Note well the characters that I introduce, since you will have to follow their fortunes through thirty novels that are to come.
Here we see how little he had been daunted by ill success, and how his prodigious imagination had not been overcome by sorrow and evil fortune. Meantime, writing almost savagely, and with a feeling combined of ambition and despair, he had begun, very slowly indeed, to create a public. These ten years, however, had loaded him with debts; and his struggle to keep himself afloat only plunged him deeper in the mire. His thirty unsigned novels began to pay him a few hundred francs, not in cash, but in promissory notes; so that he had to go still deeper into debt.
In 1827 he was toiling on his first successful novel, and indeed one of the best historic novels in French literature—The Chouans. He speaks of his labor as "done with a tired brain and an anxious mind," and of the eight or ten business letters that he had to write each day before he could begin his literary work.
"Postage and an omnibus are extravagances that I cannot allow myself," he writes. "I stay at home so as not to wear out my clothes. Is that clear to you?"
At the end of the next year, though he was already popular as a novelist, and much sought out by people of distinction, he was at the very climax of his poverty. He had written thirty-five books, and was in debt to the amount of a hundred and twenty-four thousand francs. He was saved from bankruptcy only by the aid of Mme. de Berny, a woman of high character, and one whose moral influence was very strong with Balzac until her early death.
The relation between these two has a sweetness and a purity which are seldom found. Mme. de Berny gave Balzac money as she would have given it to a son, and thereby she saved a great soul for literature. But there was no sickly sentiment between them, and Balzac regarded her with a noble love which he has expressed in the character of Mme. Firmiani.
It was immediately after she had lightened his burdens that the real Balzac comes before us in certain stories which have no equal, and which are among the most famous that he ever wrote. What could be more wonderful than his El Verdugo, which gives us a brief horror while compelling our admiration? What, outside of Balzac himself, could be more terrible than Gobseck, a frightful study of avarice, containing a deathbed scene which surpasses in dreadfulness almost anything in literature? Add to these A Passion in the Desert, The Girl with the Golden Eyes, The Droll Stories, The Red Inn, and The Magic Skin, and you have a cluster of masterpieces not to be surpassed.
In the year 1829, when he was just beginning to attain a slight success, Balzac received a long letter written in a woman's hand. As he read it, there came to him something very like an inspiration, so full of understanding were the written words, so full of appreciation and of sympathy with the best that he had done. This anonymous note pointed out here and there such defects as are apt to become chronic with a young author. Balzac was greatly stirred by its keen and sympathetic criticism. No one before had read his soul so clearly. No one—not even his devoted sister, Laure de Surville—had judged his work so wisely, had come so closely to his deepest feeling.
He read the letter over and over, and presently another came, full of critical appreciation, and of wholesome, tonic, frank, friendly words of cheer. It was very largely the effect of these letters that roused Balzac's full powers and made him sure of winning the two great objects of his first ambition—love and fame—the ideals of the chivalrous, romantic Frenchman from Caesar's time down to the present day.
Other letters followed, and after a while their authorship was made known to Balzac. He learned that they had been written by a young Polish lady, Mme. Evelina Hanska, the wife of a Polish count, whose health was feeble, and who spent much time in Switzerland because the climate there agreed with him.