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.