Balzac

In this respect, however, it should be stated that while the money which he earned in his later years was out of all proportion to that which he at first received, yet, in the mean time, some few debts had necessarily accumulated, and his income, consequently reduced, averaged at best not more than ten or twelve thousand francs.

The history of his financial troubles, and of that which he laughingly termed his floating debt, can best be found in his correspondence, which, ranging from his twentieth year to but a few days prior to his death, contains many details of the thirty years’ war which he waged with poverty; and his letters, while interesting in their account of his transient successes, attendant struggles, defeats, and final victory, will convince even the prejudiced reader, that the writer was, in the first place, a man of the strictest integrity; for it may be said, without exaggeration, that the better part of his life was passed in attempting to satisfy that necessity whose earthly representatives are creditors; secondly, that his morals were perfectly pure, for he loved and reverenced women with that amor intellectualis which made chastity to him one of those graces which are superfluities to the vulgar and necessities to the re-fined; and thirdly, that his heart, which was as great as his brain, was yet too full of affection, for those whom he loved to harbor malice against his detractors and persecutors.

The earliest of these letters, the majority of which are addressed to his sister, or to Madame Zulma Carraud, one of her intimate friends, are mere descriptions of his life and poverty, and are expressed with the smiling indifference of youth, to whom the shadows of the future are yet vague and distant.

“Since you are so much interested in all that I do,” he wrote from Paris to his sister, in 1819, “you must know that last night I slept magnificently; and how could I do otherwise? I dreamed of you, of mother, of my loves, of my hopes, and now, on awakening, I give you my earliest thoughts. I must tell you, in the first place, that that wretch, Myself, becomes more and more negligent. He goes but twice a week for provisions, and then, being economical even of his steps, always to the nearest, and consequently to the worst, shops in the neighborhood; hence, your brother, destined to such celebrity, is already nourished like any other great man, which means that he is dying of hunger.”

To his sister, in the following year, he wrote, —

“I feel to-day that wealth does not constitute happiness, and that my life here will be to me always a source of the sweetest remembrances. To live as I choose; to work when I will, and after my own manner; to do nothing, even, if I so desire; to fall asleep in a beautiful future; to think of you, and to know that you are happy; to possess the Julie of Rousseau for mistress, La Fontaine and Molière for friends, Racine for master, and Père-Lachaise for promenade!.. Oh, could it but last forever!”

And a little later, —

“I have just returned from Père-Lachaise, where I have been inhaling magnificent inspirations. Decidedly, the only beautiful epitaphs are such as these, La Fontaine, Molière, Masséna, – a single name which tells all, and makes the passer dream!”…

The next year he wrote, —

“Dear Sister, – I am going to work like the horse of Henri IV. before it was cast in bronze; and this year I hope to make the twenty thousand francs which are to commence my fortune. I have a quantity of novels and dramas to prepare… In a little while there will be, between the me of to-day and the me of to-morrow, the difference that exists between the boy of twenty and the man of thirty. I reflect; my ideas ripen; and I see that in giving to me the heart and head which I possess Nature has treated me with favor. Believe in me, dear sister; for while I do not despair of being something, some day, I yet have need of a believer. I see now that ‘Cromwell’ had not even the merit of an embryo. As to my novels, they are as poor as the devil, though not half so seductive.”

But when, later on, at the age of twenty-seven, Balzac found himself without position, without a profession, entirely unknown, without resources, and burdened, moreover, with a debt of 120,000 francs, – the result of his disastrous experience as printer and publisher, – he had but his pen with which to conquer poverty and combat the world. His family had no faith in him; they had sunk a large sum in his enterprise; he was friendless, and his genius was entirely unrecognized; and it is at once curious and pathetic to note through the rest of his correspondence the continued recurrence and repetition of his dream of prospective fortune and freedom from debt.

His first letters after his disaster are profoundly sad: in one he wrote to his sister, —

“I must live without asking aid of any one. I must live to work, that I may repay you all; but shall I be able to live long enough to pay my debts of love and gratitude as well?”

To the Duchesse d’Abrantès, in the same year, he wrote, —

“I wonder if you have ever experienced the extent to which misfortunes develop within us the terrible faculty of breasting a tempest, and of opposing to adversity an immobile calm.

“As for myself, I have acquired the habit of smiling at the torments of fate, – torments that still continue.

“I am old in suffering, but my light-hearted appearance offers no criterion of my age. I have never been otherwise; I have been always bent beneath a terrible weight. Nothing can give you an idea of the life which I have led, nor of my astonishment at having nothing but fortune to combat.

“Were you to inquire about me, you would be unable to obtain any insight to the nature of my misfortunes; but then you know there are those who die without any apparent disease…

“I have undertaken two books at a time, to say nothing of a number of articles. The days evaporate in my hands like ice in the sunlight. I do not live; I waste away; but death from work or from any other cause amounts to the same thing in the end… I sleep from six in the evening until midnight, and then I work for sixteen hours. I have but one hour of liberty, and that during dinner. I have sworn to owe nothing, and though I die like a dog my courage will support me to the end.”

In 1831, he wrote to the same lady, —

“You do not know that in 1828 I had but my pen with which to live and pay off 120,000 francs. In a few months I shall be free from debt, and be able to arrange a comfortable home. During the next six months, therefore, I shall enjoy my last miseries. I have asked aid from no one. I have never stretched my hand, either for a page or a sou. I have hidden my griefs and my wounds, and you who know how difficult it is to make money with the pen will, with your feminine glance, be able to sound the depths of the abyss which I disclose to you, and by the side of which I have marched without falling.”

In the following year, he wrote to his mother, —

“Sooner or later, literature, politics, journalism, marriage, or some good speculation will make my fortune.”

And later on, —

“Thank you, my sister; you have restored to me that energy which has been my sole support. Yes, you are right. I will not stop; I will continue to advance, and some day you will see mine counted among the great names of our country… My books are the only replies which I shall make to those who commence to attack me. Do not let their criticisms annoy you: they are the best of auguries; mediocrity is never discussed. Tell my mother that I love her as I did when a child. The tears fall from my eyes as I write these lines, – tears of tenderness and of despair, for I feel my future near at hand, and in my days of triumph my mother will be a necessity. When will they come? As to you and to your husband, I can only hope that you will never doubt my heart, and if I do not write to you let your tenderness be indulgent. Do not misjudge my silence, but say, rather, ‘He thinks of us, he is speaking to us;’ for, after my long meditations and overwhelming duties, I rest in your hearts as in some delicious spot where there is no pain.”

In the same year, from Aix, he wrote to his mother, —

“I shall not return to Paris until all my engagements are fulfilled; when I do so everything will have been paid off.”

In 1833, to Madame Carraud, —

“My life is mechanically changed. I go to sleep with the chickens and am called at one in the morning. I then work until eight o’clock, sleep for an hour, and at nine I take a cup of pure coffee, and remain in harness until four. I then take a bath, and go out, and after dinner return to bed. Profit is slow, and debts are inexorable, but I am certain now of immense wealth. I have but to wait and work for three years.”

In the following year, he wrote, —

“The fiascos of the ‘Médecin de Campagne’ and ‘Louis Lambert’ have affected me deeply, but I am resolved that nothing shall discourage me. After the 1st of August I think that I shall be free.”

And later on, in the same year, —

“If I but live, I shall have a beautiful position, and we will all be happy. Let us laugh then still, my sweet sister; the house of Balzac will triumph yet.”

To his mother he wrote, —

“The day when we shall all be happy rapidly approaches. I begin to gather the fruit of the sacrifices which I made for the sake of future prosperity. In a few months I will bring to you the ease and comfort which you need… Oh, my dear mother, you will yet live to see my beautiful future; for, in the end, everything must bend beneath the work of him who loves you, and is your devoted son.”

In 1835 he wrote to Werdet, his publisher, —

“Some day, – and that day rapidly advances, – we shall both have made our fortune; and the sight of our carriages meeting in the Bois will make our enemies swoon with envy.”

To his mother, in the same year, he wrote, —

“Do not be vexed at my silence. I not only have a great deal to do, but I work twenty-one hours and a half daily. A letter is not only a loss of money, but an hour’s sleep and a drop of blood.”

To Madame Hanska he wrote, —

“That you may know the extent of my courage, I must tell you that the ‘Secret des Ruggieri’ was written in one night, ‘La Vieille Fille’ in three, and ‘La Perle Brisée,’ which terminates ‘L’Enfant Maudit,’ was composed in a few hours of mental and physical agony. It is my Brienne, my Champaubert, my Montmirail. It is my campaign in France.”

And to Madame Carraud, —

“I sleep but five hours, and work eighteen. I shall purchase the Grenadière,21 and pay my debts. I need at least a year to be completely free from debt, but the happiness of owing nothing, which I thought impossible, is no longer a chimera.”

In October, 1836, he wrote to Madame Hanska, —

“You do not know the depths of my grief, nor the sombre courage which accompanies the second great defeat which I have experienced.22 The first occurred when I was barely twenty-nine; and then I had an angel at my side.23 To-day I am too old to inspire a sentiment of inoffensive protection… I am overcome, but not conquered. My courage yet remains… During the past month, I have worked from midnight until six in the evening; and while I have observed the strictest diet, that my brain might not be troubled by the fatigue of digestion, nevertheless, I not only suffer from indescribable weaknesses, but I also experience nervous attacks of the most singular character. I sometimes lose the sense of verticality, and even in bed it seems as though my head fell to the right or to the left; and when I attempt to get up I am as though weighed down by an enormous burden, which seems to be in my brain. I understand now how Pascal’s absolute continence and excessive brain work caused him continually to see an abyss about him, and obliged him to sit between two chairs… But if I do not succumb in the mean time, two years of work will suffice for the payment of everything.”

To the same lady, two years later, he wrote, —

“I am thirty-nine years old, and I owe two hundred thousand francs. Belgium has stolen a million from me.”24

In 1838 he wrote to Madame Carraud, —

“I have greater faith than ever in my work. I have been offered twenty thousand francs for a play. Hereafter, I shall devote my time to the theatre; books no longer pay… You have no idea how happy I shall be in a few years. My gains will be enormous.”

A few months later he wrote, —

“My debts and money troubles are the same as ever, but my courage has redoubled with the decrease of my desires… I hope to remain here25 for three or four months, and then, if my plays succeed, it may be that over and above my debts I shall have gained sufficient capital to supply my daily bread, my flowers, and my fruits. The rest, perhaps, will come with time.”

Continually overthrown, but never conquered, in his letters during the next eight years he seems to breathe the delicious idea of De Custine, that hope is the imagination of those who are unhappy. In May, 1846, however, he wrote to his sister, —

“A series of terrible and unbelievable disasters have happened to me. I am entirely without money, and am being sued by those who were friendly to me… I shall have to work eighteen hours a day.”

These terrible and unbelievable disasters were the result of a debt of ten thousand francs, which he owed to William Duckett, the editor of the “Dictionnaire de la Conversation,” who, being in difficulties himself, was obliged not only to sue Balzac, but to obtain an order for his arrest. Balzac, however, was not to be found. No trace of him was to be had at Passy, nor at any of his several habitations, which, though secret to the world at large, were necessarily known to the police. One day, however, a woman, whose advances to Balzac had not been met with that degree of cordiality which she had doubtless expected, called upon Duckett, and told him that Balzac was to be found at the residence of Madame Visconti, on the Champs-Élysées.

In an hour the house was surrounded, and Balzac, interrupted in the middle of a chapter, was informed that a cab awaited him at the door. Madame Visconti, with a hospitality which was simply royal, asked the amount of the debt, and paid the ten thousand francs on the spot. A few days later Balzac wrote to Madame Hanska, —

“You can form no idea of the life of a hunted hare which I have led. Two years of calm and tranquillity are absolutely necessary to soothe my spirit, worn by sixteen years of successive catastrophes. I am tired, very tired, of this incessant struggle. My last debts are more irksome than all the others which I have paid.”

But now in regard to these debts, to the payment of which he seems to have devoted his life, it is only natural to ask in what they consisted and whence they came: for they became as famous as Balzac himself; they followed him about like a glittering retinue, and found their way not only into his correspondence, but into his romances, and supplied him with a subject of conversation of which he never tired.

Balzac, as has been seen, wished to be considered as much of a Monte Cristo as Dumas himself, and could not, without causing his pen to blush, permit it to be believed that he did not extract from his books the same magnificent harvest which was annually reaped by his rival. The debt of 120,000 francs which had crippled his early manhood was, with his habitual probity, soon wiped out; but the remembrance of it remained, and this remembrance, joined to the annoyance caused by a few creditors, suggested an innocent deceit which would explain why he did not live in a palace and enjoy the splendors of a literary monarch. He imagined, therefore, and caused it to be understood that he was not only immensely in debt, but that the sums which he owed were fabulous; and he talked of them, wrote of them, and increased them to such an extent that it was not long before they became even more celebrated than the prodigalities of his confrère.

His debts, however, both real and imaginary, were finally paid, and their liquidation was the climax of the solitary romance of his life.

About the year 1835, he became acquainted with the Countess Hanska, a Polish lady, of great beauty and immense wealth, whose husband was an invalid. It has been stated – on what authority it has been difficult to discover – that when she accidentally met the author of the “Comédie Humaine” her emotion was so great that she lost consciousness. The better opinion, however, would be that a correspondence, begun on her side after the publication of the “Médecin de Campagne,” a work which she greatly admired, was continued for a number of years before they finally met. Balzac paid several visits to her Polish estates, and it is probable that she frequently came to Paris. After her husband’s death marriage was naturally thought of, but for the time being there were many obstacles: Balzac’s pecuniary position was most unfortunate, while she, as a Russian subject, was not in a position to marry off-hand.

The winter of 1848, as well as the spring of the following year, Balzac passed at Vierzschovnia, with Madame Hanska and her children. He was wretchedly ill, and the physicians had forbidden any kind of mental labor. Incessant work and the abuse of coffee had seriously undermined his constitution and shattered his nerves of steel, but the day to which he had looked with such constant expectation had at last arrived: his debts were not only paid, but the revenues from the sale of his books were magnificent.

For some little time he had been preparing in the Rue Fortunée – now Rue Balzac – a superb residence. His taste in furniture and works of art found ample expression there. For one set of Florentine workmanship the king of Holland himself was in treaty, while his art gallery was the same as is described in “Le Cousin Pons.”

While he was in Poland his mother was his general agent, and he wrote to her the most minute directions of everything appertaining to the house, its fixtures and decorations; and finally, on the 17th March, 1850, he wrote from Vierzschovnia as follows: —

“Three days ago I married the only woman whom I have loved, whom I love more than ever, and whom I shall love until death. I believe that this union is the recompense that God has held in reserve for me through so many adversities, years of work, and difficulties suffered and overcome. My youth was unhappy and my spring was flowerless, but I shall have the most brilliant summer and the sweetest of autumns.”

Balzac had now fulfilled his two immense desires: he was celebrated, he was beloved. His own income combined with that which remained to his wife – she had, at his instance, made over the greater portion of her fortune to her children – sufficed for the realization of his most extravagant dreams. “I shall live to be eighty,” he said. “I will terminate the ‘Comédie Humaine’ and write dozens of dramas. I will have two children, – not more; two look well on the front seat of a landau.” It was all too beautiful; nothing remained but death, and five months after his marriage, on the 20th of August, 1850, after thirty years of ceaseless toil, at the very moment when the world was his, Balzac, as a finishing touch to his own “Études Philosophiques,” died suddenly of disease of the heart.

At his grave in Père-Lachaise is a simple monument, bearing for epitaph that “single name which tells all and makes the passer dream;” and here, at the very spot where Rastignac, after the burial of Père Goriot, hurled his supreme defiance at Paris, Victor Hugo delivered the funeral oration.

“Alas!” he said, “this powerful and tireless worker, this philosopher, this thinker and poet, whose existence was filled with more labors than days, passed among us that life of struggles and combats common in all time to all great men. To-day, at last, he is at peace: he has taken leave of contests and hatreds, and enters now both glory and the tomb. Hereafter he will shine above all the clouds about us, high among the stars of our country.”

CHAPTER V.

THE THINKER

“Un écrivain doit se regarder comme un instituteur des hommes.” – Bonald.

Balzac, to borrow a Hindu expression, was “an artificer who built like a giant and finished like a jeweler.” The groundwork of the “Comédie Humaine” was grandly conceived and admirably executed; and though a few of the balconies of its superb superstructure are incomplete, yet as, happily, masterpieces are ever eternally young, it shows no signs of decay, and there is little danger of its falling in ruins.

For the decoration of this work, Balzac brought a subtle analysis of men, women, and things, and adorned it all with brilliant ideas and profound reflections, of which the saddest were dug from his own sufferings, and not, as a great writer has said, from the hearts of his mistresses.

As everything that he wrote is more or less worthy of attention, a complete collection of his theories and teachings would be as impossible, as an arrangement of Emerson’s best thoughts, and in any event would ill befit the unpretentious character of this treatise. For his elaborate monographs on religion, morality, society, politics, science, and art, the reader must turn to the complete edition of his writings; for in these pages the attempt will be made to render only a handful of unsorted aphorisms and reflections, taken at random, of which the majority will be found to touch merely upon every-day topics, and that in the lightest possible vein.

With this brief explanation, for which your indulgence is requested, the crier gives way to the thinker.

A woman is to her husband that which her husband has made her.

It is still a question, both in politics and marriage, whether empires are overthrown and happiness destroyed through over-confidence or through too great severity.

A husband risks nothing in affecting to believe his wife, and in patiently holding his tongue. Of all things, silence worries a woman most.

It is, perhaps, only those who believe in God who do good in secret.

Statesmen, thinkers, men who have commanded armies, – in a word, those who are really great, – are natural and unaffected, and their simplicity places one at once on an equality with them.

Comprehension is equality.

Discussion weakens all things.

Genius is intuition.

The most striking effects of art are but rough counterfeits of nature.

To the despair of man, he can do nothing, either for good or for evil, but that which is imperfect. His every work, be it intellectual or physical, is stamped with the mark of destruction.

Avarice begins where poverty ends.

Dignity is but the screen of pride; from behind it we rage at our ease.

There are certain rich organizations, on whom the extremes of happiness and misery produce a soporific effect.

The most natural sentiments are those which are acknowledged with the greatest repugnance.

The first requisite of revenge is dissimulation. An avowed hatred is powerless.

It is in the nature of women to prove the impossible by the possible, and to destroy facts with presentiments.

Power does not consist in striking hard and often, but in striking with justice.

To stroll about the streets is in itself a science; it is the gastronomy of the eye.

Nowadays, to be hopelessly in love, or to be wearied of life, constitutes social position.

Love is immense, but it is not infinite, while science has limitless depths.

Prosperity brings with it an intoxication, which inferior natures never resist.

It is but the heart that does not age.

The graces of manner and conversation are gifts of nature, or the fruit of an education begun at the cradle.

As soon as a misfortune occurs, some friend or other is always ready to tell us, and to run a dagger into our hearts, while expecting us to admire the handle.

It is frequently at the very moment when men most despair of their future that their fortune begins.

To talk of love is to make love.

A married woman is a slave who needs a throne.

The grandeur of desires is in proportion to the breadth of the imagination.

A husband who leaves nothing to be desired is lost.

There is no greater incentive to life than the conviction that our death would bring happiness to others.

Where there is no self-respect solitude is hateful.

A lover has all the virtues and all the defects that a husband has not.