Part 5

He was not always so spirited, and on those occasions one of his favorite jokes was to imitate the German jargon of Nucingen or Schmucke, or otherwise to speak in rama, like the clients of the middle class boarding house of Madame Vauquer (née de Conflans). At the time that he wrote Un Début dans la Vie based on an outline of Madame de Surville, he was seeking proverbs that were slightly off for the art student Mistigris, to whom later, having found him to be full of spirit, he gave a fine place in La Comédie Humaine, under the name of the great landscape painter Léon de Lora. Here are some of his nonsensical proverbs: "He is like an ass on a plain." "I am like the hare, I die or I flee." "Good Counts make good sieves." "Extremes become blocked." "The slap always smells the herring"; and so on like this. A discovery of this type put him in a good humor, and he would pleasantly frolic like an elephant through the furniture and around the salon. For her part, Madame de Girardin was in quest of sayings for the the famous lady of the seven little chairs of Le Courrier de Paris. She sometimes required my assistance, and if a stranger had entered, seeing this beautiful Delphine painting spirals through her golden hair with her white fingers, with a profoundly dreamlike air; Balzac, seated on one of the arms of the great upholstered chair on which Monsieur Girardin usually slept, his hands clenched in the bottoms of his pockets, his waistcoat turned back from his stomach, swinging his leg with a uniform rhythm, expressing with the tense muscles of his face an extraordinary mental focus; me planted between two cushions of the divan, like an opium eater seen in a hallucination; that stranger, certainly, could never have suspected what we were doing there, in so great a meditation; he would have supposed that Balzac was thinking of a new Madame Firmiani, Madame de Girardin of a role for Mademoiselle Rachel, and me of some sonnet. But it was nothing of the kind. As for the puns, Balzac, although his secret ambition was to create them, had, after painstaking efforts, to recognize his notorious incapacity in this area, and to keep to the slightly off proverbs, which preceded the rough puns brought into fashion by the school of good sense. What beautiful evenings that will never return! We were then far from foreseeing that this great and superb woman, carved fully out of marble from antiquity, that this stocky, robust, lively man, who combined in himself the vigor of the boar and the bull, half Hercules, half satyr, built to last longer than one hundred years, would soon sleep, one at Montmartre, the other at Père-Lachaise, and that, of the three, I alone would remain to preserve those memories that were already so distant and close to being lost.

Like his father, who died accidentally at more than eighty years of age, and who had flattered himself that he would become wealthy from the annuity scheme of Lafarge, Balzac believed in his longevity. Often he planned with me projects for the future. He was going to finish La Comédie Humaine, write the Théorie de la Démarche, compose the Monographie de la Vertu, fifty dramas, attain a great fortune, marry and have two children, "but not more; two children look good," he said, "on the front of a carriage." All of this could not fail to take a long time, and I pointed out that, once these tasks were accomplished, he would be around eighty years of age. "Eighty years!" he cried, "Bah! It's the flower of age." Monsieur Flourens, with his comforting theories, did not say it better.

One day that we dined together at the home of M. E. de Girardin, he told us a story about his father to show us the strength of the stock to which he belonged. Balzac's father, who had been hired to work in a prosecutor's office, ate following the custom of the time at the table of the master with the other clerks. Partridges were served. The prosecutor's wife, who had her eye on the new arrival, said to him: "Monsieur Balzac, do you know how to carve?" "Yes, Madame," responded the young man, blushing up to his ears; and he bravely took hold of the knife and fork. Entirely ignorant of culinary anatomy, he divided the partridge into four pieces, but with so much strength that he split the plate, sliced the tablecloth, and cut into the wood of the table. He was not nimble, but he was strong: the prosecutor's wife smiled, and from that day, Balzac, the young clerk, was treated with great kindness in that house.

This story that I have told seems lukewarm, but it is necessary to see the pantomime of Balzac as he imitated on his own plate his father's actions, with an air that was both frightened and resolute, mimicking the manner in which he seized his knife after having rolled up his sleeves and in which he sunk his fork into an imaginary partridge; Neptune hunting the monsters of the sea did not wield his trident with a more vigorous fist, and with what an immense weight he bore down with it! His cheeks became purple, his eyes left his head, but the operation ended with him casting upon the guests a look of innocent satisfaction trying to conceal itself in the guise of modesty.

Moreover, Balzac had in him the makings of a great actor: he possessed a full, sonorous, resonant voice, with a rich and powerful timbre, that he knew how to moderate and soften as needed, and he read in an admirable manner, a talent that most actors lack. Whatever he related, he performed it with intonations, grimaces and gestures that no comedian has surpassed in my opinion.

I find in Marguerite, by Madame de Girardin, this remembrance of Balzac. It is a character from the book who speaks.

"He related that Balzac had dined at his house on the preceding day, and that he had been more brilliant, more scintillating than ever. He very much amused us with the story of his trip to Austria. What fire! What verve! What power of imitation! It was marvelous. His manner of paying the postilions is an invention that only a novelist of genius could have discovered. ‘I was very embarrassed at each stopping point,' he said, ‘how was I going to pay? I did not know a word of German, I did not know the currency of the country. It was very difficult. Here is what I invented. I had a bag full of small silver coins, some kreuzers … When I arrived at the stopping point, I would take up my bag; the postilion would come to the window of the carriage; I would watch his eyes attentively, and I would put in his hand one kreuzer, … two kreuzer, … then three, then four, etc., until I saw him smile … when he smiled, I understood that I had given him one kreuzer too much … quickly I would take back my coin and my man was paid.'"

At Les Jardies, he read Mercadet to me, the original Mercadet, by far more sweeping, complicated and dense than the piece arranged for the Gymnase by d'Ennery, with so much delicacy and skill. Balzac, who read like Tieck, without indicating acts, scenes, or names, utilized a voice that was particular to and perfectly recognizable for each character; the voices that he gave to the different kinds of creditors were hilariously funny: there were the hoarse, the honeyed, the hasty, the slow, the menacing, the pleading. They shrieked, wailed, scolded, muttered, screamed in every possible and impossible tone. Debt first sang a solo that soon an immense choir took up. He brought out creditors from everywhere, from behind the stove, from below the bed, from the drawers of the commode; they came from the chimney; they passed through the keyhole; others entered through the window like lovers; these sprung from the bottom of a trunk like those devilish toys that take you by surprise, those moved across the walls as if they were passing by an English ambush, it was a mob, an uproar, an invasion, truly a rising tide. Mercadet might well have shaken them off, when others always returned to start an assault, and as far as the horizon one could make out a somber swarm of creditors on the march, arriving like legions of termites to devour their prey. I do not know if this piece was better when performed this way, but no other performance produced such an effect.

Balzac, during this reading of Mercadet, occupied, partially reclining, a long divan in the salon of Les Jardies because he had sprained his ankle when he slipped, like his walls, on the clay of his property. A stray hair, sticking through the fabric, poked the skin of his leg and bothered him. "The fabric is too thin, the hay passes through it; you will need to put a thick canvas beneath it," he said while pulling at the hair that annoyed him.

François, the Caleb of this Ravenswood, would not listen to this mocking of the splendors of the manor. He corrected his master and said: horsehair. "The upholsterer has cheated me?" responded Balzac. "They are all the same. I had insisted that he use hay! Cursed thief!"

The splendors of Les Jardies were mostly imaginary. All of the friends of Balzac remember having seen written in charcoal upon the bare walls or veneer of gray paper: "Rosewood paneling, tapestry of the Gobelins, Venetian mirrors, paintings by Raphaël." Gerard de Nerval had already decorated an apartment in this manner, so this did not shock me. As for Balzac, he believed literally in the gold, the marble and the silk; but, he did not complete Les Jardies and if he led others to laugh at his pipe dreams, he knew at least that he had built himself an eternal home, a monument "more durable than iron," an immense city, populated with his creations and gilded by the rays of his glory.

V

Due to an oddity of nature that he shared with several of the most poetic writers of this age, such as Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, George Sand, Mérimée, Janin, Balzac possessed neither the gift nor the love of verse, despite the effort that he otherwise made to attain them. On this point, his judgment that was so fine, so profound, so sagacious was at fault; he admired work somewhat aimlessly and in a way in line with public notoriety. I did not believe, even though he professed a great respect for Victor Hugo, that he had ever truly appreciated the lyrical qualities of the poet, while at the same time the sculpted and colored prose amazed him. He, who was so laborious and who rewrote a sentence as many times as a versifier could rework an Alexandrine on an anvil, found working on meter to be puerile, tedious, and without utility. He would have voluntarily awarded a bushel of peas to those who could manage to pass an idea through the narrow ring of rhythm, as Alexander did for the Greek who was trained to throw a ball through a ring from a long distance; verse, with its fixed and pure form, its elliptical speech little suited to a multiplicity of details, seemed to him to be an obstacle invented on a whim, an unnecessary difficulty or a mnemonic device taken from primitive times. His doctrine was in that way nearly the same as that of Stendhal: "Does the idea that a work has been made while hopping on one leg add to the pleasure that it produces?" The Romantic school holds in its heart some followers, partisans of the absolute truth, who rejected verse as trivial or unnatural. If Talma said: "I do not want fine verses!" Beyle said: "I do not want verses at all." This was the basis of the sentiments of Balzac, however in order to appear open-minded, comprehensive, universal, he sometimes in society pretended to admire poetry, just as the middle class simulate great enthusiasm for music that bores them profoundly. He was always shocked to see me write verse and take pleasure from it. "That is not copy," he would say, and if he held me in any esteem, I owed it to my prose. All of the writers, young then, who associated themselves with the literary movement represented by Hugo, used, like the master, the lyre or the pen: Alfred de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, Alfred de Musset, spoke interchangeably the language of the gods and the language of men. I too, if I am permitted to mention myself after such glorious names, have had since the beginning this double aptitude. It is always easy for poets to descend to prose. The bird may walk as needed, but the lion cannot fly. Those who are born to write prose never rise to poetry however poetic they may be elsewhere. Rhythmic speech is a particular gift, and one can possess it without being a great genius, while it is often refused to superior minds. Among the proudest who appear to disdain it, more than one keeps to himself a secret resentment to not possess it.

Among the two thousand characters in La Comédie Humaine, one finds two poets: Canalis, of Modeste Mignon, and Lucien de Rubempré, of Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes. Balzac portrayed both of them as having traits that were not particularly favorable. Canalis is dry, cold, sterile, petty, an adroit arranger of words, a maker of imitation jewelry, who sets rhinestones in gilded silver, and makes necklaces of artificial pearls. His volumes, with many blank spaces, wide margins, and large gaps, contain only a melodious nothingness, monotonous music, suitable only to cause young boarders to fall asleep or dream. Balzac, who ordinarily shapes with warmth the interests of his characters, seems to take a secret pleasure in ridiculing this one and putting him in embarrassing positions: he challenges his vanity with a thousand ironies and a thousand sarcasms, and finishes by taking from him Modeste Mignon with her great fortune, to give her to Ernest de la Brière. This conclusion, in contrast to the beginning of the story, sparkles with concealed malice and fine mockery. One would say that Balzac is personally happy at the good trick that he has played on Canalis. He avenges, in his own way, the angels, the sylphs, the lakes, the swans, the willows, the skiffs, the stars and the lyres that had been used so abundantly by the poet.

If in Canalis we have the false poet, reserving his meager inspiration and putting it behind a dam so that it can flow, foam and sound for a few minutes in order to seem like a cascade, the man used to taking advantage of his laboriously wrought literary successes to serve his political ambitions, the man with material interests who is in love with money, medals, pensions and honors, despite his elegiac attitudes and pose as an angel who misses being in heaven, Lucien de Rubempré shows us the poet who is lazy, frivolous, oblivious, capricious, and as nervous as a woman, incapable of prolonged effort, without moral force, living in the hooks of actresses and courtesans, a puppet whose strings the terrible Vautrin, under the pseudonym Carlos Herrera, pulls as he pleases. Despite all of his vices, Lucien is seductive; Balzac has equipped him with spirit, beauty, youth, and elegance; women adore him; but he ends by hanging himself at the Conciergerie. Balzac did everything he could to successfully complete the marriage of Clotilde de Grandlieu with the author of Marguerite; unfortunately the demands of morality intervened, and what would the Faubourg Saint-Germain have said of La Comédie Humaine if the student of Jacques Collin the convict had married the daughter of a duke?

Regarding the author of Marguerite, I will note here a bit of information that could amuse those who are interested in literature. The few sonnets that Lucien de Rubempré shows as a sample of his volume of verse to the bookseller Dauriat are not the work of Balzac, who did not write verse, and asked his friends for those that he happened to need. The sonnet on the daisy is by Madame de Girardin, the sonnet on the camellia is by de Lassailly, and the one on the tulip is by myself.

Modeste Mignon also contained a piece of verse, but I do not know the author.

As I have said regarding Mercadet, Balzac was an admirable reader, and he very much wanted, one day, to read some of my own verses. He read to me, among others, La Fontaine du Cimitière. Like all prose writers, he read only for the meaning, and tried to conceal the rhythm that poets, when they deliver their verses out loud, in contrast accentuate in a manner intolerable to everyone, but which delights them alone, and we had together, on this point, a long discussion, which, like always, served only to cause each of us to persist in our particular opinion.

The great literary man of La Comédie Humaine is Daniel d'Arthez, a writer who was serious, a hard worker, and for a long time buried, before achieving his success, in immense studies of philosophy, history and linguistics. Balzac feared facility, and he did not believe that a rapidly produced work could be good. In this context, journalism held a singular repugnance for him, and he regarded the time and talent consecrated to it to be wasted; he didn't hold journalists in any higher regard, and he, who was however such a great critic, despised criticism. The unflattering portraits that he has drawn of Etienne Loustau, of Nathan, of Vernisset, of Andoche Finot, represent fairly well his true opinion of the place of the press. Emile Blondet, introduced into that bad company to represent the good writer, is compensated for his articles in the imaginary Débats of La Comédie Humaine with a rich marriage to the widow of a general, which permits him to leave journalism.

Moreover, Balzac never worked toward the point of view of a newspaper. He brought his novels to the magazines and daily newspapers as they had come to him, without preparing any breaks or interesting twists at the end of each installment, to increase the desire for the continuation. His work was broken up into sections that were roughly the same length, and sometimes the description of an armchair would start on one day and finish the next. With justification, he did not want to divide his work into little dramatic or vaudevillian tableaus; he thought of nothing but the book. This working method was often to the detriment of the immediate success that journalism requires of the authors it employs. Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas were more frequently victorious in the battles each morning that then captivated the public. He did not obtain immense popularity, like that of Les Mystères de Paris and Le Juif-Errant, of Les Mousquetaires and of Monte-Cristo. Les Paysans, a masterpiece, even caused a great number of readers to cancel their subscriptions to the Presse, where the first installment appeared. Its publication had to be suspended. Every day letters arrived that demanded that it be ended. Balzac was found to be boring!

There was still not a good understanding of the great idea of La Comédie Humaine, to take on modern society and write about Paris and our times the book that sadly no ancient civilization has left for us. The collected edition of La Comédie Humaine, by assembling all of the scattered works, put into relief the philosophical intention of the writer. From that date forward, Balzac grew considerably in public opinion, he finally ceased being considered "the most productive of our novelists," a stereotyped phrase that irritated him as much as "the author of Eugénie Grandet."

There have been a number of critiques on Balzac and he has been discussed in many ways, but in my opinion one very characteristic feature has not been emphasized: this point is the absolute modernity of his genius. Balzac owes nothing to antiquity; for him there are neither Greeks nor Romans, and he has no need to cry for deliverance from them. One does not find in the composition of his talent any trace of Homer, of Virgil, of Horace, not even of De Viris Illustribus; nobody was ever less classical.

Balzac, like Gavarni, observed his contemporaries; and, in art, the supreme difficulty is to portray that which one sees before one's eyes; one can pass through one's time without appreciating it, and that is what many eminent minds have done.

To be of his time, nothing would appear to be simpler but nothing is more difficult! To wear no glasses, neither blue nor green, to think with his own brain, to use the speech of the present day, not stitch together a colorful fabric from the phrases of his predecessors! Balzac possessed this rare merit. The ages have their perspective and their distance; at that distance the great masses move away, the lines end, the flickering details disappear; with the help of classical memories, of melodious names from antiquity, the least rhetorician could create a tragedy, a poem, an historical study. But, to find yourself in the crowd, to be elbowed by it, and to appreciate its features, understand its flow, sort out its personalities, outline the features of so many diverse beings, to show the motives for their actions, that demands an entirely special genius, and this genius, the author of La Comédie Humaine had to a degree that no one has equaled and probably no one will equal.

This profound understanding of modern things rendered Balzac, it must be said, insensitive to sculptural beauty. He read with a careless eye the stanzas of white marble with which Greek art sung the perfection of the human form. In the museum of antiquities, he looked at the Venus de Milo without great ecstasy, but the Parisian woman who has stopped in front of the immortal statue, draped in her long cashmere shawl running without a crease from the neck to the heel, wearing her hat with a veil from Chantilly, gloved with her tight Jouvin gloves, showing from under the hem of her flounced dress the polished tip of her worn boots, made his eyes sparkle with pleasure. He analyzed her coquettish allure, he savored at length her skillful graces, only to find as she did that the goddess was too heavyset and would not be an attractive addition to the homes of Mesdames de Beauséant, de Listomère, or d'Espard. Ideal beauty, with its serene and pure lines, was too simple, too cold, too harmonious for this complicated, exuberant and diverse genius. He also says somewhere: "It is necessary to be Raphaël to portray many virgins." Character pleased him more than style, and he preferred looks to beauty. In his portraits of women, he never fails to put a mark, a crease, a wrinkle, a red blemish, a softened and tired corner, a vein that is too apparent, some detail indicating the bruises of life that a poet, in tracing the same image, would surely have suppressed, mistakenly without a doubt.

I do not intend to criticize Balzac in this. This fault is his principal strength. He accepted nothing of the mythologies and traditions of the past, and he did not know, happily for us, that ideal that was achieved with the verses of the poets, the marbles of Greece and Rome, the paintings of the Renaissance, which stands between the eyes of artists and reality. He loved the woman of our day just as she is, and not as a pale statue; he loved her for her virtues, for her vices, for her fantasies, for her shawls, for her dresses, for her hats, and followed her across her life, far beyond the point in the journey where love abandons her. He prolonged her youth by many seasons, gave her springs with the summers of Saint-Martin, and gilded her twilight years with the most splendid rays. We are so classical, in France, that we have not perceived, after two thousand years, that roses, in our climate, do not bloom in April as in the descriptions of poets of antiquity, but in June, and that our women begin to be beautiful at the age at which those of Greece, who are more precocious, cease to be. How many charming types he has imagined or reproduced! Madame Firmiani, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, the Princess de Cadignan, Madame de Morsauf, Lady Dudley, the Duchess de Langeais, Madame Jules, Modeste Mignon, Diane de Chaulieu, without counting the middle class women, the seamstresses and the ladies of ill repute.