[*] This work has been made available at Project Gutenberg by Team Balzac. It is in two volumes.—Preparer's Note.
Much has been said in the preceding chapters of the large use Balzac made of his own life, his adventures, his experiences, in composing the integral portions of his Comedy, so that its contents, for any one who can interpret, becomes a valuable autobiography. And the lesser as well as the greater novels supply facts. In the Forsaken Woman, Madame de Beauseant, who has been jilted by the Marquis of Ajuda-Pinto, permits herself to be wooed by Gaston de Nueil, a man far younger than herself. After ten years, he, in turn, quits her to marry the person his mother has chosen for him; but, unable to bear the combined burden of his remorse and yearning regret, he commits suicide. This tale, like the Lily in the Valley, is a adaptation of Balzac's liaison with Madame de Berny. It was written in the very year he severed the material ties that bound them. The only distinction between his case and that of Gaston de Nueil was that he had no desire to kill himself, and was content to be no more than a friend, since he was the freer to flirt with Madame de Castries. And when the latter lady kept him on tenter-hooks, tormenting him, tempting him, but never yielding to him, he revenged himself by writing the Duchess de Langeais, attributing to the foolish old general his own hopes, fears, and disappointments at the hands of the coquettish, capricious duchess. "I alone," he said in a letter, "know the horrible that is in this narrative." And, if, in Albert Savarus, we have a confession of his political ambitions and campaigns, we get in Cesar Birotteau and the Petty Bourgeois his financial projects, which never brought him anything; in A Man of Business—as well as elsewhere—his continual money embarrassments. How deeply he felt them, he often lets us gather from his fiction. "I have been to a capitalist," he wrote in one of his epistles to Madame Hanska, "a capitalist to whom are due indemnities agreed on between us for works promised and not executed; and I offered him a certain number of copies of the Studies of Manners and Morals. I proposed five thousand francs with deferred payment, instead of three thousand francs cash. He refused everything, even my signature and a bill, telling me my fortune was in my talent and that I might die any time. This scene is one of the most infamous I have known. Some day I will reproduce it."
And he did, with many things else that happened to him in his dealings with his fellows. There is biography too, as well as autobiography in the Comedy—this notwithstanding his disclaimers. Exact portraiture he avoided for obvious reasons, but intentional portraiture he indulged in largely; and life and character were sufficiently near the truth for shrewd contemporaries to recognize the originals. To add one or two examples to the number already given. Claire Brunne (Madame Marbouty) seems to have suggested his Muse of the County, a Berrichon blue-stocking; Madame d'Agoult and Liszt became Madame de Rochfide and the musician Conti in Beatrix; a cousin of Madame Hanska, Thaddeus Wylezinski, who worshipped her discreetly, is depicted under the traits of Thaddeus Paz, a Polish exile in the False Mistress, who assumes a feigned name to conceal his love; Lamartine furnished the conception of the poet Canalis in Modeste Mignon, the resemblance being at first so striking that the novelist afterwards toned it away a little; and Monnier, the caricaturist, certainly supplied the essential elements in Bixiou, who is so well drawn in Cousin Bette and the Firm of Nucingen. The Baron Nucingen himself has some of the features of the James de Rothschild whom Balzac knew; and Rastignac embodied the author's impression of Thiers in the statesman's earlier years. One might go further and couple Delacroix the painter's name with that of Joseph Bridau in A Bachelor's Household, Frederick Lemaitre, the actor's, with Medal's in Cousin Pons, Emile de Girardin's with du Tillet's in Cesar Birotteau. At last, however, owing to the mingling of one personality with another, identification is increasingly difficult, unless the novelist comes to our assistance, as in the story Cousin Bette, where he confesses Lisbeth the old maid, to be made up out of three persons, Madame Valmore, Madame Hanska's aunt, and his own mother.
Summing up Balzac's entire literary production, which in Monsieur de Lovenjoul's catalogue occupies no fewer than fourteen pages, we find that it comprises, besides the ninety-six different works of the Comedie Humaine properly so called, ten volumes of his early novels; six complete dramatic pieces—one, the School for Husbands and Wives recently published;[*] thirty Contes Drolatiques; and three hundred and fourteen articles and opuscles, some of them fairly long, since the Reminiscences of a Pariah has a hundred and eighty-four pages octavo, the Theory of Walking fifty, the Code of Honest People a hundred and twelve, the Impartial History of the Jesuits eighty; these exclusive of the Revue Parisienne with its two hundred and twenty pages, which, as we have seen, was written entirely by himself. When we remember that the whole of this, with the exception of the early novels and six of the opuscles, was produced in twenty years, we can better appreciate the man's industry, which, as Monsieur Le Breton calculates, yielded an average of some two thousand pages, or four to five volumes a year.
[*] Played for the first time March 13, 1910, at the Odeon Theatre.
In the miscellanies one meets with much that is curious, amusing, and instructive, quite worthy to figure in the Comedy—witty dialogues, light stories containing deductions a la Sherlock Holmes or Edgar Allan Poe, plenty of satire, sometimes acidulated as in his Troubles and Trials of an English Cat, and theories about everything, indicative of extensive reading, large assimilation and quick reasoning. The miscellanies really stand to the novels in the relation of a sort of prolegomenon. They serve for its better understanding, and are agreeable even for independent study.
CHAPTER XV
VALUE OF THE WORK
The aim of an author whose writings are intended to please must be ethical as well as aesthetic, if he respects himself and his readers. He wishes the pleasure he can give to do good, not harm. The good he feels capable of producing may be limited to the physical or may extend beyond to the moral; but it will be found in his work in so far as the latter is truly artistic.