Part 6

And how he loved and knew that modern Paris, whose beauty the amateurs of local color and the picturesque of that time appreciated so little! He roamed across it in every direction night and day; there is not a forgotten alley, a foul passage, a narrow, muddy and black street which did not become under his pen an etching of Rembrandt, full of teeming and mysterious darkness or sparkling with a trembling star of light. Wealth and poverty, pleasure and suffering, shame and glory, grace and ugliness, he knew all of his beloved town; it was for him an enormous, hybrid, formidable monster, an octopus with one hundred thousand arms that he heard and saw as a living thing, and which constituted in his eyes an immense individual. See with regard to this the marvelous pages placed at the beginning of La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, in which Balzac, impinging on the art of the musician, had wanted, as in a grand orchestral symphony, to make all of the voices sing together, all of the sobbing, all of the cries, all of the rumors, all of the grinding of Paris at work!

From this modernity on which I purposefully dwell arose, without his suspecting it, a difficulty in labor that Balzac experienced in his efforts to complete his work: the French language as refined by the classics of the seventeenth century is not suitable, when one conforms to it, other than to express general ideas, and to portray conventional figures in a vague setting. To describe this multiplicity of details, of characters, of types, of architectures, of furnishings, Balzac was obliged to create for himself a special language, composed of all of the technical terms, all of the argots of science, of the workshop, of the theater, even of the lecture hall. Every word that said something was welcomed, and the sentence, in order to receive it, opened a space, a parenthetic expression, and lengthened itself obligingly. It is this that made superficial critics say that Balzac did not know how to write. He possessed, even though he did not know it, a style and a very beautiful style, the necessary, inevitable, and mathematical style of his ideas!

VI

No one could have the ambition to write a complete biography of Balzac; any relationship with him was necessarily limited by gaps, absences, disappearances. Work absolutely ruled the life of Balzac, and if, as he himself says with touching sensitivity in a letter to his sister, he has painlessly sacrificed the joys and distractions of existence to this jealous god, it cost him to renounce all company that might have led to friendship. To reply with a few words to a long letter became for him who was overburdened with labor a prodigality that he could rarely permit himself; he was the slave of his work and a voluntary slave. He had, with a very good and very tender heart, the selfishness of the great worker. And who could have dreamed of being mad at his pressured negligences and his apparent forgetfulness, when one saw the results of his escapes or his seclusions? When, the work completed, he would reappear, one would have said that he had left you the day before, and he would take up the interrupted conversation once again, as if sometimes six months and more had not passed. He made trips within France to study localities that he included in Scènes de Province, and he withdrew to the houses of friends, in Touraine, or in the Charente, finding there a calm that the creditors did not always allow him in Paris. After some great work, he permitted himself, occasionally, a longer excursion to Germany, northern Italy, or Switzerland; but these rapid excursions, made with the preoccupations of bills that were due to be paid, contracts to fulfill, and limited funds for travel, may have fatigued him more than they gave him rest. His vast gaze took in the skies, the horizons, the mountains, the countryside, the monuments, the houses, the interiors to commit them to that universal and meticulous memory that never failed him. Superior in this to descriptive poets, Balzac saw man at the same time as nature; he studied the physiognomies, the manners, the passions, the characters in the same glance as locations, clothing and furnishings. One detail sufficed for him, as the least fragment of bone did for Cuvier, to accurately imagine and reconstitute a personality glimpsed while passing. Balzac has often been praised, and rightly so, for his power of observation; but, however great he was, it is not necessary to imagine that the author of La Comédie Humaine always drew from nature his portraits whose truth was so clearly from elsewhere. His process did not resemble in any way that of Henri Monnier, who followed in real life an individual in order to make a sketch with a pencil and a pen, drawing his least gestures, writing down his most insignificant phrases in order to obtain at the same time a photographic plate and a page of shorthand notes. Buried most of the time in the excavations of his work, Balzac could not materially observe the two thousand characters who play their role in his comedy of one hundred acts; but every man, when he looks inward, contains humanity: it is a microcosm in which nothing is missing.

He has, not always, but often observed within himself the numerous types that live in his work. That is why they are so complete. No one could absolutely comprehend the life of another; in such a case, there are motives that remain obscure, unknown details, actions of which one loses track. In even the most faithful portrait, some creativity is necessary. Balzac has thus created much more than he saw. His rare faculties of the analyst, of the physiologist, of the anatomist, have merely served the poet in him, just as the assistant serves the professor at his lectern when he passes him the substances that he needs for his demonstrations.

Perhaps this could be the place to define the truth as understood by Balzac; in this time of realism, it is good to be understood on this point. The truth of art is not that of nature; everything that is represented through the means of art necessarily contains some element of the conventional; make it as small as possible, it still exists, be it perspective in painting, language in literature. Balzac accentuates, magnifies, enlarges, prunes, adds, shadows, illuminates, avoids or approaches men or things according to the effect that he wants to produce. He is truthful, without doubt, but with augmentations and sacrifices for art. He prepares backgrounds that are somber and darkened with charcoal for his luminous figures, he puts white backgrounds behind his dark figures. Like Rembrandt, he sets the light of day on the brow or nose of the character; sometimes, in his description, he obtains fantastic and bizarre results, by placing, without saying anything, a microscope under the eye of the reader; the details then appear with a supernatural clarity, an amplified minutia, some unbelievable and formidable magnifications; the tissues, the scaliness, the pores, the veins, the blemishes, the fibers, the capillaries take on an enormous importance, and turn a visage that is insignificant to the naked eye into a sort of fanciful mask as amusing as those that were sculpted under the cornice of the Pont-Neuf and vermiculated by time. The characters are also pushed to excess, as it is suited to each type: if Baron Hulot is a libertine, he additionally personifies lust: he is a man and a vice, an individual and an abstraction; he unites in himself all of the scattered traits of the character. Where a writer of lesser genius would have drawn a portrait, Balzac has created a figure. Men do not have as many muscles as Michelangelo gives them to suggest the idea of strength. Balzac is full of such useful exaggerations, of those dark strokes that enhance and support the outline; he dreams while writing, like the masters, and leaves his mark on everything. As this is not a literary critique, but a biographical study that I am writing, I will not take these remarks farther than necessary. Balzac, whom the Realist school seems to wish to claim as its leader, has no connection to its features.

Unlike certain literary persons who feed on nothing but their own genius, Balzac read a great deal and with a prodigious rapidity. He loved books, and he created a beautiful library that he intended to leave to the town of his birth, an idea that the indifference of the townspeople made him later abandon. He absorbed in a few days the voluminous works of Swedenborg, which were owned by his mother, who was rather preoccupied with mysticism at that time, and that reading was responsible for Séraphita-Séraphitus, one of the most astonishing products of modern literature. Never did Balzac approach, or move closer to ideal beauty than in that book: the ascension of the mountain has a quality that is ethereal, supernatural, and luminous that lifts you from the earth. The only two colors that are employed are celestial blue and snow white with a few pearlescent tones for shadow. I know nothing more intoxicating than this beginning. The panorama of Norway, with its sharply cut coastline seen from this height, dazzles and gives one vertigo.

Louis Lambert was also influenced by the reading of Swedenborg; but soon Balzac, who had taken on the eagle wings of the mystics to soar into the infinite, descended to the earth that we inhabit, even though his robust lungs could have breathed indefinitely the thin air that is deadly for the weak: he abandoned the world beyond after that flight and returned to real life. Perhaps his remarkable genius would have gone out of view too quickly if he had continued to soar toward the unfathomable immensities of metaphysics, and we should be happy that he limited himself to Louis Lambert and Séraphita-Séraphitus, which represent sufficiently, in La Comédie Humaine, the supernatural side, and open a door that is sufficiently large into the invisible world.

I now move on to a few more intimate details. The great Goethe had a horror of three things: one of the things was tobacco smoke, I am not permitted to say the two others. Balzac, like the Jupiter of the German poetic Olympus, could not stand tobacco in any form at all; he denounced the pipe and forbid the cigar. He did not tolerate even a light Spanish cigarette; the Asian hookah alone found favor with him, and yet he only tolerated that as a curiosity and because of its local color. In his diatribes against the herb of Nicot, he did not imitate the doctor who, during a dissertation on the dangers of tobacco, does not hesitate to take ample doses from a large box of tobacco near him: he never smoked. His Théorie des Excitants contains an indictment against tobacco, and there is no doubt that if he had been Sultan, like Amurath, he would have beheaded relapsed and obstinate smokers. He reserved all of his predilections for coffee, which did him so much harm and might have killed him, although he was built to become a centenarian.

Was Balzac wrong or right? Is tobacco, as he maintained, a deadly poison and does it intoxicate those that it does not turn stupid? Is it the opium of the Occident that dulls the will and the intelligence? These are questions that I cannot answer; but I am going to list here the names of some celebrated personages of our age, some of whom smoked while the others did not smoke: Goethe, Heinrich Heine, uniquely for Germans, did not smoke; Byron smoked; Victor Hugo does not smoke, neither does Alexandre Dumas père; on the other hand Alfred de Musset, Eugène Sue, Georges Sand, Mérimée, Paul de Saint-Victor, Emile Augier, Ponsard, smoked and still smoke; however they are not exactly imbeciles.

This aversion, moreover, was shared by nearly all men who were born in our century or a little before. Only sailors and soldiers smoked then; at the odor of the pipe or the cigar, women fainted: they have become much tougher since then, and more than one pair of rosy lips has pressed with love the golden tip of a cigar, in a sitting room turned into a smoking room. Dowagers and turbaned mothers alone have preserved their old antipathy, and stoically watch their unfashionable salons be deserted by the youth.

Every time that Balzac is obliged, for the credibility of the story, to allow one of his characters to indulge in this horrible habit, his brief and disdainful sentence betrays a secret disapproval: "As for de Marsay," he said, "he was busy smoking cigars." And he must have really loved this captain of dandyism to permit him to smoke in his work.

A fragile and elegant young woman had without doubt inspired this aversion in Balzac, although that is a question that I cannot answer definitively. Still it's true that the tax collector never earned a sou from him. Regarding women, Balzac, who described them so well, must have known them, and one understands the sense that the Bible attaches to this word. In one of the letters that he writes to Madame de Surville, his sister, Balzac, quite young and completely unknown, sets down an ideal for his life in two words: "To be celebrated and to be loved." The first part of this program, which all artists map out for themselves, had been realized in every way. Was the second also accomplished? The opinion of the most intimate friends of Balzac is that he practiced the chastity that he recommended to others, and shared at most platonic love; but Madame de Surville laughs at this idea, with a smile of feminine delicacy and full of discreet reserve. She maintains that her brother was unfailingly discreet, and that if he had wanted to speak, he would have had many things to say. This must be true, and without doubt the safe of Balzac contained more of the notes with delicate, sloping handwriting than the lacquered box of Canalis. There is, in his work, the scent of a woman: odor di femina; when one enters there, one hears behind the doors that close on the hidden staircase the rustling of silk and the creaking of shoes. The semicircular and padded salon on the Rue de Batailles, of which I have quoted the description inserted by the author in La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, did not remain completely virginal, as many of us had assumed. In the course of our close friendship, which lasted from 1836 until his death, only once did Balzac make allusion, with the most respectful and the most tender terms, to an attachment of his early youth, and even then he gave me only the first name of the person whose memory, after so many years, still made his eyes moisten. Had he said any more to me, I certainly would not have abused his confidences; the genius of a great writer belongs to all of the world, but his heart is his own. I touch only briefly on this tender and delicate side of Balzac's life, because I have nothing to say that does not honor him. This reserve and this mystery are those of a gentleman. If he was loved as he wished in the dreams of his youth, the world knows nothing of it.

Do not imagine after these reflections that Balzac was austere and prudish in his speech: the author of Les Contes Drolatiques had been nourished with too much Rabelais and was too pantagruelistic to be unable to laugh; he knew good stories and invented them: his broad jokes interspersed with Gallic crudities would have made the sanctimonious and horrified members of society cry out shocking; but his laughing and talkative lips were sealed like a tomb when there was a question of a serious sentiment. He scarcely allowed his closest friends to surmise his love for a foreign woman of distinction, a love of which one can speak, since it was crowned by marriage. It was that passion that had been felt for a long time that necessitated his distant excursions, although their object remained until the last day a mystery for his friends.

Absorbed by his work, Balzac did not think until rather late of the theater, for which the general opinion judged him, wrongly to my mind, after a few more or less risky efforts, to be hardly suited. He who created so many types, analyzed so many characters, gave life to so many people, should succeed on the stage; but, as I have said, Balzac was not spontaneous, and one cannot correct the proofs of a drama. If he had lived, after a dozen works, he would assuredly have found his form and attained success; La Marâtre that played at the Théâtre-Historique was close to a masterpiece. Mercadet, lightly edited by an intelligent arranger, enjoyed a long posthumous success at the Gymnase.

Nevertheless, the factor that motivated his efforts was mostly, I must say, the idea of a windfall that would liberate him all at once from his financial predicament rather than a real vocation. Theater, as we know, is much more profitable than books; the continuing nature of the performances, on which a rather large royalty is drawn, produces quickly by accumulation some considerable sums. If the strategic work is greater, the material labor is less. Several dramas are necessary to fill a volume, and while you promenade or rest idly with slippers on your feet, the footlights are illuminated, the scenery descends from the ceiling, the actors recite and gesticulate, and you find yourself having made more money than you would have by scribbling for an entire week bent painfully over your desk. Such melodrama has more value to its author than Notre-Dame de Paris to Victor Hugo and Les Parents Pauvres to Balzac.

It's curious that Balzac who contemplated, elaborated, and corrected his novels with such unrelenting meticulousness, seemed, when it concerned the theater, to become dizzy from the rapidity of his work. Not only did he not rewrite his theater pieces eight or ten times like his books, he really did not write them at all. Having just come upon his first idea, he chose a day for the reading and called his friends to request their assistance in the project; Ourliac, Lassailly, Laurent-Jan, myself and others, have often been summoned in the middle of the night or at fabulously early times of the morning. It was necessary to drop everything; every minute of delay caused the loss of millions.

A pressing note from Balzac summoned me one day to come right away to 104 Rue de Richelieu, where he had a lodging in the house of Buisson the tailor. I found Balzac wrapped in his monastic frock, and hopping up and down with impatience on the blue and white rug of a tidy attic room that had walls upholstered in light brown percale embellished with blue, because, despite his apparent neglectfulness, he had an understanding of interior design, and always prepared a comfortable den for his laborious vigils; in none of his lodgings was there the picturesque disorder dear to artists.

"Finally, here is Theo!" he cried when he saw me. "You are lazy, slow, slothlike, an obstacle, hurry up then; you should have been here an hour ago. Tomorrow I am reading Harel a great drama in five acts."

"And you would like to have my advice," I responded while settling myself into an armchair like a man who is preparing himself to endure a long lecture.

From my attitude Balzac understood my thought, and he said to me in the most straightforward way, "The drama is not written."

"The devil," I said. "Oh well, you will need to delay the reading for six weeks."

"No. We are going to rush the dramorama to get paid. At this time I have a heavy debt that is due."

"From now until tomorrow, it's impossible; there would not be time to copy it."

"Here is how I have arranged things. You will do an act, Ourliac another, Laurent-Jan the third, de Belloy the fourth, me the fifth, and I will read at noon as agreed. One act of a drama has no more than four or five hundred lines; one can write five hundred lines of dialogue in a day and in a night."

"Tell me the subject, outline the plan, describe to me in a few words the characters, and I will get to work," I responded to him, somewhat alarmed.

"Ah!" he cried with an air of superb weariness and magnificent disdain, "if I need to tell you the subject, we will never be finished."

I did not think I was being inappropriate in posing that question, which seemed quite pointless to Balzac.

After a brief instruction that I obtained with difficulty, I set to work to put together a scene from which only a few words remained in the final work, which was not read the next day, as one might well believe. I do not know what the other collaborators did; but the only one who seriously joined in, this was Laurent-Jan, to whom the play is dedicated.

That play, it was Vautrin. Everyone knows that the dynastic and pyramidal tuft of hair that Frédérick Lemaître fantasized wearing in his disguise as a Mexican general brought down on the work the criticism of the authorities; Vautrin, forbidden, had only a single performance, and poor Balzac remained like Perrette in front of his overturned milk jug. The prodigious proceeds that he had anticipated as the probable product of his drama vanished into ciphers, which did not stop him from refusing very nobly the compensation offered by the ministry.

At the beginning of this study, I told you about the tendencies toward dandyism that were demonstrated by Balzac, I spoke of his blue coat with solid gold buttons, his monstrous cane topped with a group of turquoise stones, his appearances in society and in the extravagant salon; this splendor lasted only for a period of time, and Balzac recognized that he was not suited to play the role of Alcibiades or Brummel. Everyone could encounter him, particularly in the morning, when he rushed to the printers carrying copy or seeking proofs, in an infinitely less splendid outfit. I recall the green hunting jacket, with brass buttons representing the head of a fox, the black and gray checked pants that extended to his feet, which were encased in large laced shoes, the red scarf wrapped around the neck like a rope, and the hat that was at the same time both bristly and smooth, its blue bleached by sweat, which covered rather than clothed "the most fertile of our novelists." Despite the disorder and poverty of his dress, nobody would have been tempted to take for an unknown commoner this large man with the blazing eyes, flaring nostrils, and cheeks struck with violent tones, all illuminated by genius, who passed while carried away by his dream like a whirlwind! At the sight of him, the mocking stopped on the urchin's lips, and the serious man did not begin to smile. Everyone recognized one of the kings of thought.

Sometimes, to the contrary, he would be seen walking with slow steps, his nose in the air, his eyes searching, following one side of the street then examining the other, not daydreaming, but looking at the signs. He was looking for names to christen his characters. He maintained with some justification that a name could not be invented any more than a word. According to him, names arose on their own like languages; besides real names possessed a life, a meaning, a destiny, a mystical significance, and it was impossible to place too much importance on their choice. Léon Gozlan has told in a charming way, in his Balzac en Pantoufles, how the famous Z. Marcas of the Revue Parisienne was found.

A sign of a chimney man provided the name of Gubetta that had long been sought by Victor Hugo, who was no less careful than Balzac in the names of his characters.

This demanding life of nocturnal work had, despite his strong constitution, left its traces on the features of Balzac, and we find in Albert Savarus a portrait of him, written by himself, that represents him such as he was at that time (1842), with some minor differences: