Madame De Berney had been disillusioned, and intellectual desire was glowing with a steady, mellow light. She wanted to know and to be. And shooting through space comes Balzac, a vagrant comet, and their orbits being the same, their masses unite and continue in one course, bowled by the Infinite.
The leading impulse in the life of Balzac was to express: to tell the things he knew and the things he imagined. To express was the one gratification which made life worth living. And so he told Madame De Berney's son, and then Madame came into the class and he told her. We talk to the sympathetic and receptive: to those who are masters of the fine art of listening.
Soon the lessons were too advanced for the son to follow, and so Balzac told it all to Madame. She listened, smiled indulgently, sighed. They walked in the park and along country lanes and byways; the young tutor talked and talked, and laughed and laughed.
Balzac's brain was teeming with ideas, a mass and jumble of thoughts, ideas, plans and emotions. "Write it out," said Madame—in partial self-defense, no doubt. "Write it out!"
And so Balzac began to write poetry, plays, essays, stories. And everything he wrote he read to her. As soon as he had written something he hastened to hunt up "La Dilecta," as he called her.
Their minds fused in an idea—they blended in thought. He loved her, not knowing when he began or how. His tumultuous nature poured itself out to her, all without reason.
She became a need to him. He wrote her letters in the morning and at night. They dined together, walked, talked, rowed and read.
She ransacked libraries for him. She sold his product to publishers. They collaborated in writing, but he had the physical strength that she had not, so he usually fished the story out of the ink-bottle and presented it to her.
He began to be sought after. Fame appeared on the horizon. Critics rose and thundered. Balzac defied all rules, walked over the grammar, defiled the well of classic French. He invented phrases, paraphrased greatness, coined words. He worked the slide, glide, the ellipse—any way to express the thought. He forged a strange and wondrous style—a language made up of all the slang of the street, combined with the terminologies of the laboratory, law, medicine and science. He was an ignoramus.
But still the public read what he wrote and clamored for more, because the man expressed humanity—he knew men and women.