring laces from Belgium;’ and on assuring the valet de chambre that Madame Bertrand was in excellent health, the visitor was ushered into the great man’s presence.”

It was in the Rue des Batailles that the famous boudoir of the “Fille aux Yeux d’Or” actually existed; and though its luxury would not appear unusual to-day, it was, nevertheless, a source of continual wonder to his Bohemian friends, and his own description of it is not devoid of interest:[^[10]]—

“One side of the boudoir formed a graceful semicircle, while in the centre of the other, which was perfectly square, there shone a mantel-piece of marble and gold. The door, which was concealed behind a rich portière of tapestry, was directly in front of the window.

“In the horseshoe was a Turkish divan, fifty feet in circumference and as high as a bed. The covering was of white cashmere tufted with bows of black and lilac silk, which were disposed as at the angles of a lozenge.

“The back of this immense bed rose several inches above a pile of cushions, which added to the general effect by their coloring and artistic arrangement.

“The boudoir was hung with a red material, over which was draped an Indian muslin fluted like a Corinthian column by a piping alternately hollow and round, and bordered at top and bottom by a band of lilac embroidered with black arabesques. Beneath the muslin the red became pink, and this delicate shading was repeated in the window curtains, which were of Indian muslin lined with pink silk and ornamented with a fringe of black and lilac.

“At equal distances on the wall above the divan were six sockets of silver-gilt, each of which supported two candles, while from the centre of the ceiling hung a highly polished lustre of the same material.

“The carpet was like a camel’s-hair shawl, and seemed a mute reminder of the poetry of Persia. The furniture was covered with white cashmere relieved by lilac and black. The clock and candelabras were of gold and marble. The one table which the boudoir contained was covered with white cashmere, while all about were jardinières of white and red roses.”

Behind the semicircle was a secret passage, at one end of which was an iron cot and at the other a desk; and here it was that Balzac, secure from intrusion, worked and composed at his ease.

To return, however, to the Widow Durand. In 1838 he wrote to Madame Hanska, the lady who subsequently became his wife:—

“The Widow Durand is dead. She was killed by the contemptible conduct of the daily papers, who have betrayed a secret which should have been sacred to every man of honor.”

After this misfortune Balzac installed himself openly at Les Jardies, a country house which he had built at Ville d’Avray, and where he was, as he expressed it, “like the lantern of Demosthenes, and not, as every one else says, of Diogenes;” but when, a year or two later, he took up his residence in the Rue Basse, at Passy he surrounded himself with all his former precautions, instituted a series of countersigns which he changed weekly, and transformed himself into “Madame Bri....”

When guarded in this way from any intrusion, Balzac would work from twelve to twenty-one hours a day. His usual hours of sleep were from six in the evening until midnight. Then he would bathe, don the white robe of a Dominican friar, poise a black skull cap on his head, and, under the influence of coffee and by the light of a dozen candles, would work incessantly till he could work no more.

His work completed, the lion would forsake his den, and for an evening or two he would be seen in the Loge Infernale at the opera, invariably carrying a massive cane whose head glittered with jewels, and which Madame de Girardin was pleased to imagine rendered him invisible at will;[^[11]] or he would make brief apparitions in the salons of the literati and nobility, and then, suddenly, without a word of warning, he would shut himself up as impenetrably as before.

His manner of writing was stamped with the same eccentricity which characterized all his habits. When a subject which he proposed to treat had been well considered, he would cover thirty or forty sheets with a scaffolding of ideas and phrases, which he then sent off to the printer, who returned them in columns wired and centred on large placards. The work, freed in this way from any personality and its errors at once apparent, was then strengthened and corrected. On a second reading the forty pages grew to a hundred, two hundred on the third, and so on, while on the proof-sheets themselves new lines would start from the beginning, the middle, or the end of a phrase; and if the margins were insufficient, other sheets of paper were pinned or glued to the placards, which were again and again returned, corrected, and reprinted, until the work was at last satisfactorily completed.

But perhaps the most graphic description of Balzac’s manner of writing is the one contained in an article by Edouard Ourliac in the “Figaro” for the 15th of December, 1837, of which the following is a free translation:—

THE MISFORTUNES AND ADVENTURES OF CÉSAR BIROTTEAU BEFORE HIS BIRTH.

Let us sing, drink, and embrace, like the chorus in an opéra bouffe; let us waft kisses in the air and turn on our toes, as they do in the ballet.

Let us rejoice now that we may. The “Figaro,” without appearing to have done so, has conquered the elements, all the malefactors, and every sublunary cataclysm.

The “Figaro” has conquered César Birotteau.

Never did the angered gods, never did Juno, Neptune, M. de Rambuteau, or the prefect of the police, oppose against Jason, Theseus, or the wayfarers of the capital, greater obstacles, monsters, ruins, dragons, demolitions, than these two unhappy octavos. We have them at last, and we know their cost.

The public will have but the trouble to read them, though that should count as a pleasure.

As to M. de Balzac, twenty days of labor, two reams of paper, another masterpiece, that counts as nothing.

Whatever else it may be considered, it is at least a typographical exploit and a worthy example of literary and commercial heroism.

Writer, publisher, and printer, all deserve the praise of their countrymen.

Posterity will gossip about the binders, and our grand-nephews will regret that they do not know the names of the apprentices.

I regret it myself,—otherwise I would tell them.

The “Figaro” promised the book for the 15th of December, and M. de Balzac began it on the 17th of November.

M. de Balzac and the “Figaro” have the singular habit of keeping their word.

The printing-press was prepared, and pawed the ground like an excited charger.

M. de Balzac sent immediately two hundred sheets, scribbled in five nights of fever.

Every one knows how he writes. It was an outline, a chaos, an apocalypse, a Hindu poem.

The office paled. The time was short, the writing unheard of. The monster was transformed and translated as nearly as possible into familiar signs. No one could make head or tail of it. Back it went to the author. The author sent back the first two proofs glued on enormous placards.

It was frightful, it was pitiful. From each sign, from each printed word, shot a penstroke, gleaming and gliding like a sky-rocket, and bursting at the extremity in a luminous fire of phrases, epithets, substantives, underlined, crossed, intermingled, erased, and superposed. Its aspect was simply dazzling.

Fancy four or five hundred arabesques of this kind, interlacing, knotted together, climbing and slipping from one margin to another and from the bottom to the top.

Fancy twelve geographical maps entangling cities, rivers, and mountains in the same confusion, a skein harassed by a cat, all the hieroglyphics of the Pharonian dynasty, or twenty fireworks exploding at once.

The office then was far from gay. The typesetters beat their breasts, the presses groaned, the proof-readers tore their hair and the apprentices became howling idiots. The most intelligent recognized the Persian alphabet, others the Madagascan, while one or two considered them to be the symbolic characters of Vishnu.

They worked on chance and by the grace of God.

The next day M. de Balzac sent back two pages of the purest Chinese. It was then the 1st of December. A generous typesetter offered to blow out his brains. Then other sheets were brought, written in the most legible Siamese. Three compositors lost their sight and the little French that they knew.

The proofs were sent back seven consecutive times; then, a few symptoms of excellent French appeared, and there was even noticed a certain connection between the phrases; but the day was fast approaching, and we felt that the book would never appear.

Desolation was at its height, and it was at this point that the work became further complicated by an admirable concourse of calamities.

At the time when haste was the greatest, the miserable being who that night carried the proof-sheets to M. de Balzac was waylaid and robbed.

M. de Balzac had had the forethought to establish himself at Chaillot. The miserable being screamed and yelled. The bandits took to their heels. One proof-sheet was found at Neuilly, another in an orchard, a third descending the Seine. It is certain that they were thrown away only on account of their illegibility. Misfortune has its advantages.

The proofs were recovered, but the night was lost. There were cries and gnashing of teeth. The end was fast approaching. However, the typesetters took courage and the workmen took the bit in their teeth. The office galloped. The compositors foamed at the mouth, the presses ravened, the binders were on springs, the apprentices danced with excitement, the proof-reader shook like an epileptic, and the foreman had convulsions. The office was a cage of palsied lunatics.

The work was again taken in hand, and M. de Balzac and the “Figaro” have kept their word.

“César Birotteau” will see the light of day on the 15th of December. We have it now, and we hold it tight. The office is armed, insured, and barricaded. Smoking is not permitted. There are lightning-rods on the roof, and mounted guards at the door.

Every precaution has been taken against accidents and the ardor of our subscribers.

At this moment “César Birotteau” is a work in two volumes, an immense tableau, an entire poem, composed, written, and corrected fifteen times by M. de Balzac in twenty days, and deciphered, disentangled, and reprinted fifteen times in the same period. It may be added that M. de Balzac kept forty other workmen busy with something else at another office.

We will not now consider the value of the work.

It may be everything, or but a masterpiece.

The names of Balzac’s characters are all taken from real life; for, like Dickens, his theory was that names which were invented gave no life to imaginary creations, and, as did the English novelist, he gathered many of them from the signboards in the street. His joy at the discovery of Matifat was almost as great as his delight in finding Cardot. He found the former in the Rue de la Perle, in the Marais. “I can see him now,” he said; “he will have the pallid face of a cat. But Cardot is different: he will be dry as a bone, hasty and ill-tempered.”

In 1840, Balzac proposed to write for the “Revue Parisienne”—a periodical which, it may be explained, appeared but three times, and whose three numbers Balzac wrote entirely—the story of a man of genius, who, used as a tool by others, died through the ingratitude of those whom he had raised to magnificent positions, and who had then abandoned him to poverty and want.

Such a character needed a name proportioned to his destiny; a name which explained and announced him as clearly as the cannon-ball announces the cannon; a name which would be peculiarly his own, and would reflect his face, his figure, his voice, his past, his future, his genius, his passions, his misfortunes, and his glory.

But this supernatural alliance of man and name was not immediately discoverable, and Balzac, who had put into circulation as many cognomens as are contained in the “Almanach de Gotha,” expressed himself incapable of manufacturing it. A name, he considered, could no more be fabricated than could granite or marble. They were all three the work of time and revolutions. They made themselves.

As a last and supreme resource, therefore, he set out one day, in company with Léon Gozlan, on a journey, in search of a baptismal signboard for his hero; and from the Barrière de l’Étoile to the summits of Montmartre they zigzagged across Paris, subjecting every name they encountered to the closest scrutiny.

Thousands of names were examined, analyzed, and rejected, until at last Gozlan, utterly worn out, refused to walk another step.

Balzac looked at him, it is to be supposed, very much as Columbus looked at his mutinous sailors, and by force of entreaties obtained, not three days’ grace, but three streets more.

In the first two nothing was found, but at the extremity of the third Balzac suddenly changed color, and cried in a voice broken by emotion,—

“There, there! Read that name!”

Above a narrow, oblong door, which opened on a sombre courtyard, there hung a sign which bore for device the name of Marcas.

“Our journey is at an end!” Balzac exclaimed; “it terminates in a blaze of glory. The name of my hero shall be Marcas. Marcas contains the philosopher, the statesman, and the poet. I will call him Z. Marcas, and thereby add to his name a flame, a tiara, and a star. Nothing could be better. I wonder, however, who this Marcas is; surely some great artist.”

“He is a tailor,” Gozlan brutally replied; “there is another sign of his in the courtyard.”

Balzac looked deeply chagrined.

“No matter,” he said; “he merited a better fate. If I seem annoyed, it is not that I am lacking in respect for tailors in general, but because his calling reminds me of certain debts and a few protested notes.”

A day or two later the “Revue Parisienne” appeared, and with it the story of Z. Marcas, now forming part of the “Scènes de la Vie Politique” and containing the following monograph:—

“A certain harmony existed between the man and the name. This Z. with which Marcas was preceded, which was to be seen on the address of his letters, and with which he always completed his signature,—this last letter of the alphabet presented to the imagination a something which was indescribably fatal.

“Marcas! Repeat over to yourself this name, composed of two syllables: does it not seem to contain a sinister significance? does it not seem as though its owner were born to be martyred.

“Though weird and wild, this name has nevertheless the right to descend to posterity: it is well composed, it is easily pronounced, and possesses the brevity required of famous names. Is it not as soft as it is bizarre? but does it not also seem unfinished?

“I would not dare to affirm that destiny is uninfluenced by a name, for between the deeds of men and their names there are inexplicable affinities and visible discords which at once astonish and surprise. But this subject will some day assuredly form part of the occult sciences.

“Does not the Z. present a thwarted and contradicted appearance? does it not represent the contingent and fantastic zigzags of a tormented life? What ill wind can have blown on this letter that in every language to which it is admitted commands barely fifty words! Marcas’ Christian name was Zépherin. Saint Zépherin is highly venerated in Brittany. Marcas was a Breton.

“Examine the name again. Z. Marcas! The entire existence of the man is contained in the fantastic assemblage of these seven letters. Seven!—the most significant of the cabalistic numbers. Marcas died at the age of thirty-five; his life therefore was composed of but seven lustres. Marcas! Does not the sound bring to you the idea of something precious, broken in a noiseless fall?”

The fatality which Balzac conceived as attaching to Marcas was by no means limited to this imaginary creation. It followed him into real life, and was at one time a source of such serious preoccupation that he stood one evening for two hours in the square of the Château d’Eau confidently awaiting some fortunate occurrence, and like Gautier in “Mademoiselle de Maupin” he awoke on certain days in a state of great agitation, trembling at every noise, and convinced that the happiness of his life was somehow at stake.

These extraordinary sensations naturally led to a belief in the supernatural; and as his mother, who was also interested in the abnormal, was acquainted with all the celebrated mesmerists and mediums of the day, he was readily furnished with opportunities of experimenting in magnetism and clairvoyance. His charming story of “Ursule Mirouët” unquestionably proves that he subsequently became a firm believer in that occult electricity which is variously known as the Theopœa of the ancients, the Akâsa of the modern Hindu, and the psychic force of Sergeant Cox; while his account of the soul-projection of “Séraphita” is vivid enough to satisfy the most exacting hierophant, and would have passed him, initiate, into the brotherhood of the Theosophists.

But perhaps the most curious evidence of his every-day faith in divination is that contained in the two following extracts from his correspondence:—

TO M. CHAPELAIN, PHYSICIAN.

Paris, May, 1832.

Sir,—I am attracted by the power of somnambulism, and wonder why you have not sought to obtain from some lucid subject the causes of this disaster.[^[12]]

Science is interested therein, and its discovery would be an eternal honor to us.

Had I not been ill for a week past I would have ascended to the honors of practice, and endeavored to convince myself whether the power of a somnambulist was limited or infinite.

The second extract is from a letter addressed to his mother a year later:—

“I send you herewith two pieces of flannel which I have worn on the body. Take them to M. Chapelain, and when he has examined the first, ask of him the cause and position of the malady[^[13]] and how it should be treated. See that everything is clearly explained. Then with the second piece ask the why and wherefore of the blister ordered in the precedent consultation.

“Be careful to keep the flannels well wrapped up, that the emanations may not be disturbed.”

Balzac’s hatred of journalists was intense, and from Sainte-Beuve down to the most insignificant penny-a-liner all were enveloped in the same superb contempt.

No branch of the profession was exempt from this antipathy, and critics and feuilletonistes shared alike in his wholesale condemnation:—

“They want my scalp, do they, these Mohicans of the press! Bah! I will drink out of their skulls.”

Drink he did, indeed, and long delicious draughts, at that; and in picking up with the point of his pen the venality, envy, and petty spites of the trade, he drew in the “Illusions Perdues,” in which Jules Janin figures in the transparent disguise of Étienne Lousteau, a picture of journalism which was as faithfully unpleasant as it was pitying and contemptuous. In this respect, however, it is well to state that no one was as indifferent to the opinion of the press as Balzac himself. He rarely, if ever, read the criticisms on his books, and left them, in the consciousness of their worth, to find their level unaided.

One of the causes of his disdain of everything which smacked of journalism was this: He had engaged to write “Séraphita” for the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” and shortly after the story had been delivered he learned that it was published at St. Petersburg. Thinking, as was but natural, that the editor had been the victim of some audacious theft, he hastened to tell him what he had heard; and his astonishment may be readily imagined when he was informed that the Russian edition had appeared with the sanction of the editor himself, who not only insisted that he had a perfect right to do as he pleased with the manuscript, but positively refused to make any indemnity. Thereupon, Balzac, in spite of the remonstrances of his friends, who pointed out that any contest with the “Revue,” whose word was law, would inevitably result in the closing of its columns to him, began a lawsuit, alleging that, independent of the pecuniary loss which he suffered, a precedent of this kind, once established, would in the future be highly prejudicial, not only to him, but to all his confrères. Much to his amazement, however, the defendant appeared in court with a list of signatures of almost all of those whom he had sought to defend at his own risk and peril, who attested that from a literary as well as from an ethical standpoint they considered the action of the editor of the “Revue des Deux Mondes” as eminently right and proper.

The law was, none the less, perfectly clear. Balzac won the suit, and with it a host of enemies, whose hatred was so vigorous that it barely abated, even after his death. Their insults delighted him. “Fire away,” he would say; “the armor is strong. Your abuse is an advertisement; your praise would lull the public to sleep, but your diatribes wake them up. Besides, you hit the mark sometimes, and every fault you signalize I correct, which in the end is so much gained.”

Among the host of enemies thus aroused were those who, not content with denying his genius, advanced their artillery into private life, and painted him in the possession of every vice in the criminal statutes; and it is from the falsehoods of these guerrilleros that all the stupidities which have been told concerning him found their primal gestation. Not only his morality, his honesty, his sobriety, were attacked, but even his name was denied to him. The de was declared not only an affectation, but a theft; and when some one said to him, in allusion thereto, “But you are no connection of the De Balzac d’Entragues,” “Ah! am I not?” he answered placidly. “Well, then, so much the worse for them.”

CHAPTER II.
THE COMÉDIE HUMAINE.

“One would say he had read the inscription on the gates of Busyrane,—‘Be bold;’ and on the second gate,—‘Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold;’ and then again had paused well at the third gate,—‘Be not too bold.’”—Emerson, Plato.

The general plan and outline of the “Comédie Humaine” originated in a comparison between humanity and animal existence. That which Buffon had achieved in zoölogy, Balzac proposed to accomplish in moral science, and the habits and customs as well as the vices and virtues of his contemporaries found in him a secretary whose inventory offers to posterity an elaborate insight into the every-day life of France in the nineteenth century, and realizes for their future curiosity that work which the ancient monarchies have neglected to bequeath to us as their own civilizations.

But the pictures of two or three thousand of the most striking figures of an epoch required, in a general history of society, not only frames but galleries, and the work therefore is divided into,

Scènes de la Vie Privée.

Scènes de la Vie de Province.

Scènes de la Vie Parisienne.

Scènes de la Vie Politique.

Scènes de la Vie Militaire.

Scènes de la Vie de Campagne.

These six subdivisions are grouped under the general title of “Études de Mœurs,” and in them the attempt has been made to examine and explain the general causes of earthly happiness and misery, as demonstrated in the results obtainable in the practice of the great principles of order and mortality, or in the selfish abandonment to purely personal interests.

Happiness, Balzac considered, consisted in the exercise of our faculties as applied to realities. But inasmuch as its principles vary with each latitude, and ideas of right and wrong find their modifications in the climate, he concluded that morals and convictions were valueless terms, and that happiness was to be found, first, in violent emotions which undermine existence; second, in regular occupations functionating like mechanism; or, lastly, in the study of the laws of nature and in the application of the lessons thereby derived.

In his treatment of this subject he has prepared a complete history of the effects of the agitation of social existence, and each of the foregoing divisions represents a particular aspect of life.

In the “Scènes de la Vie Privée,” life is represented between the last developments of childhood and the first calculations of virility. These scenes contain tableaux of the emotions and undefined sensations combined with pictures of the errors committed through ignorance of the exigencies of the world.

The “Scènes de la Vie de Province” represents that phase of existence in which passions, calculations, and ideas take the place of sensations, impulses, and illusions. The instincts of the young man of twenty are generous; at thirty he calculates and turns egotist. These scenes therefore initiate the reader into the thousand aspects of the transition through which a man passes when abandoning the thoughtless impulses of adolescence for the politic attitudes of manhood. Life becomes serious: positive interests jostle with violent passions, disillusions begin, the social machinery is revealed, and from the shock of moral or pecuniary interests the crime bursts in the midst of the most tranquil household.

Herein are unveiled the petty annoyances by whose periodicity a poignant interest is concentrated in the slightest detail of existence. Herein are also exposed the petty rivalries, the jealousies born of vicinage, and the family worries, whose increasing force degrades and weakens the most resolute will. The charm of dreams escapes; the prosaic and the matter of fact alone exist; woman reasons, and no longer feels; she calculates where before she gave. Life is now ripened and shaded.

In the “Scènes de la Vie Parisienne” the questions are enlarged, and existence painted in bold outlines gradually arrives at the frontiers of decrepitude. Herein purity of sentiment is exceptional: it is broken in the play of interests and scattered by the mechanism of the world. Virtue is calumniated, innocence is purchased. Passions become vices, emotions ruinous gratifications; everything is analyzed, bought, and sold. Life is a bazaar; humanity has but two forms, that of the deceiver and the deceived; it is a struggle and a combat, and the victor is he who best throttles society and moulds it to his own ends. The death of relatives is awaited; the honest man is a simpleton; generosity is a means, religion a governmental necessity, probity a policy; everything is marketable; absurdity is an advertisement, ridicule a passport, and youth, which has lived a hundred years, insults old age.

These scenes close the tableaux of individual existence, and their three frameworks contain representations of youth, manhood, and old age. First the bloom of life, the expansion of the soul, and the radiance of love; then come the calculations, the transformation of affection into passion; and, lastly, the accumulation of interests and the continual satisfaction of the senses joined to the inevitable weariness of mind and body.

Nothing but that which affects the individual proper has herein been treated, and the fragments of the “Scènes de la Vie Politique” express, in consequence, a wider range of thought. In these pages the actors represent the interest of the masses, and place themselves above those laws to which the types in the preceding series were subjected. The foregoing divisions described the constant antagonism of thought and sentiment, but in these scenes thought is an organizing force and sentiment is completely abolished. They are, however, incomplete, as are also the “Scènes de la Vie Militaire,” in which Balzac proposed to represent the action as taking place, not in an apartment, but on the battle-field; not in the struggle of man with man, but in the concussion of France and Europe, in the slaughter of the conquered and the pæans of the victors.

After these pages, whose completion was prevented by his sudden death, the calm and peaceful pictures of the “Scènes de la Vie de Campagne” follow in orderly sequence. They represent rest after exertion, landscapes after interiors, the hush of the country after the uproar of the city, the cicatrice after the wound. This last division contains the same interests and the same struggles, but weakened now by lack of contact, like passions grown dull in solitude. It is the twilight of a busy day, a summer evening solemn with sombre shadows. It contains the purest characters and the application of the great principles of order, morality, and religion, and its actors, worn with the fatigues of the world, mingle complacently with the innocence of childhood.[^[14]]

Thus completed, the entire work has its geography and its own genealogy, its localities and their concomitants, its personages and their deeds. It has its own armorial, its nobility and middle class, its artisans, its peasants, and its army. It is a world in itself. But its most striking feature is the admirable unity preserved throughout; and this unity is undoubtedly due to a suggestion derived from the works of Sir Walter Scott, whom Balzac considered as a gifted sculptor who chiseled magnificent figures and draped them with genius and sublimity, but, while presenting the seductive effects of a marvelous analysis, left them lacking in synthesis and totally unrelated.

“The Waverley Novels,” he said,[^[15]] “resemble the Musée de la Rue des Petits-Augustins, in which each object, while magnificent in design, relates but to itself. Genius is complete only when to the faculty of creating it joins the power of coördinating its creations. The gifts of observation and description are in themselves insufficient; they must tend to a certain result. The Scotch bard was possessed of too clear a vision not to have understood this axiom, but its understanding assuredly came too late.” To this reflection the unity of the “Comédie Humaine” is probably due; and that it may not be objected that certain of its passages are unrelated to the others, it is well to note that Balzac died too suddenly to be able to connect the broken threads, which in any event are but few and far between.

But the task of rendering his work at once interesting and instructive was one of much greater difficulty than that of Scott’s, who drew his characters from former days, when every class of society was clearly defined, and clothed them from a wardrobe opulent with historical effects; whereas Balzac was obliged to offer in clear relief the almost imperceptible differences of the types of yesterday and to-day, that through an equality of fortune and education have destroyed the contrasts which once existed between the different degrees of the social order. Aided, however, by that peculiar intuition which never forsook him, he chose from among the physiognomies of his epoch an assortment of those fugitive traits which are imperceptible to the eyes of the vulgar; and in scrutinizing face after face, attentive to the changes of expression and inflections of voice, he was enabled to present a series of individualities which are far more realistic than those of his illustrious predecessor.

After displaying in the “Études de Mœurs” all the moral and physical transformations through which mankind passes, and after describing the social effects of their natural or civil positions, Balzac sought in the “Études Philosophiques” to demonstrate the causes of these effects; and while the first part of the “Comédie Humaine” contains but a series of individualities typified in the treatment of his subject, in the second part are to be found the same types individualized: as, for example, where in the “Études de Mœurs” Grandet is purely and simply a miser, avarice in the “Études Philosophiques” is incarnated in the person of Maître Cornélius, and the subject, like a sponge, gains in weight what it loses in breadth.

The “Études Philosophiques” is the fruit of analyzed comparisons of all the works which the philosophers of antiquity and the specialists of his day had produced on the intellect; and starting with the famous axiom of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that “l’homme qui pense est un animal dépravé,”—an idea which, as is well known, found its poetic interpretation in Byron’s “Manfred,” and its dramatic aspect in the “Faust” of Goethe,—Balzac proceeds to prove that ideas and sentiments are simply dissolvents of a greater or less activity; and taking as his premises the admitted fact that instincts violently excited by factitious or fortuitous circumstances produce unconsciousness and even death, and also that thought, when augmented by the transitory force of passion, may become a poison or a dagger, he infers, from the ravages produced by the intellect, that thought is the most active agent in the disorganization of man, and consequently of society. “Consider,” he says in “Louis Lambert,” “the difference between man who desires nothing and lives like a plant for a hundred years, and the creating artist who suffers early death. Where the sun is, there is thought and brevity of existence; where the cold is, there is torpor and longevity.” Then, after considering man as a simple organization, he brandishes the proposition that vitality decreases in exact proportion to the strength of desire and the dissipation of thought, and leads the reader, therewith, through the gradual development of his theory, which is first attacked in “La Peau de Chagrin.” This weird and fantastic production, in which skepticism and the supernatural join hands, represents the ravages of thought and the supreme expression of egotism as seared by the hot iron of civilization.

In “La Recherche de l’Absolu,” the theme is continued, but viewed in a broader and more comprehensive light. In “La Peau de Chagrin,” the individual is destroyed by the force of desire. In “La Recherche de l’Absolu,” the pursuit of an idea annihilates an entire family. The first is the world of pleasure, an epoch in itself; the second is the world of science, and glitters with brilliant hypotheses. In both instances, an idea, gradually strengthened, becomes a passion and a disorganizing force. In “L’Adieu,” happiness, exalted to the highest degree, becomes a destructive agency. In “Le Réquisitionnaire”, a mother is killed by the violence of maternal affection. In “El Verdugo,” a father is slain by his son that a title may be preserved. In “Le Drame au Bord de la Mer,” a son is slain by his father that an hereditary instinct may be destroyed. In “Maître Cornélius,” avarice kills the miser. In “Le Chef d’Œuvre Inconnu,” art kills the artist. In “Gambara,” the composer is crazed by his own conceptions. In “L’Enfant Maudit,” terror is the destroyer, and the subject treated herein finds a natural and logical sequence in the “Auberge Rouge.” In “Les Proscrits,” the sentiment of religion becomes the destroyer, and in “Séraphita” the same idea is more vividly presented. “César Birotteau,” an existence untroubled by misery, is, through sudden good fortune, cut off as by a scythe. In the “Église,” the agent is incredulity, but in “Louis Lambert” is to be found the most severe deduction from the fundamental proposition in that it represents the thinker killed by thought.

The destructive power of the mind and imagination, from the Neronian conflagration to the suicide of Castlereagh and Chatterton, the aphasia of Emerson, and the insanity of Tourgénieff, is too well known and too thoroughly understood to need further commentary in these pages; and in connection with this it need but be said that, while the attraction of gravity had been witnessed by countless generations, as it remained to Newton to formulate the obvious propositions of cause and effect, so in this branch of mental science, whose results have been patent since the beginning of history, a Balzac was necessary for the full elucidation of the subject, and for the proper presentation of the conclusions derived from the psycho-mental evidence of ages.

After having, in the “Études de Mœurs,” described society in every aspect, and demonstrated in the “Études Philosophiques” all the underlying causes of the general results, Balzac proposed in the third and last division of the “Comédie Humaine,” namely, in the “Études Analytiques,” to examine the principles upon which the first two rest.

This last division, however, is one of the few unfinished windows of his Aladdin’s palace, for, out of the six volumes which it was to contain, two only were written before death intervened. These two works, the “Physiologie du Mariage” and the “Petites Misères de la Vie Conjugale,” are a series of duos between husband and wife, augmented at times by the tenor notes of the amant. The first is dedicated to the reader, and contains the deceptions of the husband; the second, those of the wife. At once malicious and diabolically witty, these two books are as delicately analytical as the deductions of Leuwenhoeck and Swammerdam, and abound with that peculiar though refreshing condiment which is generally known as Gallic salt.

It is to be regretted that these two books, the first of which was published at the outset of the author’s career, and the second towards the close of his life, were not strengthened and augmented by the others with which he proposed to accompany them, and whose subjects and titles—namely, “Anatomie des Corps Enseignants,” “Pathologie de la Vie Sociale,” “Monographie de la Vertu,” “Dialogue Philosophique et Politique sur la Perfection du XIXe Siècle”—have alone descended to us; for this vein of literary treasure can never be profitably worked save by another Balzac or a modern Aristophanes.

It was in 1844 that Balzac said, “The first half of the present century will be found to have been greatly influenced by four men,—Napoleon, Cuvier, O’Connell, and myself. The first lived on the blood of Europe, the second espoused the globe, the third became the incarnation of an entire race, while I shall have carried a complete society in my brain.”

Though almost another half century has now elapsed since these words were uttered, it would seem that the influence which he was then conscious of exerting is even more vigorous than before. The characters which he painted formed, it is true, part of a Paris now dead and forgotten, but the types have survived, and the lessons which he deduced therefrom are as eminently instructive now as they were in the days when he wrote; and while, taking the world at large as the groundwork of his edifice, man was necessarily but the detail, he has, in his description thereof, painted him in every phase,—consequent and inconsequent, neither completely good nor completely vicious, logical at times, and sometimes great, but incessantly opposing his own interests to the laws of society in that gigantic struggle of customs and sentiments which is as inconsistent to-day as it was fifty years ago.

When the “fiat lux” was pronounced, and man completed, Balzac turned to his natural companion, and in his portraiture of woman not a single type is lacking. Herein he is unexcelled and unsurpassable. That which Euripides considered as the most terrible of all misfortunes, and De Maistre nothing but a beautiful animal, found its most graphic expression through him. As a faithful naturalist, he has, in descending the spiral of civilization, described and classified the femina simplex; but the ideal woman, sublime in her errors, magnificent in her devotion, and royal in her forgiveness, has found her geographer in him. His descriptions of Madame de Beauséant, the Duchesse de Langeais, Madame Firmiani, the Countess in “Colonel Chabert,” Madame Claës, Madame Jules, Madame de Montsauf, Béatrix, and Mademoiselle des Touches comprise woman almost in her entirety; they are landmarks in psychological study; and so true to nature are they that their appearance marked a new era in literature.

It is in these portraits that Balzac is most realistic; and while a few of the most admirable among them are sometimes erring, yet it will be admitted that womankind is not composed exclusively of angels; perfection is often dull, and a fault may be a virtue. By way of contrast, however, he has, in Eugénie Grandet, Madame Firmiani, Madame de la Chanterie, Marguerite Claës, Madame Jules, Agathe Rouget, Pierrette, Madame Hulot, and Ursule Mirouët, not only solved the difficult problem of rendering virtue interesting, but he has created in frames of impeccable beauty a series of irreproachable Madonnas.

His revelation of woman is completed in a special and parallel study of love. Love he considered the mainspring of humanity; without it, religion, history, romance, and art would be useless; and he has analyzed, dissected, and explained its every phase, hesitation, palpitation, and tenderness.

Beyond the scenic effects which he lent to passion, Balzac entered thoroughly into the specialties of trade and profession, and it seems almost incredible that one mind could have grappled with the details of the practice of law which are so admirably described in the “Contrat de Mariage,” in his portrait of Derville the lawyer, Peerquin the notary, and the proceedings in “César Birotteau,” while imagining such types as Vautrin, who dominated Paris from the depths of the galleys, or La Fille aux yeux d’or languishing in her octagonal boudoir.

As Bianchou he is alienist and physician; in Dr. Mirouët he is medium and mesmerist; he is a miser in Grandet and discounter in Gobseck; he is vicar at Tours and old maid at Issoudun. None better than he has described that class of fascinating scoundrels of which Rastignac is the type, nor painted more clearly the heralds of ennui and philosophers of satiety than he has done in De Marsay and Maxime de Trailles. In “Les Deux Poètes” he is printer and manufacturer of paper; in the “Cousin Pons” he presents the flower of an imagination intoxicated with the master paintings of great artists; while in the “Illusions Perdues” the journalist is dissected and the publisher decomposed.

In the veins of his characters there is not a drop of ink; they live, move, and have their being, and their eyelashes are as delicately finished as their epigrams.

Starting from the mud and vermin of Parisian by-ways, and ascending to the steps of the throne, Balzac garnered every possible type, no two of which are similar; each is original and all are profoundly human; and while the dregs of London are not further removed from the splendors of Teheran than is mother Nourrison from the Duc de Grandlieu, yet Balzac’s intuition divined the one as clearly as he described the other.

In his transitions and contrasts, however, there is as little abruptness as there is in the marriage of the blue of the skies with the green of a landscape; changes follow in orderly and natural sequence, and the mind of the reader is only confused at the multiplicity of his attainments, which present in turn houses and costumes, interiors and countries, intermingled with plot, science, religion, politics, agriculture, erudition, mysticism, and wit.

Balzac was also a delicious landscape painter, and his scenes from Brittany in “Les Chouans,” his landscapes of Touraine and particularly that of Vouvay in “La Femme de Trente Ans,” the grand sketch of Norway in “Séraphita,” that of the Mediterranean island in “La Duchesse de Langeais,” are cited by Davin as masterpieces of graphic description.

The resources of Balzac’s genius are perhaps as clearly exhibited in “Eugénie Grandet” as in any of his other works, and the appearance of this romance gave the keynote to the present Realistic school. “Eugénie Grandet” is the conquest of absolute truth in art. It is the drama applied to the most simple events of life; the fusion of the trivial and the sublime, the pathetic and the grotesque. It is a picture of life as it is, and the model of what a novel should be.

The motif here commenced is admirably continued in “Le Curé de Tours,” which contains none of those elements heretofore considered indispensable in the manufacture of fiction. From these pages love and marriage are banished; there is barely an event to be mentioned, yet the dumb, tortuous struggle between the two priests is at once clear cut and peculiarly vivid. Herein the most humble trivialities of the subject are elevated and dramatized, and to attentive eyes this book will perhaps contain the secret of Balzac’s superiority; for as no rôle is poor to a good actor, Balzac in this story demonstrates that nothing was small beneath his pen.

The interiors of Gerard Dow, with their vast chimneys lit by flickering flames, their polished floors, walls hung with tapestries, their sculptured cornices and quaint and curious furniture, their shadowed backgrounds and doors which seem about to open upon some mysterious room, are to be found in “La Recherche de l’Absolu,” in which the opulent detail of the Flemish school is equaled, if not surpassed. Here, as in “Eugénie Grandet,” the drama is formed of the fusion of the trivial and the sublime, and for the proper presentation of the subject he extracted from the past of chemistry its possibilities for the future.

This work, as is the case with almost all his others, contains evidence of the most obstinate researches; and in this respect it may be noted that the majority of his books are the result of patient labor and prolonged meditations.

“Ursule Mirouët,” one of his most chaste conceptions, is the fruit of exhaustive experiments in clairvoyance. “Séraphita” was born of the suggestions of a hundred works of the mystics. “César Birotteau” is a text-book on bankruptcy.

The production of “Gambara” and “Massimillia Doni” necessitated not only a thorough musical schooling, but vast operatic knowledge, and before attacking his subject Balzac engaged a violinist to saturate him with Rossini. “La Grande Bretèche” is the essence of the Causes Célèbres, and dowered French literature with a new shudder. The “Contrat de Mariage” is a code of legal finesse.

“Maître Cornélius,” which with the exception of “Catherine de Médicis” contains the only ghosts that he has evoked from the night of the past, is an attempt to rehabilitate Louis XI., and to refute the historical portion of “Quentin Durward.”

“Les Deux Proscrits” was the result of prolonged meditations on the works of Dante, while “La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin” is a dictionary of prison slang.

But the works for which he cared the most and on which he expended the greatest amount of labor were “Louis Lambert” and “Le Médecin de Campagne.”

In “Louis Lambert,” he asks whether electricity is not the basis of the particular fluid from which ideas are derived, and proceeds thereupon to consider thought as a complete system similar to that of vegetation; and after analyzing the birth, life, or death of certain thoughts,[^[16]] he expresses the opinion that ideas and sentiments are endowed with physical properties, such as weight and movement; and after fortifying it with striking examples of expectation, fear, anger, and determination, he concludes that facts do not exist, that ideas alone endure, and that volition is a material force, similar to that of steam.

In spite of the amount of labor which a work of this kind necessitated, a still greater amount was expended on “Le Médecin de Campagne,” of which every line and every phrase was weighed, rewritten, and corrected again and again. In this work he attempted to grasp the simple beauty of the Scriptures, to surpass the “Vicar of Wakefield,” and to put the “Imitation of Christ” into action; but its pages were written above the level of the ordinary reader, and in spite of its profundity of thought it is perhaps the least known of all his writings.

The romance, however, which gained for him the greatest favor in the boudoirs of Europe was the “Mémoires de Deux Jeunes Mariées,” which is one of the few works in which happy and satisfied love has been successfully depicted. In Rousseau there was too much rhetoric, in Richardson too much pretension; Scott was hampered by English prudery, and is consequently chill as an icicle; the poets as a rule were too extravagant and too much engrossed in metaphors; and it remained to Balzac to describe the insensate fears and unreasoning jealousies of that passion of which many speak, but few have known.

The masterful handling of these widely contrasting subjects shows not only an equipment of profound penetration and power of observation, but also an erudition at once varied and luminous. His works are those of an anatomist from whom nothing escaped, a psychologist from whom nothing was hidden, and a realist who described all. Joined thereto was the gift of adjective: in this he is the Benvenuto Cellini of literature, for his words seem less like symbols of speech than awakeners of trains of thought.

His originality is entirely undisputed. It would not be a difficult task to point out the buried hands which modeled the grandiose figure of Hugo, and the tombs ransacked by Shakespeare are still open to inspection; but Balzac was totally without literary ancestry. The influence of Scott and Hoffmann, at that time enormous, possibly presided at the conception of some of his earlier works, and brought to them strength from the massiveness of the one and coloring from the unexpectedness of the other; they were perhaps the transitory models of a necessary apprenticeship, in which the masters were soon to be neglected and surpassed. Aside from this early schooling, Balzac is indebted to no one,—neither to the Greeks nor to the Romans, to the Italian school, to the Trouvères of feudal France nor to the Minnesingers of the Middle Ages; and even where Hoffmann is not, he at least is entirely modern and absolutely original; for the fantastic effects of the former were drawn from Micromegas, who had already extracted them from Cyrano de Bergerac,—a well into which, it may be noted, Voltaire himself has dipped; and in this respect, that it may not be objected that the “Contes Drolatiques” are but a continuation of Rabelais, Béroalde de Verville, and the Reine de Navarre, it is well to point out that where but the female was seen by these writers Balzac discovered the woman, a difference surely as great as between the bottle and the wine.

And here perhaps a word may be said in regard to the present Realistic school, of which he was the founder, and whose influence is daily becoming more noticeable and apparent.

The term present Realistic school is used advisedly; for though it was only about twenty-five or thirty years ago that realism began to be seriously considered, it is erroneous to suppose that it is of purely modern origin. For realism as expressed in literature is but the sentiment of the obvious and the true; and in the days when art was a splendid novelty, the first poets, as also the first painters, sought their inspirations directly from the primal source of all reality,—that is, from Nature herself.

Nature, therefore, is the mother of realism, artistically considered, and Homer was its first exponent; for not only was the actuality of his subject never neglected for the purely ideal, but it was also a first experience.

But the impressions produced by the real undergo in the mere transcription certain modifications, which are greater or less according to the organization of the exponent; and while some of the subject’s delicate aroma invariably escapes in its passage, however transitory, from brain to canvas, the proper conservation of what remains constitutes the work of art on whose opulence succeeding generations are nourished, and from which, in turn, other impressions are derived; and where the original exponent has artistically transcribed that which he has seen and felt, his followers express not that which reality suggests to them, but that which Nature suggested to him, and the original types of the one become the modified models of the others, until in descending the centuries reality becomes unrecognizable, and art and literature through constant copying of copies become at last enervated and meaningless.

When, therefore, the poetry of the Greeks was becoming entangled in the subtleties of versification, it received a fresh and vigorous impulsion from Theocritus, who, disregarding the set rules of his contemporaries, and returning to the direct observation of reality, expressed not only the ideal, as poetry should, but also Nature in her most humble and familiar details, and represented his Shepherdess as beautiful but unkempt, the odor of cattle about her, and with her hands hardened by contact with the horns of the steers. Pictures of the obvious and the true should represent, therefore, not only the beautiful but the repulsive, not only that which is unpleasant but that which is agreeable; and the Shepherdess of Theocritus, in her unkempt beauty, would be as untrue to nature had she not the odor of the cattle about her as are the patched and powdered bergères with which Watteau charmed the Pompadour.

Nature loves and abounds in contrasts, as witness the toad squatting beneath the rose bush; and while either may afford a separate study, yet the union of the two is necessary in a faithful picture of what actually exists.

When, therefore, Villon broke away from the stilted and flowery madrigals of the school of Charles d’Orléans, and sought anew for the simplicity of Nature, he was but continuing Theocritus and paving the way for Diderot and Rétif de la Bretonne. The current of opinion, however, was adverse to these writers, and it was not until the early part of the present century, when the Romantic school, with its vanguards led by Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand and with Victor Hugo for its subsequent chief, had succeeded after a terrible struggle in freeing themselves from the established rules and conventional phrasing of the classicists and had raised the standard of liberty in art, that many of the prejudices which the Academicians had engendered disappeared, and the ground, swept clean and clear, was prepared for the advent of a new teacher.

It was at this propitious moment that Balzac, already famous through his “Physiologie du Mariage,” presented his credentials in the “Peau de Chagrin,” and with an audacity unparalleled in literature represented his hero as troubled not only about the state of his mistress’ affections, but also as to whether he would have money enough to pay her fare in a cab.

The stupefaction and indignation of the purists at this unheard-of infraction of their formal style were indescribable, but the Romantic school upheld the innovation, and the new generation applauded the realistic portrayal of the penniless student who went to an evening entertainment on the points of his shoes, while dreading a splash of mud more than a shot from a pistol.

In this respect, therefore, the “Peau de Chagrin” marked the first return in the nineteenth century to the real and to the true; it gave a fresh impulse to an expiring literature, and constituted the corner-stone of the Realistic school, which has found such able exponents not only in the De Goncourts and Flaubert, but in Dickens, Thackeray, Tourgénieff, and a host of lesser lights.

But Balzac’s incontestable superiority over other writers consists in his descriptions of the habits and customs of every-day life, and in his perception and rendition of the delicate and innumerable shadings which accompany their thousand complications, in the scenes of private life which he depicted, in the little mysterious dramas which take place every day in every social sphere, and especially in his portraits. The exactitude of the transcription, the delicacy of the shading, and the profusion and realism of detail are such that it would almost seem as though reality itself had been transported and placed before the eyes of the reader.

The third and last number of the “Revue Parisienne” contains a criticism of Balzac’s on the “Chartreuse de Parme,” in which, in alluding to the author, he says, “Stendhal is one of the most remarkable writers of the day, but in his work form is neglected; he writes as a bird sings.”

Form, the absence of which he noticed in Stendhal, was to him a source of continued care and preoccupation, and he would often spend an hour in burnishing a single sentence. With all his facility of conception, execution was exceedingly laborious, and his admiration of Gautier’s ability to dash off without an erasure a warm-colored and impeccable article, while unbounded, was not unmixed with a certain conviction that the work would be improved by a thorough revision.

As has been seen, Balzac spent almost ten years in forming his hand and chastening his style, and the courage which he then manifested was equaled only by the patience with which he sought to improve the coloring of his afterwork. As a grammarian he is unsurpassed, and the faults which are noticeable in many of his works are for the most part purely clerical, and due to his mania for writing his books on proof-sheets instead of in manuscript. As an innovator he was of course attacked,—all innovators are,—and Sainte-Beuve, whose manner of writing Balzac had characterized as macaroni, continually ridiculed his style and form of expression. In this respect, however, it should be remembered that at the time of Balzac’s advent into literature the French language had been passed through a strainer so fine that no terms remained to express anything beyond the purely conventional; and Balzac, who was thoroughly impressed with Aristotle’s idea that the inexpressible does not exist, was almost obliged to create a language of his own; and in his endeavor to express himself with realistic clearness he seized upon every suggestive technicality which he encountered in science, in the green room, the alcoves of the hospital, or the by-ways of Paris, and built a vocabulary from all that was most expressive in the different strata of existence. It was he who invented “chic” and many other terms of an equally felicitous nature.

“As for neologisms, as the critics call them,” he said, “who, I would like to know, has a right to give alms to a language, unless it be its writers? Of course I create words, but my parvenus will become nobles in time.”

But through discipline and constant attention Balzac’s style assumed at last the undulatory rhythm of the Romantic school, and became not only picturesque, mathematical, and peculiarly incisive, but the model of many of the prominent writers of to-day.

The attacks of the critics were not confined, however, to his style and form of expression; charges of personal as well as literary immorality were brought against him, and it is curious to note that while Venice reveled through an entire carnival in a masquerade of his characters his books were prohibited in Rome and Madrid.

Personally considered, Balzac was much more of a Benedictine than a disciple of Rabelais; even his student days were those of an anchorite, and purity of life was to him not only a refinement, but a basis indispensable to elevation of thought, and an essential in the production of any work of enduring value. Disorder he regarded as fatal to talent, and Gautier says that he preached what he practiced, and recommended to him that he should visit his Dulcinea but once a year, and then only for half an hour. “Write to her, if you wish to,” he said; “it forms the style.” In his books he has, it is true, agreeably painted the seductions of vice, but its contagious and destructive effects are rigorously exposed; and through all the struggles of his characters probity, purity, and self-denial are alone triumphant. In what, then, does his immorality consist? In his vast conception, it was necessary, he explained,[^[17]] here to signalize an abuse and here to point out an evil; but every writer who has an aim and who breaks a fresh lance in the domain of thought is invariably considered immoral. Socrates was immoral; Christ was immoral: both were persecuted by the people whom they reformed.

In describing in the “Comédie Humaine” all the elements of society, in grasping it in the immensity of its agitations, it was inevitable that one part should expose more wickedness than virtue, that one part of the fresco represented a culpable group: hence the critic has brought his charge of immorality without observing the morality of other parts destined to form a perfect contrast. And in this particular we must observe that the most conscientious moralists are agreed that society is incapable of producing as many good as evil actions, yet in the “Comédie Humaine” the virtuous characters exceed in number those of a reprehensible disposition.

Blamable actions, faults, crimes, from the slightest to the most grave, find therein an invariable punishment, human or divine, evident or secret; and while it would be impossible to clothe two or three thousand characters in white and orange blossoms, it must be evident even to the most careless observer that the Marneffes, male and female, the Hulots, Brideaus e tutti quanti, are not imagined,—they are simply described.

CHAPTER III.
THE BUSKIN AND THE SOCK.

“Le génie, c’est la patience.”—Buffon.

In the story of “Albert Savarus” Balzac drew a picture of the hero which, with slight modifications, might have served as his own.

He was tall and somewhat stout. His hands were those of a prelate, and his head was that of a Nero. His hair was black and dense, and his forehead, furrowed by sabre-cuts of thought, was high and massive. His complexion was of an olive hue; his nose was prominent and slightly arched; his mouth was sympathetic, and his chin firm. But his most remarkable characteristic was the expression of his gold-brown eyes, which, eloquent with interrogations and replies, seemed, instead of receiving light from without, to project jets of interior flame.

His many vicissitudes had endowed him with an air of such calm tranquillity as might have disconcerted a thunderbolt; while his voice, at once penetrating and soft, had the charm attributed to Talma’s.

In conversation persuasive and magnetic, he held his auditors breathless in a torrent of words and gesture. He convinced almost at will, and his imagination, once unbridled, was sufficient to cause a vertigo. “He frightens me,” said Gérard de Nerval; “he is enough to drive one crazy.”

“He possessed,” Gautier said, “a swing, an eloquence, and a brio which were perfectly irresistible. Gliding from one subject to another, he would pass from an anecdote to a philosophical reflection, from an observation to a description. As he spoke, his face flushed, his eyes became peculiarly luminous, his voice assumed different inflections, while at times he would burst out laughing, amused by the comic apparitions which he saw before describing, and announced, in this way, by a sort of fanfare, the entrance of his caricatures and witticisms. The misfortunes of a precarious existence, the annoyances of debt, fatigue, excessive work, even illness, were unable to change this striking characteristic of continual and Rabelaisian joviality.”

Friends, enemies, editors, strangers, money-lenders, and usurers, all with whom he came in contact, were fascinated and coerced by the extraordinary magnetism which he exerted without effort, and the most vigorous intellects were bewildered by his projects of fortune and dreams of glory.

Attracted by the mine of wealth which the theatre opens to the popular playwright; and burdened with a real or imaginary weight of debt, from which one or two dramas, if favorably received, would free him entirely; and desirous, moreover, of experiencing the delirious intoxication which the plaudits of the gallery bring to the successful dramatist, Balzac’s inflammable imagination became a veritable whirlwind of plots and epigrams whenever a new play was well received.

But for the playwright, as for the mechanic, an apprenticeship is obligatory, and, though Balzac’s novels contained action and analysis, drama and observation, it was not, as we have seen, until after a long and laborious preparation that he was enabled to attract the attention of the public; and it is evident that the heights which he then scaled were so fatiguing and time-consuming that his life, wearied by the struggle, was not of sufficient duration to permit his winning equal triumphs on the stage.

From his early schooldays, however, in which, it will be remembered, he commenced a tragedy on the Incas, which was afterwards followed by a drama in blank verse entitled “Cromwell,” the stage had possessed an irresistible attraction for him; and if therein he was not at first successful, it was perhaps from the very cause which brought to him his original popularity, and the superabundance of his ideas, paradoxical as it at first appears, was undoubtedly his greatest stumbling-block.

To imagine a plot was nothing, the scenes were but details, and the outline of a melodrama was to him the work of as little labor as would be required in the conception of a pleasing menu; but when the general plan was sketched, each scene would suggest a dozen others, and the Coliseum of Vespasian would not have been large enough to present the simultaneous action which the play, at once interminable and impossible, would have demanded.

Another reason for his lack of immediate success was the jealousy of his colleagues and the hatred of the critics; and as at that time the existence of a play depended entirely upon the manner in which the first representation was received, it was not very difficult to create a cabal against this usurper, who, not content with his legitimate celebrity, seemed, at the bare mention of a play, to meditate a universal literary monarchy, in which he would reign supreme; and while the conquest of both spheres has been effected by Hugo, Voltaire, and others of like ilk, yet these authors were careful to fortify their progress with a book in one hand and a play in the other, whereas it was not until Balzac had reached his apogee that he began a serious attack on the stage.

It was in the year 1840 that Balzac submitted “Vautrin,” his first drama, to the director of the Porte-St.-Martin. The play was at once accepted; for the author’s reputation was not only gigantic, but the Porte-St.-Martin had almost foundered in successive tempests, and to the director, who was as penniless as he was appreciative, the offer was little less than a godsend. An agreement was signed forthwith, and Balzac abandoned Les Jardies for more convenient quarters, where he could attend to the rehearsals and remodel the scenes on the stage itself, which, it may be added, he continued to do up to the very last moment.

During these preparations, the boulevards were agog with excitement. The actors and the director, accompanied by Balzac’s friends, wandered daily from the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle to Tontoni’s and the Café Riche, exciting the curiosity of the flaneurs by their reticence or murmured confidences; and Balzac’s ingress and egress from the theatre were, it is said, watched and waited for by curious crowds.

Never in the history of the drama had a first representation been so impatiently awaited; and Balzac, foreseeing the immense sale which the seats would have, bought up the entire house, and then, while endeavoring that the tickets should circulate only among his friends and their acquaintances, sold the better part of it over again at a large advance.

“My dear friend,” he wrote to Dablin, “if among your acquaintances there are any who wish to assist at the first representation of ‘Vautrin,’ let me know who they are, as I prefer to let the boxes to those whom I know about, rather than to those who are unknown to me. I particularly wish to have handsome women present. The demand for boxes is greater than the supply. The journalists are to be sacrificed.”

To Gozlan he wrote,—

“I have sent you a ticket for the stalls. The rehearsals have almost killed me. You will witness a memorable failure. I have been wrong, I think, to summon the public.

“Morituri te salutant, Cæsar!”

Unfortunately, the interval between the sale of the seats and the first representation was sufficiently great to permit of two thirds of the tickets falling into the hands of those who were unknown or hostile to Balzac; and consequently, when the great day arrived, the critics sharpened their knives, and in place of the indulgent friends and handsome women whom Balzac had expected to welcome his play the theatre was crowded with malevolent faces.

The title-rôle was taken by Frédéric Lemaître, and while the first three acts were received without any demonstrations, either of approval or disapprobation, over the fourth there burst a tempest which, since the birth-night of “Hernani,” was unequaled in the annals of the stage; for Lemaître, reappearing in the costume of a Mexican general, seemed—whether by accident or design, it has never been clearly understood—to present an insulting resemblance to Louis Philippe, whose eldest son happened to be in one of the most conspicuous boxes.

The entire house, from pit to gallery, re-echoed with hisses and catcalls. Threats and even blows were exchanged, for here and there, in spite of the general indignation, a few still remained faithful to Balzac.

Through Lemaître’s eccentricity, the battle was lost and the drama killed. Further representations were prohibited by the government; and though, a few days later, M. de Rémusat called upon Balzac, and offered in the name of the state an indemnity for the pecuniary loss which he had sustained, it was haughtily refused. “If my play was justly prohibited, there is,” he said, “no reason why I should be indemnified; if it be otherwise, I can accept nothing, unless an indemnity be also made to the manager and actors of the Porte-St.-Martin.”

Two years after the failure of “Vautrin,” and entirely unaffected by its sudden collapse, Balzac knocked at the door of the Odéon which was at that time under the management of Lireux. By this gentleman Balzac was received with the greatest cordiality; for while his first play had fallen flat, yet it had fallen with such a crash that, in the lapse of time, it was difficult to distinguish its failure from success. Moreover, the Odéon was bankrupt, and as Balzac, with his customary enthusiasm, offered nothing less than a Golconda in his manuscript, he was fêted, caressed, and altogether received with open arms.

From the office to the green room, from the door-keeper to the scene-shifters, smiles, compliments, and welcomes were showered upon him, and he was unanimously requested to read his play at once. As soon, therefore, as the actors were assembled and silence obtained, Balzac began to read “Les Ressources de Quinola.” At first thick and embarrassed, his voice gradually grew clearer, and expressed the most fugitive undulations of the dialogue. His audience laughed and wept by turns, and Balzac laughed and wept with them; the entire troop was fascinated, and applauded as only actors can. Suddenly, however, at the end of the fourth act, Balzac stopped short, and explained in the simplest and most unaffected manner that, as he had not yet written the fifth, he would be obliged to recite it to them.

The stupor and surprise of his audience can be more readily imagined than described: for the fifth act of “Quinola” is the unraveling of all the tangled threads, the union of all the joints; it is the climax and logical termination of all that has gone before; and Balzac, as he calmly rolled up his manuscript and tied it with a bit of string, easily, fluently, and unhesitatingly continued the drama through the six final scenes, and without a break, without a pause, through a torrent of varied intonations, led his listeners by a magnificent tour de force to the very fall of the curtain.

Lireux was bewildered and entranced. “The rehearsals shall commence to-morrow,” he said. “But to what address, M. de Balzac, shall I send the announcements?”

“It is unnecessary to send any,” Balzac replied. “I can come without them.”

“Ah, no, that is impossible. There will be a rehearsal one day, and none the next; and I never know until the morning at what hour a rehearsal is to take place. What is your address?”

But Balzac had not the least intention of telling where he lived, and either because he was playing hide-and-go-seek with his creditors, or else was at that time possessed of one of the inexplicable manias which caused him at times to keep his habitat a secret even from his most intimate friends, he refused flatly to impart the wished-for information.

“I do not see what we can do,” Lireux murmured helplessly, “unless we use a carrier pigeon.”

“I do,” replied Balzac, ever fertile in expedients. “Listen to me. Send a messenger up the Champs-Élysées with the notice every morning at nine o’clock. When he reaches the Arc de l’Étoile, let him turn to the left, and he will see a man beneath the twentieth tree, who will pretend to be looking up in the branches for a sparrow.”

“A sparrow?”

“A sparrow or any other bird.”

“My pigeon, perhaps.”

“Let me continue. Your messenger will approach my sentinel, and will say to him, ‘I have it.’ Thereupon my sentinel will reply, ‘Since you have it, what are you waiting for?’ Then your messenger will hand the notice to him, and immediately go away, without once looking behind him. I will attend to the rest.”

Lireux saw no objection to this fantastic whim, and contented himself by expressing the hope that if the twentieth tree should be destroyed by lightning M. de Balzac would see no insuperable objection to posting his sentinel at the twenty-first.

“No,” Balzac answered, “but I should prefer the nineteenth; the number is more quaint.”

This plan amicably arranged, the actors agreed upon, and the date of the first representation settled, Balzac proceeded to talk finance.

“Beside the customary royalty, I wish the entire house for the first three nights.”

“But what shall I get?” Lireux timidly inquired.

“Half the profits, which will be incalculable.”

Lireux reflected for a moment. “Very good,” he said; “I accept.”

From the first rehearsal Balzac recommenced with “Quinola” the treatment to which “Vautrin” had been subjected. Sometimes a phrase was altered, sometimes a scene, while at others an entire act was remodeled. That which pleased him one day displeased him the next, and each rehearsal brought fresh corrections and alterations, until the original manuscript was entirely obliterated with erasures and new ideas.

Besides undergoing the mental and physical labor attendant on these rehearsals, Balzac undertook the entire charge of the sale of the seats, or rather the entire charge of refusing seats to all comers; for the box office was opened merely for form’s sake, and tickets were to be had only of Balzac in person. To obtain one was not so much a question of money as of position and influence. The orchestra stalls he reserved for the nobility, the avant-scènes for the court circle; the boxes in the first gallery were for the ambassadors and plenipotentiaries; the second gallery was for the statesmen, the third for the moneyed aristocracy, the fourth for the select bourgeoisie. “As for the critics,” he said, “they can buy their seats, if there are any left, and there will be none.”

As a rule, therefore, when any one asked for a box, Balzac would reply, “Too late: last one just sold to the Princesse de Machin and the Grande Duchesse de Chose.” During the first few days of the sale, seats were in consequence sold at extraordinary prices; but later on the anxiety to obtain them decreased, and during the week preceding the first performance Balzac was very glad to dispose of them to any one at the regular rates.

On the 6th of March, 1842, thirteen days before the play was to be performed, he wrote to a friend as follows:—

“Dear Sofka,—Send me the address of the Princess Constantine Razumovska, that I may learn from her whether she wishes a box. Let me know also whether the two Princesses Troubetskoï want boxes, whether Kraïeska wishes one, whether the Malakoffs, and the Countess Léon, and the Countess Nariskine,—seven boxes in all. I must know, too, whether they want them in the upper or lower tier of the first gallery. I wish the handsome women in front.... It is a favor to be admitted to this solemnity. There are at the theatre a hundred and fifty applications for boxes from people whom I do not know and who will get nothing.”

On the 12th he wrote to the same person: “The avant-scènes are for the king and the cabinet; they take them by the year. I can only give, therefore, to the Princess Troubetskoï a box in the first gallery, but it is one of the best in the house.... The costumes have cost 20,000 francs; the scenery is entirely new. Every one insists that the play is a masterpiece, and that makes me shudder. In any event, it will be a terrible solemnity. Lamartine has asked for a box; I will place him among the Russians. Every morning I receive thirty or forty applications, but I will have no one whom I do not know about.... Tell your Russian friends that I must have the names and addresses, each accompanied by a written and personal recommendation of those of their friends (men) who wish stalls. There are over fifty people a day who come under assumed names and refuse to give their address; they are enemies, who wish to ruin the piece. In a week I shall not know what I am about. We are obliged to observe the most severe precautions. I am intoxicated with the play.”

The severe precautions resulted on the night of the first representation in a half-empty house.

Few imagined that seats could really be had, and it was even reported that Balzac had been obliged to refuse a seat to the Duc de Nemours. The amateurs resigned themselves, therefore, almost without a struggle, and determined that as they could not obtain seats for the first performance they would find solace in the second or third; but on reading the articles which appeared the next day they felt little need of consolation, for the fate of “Vautrin” had been repeated, and “Quinola” had fallen flat. The most sympathetic of all the criticisms which then appeared was one contained in Le National for the 16th of March, 1842. It runs as follows:—

“The subject of M. de Balzac’s drama was excellent, but unfortunately, through eccentricity or negligence, he passed but to one side of the idea, without resolutely entering it and extracting all its wealth.

“The Odéon is the theatre of tumultuous representations, but never has this terrible battle-field offered such a conglomeration of exclamations and confusing cries. The pit, like a sharp-shooter, took up an ambush behind the substantives and verbs, and slaughtered the play while it maimed the actors, who, brave though wounded, struggled on to the end with a praiseworthy and melancholy courage. At times the comedy, through its sudden flashes of originality and abrupt cannonades of wit, seemed about to rout the enemy and wave aloft a tattered but victorious flag. The faults, however, were too numerous and the errors too grave, and in spite of many advantages the battle, in the end, was fairly lost.”

But in spite of the derision, insults, and abuse with which the first representation was received, in spite of the financial and dramatic shipwreck, after the commotion had subsided and the audience had dispersed, Balzac, superior to destiny and indifferent to fate, was found fast asleep and snoring in his box.[^[18]]

In addition to “Vautrin” and “Quinola,” three other plays of Balzac’s have been produced, namely, “Paméla Giraud,” “La Marâtre,” and “Le Faiseur” (“Mercadet”), of which the first was performed at the Gaieté in September, 1843, and enjoyed a moderate success. Concerning the second, M. Hostein, formerly director of the Théatre-Historique, has offered some curious information.[^[19]] Balzac, it appears, called upon him one day, and explained that for some time past he had been thinking over an historical drama for the Théatre-Historique.

“I shall call it,” he said, “‘Pierre et Catharine,’ Peter the Great and Catharine of Russia. That, I think, would be an excellent subject.”

“Treated by you, it could not be otherwise. But are you far advanced, M. de Balzac?”