But let us return to the garret on the Rue Lesdiguières. Balzac had not conceived the plan of the work that would immortalize him; he was still seeking it with anxiety, bated breath, and hard labor, trying everything and succeeding in nothing; however he already possessed that obstinacy in his work to which Minerva, as surly as she might be, must one day or another yield; he outlined comic operas, made plans for comedies, dramas and romances whose titles Madame de Surville has preserved: Stella, Coqsigrue, Les Deux Philosophes, without counting the terrible Cromwell, whose verses had caused him so much pain and yet were not worth much more than that which began his epic poem, Incas.
Imagine to yourself young Honoré, his legs wrapped in a patched coat, his upper body protected by an old shawl of his mother, his headdress a sort of Dantesque cap and his hair of a cut that only Madame de Balzac knew, his coffee pot to his left, his inkwell to his right, working with a heaving chest and bowed forehead, like an ox at the plow, the field still stony and not cleared by those thoughts which would later trace for him such productive furrows. The lamp shines like a star in the front of the dark house, the snow falls in silence on the loosened tiles, the wind blows through the door and window "like Tulou on his Flute, but less agreeably."
If some dawdling passerby had raised his eyes toward that little, obstinately flickering glow, he certainly would not have suspected that it was the dawning of one of the greatest glories of our age.
Would you like to see a sketch of the place, transposed, it's true, but very exact, drawn by the author in La Peau de Chagrin, that work which contains so much of himself?
"… A room which looks down upon the yards of the neighboring houses, from the windows of which extend long poles hung with washing; nothing was more horrible than that garret with those yellow, grimy walls, which soaked in the misery and called out to its scholar. The roof slanted in a uniform fashion, and the loosened tiles permitted a view of the sky; there was room for a bed, a table, a few chairs, and under the sharp angle of the roof I could position my piano … I lived in this aerial sepulcher for almost three years, working night and day, without rest, with so much pleasure that my studies seemed to be the most beautiful focus, the happiest solution to human life. The calm and silence necessary to the scholar have some elements of the sweetness and intoxication of love … Study lends a sort of magic to everything that surrounds us. The meager desk upon which I wrote and the brown leather that covered it, my piano, my bed, my armchair, the peculiar wallpaper, my furniture, all of these things came to life and became for me humble friends, silent partners in my future. How many times have I not shared my soul while gazing upon them? Often, while letting my eyes wander on a crooked molding, I would encounter new developments, a striking proof of my system that I believed was able to convey nearly untranslatable thoughts."
In this same passage, he makes an allusion to his work: "I had undertaken two great works; a comedy that was in only a few days to give me fame, a fortune and entry into that world in which I wanted to reappear while exercising the kingly rights of a man of genius. You have all seen in this masterpiece the first error of a young man just out of college, the nonsense of a child. Your jibes destroyed the nascent illusions, which since then have not been awakened …"
One recognizes here the ill‑fated Cromwell, which, read in front of the family and the assembled friends, was a complete fiasco.
Honoré appealed this sentence before an arbiter whom he accepted as competent, an honorable old man, a former professor at the École Polytechnique. The judgment was that the author should do "anything at all, except literature."
What a loss for letters, what a void in the human spirit if the young man had bowed before the experience of the old man and listened to his counsel, which, certainly, was most wise, because there was not the least spark of genius nor even of talent in this rhetorical tragedy! Happily Balzac, under the pseudonym of Louis Lambert, had not composed for nothing at the college of Vendôme the Traité de la Volonté.
He submitted to the sentence, but only for tragedy; he understood that he should give up trying to walk in the footsteps of Corneille and Racine, whom he so admired without being in their debt, for never were geniuses more contrary to that of himself. The novel offered him a more suitable model, and he wrote at this time a great number of volumes which he did not sign and which he always disavowed. The Balzac that we know and that we admire was still in limbo and struggled in vain to extricate himself. Those who had judged him capable of being nothing but a copyist appeared to be right; perhaps even this option had failed him, because his beautiful handwriting had already deteriorated with the crumpled, crossed out, overwritten, near hieroglyphic drafts of the writer fighting for the idea and no longer concerned about the beauty of the character.