Part 1

Translated and produced by David Desmond ([email protected])

HONORÉ DE BALZAC BY THÉOPHILE GAUTIER

REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

PARIS POULET-MALASSIS ET DE BROISE BOOKSELLERS-PUBLISHERS 9, rue des Beaux-Arts 1859

Translated by David Desmond

I

Around 1835, I lived in two small rooms in the Impasse du Doyenné, not far from the current location of the Pavillon Mollien. Although it was located in the center of Paris facing the Tuilleries and just a few steps from the Louvre, the location was deserted and wild, and it required a certain persistence for me to be found. However, one morning a young man with a distinguished look and a cordial and spiritual air approached my front door and excused himself while making his introduction; he was Jules Sandeau: he had come to recruit me on behalf of Balzac for La Chronique de Paris, a weekly journal that one will certainly remember, but which had not been as financially successful as it deserved. Balzac, Sandeau told me, had read Mademoiselle de Maupin, then very recently published, and he had very much admired its style; thus he wished to request my collaboration on the journal that he sponsored and directed. A date was set for us to get together, and from that date forward there was between us a friendship that only death could break.

If I have told this story, it is not because it is flattering for me, but because it honors Balzac, who, already famous, sought out a young, obscure writer to collaborate in a spirit of of camaraderie and complete equality. At that time, it's true, Balzac was not yet the author of La Comédie Humaine, but he had completed, besides several novellas, La Physiologie du Mariage, La Peau de Chagrin, Louis Lambert, Seraphita, Eugénie Grandet, l'Histoire des Treize, Le Médecin de Campagne, Père Goriot, that is to say, in ordinary times, enough to solidify five or six reputations. His nascent glory, strengthened each month with new rays, shined with all of the splendors of the aurora; certainly he shined brightly like his contemporaries Lamartine, Victor Hugo, de Vigny, de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Alexandre Dumas, Mérimée, George Sand, and many others; but at no time in his life did Balzac carry himself as the Grand Lama of literature, and he was always good company; he had pride, but he was entirely free of vanity.

He lived at that time at the end of the Jardin du Luxembourg, near the Observatoire, on a little frequented road given the name of Cassini, without doubt because of its astronomical neighbor. On the garden wall which occupied almost the entire side, and at the end of which was found the house in which Balzac lived, one read: Labsolu, brick merchant. That strange sign, which is still there, if I am not wrong, is very striking; La Recherche de l'Absolu can have no other inspiration. This fateful name probably suggested to the author the idea of Balthasar Claës in the pursuit of his impossible dream.

When I saw him for the first time, Balzac, one year older than the century, was around thirty-six, and his face was one of those that one would never forget. In his presence, one is reminded of Shakespeare's lines about Julius Caesar: "Before him, nature stands up boldly and says to the world, 'This is a man!'"

My heart beat strongly because never had I approached without trembling a master of thought, and all the speeches I had prepared on the way stayed in my throat, allowing nothing to pass other than a stupid phrase like this: "The temperature is nice today." Heinrich Heine, when he went to visit Goethe, could find nothing to say except that the plums that have fallen from the trees on the route from Iéna to Weimar are excellent for thirst, which made the Jupiter of German poetry laugh gently. Balzac, seeing my embarrassment, soon put me at my ease, and during breakfast I became calm enough to examine him in detail.

He wore, in the form of a dressing gown, a robe of white cashmere or flannel held at the waist by a cord, in which, some time later, he was painted by Louis Boulanger. What whim had pushed him to choose, ahead of any other, this costume that he never took off? Could it be that it symbolized in his eyes the cloistered life to which his labors condemned him, and, Benedictine of the novel, he had thus taken the robe? This robe always suited him marvelously. He boasted, showing me the intact sleeves, to have never sullied its purity with the least stain of ink, "because," he said, "the true writer should always be neat while at his work."

His robe, thrown back, revealed the neck of an athlete or a bull, round as a section of a column, without apparent muscles, and of a satiny whiteness which contrasted with the deeper hue of his face. At this time, Balzac, in the prime of his life, gave the impression of a robust health, little in harmony with the romantic pallors then in fashion. The pure Tourainian blood left his cheeks a bright purple and warmly colored his lips, thick and sinuous, easy to laugh; a light mustache and a small beard just below his lower lip accentuated the contours of his mouth, without concealing them; the nose, square at the end, divided into two lobes, pierced by very open nostrils, of a character entirely original and unique; Balzac, in posing for his bust, told the sculptor, David d'Angers, "Be careful about my nose, my nose is a world!" The forehead was beautiful, vast, noble, much whiter than the face, with no creases other than a perpendicular furrow along the ridge of the nose; there was a very pronounced ridge above the eyebrows; the hair, abundant, long, strong and black, stood up in back like a lion's mane. As for the eyes, there have never existed anything comparable. They had a life, a light, an inconceivable magnetism. Despite the nightly vigils, their whites were pure, limpid, bluish, like that of a child or a virgin, and encased two black diamonds that shined at times with rich reflections of gold: they were eyes to make eagles avert their gaze, to penetrate walls and hearts, to strike down a furious wild beast, the eyes of the sovereign, the seer, the conqueror.

Mme. Emile de Girardin, in her novel entitled La Canne de M. de Balzac, speaks of these shining eyes:

"Tancred then perceived at the front of the club, turquoise, gold, marvelous carvings; and behind all of that two large black eyes more brilliant than the stones."

Those extraordinary eyes, once one had met their gaze, made it difficult to notice other features that might have been trivial or irregular.

The habitual expression of the face was a sort of powerful hilarity, a Rabelaisian and monkish joy — the robe no doubt contributing to the birth of this idea — which made you think of Brother Jean des Entommeures, but it was enlarged and elevated by a mind of the first order.

According to his habit, Balzac had risen at midnight, and had written until my arrival. His features betrayed no fatigue, aside from a slight darkening beneath the eyelids, and during the entire breakfast he demonstrated a wild gaiety. Little by little the conversation drifted toward literature, and he complained of the enormous difficulties of the French language. Style preoccupied him a great deal, and he sincerely believed that he had none at all. It is true that he was then generally thought to be lacking this quality. The school of Victor Hugo, in love with the sixteenth century and the Middle Ages, specialized in patterns, in rhythms, in structure, rich in words, breaking prose with the gymnastics of verse, and modeling itself on a master confident in his methods, would do nothing other than that which was well written, that is to say worked and toned beyond measure, and found the portrayal of modern manners to be useless, conventional, and lacking in lyricism. Balzac, despite the popularity that he had begun to enjoy among the public, was not admitted among the gods of Romanticism, and he knew it. While devouring his books, people did not pause to regard their serious side, and even for his admirers, he remained for a long time the most productive of our novelists and nothing else; this surprises today, but I can vouch for the truth of my assertion. He tortured himself in trying to achieve a style, and, in his anxiety to make corrections, he consulted people who were a hundred times his inferiors. Before signing his name to anything, he had written under different pseudonyms (Horace de Saint-Aubin, L. de Viellerglé, etc.) one hundred volumes just "to free his hand." However he already possessed a style of his own without being conscious of it.

But let me return to our breakfast. While talking, Balzac played with his knife or his fork, and I noted that his hands were of a rare beauty, the true hands of a prelate, white, with fingers both slender and plump, and nails that were pink and shiny; he was proud of them and smiled with pleasure as I looked at them. He considered his hands to be evidence of breeding and aristocratic birth. Lord Byron, in a note, says with evident satisfaction, that Ali Pacha complimented him on the smallness of his ears, and inferred from them that he was a true gentleman. A similar remark upon his hands would have equally flattered Balzac, even more than the praise of one his books. He had a sort of prejudice against those whose extremities lacked finesse. The meal was rather fine, a paté de foie gras was part of it, but this was a deviation from his habitual frugality, as he remarked while laughing, and that for "this solemn occasion" he had borrowed his silver plates from his library!

I retired after having promised some articles for La Chronique de Paris, where Le Tour en Belgique, La Morte Amoureuse, La Chaine d'Or, and other literary works had appeared. Charles de Bernard, who had also been called by Balzac, contributed La Femme de Quarante Ans, La Rose Jaune, and some new work since collected into volumes. Balzac, as one knows, had invented the woman of thirty years; his imitator added ten years to that already venerable age and his heroine obtained no less success.

Before going further, let's pause for a moment and give some details of Balzac's life prior to my acquaintance with him. My authorities will be Madame de Surville, his sister, and himself.

Balzac was born in Tours, May 16, 1799, on the day of the celebration of Saint Honoré who gave him his name, which sounded good and augured well. Little Honoré was not a child prodigy; he did not announce prematurely that he would write La Comédie Humaine. He was a fresh, rosy, healthy boy, fond of play, with gentle, sparkling eyes, but in no way distinguished from other boys of his age, at least upon casual observation. At seven, upon leaving a day school in Tours, he attended a secondary school in Vendôme run by the Oratoriens, where he was thought to be a very mediocre student.

The first part of Louis Lambert contains curious information regarding this period of Balzac's life. Dividing his own personality, he describes himself as an old classmate of Louis Lambert, sometimes speaking in his name, and sometimes lending his own sentiments to this person who is imaginary, yet very real, since he is a sort of lens into the writer's very soul.

"Situated in the middle of the town, upon the little river Loire that bathes its walls, the college forms a vast enclosure containing the establishments necessary for an institution of this kind: a chapel, a theater, an infirmary, a bakery, some streams of water. This college, the most celebrated seat of instruction of the central provinces, is populated by those provinces and by our colonies. The distance does not allow parents to come here often to see their children; the rules forbid vacations away from the institution. Once they have entered, the pupils do not leave the college until the end of their studies. With the exception of walks taken outside under the supervision of the Fathers, everything had been planned to give to this house all of the advantages of monastic discipline. In my time, the corrector was still a living memory, and the leather strap played with honor its terrible role."

It is in this way that Balzac described this formidable college, which left in his imagination such persistent memories.

It would be intriguing to compare the novella titled William Wilson, in which Edgar Allen Poe describes, with the strange exaggerations of childhood, the old building from the time of Queen Elizabeth where his hero was raised with a companion who was no less strange than Louis Lambert; but this is not the place to make this comparison, thus I must content myself only to point it out.

Balzac suffered prodigiously in this college, where his tendency to daydream was assaulted every instant by some inflexible rule. He neglected his studies; but, benefitting from the tacit complicity of a tutor of mathematics, who was at the same time a librarian and occupied in studies that were outside of the realm of ordinary experience, he did not take his lessons and borrowed all of the books he wished. He passed all of his time in secret reading. Soon he became the most punished student in the class. Extra work and detentions occupied his recreation time.

For certain schoolchildren, punishments inspire a sort of stoic rebellion, and they oppose the exasperated professors with the same disdainful impassivity that captive savage warriors display toward the enemy who tortures them. Isolation, starvation, and the leather strap will not elicit the least complaint; there are thus between the master and the student some horrible conflicts, unknown to the parents, in which the steadfastness of the martyrs and the skills of the executioner are found equally. Some nervous teachers cannot bear the expressions full of hate, scorn, and threat with which a child of eight or ten years defies them.

Let us consider here some characteristic details that, under the name of Louis Lambert, also describe Balzac. "Accustomed to the open air, the independence of an education left to chance, the tender care of an old man who cherished him, and thinking while being warmed by the rays of the sun, it was very difficult for him to conform to the rules of the college, to march in line, to live within the four walls of a room in which twenty-four young boys were silent, seated on a wooden bench, each before his desk. His senses possessed a perfection which gave them an exquisite fragility, and they all suffered from this communal life; the exhalations that left the air corrupted, mixed with the odor of a class that was always dirty and encumbered by the remains of our lunches and our snacks, affected his sense of smell, that sense which, connected more directly than the others to the cerebral system, should cause by its derangements some unavoidable shocks to the organ of thought; apart from these atmospheric corruptions, he found in our study halls some spots where each would put his booty, pigeons killed for the feast days or plates stolen from the refectory. Finally our rooms contained an immense stone on which two buckets of water rested where on a rotating basis we went each morning to wash our face and hands, in the presence of the master. Washed only once each day before our awakening, our premises were always dirty. Then, despite the number of windows and the height of the door, the air was always fouled by the emanations of the wash house, the garbage dump, by the thousand activities of every schoolboy, without counting our eighty bodies when assembled. This kind of a collective humidity, when combined with the dirt that we would carry back from our travels, resulted in an unbearable stench. The deprivation of air that was pure and scented with the countryside in which he had until then lived, the change in his routines, and the discipline all saddened Lambert. His head always leaning on his left hand and his arm supported by his desk, he passed his study time by looking at the foliage of the trees or the clouds in the sky. He seemed to be studying his lessons; but seeing his pen immovably fixed and his page remaining blank, the professor would cry out to him: 'You are doing nothing, Lambert.'"

To this vivid and truthful description of the miseries of life at school, let me add an extract in which Balzac characterizes himself as a duality under the double sobriquet Pythagoras and the Poet, one carried by the half of himself personified in Louis Lambert and the other by the half of himself that was his true identity, and which explains admirably why he was seen by his teachers as being an incapable child:

"Our independence, our illicit occupations, our apparent indolence, the torpor in which we remained, our constant punishments, our repugnance toward homework and chores, won us the reputation of being useless and incorrigible boys: our masters despised us, and we similarly fell into the most terrible discredit among our classmates, from whom we concealed our contraband studies for fear of their mockeries. This double low regard, unjust on the part of the Fathers, was a natural sentiment on the part of our classmates; we didn't know how to play ball, run, or walk on stilts on those days of amnesty when by chance we obtained a moment of freedom; we didn't take part in any of the amusements then in style at the school; strangers to the pleasures of our comrades, we remained alone, seated sadly under a tree in the courtyard. The Poet and Pythagoras were an exception, living a life separate from that of the community. The penetrating instinct, the fragile self-regard of schoolboys, gave them a greater sensitivity with regard to minds that were higher or lower than their own; from there, for some, was hatred of our mute aristocracy; for others, scorn for our uselessness. We held these sentiments between us without our full knowledge, and it's possible that I didn't understand them until today. We lived therefore exactly like two rats skulking in the corner of the room that held our desks, bound there equally during the hours of study and during those of recreation."

The result of these hidden labors, of these meditations which used up study time, was the famous Traité de la Volonté about which he spoke many times in La Comédie Humaine. Balzac always regretted the loss of this first work that he describes in Louis Lambert, and he speaks with an emotion that time has not diminished of the confiscation of the box that held the precious manuscript; some jealous schoolmates tried to snatch the box that two friends fiercely defended: "Suddenly, attracted by the noise of the battle, Father Haugoult roughly intervened and quieted the dispute. This terrible Haugoult ordered us to give the box to him; Lambert handed him the key, the teacher took the papers and flipped through them; then he said while confiscating them: 'So this is the foolishness for which you neglect your work!' Large tears fell from Lambert's eyes, caused as much by the consciousness of his offended sense of moral superiority as by the gratuitous insult and the betrayal that overwhelmed him. Father Haugoult probably sold the Traité de la Volonté to a grocer of Vendôme without knowing the importance of the scientific treasures whose seeds were left to die in ignorant hands."

After this passage he adds, "It was in memory of the catastrophe that had happened to Louis's book that in the work with which these studies begin I used for a piece of fiction the title truly invented by Lambert, and that I ave the name (Pauline) of a woman who was dear to him to a young girl who was full of devotion."

In effect, if I open La Peau de Chagrin, I find in the confession of Raphael the following words: "You alone admired my Théorie de la Volonté, that long work for which I learned the Oriental languages, anatomy, physiology, and to which I dedicated the greatest part of my time, work which, if I am not mistaken, will complete the studies of Mesmer, of Lavater, of Gall, of Bichat, by opening a new path to the human science; there stops my beautiful life, this sacrifice of all of those days, this silkworm's work, unknown to the world, and whose only compensation could be in the work itself; since the end of childhood until the day that I finished my Theorié, I have observed, learned, written, read without rest, and my life has seemed like a long chore; a gentle lover of Oriental idleness, enthralled with my dreams, sensual, I have always worked, denying myself the delights of Parisian life; a gourmand, I have been temperate; fond of hikes and journeys on the water, hoping to visit foreign countries, still finding a child's pleasure in skipping stones on the water, I stayed constantly seated with pen in hand; talkative, I went to listen in silence to the public courses at the library and the museum; I slept in my solitary bunk like a devotee of the order of Saint Benedict, and women were however my only fantasy, a fantasy that I caressed but which always escaped me!"

If Balzac regretted the Traité de la Volonté, he was less sensitive to the loss of his epic poem on the Incas, which began thusly:

Oh Inca, oh ill-fated and unhappy king!

This unfortunate inspiration earned him, for all of the remaining time that he stayed at the school, the derisory nickname of poet. Balzac, it must be confessed, never had a gift for poetry, at least for meter; his complex thoughts rebelled against rhythm.

From these intense meditations, from these truly prodigious intellectual efforts of a child of twelve or fourteen years, there resulted a bizarre malady, a nervous fever, a sort of coma entirely inexplicable for the professors, who were not in on the secret of the readings and the works of young Honoré, who appeared to be so lazy and stupid. No one at the school suspected this precocious excess of intelligence, no one knew that in the cell in which he caused himself to be put daily so as to be at liberty, this student who was thought to be lazy had absorbed an entire library of serious books that were beyond the typical understanding of his age.

Let me here tie together several curious lines related to the reading ability attributed to Louis Lambert, that is to say, Balzac:

"In three years, Louis had assimilated the substance of the books in his uncle's library that deserved to be read. His absorption of ideas by reading had become a curious phenomenon: his eye took in seven or eight lines at a time, and his mind appreciated their meaning at an equal speed. Often a single word in a phrase sufficed for him to appreciate its substance. His memory was prodigious. He remembered with the same fidelity the thoughts acquired by reading as those which reflection or conversation had suggested to him. Ultimately he retained all of those memories: those of places, of names, of words, of things, of figures; not only did he recall objects at will, but he remembered them again lit and colored as they were at the moment that he first perceived them. This power applied equally to the most imperceptible elements of understanding. He remembered not only the placement of thoughts in the book from which he had derived them, but even the disposition of his soul at those distant times."

Balzac retained this marvelous gift of his youth throughout his life, even in larger measure as the years passed, and it is through this that his immense work can be explained, truly the work of Hercules.