Balzac. Saltus Edgar
characters as realistically vivid to him as are the hallucinations of a neurosthene, but he invariably spoke of them as another would of friends and acquaintances. “Let us talk of realities,” he one day said to Jules Sandeau, who had been speaking to him of an invalid relative, “let us talk about ‘Eugénie Grandet;’” and at another time, when his sister asked for some information about Captain Jordy,6 Balzac replied very simply, “I never knew the man before he came to Nemours, but if he interests you, I will try to learn something of him.” It was a long time before he was able to find a suitable husband for Mlle. Camille Grandlieu, and rejected all who were suggested to him. “They are not in the same set,” he would say. “Chance alone can supply her with a husband, and chance is a commodity which a novelist should use but sparingly. Reality alone justifies the improbable, and the probable alone is permitted to us.” But Mlle. de Grandlieu was not destined to braid St. Catherine’s tresses, and afterwards, to Balzac’s great delight, found a suitable husband in the person of the young Comte de Restaud,7 who in spite of his mother’s derelictions8 was otherwise a very acceptable suitor.
After the place of his novel had been visited, viewed from every aspect, the customs noted and the localisms acquired, Balzac would return to Paris, shut himself up in a garret, – the garret has its poetry, – and for weeks and sometimes months at a time he would not only disappear entirely from view, but all trace of him would be lost.
At other times, he would lodge under an assumed name, which he imparted only to his most intimate friends. “My address,” he wrote to Madame Carraud in 1834, “is always Madame Veuve Durand, 13, Rue des Batailles;” and in 1837, he wrote to Dablin, “To see the Widow Durand, a name must be given. Yours is on the list.”
“The house,” Gautier wrote,9 “of the Widow Durand was as well guarded as the Garden of the Hesperides. Two or three passwords were exacted, and that they might not become vulgarized they were frequently changed. Among others, I recall the following. On telling the janitor that the season for prunes had arrived, the visitor was permitted to cross the threshold; to the servant who prowled about the head of the stairway, it was necessary to murmur ‘I bring laces from Belgium;’ and on assuring the valet de chambre that Madame Bertrand was in excellent health, the visitor was ushered into the great man’s presence.”
It was in the Rue des Batailles that the famous boudoir of the “Fille aux Yeux d’Or” actually existed; and though its luxury would not appear unusual to-day, it was, nevertheless, a source of continual wonder to his Bohemian friends, and his own description of it is not devoid of interest:10 —
“One side of the boudoir formed a graceful semicircle, while in the centre of the other, which was perfectly square, there shone a mantel-piece of marble and gold. The door, which was concealed behind a rich portière of tapestry, was directly in front of the window.
“In the horseshoe was a Turkish divan, fifty feet in circumference and as high as a bed. The covering was of white cashmere tufted with bows of black and lilac silk, which were disposed as at the angles of a lozenge.
“The back of this immense bed rose several inches above a pile of cushions, which added to the general effect by their coloring and artistic arrangement.
“The boudoir was hung with a red material, over which was draped an Indian muslin fluted like a Corinthian column by a piping alternately hollow and round, and bordered at top and bottom by a band of lilac embroidered with black arabesques. Beneath the muslin the red became pink, and this delicate shading was repeated in the window curtains, which were of Indian muslin lined with pink silk and ornamented with a fringe of black and lilac.
“At equal distances on the wall above the divan were six sockets of silver-gilt, each of which supported two candles, while from the centre of the ceiling hung a highly polished lustre of the same material.
“The carpet was like a camel’s-hair shawl, and seemed a mute reminder of the poetry of Persia. The furniture was covered with white cashmere relieved by lilac and black. The clock and candelabras were of gold and marble. The one table which the boudoir contained was covered with white cashmere, while all about were jardinières of white and red roses.”
Behind the semicircle was a secret passage, at one end of which was an iron cot and at the other a desk; and here it was that Balzac, secure from intrusion, worked and composed at his ease.
To return, however, to the Widow Durand. In 1838 he wrote to Madame Hanska, the lady who subsequently became his wife: —
“The Widow Durand is dead. She was killed by the contemptible conduct of the daily papers, who have betrayed a secret which should have been sacred to every man of honor.”
After this misfortune Balzac installed himself openly at Les Jardies, a country house which he had built at Ville d’Avray, and where he was, as he expressed it, “like the lantern of Demosthenes, and not, as every one else says, of Diogenes;” but when, a year or two later, he took up his residence in the Rue Basse, at Passy he surrounded himself with all his former precautions, instituted a series of countersigns which he changed weekly, and transformed himself into “Madame Bri…”
When guarded in this way from any intrusion, Balzac would work from twelve to twenty-one hours a day. His usual hours of sleep were from six in the evening until midnight. Then he would bathe, don the white robe of a Dominican friar, poise a black skull cap on his head, and, under the influence of coffee and by the light of a dozen candles, would work incessantly till he could work no more.
His work completed, the lion would forsake his den, and for an evening or two he would be seen in the Loge Infernale at the opera, invariably carrying a massive cane whose head glittered with jewels, and which Madame de Girardin was pleased to imagine rendered him invisible at will;11 or he would make brief apparitions in the salons of the literati and nobility, and then, suddenly, without a word of warning, he would shut himself up as impenetrably as before.
His manner of writing was stamped with the same eccentricity which characterized all his habits. When a subject which he proposed to treat had been well considered, he would cover thirty or forty sheets with a scaffolding of ideas and phrases, which he then sent off to the printer, who returned them in columns wired and centred on large placards. The work, freed in this way from any personality and its errors at once apparent, was then strengthened and corrected. On a second reading the forty pages grew to a hundred, two hundred on the third, and so on, while on the proof-sheets themselves new lines would start from the beginning, the middle, or the end of a phrase; and if the margins were insufficient, other sheets of paper were pinned or glued to the placards, which were again and again returned, corrected, and reprinted, until the work was at last satisfactorily completed.
But perhaps the most graphic description of Balzac’s manner of writing is the one contained in an article by Edouard Ourliac in the “Figaro” for the 15th of December, 1837, of which the following is a free translation: —
Let us sing, drink, and embrace, like the chorus in an opéra bouffe; let us waft kisses in the air and turn on our toes, as they do in the ballet.
Let us rejoice now that we may. The “Figaro,” without appearing to have done so, has conquered the elements, all the malefactors, and every sublunary cataclysm.
The “Figaro” has conquered César Birotteau.
Never did the angered gods, never did Juno, Neptune, M. de Rambuteau, or the prefect of the police, oppose against Jason, Theseus, or the wayfarers of the capital, greater obstacles, monsters, ruins, dragons, demolitions, than these two unhappy octavos. We have them at last, and we know their cost.
The public will have but the trouble to read them, though that should count as a pleasure.
As to M. de Balzac, twenty days of labor, two reams of paper, another masterpiece, that counts as nothing.
Whatever else
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