Balzac. Saltus Edgar
what they owed.
“To relinquish my identity, to become another through the intoxication of the moral faculties, and to play this game at will, such was my sole distraction. I have sometimes wondered if this gift was one of those faculties whose abuse leads to madness, but its causes I have never sought. I know, merely, that I possess and make use of it.”
This ability to penetrate mentally the individuality of another is the evident explanation of the minuteness with which all of Balzac’s characters are drawn, as well as the secret of their logical attitudes; for as in every-day life, while it is a question whether man is his own providence or is interwoven in a web of pre-ordained circumstances, yet in either case certain results are inevitable and a matter of statistic, so in Balzac there is no dodging of fate or shirking of consequences, and he is careful, in sending his own blood tingling through the veins of his creations, to surround them with the same laws to which he is himself subjected.
During his novitiate Balzac prepared a five-act tragedy in blank verse, entitled “Cromwell,” a subject which it is curious to note was simultaneously chosen by Victor Hugo. At its completion, a professor of the École Polytechnique was requested to decide whether the lines contained a sufficient promise of genius to warrant a further pursuit of literary honors on the part of the young aspirant. The play, conscientiously examined, was deemed simply detestable, and the referee adjudged that Balzac might do what he would, but that literature was certainly not his vocation.
From this decision there was no present appeal; and while his mother and sisters begged him to engage in some other occupation, his father assured him that he would suppress his allowance should he persist in his intentions. Another perhaps would have yielded, but his pride and belief in his destiny made his resolution unalterable, and Balzac was left in solitary sadness to meditate on the coquetries of the Muse.
“I delighted,” he says in “La Peau de Chagrin,” “in the thought that I should live in the midst of tumultuous Paris in an inaccessible sphere of work and silence, in a world of my own, of books and ideas, where like the chrysalis I should build a tomb only to emerge again brilliant and famous.
“I took the chances of dying to live. In reducing existence to its actual needs, I found that three sous for charcuterie prevented me from dying of hunger and preserved my mind in a state of singular lucidity, while enabling me at the same time to observe the wonderful effects which diet produces on the imagination. My lodging cost three sous a day, I burned at night three sous’ worth of oil, and for two sous more I heated my room with charcoal: and in this manner I lived in my aerial sepulchre, working night and day with such pleasure that study seemed the most beautiful theme, the happiest solution, of existence. The calm and silence necessary to the student possess an indescribable something which is as sweet and intoxicating as love, and study itself seems to lend a sort of magic to all that surrounds us. The forlorn desk on which I wrote, my piano, my bed, my chair, the zigzags of the wall-paper, – all these things became as though animated and humble friends, the silent accomplices of my future. Many a time I have communicated my soul to them in a glance, and often in looking at the broken moulding I encountered new developments of thought, some striking proof of my system, or words which I considered peculiarly fitted to express ideas almost untranslatable.”
Balzac had not as yet any settled plan of work, but he tried his hand, while forming his style, at a quantity of comic operas, dramas, comedies, and romances, none of which, however, were accepted save by the gutter’s sneering fatalist, the ragpicker.
After many fruitless attempts and knocks at many a door, Balzac succeeded at last in finding a publisher, but of a type seen only in opéra bouffe, who proffered in payment of a romance a promissory note with a year to run. Balzac of course had no choice. He wished to appear in print. The bargain was concluded, and the “Héritière de Birague” was produced. Then, under various pseudonyms, such as Lord R’hoone, the anagram of Honoré, Dom Rago, M. de Viellerglé, and Horace de Saint-Aubin, he produced a quantity of novels somewhat after the style of Pegault Lebrun, and yet so diverse in treatment that one of them, “Wann-Chlore,”2 was attributed to a luminary of the Romantic school, and another, “Annette et le Criminel,” was suppressed by the censorship. Some of these books, whose paternity he always denied, have since been collected under the title of “Œuvres de Jeunesse,” but of the greater part no trace remains.
Exhausted by privations and worn with continued study, Balzac was obliged to return to his family, then established at Villeparisis, where, broken in mind and health, he sank into an almost hopeless dejection.
“Is this what you term life,” he wrote3 to his sister, – “this involuntary rotation and perpetual return of the same things? I am in the springtide of a flowerless life, and I long to have some charm thrown over my chill existence; for of what use is fortune and pleasure when youth is gone? Of what use is the actor’s gown if he play no longer his part? Old age is a man who has dined and looks at others eat; and I, I am young, and I hunger before an empty plate – Laura, Laura, shall I, then, never realize my two immense desires, to be celebrated and to be loved?”
But Balzac soon wearied of this plaintive inactivity, and, fertile in projects, conceived the plan of printing Molière complete in one volume, and of following it with similar editions of the French classics. When these had appeared, he proposed, like Richardson, to produce his own works, and his illuminous imagination immediately foresaw new Clarissas issuing from the press.
The necessary working capital he procured from his family, who, though far from rich, were none the less glad to aid him in an enterprise for which literature would be abandoned and a legitimate business adopted.
But after the publication of Molière and La Fontaine, in each of which he inserted an elaborate and original introduction, he was obliged, through the cabals of the other publishers, to relinquish his plan, while burdened at the same time with a load of debt which oppressed almost every hour of his after life.
He was now absolutely without resources. The expense of a few sous attending the carriage of a letter, an omnibus ride, anything, in fact, which demanded the outlay of ready money, he was obliged to forego, and even remained in his garret that he might preserve as long as possible the only shoes which he owned.
“My sole possessions,” he wrote to his sister, “are my books, which I cannot part with, and my good taste, which unfortunately for the rich cannot be bought. If I were in prison I should be happier; life then would cost me nothing, and in any event I could not be more of a captive than I am.”
But the pecuniary loss which he had sustained, and which amounted to about 120,000 francs, served but as a stimulus to renewed activity; and resolving that he would recover from the printing press all that it had robbed him of, he commenced to seek some undiscovered vein of literary treasure, and in 1829 brought out “Le Dernier Chouan,” the first romance which he considered worthy to bear his own name. Its ferocity and passion attracted great attention, and the public became at once favorably disposed toward him; but when, a few months later, the “Physiologie du Mariage” appeared, its success was not only instantaneous, but Balzac was heralded as a new Molière. He now emerged from quasi obscurity into the white light of fame. Publishers were submissive, praise was unstinted. He had realized the first of his immense desires, and had it not been for his weight of debt he might perhaps have been able to realize the other, but his time was not his own. He labored, if possible, more incessantly than ever, conceived the plan of the “Comédie Humaine,” and from that time up to almost the day of his death produced a series of masterpieces which in point of interest and erudition form the most gigantic monument in the history of modern literature.
His work accompanied him wherever he went. He dreamed of it; he wrote while he ate; he traveled over the better part of Europe, and wrote while he traveled; he composed in the omnibus and in the street; and had he had a mistress he would, in all probability, have followed the example of Baudelaire, and composed in her arms. Thoroughly conscientious, he invariably visited the place where the scenes of a drama were to be located. “I am going to Alençon,” he would say; “you know Mlle. Cormon4 lives there;” or, “I am off for Grenoble; there is where M.
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