CHAPTER XII
LETTERS TO "THE STRANGER," 1845, 1846
Though fertile in incidents, the year of 1845 was, from a literary point of view, more barren than any in Balzac's past career, exception, of course, made for the time lost during his printing-house adventure. Beyond his short, witty sketch, A Man of Business, relating the tricks employed by the princes of bohemianism to pay their debts and indulge their caprices gratis, no finished work was published. The Peasants, which the author never entirely got through, was taken up repeatedly, and as often put aside from sheer inability to proceed.
The deadlock in which he found himself had been preparing since his visit to Saint Petersburg. Whether the intimacy created there between Madame Hanska and himself was that of two lovers in the chaster sense, or, as Monsieur Gabriel Ferry assets, in his Balzac et ses Amies, that of a closer union, it had haunted him during his subsequent twelvemonth's loneliness. And when Eve, who had come to spend the winter at Dresden, discouraged, from fear of her society friends' backbiting, the idea of his going there to see her, he grew incapable of concentrating his mind on his books; and, even in his letters to her, chafed and was irritable, scolding her for not stamping her envelopes, and recommending her to acquire habits of order and economy! confessing the while that, to escape from his melancholy, he had been playing lansquenet, dining out, going to the theatres, and leading a nonchalant life.
The tone was a bold one to assume, but clever. His tyrant, already repenting the pledges given, had been hinting it would be better not to carry them out. Her own relatives were quite as much against the match as Balzac's, she reminded him, while narrating all the malicious tittle-tattle that mutual acquaintances were constantly telling her. She defended him, she said. "A mistake!" retorted Balzac. "When, in your presence, any one attacks me, your best plan is to mock the slanderers by outdoing them. When some one sneeringly remarked to Dumas that his father was a nigger, he answered: 'My grandfather was a monkey.'"
His scolding for once did good. Eve did not like his "wounding prose," but she talked no more of breaking with him. On the contrary, she relented as far as to remove the embargo on his going to Dresden; so in May he went. And, what was more, she came in August to Paris; incognito, since the visit was without the Czar's permission, she and her daughter Anna travelling from the frontier under the names of Balzac's sister and niece.
In the novelist's correspondence, there is a curious letter written on the 2nd of August to Madame Emile de Girardin. In it the writer excuses himself for not calling on her, being obliged to remain at home on account of the disquieting condition of a lady friend of his who had hurt herself and was under medical treatment. The inference is that the lady in question was staying in his house; and a note written to Madame Hanska, on the 4th of September, with its allusion to the Passy garden in which they had walked so much together, makes it sufficiently plain that she was the August guest. Although no proofs have yet come to light which we can accept as irrefutable, there seems to be ground for the supposition put forward that a premature confinement was the illness, carefully concealed from every one.
If the supposition be correct, it explains the convalescent's being joined by Balzac again in September at Baden-Baden, where the arrangements were made for Eve and himself to meet in October at Chalon-sur-Saone and to travel together to Italy. It was during this second stay in Germany that the play of the Saltimbanques they had seen suggested to the novelist the amusing nicknames which he henceforth adopted when writing to Madame Hanska's family. Anna was dubbed Zephirine; her betrothed, Gringalet; Eve, Atala; and himself, Bilboquet. Georges, the betrothed, who was a Pole bearing the title of Count Mniszech, was a young man of scientific tastes and considerable learning, for whom Balzac conceived a great liking, and whom he helped in his entomological researches.
The ramble southwards was probably the most pleasurable experience in the novelist's life, being an anticipated honeymoon. From Chalon they journeyed along the banks of the Rhone, visiting no fewer than twenty-three towns on the way. At Naples they parted, and the prospective bridegroom turned Paris-wards, going via Pisa, Civita Vecchia, and Marseilles; in this last city he comforted himself for the separation by hunting out further adornments for the home he was still busily striving to find in the capital.
At Marseilles lived a poet-friend of his named Mery, whom he had enlisted as a collaborator in his teeming dramatic schemes. Him he commissioned to bargain for certain articles of vertu which Lazard, the famous dealer in antiquities, quoted too dear—eight hundred francs for a mirror, and five hundred for a statuette. "Let Lazard see that you will give a thousand francs for the two things," he advised Mery; "but don't offer more than nine. Glance stoically at the articles when passing by, and joke the dealer. Then send acquaintances to offer a little less than you. After a fortnight's haggling, Lazard will let you have them one fine morning." For getting the better of these sly shopkeepers, Balzac had a good many devices up his sleeve.