Part 30

But this would lead me too far. The proofs are waiting, and I must plunge into the Augean stable of my style, and sweep out its faults. My life offers nothing now but the monotony of work, which the work itself varies. I am like the old Austrian colonel who talked about his gray horse and his black horse to Marie Antoinette; sometimes I am on one, sometimes on the other; six hours on the "Ruggieri," six hours on "L'Enfant Maudit," six hours on "La Vieille Fille." From time to time I rise, I contemplate that ocean of houses which my window overlooks, from the École Militaire to the Barrière du Trône, from the Pantheon to the Étoile; and then, having inhaled the air, I go back to my work. My apartment on the second floor is not yet vacant; I play at garret; I like it, like the duchesses who eat brown bread by chance. There is not in all Paris a prettier garret. It is white and coquettish as a grisette of sixteen. I shall make a bedroom of it to supplement mine in case of illness; for below I sleep in the passage, in a bed two feet wide which leaves only room to pass. The doctors say it is not unhealthy; but I am afraid it is. I need much air; I consume it enormously. My apartment costs me seven hundred francs. I shall be no longer in the National Guard; but I am still pursued by the police and the _état-major_ for eight days in prison. Not going out of the house, they cannot catch me. My apartment is taken under another name than mine [that of his doctor], and I am living ostensibly in a furnished hotel.

Well, I wish I could send you some of my courage. Find it here with my tender respects.

CHAILLOT, October 22, 1836.

I had great need of the letter I have just received from you, to efface the grief your last had caused me; for, I may now tell you, it pained me by the uncertainty it revealed, and perhaps that pain may have acted on my answer, though I am tolerably stoic. But when an affection as devoted, as pure of all storms, as that of Madame de Berny has perished, and around us little else remains, if then, amid dreadful misfortunes, the branch on which our beliefs are hanging breaks also, the skies are very sombre, and the fall to earth is heavy.

That letter came, full of doubts and reproaches wrapped in your pretty phrases, while I was in my garret, which I shall not quit until I owe nothing; and was it not a cruelly facetious thing to be told that one is dissipated in one's fortieth year, and when the doctors cannot explain to themselves how it is that I bear such work? They see my monkish life; they will not believe in it. They are like you.

A dreadful misfortune has come to crown my misery. Werdet, who never had a sou, is about to fail, and drags me into the gulf; for, to sustain him, I had the weakness to sign bills of exchange, the value of which I never received, and notes to the amount of thirteen thousand francs which I must honour. I have already taken precautions to weather this storm.

To-morrow I shall have moved all from the rue Cassini, which I have left never to return. My apartment here is taken in the name of a third person. I did this to evade the National Guard; also my furniture is secured from attachment, for I have to face the immediate payment of fifty thousand francs without the resource of my own credit, or that of a publisher.

Under these circumstances, which have made this month of October a true Beresina for me, I longed to go and ask you for an asylum and bread for two years, during which time I could earn, by working, the hundred thousand francs I need. But my life would have been too stained by that flight, although my most sensitive and upright friends advised it. I have been greater than my misfortune. In fifteen days' time I have sold fifty columns to the "Chronique de Paris" for a thousand francs; one hundred and twenty columns to the "Presse" for eight thousand; twenty columns to a "Revue Musicale" for one thousand; an article to the "Dictionnaire de la Conversation" for a thousand. That makes eleven thousand francs in fifteen days. I have worked thirty nights without going to bed. I have written "La Perle brisée" (for the "Chronique") "La Vieille Fille" (for the "Presse"). I have done the "Secret des Ruggieri" for Werdet. I have sold for two thousand francs my last _dizain_ (that makes thirteen thousand). And now I am doing "La Torpille" for the "Chronique," and "La Femme Supérieure," and "Les Souffrances d'un Inventeur" for the "Presse." At the same time I am in process of selling the reprinting [in book form] of "La Torpille," "La Femme Supérieure," "Le Grand homme de Province à Paris," and "Les Héritiers Boirouge," both begun; that will give me in all thirty-one thousand francs. Then, having no longer that rotten plank Werdet to rest on, I shall contract with a rich and solid firm for the last fourteen volumes of the "Études de Mœurs," which ought to amount to fifty-six thousand francs for author's rights, on which I want thirty thousand at once. If that succeeds I shall have sixty-one thousand francs, which will save me. Not only shall I then owe nothing, but I shall have some money for myself. But I must work day and night for six months, and after that at least ten hours a day for two years.

Rossini said to me yesterday:--

"When I did that myself, I was dead at the end of fifteen days, and then I took fifteen to rest."

I said to him, "I have only a coffin in prospect for my rest; but work is a fine shroud."

You can comprehend how, in the midst of these multiplied errands, these torrents of proofs, of manuscripts to write, of this savage struggle, it is dreadful to receive stones from heaven instead of rays of light. Not only have I neither pleasure nor time, but I have not been able since my return to take a bath or go to the Opera, two things (bath and Opera) which are more essential to me than bread. Everything is going to ruin within me to the profit of my brain. It makes one shudder.

For having three times in my life--I, feeble--interested myself in unfortunate men, and taken them _en croupe_ upon my horse or in my boat,--the printer, Jules Sandeau, and Werdet,--three times have they broken the tiller, sunk the boat, and flung me into the water naked. It is over. I will never interest myself again in feeble men. I have too many obligations, which command me to employ the cold logic of a banker's strong-box. I shut myself up, in my work and my garret. I grow more solitary than ever.

See how the whole of society combines to isolate superiorities, how it drives them to the heights! Affections which ought to be exclusively kind and tender to us, never judge us, never make a mountain out of nothing, and a nothing of a mountain, these very affections torture us by fantastic exactions; they stab us with pin-pricks about silly things; they want faith for themselves and have none for us; they will not put into their sentiments that grandeur which separates them from others. They do not abstract their sentiments, as we do, from earthly soiling. The protections that we give to the weak are fresh means by which we fling ourselves more rapidly into the inextricable difficulties of material life. Indifferent people adopt calumnies which enemies forge and envious men repeat. No one succours us. The masses do not understand us; superior persons have no time to read us and defend us. Fame illumines the grave only; posterity gives us no income, and I am tempted to cry out, like that English country gentleman from his place in parliament: "I hear much talk of posterity; I would like to know what that power has so far done for England."

So you see, _cara_, that short of miracles, poor writers are condemned to misfortunes under all forms; therefore, I entreat you, do not keep from me any of your griefs, or your ideas, or anything regarding yourself, but be indulgent and kind to me. Think always that what I do has a reason and an object, that my actions are _necessary_. There is, for two souls that are a little above others, something mortifying in repeating to you for the tenth time not to believe in calumny. When you said to me, three letters ago, that I gambled, it was just as true as my marriage was at Geneva.

_Cara_, the life that I lead cannot endure that the sweet things of friendship should be converted into constant explanations; the life of the soul is not that.

You ask me again who is Charles de Bernard. I have already told you; did you not get my letter? He is a gentleman of Besançon who, on my passage through that town when I went to Neufchâtel, received me like an honour, and in whom I found talent. As soon as I owned the "Chronique de Paris" I sent for him; I advised him, directed him with paternal affection, telling him that he was a man to gallop straight if given a horse; and it was true. I conceived of making a newspaper only by the help of superior men. I had already picked out Planche, Bernard, Théophile Gautier. I should have unearthed others. But that is all over now.

A Polish colonel, who returns to Saint-Petersburg by way of Warsaw, a Monsieur Frankowski, will take to you the _cassolette_ attached to my watch-chain. The chain, you know, was so delicate that the little links were continually breaking. As I told you before, it will be safer fastened to a ring; you will not then destroy it when playing with it. Lecointe has tried to do it well. You gave me, in Vienna, the right to recall myself to your memory by such little dainty things. Let Paris send you, now and then, a few flowers of her industry. Ah! _cara_, if I had not among so many waking nights the thought that one of them is spent in sending to you a little thing the gold of which, as Walter Scott's man says in the "Chronicles of the Canongate," is earned grain by grain, to testify to you my gratitude, my toil would be too heavy.

M. Frankowski would have taken charge of my manuscripts and sent them to you with Polish fidelity, but he feared the difficulties of the custom-house. You have here a veritable library. You would be proud if you knew the price the magistrates attached to this enormous collection of manuscripts and proofs, which I was forced to show them in my lawsuit with the "Revue de Paris." The rage for these things was quite absurd. M. de Montholon wanted to buy for a hundred francs one of those "orders to print" which you saw me write in Geneva. But any printer who abstracted from Madame Hanska a single one of her proofs would be quitted by me.

Well, _addio_. Take care of yourself. Alas! if I only had money! In a few days I must have a month's rest, and then I could have gone and spent a week in your Wierzchownia. But nothing is possible to poverty--to that poverty which the world envies me!

CHAILLOT, October 28, 1836.

I have received your letter number 19, addressed to the widow Durand, which ends with a dreadful "Be happy!" I would have preferred another wish, though less Christian. I write in haste to tell you that I have received all your letters; there is no reason why, though I am at Chaillot, I should not get my letters from the rue Cassini.

_La Marchesa_ is a very agreeable old woman who had, they say, all Turin at her feet thirty years ago. You are not, in spite of your analytical mind, either generous or attentive; you write me a quantity of phrases, to which I cannot answer; you even overwhelm me with them, while I have to read them with my arms crossed, my lips silent, and my heart sick. But on this point you will find a word in my last letter.

I write now only to say one thing. I have put many anxieties into your heart, if you have for me all the affection that I have for you. So, then, you must now be told that the end of so much misery is approaching. Did I tell you that one day, when a mind astray led me to the river so frequented by suicides (those are things that I have hidden from you), I met the former head-clerk of my lawyer, who was my comrade in legal days. He was the head of the lawyer's office where Scribe and I were placed. This poor young fellow has, so he says himself, a saintly respect for genius (that word always makes me laugh), and he believed me to be at the summit of fortune and honours. I, who would die like the Spartan with the fox at my vitals rather than betray my penury, I had the weakness, at that moment when I was bidding farewell to many things, to pour out a heart too full. It was at a spot that I shall never forget; rue de Rivoli, before the iron gate of the Tuileries. This poor man who is--remark this--a business man in Paris, said, with moist eyelids:--

"Monsieur de Balzac, all that a sacred zeal can do, expect from me. I ought only to speak to you by results. I shall try to save you."

And yesterday, this brave and devoted young man wrote me that he had succeeded in making a loan which would liquidate my debts, lift off the burden of anxiety, and leave me time to pay all. And something finer still. When the lender heard the name of the borrower, he, who wanted ten per cent and securities, would take only five per cent and a mortgage on my works. May those two names be blest! _If this thing is arranged_, for I own to you I have little faith in luck, I shall escape a long suicide--that of death by toil.

Besides this loan, a company is to be formed for the management of my works. I am following up this affair, about which I think I have already spoken to you, very warmly. It will be done _col tempo_. I have about forty thousand francs to pay immediately; but I shall have earned nearly sixty thousand in a short time. Instead of working eighteen hours, I shall then work nine, and I shall have won, after fourteen years' labour, the right to come and go as I please. It is too fine; I don't believe in it.

The five hundred francs sent as you sent them, now instead of a few months later, have been, between ourselves, a benefit. Boulanger needed the money; and I am now bestirring myself to get him a thousand francs for the right to engrave the portrait. That outrageous miser Custine paid him only three thousand francs for his picture of "Le Triomphe de Pétrarque," while my portrait will thus have brought him fifteen hundred francs. But can we get an engraver to pay one thousand for the right of engraving? That is what I am trying to do.

Now, here is a grave question; I want you to have the original. Boulanger wants to exhibit it. Though I shall pose for the copy, a copy never has the indefinable beauty of a canvas on which the painter has sought out, scrutinized, and seized the soul of his model. We must therefore wait; for, to the artist, my portrait is a battle to win before the eyes of his comrades. They are beginning to talk of this canvas--which is magnificent. The copy will be ready in a month. You could receive it in January. But if you permit me to send you the original, it cannot leave till after the Exhibition. I have conferred with Boulanger; though I pose for the copy, and though he wants to make as good a thing, he always says to me, "A copy, even done by the artist himself, is never worth the original."

Let me tell you that my mother, who will be on the Salon catalogue as having ordered the portrait, will be quite indifferent about having the copy or the original. (This is between ourselves.) You have time to answer me about this. The newspapers are beginning to speak of the portrait. The painters say of it, obligingly, what people said to me of "Séraphita." I did not think that Boulanger was capable of making such a picture. In style of art it is masterly. It has cost me two volumes which I might have made during the last sittings--which I had to give standing.

Whatever happens, let me confide to you a very bad feeling that I have: it is that I don't like my friends to judge me; I want them to believe that what I determine on doing is necessary. A sentiment discussed has no more existence than a power controlled. Why couple pettiness with greatness?

As I have added a second sheet to the single one which I intended to cover with ink and friendship, I will tell you that Werdet is horrible to me. Another deception about which I must keep silence, another wound I must receive, more calumnies to listen to calmly. There is no publisher possible for me so long as he is a publisher of the publishing _race_. I made every sacrifice for that man, and now he kills me, he refuses to join in taking measures for our common interests. I must be willing to lose thirty thousand more francs and be accused of having wrecked a man for whom I have used all my resources, put my silver in pawn, lent my signature, etc., and written fifteen 12mo volumes and six 8vo volumes in the course of two years! He's a sparrow's head on the body of a child!

I must now come to the selfishness of a man who works, not for himself, but for his creditors. This is the third trial of my life. After this, my experience ought to be complete. I am expecting Werdet on Sunday. If he has good sense matters may still be arranged. But he's a perfect child. After the third month I judged the man to whom I had intrusted the material interests of my works. But these are secrets one keeps to one's self. I hoped he would follow my advice; but no! he is like a child with a sparrow's head, and, over and above it all, as obstinate as a donkey. Moreover, he has the fatal defect of saying "yes" and doing the contrary, or else he forgets what he promises.

I am much distressed; all this will help to publish calumnies which Werdet is already assisting, for he finds it convenient to say that he fails because of me.

Well, adieu. Remember that I never read over my letters; I have barely time to write them between two proofs. If anything shocks you, pardon it. A thousand tender regards. Do not forget to remember me to all. Write me regularly. If you knew what one of your letters is to me in my life of toil, you would write out of charity.

TOURS, November 23, 1836.

After the great struggle that I have just maintained, and of which you have been sole confidant, I felt the need of returning to the _cara patria_, to rest like a child on the bosom of its mother.

If you find a gap in my letters, you must attribute it to what has just been taking place, of which you shall now be told in a few words. _All my debts are paid_; I mean those that harassed me. The prospect that promised good by a loan failed; everything about me became more serious, more inflamed. During this month writs, protests, sheriffs, crowded upon me; I truly think that a stout volume in-folio could be made of that literature of misfortune.

Then, when flames surrounded me on every side, when all had failed me on the side of succour, when no friend could or perhaps would save me, before renouncing France and going to find a country in Russia, in the Ukraine, I attempted a last effort; and that effort was crowned with a success which will redouble the bitterness of my enemies. God grant that you will divine all the agony that lies on this simple page, for then you will indeed feel pity for your poor moujik.

Nothing still shone on the horizon in this great shipwreck of all my ambitions but the _una fides_, the principle of which is _adoremus in æternum_.

I went to find a speculator named Victor Bohain, to whom I had done some very disinterested services. He immediately called in the man who had drawn Chateaubriand out of trouble, and a capitalist who has of late done a publishing business. Here is the agreement that came out of our four heads:--

1. They gave me fifty thousand francs to pay my urgent debts.

2. They secure me, for the first year, fifteen hundred francs a month. The second year, I may have three thousand monthly; and the fourth, four thousand, up to the fifteenth year, if I supply them with a certain number of volumes. We are in partnership for fifteen years. We are not author and publishers, but associates, partners. I bring to them the management of all my books made or to be made for fifteen years. My three associates agree to advance all costs and give me half the profits above the cost of the volume. My eighteen, twenty-four, or forty-eight thousand francs a year and the fifty thousand francs paid down are charged upon my profits.

Such is the basis of the treaty which delivers me forever from newspapers, publishers, and lawsuits; these gentlemen being substituted for me in all my rights as to management, sale, etc. They share the profits of my pen with me, like all other profits of sale. It is like a farm on shares, where my intellect is the soil, with this difference,--that I, the owner, have no costs or risks, and that I finger my profits without anxiety.

This agreement is a great deal more advantageous than that of M. de Chateaubriand, beside whom speculation places me; for I sell nothing of my future; whereas for one hundred thousand francs, and twelve thousand francs a year, rising to twenty-five thousand when he published anything, M. de Chateaubriand gave up everything.

I would not send you word of all this until the papers were signed. They were signed on Saturday, 19th, and I started for Tours the 20th; and now, after one day's rest, I send you this little scrap of a letter, scribbled in haste.

I have no doubt that between now and spring we shall employ the means I discovered of preventing piracy; and if I make a journey on that account, God and you alone know with what rapidity I shall go to Wierzchownia to tell you all that time, business, cares, and the narrow limits of a letter, have prevented me from putting, as yet, into my correspondence, smothered by so many causes!

I am very uneasy about you and yours. It is now an immense time since I have received any word from you. It has been a torture the more to add to all my other pains and distresses. You have moments of cruelty which make me doubt your friendship; then, when I fancy you may be ill, that your little Anna is a cause of anxiety, or that--that--etc, then my head decamps!

I was all the more obliged to come here because the National Guard, for whom I have ten more days of prison to do, worries me horribly. The grocers and gendarmes are at my heels. I have not been able to go to my dear Italian Opera for fear they should arrest me. At this moment I must finish "Illusions Perdues" in order to be done with Werdet, and the third _dizain_; also two works for the "Presse" and two for the "Figaro." After which, my pen is free, and my new treaty will go into execution. Now, as Werdet is much disposed to torment me, I must give him his devil of a volume as soon as may be.

I shall have a hard year, because, to reach a tolerable condition, I must complete what my pen already owes; and besides that, show a value of ten volumes to my associates. Until I do that, I shall be miserable.

After having killed my janissaries (creditors), I must, like Mahmoud, introduce a vast reform into my States. So here I am in my garret, having paid all, evacuated the rue Cassini, and keeping no one but Auguste and a boy for all service. I have resolved never to dine from home and to continue my monk's life for three years.

I left Paris so hurriedly that I have not brought with me the sacred seal, nor the autograph I wanted to send you; this will prove to you the perturbations of my triumph.

Three days hence I shall go, I think, to Rochecotte, to see the Duchesse de Dino, and the Prince de Talleyrand, whom I have never seen; and you know how I desire to see the witty turkey who plucked the eagle and made it tumble into the ditch of the house of Austria. As for Madame de Dino, I have already met her at Madame Appony's.