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.