This garret was perched on the Rue de Lesdiguières, number nine, near the Arsenal, whose library offered its resources to the young laborer. Without a doubt, to pass from an abundant and luxurious house to a miserable hovel would be difficult at any age other than 21, which was the age of Balzac; but if the dream of every child is to have boots, that of every young man is to have a room, a room all to himself, whose key he carries in his pocket, although he can stand upright only at its center: a room, it's the trappings of virility, it's independence, personality, love!
Behold then master Honoré perched near the sky, seated before his table, and trying to create a work that would justify the indulgence of his father and disprove the unfavorable predictions of his friends. It is a remarkable thing that Balzac debuted with a tragedy, with a Cromwell! Around that same time, Victor Hugo also put the last touches on his Cromwell, whose preface became the manifesto of all young dramatists.
II
In attentively rereading La Comédie Humaine when one has known Balzac personally, one finds there scattered curious details with regard to his character and his life, particularly in his first works, where he has not yet separated out his own personality, and, due to a lack of subjects, observes and dissects himself. I have said that he began his rude apprenticeship for the literary life in a garret on the Rue Lesdiguières, near the Arsenal. The novel Facino Cane, published in Paris in March, 1836, and dedicated to Louise, contains some precious information regarding the life that this young aspirant for glory led in his aerial nest.
"I lived then in a street which without doubt you do not know, the Rue Lesdiguières: it begins at the Rue Saint‑Antoine, opposite a fountain, near the Place de la Bastille, and leads into the Rue de la Cerisaie. The love of science had thrown me into an attic where I wrote all night, and I passed the day in a neighboring library, that of Monsieur; I lived frugally, I had accepted all of the conditions of the monastic life, so necessary for laborers. When the weather was fine, I allowed myself a walk on the Boulevard Bourbon. One sole passion enticed me from my studious habits; but wasn't this also studying? I went to observe the manners of the neighborhood, its inhabitants and their characters. As ill clad as the workers, indifferent to decorum, I did not put them on their guard against me: I could mingle in their groups, see them conclude their deals, and hear them argue about the time that they would stop working. For me, observation had already become intuitive, it penetrated the soul without neglecting the body; in other words it so thoroughly grasped exterior that it transcended it immediately; it gave me the ability to live the life of the individual on which I was focused and permitted me to substitute myself for him, like the dervish of the Thousand and One Nights seized the body and the soul of persons over whom he pronounced certain words.
"When, between eleven o'clock and midnight, I met a workman and his wife returning from the Ambigu‑Comique, I amused myself by following them from the Boulevard Pont‑aux‑Choux to the Boulevard Beaumarchais. These good people would at first speak of the play that they had just seen; next they would address their personal affairs; the mother would pull the child by the hand without listening to either his complaints or his questions. The married couple would count up the money that would be paid to them the next day. They would spend it in twenty different ways. They would then move on to household matters, complaints over the excessive price of potatoes or the length of the winter and the rise in the cost of butter, energetic discussions on how much was owed to the baker, and finally onto discussions where each of them became irritated and demonstrated his character with picturesque words. In listening to these people, I could connect with their life, I felt their rags upon my back, I walked with my feet in their tattered shoes; their desires, their needs, all passed into my soul, and my soul passed into theirs; it was the dream of an awakened man. I became exasperated with them against the workshop foremen who tyrannized them or against the unfair practice that made them return many times without providing them with their pay. To abandon habits, to become another through this intoxication of the moral faculties and to play this game at will, such was my entertainment. To what do I owe this gift? Is it an extrasensory perception? Is it one of those qualities whose abuse would lead to madness? I have never sought the sources of this power; I possess it and I use it, that is all."
I have transcribed these lines, which are doubly interesting because they illuminate a little‑known side of Balzac's life, and because they show that he was conscious of this powerful faculty of intuition that he already possessed at such a high level and without which the realization of his work would have been impossible. Balzac, like Vishnu, the Indian god, possessed the gift of metamorphosis, that is to say the ability to incarnate himself into different bodies and live in them as long as he wished; however, the number of the metamorphoses of Vishnu is fixed at ten: those of Balzac are countless, and furthermore he could produce them at will. Although it may seem extravagant to say this in the heart of the nineteenth century, Balzac was a seer. His merits as an observer, his acuteness as a physiologist, his genius as a writer, do not suffice to explain the infinite variety of the two or three thousand types which play a more or less important role in La Comédie Humaine. He did not copy them, he lived them in an ideal manner, he wore their clothes, he took on their habits, he immersed himself in their surroundings, he was them for as long as necessary. From there come these authentic, logical characters, never contradicting themselves and never forgetting themselves, endowed with an intimate and profound existence, who, to use one of his expressions, took on the challenge of life in civil society. Truly red blood circulated in their veins in place of the ink that infused the creations of ordinary writers.
Balzac did not possess this ability for any time except the present. He could transport his thought into a marquis, into a financier, into a middle‑class person, into a man of the people, into a woman of the world, into a courtesan, but the shadows of the past did not obey his call: he never knew, like Goethe, how to evoke from the depths of antiquity the beautiful Hélène and make her dwell in the Gothic manor of Faust. With two or three exceptions, all of his work is modern; he has assimilated the living, he has not resurrected the dead. Even history seduced him little, as one can see from the preface to La Comédie Humaine: "In reading the dry and off‑putting catalogues of facts called histories, who has not recognized that the writers have forgotten in every era, in Egypt, in Persia, in Greece, in Rome, to give us the history of manners? The piece by Petronius on the private life of the Romans irritates rather than satisfies our curiosity."
This void left by the historians of vanished societies, Balzac proposed to fill for our own, and God knows that he carefully followed the program that he had planned.
"Society was going to be the historian, I should not be but the secretary; in constructing the inventory of vices and of virtues, in assembling the principal features of the passions, in depicting the characters, in choosing the principal events of the society, in composing types by the blending of traits of several homogeneous characters, perhaps I could succeed in writing the history forgotten by so many historians, that of manners. With a great deal of patience and courage, I might be able to complete, on nineteenth century France, the book that we all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, India, have unfortunately not left us on their civilization, and that like the abbot Bartholomew, the courageous and patient Monteil had attempted regarding the Middle Ages, although in a form that was not appealing."