Honoré de Balzac

by Théophile Gautier

Thrown off of one chimera, Balzac very quickly mounted a new one, and he set out for another voyage in the blue with that childlike innocence which in him was combined with the profoundest sagacity and the shrewdest intellect.

So many bizarre projects he has described to me, so many strange paradoxes he has defended to me, always with the same good faith! Sometimes he would maintain that one should live on nine sous a day, sometimes he would require one hundred thousand francs in order to be most comfortable. Once, when I asked him to reconcile the accounting, he responded to the objection that thirty thousand francs still remained unallocated. "Ah well! That is for the butter and the radishes. In what even slightly proper house does one not eat thirty thousand francs of radishes and butter?" I wish I could portray the look of sovereign disdain he cast on me as he gave that triumphal reason; that look said: "Decidedly Theo is nothing but a contemptible person, a skinned rat, a pitiful spirit; he understands nothing of a grand existence and he has all his life eaten only the salted butter of Brittany."

Les Jardies attracted a great deal of attention from the public when Balzac bought it with the honorable intention of making an investment for his mother. While riding on the railway that passes Ville‑d'Avray, every passenger would look with curiosity at that little house, half cottage, half chalet, which rose in the middle of a clay slope.

This plot of land, in Balzac's opinion, was the best in the world; formerly, he asserted, a certain celebrated wine was grown there, and the grapes, thanks to an unparalleled exposure, baked like the grapes of Tokaj on the Bohemian hills. The sun, it is true, had the freedom to ripen the crop in this place, where there existed only a single tree. Balzac tried to enclose this property with walls, which became famous for obstinately collapsing or sliding all in one piece down the steep escarpment, and he dreamed of the most fabulous and the most exotic crops for this heavenly place. Here comes naturally the anecdote of the pineapples, which has been so often repeated that I would not tell it again except to add one truly characteristic trait. Here is the project: one hundred thousand feet of pineapples were planted within the boundaries of Les Jardies, transformed into greenhouses that required only limited heat due to the sunniness of the site. The pineapples were going to be sold for five francs instead of the one louis that they ordinarily cost, for a total of five hundred thousand francs; from this sum it was necessary to deduct one hundred thousand francs for the costs of cultivation, equipment, and coal; there remained therefore a net profit of four hundred thousand francs which would constitute a splendid profit for the happy proprietor, "without the least bit of writing," he added. That was nothing, Balzac had a thousand projects like this; but the beauty of this was that we sought together, on the Boulevard Montmartre, a shop for the sale of the pineapples that were still in the form of seeds. The shop was to be painted black with thin gold stripes, and carry on its sign, in enormous letters: "PINEAPPLES FROM LES JARDIES."

For Balzac, the one hundred thousand pineapples were already raising their plumes of serrated leaves above their great lozenged cones under immense glass roofs: he saw them; he swelled in the high temperature of the greenhouse, he breathed in the tropical scent through his passionately open nostrils; and when, having returned to his home, he watched, while leaning on the window, the snow descend silently onto the bare slopes, he still only gave up his illusion with difficulty.

Yet he followed my advice to hold off on renting the shop until the following year in order to avoid an unnecessary expense.

I write my reminiscences as they return to me, without trying to place in order things which are better left apart. Besides, as Boileau said, transitions are the great difficulty of poetry, and of newspaper articles too, I will add; but modern journalists have neither as much conscience nor even more importantly as much leisure as the legislator of Parnasse.

Madame de Girardin professed for Balzac a lively admiration that he appreciated and that he acknowledged with his frequent visits, he who was so justifiably stingy with his time and his working hours. Never did a woman possess to such a high degree as Delphine, as I permitted myself to call her familiarly when we were together, the ability to stir the minds of her guests. With her, we always found ourselves to be particularly eloquent and each left her salon enthralled with himself. There was no stone so hard that she could not make a spark fly from it, and with Balzac, as you would expect, it was not necessary to strike the stone for very long: he sparkled and then lit up right away. Balzac was not precisely what one would call a talker, but he was quick with a reply, throwing a fine and decisive word into a discussion, changing the thread of the discourse, touching everything with lightness, and never going past a half smile: he had a verve, an eloquence, and an irresistible brio; and, as each person became silent to listen to him, with him, to the general satisfaction, the conversation would quickly descend into a soliloquy. The starting point was soon forgotten and he passed from an anecdote into a philosophical reflection, from an observation on manners to a local description; as he spoke his complexion would redden, his eyes would develop a distinctive luminosity, his voice would take on different inflections, and sometimes he would roar with laughter, amused by comic images that he saw before he described them. He announced in this way, like a sort of fanfare, the entry of his characters and his humorous comments, and his hilarity was soon shared by his assistants. Although this was the age of dreamers with hair hanging loosely like a willow, of weepers in their garrets and of disillusioned Byronians, Balzac had that robust joy and power that one would attribute to Rabelais, and that Molière did not show except in his plays. His loud laugh coming from his sensual lips was that of a kindly god amused by the spectacle of the human marionettes, and who is distressed by nothing because he understands everything and grasps at once both sides of things. Neither the worries of an often precarious situation, nor the tedium of money, nor the fatigue of excessive work, nor the confinement of the study, nor the renunciation of all of the pleasures of life, nor even sickness could strike down this Herculean joviality, in my opinion one of the most striking characteristics of Balzac. He knocked out the hydras while laughing, happily tore the lions in two, and carried as if it were a hare the boar of Erymanthe on the mountainous muscles of his shoulders. At the least provocation this gaiety would burst forth and cause his strong chest to heave, which might surprise a person with a delicate constitution, but it had to be shared, no matter how much effort one made to remain serious. Do not believe however that Balzac was seeking to entertain his audience: he obeyed, affected by a kind of internal euphoria and painting with rapid strokes, with a comic intensity and an incomparable talent for satire, the bizarre phantasmagoria that danced in the dark chamber of his brain. I do not know how to better compare the impression produced by certain of his conversations than with that which one experiences while leafing through the strange drawings of Songes Drolatiques, by the master Alcofribas Nasier. These are of monstrous personages, composed of the most hybrid elements. Some have for a head a bellows in which the hole represents the eye, while others have an alembic flute for a nose; these ones walk with wheels in place of feet; those ones have the rounded belly of a cooking pot and wear a lid in place of a hat, but an intense life animates these fanciful beings, and one recognizes in their grimacing faces the vices, the follies and the passions of man. Some, although absurdly outside the realm of possibility, stop you like a portrait. One could give them a name.

When one listened to Balzac, a whole carnival of extravagant and real puppets frolicked before your eyes, wearing on their shoulders a colorful phrase, waving long sleeves of epithets, blowing their noses noisily with an adverb, smacking themselves with a bat of antitheses, pulling you by the tail of your coat, and whispering into your ear your secrets in a disguised and nasal voice, pirouetting, whirling in the midst of a sparkle of lights and of glitter. Nothing was more vertiginous, and at the end of one half hour, one felt, like the student after the speech of Méphistophélès, a millstone turning in the brain.

He was not always so spirited, and on those occasions one of his favorite jokes was to imitate the German jargon of Nucingen or Schmucke, or otherwise to speak in rama, like the clients of the middle class boarding house of Madame Vauquer (née de Conflans). At the time that he wrote Un Début dans la Vie based on an outline of Madame de Surville, he was seeking proverbs that were slightly off for the art student Mistigris, to whom later, having found him to be full of spirit, he gave a fine place in La Comédie Humaine, under the name of the great landscape painter Léon de Lora. Here are some of his nonsensical proverbs: "He is like an ass on a plain." "I am like the hare, I die or I flee." "Good Counts make good sieves." "Extremes become blocked." "The slap always smells the herring"; and so on like this. A discovery of this type put him in a good humor, and he would pleasantly frolic like an elephant through the furniture and around the salon. For her part, Madame de Girardin was in quest of sayings for the the famous lady of the seven little chairs of Le Courrier de Paris. She sometimes required my assistance, and if a stranger had entered, seeing this beautiful Delphine painting spirals through her golden hair with her white fingers, with a profoundly dreamlike air; Balzac, seated on one of the arms of the great upholstered chair on which Monsieur Girardin usually slept, his hands clenched in the bottoms of his pockets, his waistcoat turned back from his stomach, swinging his leg with a uniform rhythm, expressing with the tense muscles of his face an extraordinary mental focus; me planted between two cushions of the divan, like an opium eater seen in a hallucination; that stranger, certainly, could never have suspected what we were doing there, in so great a meditation; he would have supposed that Balzac was thinking of a new Madame Firmiani, Madame de Girardin of a role for Mademoiselle Rachel, and me of some sonnet. But it was nothing of the kind. As for the puns, Balzac, although his secret ambition was to create them, had, after painstaking efforts, recognized his notorious incapacity in this area, and kept to the slightly off proverbs, which preceded the rough puns brought into fashion by the school of good sense. What beautiful evenings that will never return! We were then far from foreseeing that this great and superb woman, carved fully out of marble from antiquity, that this stocky, robust, lively man, who combined in himself the vigor of the boar and the bull, half Hercules, half satyr, built to last longer than one hundred years, would soon sleep, one at Montmartre, the other at Père‑Lachaise, and that, of the three, I alone would remain to preserve those memories that were already so distant and close to being lost.