THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC
The Court of the Pension Vauquer.
THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC[1]
Set in the front wall of a commonplace house, in the broad main street of sunny Tours, a tablet records the birth of Balzac in that house, on the 27 Floréal, An VII. of the Republic—May 16, 1799—the day of Saint-Honoré, a saint whose name happened to hit the fancy of the parents, and they gave it to their son. Many a secluded corner of the town, many a nook within and about its Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, many a portrait of its priests, has been brought into his books. And he has portrayed, with his artist hand, the country round about of the broad Loire and of bright Touraine, always vivid in his boyish reminiscences. In his life and his work, however, he was, first and always, a Parisian. To the great town, with all its mysteries and its possibilities, his favorite creations surely found their way, however far from it they started, drawn thither, as was drawn and held their creator, by its unconquerable authority.
His father had been a lawyer, forced for safety during the Revolution into army service, and when he was ordered from Tours, in 1814, to take charge of the commissariat of the First Division of the Army in Paris, he brought his family with him. Their abode was in Rue de Thorigny, one of the old Marais streets, and the boy, nearly fifteen, was put to school in the same street, and later in Rue Saint-Louis, hard by. Transformed as is this quarter, there yet remain many of the magnificent mansions with which it was built up in the days of its grandeur, and their ample halls and rooms and gardens serve admirably now as schools for boys and for girls. The young Honoré and his Louis Lambert are one in their pitiful memories of these schools and of their earlier schooling at the Seminary of Vendôme.
To please his father, the boy, when almost eighteen, went through the law course of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France. To please himself he listened, for the sake of their literary charm, to the lectures of Villemain and Cousin and Guizot, and would rehearse them with passion when he got home. But he had no love for the arid literature of the law, and was wont to linger, in his daily walks along the quays and across the bridges to and from his lecture-rooms, over the bookstalls, spending his modest allowance for old books, which he had learned already to select for their worth.
These studies ended, he entered the law office of M. de Merville, a friend of his father, with whom Eugène Scribe had just before finished his time, and to whom Jules Janin came for his training a little later. And these three, unknown to one another, were, as it happened, of the same mind in their revolt against the drudgery of the desk, and against the servitude of the attorney, coupled with certain competence as it might be; and in their preference for that career of letters, which might mean greater toil, but which brought immediate freedom and promised not far-off fame, and perhaps fortune, too.
The elder Balzac, severely practical, dreamed no dreams, and was horrified by his son's refusal to pursue the profession appointed for him. He foretold speedy starvation, and—perhaps to prepare Honoré for it—allowed him to try his experiment, for two years, on a hundred francs or less a month. So, the family having to leave Paris early in 1820, a garret—literally—was rented for the young author, and poorly furnished by his mother; a painstaking, hard-working, fussy old lady, who looked on him as a little boy all her life long, who drudged for him to his last days, and who felt it to be her duty to discipline him to hardship in these early days! This attic-room was at the top of the old house No. 9 Rue Lesdiguières, which was swept away by the cutting of broad Boulevard Henri IV. in 1866-67, its site being in the very middle of this new street. To wax sentimental—as has a recent writer—over the present No. 9 as Balzac's abode is touching, but hardly worth while, that house having no interest for us beyond that of being of the style and the period of Balzac's house, and serving to show the shabbiness of his surroundings. These did not touch the young author, whose garret's rental was within his reach, as was the Librairie de Monsieur; for he gives it the old Bourbon name, and how it got that name shall be told in our last chapter. It was the Library of the Arsenal, still open to students as in his days there, in the building begun by François I. for the casting of cannon, which he made lighter and easier of carriage, and the casting of which exploded the Arsenal within twenty years, and with it part of the adjacent Marais. The Valois kings rebuilt it, Henri IV. enlarged it, and gave it for a residence to his Grand Master of artillery, Sully, for whom he decorated the salons as we see them to-day. You may climb the grand staircase, and stand in the rooms—their gildings fresh, their paintings bright—occupied by the great minister. In the cabinet that contains his furniture and fittings is an admirable bust of the King. And you seem to see the man himself, as he enters, his debonair swagger covering his secret shamefacedness for fear of a refusal of his stern treasurer to make the little loan for which he has again come to beg, to pay his last night's gambling or other debt of honor!
In this library by day, and in his garret by night, Balzac began that life of terrific toil from which he never ceased until death stopped his unresting hand. The novels he produced during these years were hardly noticed then, are quite unknown now; showing no art, giving no promise. He never owned them, and put them forth under grotesque pen-names, such as "Horace de Saint-Aubin," "Lord R'hoone"—an anagram of Honoré—and others equally absurd, all telling of his fondness for titles.
This garret, in which he lived for fifteen months, is vividly pictured in "La Peau de Chagrin," written in 1830, as Raphael's room in his early days, before he became rich and wretched. Balzac's letters to his sister Laure (Madame Laure de Surville) detail, with delightful gayety, his exposure to wind and wet within these weather-worn walls; and his ingenious shifts in daily small expenditure of sous to make his income serve. He relates how he shopped, how he brought home in his pockets his scant provender, how he fetched up from the court-pump his large allowance of water. For he used it lavishly in making his coffee, that stimulation supplying the place of insufficient food, and carrying him through his nights of pen-work. Excessive excitation and excessive toil, begun thus early, went on through all his life, and he dug his too early grave with his implacable pen. His only outings, by day or by night, were the long walks that gave him his amazing acquaintance with every corner of Paris, and his solitary strolls through the great graveyard of Paris, near at hand. "Je vais m'égayer au Père-Lachaise," he writes to his sister; and there he would climb to the upper slopes, from which he saw the vast city stretched out. For he was fond of height and space, and we shall see how he sought for them in his later dwelling-places.
And in this storm-swept attic he had his first dreams of dwelling in marble halls. Extreme in everything, he could imagine no half-way house between a garret and a palace; he began in the one, he ended in the other, unable to find pause or repose in either!
Dreaming the dreams of Midas, he loved to plunge his favorite young heroes into floods of sudden soft opulence, and his longings for luxury found expression in those unceasing schemes for instant wealth which made him a kindly mock to his companions. His first practical project was started in 1826, during a temporary sojourn for needed rest and proper food at his father's new home in Villeparisis, eighteen miles from Paris, on the edge of the forest of Bondy. He speedily hurried back to Paris and turned printer and publisher; bringing out, among other reprints, the complete works of Molière and of La Fontaine, each with his own introduction, each in one volume—compact and inconvenient—and, at the end of the year which saw twenty copies of either sold, the entire editions were got rid of, to save storage, at the price by weight of their paper. This and other failures left him in debt, and to pay this debt and to gain quick fortune, he set up a type-foundry in partnership with a foreman of his printing-office. The young firm took the establishment at No. 17 Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, now Rue Visconti; named for the famous archæologist who had lived, and in 1818 had died, in that venerable mansion hard by on the corner of Rue de Seine and Quai Malaquais. We have already found our way to this short and narrow Rue Visconti, to visit Jean Cousin and Baptiste du Cerceau, and, last of all, the rival houses of Racine.
Balzac's establishment, now entirely rebuilt, was as typical a setting of the scene as any ever invented by that master of scene-setting in fiction. It may be seen, as it stood until very lately, in its neighbor No. 15, an exact copy of this vanished No. 17. Its frowning front, receding as it rises, is pierced with infrequent windows, and hollowed out by a huge, wide doorway, within which you may see men casting plates for the press, albeit the successors of "Balzac et Barbier" no longer set type nor print.
"Balzac H. et Barbier A., Imprimeurs, Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, 17;" so appears the firm in the Paris directory for 1827. The senior partner had not yet assumed the particle "de," so proudly worn in later years when, too, he is labelled in the directory "homme-de-lettres," the title of "imprimeur," on which he prided himself because it meant wealth, having lasted only until the end of 1827 or the beginning of 1828. Printing-office and type-foundry were sold at a ruinous sacrifice, and Balzac was left with debts of about 120,000 francs; a burden that nearly broke his back and his heart for many years. He never went through that narrow street without groaning for its memories; and for a long time, he told his sister, he had been tempted to kill himself, as was tempted his hero of "La Peau de Chagrin." In his "Illusions Perdues" he has painted, in relentless detail, the cruel capacity of unpaid, or partially paid, debts for piling up interest. But the helpless despair of David Séchard was, in Balzac himself, redeemed by a buoyant confidence that never deserted him for long. To pay his debts, he toiled as did Walter Scott, whom Balzac admired for this bondage to rectitude, as he admired his genius. All through the "Comédie Humaine" he dwells on the burden of debt, the ceaseless struggle to throw it off, by desperate, by dishonorable, expedients.
On an upper floor of his establishment, Balzac had fitted up a small but elegant apartment for his living-place, his first attempt to realize that ideal of a bachelor residence such as those in which he installed his heroes. This was furnished, of course, on credit, and when failure came, he removed his belongings to a room at No. 2 Rue de Tournon, a house quite unchanged to-day. Here his neighbor was the editor of the "Figaro," Henri de la Touche—his intimate friend then, later his intimate enemy; a poor creature eaten by envy, whose specialty it was to turn against former friends and to sneer at old allies.
Here Balzac finished the book begun in his former room over his works, "Les Chouans." It was published in 1829, and was the first to bear his real name as author, the first to show to the reading world of what sterling stuff he was made. That stuff was not content with the book, good as it was, and he retouched and bettered it in after years. It brought him not only readers but editors and publishers; and before the end of 1830, he had poured forth a flood of novels, tales, and studies; among them such works as "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote," "Physiologie du Mariage," "Gobseck," "Étude de Femme," "Une Passion dans le Désert," "Un Épisode sous la Terreur," "Catherine de Médicis," "Lettres sur Paris"—with "Les Chouans," seventy in all!
Werdet, one of Balzac's publishers—his sole publisher from 1834 to 1837—lived and had his shop near by, at No. 49 Rue de Seine. To his house, just as it stands to-day, the always impecunious young author used to come, morning, noon, and night for funds, in payment of work unfinished, of work not yet begun, often of work never to be done.
From Rue de Tournon he removed, early in 1831, to Rue Cassini, No. 1, as we find it given in the Paris Bottin of that year. It is a short street of one block, running from Avenue de l'Observatoire to Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, and takes its name appropriately from the Italian astronomer, who was installed in the Observatory, having been made a citizen of France by Colbert, Louis XIV.'s great Finance Minister. It is a secluded quarter still, with its own air of isolation and its own village atmosphere. In 1831 it was really a village, far from town, and these streets were only country lanes, bordered by infrequent cottages, dear to the weary Parisian seeking distance and quiet. Three of them, near together here, harbored famous men at about this period, and all three have remained intact until lately for the delight of the pilgrim—that of Châteaubriand, No. 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, that of Victor Hugo, No. 27 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and this one of Balzac. His house, destroyed only in 1899, was on the southwest corner of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques and Rue Cassini. It was a little cottage of two stories, with two wings and a small central body, giving on a tiny court. A misguided Paris journal has claimed, with copious letterpress and illustrations, the large building at No. 6 Rue Cassini for Balzac's abode. This is a lamentable error, one of the many met with in topographical research, by which the traditions of a demolished house are transplanted to an existing neighbor. This characterless No. 6 carries its own proof that Balzac could never have chosen it, even were we without the decisive proof given by the cadastre of the city, lately unearthed by M. G. Lenôtre among the buried archives of the Bureau des Contributions Directes.
In the sunny apartment of the left wing dwelt Balzac and his friend, Auguste Borget; in the other wing, Jules Sandeau lived alone and lonely in his recent separation from George Sand. Their separation was not so absolute as to prevent an occasional visit from her, and an occasional dinner to her by the three men. She has described one of these wonderful dinners with much humor; telling how Balzac, when she started for her home—then on Quai Malaquais—arrayed himself in a fantastically gorgeous dressing-gown to accompany her; boasting, as they went, of the four Arabian horses he was about to buy; which he never bought, but which he quite convinced himself, if not her, that he already owned! Says Madame Dudevant: "He would, if we had permitted him, have thus escorted us from one end of Paris to the other." He so far realized his vision as to set up a tilbury and horse at this period—about 1832—and exulted in the sensation created by his magnificence as he drove, clad in his famous blue coat with shining buttons, and attended by his tiny groom, "Grain-de-mil."
This equipage and that gorgeous dressing-gown were but a portion of the bizarre splendor with which Balzac loved to relieve the squalor of his debt-ridden days. Here, his creditors forgetting, by them forgotten, as he fondly hoped, hiding from his friends the furniture he had salvaged from his wreck, he wantoned in silver toilet-appliances, in dainty porcelain and bric-à-brac; willing to go without soup and meat—never without his coffee—that he might fill, with egregious bibelots, his "nest of boudoirs à la marquise, hung with silk and edged with lace," to use George Sand's words; boudoirs which he has described in minute detail, placing them in the preposterous apartment of "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or."
In his work-room, apart and markedly simple and severe, he began that series of volumes, amazing in number and vigor, with which he was resolute to pay his enormous debts. Here, in this little wing, in the years between 1831 and 1838, he produced, among over sixty others of less note, such masterpieces as "La Peau de Chagrin," "Le Chef d'Œuvre Inconnu," "Le Curé de Tours," "Louis Lambert," "Eugénie Grandet," "Le Médecin de Campagne," "Le Père Goriot," "La Duchesse de Langeais," "Illusion Perdues" (first part only), "Le Lys dans la Vallée," "L'Enfant Maudit," "César Birotteau," "Cent Contes Drôlatiques" (in three sections), "Séraphita," "La Femme de Trente Ans," and "Jésus-Christ en Flandres."
In addition to his books, he did journalistic writing, chiefly for weekly papers; and in 1835 he bought up and took charge of the "Chronique de Paris," aided by a gallant staff of the cleverest men of the day. It lived only a few months. In 1840 he started "La Revue Parisienne," written entirely by himself. It lived three months.
When once at work, Balzac shut himself in his room, often seeing no one but his faithful servant for many weeks. His work-room was darkened from all daylight, his table lit only by steady-flamed candles, shaded with green. A cloistered monk of fiction, he was clad in his favorite robe of white cashmere, lined with white silk, open at the throat, with a silken cord about the waist, as we see him on the canvas of Louis Boulanger. He would get to his table at two in the morning and leave it at six in the evening; the entire time spent in writing new manuscript, and in his endless correction of proofs, except for an hour at six in the morning, for his bath and coffee, an hour at noon for his frugal breakfast, with frequent coffee between-times. At six in the evening he dined most simply, and was in bed and asleep by eight o'clock.
Honoré de Balzac.
(From the portrait by Louis Boulanger.)
With no inborn literary facility, with an inborn artistic conscience that drove him on in untiring pursuit of perfection, he filled the vast chasm between his thought and its expression with countless pen-strokes, and by methods of composition all his own: the exact reverse of those of Dumas, writing at white heat, never rewriting; or of Hugo, who said: "I know not the art of soldering an excellence in the place of a defect, and I correct myself in another work." Balzac began with a short and sketchy and slip-shod skeleton, making no attempt toward sequence or style, and sent it, with all its errors, to the printer. Proofs were returned to him in small sections pasted in the centre of huge sheets; around whose wide borders soon shot from the central text rockets and squibs of the author's additions and corrections, fired by his infuriated fist. The new proofs came back on similar sheets, to be returned to the printer, again like the web and tracks of a tipsy spider. This was repeated a dozen or, it is said, a score of times, always with amplifications, until his type-setters became palsied lunatics. He overheard one of them, as he entered the office one day, say: "I've done my hour of Balzac; who takes him next?" Type-setter, publisher, author were put out of misery only when the last proof came in, at its foot the magic "Bon à tirer."
This stupendous work had been preceded and was accompanied by as stupendous preparation of details. He dug deep to set the solid foundations for each structure he meant to build. "I have had to read so many books," he says, referring to his preliminary toil on "Louis Lambert." So real were his creations to him—more alive to his vision than visible creatures about—that he must needs name them fittingly, and house them appropriately. Invented nomenclature gave no vitality to them, in his view, and he hunted, on signs and shop-fronts wherever he went, for real names that meant life, and a special life. "A name," as he said, "which explains and pictures and proclaims him; a name that shall be his, that could not possibly belong to any other." He revelled in his discovery of "Matifat," and "Cardot," and like oddities. He dragged Léon Gozlan through miles of streets on such a search, refusing every name they found, until he quivered and colored before "Marcas" on a tailor's sign; it was the name he had dreamed of, and he put "Z" before it, "to add a flame, a plume, a star to the name of names!"
His scenes, too, were set for his personages with appalling care, so that, as has been well said, he sometimes chokes one with brick and mortar. He knew his Paris as Dickens knew his London, and found in unknown streets or unfrequented quarters the scenes he searched long for, the surroundings demanded by his characters. If his story were placed in a provincial town, he would write to a friend living there for a map of the neighborhood, and for accurate details of certain houses. Or, he would make hurried journeys to distant places: "I am off to Grenoble," or, "to Alençon"—he wrote to his sister—"where So-and-so lives:" one of his new personages, already a living acquaintance to him. In his artistic frenzy for fitting atmosphere he has, unconsciously, breathed his spirit of unrest into much of his narrative, and the reader plunges on, out-of-breath, through chapterless pages of fatiguing detail.
These excursions were not his only outings in later years. He got away from his desk during the summer months, for welcome journeys to his own Touraine, and to other lands, and for visits to old family friends. Always and everywhere he carried his work with him.
And he began to see the world of Paris, and to be seen in that world, notably in the famous salon of Emile de Girardin and his young wife, Delphine Gay de Girardin, where the watchword was "Admiration, more admiration, and still more admiration." He met well-bred women and illustrious men, whose familiar intercourse polished him, whose attentions gratified him. The pressure of his present toil removed for a while, he was fond of emerging from his solitude, and of flashing in the light of publicity. He was an interested and an interesting talker, earnest and vehement and often excited in his utterances; yet frank and merry, and vivid with a "Herculean joviality." His thick fine black hair was tossed back like a mane from his noble, towering brow; his nose was square at the end, his lips full and curved, and hidden partly by a small mustache. His most notable features were his eyes, brown, spotted with gold, glowing with life and light—"the eyes of a sovereign, a seer, a subjugator." A great soul shone out of them, and they redeemed and triumphed over all that was heavy in face and vulgar in body; for, with a thickness of torso like Mirabeau, and the neck of a bull, he had his own corpulence. Lamartine says that the personal impression made by Balzac was that of an element in nature; he gripped one's brain when speaking, and one's heart when silent. Moreover, it was an element good as well as strong, unable to be other than good; and his expression, we know from all who saw it, told of courage, patience, gentleness, kindliness.
He was commonly as careless of costume as a vagrant school-boy in outgrown clothes. He would rush from his desk to the printer's or race away in search of names, clad in his green hunting-jacket with its copper buttons of foxes' heads, black and gray checked trousers, pleated at the waist, and held down by straps passing under the huge high-quartered shoes, tied or untied as might happen, a red silk kerchief cord-like about his neck, his hat, shaggy and faded, crushed over his eyes—altogether a grotesque creature! In contrast, he was gorgeous in his gala toilet of the famous blue coat and massive gold buttons, and the historic walking-stick, always carried en grande tenue, its great knob aglow with jewels sent him by his countless feminine adorers.
When Balzac removed with Sandeau, in 1838, to new quarters, he kept this apartment in Rue Cassini for an occasional retreat, perhaps for a friendly refuge against the creditors, who became more and more clamorous in their attentions. The two comrades furnished the lower floor of their new home most handsomely; mainly with the view of dazzling urgent publishers, who, as said Balzac, "would give me nothing for my books if they found me in a garret." Coming to drive a bargain, these guileless gentry found themselves too timid to haggle with the owners of such luxury. They could not know that that luxury was merely hired under cover of a friend's name, and lit up only by night to blind and bewilder them, while the haughty authors lived by day in bare discomfort, on a half-furnished upper floor.
Of this mansion only the site remains. It was at No. 17 Rue des Battailles, on the heights of Chaillot—the suburb between Paris and Passy—and that street and the Balzac house have been cut away by the modern Avenue d'Iéna. Retired and high as it was, with its grand view over river and town, it was not high enough nor far enough away for this lover of distance and height. He soon tried again to realize his ideal of a country home by buying, in 1838, three acres of land at Ville d'Avray, a quarter near Sèvres, on the road to Versailles. On the ground was a small cottage called, in Louis XIV.'s time, "Les Jardies," still known by that name, and notable in our time as the country-home of Léon Gambetta, wherein he died. That home remains exactly as he left it, at No. 14 Rue Gambetta, Ville d'Avray, and has been placed among the National Monuments of France. It is a shrine for the former followers of the great tribune, who visit it on each anniversary of his death. The statue they have erected to their leader, alongside the house, may be most kindly passed by in silence.
Les Jardies.
The glorious view from this spot—embracing the valley of Ville d'Avray, the slopes opposite, the great city in the distance—was a delight to Balzac. Les Jardies was a tiny box, having but three rooms in its two stories, which communicated by a ladder-like staircase outside. He had tried to improve the place by a partial rebuilding, and the stairs were forgotten until it was too late to put them inside. A later tenant has enclosed that absurd outer staircase within a small addition. His garden walls gave him even more trouble, for they crumbled and slid down on the grounds of an irate neighbor. The greater part of that garden has been walled off. Yet the poor little patch was a domain in his eyes; its one tree and scattered shrubs grew to a forest in his imagination, and his fancy pictured, in that confined area, a grand plantation of pineapples, from which he was to receive a yearly income of 400,000 francs! He had fixed on the very shop on the boulevards where they were to be sold, and only Gautier's cold sense prevented the great planter, as he saw himself, from renting it before he had grown one pineapple!
His rooms were almost bare of furniture, and this was suggested by his stage directions charcoaled on the plaster walls: "Rosewood panels," "Gobelins tapestries," "Venetian mirror," "An inlaid cabinet stands here," "Here hangs a Raphael." Thus he was content to camp for four or five years, hoping his house would yet be furnished, and perhaps believing it was already furnished.
At this time, and for many years, Balzac rented a room over the shop of his tailor Buisson, at the present No. 112 Rue de Richelieu. His letters came here always, and he used the place not only for convenience when in town, but, in connection with other shelters, for his unceasing evasion of pursuing creditors. A tailor still occupies that shop, and seems to be prosperous; probably able to collect his bills from prompter customers than was Balzac.
In 1843, forced to sell Les Jardies, he came back into the suburbs, to a house then No. 19 Rue Basse, at Passy, now No. 47 Rue Raynouard of that suburb. On the opposite side of the street, at No. 40, is a modest house, hiding behind its garden-wall. This was the unpretending home of "Béranger, poète à Passy," to quote the Paris Bottin. No. 47 is a plain bourgeois dwelling of two stories and attic, wide and low, standing on the line of the street; in the rear is a court, and behind that court is the pavilion occupied by Balzac. He had entrance from the front, and unseen egress by a small gate on the narrow lane sunk between walls, now named Rue Berton, and so by the quay into town. This was a need for his furtive goings and comings, at times.
Balzac's work-room here looked out over a superb panorama—across the winding Seine, over the Champ-de-Mars, and the Invalides' dome, and all southern Paris, to the hills of Meudon in the distance. This room he kept austerely furnished, as was his way; while the living apartments were crowded with the extraordinary collection of rare furniture, pictures, and costly trifles, which he had begun again to bring together. To it he gave all the money he could find or get credit for, and as much thought and labor and time as to his books, although with little of the knowledge that might have saved him from frequent swindlers. It was only his intimates who were allowed to enter these rooms, and they needed, in order to enter them, or the court or the house on the street, many contrivances and passwords, constantly changed. He himself posed as "la Veuve Durand," or as "Madame de Bruguat," and each visitor had to ask for one of these fictitious persons; stating, with cheerful irrelevancy: "The season of plums has arrived," or, "I bring laces from Belgium." Once in, they found free-hearted greeting and full-handed hospitality, and occasional little dinners. The good cheer was more toothsome to the favored convives, than were the cheap acrid wines, labelled with grand names, made drinkable only by the host's fantastic fables of their vintages and their voyages; believed by him, at least, who dwelt always in his own domain of dreams.
These dinners were not extravagant, and there was no foolish expenditure in this household at Passy. Balzac wrote later to his niece, that his cooking there had been done only twice a week, and in the days between he was content with cold meat and salad, so that each inmate had cost him only one franc a day. For this man of lavish outlay for genuine and bogus antiques, this slave to strange extravagances and colossal debts—partly imaginary—was painfully economical in his treatment of himself. He thought of money, he wrote about money. Before him, love had been the only passion allowed in novels; he put money in its place and found romance in the Code. All through his life he worked for money to pay his debts, intent on that one duty. In October, 1844, he wrote two letters, within one week, to the woman who was to be his wife; in one of them he says that his dream, almost realized, is to earn before December the paltry twenty thousand francs that would free him from all debt; in the other he gloats over recent purchases of bric-à-brac, amounting to hundreds of francs. He saw nothing comically inconsistent in the two letters.
In all his letters, the saddest reading of all letters, there is this curious commingling of the comic and the sordid. Those, especially, written to his devoted sister and to the devoted lady who became his wife at the last, give us most intimate acquaintance with the man; showing a man, indeed, strong and vehement, steadfast and patient; above all, magnanimous. Self-assertive in his art, eager and insistent concerning it, he was quite without personal envy or self-seeking. Said Madame Dudevant: "I saw him often under the shock of great injustices, literary and personal, and I never heard him say an evil word of anyone." Nor was there any evil in his life—a life of sobriety and of chastity, as well as of toil. At the bottom of his complex nature lay a deep natural affection. This giant of letters, when nearly fifty years old, signed his letters to his mother, "Ton fils soumis"; so expressing truly his feeling for her, from the day she had installed him in his mean garret, to that later day, when she fitted up his grand last mansion. In his letters to those dear to him, amid clamorous outcries about debts and discomforts, comes a deeper cry for sympathy and affection. Early in life, he wrote to his sister: "My two only and immense desires—to be famous and to be loved—will they ever be satisfied?" To a friend he wrote: "All happiness depends on courage and work." So, out of his own mouth, we may judge this man in all fairness.
From this Passy home one night, Balzac and Théophile Gautier went to the apartment of Roger de Beauvoir, in the Hôtel de Lauzun-Pimodan, on the Island of Saint-Louis; and thence the three friends took a short flight into a hashish heaven. Their strange experiences have been told by their pens, but to us, Balzac's night of drugged dreams is not so strange as his days of unforced dreams. That which attracts us in this incident is its scene—one of the grandest of the mansions that sprang up from the thickets of Île Saint-Louis, as le Menteur has put it. Built in the middle years of the seventeenth century, it stands quite unchanged at No. 17 Quai d'Anjou, bearing, simply and effectively, every mark of Mansart's hand in his later years. Its first owner followed his friend Fouquet to the Bastille and to Pignerol; its next tenant came to it from a prison-cell, and went from it to the very steps of the throne. He was the superb adventurer, Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Duc de Lauzun, and his family name clings still to the place, and is cut in gold letters on the black marble tablet above the door. On that prettiest balcony in Paris, crowded the prettiest women of Paris, on summer nights, to look at the river fêtes got up by their showy and braggart Gascon host. Through this portal have passed Bossuet and Père Lachaise, going in to convert the plain old Huguenot mother of de Lauzun, who lived retired in her own isolated chamber through the years of her son's ups and downs. When her family had gone, came the Marquis de Richelieu, great-nephew of the great Richelieu, with the bride he had stolen from her convent at Chaillot—the daughter of Hortense Mancini, niece of Mazarin, and of her husband, it is alleged. Then came the Pimodan, who was first of that name, and who gave it to his hôtel. It is an admirable relic; its rooms, with their frescoed ceilings and their panelled walls, are as remarkable as those of the château of Fontainebleau, and are not surpassed by any in Paris. The mansion is well worth a visit for itself and for its memories.
Balzac's Paris—the Paris for which his pen did what Callot and Meryon did for it with their needles—has been almost entirely pickaxed out of sight and remembrance. The Revolution, wild-eyed in its mad "Carmagnole," gave itself time to raze a few houses only, after clearing the ground of the Bastille, although it had meant much more destruction; the Empire cut some new streets, and planned some new quarters; the Bourbons came back and went away again, leaving things much as they had found them. It remained for Louis-Philippe to begin "works of public utility," an academic phrase, which being interpreted signified the tearing down of the old and the building up of the new, to gratify the grocers and tallow-chandlers whose chosen King he was, and to fill his own pocket. Yet much of Balzac's stage-setting remained until it was swept away by Haussmann and his master of the Second Empire. Such was the wretched Rue du Doyenné, that "narrow ravine" between the Louvre and Place du Carrousel, where Baron Hulot first saw la Marneffe, and where la Cousine Bette kept guard over her Polish artist in his squalid garret; doubtless the very garret known to Balzac in his visits there, when it was tenanted by Arsène Houssaye, Gautier, Gavarni, and the rest of "Young France, harmless in its furies." That house, one of a block of black old eighteenth-century structures, stood where now is the trim little garden behind the preposterous statue of Gambetta.
History and fiction meet on the steps of Saint-Roch. There César Birotteau, the ambitious and unlucky perfumer, was "wounded by Napoleon," on the 13 Vendémiaire, the day that put the young Corsican's foot into the stirrup, and gave to the sham-heroic César that sounding phrase, always thereafter doing duty on his tongue. He was carried to his shop in Rue Saint-Honoré, on its northern side near Rue de Castiglione, and hid and bandaged and nursed in his entresol. This part of Rue Saint-Honoré and its length eastward, with its narrow pavement and its tall, thin houses, is still a part of the picture Balzac knew and painted; but the business district hereabout has greatly changed since his day. The Avenue de l'Opéra, and all that mercantile quarter dear to the American pocket, the Bourse and the banking-houses about, date from this side of his Paris. Nucingen would be lost in his old haunts, and Lucien de Rubempré could not recognize the newspaper world of our day.
The hôtels of the Faubourg Saint-Germain—the splendid mansions of the splendid eighteenth century, where his Rastignac and his lesser pet swells lorded it—are now, in many cases, let out in apartments, their owners content with the one floor that is in keeping with their diminished fortunes. Undiminished, however, are their traditions and their prejudices, albeit "Le Faubourg" exists no longer, except as an attitude of mind. Yet, here on the left bank, are still to be found some of the scenes of the "Comédie Humaine." On Quai Voltaire, alongside the house in which Voltaire died, is the very same shop of the antiquary, from whom Raphael de Valentin bought the peau de chagrin. Balzac knew it well, doubtless was swindled there, and to-day you will find it as crowded with curiosities, as begrimed with dust, as suggestive of marvels hid in its dusky corners, as when he haunted it.
Raphael de Valentin lived in the hôtel-garni Saint-Quentin, Rue des Cordiers. Long before his day, Rousseau had been a tenant of a dirty room in the same dirty hôtellerie, going there because of the scholarly neighborhood of the place and of its memories, even at that time. Leibnitz, in 1646, had found it a village inn in a narrow lane, hardly yet a street. Gustave Planche lived there, and Hégésippe Moreau died there in 1838—a true poet, starved to death. The old inn and all its memories and the very street are vanished; and the new buildings of the Sorbonne cover their site.
The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the house where Voltaire died.
"One of the most portentous settings of the scene in all the literature of fiction. In this case there is nothing superfluous; there is a profound correspondence between the background and the action." Such is the judgment of so competent a critic as Mr. Henry James, concerning the house in which is played the poignant tragedy of "Père Goriot." You will, if you love Balzac, own to the truth of this statement, when you look upon this striking bit of salvage. It stands, absolutely unchanged as to externals, at No. 24 Rue Tournefort; a street named in honor of the great botanist who cleared the track for Linnæus. In Balzac's day, this street was known by its original name of Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève; one of the most ancient and most isolated streets on the southern bank. Once only, through the centuries, has its immemorial quiet been broken by unseemly noise, when, in the days of François I., a rowdy gambling-den there, the "Tripôt des 11,000 Diables," did its utmost to justify its name. The street seems to creep, in subdued self-effacement, over the brow of Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, away from the Paris of shops and cabs and electric light. The house stands narrow on the street, its gable window giving scanty light to poor old Goriot's wretched garret; framed in it, one may fancy the patient face of the old man, looking out in mute bewilderment on his selfish, worldly daughters. The place no longer holds the "pension bourgeoise de deux sexes et autres" of the naïve description on the cards of Madame Vauquer, née Conflans; and is now let out to families and single tenants. Its gate-way stands always open, and you may enter without let or hindrance into the court, and so through to the tiny garden behind, once the pride of Madame Vauquer, no longer so carefully kept up. You peep into the small, shabby salle-à-manger, on the entrance floor of the house, and you seem to see the convict Vautrin, manacled, in the clutch of the gens-d'armes, and, cowering before him, the vicious old maid who has betrayed him. That colossal conception of the great romancer had found his ideal hiding-place here, as had the forlorn father his hiding-place, in his self-inflicted poverty. All told, there is no more convincing pile of brick and mortar in fiction; sought out and selected by Balzac with as much care and as many journeys as Dickens gave to his hunt for exactly the right house for Sampson and Sally Brass.
The Pension Vauquer.
While Balzac was still at Passy, after long searching for a new home, he made purchase, as early as 1846, in the new quarter near the present Parc Monceaux. That name came from an estate hereabout, once owned by Philippe Égalité; and his son, the King of the French, and the shrewdest speculator among the French, was just at this time exploiting this estate, in company with lesser speculators. The whole suburb was known as the Quartier Beaujon, from a great banker of the eighteenth century, whose grand mansion, within its own grounds, had been partly demolished by the cutting of new streets, leaving only out-buildings and a pavilion in a small garden. This was the place bought by Balzac; the house and grounds, dear as they were, costing much less, as he found, than his furniture, bronzes, porcelains, and pottery, paintings and their frames—all minutely described in the collection of le cousin Pons. He made a museum, indeed, of this house, bringing out all his hidden treasures from their various concealments here and there about town. There was still a pretence of poverty regarding his new home; he would say to his friends, amazed by the display: "Nothing of all this is mine. I have furnished this house for a friend, whom I expect. I am only the guardian and doorkeeper of this hôtel."
The pretty mystery was resolved within a few months, and its solution explained Balzac's frequent and long absences from Paris after the winter of 1842-43. These months had been passed at the home of Madame Ève de Hanska, the Polish widow who was to be his wife. Her home was in the grand château of Wierzchownie, in the Ukraine, whose present owner keeps unchanged the furniture of Balzac's apartment, where is hung his portrait by Boulanger, a gift to Madame de Hanska from her lover. And from there he brought his bride to Paris in the summer of 1850, their marriage dating from March of that year, after many years of waiting in patient affection. She had made over—with Balzac's cordial consent—nearly the whole of her great fortune to her daughter, her only child, and to that daughter's husband, retaining but a small income for herself. It was—and the envious world owned that it was—truly a love-match. They came home to be welcomed, first of all, by Balzac's aged mother; who had, during his absence, taken charge of all the preparations, with the same anxious, loving care she had given to the fitting-up of his garret thirty years before. She had carried out, in every detail, even to the arrangement of the flowers in the various rooms, the countless directions he had sent from every stage of the tedious journey from Wierzchownie.
"And so, the house being finished, death enters," goes the Turkish proverb. This undaunted mariner, after his stormy voyage, gets into port and is ship-wrecked there. His premonition of early years, written to his confidant Dablin in 1830, was proven true: "I foresee the darkest of destinies for myself; that will be to die when all that I now wish for shall be about to come to me." As early as in the preceding summer of 1849, he had ceased to conceal from himself any longer the malady that others had seen coming since 1843. The long years of unbroken toil, of combat without pause, of stinted sleep, of insufficient food, of inadequate exercise, of the steady stimulation of coffee, had broken the body of this athlete doubled with the monk. Years before, he had found that the inspiration for work given by coffee had lessened in length and strength. "It now excites my brain for only fifteen days consecutively," he had complained; protesting that Rossini was able to work for the same period on the same stimulus! So he spurred himself on, listening to none of the warnings of worn nature nor of watchful friends. "Well, we won't talk about that now," was always his answer. "In the olden days," says Sainte-Beuve, "men wrote with their brains; but Balzac wrote, not only with his brains, but with his blood." And now, he went to pieces all at once; his heart and stomach could no longer do their work; his nerves, once of steel and Manila hemp, were torn and jangled, and snapped at every strain; his very eyesight failed him. The most pitiful words ever penned by a man-of-letters were scrawled by him, at the end of a note written by his wife to Gautier, a few weeks after their home-coming: "Je ne puis ni lire ni écrire."
"On the 18th August, 1850"—writes Hugo in "Choses Vues"—"my wife, who had been during the day to call on Madame Balzac, told me that Balzac was dying. My uncle, General Louis Hugo, was dining with us, but as soon as we rose from table, I left him and took a cab to Rue Fortunée, Quartier Beaujon, where M. de Balzac lived. He had bought what remained of the hôtel of M. de Beaujon, a few buildings of which had escaped the general demolition, and out of them he had made a charming little house, elegantly furnished, with a porte-cochère on the street, and in place of a garden, a long, narrow, paved court-yard, with flower-beds about it here and there."
It was to No. 14, Allée Fortunée, that Hugo drove. That suburban lane is now widened into Rue Balzac, and where it meets Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré there is a bit of garden-wall, and set in it is a tablet recording the site of this, Balzac's last home. The house itself has quite vanished, but one can see, above that wall, the upper part of a stone pavilion with Greek columns, built by him, it is believed.
"I rang," continues Hugo; "the moon was veiled by clouds; the street deserted. No one came. I rang again. The gate opened; a woman came forward, weeping. I gave my name, and was told to enter the salon, which was on the ground floor. On a pedestal opposite the fireplace was the colossal bust by David. A wax-candle was burning on a handsome oval table in the middle of the room.... We passed along a corridor, and up a staircase carpeted in red, and crowded with works of art of all kinds—vases, pictures, statues, paintings, brackets bearing porcelains.... I heard a loud and difficult breathing. I was in M. de Balzac's bedroom.
"The bed was in the middle of the room. M. de Balzac lay in it, his head supported by a mound of pillows, to which had been added the red damask cushions of the sofa. His face was purple, almost black, inclining to the right. The hair was gray, and cut rather short. His eyes were open and fixed. I saw his side face only, and thus seen, he was like Napoleon.... I raised the coverlet and took Balzac's hand. It was moist with perspiration. I pressed it; he made no answer to the pressure...."
The bust that Hugo saw was done by David d'Angers; a reduced copy surmounts Balzac's tomb. His portrait, in water-color, painted, within an hour after his death, by Eugène Giraud, is a touching portrayal of the man, truer than any made during life, his widow thought. While long suffering had wasted, it had refined, his face, and into it had come youth, strength, majesty. It is the head of the Titan, who carried a pitiable burden through a life of brave labor.
Balzac's death was known in a moment, it would seem, to his creditors, and they came clamoring to the door, and invaded the house—a ravening horde, ransacking rooms and hunting for valuables. They drove the widow away, and she found a temporary home with Madame de Surville, at 47 Rue des Martyrs. This house and number are yet unchanged. Cabinets and drawers were torn open, and about the grounds were scattered his letters and papers, sketches of new stories, drafts of contemplated work—all, that could be, collected by his friends, also hurrying to the spot. They found manuscripts in the shops around, ready to enwrap butter and groceries. One characteristic and most valuable letter was tracked to three places, in three pieces, by an enthusiast, who rescued the first piece just as it was twisted up and ready to light a cobbler's pipe.
"He died in the night," continues Hugo. "He was first taken to the Chapel Beaujon.... The funeral service took place at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. As I stood by the coffin, I remembered that there my second daughter had been baptized. I had not been in the church since.... The procession crossed Paris, and went by way of the boulevards to Père-Lachaise. Rain was falling as we left the church, and when we reached the cemetery. It was one of those days when the heavens seemed to weep. We walked the whole distance. I was at the head of the coffin on the right, holding one of the silver tassels of the pall. Alexandre Dumas was on the other side.... When we reached the grave, which was on the brow of the hill, the crowd was immense.... The coffin was lowered into the grave, which is near to those of Charles Nodier and Casimir Delavigne. The priest said a last prayer and I a few words. While I was speaking the sun went down. All Paris lay before me, afar off, in the splendid mists of the sinking orb, the glow of which seemed to fall into the grave at my feet, as the dull sounds of the sods dropping on the coffin broke in upon my last words."
Yes, stretched before his grave, lies all Paris, as his Rastignac saw it, when he turned from the fosses-communes, into which they had just thrown the body of Père Goriot, and with his clinched fist flung out his grand defiance toward the great, beautiful, cruel city: "À nous deux, maintenant!"