Part 7

"… A superb head, black hair already streaked with some white, hair like that of Saint Peter and Saint Paul in our paintings, with thick shining curls, stiff like horsehair, a round white neck like that of a woman, a magnificent forehead, divided by the powerful furrows that great projects, great thoughts, strong reflections inscribe on the the foreheads of great men; an olive complexion marbled with red marks, a square nose, eyes of fire, then the hollow cheeks, with two long lines full of suffering, a mouth with a sardonic smile and a small chin that was narrow and too short; crow's feet at his temples, sunken eyes, rolling under the eyebrow arches like two burning globes; but despite all of these signs of violent passion, a calm manner, profoundly accepting, the voice of a penetrating sweetness which surprised me with its facility, the true voice of an orator, sometimes pure and astute, sometimes insinuating, and thunderous when necessary, then pliant with sarcasm, and then becoming incisive. Monsieur Albert Savaron is of middle height, neither fat nor thin; finally, he has the hands of a prelate."

In this portrait, which is incidentally very faithful, Balzac idealizes himself a little for the needs of the novel, and subtracts from himself a few kilograms of portliness, license which is certainly permitted to a beloved hero of the Duchess d'Argaiolo and Mademoiselle Philomène de Watteville. This novel of Albert Savarus, one of the least known and least quoted of Balzac, contains many transposed details on his habits of life and of work; one could even see there, if it was permissible to lift those veils, secrets of another kind.

Balzac had left the Rue des Batailles for Les Jardies; he then went to live at Passy. The house in which he lived, situated on a steep slope, offered a unique architectural layout. One entered there

A little like wine enters bottles

It was necessary to descend three floors to reach the first. The entry door, which was on the side of the house that faced the road, opened nearly into the roof, like a mansard. I dined there once with L. G. It was a strange dinner, with its dishes based on economical recipes invented by Balzac. At my express request, the famous onion purée, endowed with so many healthy and symbolic qualities and which almost killed Lassailly, did not appear. But the wines were marvelous! Each bottle had a story, and Balzac told it with an eloquence, a verve, a conviction without equal. The wine of Bordeaux had gone around the world three times; the Châteauneuf-du-Pape traced back to legendary times; the rum came from a barrel rolled for more than a century by the sea, which had to be opened with blows from an axe, because the crust that had been formed around it by shellfish, coral and seaweed was thick. My palate, surprised, irritated by the acidic flavors, protested in vain against these illustrious origins. Balzac maintained the solemnity of a soothsayer, and despite the proverb, I kept my eyes fixed on him, but I did not make him laugh!

For dessert, we had pears of a ripeness, a size, a tenderness and a quality that would do honor to a royal table. Balzac devoured five or six of them with the juice running down his chin; he believed that this fruit was good for him, and he ate them in such a quantity as much for health as for sweetness. Already he felt the first effects of the illness that would take him. Death, with its skeletal fingers, was touching this robust body to know where to attack it, and finding no weakness there, killed it through excess and hypertrophy. The cheeks of Balzac were already lined and marked with those red spots that simulate health to inattentive eyes; but for the observer, the yellow tones of hepatitis surrounded the tired eyelids with their golden halo; the expression, brightened by this warm sepia hue, appeared even more vivacious and shining and lessened anxieties.

At that time, Balzac was very preoccupied with the occult sciences, palmistry, and card reading; he had been told of an oracle even more astonishing than Mademoiselle Lenormand, and he persuaded me, as well as Madame E. de Girardin and Méry, to go and consult her with him. The prophetess lived in Auteuil, I no longer know in which street; that matters little to my story, because the address that was given was false. We came upon an honorable middle class family on holiday: the husband, the wife, and an old mother in whom Balzac, sure of his facts, persisted in finding a mystical air. The good woman, not flattered to have been taken for a sorceress, became angry; the husband took us for tricksters or crooks; the young woman laughed loudly, and the servant hastened prudently to lock up the silver. We had no choice but to withdraw after our blunder; but Balzac maintained that we were in the right place, and having climbed back into the carriage, muttered insults at the old lady: "Demon, harpy, magician, vampire, worm, monster, lemur, ghoul, snake charmer, creature," and all of the bizarre terms that a familiarity with the litanies of Rabelais could suggest to him. I said: "If she is a sorceress, she hides her game well." "Of cards," added Madame de Girardin with a quickness of mind that never failed her. We tried some further explorations, always fruitlessly, and Delphine asserted that Balzac had imagined this resource of Quinola in order to be driven by carriage to Auteuil, where he had business, and to procure some pleasant traveling companions. It is necessary to believe, however, that Balzac alone found that Madame Fontaine that we were all seeking together, because, in Les Comédiens Sans le Savoir, he depicted her between her hen Bilouche and her toad Astaroth with a fantastic and frightening truthfulness, if those two words can go together. Did he consult her seriously? Did he go to see her as a simple observer? Many passages in La Comédie Humaine seem to suggest that Balzac had a kind of faith in the occult sciences, about which the official sciences have still not said their last word.

Around this time, Balzac began to show a taste for old furniture, chests, vases; the least piece of worm-eaten wood that he bought on the Rue de Lappe always had an illustrious provenance, and he created detailed genealogies for his lesser knickknacks. He hid them here and there, always because of those fantastical creditors that I was starting to doubt. I even amused myself by spreading the rumor that Balzac was a millionaire, that he was buying old stockings from dealers in caterpillars to hide onces, quadruples, génovines, crusades, colonnates, double louis, in the manner of Père Grandet; I said everywhere that he had three cisterns, like Aboul-Casem, filled to the brim with garnets, dinars and rials. "Théo will get my throat cut with his jokes!" said Balzac, annoyed and charmed.

That which gave some veracity to my jokes was the new house in which Balzac lived, on the Rue Fortunée, in the Beaujon quarter, less populated then than it is today. He occupied a mysterious little house there that would have suited the fantasies of an ostentatious financier. From outside, one saw over the wall a sort of cupola formed by the arched ceiling of a sitting room and fresh paint on the closed shutters.

When one entered this small house, which was not easy, because the master of this dwelling hid himself with extreme care, one discovered a thousand details of luxury and comfort that contradicted the poverty that he affected. He received me however one day, and I could see a dining room adorned with old oak, with a table, a fireplace, some buffets, some sideboards and some chairs of sculpted wood, that would have made Berruguète, Cornejo Duque and Verbruggen envious; a salon of golden yellow damask, with doors, cornices, plinths and window frames of ebony; a library arranged in armoires inlayed with shell and brass in the style of Boule, and whose door, hidden by the shelves, once closed, could not be found; a bathroom in yellow Breccia, with bas-reliefs of stucco; a domed sitting room, whose old paintings had been restored by Edmond Hédouin; a gallery lit from above, that I recognized later in the collection of Le Cousin Pons. There were on the shelves all sorts of curiosities, porcelain from Dresden and Sèvres, horns of crackled celadon, and on the stairway, which was covered with a rug, some great vases from China and a magnificent lantern suspended by a cable of red silk.

"So have you emptied one of the caches of Aboul-Casem?" I said to Balzac, laughing, confronted with these splendors. "You can see well that I was right to suggest that you are a millionaire."

"I am poorer than ever," he responded while taking on a humble and pious air. "None of this is mine. I have furnished the house for a friend that I await. I am only the caretaker and porter of the building."

I quote here his exact words. This response, he made it in passing to many people who were as shocked as me. The mystery was soon explained by the marriage of Balzac to the woman whom he had loved for a long time.

There is a Turkish proverb that says: "When the house is finished, death enters." It is for this reason that the sultans always have a palace in the course of construction that they are very careful not to complete. Life seems to want nothing to be complete – except misfortune. Nothing is as dreaded as a wish fulfilled.

The notorious debts were finally paid, the dream union completed, the nest made for happiness padded and covered with down; as if they had foreseen his approaching end, those who envied Balzac started to praise him: Les Parents Pauvres, Le Cousin Pons, where the genius of the author shines in all its radiance, united all opinions. It was too beautiful; nothing more remained for him but to die.

His illness made rapid progress, but nobody believed that there would be a fatal outcome, so much we all trusted in the athletic constitution of Balzac. I thought firmly that he would bury us all.

I was going to take a trip to Italy. And before leaving I wanted to say goodbye to my illustrious friend. He had left in a carriage to collect from customs some exotic curiosity. I drew away reassured, and at the moment that I returned to my carriage, I was given a note from Madame de Balzac, which explained to me obligingly and with polite regrets why I had not found her husband at home. At the bottom of the letter, Balzac had scrawled these words.

"I can neither read, nor write. "De Balzac."

I have preserved like a relic that ominous line, probably the last that was written by the author of La Comédie Humaine; it was, and I did not understand it right away, the final cry, "My God, why have you forsaken me!" of the thinker and of the worker. The idea that Balzac could die did not even occur to me.

A few days after that, I was eating ice cream at the Café Florian, on the Piazza Saint Marco; in my hand I found the Journal des Débats, one of the few French papers that was available in Venice, and I saw in it the announcement of the death of Balzac. I almost fell from my chair onto the stones of the Piazza at this sudden news, and my pain was quickly mixed with an impulse of indignation and outrage that was not very Christian, because all souls have an equal value before God. I had just visited the insane asylum on the island of San-Servolo, and I saw there decrepit idiots, doddering octogenarians, human worms who are not even guided by animal instinct, and I asked myself why this luminous brain was extinguished like a flame on which one blows, while tenacious life persisted in these murky heads that were dimly traversed by fickle rays.

Nine years have already passed since that fatal date. Posterity has commenced for Balzac; every day he seems greater. When he was in the company of his contemporaries, he was poorly appreciated, he was seen only in fragments under sometimes unfavorable circumstances: now the edifice that he built rises as one draws further away, like the cathedral of a city that conceals the neighboring houses, and which on the horizon appears immense above the flattened roofs. The monument is not completed, but, such as it is, it terrifies by its enormity, and surprised generations will ask themselves who is the giant who alone has raised these formidable blocks and built so high this Babel that made all of society sing.

Although he is dead, Balzac still has detractors; on his memory are thrown the banal reproach of immorality, the last insult of powerless and jealous mediocrity, or even of total stupidity. The author of La Comédie Humaine not only is not immoral, but he is actually a strict moralist. Monarchical and catholic, he defends authority, exalts religion, preaches duty, reprimands passion, and does not accept happiness except in marriage and the family.

"Man," he says, "is neither good, nor bad; he is born with instincts and aptitudes; society, far from corrupting him, as Rousseau maintained, improves him, makes him better; but self-interest develops also his evil tendencies. Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, being, as I said in Le Médecin de Campagne, a complete system for the repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the most important component of social order."

And with the ingenuity that suits a great man, anticipating the reproach of immorality that will be addressed to him by shoddy spirits, he numbers the irreproachably virtuous characters who are found in La Comédie Humaine: Pierrette Lorrain, Ursule Mirouët, Constance Birotteau, la Fosseuse, Eugénie Grandet, Marguerite Claës, Pauline de Villenoix, Madame Jules, Madame de la Chanterie, Eve Chardon, Mademoiselle d'Esgrignon, Madame Firmiani, Agathe Rouget, Renée de Maucombe, without counting among the men, Joseph Le Bas, Genestas, Benassis, the cleric Bonnet, Dr. Minoret, Pillerault, David Séchard, the two Birotteaus, the cleric Chaperon, the judge Popinot, Bourgeat, the Sauviats, the Tascherons, etc.

Rogues are not missing, it is true, in La Comédie Humaine. But is Paris populated only with angels?

END