Balzac had left the Rue des Batailles for Les Jardies; he then went to live at Passy. The house in which he lived, situated on a steep slope, offered a unique architectural layout. One entered there
A little like wine enters bottles
It was necessary to descend three floors to reach the first. The entry door, which was on the side of the house that faced the road, opened nearly into the roof, like a mansard. I dined there once with L. G. It was a strange dinner, with its dishes based on economical recipes invented by Balzac. At my express request, the famous onion purée, endowed with so many healthy and symbolic qualities and which almost killed Lassailly, did not appear. But the wines were marvelous! Each bottle had a story, and Balzac told it with an eloquence, a verve, a conviction without equal. The wine of Bordeaux had gone around the world three times; the Châteauneuf‑du‑Pape traced back to legendary times; the rum came from a barrel rolled for more than a century by the sea, which had to be opened with blows from an axe, because the crust that had been formed around it by shellfish, coral and seaweed was thick. My palate, surprised, irritated by the acidic flavors, protested in vain against these illustrious origins. Balzac maintained the solemnity of a soothsayer, and despite the proverb, I kept my eyes fixed on him, but I did not make him laugh!
For dessert, we had pears of a ripeness, a size, a tenderness and a quality that would do honor to a royal table. Balzac devoured five or six of them with the juice running down his chin; he believed that this fruit was good for him, and he ate them in such a quantity as much for health as for sweetness. Already he felt the first effects of the illness that would take him. Death, with its skeletal fingers, was touching this robust body to know where to attack it, and finding no weakness there, killed it through excess and hypertrophy. The cheeks of Balzac were already lined and marked with those red spots that simulate health to inattentive eyes; but for the observer, the yellow tones of hepatitis surrounded the tired eyelids with their golden halo; the expression, brightened by this warm sepia hue, appeared even more vivacious and shining and lessened anxieties.
At that time, Balzac was very preoccupied with the occult sciences, palmistry, and card reading; he had been told of an oracle even more astonishing than Mademoiselle Lenormand, and he persuaded me, as well as Madame E. de Girardin and Méry, to go and consult her with him. The prophetess lived in Auteuil, I no longer know in which street; that matters little to my story, because the address that was given was false. We came upon an honorable middle class family on holiday: the husband, the wife, and an old mother in whom Balzac, sure of his facts, persisted in finding a mystical air. The good woman, not flattered to have been taken for a sorceress, became angry; the husband took us for tricksters or crooks; the young woman laughed loudly, and the servant hastened prudently to lock up the silver. We had no choice but to withdraw after our blunder; but Balzac maintained that we were in the right place, and having climbed back into the carriage, muttered insults at the old lady: "Demon, harpy, magician, vampire, worm, monster, lemur, ghoul, snake charmer, creature," and all of the bizarre terms that a familiarity with the litanies of Rabelais could suggest to him. I said: "If she is a sorceress, she hides her game well." "Of cards," added Madame de Girardin with a quickness of mind that never failed her. We tried some further explorations, always fruitlessly, and Delphine asserted that Balzac had imagined this resource of Quinola in order to be driven by carriage to Auteuil, where he had business, and to procure some pleasant traveling companions. It is necessary to believe, however, that Balzac alone found that Madame Fontaine that we were all seeking together, because, in Les Comédiens Sans le Savoir, he depicted her between her hen Bilouche and her toad Astaroth with a fantastic and frightening truthfulness, if those two words can go together. Did he consult her seriously? Did he go to see her as a simple observer? Many passages in La Comédie Humaine seem to suggest that Balzac had a kind of faith in the occult sciences, about which the official sciences have still not said their last word.
Around this time, Balzac began to show a taste for old furniture, chests, vases; the least piece of worm‑eaten wood that he bought on the Rue de Lappe always had an illustrious provenance, and he created detailed genealogies for his lesser knickknacks. He hid them here and there, always because of those fantastical creditors that I was starting to doubt. I even amused myself by spreading the rumor that Balzac was a millionaire, that he was buying old stockings from dealers in caterpillars to hide onces, quadruples, génovines, crusades, colonnates, double louis, in the manner of Père Grandet; I said everywhere that he had three cisterns, like Aboul‑Casem, filled to the brim with garnets, dinars and rials. "Théo will get my throat cut with his jokes!" said Balzac, annoyed and charmed.
That which gave some veracity to my jokes was the new house in which Balzac lived, on the Rue Fortunée, in the Beaujon quarter, less populated then than it is today. He occupied a mysterious little house there that would have suited the fantasies of an ostentatious financier. From outside, one saw over the wall a sort of cupola formed by the arched ceiling of a sitting room and fresh paint on the closed shutters.
When one entered this small house, which was not easy, because the master of this dwelling hid himself with extreme care, one discovered a thousand details of luxury and comfort that contradicted the poverty that he affected. He received me however one day, and I could see a dining room adorned with old oak, with a table, a fireplace, some buffets, some sideboards and some chairs of sculpted wood, that would have made Berruguète, Cornejo Duque and Verbruggen envious; a salon of golden yellow damask, with doors, cornices, plinths and window frames of ebony; a library arranged in armoires inlayed with shell and brass in the style of Boule, and whose door, hidden by the shelves, once closed, could not be found; a bathroom in yellow Breccia, with bas‑reliefs of stucco; a domed sitting room, whose old paintings had been restored by Edmond Hédouin; a gallery lit from above, that I recognized later in the collection of Le Cousin Pons. There were on the shelves all sorts of curiosities, porcelain from Dresden and Sèvres, horns of crackled celadon, and on the stairway, which was covered with a rug, some great vases from China and a magnificent lantern suspended by a cable of red silk.
"So have you emptied one of the caches of Aboul‑Casem?" I said to Balzac, laughing, confronted with these splendors. "You can see well that I was right to suggest that you are a millionaire."
"I am poorer than ever," he responded while taking on a humble and pious air. "None of this is mine. I have furnished the house for a friend that I await. I am only the caretaker and porter of the building."