If he did not die too soon, she might consider she would marry a million in giving him her hand, he said. Slily, he now and again quoted his worth in the estimation of a rival feminine authority. For example, Madame de Girardin was about to write an article on the great conversationalists of the day, and had mentioned that she held him to be one of the most charming. However, when he raised his rate of exchange in this way, he was always prudent enough to follow up with concessions. His intimacy with the Englishwoman, Madame Visconti, who was Eve's bugbear, he broke off completely—at least he swore he had done so and offered to send his beloved tyrant the cold letter in which his whilom friend and benefactress bade him good-bye. To let Eve see it would not be gallant on his part, he confessed; but what could he deny her, if she persisted. He was her Paris agent, even her Paris errand-boy, at one time negotiating the entrance of the governess, Mademoiselle Borel, into the Saint-Thomas-de-Velleneuve nunnery; at another, purchasing gloves, millinery, and other articles of dress. Yet she never considered him submissive enough, notwithstanding his pretty flattery.
"Why shouldn't you have a poet?" he asked, thinking of himself, "as other people have a dog, a monkey, a parrot—the more so as I have in me something of these three creatures: I always repeat the same phrase, I imitate society, I am faithful." And again in a burst of lyricism, he exclaimed: "Adieu, loved friend, to whom I belong like the sound to the bell, the dog to his master, the artist to his ideal, prayer to God, pleasure to cause, colour to the painter, life to the sun. Love me, for I need your affection, so vivifying, so coloured, so agreeable, so celestial, so ideally good, of such sweet dominance, and so constantly vibrating." With comparisons of this sort he was lavish. "I am like Monsieur de Talleyrand," he told her in another letter. "Either I show a stolid, tin face and do not speak a word, or else I chatter like a magpie." Adopting the expression first invented by Guizot, he characterized their mutual relations as an entente cordiale, impatient, none the less, for the realization of his fancy, which was to see his idol enter a tabernacle prepared to receive her on the return from a delightful honeymoon. Meanwhile, he was amassing furniture and bric-a-brac, just as the bird bits of straw; and he implored her not to scold him. In the Rue Neuve-Saint-Augustin, he had ferreted out two Dresden vases, which he bought, resolving to deprive himself for a time of his grapes at forty sous a pound, in order to retrieve the money.
The retrieval indeed was not easy, since his passion for collecting curios led him far, and he generally succumbed to the temptation of something ancient and rare. In the previous autumn he had bought, for thirteen hundred and fifty francs, a secretaire and commode in ebony, with inlaid pearl, that had apparently been manufactured at Florence in the seventeenth century; these objets d'art he estimated at values ranging up to forty or fifty thousand francs. A description of them appeared in the press, and rich amateurs inquired whether he were willing to sell; but, either because he asked too much or really did not want to part with them, they were kept, as also his Christ by Bouchardon or Girardon, which he obtained for two hundred francs and valued at several thousands. If he had no cash for his purchases —and this frequently happened—he placed one of his already acquired treasures (possibly unpaid for, too) in the establishment of his "respectable relative," as he styled the pawnbroker, and thus secured the coveted object.
In his intercourse with his own family, Madame Hanska was a continuously troubling factor. The prospect of his alliance with this foreign aristocrat had less charm for Madame Balzac and Laure than for Honore. They probably perceived the chimera he was pursuing, and could not be expected to show enthusiasm. This attitude on their side and a certain hauteur on his, partly caused by offended dignity, widened the breach between him and them. "I have now no family," he told "The Stranger," "and am glad that the coldness should be established before I am completely happy; for later the reason of it would have been attributed to you, or to what would have been termed my uppishness. The isolation, which you wish, will be likewise my dearest desire. My sister," he proceeded, "has suppressed for ever the literary question betwixt us, with her blue-stocking whims. I cannot talk to her of my affairs, nor yet of my mother's. She asserts that her husband is a greater man than I am." Madame de Berny, he added, had foreseen his mother's and sister's transformation when she told him he was a flower that had sprung up on a dunghill! If Madame de Berny told him this, it was no doubt in a fit of anger against them for endeavouring to sever the liaison, an endeavour they were perfectly justified in. These portions of Balzac's confidences, which reflect upon his character seriously, and besmirch him more than those against whom they were spoken, cannot be overlooked in a biography. They have to be included in our judgment of him, and, in a measure, concern the tragic close of his love romance.
We are fonder of him in the expansive moods when his naive wonder at his own performances carries him into self-panegyric, which, not infrequently, we can endorse, though with some discount. Thus, for instance, the Bourgeois of Paris he declared to be one of those masterpieces that leave everything else behind. "It is grand, it is terrifying in verve, in philosophy, in novelty, in painting, in style." And yet there was Eugene Sue selling the Wandering Jew to a newspaper for a hundred thousand francs, while the Philosophy of Conjugal Life, a publication of his own in Hetzel's Diable a Paris, fetched only eight hundred; and the Peasants was paid for only at the rate of sixty centimes a line. His Modeste Mignon which appeared in the Debats, sold rather dearer, six thousand francs being given, and for the Bourgeois, nine thousand. The explanation of Sue's getting more than he he imagined to be because Sue lived in grander style than himself with flunkeys to open the door and overawe the publishers who flocked to the successful writer, whereas he, living in a cottage, had to cool his heels in an office ante-chamber, and was exploited on account of his neediness. There was some truth in what he said; but he did not sufficiently realize that Sue wrote, for the market, exciting tales that everybody rushed to read. His own books were, of course, most of them infinitely superior; but they appealed to a much smaller public. All the same, he was loth to resign himself to the depreciation Sue's bargains effected in his own. Feverishly he strove to demonstrate by his painfully gained successes that they were masterpieces, as he said, by the side of Sue's chimney-fronts, and as far above them as Raphael was above Dubufe. Moliere, Lesage, Voltaire, Walter Scott—these were the only names he acknowledged as rivals to his own. Sue was nothing but a spangled and satined Paul de Kock.
We can grant him that, in fiction, his proper manner was as far in advance of his epoch as, in politics, his doctrine was behind it. George Sand was a medium in both, although she dwelt always a little too much in the clouds. At a dinner with her towards the end of January, the antagonism of their principles manifested itself over his recent visit to Russia.
"If you were to see the Czar," Balzac said to her, "you would fall in love with him and jump from your bousingotism[*] to autocracy."
[*] A word used to characterise the dress and manners of the Romanticists, who were fond of Robespierre waistcoats, long hair, and other peculiarities intended to distinguish them from ordinary mortals.
Madame Dudevant waxed angry. It was not kind in a man who had resisted her blandishments to make merry over her foibles.
The Russians, he gravely told her, were extremely amiable, easy to get on with, exceedingly literary, since everything was done on paper, and Russia was the only country in which people knew how to obey.