Perhaps this could be the place to define the truth as understood by Balzac; in this time of realism, it is good to be understood on this point. The truth of art is not that of nature; everything that is represented through the means of art necessarily contains some element of the conventional; make it as small as possible, it still exists, be it perspective in painting, language in literature. Balzac accentuates, magnifies, enlarges, prunes, adds, shadows, illuminates, avoids or approaches men or things according to the effect that he wants to produce. He is truthful, without doubt, but with augmentations and sacrifices for art. He prepares backgrounds that are somber and darkened with charcoal for his luminous figures, he puts white backgrounds behind his dark figures. Like Rembrandt, he sets the light of day on the brow or nose of the character; sometimes, in his description, he obtains fantastic and bizarre results, by placing, without saying anything, a microscope under the eye of the reader; the details then appear with a supernatural clarity, an amplified minutia, some unbelievable and formidable magnifications; the tissues, the scaliness, the pores, the veins, the blemishes, the fibers, the capillaries take on an enormous importance, and turn a visage that is insignificant to the naked eye into a sort of fanciful mask as amusing as those that were sculpted under the cornice of the Pont‑Neuf and vermiculated by time. The characters are also pushed to excess, as it is suited to each type: if Baron Hulot is a libertine, he additionally personifies lust: he is a man and a vice, an individual and an abstraction; he unites in himself all of the scattered traits of the character. Where a writer of lesser genius would have drawn a portrait, Balzac has created a figure. Men do not have as many muscles as Michelangelo gives them to suggest the idea of strength. Balzac is full of such useful exaggerations, of those dark strokes that enhance and support the outline; he dreams while writing, like the masters, and leaves his mark on everything. As this is not a literary critique, but a biographical study that I am writing, I will not take these remarks farther than necessary. Balzac, whom the Realist school seems to wish to claim as its leader, has no connection to its features.
Unlike certain literary persons who feed on nothing but their own genius, Balzac read a great deal and with a prodigious rapidity. He loved books, and he created a beautiful library that he intended to leave to the town of his birth, an idea that the indifference of the townspeople made him later abandon. He absorbed in a few days the voluminous works of Swedenborg, which were owned by his mother, who was rather preoccupied with mysticism at that time, and that reading was responsible for Séraphita‑Séraphitus, one of the most astonishing products of modern literature. Never did Balzac approach, or move closer to ideal beauty than in that book: the ascension of the mountain has a quality that is ethereal, supernatural, and luminous that lifts you from the earth. The only two colors that are employed are celestial blue and snow white with a few pearlescent tones for shadow. I know nothing more intoxicating than this beginning. The panorama of Norway, with its sharply cut coastline seen from this height, dazzles and gives one vertigo.
Louis Lambert was also influenced by the reading of Swedenborg; but soon Balzac, who had taken on the eagle wings of the mystics to soar into the infinite, descended to the earth that we inhabit, even though his robust lungs could have breathed indefinitely the thin air that is deadly for the weak: he abandoned the world beyond after that flight and returned to real life. Perhaps his remarkable genius would have gone out of view too quickly if he had continued to soar toward the unfathomable immensities of metaphysics, and we should be happy that he limited himself to Louis Lambert and Séraphita‑Séraphitus, which represent sufficiently, in La Comédie Humaine, the supernatural side, and open a door that is sufficiently large into the invisible world.
I now move on to a few more intimate details. The great Goethe had a horror of three things: one of the things was tobacco smoke, I am not permitted to say the two others. Balzac, like the Jupiter of the German poetic Olympus, could not stand tobacco in any form at all; he denounced the pipe and forbid the cigar. He did not tolerate even a light Spanish cigarette; the Asian hookah alone found favor with him, and yet he only tolerated that as a curiosity and because of its local color. In his diatribes against the herb of Nicot, he did not imitate the doctor who, during a dissertation on the dangers of tobacco, does not hesitate to take ample doses from a large box of tobacco near him: he never smoked. His Théorie des Excitants contains an indictment against tobacco, and there is no doubt that if he had been Sultan, like Amurath, he would have beheaded relapsed and obstinate smokers. He reserved all of his predilections for coffee, which did him so much harm and might have killed him, although he was built to become a centenarian.
Was Balzac wrong or right? Is tobacco, as he maintained, a deadly poison and does it intoxicate those that it does not turn stupid? Is it the opium of the Occident that dulls the will and the intelligence? These are questions that I cannot answer; but I am going to list here the names of some celebrated personages of our age, some of whom smoked while the others did not smoke: Goethe, Heinrich Heine, uniquely for Germans, did not smoke; Byron smoked; Victor Hugo does not smoke, neither does Alexandre Dumas père; on the other hand Alfred de Musset, Eugène Sue, Georges Sand, Mérimée, Paul de Saint‑Victor, Emile Augier, Ponsard, smoked and still smoke; however they are not exactly imbeciles.
This aversion, moreover, was shared by nearly all men who were born in our century or a little before. Only sailors and soldiers smoked then; at the odor of the pipe or the cigar, women fainted: they have become much tougher since then, and more than one pair of rosy lips has pressed with love the golden tip of a cigar, in a sitting room turned into a smoking room. Dowagers and turbaned mothers alone have preserved their old antipathy, and stoically watch their unfashionable salons be deserted by the youth.
Every time that Balzac is obliged, for the credibility of the story, to allow one of his characters to indulge in this horrible habit, his brief and disdainful sentence betrays a secret disapproval: "As for de Marsay," he said, "he was busy smoking cigars." And he must have really loved this captain of dandyism to permit him to smoke in his work.
A fragile and elegant young woman had without doubt inspired this aversion in Balzac, although that is a question that I cannot answer definitively. Still it's true that the tax collector never earned a sou from him. Regarding women, Balzac, who described them so well, must have known them, and one understands the sense that the Bible attaches to this word. In one of the letters that he writes to Madame de Surville, his sister, Balzac, quite young and completely unknown, sets down an ideal for his life in two words: "To be celebrated and to be loved." The first part of this program, which all artists map out for themselves, had been realized in every way. Was the second also accomplished? The opinion of the most intimate friends of Balzac is that he practiced the chastity that he recommended to others, and shared at most platonic love; but Madame de Surville laughs at this idea, with a smile of feminine delicacy and full of discreet reserve. She maintains that her brother was unfailingly discreet, and that if he had wanted to speak, he would have had many things to say. This must be true, and without doubt the safe of Balzac contained more of the notes with delicate, sloping handwriting than the lacquered box of Canalis. There is, in his work, the scent of a woman: odor di femina; when one enters there, one hears behind the doors that close on the hidden staircase the rustling of silk and the creaking of shoes. The semicircular and padded salon on the Rue de Batailles, of which I have quoted the description inserted by the author in La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, did not remain completely virginal, as many of us had assumed. In the course of our close friendship, which lasted from 1836 until his death, only once did Balzac make allusion, with the most respectful and the most tender terms, to an attachment of his early youth, and even then he gave me only the first name of the person whose memory, after so many years, still made his eyes moisten. Had he said any more to me, I certainly would not have abused his confidences; the genius of a great writer belongs to all of the world, but his heart is his own. I touch only briefly on this tender and delicate side of Balzac's life, because I have nothing to say that does not honor him. This reserve and this mystery are those of a gentleman. If he was loved as he wished in the dreams of his youth, the world knows nothing of it.
Do not imagine after these reflections that Balzac was austere and prudish in his speech: the author of Les Contes Drolatiques had been nourished with too much Rabelais and was too pantagruelistic to be unable to laugh; he knew good stories and invented them: his broad jokes interspersed with Gallic crudities would have made the sanctimonious and horrified members of society cry out shocking; but his laughing and talkative lips were sealed like a tomb when there was a question of a serious sentiment. He scarcely allowed his closest friends to surmise his love for a foreign woman of distinction, a love of which one can speak, since it was crowned by marriage. It was that passion that had been felt for a long time that necessitated his distant excursions, although their object remained until the last day a mystery for his friends.
Absorbed by his work, Balzac did not think until rather late of the theater, for which the general opinion judged him, wrongly to my mind, after a few more or less risky efforts, to be hardly suited. He who created so many types, analyzed so many characters, gave life to so many people, should succeed on the stage; but, as I have said, Balzac was not spontaneous, and one cannot correct the proofs of a drama. If he had lived, after a dozen works, he would assuredly have found his form and attained success; La Marâtre that played at the Théâtre‑Historique was close to a masterpiece. Mercadet, lightly edited by an intelligent arranger, enjoyed a long posthumous success at the Gymnase.
Nevertheless, the factor that motivated his efforts was mostly, I must say, the idea of a windfall that would liberate him all at once from his financial predicament rather than a real vocation. Theater, as we know, is much more profitable than books; the continuing nature of the performances, on which a rather large royalty is drawn, produces quickly by accumulation some considerable sums. If the strategic work is greater, the material labor is less. Several dramas are necessary to fill a volume, and while you promenade or rest idly with slippers on your feet, the footlights are illuminated, the scenery descends from the ceiling, the actors recite and gesticulate, and you find yourself having made more money than you would have by scribbling for an entire week bent painfully over your desk. Such melodrama has more value to its author than Notre‑Dame de Paris to Victor Hugo and Les Parents Pauvres to Balzac.