Part 41

I have just been to the post-office to see if any one had had the idea to write to me _poste restante_. There I found a letter from the kind Countess Loulou [Louise Turheim], who loves you and whom you love, and in whose letter your name is mentioned in a melancholy sentence which drew tears from my eyes; for, in the species of nostalgia under which I am, imagine what it was to me to recall the Landstrasse and the Gemeindegasse! I sat down on a bench before a café and stayed there for nearly an hour, with my eyes fixed on the Duomo, fascinated by all that letter recalled; and the incidents of my stay in Vienna passed before me, one by one, in their truth, their marble candour. Ah! what do I not owe--not to her who causes such memories, but--to this frail paper that awakens them! You must remember that I am without news of you for three months, by my own fault. You know why. But you will never know whence this thirst for making a fortune comes to me.

I am going to write to the good chanoinesse without telling her all she has done by her letter, for such things are difficult to express, even to that kind German woman. But she spoke of you with such soul that I can tell her that what in her is friendship in me is worship that can never end. She says so prettily that _one_ of my friends--not the _veritable_ one, but the _other_--is in Venice; truly, she moved me to tears. What perpetual grief to be always so near you in thought and so distant in reality! Ah, dear, the Duomo was very sublime to me on the 5th of June at eleven o'clock! I lived there a whole year.

Well, adieu. I leave to-morrow, and in ten days I shall answer all your letters, treasures amassed during this dreadful journey. May God guard you and yours, and forget not the poor exile who loves you well.

AUX JARDIES, SÈVRES, July 26, 1838.

I receive to-day your number 44, and I answer it, together with the three letters I found awaiting me in the rue des Batailles a month ago.

In the first place, dear, you must know that the "Veuve Durand" no longer exists. The poor woman was killed by the little journals which pushed their baseness towards me so far as to betray a secret which to any men of honour would have been sacred. So now I am established for always at Sèvres, and my hovel is called "Les Jardies;" therefore my address now is and long will be: "M. de Balzac, aux Jardies, à Sèvres."

You predicted truly in your last letter; I ought to pass a month here doing nothing but turning round and round to settle myself upon my muck-heap. I am still in the midst of plasterers, masons, diggers, painters, and other workmen. I arrived quite full of that book which does not exist, which has never been done, and which I desire to do, and I found the most foolish mercantile hindrances; the two volumes of "La Femme Supérieure," taken from the "Presse," lack a few pages before they can be sold as a book, which I must fill out by adding the beginning of "La Torpille." I found the contractor for my house at bay; I found the hounds of my debts awaiting me, with annoyances of all kinds. I have enough to do for a month in goings and comings, etc. I took a week to rest; my journey back was very fatiguing; I risked an ophthalmia on the Mont Cenis; having left the great heat of Lombardy, I came, in a few hours, into twenty degrees below freezing on the summit of the Alps, with snow and wind.

August 7.

Fifteen days' interruption, during which this letter has been constantly under my eyes, on my table, without my being able to tell you that the wind on the Mont Cenis drove a fine dust into my eyes, which pricked them with blinding particles. I know that my letters, which tell you my life, give you as much pleasure as yours give me. Only, your words sustain and refresh me; whereas mine communicate to you my vertigoes, my worries, my disappointments, my lassitudes, my terrors, my toils. Your existence is calm, gentle, and religious; it rolls slowly along, like a stream on its gravelly bed between two verdant shores. Mine is a torrent, all noise and rocks. I am ashamed of the exchange, in which I bring you only troubles, and obtain from you the treasures of peace. You are patient; I am in revolt. You have not understood the last cry I uttered, at Milan. I had, there, a double nostalgia, and I had not, against the more dreadful of the two, the resource, horrible as it is, of my struggles here. Here, moral and physical combat, debts, and literature have something exciting, bewildering. See it yourself; I am interrupted in a sentence in the middle of the night, and I cannot resume that sentence for perhaps two weeks.

I have a world of things to tell you. In the first place, remove from your tranquil life a trouble like that of procuring my hookah. Just fancy! all that came of my ignorance! I thought you lived near Moscow, and that Moscow was the principal market for such things. That was all,--except that I wanted to receive from you an article which is, they say, a _chasse-chagrin_. But if it causes you the slightest trouble it will be painful to me to see it.

Among the thousand and one things that I have had to do I must put in the front line a negotiation about the "Mariage de Joseph Prudhomme," with a theatre that agrees to give me twenty thousand francs on the day the play is read; and you can imagine what thirst a man has for twenty thousand francs when he is building a house, and how he must work to obtain them!

I am, therefore, in spite of the doctor's orders forbidding me to live in freshly plastered rooms, at Les Jardies. My house is situated on the slope of the mountain, or hill, of Saint-Cloud, half-way up, backing on the king's park and looking south. To the west I see the whole of Ville d'Avray; to the south I look down upon the road to Ville d'Avray, which passes along the foot of the hills where the woods of Versailles begin; and easterly I overlook Sèvres and rest my eyes upon a vast horizon where lies Paris, its smoky atmosphere blurring the edges of the famous slopes of Meudon and Bellevue; beyond which I see the plains of Montrouge and the Orléans highroad which leads to Tours. It is all strangely magnificent, with ravishing contrasts. The depths of the valley of Ville d'Avray have all the freshness, shade, and verdure of the Swiss valleys, adorned with charming buildings. The horizon on the other side shines on its distant lines like the open sea. Woods and forests everywhere. To the north is the royal residence. At the end of my property is the station of the railway from Paris to Versailles, the embankment of which runs through the valley of Ville d'Avray without injury to any part of my view.

So, for ten sous and in ten minutes I can go from Les Jardies to the Madeleine in the heart of Paris! Whereas at Chaillot, and in the rue Cassini it took an hour and forty sous at least. Therefore, thanks to that circumstance, Les Jardies will never be a folly, and its value will be some day doubled. I have about one acre of land, ending, towards the south, in a terrace of one hundred and fifty feet and surrounded by walls. At present nothing is planted in it, but this autumn I shall make this little corner of the earth an Eden of plants and shrubs and fragrance. In Paris or its environs anything can be had for money; so, I shall get magnolias twenty years old, _tiyeuilles_ of sixteen, poplars of twelve years, birches, etc., transplanted with balls of roots, and white Chasselas grapes, brought in boxes, that I may gather them next year. Oh! how admirable civilization is! To-day my land is bare as my hand. In the month of May it will be surprising. I must buy two more acres of ground about me, to have a vegetable garden and fruit, etc. That will cost some thirty thousand francs, and I shall try to earn them this winter.

The house is a parrot's perch; there is one room on each floor, and there are three floors. On the ground-floor a dining-room and salon; on the first floor a bedroom and dressing-room; on the second floor a study, where I am writing to you at this moment in the middle of the night. The whole is flanked by a staircase that somewhat resembles a ladder. All round the building is a covered gallery to walk in, which rises to the first floor. It is supported on brick pilasters. This little pavilion, Italian in appearance, is painted brick-colour, with stone courses at the four corners, and the appendix in which is the well of the staircase is painted red also. There is room in it only for me.

Sixty feet in the rear, towards the park of Saint-Cloud, are the offices, composed, on the ground-floor, of a kitchen, scullery, pantry, stable, coach-house, and harness-room, bath-room, woodhouse, etc. Above is a large apartment which I can let if I choose, and above that again are servants' rooms and a room for a friend, [He says elsewhere that this building was the peasant's house, bought with the land.] I have a supply of water equal to the famous Ville d'Avray water, for it comes from the same source. There is no furniture here as yet; but all that I own in Paris will be brought here, little by little. I have, just now, my mother's old cook and her husband to serve me. But for at least a month longer I shall live in the midst of masons, painters and other workmen; and I am working, or am going to work to pay them. When the interior is finished I will describe it to you.[1]

I shall stay here until my fortune is made; and I am already so pleased with it that after I have obtained the capital of my tranquillity I believe that I shall end my days here in peace, bidding farewell, without flourish of trumpets, to my hopes, my ambitions--to all! The life that you lead, that life of country solitude, has always had great charms for me. I wanted more, because I had nothing at all, and in making to one's self illusions it costs a young man no more to make them grand. To-day my want of success in everything has wearied my character--I do not say my heart, which will hope ever. That I may have a horse, fruits in abundance, the material costs of living secured, such is my place in the sunshine, obtained, not paid for, but sketched out. I pay the interest on capital, instead of paying rent. That is the change of front I have performed. I am in my own home, instead of being in the house of an oppressive landlord. My debt and my money anxieties remain the same; but my courage has redoubled under the lessening of my desires.

To-morrow, _cara_, I will continue my chatter and send it to you this week.

[Footnote 1: See Théophile Gautier's description of that interior; "Memoir of Balzac," pp. 224, 225.--TR.]

Wednesday, August 8.

There are many things in your last four letters to which I ought to reply; but they are locked up in Paris, and before I can get them too much time will have passed. I will answer in another letter, quickly following this.

But among other things that struck me in them was the extreme melancholy of your religious ideas. You write to me as if I believed in nothing, as if you wished to send me to La Grande-Chartreuse, or as if you meant to say to me, "Earth no longer interests me." You cannot think how many inductions, possibly false, I draw from that state of mind; but (and you tell me so with sincerity) you express to me what you feel; otherwise you would be false and distrustful when you should be all truth with a friend like me. Even if I displease you, I must say to you with confidence that I am not satisfied, and I would rather see you otherwise. To go thus to God is to renounce the world; and I do not comprehend why you should renounce it when you have so many ties that bind you to it, so many duties to accomplish. None but feeble souls will take that course. The reflections that I make on this subject are not of a nature to be communicated to you. They are, moreover, very selfish, and concern only me. Like those that I expressed in Milan, they would displease you, because, as you say, they trouble you; and for those my heart sinks down. I see clearly that happiness will never come to me; and who would have no bitterness in thinking that thought? I was very unhappy in my youth, but Madame de Berny balanced all by an absolute devotion, which was understood to its full extent only when the grave had seized its prey. Yes, I was spoilt by that angel; I prove my gratitude by striving to perfect that which she sketched out in me.

I meant to speak to you of new vexations; but I ought to be silent. In one of my letters, I don't know which, there is a promise that I made to us both not to speak to you again of my troubles, to write to you only at the moments when all looked rosy, and to tell my jeremiads to the passing clouds, going northward. When you see them look gray they are telling them to you. How many black confidences have I not smothered! There is many a corner that I hide from you; and it is those corners that would amaze you could you penetrate them and find--behind so many agitations, preoccupations, toils, travels, "inward dissipations," as you say--a fixed idea, daily more intense, which surely has little virtue since it cannot remove mountains, that miracle promised to faith! Often, friends have seen me turn pale at the loud cracking of a whip and rush to the window. They ask me what the matter is; and I sit down, palpitating, and saddened for days. Such fevers, such starts, shaken by inward convulsions, break me, crush me. There are days when I fancy that my fate is being decided, that something happy or unhappy will occur to me, is preparing, and I not there! These are the follies of poets, comprehended by them alone. There are days when I take real life and all about me for a dream; so much is this present life, for me, against nature. But now all that will cease amid these fields, which always calm me.

Have I secured material existence, beneath which I would fain compress the life of the heart that I see is lost and useless, in spite of the ten good years that still remain to me?--for my passion has a will of which you can form to yourself no idea. It must have all or nothing. As to that, I am as I was on the day I left college. I am much to be pitied, and I will not be pitied. I have never done anything to disprove the absurd and silly lies of society which give me the good graces of charming women, all of which are derived from the coquetries of Madame de Castries and a few others. I have accepted the accusation of self-conceit; I am willing that absurdity on absurdity should accumulate about me to hide the true man, who has but one sentiment, one ideal!

I am at this moment-engaged in doing a part of my book on love, which will be detached; I want to paint well the soul of a young girl before the invasion of that love (which will lead her into a convent), and I have thought it true to make her abhor the Carmelites (to whom she will eventually return) at the beginning of life, when she longs for the world and its pleasures. As she has been eight years in the convent, she arrives in Paris as much a stranger to it as Montesquieu's Persian; and by the power of that idea I shall make her judge and depict the modern Paris, instead of employing the dramatic method of novels. That is a novel idea, and I am putting it into execution.

Nevertheless, it is very difficult for me to resume my life of labour, getting up at midnight and working till five in the afternoon. This is the first morning that I have passed without dozing between six and eight o'clock. Six months' interruption have made ravages; there are forces that come from habit, and when habit is broken, farewell forces. I hope to continue working for three or four months, in order to repair the breaches caused by absence, and, if my plays succeed, perhaps I shall have earned, over and above my debts, enough capital for the bread and water on my table, and my flowers and fruit. The rest may come, perhaps, hereafter.

_Addio, cara_; I could not tell you how my comic-opera house, that cottage they push forward on the stage and where lovers give themselves a rendezvous, has awakened the housekeeping and bourgeois instincts in me. One could be so happy here! All the advantages of Paris, and none of its disadvantages! I am here as at Saché, with the possibility of being in Paris in fifteen minutes--just time enough to reflect on what one is going to do there.

_Mon Dieu!_ have you read in the "Lettres d'un Voyageur" the part about Moulin-Joli? the engraving of which I saw in _her_ house without then knowing the terrible passage to which it gave rise, terrible to ill-mated beings. Well, Les Jardies are Moulin-Joli without the woman who engraves. If you do not know this history, read it. George Sand never related anything as well.

I send you many caressing homages and all those flowers of the soul which are so exactly the same that I fear they bore you. Many kind remembrances to those about you. I cannot send you an autograph, unfortunately; I had one of Manzoni for you, but they have just lit my fire with it! This is the second time something precious has been burned up here.

The newspapers have told you of the deplorable end of the poor Duchesse d'Abrantès. She has ended like the Empire. Some day I will explain her to you,--some good evening at Wierzchownia.

I can now reply to your bucolics on your beautiful flowers and turf by idyls on my own; but alas! there's a difference in quantity. You have a thousand acres, and I have a thousand square feet!

All affectionate and good things. Do not neglect to tell me about your health, your beauty, your incidents in the depths of the Ukraine; you will do so if you form the least idea of the value I attach to the most minute particular.

AUX JARDIES, September 17, 1838.

Since I last wrote I have done nothing but work desperately; for one must conquer during the last years, or bury one's self under a barren success.

I have just written for the "Presse" the beginning of "La Torpille," and the "Presse" would not have it. I have written the beginning of "Le Curé de Village," the religious pendant of the philosophical book you know as "Le Médecin de campagne." I have written the preface to two volumes about to be published, containing "La Femme Supérieure," "La Maison Nucingen," and "La Torpille." I have written two volumes in 8vo, entitled, "Qui Terre a, Guerre a;" and finally, I have written for the "Constitutionnel" the end of "Le Cabinet des Antiques," under the title of "Les Rivalités de Province."

You will understand from that, _cara_, that I have been unable to write you even two lines in the midst of this avalanche of ideas and labour.

Nothing of all that gives me a sou. I had prepared, to save me, certain dramas, and they are all begun; but I wish to go to the _grand_, and I am discontented; so much so that, seeing how ill I do things while I see such fine things to do, I have abandoned my attempts. And yet, my salvation is in the theatre. A success there would give me a hundred thousand francs. Two successes would clear me, and two successes are only matters of intelligence and toil,--nothing else.

At the moment of present writing I have begun a drama in three acts, entitled, "La Gina." It is Othello the other way. La Gina will be a female Othello. The scene is in Venice. I _must_ essay the stage. Proposals are not lacking to me. I am offered in one direction twenty thousand francs first payment for fifteen acts; and I have the fifteen acts in my head, but not on paper.

Well, all the manuscripts are at the printing-office; proofs are rolling; the printers will not beat me in rapidity, for it is not the mechanical invention with its thousand arms that gets on fastest, it is the brain of your poor friend!

September 18.

The time to turn the page, and I find "La Gina" too difficult. Reasons have killed it. In "Othello" Iago is the pillar which supports the conception; I have only a money motive, instead of the motive of hidden love. I found my personage inadmissible. A vaudeville writer would not have been stopped by that difficulty. So I return to a former play, imagined some time ago, called "Richard Cœur-d'Éponge." I will tell you about it if I do it.

My house does not get on. I have the walls of the enclosure still to do, and much to the interior. It is alarming. I have found a source--not of fortune! only clear water.

October 1.

I am into money matters up to my neck. It is demoralizing. I have not had two hours to myself for reflection since I wrote you the above few lines. Do not be vexed with me. I need calmer times to relate to you a life like mine. I must say mass every second, and ring it. I have had the hope of buying out my publishers, who are ruining me, and I have just spent two weeks in Paris in crushing, killing efforts. You must remember that I have no help or succour, but, on the other hand, infinite obstacles, without number. If I cannot overcome them I shall go to you for six months' rest at Wierzchownia, where I can write my plays in peace before returning here. Many persons whom I love and esteem advise this, telling me to "go somewhere." But as for me, I cannot abandon a battlefield.

The two volumes containing "La Femme Supérieure," "La Maison Nucingen," and "La Torpille" are out.

October 10.

For the last seven years or so, whenever I have read a book in which Napoleon was mentioned, if I found any new and striking thought said by him, I put it at once into a cook-book that never leaves my desk and lies on that little book you know of, which will belong to you--alas, soon, perhaps--in which I put my subjects and my first ideas. In a day of distress (one of my recent days), being without money, I looked to see how many of those thoughts there were. I found five hundred; hence, the finest book of the century; I mean the publication of the "Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon." I sold the work to a former hosier, who is the big-wig of his arrondissement, and wants the cross of the Legion of honour, which he can have by dedicating this book to Louis-Philippe. It is about to appear. Get it. You will have one of the finest things of the day; the soul, the thought of that great man, gathered through much research by your moujik, Honoré de Balzac. Nothing has made me laugh so much as this idea of getting the cross for a sort of grocer, who may perhaps recommend himself to your Grace by his title of administrator of a charitable enterprise. Napoleon will have brought me four thousand francs and the hosier may get a hundred thousand. I had such great distrust of myself that I would not work my own idea. To the hosier, both fame and profit. But you will recognize the hand of your serf in the dedication to Louis-Philippe. May the shade of Napoleon forgive me![1]

[Footnote 1: This book, extremely rare to-day, appeared at the close of the year 1838, without the name of any publisher, under the following title: "Maximes et Pensées de Napoléon, recueillies par J. L. Gaudy jeune. Paris. 1838."]

October 15.

I receive to-day your answer to my last letter. Never before did it happen to me to receive a reply to one letter while I was writing another. This phenomenon takes place now at the end of five years, during which time I have written to you once a fortnight at least. To tell you all the whys and wherefores belongs to the domain of _talk_, not to that of epistolary conversation.