Chapter III

I have related the anecdote of the treasure buried by Toussaint Louverture, not for the pleasure of telling a strange story, but because it is connected with a dominant idea of Balzac – money. Certainly, nobody was less avaricious than the author of La Comédie Humaine, but his genius made him foresee the immense role that this metallic hero would play in art, more interesting for modern society than the Grandissons, the Desgrieux, the Oswalds, the Werthers, the Malek-Adhels, the Renés, the Laras, the Waverleys, the Quentin Durwards, etc.

Until then the story had been confined to the portrayal of a unique passion, love, but love in an ideal sphere and outside of the necessities and miseries of life. The personages of these entirely psychological recitals neither ate, nor drank, nor lodged, nor had an account with their tailor. They moved in an abstract environment like those of a tragedy. If they wished to travel, they put, without obtaining a passport, some handfuls of diamonds into the bottom of their pocket, and paid with this currency the postilions, who did not fail at each way station to have exhausted their horses; some chateaus of indistinct architecture received them at the end of their journeys, and with their blood they wrote to their beloveds interminable epistles dated from the tour of the North. The heroines, no less immaterial, resembled an aquatint of Angelica Kauffmann: a large straw hat, hair somewhat straightened in the English style, a long robe of white chiffon, held at the waist by an azure sash.

With his profound instinct for reality, Balzac understood that the modern life he wanted to portray was dominated by one grand fact, money, and, in La Peau de Chagrin, he had the courage to present a lover not only anxious to know if he had touched the heart of the one he loves, but also if he will have enough money to pay for the carriage in which he was bringing her home. This audacity is perhaps one of the greatest that one might permit oneself in literature, and it alone sufficed to immortalize Balzac. The consternation was profound, and the purists were indignant at this infraction of the laws of the genre; but all the young people who, going out in the evening to the home of some beautiful woman wearing white gloves ironed with gum elastic, had traversed Paris as dancers, on the tips of their shoes, fearing a spot of mud more than the crack of a pistol, commiserated, having shared these fears, like the anguishes of Valentin, who cared deeply about a hat that he could not renew and preserve despite his minute care. In moments of supreme misery, the discovery of a one hundred sou piece slid under the papers of the drawer, due to the discreet pity of Pauline, produced the effect of the most romantic theatrical strokes or of the intervention of a Peri in the Arabian tales. Who has not discovered during days of distress, forgotten in pants or in a vest, a few glorious coins appearing at just the right time and saving you from the calamity that youth fears the most: to fail to provide a beloved woman with a carriage, a bouquet, a small bench, a show program, a tip to the usherette or some trifles of this type?

Balzac excels in the portrayal of youth who are poor, as they almost always are, entering into their first struggles with life, prey to the temptation of pleasures and luxury, and experiencing profound miseries due to their high hopes. Valentin, Rastignac, Bianchon, d'Arthez, Lucien de Rubempré, Lousteau, have all sunk their beautiful teeth into the tough meat of the angry cow, fortifying food for robust stomachs, indigestible for weak stomachs; he does not lodge them, these beautiful young ones without a sou, in conventional garrets decorated with Persian rugs, with windows festooned with sweet peas and looking out on gardens; he does not have them eat "some simple dishes, prepared by the hand of nature," and does not dress them in luxurious garments, but in those that are proper and practical; he puts them in the boarding house of Mother Vauquer, or forces them to crouch under the sharp angle of a roof, he presses them into greasy tables at mean little restaurants, dressing them in black clothing with gray seams, and he is not afraid to send them to the pawn shop, if they still have, a rare occurrence, their father's watch.

Oh Corinne, you who allows, upon Cape Misèna, your snowy arm to dangle across your ivory lyre, while the son of Albion, draped in a superb new coat, and shod in his beloved perfectly polished boots, reflects on you and listens to you in an elegant pose, Corinne, what would you have said to such heroes? They have however one small quality that was lacking in Oswald, they live, and of a life so robust that it seems like one has encountered them one thousand times; also Pauline, Delphine de Nucingen, the princess of Cadignan, Madame de Bargeton, Coralie, Esther, are madly infatuated with them.

At the time that the first novels signed by Balzac appeared, one did not have, to the same degree as today, the preoccupation, or, better said, the fever for gold. California had not been discovered; there existed perhaps several leagues of railway whose future one hardly suspected, and that one saw as a kind of conduit that led up to the Russian mountains, but that had fallen into disuse; the public ignored, so to speak, "business," and only bankers gambled at the Bourse. This movement of capital, this flow of gold, these calculations, these figures, this importance given to money in works that one still took as simple romantic fictions and not as serious portraits of life, singularly shocked the subscribers to the reading rooms, and critics added up the total sums spent or staked by the author. The millions of father Grandet led to arithmetic discussions, and serious people, troubled by the enormity of the totals, doubted the financial abilities of Balzac, very great abilities nevertheless, and recognized later. Stendhal said with a sort of disdainful smugness, "Before writing, I always read three or four pages of the Civil Code to give me the tone." Balzac, who understood money so well, also discovered poems and dramas in the Code: Le Contrat de Mariage, where he places in opposition, in the persons of Matthias and of Solonnet, the ancient and the modern notary, has all of the interest of the most eventful comedy of the cloak and sword. The bankruptcy in Grandeur et Décadence de César Birotteau makes you quiver like the story of an empire's fall; the conflict of the château and the cottage in Les Paysans offers just as much adventure as the siege of Troy. Balzac knows how to give life to the soil, to a house, to a heritage, to a capital, and in fact to heroes and heroines whose adventures are devoured with anxious avidity.

These new elements introduced into the novel were not appreciated at first; the philosophical analyses, the detailed character portraits, the minute descriptions that seemed to have the future in view, were regarded as unpleasantly lengthy, and quite often one skipped them to move on to the story. Later, one recognized that the goal of the author was not to weave intrigues that were more or less well-plotted, but to portray society in its entirety, from the summit to the base, with its characters and its components, and that one will admire in it the immense variety of these types. Is it not Alexandre Dumas who said of Shakespeare: "Shakespeare, the man who has created the most after God?"; the words might be even more justly applied to Balzac; never, indeed, did so many living creatures issue from one human brain.

At this time (1836), Balzac had conceived the plan for his Comédie Humaine and possessed the full awareness of his genius. He adroitly connected the works that had already been published to his general concept and found them a place in the categories that had been philosophically outlined. Some novels of pure fantasy did not fit in very well, despite the connections that were added afterwards; but these are details that are lost in the immensity of the ensemble, like ornaments in a differing style on a grand edifice.

I have said that Balzac worked laboriously, and, being an obstinate smelter, rejected ten or twelve times from the crucible the metal that had not perfectly filled the mold; like Bernard Palissy, he would have burned the furniture, the flooring and up through the beams of his house without regret to maintain the fire in his furnace; the most challenging necessities would never make him deliver a work on which he had not put the utmost effort, and he gave admirable examples of literary conscientiousness. His corrections, so numerous that they were almost equivalent to different editions on the same idea, were charged to his account by the editors who were responsible for earnings, and his compensation, often modest for the value of the work and the pain it had cost him, were diminished in proportion. The promised sums did not always arrive on time, and to sustain what he laughingly called his floating debt, Balzac displayed prodigious resources of mind and a level of activity that would have completely absorbed the life of an ordinary man. But, when seated before his table in his friar's frock, in the midst of the nocturnal silence, he found himself confronted with blank sheets illuminated by the glow of seven candles, concentrated by a green shade, in taking pen in hand he forgot everything, and thus commenced a struggle more terrible than the conflict of Jacob with the angel, that of form and idea. In these nightly battles, from which in the morning he would issue broken but victorious, when the extinguished hearth chilled the atmosphere of his room once again, his head steamed and his body exhaled a visible fog like the body of a horse in wintertime. Sometimes only a single phrase occupied an entire evening; it was considered, reconsidered, twisted, kneaded, pounded, stretched, shortened, written in one hundred different ways, and, bizarrely, the necessary, complete, form, would not present itself until after the exhaustion of the approximate forms; without doubt the metal often flowed from a fuller and thicker hose, but there are very few pages in Balzac that stayed identical to the first draft. His manner of proceeding was this: when he had for a long time borne and lived a subject, with writing that was rapid, jumbled, blotted, nearly hieroglyphic, he would outline a sort of scenario in a few pages, which he would send to the printer and which was returned on placards, that is to say as isolated columns in the middle of large sheets. He read these placards carefully, which already gave to his embryo of work that impersonal character that the manuscript does not have, and he applied to this rough sketch the high critical faculty that he possessed, acting as if he were another person. He worked on something; approving or disapproving, he kept or corrected, but mostly added. Lines issuing from the beginning, the middle or the end of phrases, were directed toward the margins, to the right, to the left, to the top, to the bottom, leading to some developments, to insertions, to interpolations, to epithets, to adverbs. At the end of some hours of work, one would have called his sheet a bouquet of fireworks drawn by a child. From the primitive text shot forth rockets of style which exploded on all sides. Then there were simple crosses, crosses recrossed like a coat of arms, stars, suns, Arab or Roman numerals, Greek or French letters, every imaginable sign of reference to mix with the scratchings. Some strips of paper, fastened with sealing wafers, stuck on with pins, added to the insufficient margins, striped with lines of fine characters to conserve space, themselves full of crossings out, because the correction that had barely been made had itself already been corrected. The printed placard nearly disappeared in what appeared to be a cabalistic book of spells, which the typographers passed from hand to hand, each not wanting to work for more than an hour on Balzac.

The following day, they sent back the placards with the corrections made, and already expanded by half.

Balzac resumed work, always amplifying, adding a trait, a detail, a description, an observation on manners, a characteristic word, a phrase for effect, bringing the form closer to the idea, always moving closer to his internal outline, choosing like a painter among three or four contours the definitive line. Often this terrible work ended with that intensity of attention of which he alone was capable, as he recognized that a thought had been poorly expressed, that one incident predominated, that a figure that he wished to be secondary for general effect deviated from his plan, and with one stroke of the pen he would courageously destroy the result of four or five nights of labor. He was heroic in these circumstances.

Six, seven, and sometimes ten proofs were returned with crossings out, rewritten, without satisfying the author's desire for perfection. I have seen at Les Jardies, on the shelves of a library composed of only his works, each different proof of the same work bound in a separate volume from the first sketch to the definitive book; the comparison of Balzac's thought at these diverse stages offers a very curious study and contains profitable literary lessons. Near these volumes a sinister looking book, bound in black morocco leather, with neither clasps nor gilding, drew my attention: "Take it," Balzac said to me, "it is an unpublished work which may have some value." Its title was Comptes Mélancoliques; it contained lists of debts, due dates of bills to be paid, notices of purveyors and all that menacing paperwork that is legalized by a stamp. This volume, with a kind of mocking contrast, was placed beside the Contes Drolatiques, "of which it is not a continuation," added the author of La Comédie Humaine with a laugh.

Despite this laborious method of execution, Balzac produced a great deal, thanks to his superhuman will supplemented by the temperament of an athlete and the seclusion of a monk. For two or three months in succession, when he had some important work in progress, he labored sixteen or eighteen hours out of twenty-four; he granted to his animal being only six hours of a heavy, feverish, convulsive sleep, encouraged by the torpor of digestion after a hastily taken meal. He would disappear so completely, his best friends would lose all trace; but he would soon return from underground, waving a major work above his head, laughing his hearty laugh, applauding himself with a perfect innocence and according himself the praise that he demanded from no one else. No author was more unconcerned than him regarding reviews and advertising upon the release of his books; he allowed his reputation to grow by itself, without putting his hand to it, and he never courted journalists. Indeed other things consumed his time: he delivered his copy, took his money and fled to distribute it to his creditors who often waited in the journal's courtyard, like, for example, the masons of Les Jardies.

Sometimes, in the morning, he would meet me breathless, exhausted, giddy from the fresh air, like Vulcan escaping from his forge, and he would fall upon a couch; his long vigil had left him starving and he would blend sardines with butter and make a sort of paste which reminded him of the rillettes of Tours, and which he would spread on bread. This was his favorite dish; he had no sooner eaten than he fell asleep, begging me to awaken him after one hour. Without regard for his admonition, I would respect this well-earned sleep, and I silenced all of the whispers in the house. When Balzac awoke of his own accord, and he saw that the evening's twilight was diffusing its gray tints across the sky, he would leap up from his couch and heap me with abuse, calling me traitor, thief, assassin: I made him lose ten thousand francs, because awake he could have had the idea for a novel that would have earned this sum (without the reprints). I was the cause of the gravest catastrophes and unimaginable disorders. I had made him miss meetings with bankers, editors, duchesses; he would not be able to repay his debts on time; this fatal sleep would cost millions. But I was already used to these prodigious betting systems that Balzac, starting from the lowest figure, would push excessively to the most monstrous sums, and I easily consoled myself by seeing the beautiful colors characteristic in Tours reappear on his rested cheeks.

Balzac lived then at Chaillot, rue des Batailles, a house from which one found an admirable view of the course of the Seine, the Champ de Mars, the École Militaire, the dome of the Invalides, a large proportion of Paris and further away the hills of Meudon. He had arranged there an interior that was luxurious enough, because he knew that in Paris nobody believed in an impoverished talent, and that perception often leads to reality. It was during this period that one hears of his tendencies toward elegance and dandyism, the famous blue coat with solid gold buttons, the walking stick with a turquoise head, the appearances at the Bouffes and at the Opera, and the more frequent visits into society where his sparkling flair made him much sought after, visits that were useful for more than one reason, for he met there more than one model. It was not easy to penetrate into his home, which was better guarded than the garden of the Hespérides. Two or three passwords were required. Balzac, for fear they might be divulged, changed them often. I remember these ones: to the porter one said: "Prune season has arrived," and he would let you cross the threshold; to the servant who ran to the stairs at the sound of the bell, it was necessary to whisper: "I bring lace from Belgium," and if you could assure the bedroom valet that "Madame Bertrand was in good health," you were finally introduced.

This childish behavior very much amused Balzac; it was necessary to ward off unwanted people and those who were even more disagreeable.

In La Fille aux Yeux d'Or is found a description of the salon in the rue des Batailles. It is of the most scrupulous fidelity, and one will not be displeased to see the lion's den painted by himself. There is not a detail to add or to subtract.

"Half of the sitting room described a delicately graceful circular line, opposite of which the other half was perfectly square, in the middle of which shined a fireplace of white marble and gold. One entered through a side door concealed by a rich tapestry and which faced a window. The horseshoe-shaped section of the room was decorated with a real Turkish divan, that is to say with a mattress placed on the ground, but a mattress as large as a bed, a divan fifty feet in circumference covered in white cashmere, embellished with tufts of black and poppy-colored silk, arranged in a diamond pattern; the back of this immense bed was elevated several inches higher by the numerous cushions that enriched it further by their stylish compatibility. This sitting room was hung with a red fabric on which was mounted a muslin from the Indies that was fluted like a Corinthian column by piping that alternated between hollow and round and stopped at the top and bottom with a band of poppy-colored fabric, on which were drawn some black arabesques. Under the muslin, the poppy color became rose, an amorous color that repeated in the window curtains, which were of muslin from the Indies lined with rose-colored taffeta and ornamented with poppy and black fringes. Six silver arms each supporting two candles were attached to these wall coverings at equal distances, to illuminate the divan. The ceiling, from the center of which hung a lantern of matte silver, sparkled with whiteness, and the molding was gilded. The carpet resembled an Oriental shawl, it presented the designs and recalled the poetry of Persia, where the hands of slaves had created it. The furniture was covered in white cashmere, set off by black and poppy-colored accents. The clock, the candelabras, all were of white marble and gold. The only table in the room had a cashmere covering; elegant jardinières contained roses of every type, and white or red flowers."

I can add that upon the table was placed a magnificent writing desk in gold and malachite, the gift, without a doubt, of some admiring stranger.

It was with a childlike satisfaction that Balzac showed me this sitting room set in a square salon, and by necessity leaving empty spaces at the angles of the circular half. When I had admired the stylish splendors of this room sufficiently, splendors whose luxury would seem less today, Balzac opened a secret door and made me enter a shadowy passage that led around the semicircle; at one of the corners was placed a narrow iron bed, a kind of working camp bed; in the other, there was a table "with everything that is necessary to write," as M. Scribe said in his stage directions: it was there that Balzac took refuge to be free of all intrusions and all investigations.

Many thicknesses of fabric and paper padded the wall to block all noise from both sides. To be sure that no sounds could pass into the salon from outside, Balzac asked me to return to the room and shout as loudly as I could; one could still hear a little; it was necessary to add a few sheets of gray paper to entirely block the sound. These mysterious actions intrigued me immensely and I demanded to know their motivation. Balzac gave me a reason that Stendhal would have approved, but modern prudery prevents my repeating. The fact is that he was already developing in his mind the scene of Henry de Marsay and Paquita, and he was anxious to know if the cries of the victim in the salon could reach the ears of the other inhabitants of the house.

He gave me a splendid dinner in the same sitting room, for which he lit with his own hand all of the candles on the silver arms, as well as the lantern and the candelabras. The guests were the Marquis de B. and the painter L. B.: although very sober and abstemious by habit, Balzac from time to time did not fear to "indulge in a little good cheer"; he ate with a jovial gourmandism that inspired the appetite, and he drank in the manner of Pantagruel. Four bottles of the white wine of Vouvray, one of the headiest known, did not affect his powerful brain and gave only a greater sparkle to his gaiety. What good stories he told us at dessert! Rabelais, Beroalde de Verville, Eutrapel, le Pogge, Straparole, the Queen of Navarre and all of the doctors of the happy science would have recognized in him a disciple and a master!

Characteristic feature! At this splendid feast provided by Chevet there was no bread! But when one has excess then what is the point of necessities?

After dinner, our Amphytrion led us to the Italians in a superb presentation. The evening was already getting late, but Balzac did not want to miss "the descent of the staircase" spectacle, which, according to him, was eminently instructive.

Weighed down by the good food and fine wines, enveloped in the warm atmosphere of the room, I should say that the three of us slept the sleep of the just and only awakened to offer our final compliments.

Balzac was quite amused by this somnolent trio.

In the same apartment on the rue des Batailles, whose salon I described using Balzac's own words, I recall having seen a magnificent sketch of Louis Boulanger after a bas-relief of Léda and the Swan attributed to Michelangelo. It was the only picture that it contained, because the author of La Comédie Humaine did not yet have the taste for paintings and curiosities that he would later develop, and his luxury then, as we have seen, consisted more of sumptuousness than of art. His painter was Girodet. Some of his first stories show the influence of this admiration which led me to tease him with jibes that he accepted with good grace.