Balzac

It was at this propitious moment that Balzac, already famous through his “Physiologie du Mariage,” presented his credentials in the “Peau de Chagrin,” and with an audacity unparalleled in literature represented his hero as troubled not only about the state of his mistress’ affections, but also as to whether he would have money enough to pay her fare in a cab.

The stupefaction and indignation of the purists at this unheard-of infraction of their formal style were indescribable, but the Romantic school upheld the innovation, and the new generation applauded the realistic portrayal of the penniless student who went to an evening entertainment on the points of his shoes, while dreading a splash of mud more than a shot from a pistol.

In this respect, therefore, the “Peau de Chagrin” marked the first return in the nineteenth century to the real and to the true; it gave a fresh impulse to an expiring literature, and constituted the corner-stone of the Realistic school, which has found such able exponents not only in the De Goncourts and Flaubert, but in Dickens, Thackeray, Tourgénieff, and a host of lesser lights.

But Balzac’s incontestable superiority over other writers consists in his descriptions of the habits and customs of every-day life, and in his perception and rendition of the delicate and innumerable shadings which accompany their thousand complications, in the scenes of private life which he depicted, in the little mysterious dramas which take place every day in every social sphere, and especially in his portraits. The exactitude of the transcription, the delicacy of the shading, and the profusion and realism of detail are such that it would almost seem as though reality itself had been transported and placed before the eyes of the reader.

The third and last number of the “Revue Parisienne” contains a criticism of Balzac’s on the “Chartreuse de Parme,” in which, in alluding to the author, he says, “Stendhal is one of the most remarkable writers of the day, but in his work form is neglected; he writes as a bird sings.”

Form, the absence of which he noticed in Stendhal, was to him a source of continued care and preoccupation, and he would often spend an hour in burnishing a single sentence. With all his facility of conception, execution was exceedingly laborious, and his admiration of Gautier’s ability to dash off without an erasure a warm-colored and impeccable article, while unbounded, was not unmixed with a certain conviction that the work would be improved by a thorough revision.

As has been seen, Balzac spent almost ten years in forming his hand and chastening his style, and the courage which he then manifested was equaled only by the patience with which he sought to improve the coloring of his afterwork. As a grammarian he is unsurpassed, and the faults which are noticeable in many of his works are for the most part purely clerical, and due to his mania for writing his books on proof-sheets instead of in manuscript. As an innovator he was of course attacked, – all innovators are, – and Sainte-Beuve, whose manner of writing Balzac had characterized as macaroni, continually ridiculed his style and form of expression. In this respect, however, it should be remembered that at the time of Balzac’s advent into literature the French language had been passed through a strainer so fine that no terms remained to express anything beyond the purely conventional; and Balzac, who was thoroughly impressed with Aristotle’s idea that the inexpressible does not exist, was almost obliged to create a language of his own; and in his endeavor to express himself with realistic clearness he seized upon every suggestive technicality which he encountered in science, in the green room, the alcoves of the hospital, or the by-ways of Paris, and built a vocabulary from all that was most expressive in the different strata of existence. It was he who invented “chic” and many other terms of an equally felicitous nature.

“As for neologisms, as the critics call them,” he said, “who, I would like to know, has a right to give alms to a language, unless it be its writers? Of course I create words, but my parvenus will become nobles in time.”

But through discipline and constant attention Balzac’s style assumed at last the undulatory rhythm of the Romantic school, and became not only picturesque, mathematical, and peculiarly incisive, but the model of many of the prominent writers of to-day.

The attacks of the critics were not confined, however, to his style and form of expression; charges of personal as well as literary immorality were brought against him, and it is curious to note that while Venice reveled through an entire carnival in a masquerade of his characters his books were prohibited in Rome and Madrid.

Personally considered, Balzac was much more of a Benedictine than a disciple of Rabelais; even his student days were those of an anchorite, and purity of life was to him not only a refinement, but a basis indispensable to elevation of thought, and an essential in the production of any work of enduring value. Disorder he regarded as fatal to talent, and Gautier says that he preached what he practiced, and recommended to him that he should visit his Dulcinea but once a year, and then only for half an hour. “Write to her, if you wish to,” he said; “it forms the style.” In his books he has, it is true, agreeably painted the seductions of vice, but its contagious and destructive effects are rigorously exposed; and through all the struggles of his characters probity, purity, and self-denial are alone triumphant. In what, then, does his immorality consist? In his vast conception, it was necessary, he explained,17 here to signalize an abuse and here to point out an evil; but every writer who has an aim and who breaks a fresh lance in the domain of thought is invariably considered immoral. Socrates was immoral; Christ was immoral: both were persecuted by the people whom they reformed.

In describing in the “Comédie Humaine” all the elements of society, in grasping it in the immensity of its agitations, it was inevitable that one part should expose more wickedness than virtue, that one part of the fresco represented a culpable group: hence the critic has brought his charge of immorality without observing the morality of other parts destined to form a perfect contrast. And in this particular we must observe that the most conscientious moralists are agreed that society is incapable of producing as many good as evil actions, yet in the “Comédie Humaine” the virtuous characters exceed in number those of a reprehensible disposition.

Blamable actions, faults, crimes, from the slightest to the most grave, find therein an invariable punishment, human or divine, evident or secret; and while it would be impossible to clothe two or three thousand characters in white and orange blossoms, it must be evident even to the most careless observer that the Marneffes, male and female, the Hulots, Brideaus e tutti quanti, are not imagined, – they are simply described.

CHAPTER III.

THE BUSKIN AND THE SOCK

“Le génie, c’est la patience.” – Buffon

In the story of “Albert Savarus” Balzac drew a picture of the hero which, with slight modifications, might have served as his own.

He was tall and somewhat stout. His hands were those of a prelate, and his head was that of a Nero. His hair was black and dense, and his forehead, furrowed by sabre-cuts of thought, was high and massive. His complexion was of an olive hue; his nose was prominent and slightly arched; his mouth was sympathetic, and his chin firm. But his most remarkable characteristic was the expression of his gold-brown eyes, which, eloquent with interrogations and replies, seemed, instead of receiving light from without, to project jets of interior flame.

His many vicissitudes had endowed him with an air of such calm tranquillity as might have disconcerted a thunderbolt; while his voice, at once penetrating and soft, had the charm attributed to Talma’s.

In conversation persuasive and magnetic, he held his auditors breathless in a torrent of words and gesture. He convinced almost at will, and his imagination, once unbridled, was sufficient to cause a vertigo. “He frightens me,” said Gérard de Nerval; “he is enough to drive one crazy.”

“He possessed,” Gautier said, “a swing, an eloquence, and a brio which were perfectly irresistible. Gliding from one subject to another, he would pass from an anecdote to a philosophical reflection, from an observation to a description. As he spoke, his face flushed, his eyes became peculiarly luminous, his voice assumed different inflections, while at times he would burst out laughing, amused by the comic apparitions which he saw before describing, and announced, in this way, by a sort of fanfare, the entrance of his caricatures and witticisms. The misfortunes of a precarious existence, the annoyances of debt, fatigue, excessive work, even illness, were unable to change this striking characteristic of continual and Rabelaisian joviality.”

Friends, enemies, editors, strangers, money-lenders, and usurers, all with whom he came in contact, were fascinated and coerced by the extraordinary magnetism which he exerted without effort, and the most vigorous intellects were bewildered by his projects of fortune and dreams of glory.

Attracted by the mine of wealth which the theatre opens to the popular playwright; and burdened with a real or imaginary weight of debt, from which one or two dramas, if favorably received, would free him entirely; and desirous, moreover, of experiencing the delirious intoxication which the plaudits of the gallery bring to the successful dramatist, Balzac’s inflammable imagination became a veritable whirlwind of plots and epigrams whenever a new play was well received.

But for the playwright, as for the mechanic, an apprenticeship is obligatory, and, though Balzac’s novels contained action and analysis, drama and observation, it was not, as we have seen, until after a long and laborious preparation that he was enabled to attract the attention of the public; and it is evident that the heights which he then scaled were so fatiguing and time-consuming that his life, wearied by the struggle, was not of sufficient duration to permit his winning equal triumphs on the stage.

From his early schooldays, however, in which, it will be remembered, he commenced a tragedy on the Incas, which was afterwards followed by a drama in blank verse entitled “Cromwell,” the stage had possessed an irresistible attraction for him; and if therein he was not at first successful, it was perhaps from the very cause which brought to him his original popularity, and the superabundance of his ideas, paradoxical as it at first appears, was undoubtedly his greatest stumbling-block.

To imagine a plot was nothing, the scenes were but details, and the outline of a melodrama was to him the work of as little labor as would be required in the conception of a pleasing menu; but when the general plan was sketched, each scene would suggest a dozen others, and the Coliseum of Vespasian would not have been large enough to present the simultaneous action which the play, at once interminable and impossible, would have demanded.

Another reason for his lack of immediate success was the jealousy of his colleagues and the hatred of the critics; and as at that time the existence of a play depended entirely upon the manner in which the first representation was received, it was not very difficult to create a cabal against this usurper, who, not content with his legitimate celebrity, seemed, at the bare mention of a play, to meditate a universal literary monarchy, in which he would reign supreme; and while the conquest of both spheres has been effected by Hugo, Voltaire, and others of like ilk, yet these authors were careful to fortify their progress with a book in one hand and a play in the other, whereas it was not until Balzac had reached his apogee that he began a serious attack on the stage.

It was in the year 1840 that Balzac submitted “Vautrin,” his first drama, to the director of the Porte-St. – Martin. The play was at once accepted; for the author’s reputation was not only gigantic, but the Porte-St. – Martin had almost foundered in successive tempests, and to the director, who was as penniless as he was appreciative, the offer was little less than a godsend. An agreement was signed forthwith, and Balzac abandoned Les Jardies for more convenient quarters, where he could attend to the rehearsals and remodel the scenes on the stage itself, which, it may be added, he continued to do up to the very last moment.

During these preparations, the boulevards were agog with excitement. The actors and the director, accompanied by Balzac’s friends, wandered daily from the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle to Tontoni’s and the Café Riche, exciting the curiosity of the flaneurs by their reticence or murmured confidences; and Balzac’s ingress and egress from the theatre were, it is said, watched and waited for by curious crowds.

Never in the history of the drama had a first representation been so impatiently awaited; and Balzac, foreseeing the immense sale which the seats would have, bought up the entire house, and then, while endeavoring that the tickets should circulate only among his friends and their acquaintances, sold the better part of it over again at a large advance.

“My dear friend,” he wrote to Dablin, “if among your acquaintances there are any who wish to assist at the first representation of ‘Vautrin,’ let me know who they are, as I prefer to let the boxes to those whom I know about, rather than to those who are unknown to me. I particularly wish to have handsome women present. The demand for boxes is greater than the supply. The journalists are to be sacrificed.”

To Gozlan he wrote, —

“I have sent you a ticket for the stalls. The rehearsals have almost killed me. You will witness a memorable failure. I have been wrong, I think, to summon the public.

“Morituri te salutant, Cæsar!”

Unfortunately, the interval between the sale of the seats and the first representation was sufficiently great to permit of two thirds of the tickets falling into the hands of those who were unknown or hostile to Balzac; and consequently, when the great day arrived, the critics sharpened their knives, and in place of the indulgent friends and handsome women whom Balzac had expected to welcome his play the theatre was crowded with malevolent faces.

The title-rôle was taken by Frédéric Lemaître, and while the first three acts were received without any demonstrations, either of approval or disapprobation, over the fourth there burst a tempest which, since the birth-night of “Hernani,” was unequaled in the annals of the stage; for Lemaître, reappearing in the costume of a Mexican general, seemed – whether by accident or design, it has never been clearly understood – to present an insulting resemblance to Louis Philippe, whose eldest son happened to be in one of the most conspicuous boxes.

The entire house, from pit to gallery, re-echoed with hisses and catcalls. Threats and even blows were exchanged, for here and there, in spite of the general indignation, a few still remained faithful to Balzac.

Through Lemaître’s eccentricity, the battle was lost and the drama killed. Further representations were prohibited by the government; and though, a few days later, M. de Rémusat called upon Balzac, and offered in the name of the state an indemnity for the pecuniary loss which he had sustained, it was haughtily refused. “If my play was justly prohibited, there is,” he said, “no reason why I should be indemnified; if it be otherwise, I can accept nothing, unless an indemnity be also made to the manager and actors of the Porte-St. – Martin.”

Two years after the failure of “Vautrin,” and entirely unaffected by its sudden collapse, Balzac knocked at the door of the Odéon which was at that time under the management of Lireux. By this gentleman Balzac was received with the greatest cordiality; for while his first play had fallen flat, yet it had fallen with such a crash that, in the lapse of time, it was difficult to distinguish its failure from success. Moreover, the Odéon was bankrupt, and as Balzac, with his customary enthusiasm, offered nothing less than a Golconda in his manuscript, he was fêted, caressed, and altogether received with open arms.

From the office to the green room, from the door-keeper to the scene-shifters, smiles, compliments, and welcomes were showered upon him, and he was unanimously requested to read his play at once. As soon, therefore, as the actors were assembled and silence obtained, Balzac began to read “Les Ressources de Quinola.” At first thick and embarrassed, his voice gradually grew clearer, and expressed the most fugitive undulations of the dialogue. His audience laughed and wept by turns, and Balzac laughed and wept with them; the entire troop was fascinated, and applauded as only actors can. Suddenly, however, at the end of the fourth act, Balzac stopped short, and explained in the simplest and most unaffected manner that, as he had not yet written the fifth, he would be obliged to recite it to them.

The stupor and surprise of his audience can be more readily imagined than described: for the fifth act of “Quinola” is the unraveling of all the tangled threads, the union of all the joints; it is the climax and logical termination of all that has gone before; and Balzac, as he calmly rolled up his manuscript and tied it with a bit of string, easily, fluently, and unhesitatingly continued the drama through the six final scenes, and without a break, without a pause, through a torrent of varied intonations, led his listeners by a magnificent tour de force to the very fall of the curtain.

Lireux was bewildered and entranced. “The rehearsals shall commence to-morrow,” he said. “But to what address, M. de Balzac, shall I send the announcements?”

“It is unnecessary to send any,” Balzac replied. “I can come without them.”

“Ah, no, that is impossible. There will be a rehearsal one day, and none the next; and I never know until the morning at what hour a rehearsal is to take place. What is your address?”

But Balzac had not the least intention of telling where he lived, and either because he was playing hide-and-go-seek with his creditors, or else was at that time possessed of one of the inexplicable manias which caused him at times to keep his habitat a secret even from his most intimate friends, he refused flatly to impart the wished-for information.

“I do not see what we can do,” Lireux murmured helplessly, “unless we use a carrier pigeon.”

“I do,” replied Balzac, ever fertile in expedients. “Listen to me. Send a messenger up the Champs-Élysées with the notice every morning at nine o’clock. When he reaches the Arc de l’Étoile, let him turn to the left, and he will see a man beneath the twentieth tree, who will pretend to be looking up in the branches for a sparrow.”

“A sparrow?”

“A sparrow or any other bird.”

“My pigeon, perhaps.”

“Let me continue. Your messenger will approach my sentinel, and will say to him, ‘I have it.’ Thereupon my sentinel will reply, ‘Since you have it, what are you waiting for?’ Then your messenger will hand the notice to him, and immediately go away, without once looking behind him. I will attend to the rest.”

Lireux saw no objection to this fantastic whim, and contented himself by expressing the hope that if the twentieth tree should be destroyed by lightning M. de Balzac would see no insuperable objection to posting his sentinel at the twenty-first.

“No,” Balzac answered, “but I should prefer the nineteenth; the number is more quaint.”

This plan amicably arranged, the actors agreed upon, and the date of the first representation settled, Balzac proceeded to talk finance.

“Beside the customary royalty, I wish the entire house for the first three nights.”

“But what shall I get?” Lireux timidly inquired.

“Half the profits, which will be incalculable.”

Lireux reflected for a moment. “Very good,” he said; “I accept.”

From the first rehearsal Balzac recommenced with “Quinola” the treatment to which “Vautrin” had been subjected. Sometimes a phrase was altered, sometimes a scene, while at others an entire act was remodeled. That which pleased him one day displeased him the next, and each rehearsal brought fresh corrections and alterations, until the original manuscript was entirely obliterated with erasures and new ideas.

Besides undergoing the mental and physical labor attendant on these rehearsals, Balzac undertook the entire charge of the sale of the seats, or rather the entire charge of refusing seats to all comers; for the box office was opened merely for form’s sake, and tickets were to be had only of Balzac in person. To obtain one was not so much a question of money as of position and influence. The orchestra stalls he reserved for the nobility, the avant-scènes for the court circle; the boxes in the first gallery were for the ambassadors and plenipotentiaries; the second gallery was for the statesmen, the third for the moneyed aristocracy, the fourth for the select bourgeoisie. “As for the critics,” he said, “they can buy their seats, if there are any left, and there will be none.”

As a rule, therefore, when any one asked for a box, Balzac would reply, “Too late: last one just sold to the Princesse de Machin and the Grande Duchesse de Chose.” During the first few days of the sale, seats were in consequence sold at extraordinary prices; but later on the anxiety to obtain them decreased, and during the week preceding the first performance Balzac was very glad to dispose of them to any one at the regular rates.

On the 6th of March, 1842, thirteen days before the play was to be performed, he wrote to a friend as follows: —

“Dear Sofka, – Send me the address of the Princess Constantine Razumovska, that I may learn from her whether she wishes a box. Let me know also whether the two Princesses Troubetskoï want boxes, whether Kraïeska wishes one, whether the Malakoffs, and the Countess Léon, and the Countess Nariskine, – seven boxes in all. I must know, too, whether they want them in the upper or lower tier of the first gallery. I wish the handsome women in front… It is a favor to be admitted to this solemnity. There are at the theatre a hundred and fifty applications for boxes from people whom I do not know and who will get nothing.”

On the 12th he wrote to the same person: “The avant-scènes are for the king and the cabinet; they take them by the year. I can only give, therefore, to the Princess Troubetskoï a box in the first gallery, but it is one of the best in the house… The costumes have cost 20,000 francs; the scenery is entirely new. Every one insists that the play is a masterpiece, and that makes me shudder. In any event, it will be a terrible solemnity. Lamartine has asked for a box; I will place him among the Russians. Every morning I receive thirty or forty applications, but I will have no one whom I do not know about… Tell your Russian friends that I must have the names and addresses, each accompanied by a written and personal recommendation of those of their friends (men) who wish stalls. There are over fifty people a day who come under assumed names and refuse to give their address; they are enemies, who wish to ruin the piece. In a week I shall not know what I am about. We are obliged to observe the most severe precautions. I am intoxicated with the play.”

The severe precautions resulted on the night of the first representation in a half-empty house.

Few imagined that seats could really be had, and it was even reported that Balzac had been obliged to refuse a seat to the Duc de Nemours. The amateurs resigned themselves, therefore, almost without a struggle, and determined that as they could not obtain seats for the first performance they would find solace in the second or third; but on reading the articles which appeared the next day they felt little need of consolation, for the fate of “Vautrin” had been repeated, and “Quinola” had fallen flat. The most sympathetic of all the criticisms which then appeared was one contained in Le National for the 16th of March, 1842. It runs as follows: —

“The subject of M. de Balzac’s drama was excellent, but unfortunately, through eccentricity or negligence, he passed but to one side of the idea, without resolutely entering it and extracting all its wealth.

“The Odéon is the theatre of tumultuous representations, but never has this terrible battle-field offered such a conglomeration of exclamations and confusing cries. The pit, like a sharp-shooter, took up an ambush behind the substantives and verbs, and slaughtered the play while it maimed the actors, who, brave though wounded, struggled on to the end with a praiseworthy and melancholy courage. At times the comedy, through its sudden flashes of originality and abrupt cannonades of wit, seemed about to rout the enemy and wave aloft a tattered but victorious flag. The faults, however, were too numerous and the errors too grave, and in spite of many advantages the battle, in the end, was fairly lost.”