Chapter IV

One of the dreams of Balzac was of a heroic and devoted friendship, two souls, two courages, two intelligences blended into the same will. Pierre and Jaffier of Otway's Venice Preserv'd had impressed him greatly and he spoke of them many times. L'Histoire des Treize is nothing but this idea enlarged and complicated: one powerful unit composed of multiple beings acting unquestioningly toward an accepted and suitable goal. We know what gripping, mysterious and terrible effects he has drawn from this starting point in Ferragus, La Duchesse de Langeais, and La Fille aux Yeux d'Or; but real life and the intellectual life were not as clearly separated for Balzac as they were for certain authors, and his creations followed him outside of his study. He wanted to form an association after the fashion of that which united Ferragus, Montriveau, Ronquerolles, and their companions. Only it was not done in such bold strokes; a certain number of friends were to lend each other aid and relief at all times, and to work according to their strengths for the success or the fortune of the individual who would be selected, with the understanding that that person should in turn work for the others. Very much infatuated with his project, Balzac recruited some associates whom he put in contact with each other but took precautions as if it were a political society or a meeting of Carbonari. This needless mystery amused him considerably, and he pursued his activities with the utmost seriousness. When their numbers were complete, he assembled the adepts and made known the goal of the society. It need not be said that everyone was in agreement, and that the statutes were approved with enthusiasm. No one more than Balzac possessed the ability to agitate, to overexcite, to intoxicate the coolest heads, the most considered intellects. He had an eloquence that was overflowing, tumultuous, rousing, that carried you off: no objection was possible with him; he would immediately drown you in such a deluge of words that you were compelled to be silent. Besides he had an answer for everything; then he would cast upon you glances that were so sharp, so brilliant, so full of a mysterious power that he would infuse you with his own desire.

The association which counted among its members G. de C., L. G., L. D., J. S., Merle, who was called Handsome Merle, myself, and a few others who it is not necessary to name, was called Le Cheval Rouge. Why Le Cheval Rouge, you are going to say, rather than Le Lion d'Or or La Croix de Malte? The first meeting of the members took place at a restaurant on the Quai de l'Entrepôt, at the end of the Pont de la Tournelle, whose sign was a carrier’s horse, and this had given Balzac the idea of that somewhat bizarre, unintelligible, and cabalistic designation.

When it was necessary to organize a project, to agree on certain steps, Balzac, elected by acclamation grandmaster of the order, sent by one of the members to each horse (that was the slang name used by the members among themselves) a letter on which was drawn a small red horse with the words: "Stable, at such and such a day, at such and such a location”; the place changed each time, out of fear of awakening curiosity or suspicion. In the society, although we all knew each other and for a long time for the most part, we were to avoid speaking to each other or approaching each other except in the most distant manner to avoid any idea of complicity. Often, in the middle of a salon, Balzac would pretend to meet me for the first time, and by blinks of the eye and facial expressions such as actors make in their asides, he would call my attention to his finesse and seem to say to me: "See how well I play my game!"

What was the goal of Le Cheval Rouge? Did it wish to change the government, set forth a new religion, found a philosophical school, master men, seduce women? Far less than that. It sought to take control of the newspapers, take control of the theatres, sit in the seats of the Academy, receive an array of decorations, and end modestly as a peer of France, minister and millionaire. All this was easy, according to Balzac; we had only to work in harmony with each other, and by such modest ambition we should prove well the moderation of our characters. This devil of a man had such a powerful vision that he described to each of us, in the most minute details, the splendid and glorious life that the association would procure for us. As we listened to him, we believed ourselves already leaning, at the heart of a beautiful mansion, against the white marble of the fireplace, red ribbons around our necks, a shining badge over our hearts, receiving with an affable air the greatest politicians, artists and writers, who were shocked by our rapid and mysterious fortune. For Balzac, the future did not exist, everything was in the present; he drew it out of the mists and made it palpable; an idea was so vivid that it became real in a certain way: in speaking of a dinner, he ate it as he told its story; of a carriage, he felt the soft cushions under him and the steady ride; a perfect well-being, a profound jubilation were then shown on his face, although often he was hungry and walking over a rough pavement with worn-out shoes.

The whole association would push, praise, and extol, by articles, advertisements and conversations, any one of its members who had just published a book or staged a drama. Whoever showed himself to be hostile to one of the horses would provoke the kicks of the entire stable; Le Cheval Rouge would not forgive: the culpable became the target of insults, cutting remarks, pin pricks, taunts and other means of driving a man to despair, which are well known by the smaller newspapers.

I smile while betraying after so many years the innocent secret of this literary freemasonry, which had no other result than some persuasive words for a book whose success did not require them. But, at that time, we took the thing seriously, we imagined ourselves to be the Treize themselves in person, and I was surprised to find that obstacles still existed; but the world is so badly designed! What an important and mysterious air we had in challenging other men, poor conventional men who in no way doubted our power.

After four or five meetings, Le Cheval Rouge ceased to exist; most of the chevaux could not afford to pay for their oats in this symbolic manger, and the association which was going to seize total control was dissolved, because its members often lacked the fifteen francs to pay their share. Each one now dove back alone into the chaos of life, fighting his own fight, and it is this that explains why Balzac was not a member of the Academy and died a simple knight of the Legion of Honor.

The idea however was good, for Balzac, as he himself says of Nucingen, could not have a bad idea. Others who have succeeded have set to work without surrounding themselves with the same romantic fantasies.

Thrown off of one chimera, Balzac very quickly mounted a new one, and he set out for another voyage in the blue with that childlike innocence which in him was combined with the profoundest sagacity and the shrewdest intellect.

So many bizarre projects he has described to me, so many strange paradoxes he has defended to me, always with the same good faith! Sometimes he would maintain that one should live on nine sous a day, sometimes he would require one hundred thousand francs in order to be most comfortable. Once, when I asked him to reconcile the accounting, he responded to the objection that thirty thousand francs still remained unallocated. "Ah well! That is for the butter and the radishes. In what even slightly proper house does one not eat thirty thousand francs of radishes and butter?" I wish I could portray the look of sovereign disdain he cast on me as he gave that triumphal reason; that look said: "Decidedly Theo is nothing but a contemptible person, a skinned rat, a pitiful spirit; he understands nothing of a grand existence and he has all his life eaten only the salted butter of Brittany."

Les Jardies attracted a great deal of attention from the public when Balzac bought it with the honorable intention of making an investment for his mother. While riding on the railway that passes Ville-d'Avray, every passenger would look with curiosity at that little house, half cottage, half chalet, which rose in the middle of a clay slope.

This plot of land, in Balzac's opinion, was the best in the world; formerly, he asserted, a certain celebrated wine was grown there, and the grapes, thanks to an unparalleled exposure, baked like the grapes of Tokaj on the Bohemian hills. The sun, it is true, had the freedom to ripen the crop in this place, where there existed only a single tree. Balzac tried to enclose this property with walls, which became famous for obstinately collapsing or sliding all in one piece down the steep escarpment, and he dreamed of the most fabulous and the most exotic crops for this heavenly place. Here comes naturally the anecdote of the pineapples, which has been so often repeated that I would not tell it again except to add one truly characteristic trait. Here is the project: one hundred thousand feet of pineapples were planted within the boundaries of Les Jardies, transformed into greenhouses that required only limited heat due to the sunniness of the site. The pineapples were going to be sold for five francs instead of the one louis that they ordinarily cost, for a total of five hundred thousand francs; from this sum it was necessary to deduct one hundred thousand francs for the costs of cultivation, equipment, and coal; there remained therefore a net profit of four hundred thousand francs which would constitute a splendid profit for the happy proprietor, "without the least bit of writing," he added. That was nothing, Balzac had a thousand projects like this; but the beauty of this was that we sought together, on the Boulevard Montmartre, a shop for the sale of the pineapples that were still in the form of seeds. The shop was to be painted black with thin gold stripes, and carry on its sign, in enormous letters: "PINEAPPLES FROM LES JARDIES."

For Balzac, the one hundred thousand pineapples were already raising their plumes of serrated leaves above their great lozenged cones under immense glass roofs: he saw them; he swelled in the high temperature of the greenhouse, he breathed in the tropical scent through his passionately open nostrils; and when, having returned to his home, he watched, while leaning on the window, the snow descend silently onto the bare slopes, he still only gave up his illusion with difficulty.

Yet he followed my advice to hold off on renting the shop until the following year in order to avoid an unnecessary expense.

I write my reminiscences as they return to me, without trying to place in order things which are better left apart. Besides, as Boileau said, transitions are the great difficulty of poetry, and of newspaper articles too, I will add; but modern journalists have neither as much conscience nor even more importantly as much leisure as the legislator of Parnasse.

Madame de Girardin professed for Balzac a lively admiration that he appreciated and that he acknowledged with his frequent visits, he who was so justifiably stingy with his time and his working hours. Never did a woman possess to such a high degree as Delphine, as I permitted myself to call her familiarly when we were together, the ability to stir the minds of her guests. With her, we always found ourselves to be particularly eloquent and each left her salon enthralled with himself. There was no stone so hard that she could not make a spark fly from it, and with Balzac, as you would expect, it was not necessary to strike the stone for very long: he sparkled and then lit up right away. Balzac was not precisely what one would call a talker, but he was quick with a reply, throwing a fine and decisive word into a discussion, changing the thread of the discourse, touching everything with lightness, and never going past a half smile: he had a verve, an eloquence, and an irresistible brio; and, as each person became silent to listen to him, with him, to the general satisfaction, the conversation would quickly descend into a soliloquy. The starting point was soon forgotten and he passed from an anecdote into a philosophical reflection, from an observation on manners to a local description; as he spoke his complexion would redden, his eyes would develop a distinctive luminosity, his voice would take on different inflections, and sometimes he would roar with laughter, amused by comic images that he saw before he described them. He announced in this way, like a sort of fanfare, the entry of his characters and his humorous comments, and his hilarity was soon shared by his assistants. Although this was the age of dreamers with hair hanging loosely like a willow, of weepers in their garrets and of disillusioned Byronians, Balzac had that robust joy and power that one would attribute to Rabelais, and that Molière did not show except in his plays. His loud laugh coming from his sensual lips was that of a kindly god amused by the spectacle of the human marionettes, and who is distressed by nothing because he understands everything and grasps at once both sides of things. Neither the worries of an often precarious situation, nor the tedium of money, nor the fatigue of excessive work, nor the confinement of the study, nor the renunciation of all of the pleasures of life, nor even sickness could strike down this Herculean joviality, in my opinion one of the most striking characteristics of Balzac. He knocked out the hydras while laughing, happily tore the lions in two, and carried as if it were a hare the boar of Erymanthe on the mountainous muscles of his shoulders. At the least provocation this gaiety would burst forth and cause his strong chest to heave, which might surprise a person with a delicate constitution, but it had to be shared, no matter how much effort one made to remain serious. Do not believe however that Balzac was seeking to entertain his audience: he obeyed, affected by a kind of internal euphoria and painting with rapid strokes, with a comic intensity and an incomparable talent for satire, the bizarre phantasmagoria that danced in the dark chamber of his brain. I do not know how to better compare the impression produced by certain of his conversations than with that which one experiences while leafing through the strange drawings of Songes Drolatiques, by the master Alcofribas Nasier. These are of monstrous personages, composed of the most hybrid elements. Some have for a head a bellows in which the hole represents the eye, while others have an alembic flute for a nose; these ones walk with wheels in place of feet; those ones have the rounded belly of a cooking pot and wear a lid in place of a hat, but an intense life animates these fanciful beings, and one recognizes in their grimacing faces the vices, the follies and the passions of man. Some, although absurdly outside the realm of possibility, stop you like a portrait. One could give them a name.

When one listened to Balzac, a whole carnival of extravagant and real puppets frolicked before your eyes, wearing on their shoulders a colorful phrase, waving long sleeves of epithets, blowing their noses noisily with an adverb, smacking themselves with a bat of antitheses, pulling you by the tail of your coat, and whispering into your ear your secrets in a disguised and nasal voice, pirouetting, whirling in the midst of a sparkle of lights and of glitter. Nothing was more vertiginous, and at the end of one half hour, one felt, like the student after the speech of Méphistophélès, a millstone turning in the brain.

He was not always so spirited, and on those occasions one of his favorite jokes was to imitate the German jargon of Nucingen or Schmucke, or otherwise to speak in rama, like the clients of the middle class boarding house of Madame Vauquer (née de Conflans). At the time that he wrote Un Début dans la Vie based on an outline of Madame de Surville, he was seeking proverbs that were slightly off for the art student Mistigris, to whom later, having found him to be full of spirit, he gave a fine place in La Comédie Humaine, under the name of the great landscape painter Léon de Lora. Here are some of his nonsensical proverbs: "He is like an ass on a plain." "I am like the hare, I die or I flee." "Good Counts make good sieves." "Extremes become blocked." "The slap always smells the herring"; and so on like this. A discovery of this type put him in a good humor, and he would pleasantly frolic like an elephant through the furniture and around the salon. For her part, Madame de Girardin was in quest of sayings for the the famous lady of the seven little chairs of Le Courrier de Paris. She sometimes required my assistance, and if a stranger had entered, seeing this beautiful Delphine painting spirals through her golden hair with her white fingers, with a profoundly dreamlike air; Balzac, seated on one of the arms of the great upholstered chair on which Monsieur Girardin usually slept, his hands clenched in the bottoms of his pockets, his waistcoat turned back from his stomach, swinging his leg with a uniform rhythm, expressing with the tense muscles of his face an extraordinary mental focus; me planted between two cushions of the divan, like an opium eater seen in a hallucination; that stranger, certainly, could never have suspected what we were doing there, in so great a meditation; he would have supposed that Balzac was thinking of a new Madame Firmiani, Madame de Girardin of a role for Mademoiselle Rachel, and me of some sonnet. But it was nothing of the kind. As for the puns, Balzac, although his secret ambition was to create them, had, after painstaking efforts, to recognize his notorious incapacity in this area, and to keep to the slightly off proverbs, which preceded the rough puns brought into fashion by the school of good sense. What beautiful evenings that will never return! We were then far from foreseeing that this great and superb woman, carved fully out of marble from antiquity, that this stocky, robust, lively man, who combined in himself the vigor of the boar and the bull, half Hercules, half satyr, built to last longer than one hundred years, would soon sleep, one at Montmartre, the other at Père-Lachaise, and that, of the three, I alone would remain to preserve those memories that were already so distant and close to being lost.

Like his father, who died accidentally at more than eighty years of age, and who had flattered himself that he would become wealthy from the annuity scheme of Lafarge, Balzac believed in his longevity. Often he planned with me projects for the future. He was going to finish La Comédie Humaine, write the Théorie de la Démarche, compose the Monographie de la Vertu, fifty dramas, attain a great fortune, marry and have two children, "but not more; two children look good," he said, "on the front of a carriage." All of this could not fail to take a long time, and I pointed out that, once these tasks were accomplished, he would be around eighty years of age. "Eighty years!" he cried, "Bah! It's the flower of age." Monsieur Flourens, with his comforting theories, did not say it better.

One day that we dined together at the home of M. E. de Girardin, he told us a story about his father to show us the strength of the stock to which he belonged. Balzac's father, who had been hired to work in a prosecutor's office, ate following the custom of the time at the table of the master with the other clerks. Partridges were served. The prosecutor's wife, who had her eye on the new arrival, said to him: "Monsieur Balzac, do you know how to carve?" "Yes, Madame," responded the young man, blushing up to his ears; and he bravely took hold of the knife and fork. Entirely ignorant of culinary anatomy, he divided the partridge into four pieces, but with so much strength that he split the plate, sliced the tablecloth, and cut into the wood of the table. He was not nimble, but he was strong: the prosecutor's wife smiled, and from that day, Balzac, the young clerk, was treated with great kindness in that house.

This story that I have told seems lukewarm, but it is necessary to see the pantomime of Balzac as he imitated on his own plate his father's actions, with an air that was both frightened and resolute, mimicking the manner in which he seized his knife after having rolled up his sleeves and in which he sunk his fork into an imaginary partridge; Neptune hunting the monsters of the sea did not wield his trident with a more vigorous fist, and with what an immense weight he bore down with it! His cheeks became purple, his eyes left his head, but the operation ended with him casting upon the guests a look of innocent satisfaction trying to conceal itself in the guise of modesty.

Moreover, Balzac had in him the makings of a great actor: he possessed a full, sonorous, resonant voice, with a rich and powerful timbre, that he knew how to moderate and soften as needed, and he read in an admirable manner, a talent that most actors lack. Whatever he related, he performed it with intonations, grimaces and gestures that no comedian has surpassed in my opinion.

I find in Marguerite, by Madame de Girardin, this remembrance of Balzac. It is a character from the book who speaks.

"He related that Balzac had dined at his house on the preceding day, and that he had been more brilliant, more scintillating than ever. He very much amused us with the story of his trip to Austria. What fire! What verve! What power of imitation! It was marvelous. His manner of paying the postilions is an invention that only a novelist of genius could have discovered. ‘I was very embarrassed at each stopping point,' he said, ‘how was I going to pay? I did not know a word of German, I did not know the currency of the country. It was very difficult. Here is what I invented. I had a bag full of small silver coins, some kreuzers … When I arrived at the stopping point, I would take up my bag; the postilion would come to the window of the carriage; I would watch his eyes attentively, and I would put in his hand one kreuzer, … two kreuzer, … then three, then four, etc., until I saw him smile … when he smiled, I understood that I had given him one kreuzer too much … quickly I would take back my coin and my man was paid.'"

At Les Jardies, he read Mercadet to me, the original Mercadet, by far more sweeping, complicated and dense than the piece arranged for the Gymnase by d'Ennery, with so much delicacy and skill. Balzac, who read like Tieck, without indicating acts, scenes, or names, utilized a voice that was particular to and perfectly recognizable for each character; the voices that he gave to the different kinds of creditors were hilariously funny: there were the hoarse, the honeyed, the hasty, the slow, the menacing, the pleading. They shrieked, wailed, scolded, muttered, screamed in every possible and impossible tone. Debt first sang a solo that soon an immense choir took up. He brought out creditors from everywhere, from behind the stove, from below the bed, from the drawers of the commode; they came from the chimney; they passed through the keyhole; others entered through the window like lovers; these sprung from the bottom of a trunk like those devilish toys that take you by surprise, those moved across the walls as if they were passing by an English ambush, it was a mob, an uproar, an invasion, truly a rising tide. Mercadet might well have shaken them off, when others always returned to start an assault, and as far as the horizon one could make out a somber swarm of creditors on the march, arriving like legions of termites to devour their prey. I do not know if this piece was better when performed this way, but no other performance produced such an effect.

Balzac, during this reading of Mercadet, occupied, partially reclining, a long divan in the salon of Les Jardies because he had sprained his ankle when he slipped, like his walls, on the clay of his property. A stray hair, sticking through the fabric, poked the skin of his leg and bothered him. "The fabric is too thin, the hay passes through it; you will need to put a thick canvas beneath it," he said while pulling at the hair that annoyed him.

François, the Caleb of this Ravenswood, would not listen to this mocking of the splendors of the manor. He corrected his master and said: horsehair. "The upholsterer has cheated me?" responded Balzac. "They are all the same. I had insisted that he use hay! Cursed thief!"

The splendors of Les Jardies were mostly imaginary. All of the friends of Balzac remember having seen written in charcoal upon the bare walls or veneer of gray paper: "Rosewood paneling, tapestry of the Gobelins, Venetian mirrors, paintings by Raphaël." Gerard de Nerval had already decorated an apartment in this manner, so this did not shock me. As for Balzac, he believed literally in the gold, the marble and the silk; but, he did not complete Les Jardies and if he led others to laugh at his pipe dreams, he knew at least that he had built himself an eternal home, a monument "more durable than iron," an immense city, populated with his creations and gilded by the rays of his glory.