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.