Having provided these indispensable biographical details, I come to my direct and personal impressions of Balzac.
Balzac, that immense brain, that physiologist so penetrating, that observer so profound, that mind so intuitive, did not possess the literary gift: within him there opened an abyss between the thought and the form. That abyss, particularly in the early years, he despaired of crossing. He threw himself without fulfillment into volume upon volume, observation upon observation, essay upon essay; an entire library of disavowed books passed through there. A will less robust would have been discouraged a thousand times; but happily Balzac had an unshakeable confidence in his genius, unknown to all the world. He wanted to be a great man, and he was that by his unrelenting projections of that force that was more powerful than electricity, and with which he made such subtle analyses in Louis Lambert.
Unlike the writers of the romantic school, who distinguished themselves by a boldness and astonishing facility of execution, and produced their fruits at nearly the same time as their flowers, in a blossoming that was in a sense involuntary, Balzac, the equal in genius of them all, did not find his means of expression, or did not find it until after infinite suffering. Hugo said in one of his prefaces, with his Castilian pride: "I do not know the art of soldering a beauty in the place of a defect, and I correct myself in another work." But Balzac would cover a tenth proof with his crossings out, and when he saw me return to the La Chronique de Paris the proof of an article written in a hurry, on the corner of a table, with only typographical corrections, he could not believe, as content as he was otherwise, that I had applied all of my talent there. "By reworking it two or three times, it would have been better," he said to me.
Citing himself as an example, he preached to me a strange literary lifestyle. I must cloister myself for two or three years, drink water, eat soggy lupins like Protogène, go to bed at six o'clock in the evening, get up at midnight, and work until morning, using the day to revise, expand, shorten, perfect, polish the nocturnal work, correct the proofs, take notes, do the necessary studies, and live most importantly with absolute chastity. He insisted a great deal upon this last recommendation, which was very challenging for a young man of twenty‑four or twenty‑five years. According to him, true chastity develops to the highest degree the powers of the mind, and gives to those who practice it unidentified abilities. I timidly objected that the greatest geniuses did not forbid themselves love, passion, or even pleasure, and I cited some illustrious names. Balzac shook his head and responded, "They would have done better, without the women!"
The only concession that he would grant me, and even then he regretted it, was to see my beloved one half hour each year. He permitted letters: "These guide the development of style."
By means of this regimen, he promised to make of me, with the natural abilities that he was pleased to recognize in me, a writer of the first order. It is clear from my work that I have not followed this plan.
It must not be believed that Balzac was joking when he laid down these conditions that the Trappists or the Carthusians would have found harsh. He was perfectly convinced, and spoke with such eloquence that many times I consciously tried to use this method to develop genius; I awoke numerous times at midnight, and after having partaken of the inspirational coffee, acted according to the formula, seating myself in front of a table on which sleep caused me to quickly lay my head. La Morte Amoureuse, published in the La Chronique de Paris, was my only nocturnal work.
Around this time, Balzac had written for a review Facino Cane, the story of a noble Venetian who, imprisoned in the vaults of the ducal palace, had fallen, while digging an escape tunnel, upon the secret treasure of the Republic, a good part of which he carried away with the help of a bribed jailer. Facino Cane, who became blind and played the clarinet under the common name of Father Canet, had kept an extrasensory perception for gold; he recognized it through walls and in vaults, and he offered to the writer, at a wedding in the Faubourg Saint‑Antoine, to guide him, if he was willing to pay him the cost of the journey, toward this immense mass of riches whose location had been lost due to the fall of the Venetian Republic. Balzac, as I have said, lived his characters, and at this moment, he was Facino Cane himself, although without the blindness, for never have there been eyes more sparkling or scintillating on a human face. He dreamed of nothing but tons of gold, heaps of diamonds and garnets, and, by means of magnetism, with whose practices he had been long familiar, he sought from these explorations the location of the buried and lost treasure. He pretended to have learned in this way, in the most precise manner, the place where, near the hill of Pointe‑à‑Pître, Toussaint Louverture had caused his booty to be buried by negroes who were immediately shot. The Gold‑Bug, of Edgar Poe, does not equal, in subtlety of reasoning, in clarity of plan, in divination of details, the fevered rendition that he has given us of the expedition to attempt to become master of this treasure, which was far richer than that which was buried by Tom Kidd at the skull at the foot of the Talipot.
I implore the reader to not make too much fun of me, if I confess to him in all humility that I soon shared the conviction of Balzac. What brain could have resisted his breathtaking speech? Jules Sandeau was also soon seduced, and as he needed two dependable friends, two devoted and robust companions to perform the nocturnal excavations under the direction of the seer, Balzac was pleased to grant us one‑fourth each of this prodigious fortune. One‑half was to revert to him by right, as he had made the discovery and directed the enterprise.
We were to buy pikes, pickaxes and shovels, get them secretly on board the vessel, and get ourselves to a designated point by different routes so as not to excite suspicions, and, the blow being struck, we were to transport our riches on a brigantine chartered in advance; in short, it was quite a tale, which would have been admirable if Balzac had written it instead of speaking it.