Attracted by the mine of wealth which the theatre opens to the popular playwright; and burdened with a real or imaginary weight of debt, from which one or two dramas, if favorably received, would free him entirely; and desirous, moreover, of experiencing the delirious intoxication which the plaudits of the gallery bring to the successful dramatist, Balzac’s inflammable imagination became a veritable whirlwind of plots and epigrams whenever a new play was well received.
But for the playwright, as for the mechanic, an apprenticeship is obligatory, and, though Balzac’s novels contained action and analysis, drama and observation, it was not, as we have seen, until after a long and laborious preparation that he was enabled to attract the attention of the public; and it is evident that the heights which he then scaled were so fatiguing and time-consuming that his life, wearied by the struggle, was not of sufficient duration to permit his winning equal triumphs on the stage.
From his early schooldays, however, in which, it will be remembered, he commenced a tragedy on the Incas, which was afterwards followed by a drama in blank verse entitled “Cromwell,” the stage had possessed an irresistible attraction for him; and if therein he was not at first successful, it was perhaps from the very cause which brought to him his original popularity, and the superabundance of his ideas, paradoxical as it at first appears, was undoubtedly his greatest stumbling-block.
To imagine a plot was nothing, the scenes were but details, and the outline of a melodrama was to him the work of as little labor as would be required in the conception of a pleasing menu; but when the general plan was sketched, each scene would suggest a dozen others, and the Coliseum of Vespasian would not have been large enough to present the simultaneous action which the play, at once interminable and impossible, would have demanded.
Another reason for his lack of immediate success was the jealousy of his colleagues and the hatred of the critics; and as at that time the existence of a play depended entirely upon the manner in which the first representation was received, it was not very difficult to create a cabal against this usurper, who, not content with his legitimate celebrity, seemed, at the bare mention of a play, to meditate a universal literary monarchy, in which he would reign supreme; and while the conquest of both spheres has been effected by Hugo, Voltaire, and others of like ilk, yet these authors were careful to fortify their progress with a book in one hand and a play in the other, whereas it was not until Balzac had reached his apogee that he began a serious attack on the stage.
It was in the year 1840 that Balzac submitted “Vautrin,” his first drama, to the director of the Porte-St.-Martin. The play was at once accepted; for the author’s reputation was not only gigantic, but the Porte-St.-Martin had almost foundered in successive tempests, and to the director, who was as penniless as he was appreciative, the offer was little less than a godsend. An agreement was signed forthwith, and Balzac abandoned Les Jardies for more convenient quarters, where he could attend to the rehearsals and remodel the scenes on the stage itself, which, it may be added, he continued to do up to the very last moment.
During these preparations, the boulevards were agog with excitement. The actors and the director, accompanied by Balzac’s friends, wandered daily from the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle to Tontoni’s and the Café Riche, exciting the curiosity of the flaneurs by their reticence or murmured confidences; and Balzac’s ingress and egress from the theatre were, it is said, watched and waited for by curious crowds.
Never in the history of the drama had a first representation been so impatiently awaited; and Balzac, foreseeing the immense sale which the seats would have, bought up the entire house, and then, while endeavoring that the tickets should circulate only among his friends and their acquaintances, sold the better part of it over again at a large advance.
“My dear friend,” he wrote to Dablin, “if among your acquaintances there are any who wish to assist at the first representation of ‘Vautrin,’ let me know who they are, as I prefer to let the boxes to those whom I know about, rather than to those who are unknown to me. I particularly wish to have handsome women present. The demand for boxes is greater than the supply. The journalists are to be sacrificed.”
To Gozlan he wrote,—