"Il peignit l'arbre vu du côté des racines,
Le combat meurtrier des plantes assassines."
In the exuberantly fertile province of Touraine, "the garden of France," the native province of Rabelais, Honoré de Balzac was born on a spring day in 1799—a man of an exuberantly fertile, full-blooded, warm-blooded nature, with plenty of heart and plenty of brain. Clumsy and tender, coarse and sensitive, the presentient dreamer, the minute observer, this man of curiously complex character combined sentiment, genuine and somewhat ponderous, with a marvellous keenness of vision, combined the seriousness of the scientific investigator with the light humour of the storyteller, the discoverer's perseverance and absorption in his idea with the artist's impulse to present to the eyes of all, in unabashed nakedness, what he had observed, felt, discovered or invented. He was as if created to divine and betray the secrets of society and humanity.
BALZAC
Balzac was a powerfully built, broad-shouldered man of middle height, corpulent in later life; the feminine whiteness of his strong, thick neck was his pride; his hair was black and as coarse as horse-hair, and his eyes shone like two black diamonds; they were lion-tamer's eyes, eyes that saw through the wall of a house what was happening inside, that saw through human beings and read their hearts like an open book. His whole appearance indicated a Sisyphus of labour.
He came as a youth to Paris, poor and solitary, drawn thither by his irresistible author's vocation and by the hope of winning fame. His father, like most fathers, was extremely unwilling that his son, whom no one credited with being a genius, should give up the profession of law for literature, and therefore left him entirely to his own resources. So there he sat in his garret, unwaited on, shivering with cold, his plaid wrapped round his legs, the coffee-pot on the table on one side of him, the ink-bottle on the other, staring out now and again over the roofs of the great city whose spiritual conqueror and delineator fate had destined him to be. The view was neither extensive nor beautiful—moss-grown tiles, shining in the sun or washed by the rain, roof-gutters, chimneys, and chimney-smoke. His room was neither comfortable nor elegant; the cold wind whistled through the chinks of its window and door. To sweep the floor, to brush his clothes, and to purchase the barest necessaries with the utmost economy, were the daily morning tasks of the young poet who was planning a great tragedy, to be called Cromwell. His recreation was a walk in the neighbouring cemetery of Père Lachaise, which overlooks Paris. From this vantage-ground young Balzac (like his hero, Rastignac) measured the great metropolis with his eye, and made a defiant wager with it that he would compel it to recognise and honour his unknown name.
The tragedy was soon given up; Balzac's genius was too modern, too vigorous, to put up with the rules and abstract characters of French tragedy. And, besides, it was imperative that the young hermit, who had only obtained conditional leave of absence from home, should make himself independent as quickly as possible.