Balzac Part 10

From what we know of his relations with Madame Visconti, we may, however, suppose that his prejudice against the _perfide Albion_ was not very deep-rooted. Indeed in his sentiments, as in his conduct, consistency was conspicuous by its absence. We find this would-be Legitimist, absolutist, ultra-orthodox wors.h.i.+pper of every old-time privilege and doctrine, yet continually saying and doing things that savour more of the democratic than the aristocratic. Towards the disintegration of monarchic attachments, his fiction contributed at least as much as that of George Sand; and even his comic resistance to the compulsory service required of him in the National Guard showed how little he was inclined to accept for himself those doctrines of authority which he would fain impose on others.

Such incongruity between his theory and practice may have struck the members of the Academie Francaise, who manifested their disapproval of his candidature so unmistakably in 1839 that he withdrew in favour of Victor Hugo. This forced concession perhaps tinged the portrait he sketched of Hugo for Madame Hanska about the same time. "Victor Hugo,"

he said, "is an exceedingly witty man; he has as much wit as poetry in him. His conversation is most delightful, with some resemblance to that of Humboldt, but superior and allowing more dialogue. He is full of bourgeois ideas. He execrates Racine, and treats him as a sorry sort of man. On this point he is quite mad. His wife he has thrown over for J----; and gives for such conduct reasons of signal meanness (she bore him too many children; notice that J---- has borne him none). In fine, there is more good than bad in him. Although the good traits are an outcome of pride, and although in everything he is a deeply calculating man, he is amiable on the whole, and, besides, is a great poet. Much of his force, value, and quality he has lost by the life he leads, having overdone his devotion to Venus."

Calling Hugo a great poet meant little in Balzac's mouth. Of poetry he made but small account, probably because he succeeded so ill in it himself. When poets appear in his stories, they are rarely estimable characters. For Lucien de Rubempre he has only little sympathy. The three specimens of Lucien's verse given in the novel he procured from his acquaintances. The sonnet to Marguerite was composed by Madame de Girardin; the one to Camellia, by La.s.sailly, and that to Tulipe, by Theophile Gautier.

A movement of disinterested generosity displayed by him in the same year was his fight, in conjunction with the artist Gavarni, on behalf of Sebastien Benoit Peytel. Peytel was a notary living at Belley, who, on the 20th of August 1839, was condemned to death by the Ain a.s.sizes on a charge of murdering his wife and man-servant. Balzac had known him some time before in Paris, when both were on the staff of the theatrical journal _Le Voleur_. The Court of Ca.s.sation was appealed to in vain and the sentence was carried out at Bourg on the 28th of October. As long as there seemed the slightest chance of preventing the execution, Balzac continued his efforts to save the notary, though blamed by his family and friends for his interference, which they set down as quixotic. Presumably Peytel had committed the crime in a fit of jealous pa.s.sion, to punish his wife's adultery. A curious drawing by Balzac exists in the first volume of his general correspondence, in which Gavarni is represented mocking the headsman; and, accompanying the design, is an autograph letter to Dutacq, managing director of the _Siecle_, referring to an article on the question published by the novelist in that paper.

The time and money he gave to this lost cause were all the more meritorious as his own concerns demanded greater attention than ever.

A new departure had occurred in journalism. The appearance of certain cheaper newspapers necessitated a change in the _roman feuilleton_; and the _Presse_ and _Siecle_, which had inaugurated the reform, and to both of which Balzac contributed fiction, laid down the principle that they would print only short tales complete in three or four numbers. This was hard on the novelist. For him to compress a story within artificial limits determined by an editor was a task even more difficult than to write a play.

It must have been the desire to escape from such servitude which induced him to launch into another adventure with a journal of his own. The _Revue Parisienne_, which he founded in July 1840, was not a newspaper but a magazine, intended to supply the public, at a reasonable price, with tales, novels, poetry, and articles of criticism both literary and political, and to give the same public for their money more than three times as much matter as they would get in other reviews. The success of Alphonse Karr's monthly _Guepes_, which was reported to be selling extraordinarily, encouraged him to believe that his own fame, wider spread in 1839 than in 1836, and greater, would suffice to a.s.sure a similar result. Author and editor combined, he made the three numbers of his review, which were all he was able to bring out, at any rate the equal of the older established monthlies.

In the three appeared his _Z. Marcas_, and _A Prince of Bohemia_, the former a resuscitation of the _Louis Lambert_ species of hero transformed into a politician. The _Russian Letters_, likewise political, furnish a very exact and comprehensive sketch of the general state of mind in Europe at the commencement of the Forties.

One article of criticism praised to the skies Stendhal's _Chartreuse de Parme_ published in the previous year. A letter he had addressed to Stendhal in April 1839 was more moderate in its tone, though eulogistic with its well-turned compliment: "I make a fresco, and you have made Italian statues." He blamed the writer in his letter for situating the plot of the _Chartreuse_ in Parma. "Neither state or town," he told him, "should have been named. It should have been left to the imagination to discover the Prince of Modena and his minister.

Hoffman never failed to obey this law without exception in the rules of the novel. If everything be left undefined as regards reality, then everything becomes real." In short, notwithstanding parts that were too long drawn out, he found the whole a fine piece of work; and, if a modern Machiavelli were to write a novel, it would be, he said, the _Chartreuse de Parme_.

Between the judicious language employed in the letter and the article of the _Revue Parisienne_, the difference was so enormous that Beyle himself remarked: "This astonis.h.i.+ng notice, such as never one writer had from another, I read, let me own it, amid bursts of laughter.

Whenever I came to fresh flights of eulogy--and I met with them in every paragraph--I could not help thinking how my friends would look when they saw them." "The reason for this augmented enthusiasm must be sought," says Sainte-Beuve, "in the fact that Stendhal lent or gave Balzac a sum of five thousand francs in the interval, and thus received back a service of _amour propre_ for the service rendered in cash. Since the proof of this gift or loan was found in Beyle's papers, at his death, Sainte-Beuve's explanation seems well grounded; and yet, for Balzac's credit, one could have wished his praise more spontaneous."

The cessation of the _Revue Parisienne_ forced its founder again to enter the ranks of paid contributors to the daily press, and to comply with its exigencies. Yet not entirely. His qualities and his defects alike led him frequently to break from restraint and to follow his own bent, maugre the complaints of readers, maugre editors' entreaties; and, even in the final phase of his production, there were some masterpieces supporting comparison with those of his best period.

At the end of the Thirties, he was again, like Bruce's spider, renewing his efforts to climb on to the stage. He had three pieces in hand, _La Gina_, _Richard the Sponge-Heart_, and his _School for Husbands and Wives_, already mentioned. The last he had now managed to carry through to its conclusion; and, in February 1839 there seemed to be some prospect of his getting it played. Pereme, an influential acquaintance of his in the theatrical world, had persuaded the Renaissance theatre to accept it on approval, but was less fortunate with regard to the fifteen thousand francs which Balzac had asked for on account. The roles were discussed and partially distributed. Henry Monnier and Frederick Lemaitre were to be chief actors on the men's side, Mesdames Theodore and Albert on the women's. On the 25th of the month, the author presented himself with his ma.n.u.script before the reading committee; and, to his intense annoyance and dismay, was compelled to put it back into his pocket. Either the committee feared the expense which the representation would have entailed, or else the elder Dumas, who was one of their most successful suppliers of dramas, and had recently fallen out with them, must have made up the quarrel just before Balzac's comedy was read. Whatever the reason was, the rejection of the piece grievously affected the novelist, who, besides losing a great deal of valuable time, had spent money to no purpose in having his comedy printed.

It must be acknowledged that, in dramatic composition, whatever Balzac had so far done by himself was done grudgingly, and, when possible, s.h.i.+fted on to other shoulders. Gozlan relates that La.s.sailly, who went to Les Jardies and lived there for some little time as a paid secretary, would be rung up at night, when his employer usually worked--rung up not once nor twice, but several times, to hear himself asked whether, in his waking or his dreaming, he had hatched any good plan; and poor La.s.sailly would have sorrowfully to avow that his brain had conceived nothing of any importance in the way of drama.

How Harel, the managing director of the Porte-Saint-Martin, was brought to give in the same twelve-month to the rejected of the Renaissance a firm promise that anything he liked to do for that theatre should be acted is an impenetrable mystery. But then Harel himself was an oddity, and he may have felt bowels of compa.s.sion for a _confrere_ so original. The story goes that once he tried to borrow thirty thousand francs from King Louis-Philippe. "Ah! Monsieur Harel,"

replied the monarch, smiling, "I was thinking of applying to you for a similar sum."

The subject that, after much cogitation, Balzac chose for Harel's stage was _Vautrin_--the Vautrin of _Pere Goriot_ and the _Lost Illusions_--back at his old trade of acting Providence to a presumably fatherless and friendless young man, whose fortunes he sought to advance by means similar to those that had brought Lucien de Rubempre (we are antic.i.p.ating a little) to so miserable an end. In the concluding act of the play, the young man discovers that he has a family, and a father who is a n.o.ble; and he marries the girl he loves.

But Vautrin is arrested, and, although he has been the instrument of his protege's happiness, he is led off to prison once more. The theme, as treated, was a somewhat hackneyed one, and was further spoiled by ill-managed contrasts of the serious and comic, of which in any form the French stage was not tolerant. Objection has been made on the same score to the _School for Husbands and Wives_ at the Theatre Francais, where it had been offered after its rejection by the Renaissance.

Balzac himself had no great opinion of his dramatic arrangement of _Vautrin_. He had done wrong, he said, to put a romantic character on the stage. After the play was finished, he re-wrote nearly the whole of it; and, from what Theophile Gautier relates about the way in which it was primitively composed, we can well believe that the revision was necessary. When the treaty with Harel was signed, Balzac installed himself in the small apartment which he rented at his tailor's, No.

104 Rue de Richelieu, and sent for Gautier. "I am going to read to Harel to-morrow," he announced, "a grand five-act drama." "Ah!"

replied Gautier; "so I suppose you want us to hear it and to give you our opinion." "The play is not yet written," answered Balzac coolly.

"You shall do one act; Ourliac, a second; Laurent Jan, a third; de Belloy, a fourth; and I, the fifth. There are not so many lines in one act. With all of us working together, we shall be able to complete it by to-morrow." Objections were timidly put forward as to the hotch-potch that was likely to result from so improvized a method of work; but the hasty playwright overruled them all. It need hardly be said that the five acts were not ready on the morrow, nor for some time after. In fact, Laurent Jan was the only collaborator who gave any considerable help. To him, in acknowledgment, Balzac dedicated the piece, which was performed on the 14th of March 1840.

Knowing what a number of enemies he had among the Parisian journalists and critics, whom he had satirized with increased causticity in his latest fiction, the author endeavoured to pack the theatre with his friends, but there was a large leakage in the sale of tickets; and, on the eventful evening, the seats were occupied by a majority of persons hostile to him. He must have had an inkling of this; for, when sending a ticket to Lamartine, he said to him: "You will see a memorable failure. I have done wrong, I believe, to appeal to the public.

_Morituri te salutant Caesar_." The first portion of the performance was received, on the whole, favourably, though there was no enthusiasm; but, when Frederick Lemaitre, who was entrusted with the role of Vautrin, came on to the stage, in the fourth act, dressed as a Mexican general, and wearing his forelock of hair in a way that appeared to imitate a like peculiarity in the King, there was an outcry among the audience; and Louis-Philippe's son, who was present, was informed by complaisant courtiers that the travesty was intended as an insult to his father. The next day, Harel was advertized that the authorities forbade any other presentation of the piece; and, on the 16th, the Press, following the Government's lead, were practically unanimous in anathematizing the unhappy dramatist, the _Debats_ being particularly acrimonious, and a.s.serting that _Vautrin_ was a thoroughly immoral play.

Balzac's friends, Victor Hugo included, did what they could to get the interdiction raised; but the Minister was inflexible. All that he would consent to was an indemnity of five thousand francs offered through Cave, the Under-Secretary for Fine Arts. This, Balzac indignantly refused. One might have expected such continued ill-luck to prostrate its victim, at least momentarily. Gozlan went out to Les Jardies for the purpose of cheering the hermit up. He found him calm and collected. "You see that strip of land bordering the garden over there?" the latter said, looking out of the window. "Yes." "I am about to establish there a dairy, with an installation of the best kind, the cows of which will bring me in three thousand francs a year." Gozlan stared. "And you see the other strip down yonder farther than the wall?" "Yes." "Well, I intend to plant that with rare vegetables of the sort that used to be supplied to the King's table. That will bring me in another three thousand francs a year." Gozlan waited for what would come next. "And you see the plot right facing the southern sun?"

"Yes." "Ah! there I shall plant a vineyard, which will furnish exquisite grapes that I can sell for wine-making in quant.i.ties sufficient to bring me in twelve thousand francs a year. This means a revenue of eighteen thousand francs annually. And then, the walnut-tree you see there--I can utilize it to the tune of two thousand francs a year." "How?" "Ah! that is my secret. So we get a total of twenty thousand francs a year, which I shall gain by the refusal of my _Vautrin_."

This was brave talk on the part of the obstacle-breaker, as he loved to call himself. 'Twas also the bravest temper he could a.s.sume in face of the outside world. To Madame Hanska he revealed more the cankering disappointment, just as he had a twelvemonth previously, after the mishap of the _School for Husbands and Wives_. He had fresh thoughts of leaving France, which being, for the nonce, a bear-garden, he said, he detested, and of going away to America, perhaps to Brazil, where he should soon grow rich. He even told her she might next hear from him at Havre or Ma.r.s.eilles, just as he was on the point of embarking for the other side of the Atlantic. He had been reading Fenimore Cooper again; and the descriptions given by this painter of Nature always aroused his roaming instincts. He envied especially Cooper's power and skill in reproducing the details of a landscape. Once, in a pastry-cook's shop that he had entered with Gozlan to devour a plate of macaroni, he brandished a book of Cooper's, which he had been carrying under his arm, while he recounted his fruitless efforts to get experts in botany to tell him how to describe the differences between certain gra.s.ses that he wanted to distinguish appropriately in his fiction. An English girl who had served him in the shop listened open-mouthed to the great man, whose name had been uttered by Gozlan; and, when the moment came for settling, marked her appreciation of what she had heard and seen by charging him nothing for the macaroni. Balzac, not to be outdone in generosity, made her a gift of his copy of Cooper, expressing his regret that he had not one of his own novels with him that he might have offered her instead.

No account of this macaroni feast figures in his almost daily letters at this time despatched to Madame Hanska. To her, if he mentioned his diet, its meagreness was emphasized rather. Being in one of his chronic hard-up crises, he excused himself for the intervals that had occurred between some of his previous epistles on the ground of having no ready money for the postage--the rates for Russia, it is true, were high; and he spoke of buying a bit of dry bread on the boulevards, or of intending to beg from Rothschild; then flourished his big debt at the end, quoting fantastic sums, variable as the barometer, which would oblige him sooner or later, notwithstanding his constant devotion to the Countess, whom he loved more than he loved G.o.d, to barter himself away to some agreeable young woman who should be willing to bestow her person upon him, plus a couple of hundred thousand francs. Once or twice there was really a question of his making a match through the good offices of his mother, of whom he none the less said fretfully that she did not think much about him. But, on each occasion, the negotiations fell through--why we do not learn.

Such information, maybe, he reserved for the various dames in Paris whose houses he still frequented. Madame de Girardin had managed to get him back; and some sort of relations had been re-established between him and her husband, mostly business, since Monsieur de Girardin continued to be editor of the _Presse_.

One day, Gozlan met him in the Champs Elysees, just as he had left Delphine's _salon_. He looked chilly and anxious. The chill he attributed to the unheated drawing-room that he had quitted; but it was due mostly to his condition of mind, then much exercised by something of prime importance to him, the finding of a name for a story which he had written but could not christen, in spite of protracted meditation. It was a man's name he wanted--a name unusual, striking, suggestive of the extraordinary nature of the person he had created. "Why not try the names you see in the street?" said Gozlan incautiously. "The very thing," answered Balzac, whose face grew radiant. "Come along with me. We will seek together." Realizing too late into what an adventure he had allowed himself to be entangled, Gozlan tried in vain to escape. Protests were of no use. Balzac dragged him off; and, with noses in the air and absorbed gaze, the two men promenaded along the Rue Saint-Honore and a number of other streets, knocking up against the people they met and provoking a good deal of profane language from these latter, who regarded them as a couple of imbeciles. At length, Gozlan, like Columbus' sailors, having more than enough of the tramp, refused to play follow-my-leader any longer; and only after a long palaver was he dragged up one last narrow street dubbed variously the Rue du Bouloi, du Coq Heron, and de la Jussienne throughout its course. Here, suddenly, Balzac stopped dead, and pointed to the word _Marcas_, inscribed over a door. "That's what I've been looking for," he cried. "It exactly suits my man. The person that owns the name ought to be some one out of the common,--an artist, a worker in gold, or something of the kind." Inquiry proved that the real Marcas was a modest tailor. However, his name was selected, and the initial Z was tacked on to it for the book, Z being by the novelist's interpretation a letter of mystic import.

Another rather longer tale than this, belonging to the year 1840, was _Pierrette_, which the author dedicated to Madame Hanska's daughter Anna, characterizing it as a pearl "sweated through suffering," and telling her that there was nothing in it improper--he used the English word. The story is a painful one, and is scarcely suitable for a young girl's perusal, the heroine, a simple Breton maid, being the victim of an avaricious Provins family, the Rogrons, who under cover of the law, inflict on her such terrible ill-treatment that she ultimately dies from it. _Pierrette_ first appeared as a serial in the _Siecle_. In the final edition of the novelist's works it is cla.s.sed under the _Celibates_; and, apropos of this heading, may be mentioned the fact that Balzac reproved celibacy as a state injurious to society, and held the opinion, dear to the hearts of certain Parliamentarians of to-day, that the unmarried should be taxed for the benefit of those having large families.

Of course, the agricultural projects entertained for a moment after the interdiction of _Vautrin_ soon faded from Balzac's mind, which was still harping on the necessity of his conquering the suffrages of the public in his character of dramatist. He now set himself to write a play called _Mercadet_ or the _Faiseur_,[*] the latter word implying by its meaning the tragi-comedy of a penniless financier--the novelist's own experience was there to guide him--who invents a thousand and one stratagems for keeping his creditors at bay, and for creating the illusion of a wealth which he had not; who deceives himself as well as others; who is neither entirely a rogue nor entirely honest; but who, after all, reaches relative tranquillity and competency more through accident than purpose. The piece was not performed in its author's life-time; but friends were acquainted with it already in 1840, when Gautier and the rest of the inner circle were summoned to Les Jardies to hear the hermit read it, differing considerably then from the arrangement that was ultimately played.

Balzac read it well, with all the inflections peculiar to each character and suitable to every change of circ.u.mstance. He had in him, says Gautier, the stuff of a great actor, possessing a full, sonorous, metallic voice of rich, powerful timbre, and kept his audience under the spell from the beginning to the end of the recitation. If Vedel and Desmousseaux, the administrators of the Comedie Francais heard him interpret his own pieces, they might be excused for having, as he a.s.serted they had, a high opinion of his dramatic talent.

[*] English, _Jobber_.

The greatest honour done to Les Jardies during the hermit's residence there was a visit of Victor Hugo, who came to talk over the affairs of the Men of Letters Society. During lunch, the conversation naturally turned on literature, and the host waxed bitter against the stupidity of kings that neglected letters, and against Louis-Philippe in particular, who had recently put a stop to the evening gatherings --chimney-gatherings they were called--held by the Duke of Orleans for the purpose of honouring the arts. In the afternoon the guests were shown round the domain, and expected to admire its beauties. Hugo was extremely sober in his praises until they came to the famous walnut-tree. Encouraged by the notice accorded to his favourite, the master of Les Jardies repeated to Hugo what he had already affirmed to Gozlan, to wit, that the tree was worth fifteen hundred francs to him (to Gozlan he had said two thousand). "In walnuts, I suppose?"

retorted the chief guest quizzingly. "No," replied Balzac, chuckling, "not in walnuts." And he proceeded to explain that, by an old custom, the inhabitants of the neighbourhood had been accustomed to make the shadow of the walnut-tree a "temple of all the G.o.ds," and that he had only to exploit the offerings, in the same way as a guano island is exploited to-day, for the fifteen hundred francs to be added to his revenues.

A few months later, in December, Les Jardies, with its walnut-tree and other advantages, was abandoned in hasty flight; and the hermit took refuge in the Pa.s.sy quarter of Paris. On the house and property a distraint had been levied for moneys due which had not been paid. In total, his desire to abide under his own vine and under his own fig-tree had cost him a sum that he estimated between one hundred thousand and one hundred and twenty thousand francs. Deduction made for his Falstaffian speech, the amount was probably about eighty thousand.

This might have been gradually saved and the interest meantime given regularly, if he had been willing to live well within his income. With his system of spending not only what he earned but hoped to earn each year, perpetual insolvency was inevitable.

At Les Jardies he had small creditors as well as great, fear of whom haunted him to the extent of curtailing his walks abroad. Leon Gozlan relates that, going over to Ville d'Avray early one morning, he found Balzac taking a const.i.tutional round the asphalt of his house. "Come and have a stroll in the woods," said the visitor. "I am afraid,"

answered Balzac. "Of what or whom?" "Of the keeper." Not understanding why the novelist, who would not explain, should be in dread of this humble functionary, and imagining that much study and labour had made his friend a little mad, Gozlan took no denial, and, b.u.t.ton-holing Balzac, lugged him off into the leafy avenues. And there, sure enough, after a while, they saw the bugbear, who, as soon as he perceived the two pedestrians, bore down on them with plodding but vigorous step.

The shorter of the two turned pale, but tried to put on an air of dignified indifference. Soon the official ran in under their lee, pa.s.sed alongside with slackened pace, and clarioned into the novelist's ear: "Monsieur de Balzac, this is beginning to get musical." The owner of Les Jardies quailed in his shoes. He owed the man thirty francs.

CHAPTER X

LETTERS TO "THE STRANGER," 1841, 1842

The abode that Balzac chose, on coming back to live within the city walls, was not far from the Rue de Chaillot which had been his address before he removed to Sevres. It was situated in what is now called the Rue Raynouard, but then bore the name of the Rue Ba.s.se. In reality, the street is low only at one end, to which it descends from some high land that forms the Pa.s.sy and Trocadero quarter, and, for some distance, overhangs the Seine. The whole of the street is narrow and winding, and still has an old-time provincial aspect, though the modern building has begun to make its appearance in it, replacing the ancient mansions surrounded by gardens with ever-encroaching blocks of flats.

Balzac's new house was at Number 19 (at present Number 47). It stood --and the house still stands--in a back garden, on a lower level than the road, from which it was masked by houses fronting the causeway.

Any one approaching it from the side of the Rue Ba.s.se would enter the common vestibule of one of these houses, go down some stone steps, and would then find himself in a courtyard, opposite a fairly good-sized, apparently one-storied cottage, with the tree adorned garden to the right of him. Once inside the cottage, however, he would notice that it was built on the extreme upper edge of a precipitous slope, and that on the farther side the structure had lower stories, with an issue through them into a lane at the rear leading to the Seine banks and the lower portion of the Rue Ba.s.se. Whoever, therefore, inhabited the cottage could quit it fore or aft, an advantage which must have weighed with the incoming tenant, tracked as he was by creditors, and hiding himself here under the name of Madame de Brugnol.

The insistence of these claimants on his purse was such that, acting on the advice of his solicitor, Gavault, in the course of the year 1841, he executed a fict.i.tious sale of Les Jardies for the sum of seventeen thousand five hundred francs, his hope being to preserve his hermitage for the days of wealth and ease to come. Meanwhile, he took his mother to live with him. After giving him and her other son, Henry, all she possessed, and the latter being now in the colonies, where he ultimately died in poverty, she was dependent on what Honore could pay her each month. The living-together arrangement was not very successful. Madame Balzac's nervous, fretful temperament had not been improved by age and trouble; and her elder son found it hard to bear with her complainings, excusable and even justifiable though they might be. It is not pleasant to read the pa.s.sages in his letters to Madame Hanska, in which he reiterates the old charge of his misfortunes being all due to his mother. In some of them he goes so far as to say that she was a monster and a monstrosity, that she was hastening the death of his sister Laure--Laure outlived them both --after hastening those of his sister Laurence and his grandmother, that she hated him before he was born, that she had a dreadful countenance, that the doctor affirmed her to be not mad but malicious, that his father had stated in 1822 he--Honore--would never have a worse enemy than his mother. Had his mother been all this and more, it would have been ungenerous and unfilial to blacken her reputation to a stranger.

And, being false, it was odious. Madame Balzac's partiality towards the second son--heavily enough punished--did not prevent her from loving the elder, though their characters (hers and his) were not made to comprehend each other; and her lack of enthusiasm in the days of his literary apprentices.h.i.+p was natural enough in a parent who understood only too well the impractical, improvident mind he possessed, and feared its consequences. The fact was that Balzac ill supported remonstrances from his own family, and especially from his mother, and, when irritated by them, forgot every benefit he had received from her.

This peculiarity of temperament rendered his feelings toward many of his friends exceedingly variable. One day he was lauding them to the skies, another depreciating them to a cipher. Even his sister, Laure, in spite of her loyalty to him, did not escape attacks from his fickle humour. Like her mother, she never thoroughly penetrated the nature of this wayward, excitable, compa.s.s-boxing brother of hers, whose gaze was so much in the clouds and whose feet so often in the mire. But she defended him to others; and, as far as her purse and her husband's could possibly afford, she gave him money when he was hard up--and when he was not!--money which he was never in a hurry to pay back. Yet her, too, he maligned to "The Stranger," because she now and again ventured on expostulations.

Madame Balzac made two stays in the Pa.s.sy cottage, neither of them very long. After leaving the first time, she asked her son to pay her a somewhat larger sum per month, which would allow her to live decently elsewhere. Considering that he had borrowed from her a couple of thousand pounds--over fifty thousand francs--and that the sum he had paid her irregularly was not five per cent interest on the money, this request was not unreasonable. Yet he refused to accede to it on the ground of being in financial straits; and offered her a home with him once more, but in language that spoke of strained relations between them, as well as of a personal discouragement that was real.

"The life I lead," he wrote, "suits no one; it wearies relatives and friends alike. All leave my melancholy home. . . . It is impossible for me to work amidst the petty tiffs aroused by surroundings of discord; and my activity has waned during the past year. . . . You were in a tolerable situation. I had a trustworthy person who spared you all household worries. You were not obliged to trouble about domestic matters; you were in peace and silence. You insisted on interfering with me when you should have forgotten I existed, and should have let me have my entire liberty, without which I can do nothing. This is not your fault; it is in the nature of women. To-day, everything is changed. If you like to come back, you will have a little of the weight that will fall on me and that hitherto affected you only because you wished it."

The conclusion of the letter, in which he a.s.sured her of his love, could not counterbalance the harshness of its contents. Madame Balzac, be it granted, was cantankerous; but how many sons who have never sponged on their mothers have supported them cheerfully, gladly, for long years out of meagre resources, and have borne with a smile the natural peevishness of old age, not to say its egoisms!

At this period, Balzac's acquaintance with the grand dames of Paris was considerably diminished. Madame de Castries he seems to have broken with altogether. Madame Visconti, who lived a good deal at Versailles, he saw but seldom. In lieu of these, he regularly visited George Sand, who was at present settled in a small flat of the Rue Pigalle in Paris, and was there enjoying the society of Chopin. With a connoisseur's envy, the novelist describes to Eve the interior, the elegantly furnished dining-room in carved oak, the _cafe-au-lait_ upholstered drawing-room, with its superb Chinese vases of fragrant flowers, its cabinet of curiosities, its Delacroix pictures, its rosewood piano, and the portrait of the auth.o.r.ess by Calamatta. What struck him as much as anything was the bedroom in brown, with the bed on the floor in Turkish fas.h.i.+on. He was careful to a.s.sure his correspondent that, Chopin being the _maitre de ceans_, she had no need to be jealous. But jealous she was, though not of George Sand. As Paris was a resort for rich Russians, Madame Hanska's cousins among the number, she had frequent reports of Balzac's doings, distorted by society gossip, the true and the untrue being fantastically mixed; and it was no small task to disabuse her mind and persuade her that his conduct was blameless. Indeed, at bottom she remained sceptical.

In 1841, three books were published which merit attention on the part of a student of his works. The first, _A Shady Affair_, has the right to be styled an historical novel. Dealing with the Napoleonic epoch, its interest gathers chiefly round the person of the brave peasant Michu, whose devotion to the Legitimist house of Cinq-Cygne brings him, an innocent victim, to the scaffold. The character of Laurence de Cinq-Cygne, a girl of the Flora MacDonald type, and the characters also of the two cousins de Simeuse, who both loved her and conspired with her, and whose pardon she gained only to lose these faithful knights dying on a field of battle, are drawn with great power and naturalness. And the plot, in which, together with other police spies, the same Corentin reappears that was the evil genius of the _Chouans_, is more rapid and less c.u.mbered than in the earlier work. When the _Shady Affair_ came out in the _Commerce_ journal, Balzac was accused of having identified a certain Monsieur Clement de Ris with his Malin de Gondreville, who plays an evil role in the story--that of an unscrupulous, political turncoat, Revolutionary to begin with, Senator under the Empire, and Peer under the Restoration. The novelist defended himself against the imputation; but the resemblances between the fict.i.tious and the real personage were, all the same, too close to be quite accidental.

Something, however, more important than the question of likeness or portraiture in the book, is that it gives us Balzac's conception of what the historical novel should be. His contemporary Dumas, and his predecessor Walter Scott--the latter in a less degree than Dumas--did not weave a romance on to a warp of history, but romanced the history itself. What he tried to do was to keep the historical action exact and accurate, and to throw its romantic elements into relief without dislocating them. His opinion was that history might so be written as to be a sort of novel, which, perhaps, will account for his answer to Lamartine, who, in 1847, asked him if he could explain how it was that the _History of the Girondins_ had obtained a greater success than the most popular novels of the same date. "Gad!" he replied, "the reason is that you wrote this fine book as a novelist, not as an historian."

The _Shady Affair_ recreates for us the Napoleonic atmosphere, silent and heavy, yet electrically charged with grudge, hatred, and ambition, all ready to burst out at one or another point. Underhand plotting was the order of the day; there was a language of the eye rather than of the tongue, since no one was sure that in his own family there might not be eavesdroppers listening to betray him.

_Ursule Mirouet_ is a very different kind of story. We have here the old Doctor Minoret, who after making a fortune in Paris, returns to spend the last few years of his life in Nemours, his native town.

Having lost wife and child by death, he brings back with him a baby niece, who is an orphan, and to whom he devotes himself with tender care. In Nemours there are other less estimable branches of the Minoret stock, cousins of the Doctor's, whose hopes of inheriting his fortune are damped by the presence of little Ursule. Chief of these relatives is the burly postmaster, Minoret Levrault, whose son Desire is destined to the law and is sent by his parents to study in Paris.

Although a disciple of Voltaire, and scouting all religious practice for himself, the Doctor is friendly with the Cure, and allows his niece to be brought up to Church. At the time the story opens an unexpected event astonishes the town. The Doctor has become converted, and goes to Ma.s.s. The cause of the change is a wonderful experience of clairvoyance he meets with in the capital, whither he has been summoned by a colleague with whom he had quarrelled years before over the new-fangled doctrines of Mesmerism. What necessary connection there is between clairvoyance and Catholicism, or indeed any particular form of religion, the novelist does not attempt to prove.

It suffices for the sceptical old Doctor to be told by a hypnotized woman in Paris what Ursule is doing at Nemours, and the conversion is wrought. Soon after, Doctor Minoret dies, bequeathing his fortune in just and appropriated shares to his various relatives, Ursule included. She is at the time a fine young woman, beloved by a young gentleman of the place. The rest of the novel tells how the big postmaster contrives to destroy the part of the will favourable to Ursule and to steal certain moneys that belong to her; how Minoret's ghost appears in dreams and signs to confound the guilty man and his guilty wife, who are at last induced to confess their ill deeds, the repentance being hastened by the death of their son Desire; and, in fine, how Ursule marries Monsieur de Portenduere and is happy.