His account of Sardinia is equally curious. It was a wilderness, he says, with savannas of palm-trees, inhabited by savages. On horseback, he traversed a virgin forest, obliged to bend over his horse's neck to avoid the huge branches of holm-oaks and cork-trees, and laurels and heather that were thirty feet high. In one canton he found people naked, except for a waist-cloth, and living on coarse bread made from acorns mixed with clay. Their mud hovels had no chimney, the fire being lighted on the ground in the middle. There was no agriculture in the island, and the only work done by the men was tending their flocks of goats and other animals.
A tour through Genoa, Florence, and Milan made up the rest of this interesting trip, which lasted from March till June. Disappointed in the object for which he left home, it furnished him with leisure to gather fresh subjects for his pen, and even to begin one—the Diaries of Two Young Wives. What he wished to describe in this book was stated in the following remarks to Madame Hanska: "I have never seen a novel in which happy love, satisfied love, is depicted. Rousseau puts too much rhetoric in his attempt, and Richardson too much preaching. The poets have too many flourishes; the novelists are too much the slaves of facts. Petrarch is too exclusively occupied with his images of speech and his concetti; he sees the poetry more than the woman. Pope has given perhaps too many regrets to Heloise; he wanted her to be better than nature; and the better is an enemy to the good. In fine, God, who created love with humanity, has alone understood it; for none of his creatures has described, so as to please me, the elegies, fantasies, and poems of this divine passion of which each speaks and which so few have really known."
Did Balzac himself ever know it? By his own confession, never in his youth. In the years of his adolescence there is no sign of such a feeling having agitated his breast, where ambition reigned to the exclusion of everything else. If, then, he thought of marriage, its prosaic, advantageous side only appears to have entered into count; and the liaison, which stood him in lieu of it, stirred, beyond sense, nothing but sentiments of common gratitude. In riper age, his attachment to Madame Hanska was a bizarre medley of flattered vanity, artistic appreciation of beauty, and cold calculation. His epistles reek with each and all of these; and his eternal complaints of financial embarrassment not infrequently read like the expressions of a pauper's whining.
That they ultimately wearied out the recipient of them is evident from the remonstrances he drew upon himself. Eve blamed his lightness of character, the facility with which he let himself be tempted, his tendency to waste in travelling the funds he would have done more wisely to employ in reducing his obligations or avoiding them. At such moments he defended himself sharply, his tone savouring less of the boudoir than the forum. Any and every excuse was pressed into service; everything and everybody were responsible but himself. Even his mother he accused of causing his indebtedness—his mother who had ruined herself for him, and from whose remaining pittance he took in this self-same year the wherewithal to go to Sardinia, although earning many thousands of francs annually. The truth is that Balzac exploited all the women that loved him, himself incapable of loving any one of them with that entire devotion which, if roused, is unique in a man's life; and, as he was ignorant of it, so he has never described it adequately, faithfully. In one or two instances, he obtains a glimpse of it—as Moses obtained a vision of the promised land—from afar; when he tries to get nearer, he presents us with mere sensualism.
What Madame Hanska probably enjoyed most in his letters were the obiter dicta which he was never tired of pronouncing on his contemporaries. Scribe, whose Camaraderie he had been to see, he summed up as a man who was conversant in his trade but had no veritable art, who possessed talent but not the higher dramatic genius, and who, moreover, was altogether lacking in style. Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas was to him an infamy in verse, and the rest of this author's pieces miserable melodramas. Theophile Gautier's poetry was decadent, his style sparkling with great wit; yet the man was wanting in force of ideas. When, however, he added that Gautier would do nothing that would last because he was engaged in journalism, he spoke with all his hatred of a profession that refused him the honour he deemed his due. Eugene Sue, also, he looked upon with jaundiced eyes, as being a rival whose material success amazed him—a rival, indeed, whom no less a critic than Sainte-Beuve erroneously declared to be his equal. Sue, he informed Madame Hanska, was a man of narrow bourgeois mind, perceiving merely certain insignificant details of the vulgar evils of French contemporary society. To Balzac, besides, it was blasphemy in Sue that he spoke slightingly of the century which to this Legitimist was the grandest epoch in French history, slightingly of Louis XIV., who, in the said Legitimist's opinion, was France's premier king.
The latter half of 1838 was spent at Les Jardies, where the novelist was busy either with his pen or in improving the interior and exterior of the property. A scheme for cultivating a pine-apple orchard in his grounds kept him from fretting over the sorry termination of his Sardinian dream. He intended to set five thousand plants, and sell the fruit at five francs a piece, instead of twenty which was the ordinary price. After deducting the expenses of the undertaking, he reckoned he could gain twenty thousand francs a year out of his pine-apples. If they had been willing to grow in the open air, he would undoubtedly have gone from theory into practice. But, as this difficulty presented itself in the initial stage, he threw up incontinently his market-gardening; and, since he was in urgent want of cash, he bethought himself that, lying by him, he had a collection of Napoleon's sayings, which he had been making for the past seven years, cutting them out of books that dealt with the Emperor's life. The number was just then five hundred. For a sum of five thousand francs he disposed of the fruits of his industry to a retired hosier named Gandy, who published them subsequently under the title Maxims and Thoughts of Napoleon, the preface being also supplied by the novelist.
Besides Gambara, a second study of the musical art, containing a lyrically expressed analysis of Robert le Diable, Balzac produced in 1837 and 1838 two longer works, the Employees or the Superior Woman and the Firm of Nucingen. The former, with its criticism of the bureaucratic system, depicted a state of things which has survived several changes of regime in France, in spite of much in it that contradicts common sense. Rabourdin, the head clerk in a government department, seeks to simplify the useless machinery that clogs rather than advances the administration of the country. Having a practical mind, he believes that a hundred functionaries at twelve thousand francs a year would do the same work better than a thousand employees at twelve hundred francs, and cost no more. As in other of the novelist's books that preached reform, there are parts in this one where the main thread of the story disappears like a river in a canyon; and readers of the Presse, in which it came out as a serial, railed at the author, called his contribution stupid, and threatened to cease subscribing if it were not withdrawn. Yet, perused in volume form, it reveals comedy in abundance. The portraits are limned with master hand; and Celestine Rabourdin, the wife of the head clerk, has, together with her grace and taste, the gift of amusing by the skill with which she bamboozles the dissolute des Lupeaulx.
The Firm of Nucingen is a scathing satire of the world of stock-jobbing, where the money of the small investor is robbed with impunity under cover of legality. Balzac's Jewish banker, who thrives on others' ruin is a type that exists to-day, as then, without any adequate effort made by law to suppress him. Less happy in indicating a remedy than in branding an evil, the novelist naively held that France had only to adopt his doctrine of absolute rule for the suppression to become a fact. An unprejudiced reading of history should have informed him that regimes have always so far existed for the benefit of their creators, and that, although constitutional monarchies and republics have not yet found out a system capable of defending the interests of all individual citizens, and perhaps never will, absolute monarchy has shown to satiety its inability to defend the interests of more than a few.
In perusing such a book as the foregoing, one is led to ask why it was so inoperative on the life of the country. One reason perhaps is that Balzac wrote from his head rather than from his heart. Whatever may be, in other respects, the superiority of the Realistic over the Romantic school of fiction, it is inferior in this, viz., that its emotiveness tends to the negation, not to the affirmation, of action. One cannot but recollect to the novelist's disadvantage, as applying to this reference, the following statement he made to Madame Hanska for another purpose: "I have never in my life confused the thoughts of my heart with those of my head, and, excepting a few lines written only for you to read (for instance, Madame de Chaulieu's jealous letter), I have never expressed in my books anything of my heart. It would have been the most infamous sacrilege." Unconsciously insincere, like the majority of people in their justificative confessions, Balzac often allowed his heart to intrude where it had no business to be present. Nevertheless in his realist pictures he exercised himself with all the cold delight of the anatomist, and with none of the warm emotion that might have become communicative. This Brunetiere implicitly admits when he says that most of Balzac's novels are, so to speak, inquiries,—collections of documents.
The year 1838 closed questioningly for the hermit at Les Jardies. The yoke of his treaty with the publishing syndicate was hardly twelve moons old; and, however, it galled his neck to the extent of his cogitating how he might pay off the earnest money he had received, and be his own man again. And how was he to do it unless by increasing his earnings? All his actual revenue was swallowed up by his debts and habits of living. Ah! if only he could become a successful dramatic author! Alone, he did not for the moment feel equal to trying. But there was the possibility of collaboration. His late secretary, the Marquis de Belloy, had recently seemed disposed to come and help him again. But de Belloy desired some acknowledgment in coin; and Balzac, on the contrary, judged that the honour of collaborating with a novelist of his celebrity ought to be sufficient wage.