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.