Like his father, who died accidentally at more than eighty years of age, and who had flattered himself that he would become wealthy from the annuity scheme of Lafarge, Balzac believed in his longevity. Often he planned with me projects for the future. He was going to finish La Comédie Humaine, write the Théorie de la Démarche, compose the Monographie de la Vertu, fifty dramas, attain a great fortune, marry and have two children, "but not more; two children look good," he said, "on the front of a carriage." All of this could not fail to take a long time, and I pointed out that, once these tasks were accomplished, he would be around eighty years of age. "Eighty years!" he cried, "Bah! It's the flower of age." Monsieur Flourens, with his comforting theories, did not say it better.
One day that we dined together at the home of M. E. de Girardin, he told us a story about his father to show us the strength of the stock to which he belonged. Balzac's father, who had been hired to work in a prosecutor's office, ate following the custom of the time at the table of the master with the other clerks. Partridges were served. The prosecutor's wife, who had her eye on the new arrival, said to him: "Monsieur Balzac, do you know how to carve?" "Yes, Madame," responded the young man, blushing up to his ears; and he bravely took hold of the knife and fork. Entirely ignorant of culinary anatomy, he divided the partridge into four pieces, but with so much strength that he split the plate, sliced the tablecloth, and cut into the wood of the table. He was not nimble, but he was strong: the prosecutor's wife smiled, and from that day, Balzac, the young clerk, was treated with great kindness in that house.
This story that I have told seems lukewarm, but it is necessary to see the pantomime of Balzac as he imitated on his own plate his father's actions, with an air that was both frightened and resolute, mimicking the manner in which he seized his knife after having rolled up his sleeves and in which he sunk his fork into an imaginary partridge; Neptune hunting the monsters of the sea did not wield his trident with a more vigorous fist, and with what an immense weight he bore down with it! His cheeks became purple, his eyes left his head, but the operation ended with him casting upon the guests a look of innocent satisfaction trying to conceal itself in the guise of modesty.
Moreover, Balzac had in him the makings of a great actor: he possessed a full, sonorous, resonant voice, with a rich and powerful timbre, that he knew how to moderate and soften as needed, and he read in an admirable manner, a talent that most actors lack. Whatever he related, he performed it with intonations, grimaces and gestures that no comedian has surpassed in my opinion.
I find in Marguerite, by Madame de Girardin, this remembrance of Balzac. It is a character from the book who speaks.
"He related that Balzac had dined at his house on the preceding day, and that he had been more brilliant, more scintillating than ever. He very much amused us with the story of his trip to Austria. What fire! What verve! What power of imitation! It was marvelous. His manner of paying the postilions is an invention that only a novelist of genius could have discovered. ‘I was very embarrassed at each stopping point,' he said, ‘how was I going to pay? I did not know a word of German, I did not know the currency of the country. It was very difficult. Here is what I invented. I had a bag full of small silver coins, some kreuzers … When I arrived at the stopping point, I would take up my bag; the postilion would come to the window of the carriage; I would watch his eyes attentively, and I would put in his hand one kreuzer, … two kreuzer, … then three, then four, etc., until I saw him smile … when he smiled, I understood that I had given him one kreuzer too much … quickly I would take back my coin and my man was paid.'"
At Les Jardies, he read Mercadet to me, the original Mercadet, by far more sweeping, complicated and dense than the piece arranged for the Gymnase by d'Ennery, with so much delicacy and skill. Balzac, who read like Tieck, without indicating acts, scenes, or names, utilized a voice that was particular to and perfectly recognizable for each character; the voices that he gave to the different kinds of creditors were hilariously funny: there were the hoarse, the honeyed, the hasty, the slow, the menacing, the pleading. They shrieked, wailed, scolded, muttered, screamed in every possible and impossible tone. Debt first sang a solo that soon an immense choir took up. He brought out creditors from everywhere, from behind the stove, from below the bed, from the drawers of the commode; they came from the chimney; they passed through the keyhole; others entered through the window like lovers; these sprung from the bottom of a trunk like those devilish toys that take you by surprise, those moved across the walls as if they were passing by an English ambush, it was a mob, an uproar, an invasion, truly a rising tide. Mercadet might well have shaken them off, when others always returned to start an assault, and as far as the horizon one could make out a somber swarm of creditors on the march, arriving like legions of termites to devour their prey. I do not know if this piece was better when performed this way, but no other performance produced such an effect.
Balzac, during this reading of Mercadet, occupied, partially reclining, a long divan in the salon of Les Jardies because he had sprained his ankle when he slipped, like his walls, on the clay of his property. A stray hair, sticking through the fabric, poked the skin of his leg and bothered him. "The fabric is too thin, the hay passes through it; you will need to put a thick canvas beneath it," he said while pulling at the hair that annoyed him.
François, the Caleb of this Ravenswood, would not listen to this mocking of the splendors of the manor. He corrected his master and said: horsehair. "The upholsterer has cheated me?" responded Balzac. "They are all the same. I had insisted that he use hay! Cursed thief!"
The splendors of Les Jardies were mostly imaginary. All of the friends of Balzac remember having seen written in charcoal upon the bare walls or veneer of gray paper: "Rosewood paneling, tapestry of the Gobelins, Venetian mirrors, paintings by Raphaël." Gerard de Nerval had already decorated an apartment in this manner, so this did not shock me. As for Balzac, he believed literally in the gold, the marble and the silk; but, he did not complete Les Jardies and if he led others to laugh at his pipe dreams, he knew at least that he had built himself an eternal home, a monument "more durable than iron," an immense city, populated with his creations and gilded by the rays of his glory.