Balzac. Saltus Edgar
commercial heroism.
Writer, publisher, and printer, all deserve the praise of their countrymen.
Posterity will gossip about the binders, and our grand-nephews will regret that they do not know the names of the apprentices.
I regret it myself, – otherwise I would tell them.
The “Figaro” promised the book for the 15th of December, and M. de Balzac began it on the 17th of November.
M. de Balzac and the “Figaro” have the singular habit of keeping their word.
The printing-press was prepared, and pawed the ground like an excited charger.
M. de Balzac sent immediately two hundred sheets, scribbled in five nights of fever.
Every one knows how he writes. It was an outline, a chaos, an apocalypse, a Hindu poem.
The office paled. The time was short, the writing unheard of. The monster was transformed and translated as nearly as possible into familiar signs. No one could make head or tail of it. Back it went to the author. The author sent back the first two proofs glued on enormous placards.
It was frightful, it was pitiful. From each sign, from each printed word, shot a penstroke, gleaming and gliding like a sky-rocket, and bursting at the extremity in a luminous fire of phrases, epithets, substantives, underlined, crossed, intermingled, erased, and superposed. Its aspect was simply dazzling.
Fancy four or five hundred arabesques of this kind, interlacing, knotted together, climbing and slipping from one margin to another and from the bottom to the top.
Fancy twelve geographical maps entangling cities, rivers, and mountains in the same confusion, a skein harassed by a cat, all the hieroglyphics of the Pharonian dynasty, or twenty fireworks exploding at once.
The office then was far from gay. The typesetters beat their breasts, the presses groaned, the proof-readers tore their hair and the apprentices became howling idiots. The most intelligent recognized the Persian alphabet, others the Madagascan, while one or two considered them to be the symbolic characters of Vishnu.
They worked on chance and by the grace of God.
The next day M. de Balzac sent back two pages of the purest Chinese. It was then the 1st of December. A generous typesetter offered to blow out his brains. Then other sheets were brought, written in the most legible Siamese. Three compositors lost their sight and the little French that they knew.
The proofs were sent back seven consecutive times; then, a few symptoms of excellent French appeared, and there was even noticed a certain connection between the phrases; but the day was fast approaching, and we felt that the book would never appear.
Desolation was at its height, and it was at this point that the work became further complicated by an admirable concourse of calamities.
At the time when haste was the greatest, the miserable being who that night carried the proof-sheets to M. de Balzac was waylaid and robbed.
M. de Balzac had had the forethought to establish himself at Chaillot. The miserable being screamed and yelled. The bandits took to their heels. One proof-sheet was found at Neuilly, another in an orchard, a third descending the Seine. It is certain that they were thrown away only on account of their illegibility. Misfortune has its advantages.
The proofs were recovered, but the night was lost. There were cries and gnashing of teeth. The end was fast approaching. However, the typesetters took courage and the workmen took the bit in their teeth. The office galloped. The compositors foamed at the mouth, the presses ravened, the binders were on springs, the apprentices danced with excitement, the proof-reader shook like an epileptic, and the foreman had convulsions. The office was a cage of palsied lunatics.
The work was again taken in hand, and M. de Balzac and the “Figaro” have kept their word.
“César Birotteau” will see the light of day on the 15th of December. We have it now, and we hold it tight. The office is armed, insured, and barricaded. Smoking is not permitted. There are lightning-rods on the roof, and mounted guards at the door.
Every precaution has been taken against accidents and the ardor of our subscribers.
At this moment “César Birotteau” is a work in two volumes, an immense tableau, an entire poem, composed, written, and corrected fifteen times by M. de Balzac in twenty days, and deciphered, disentangled, and reprinted fifteen times in the same period. It may be added that M. de Balzac kept forty other workmen busy with something else at another office.
We will not now consider the value of the work.
It may be everything, or but a masterpiece.
The names of Balzac’s characters are all taken from real life; for, like Dickens, his theory was that names which were invented gave no life to imaginary creations, and, as did the English novelist, he gathered many of them from the signboards in the street. His joy at the discovery of Matifat was almost as great as his delight in finding Cardot. He found the former in the Rue de la Perle, in the Marais. “I can see him now,” he said; “he will have the pallid face of a cat. But Cardot is different: he will be dry as a bone, hasty and ill-tempered.”
In 1840, Balzac proposed to write for the “Revue Parisienne” – a periodical which, it may be explained, appeared but three times, and whose three numbers Balzac wrote entirely – the story of a man of genius, who, used as a tool by others, died through the ingratitude of those whom he had raised to magnificent positions, and who had then abandoned him to poverty and want.
Such a character needed a name proportioned to his destiny; a name which explained and announced him as clearly as the cannon-ball announces the cannon; a name which would be peculiarly his own, and would reflect his face, his figure, his voice, his past, his future, his genius, his passions, his misfortunes, and his glory.
But this supernatural alliance of man and name was not immediately discoverable, and Balzac, who had put into circulation as many cognomens as are contained in the “Almanach de Gotha,” expressed himself incapable of manufacturing it. A name, he considered, could no more be fabricated than could granite or marble. They were all three the work of time and revolutions. They made themselves.
As a last and supreme resource, therefore, he set out one day, in company with Léon Gozlan, on a journey, in search of a baptismal signboard for his hero; and from the Barrière de l’Étoile to the summits of Montmartre they zigzagged across Paris, subjecting every name they encountered to the closest scrutiny.
Thousands of names were examined, analyzed, and rejected, until at last Gozlan, utterly worn out, refused to walk another step.
Balzac looked at him, it is to be supposed, very much as Columbus looked at his mutinous sailors, and by force of entreaties obtained, not three days’ grace, but three streets more.
In the first two nothing was found, but at the extremity of the third Balzac suddenly changed color, and cried in a voice broken by emotion, —
“There, there! Read that name!”
Above a narrow, oblong door, which opened on a sombre courtyard, there hung a sign which bore for device the name of Marcas.
“Our journey is at an end!” Balzac exclaimed; “it terminates in a blaze of glory. The name of my hero shall be Marcas. Marcas contains the philosopher, the statesman, and the poet. I will call him Z. Marcas, and thereby add to his name a flame, a tiara, and a star. Nothing could be better. I wonder, however, who this Marcas is; surely some great artist.”
“He is a tailor,” Gozlan brutally replied; “there is another sign of his in the courtyard.”
Balzac looked deeply chagrined.
“No matter,” he said; “he merited a better fate. If I seem annoyed, it is not that I am lacking in respect for tailors in general, but because his calling reminds me of certain debts and a few protested notes.”
A day or two later the “Revue Parisienne” appeared, and with it the story of Z. Marcas, now forming part of the “Scènes de la Vie Politique” and containing the following monograph: —
“A