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.