Honoré de Balzac

by Théophile Gautier

There is no need to say that we did not unearth the treasure of Toussaint Louverture. Money was not available to pay our passage; the three of us had at most enough to buy the pickaxes.

The dream of a sudden fortune won by some strange and marvelous means often haunted the brain of Balzac; some years before (in 1833), he had made a voyage to Sardinia to examine the slag of the silver mines abandoned by the Romans, which, treated by imperfect processes, must according to him still have contained a great deal of metal. The idea was reasonable and, imprudently confided, made the fortune of another.

III

I have related the anecdote of the treasure buried by Toussaint Louverture, not for the pleasure of telling a strange story, but because it is connected with a dominant idea of Balzac ­­– money. Certainly, nobody was less avaricious than the author of La Comédie Humaine, but his genius made him foresee the immense role that this metallic hero would play in art, more interesting for modern society than the Grandissons, the Desgrieux, the Oswalds, the Werthers, the Malek‑Adhels, the Renés, the Laras, the Waverleys, the Quentin Durwards, etc.

Until then the story had been confined to the portrayal of a unique passion, love, but love in an ideal sphere and outside of the necessities and miseries of life. The personages of these entirely psychological recitals neither ate, nor drank, nor lodged, nor had an account with their tailor. They moved in an abstract environment like those of a tragedy. If they wished to travel, they put, without obtaining a passport, some handfuls of diamonds into the bottom of their pocket, and paid with this currency the postilions, who did not fail at each way station to have exhausted their horses; some chateaus of indistinct architecture received them at the end of their journeys, and with their blood they wrote to their beloveds interminable epistles dated from the tour of the North. The heroines, no less immaterial, resembled an aquatint of Angelica Kauffmann: a large straw hat, hair somewhat straightened in the English style, a long robe of white chiffon, held at the waist by an azure sash.

With his profound instinct for reality, Balzac understood that the modern life he wanted to portray was dominated by one grand fact, money, and, in La Peau de Chagrin, he had the courage to present a lover not only anxious to know if he had touched the heart of the one he loves, but also if he will have enough money to pay for the carriage in which he was bringing her home. This audacity is perhaps one of the greatest that one might permit oneself in literature, and it alone sufficed to immortalize Balzac. The consternation was profound, and the purists were indignant at this infraction of the laws of the genre; but all the young people who, going out in the evening to the home of some beautiful woman wearing white gloves ironed with gum elastic, had traversed Paris as dancers, on the tips of their shoes, fearing a spot of mud more than the crack of a pistol, commiserated, having shared these fears, like the anguishes of Valentin, who cared deeply about a hat that he could not renew and preserve despite his minute care. In moments of supreme misery, the discovery of a one hundred sou piece slid under the papers of the drawer, due to the discreet pity of Pauline, produced the effect of the most romantic theatrical strokes or of the intervention of a Peri in the Arabian tales. Who has not discovered during days of distress, forgotten in pants or in a vest, a few glorious coins appearing at just the right time and saving you from the calamity that youth fears the most: to fail to provide a beloved woman with a carriage, a bouquet, a small bench, a show program, a tip to the usherette or some trifles of this type?

Balzac excels in the portrayal of youth who are poor, as they almost always are, entering into their first struggles with life, prey to the temptation of pleasures and luxury, and experiencing profound miseries due to their high hopes. Valentin, Rastignac, Bianchon, d'Arthez, Lucien de Rubempré, Lousteau, have all sunk their beautiful teeth into the tough meat of the angry cow, fortifying food for robust stomachs, indigestible for weak stomachs; he does not lodge them, these beautiful young ones without a sou, in conventional garrets decorated with Persian rugs, with windows festooned with sweet peas and looking out on gardens; he does not have them eat "some simple dishes, prepared by the hand of nature," and does not dress them in luxurious garments, but in those that are proper and practical; he puts them in the boarding house of Mother Vauquer, or forces them to crouch under the sharp angle of a roof, he presses them into greasy tables at mean little restaurants, dressing them in black clothing with gray seams, and he is not afraid to send them to the pawn shop, if they still have, a rare occurrence, their father's watch.

Oh Corinne, you who allows, upon Cape Misèna, your snowy arm to dangle across your ivory lyre, while the son of Albion, draped in a superb new coat, and shod in his beloved perfectly polished boots, reflects on you and listens to you in an elegant pose, Corinne, what would you have said to such heroes? They have however one small quality that was lacking in Oswald, they live, and of a life so robust that it seems like one has encountered them one thousand times; also Pauline, Delphine de Nucingen, the princess of Cadignan, Madame de Bargeton, Coralie, Esther, are madly infatuated with them.

At the time that the first novels signed by Balzac appeared, one did not have, to the same degree as today, the preoccupation, or, better said, the fever for gold. California had not been discovered; there existed perhaps several leagues of railway whose future one hardly suspected, and that one saw as a kind of conduit that led up to the Russian mountains, but that had fallen into disuse; the public ignored, so to speak, "business," and only bankers gambled at the Bourse. This movement of capital, this flow of gold, these calculations, these figures, this importance given to money in works that one still took as simple romantic fictions and not as serious portraits of life, singularly shocked the subscribers to the reading rooms, and critics added up the total sums spent or staked by the author. The millions of father Grandet led to arithmetic discussions, and serious people, troubled by the enormity of the totals, doubted the financial abilities of Balzac, very great abilities nevertheless, and recognized later. Stendhal said with a sort of disdainful smugness, "Before writing, I always read three or four pages of the Civil Code to give me the tone." Balzac, who understood money so well, also discovered poems and dramas in the Code: Le Contrat de Mariage, where he places in opposition, in the persons of Matthias and of Solonnet, the ancient and the modern notary, has all of the interest of the most eventful comedy of the cloak and sword. The bankruptcy in Grandeur et Décadence de César Birotteau makes you quiver like the story of an empire's fall; the conflict of the château and the cottage in Les Paysans offers just as much adventure as the siege of Troy. Balzac knows how to give life to the soil, to a house, to a heritage, to a capital, and in fact to heroes and heroines whose adventures are devoured with anxious avidity.

These new elements introduced into the novel were not appreciated at first; the philosophical analyses, the detailed character portraits, the minute descriptions that seemed to have the future in view, were regarded as unpleasantly lengthy, and quite often one skipped them to move on to the story. Later, one recognized that the goal of the author was not to weave intrigues that were more or less well‑plotted, but to portray society in its entirety, from the summit to the base, with its characters and its components, and that one will admire in it the immense variety of these types. Is it not Alexandre Dumas who said of Shakespeare: "Shakespeare, the man who has created the most after God?"; the words might be even more justly applied to Balzac; never, indeed, did so many living creatures issue from one human brain.