Matters seemed, however, quite hopeless; but when, towards the end of 1827, an opportunity occurred of becoming possessed of a type-foundry, the partners, perhaps with the desperation of despair, did not hesitate to avail themselves of it. This new acquisition naturally only appeared likely to precipitate the catastrophe, and Barbier prepared to leave the sinking ship. At this juncture Madame de Berny came forward with substantial help, and allowed her name to appear as partner in his place. However, even this assistance did not long avert disaster — bankruptcy was impending, and Madame de Berny and Laure implored Madame de Balzac to prevent this. The latter, wishing at all costs to keep the matter from the ears of her husband, now a very old man and failing in health, begged a cousin, M. Sedillot, to come forward, and at least to save the honour of the family. M. Sedillot, who appears to have been a good man of business, at once set gallantly to work to disentangle the embroglio, and to free Honore from its meshes. As a result of his efforts, the printing-press was sold to M. Laurent, and the type-foundry became the property of the De Bernys, under whom it was highly successful. At the same time, to save Honore from disgrace, Madame de Balzac lent 37,000 francs and Madame de Berny 45,000, the latter sum being paid back in full by Balzac in 1836, the year of Madame de Berny’s death. “Without her I should be dead,” he tells Madame Hanska. He was most anxious not to sell the type-foundry, and his parents have been severely criticised for their refusal to provide further funds for the purpose of carrying on that and the printing-office.
This blame seems a little unfair. It is true that, after Balzac had been obliged, to his intense grief, to part with both businesses at a loss, a fortune was made out of the type-foundry alone. But the Balzacs had lost money, and had their other children to provide for; while Honore, though well equipped with hope, enthusiasm, and belief in himself, had hitherto failed to justify a trust in his business capacities. In fact, if his parents had been endowed with prophetic eyesight, and had been enabled to take a bird’s-eye view of their celebrated son’s future enterprises, which were always, according to his own account, destined to fail only by some unfortunate slip at the last, it seems doubtful whether they would have been wise to alter the course they adopted.
CHAPTER V
1828 - 1829
Life in the Rue de Tournon — Privations and despair — Friendships
— Auguste Borget — Madame Carraud — The Duchesse d’Abrantes — George
Sand, etc. — Balzac writes “La Peau de Chagrin” and the
”Physiologie du Marriage” — His right to be entitled “De Balzac.”
In September, 1828, before the final winding up of affairs, Balzac had fled from Paris, and had gone to spend three weeks with his friends the Pommereuls in Brittany. There he began to write “Les Chouans,” the first novel to which he signed his name. With his usual hopefulness, dreams of future fame filled his brain; and in spite of his misfortunes, his relief at having obtained temporary escape from his difficulties and freedom to pursue his literary career was so great, that his jolly laugh often resounded in the old chateau of Fougeres. It was certainly a remarkable case of buoyancy of temperament, as the circumstances in which he found himself were distinctly discouraging. He was now twenty-nine years old; he owed about 100,000 francs, and was utterly penniless; while his reputation for commercial capacity had been completely destroyed. His most pressing liabilities had been paid by his mother, who was all his life one of his principal creditors; and he was now firmly under the yoke of that heavy burden of debt which was destined never again to be lifted from his shoulders. Once again, as they had done nine years before, his parents cast off all responsibility for their unsatisfactory son. They had saved the family honour, which would have been compromised by his bankruptcy; but they felt that whether he lived or starved was his own affair. His position was infinitely worse than it had been in those early days in the Rue Lesdiguieres, when submission would have led to reinstatement in favour. He was now, as he graphically expressed it, “thrown into” the Rue de Tournon,[*] and apparently no provision was made for his wants. His parents, who had moved from Villeparisis to Versailles the year before, in order to be near Madame Surville, limited their interference in his affairs to severe criticism on his want of respect in not coming to see his family, and righteous wrath at his extravagance in hanging his room with blue calico. These reproaches he parried with the defence that he had no money to pay omnibus fares, and could not even write often because of the expense of postage; while anent the muslin, he stated that he possessed it before his failure, as La Touche and he had nailed it up to hide the frightful paper on the walls of the printing-office. Uncrushed by the scathing comments on his attempts at decoration, curious though characteristic efforts on the part of a starving man, he writes to his sister a few days later: “Ah, Laure, if you did but know how passionately I desire (but, hush! keep the secret) two blue screens embroidered in black (silence ever!).”[+] He reopens his letter about the screens to answer one from Madame Surville, written evidently at the instigation of M. and Mme. de Balzac, to blame his supposed idleness; and the poor fellow, to whom this fault at least could at no time be justly imputed, asks her if he is not already unhappy enough, and tells her pathetically how he suffers from these unjust suspicions, and that he can never be happy till he is dead. In the end, however, he returns with childlike persistence to the screens as a panacea for all his ills, and finishes with: “But my screens — I want them more than ever, for a little joy in the midst of torment!”
[*] He says himself “Rue Cassini,” but this is a mistake.
[+] “Correspondance,” vol. i. p. 82.
He had now apparently completely gone under, like many another promising young man of whom great things are expected; and he had in his pride and misery hidden himself from every one, except a few intimate friends. With the death on June 19, 1829, of his father, whose last days were saddened by the knowledge of his son’s disaster, the world was poorer by one castle in the air the less; for besides his natural sorrow at the death of the kind old man, who was so much softer than his wife, the dream of becoming a millionaire by means of the Tontine capital faded way, like all poor Honore’s other visions. Even Balzac’s buoyancy was not always proof against the depressing influence of two or three days of starvation, and he sometimes descended to the lowest depths, and groped in those dark places from which death seems the only escape. When he tells us in “La Peau de Chagrin” that Raphael walked with an uncertain step in the Tuileries Gardens, “as if he were in some desert, elbowed by men whom he did not see, hearing, through all the voices of the crowd, one voice alone, the voice of Death,” it is Balzac himself, who, after glorious aspirations, after being in imagination raised to heights to which only a great nature can aspire, now lay bruised and worsted, a complete failure, and thought that by suicide he would at least obtain peace and oblivion. He knew to the full the truth of his words: “Between a self-sought death and the abundant hopes whose voices call a young man to Paris, God only knows what may intervene, what contending ideas have striven within the soul, what poems have been set aside, what moans and what despair have been repressed, what abortive masterpieces and vain endeavours.”[*]
[*] Honore de Balzac, “La Peau de Chagrin.”
Looking back years afterwards at this terrible time, he can find only one reason why he did not put an end to himself, and that was the existence of Madame de Berny: “She was a mother, a woman friend, a family, a man friend, an adviser,” he cries enthusiastically; “she made the writer, she consoled the young man, she formed his taste, she cried like a sister, she laughed, she came every day, like a merciful slumber, to send sorrow to sleep.”[*] Certainly there was no woman on earth to whom Balzac owed so deep a debt of gratitude, and certainly also he joyfully acknowledged his obligations. “Every day with her was a fete,” he said to Madame Hanska long afterwards.
[*] “Lettres a l’Etrangere.”
About this time another friendship was beginning, which,
though slower in growth and not so passionate in character, was as faithful, and was only terminated by Balzac’s death. When Madame Surville went to live at Versailles, she was delighted to find that an old schoolfellow, Madame Carraud, was settled there, her husband holding the post of director of the military school at Saint-Cyr. Honore had known Madame Carraud since 1819; but he first became intimate with her and her husband in 1826, and later he was their constant guest at Angouleme, where Commandant Carraud was in charge of the Government powder-works, or at Frapesle in Berry, where Madame Carraud had a country house. She was a woman of much intelligence and ambition, high-principled and possessing much common sense. Balzac occasionally complained that she was a little wanting in softness; but, nevertheless, he invariably turned to her for comfort in the vicissitudes of his more passionate attachments. He was also much attached to M. Carraud, a man of great scientific attainments and a good husband, but, to his wife’s despair, utterly lacking in energy and ambition; so that instead of taking the position to which by his abilities he was entitled, he soon retired altogether from public life, and Madame Carraud, who should, according to Balzac, have found scope for her talents in Paris, was buried in the country. Nevertheless, the Carrauds were a happy couple, genuinely devoted to each other; and Madame Carraud cited the instance of their affection, in spite of the difference of their point of view on many subjects, when in 1833 she wrote to Honore urging him to marry.[*] “There is no need to tell you that my husband and I are not sympathetic in everything. We are so unlike each other that the same objects appear quite differently to us. Yet I know the happiness about which I speak. We both feel it in the same degree, though in a different way. I would not give it up for the fullest existence, according to generally received ideas. I have not an empty moment.”
[*] Letter from Madame Carraud in the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul’s collection, published in La Revue Bleue, November 21st, 1903.
She was an ardent politician, and we gain much of our knowledge of Balzac’s political views from his letters to her when he wished to become a deputy; while she also possessed the faculty which he valued most in his women friends, that of intelligent literary criticism. She could be critical on other points as well; and, like Madame Hanska, blamed Balzac for mobility of ideas and inconstancy of resolution, which she said wasted his intellect. She complained that, in the time that he might have used to bring one plan successfully to completion, he generally started ten or twelve new ones, all of which vanished into smoke, and brought him no advantage.[*]
[*] “L’Ecole des Menages” in “Autour de Honore de Balzac,” by the
Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.
Hardly a year passed without Balzac spending some time at the hospitable house at Frapesle, the doors of which were always open to him; and there, away from creditors, publishers, journalists, and all his other enemies, he was able to write in peace and quietness. There, too, he made many pleasant acquaintances, among them M. Armand Pereme, the distinguished antiquary, and M. Periollas, who was at one time under M. Carraud at Saint-Cyr, and afterwards became chief of a squadron of artillery. To Madame Carraud he also owed an introduction to his most intimate male friend, Auguste Borget, a genre painter who travelled in China, and drew many pictures of the scenery there. Borget lodged in the same house with Balzac in the Rue Cassini, and is mentioned by him in a letter to Madame Hanska, in 1833, as one of his three real friends beside her and his sister, Madame de Berny and Madame Carraud being the other two. It was a very real grief to Balzac when Borget was away; and he says that even when the painter is travelling, sketching, and never writes to him, he is constantly in his remembrance; while in another letter he speaks of his friend’s nobility of soul and beauty of sentiment. To Borget was dedicated the touching story of “La Messe de l’Athee”; and in case of Balzac’s sudden death it was to this “good, old, and true friend” that the duty of burning Madame Hanska’s letters were entrusted, though eventually their recipient performed this painful task himself in 1847.
A still older friend was M. Dablin, a rich, retired ironmonger with artistic tastes, who left his valuable collection of artistic objects to the Louvre. He was known to Balzac before 1817; and in 1830 the successful writer remembers with gratitude that M. Dablin used to be his only visitor during his martyrdom in the Rue Lesdiguieres in 1819. At that time and later he was most generous in lending Honore money; and the only cloud that came between them for a long time was his indignation when Balzac wished to find him further security than his own life for a loan he had promised. Later on, in 1845, when M. Dablin, rather hurt by some heedless words from Balzac, and evidently jealous of his former protege’s grand acquaintances, complained that honours and fortune changed people’s hearts — the great novelist found time, after his daily sixteen hours of work, to write a long letter to his old benefactor.[*] In this he tells him that nothing will alter his affection for him, that all his real friends are equal in his sight; and he makes the true boast that, though he may have the egotism of the hard worker, he has never yet forsaken any one for whom he feels affection, and is the same now in heart as when he was a boy.
[*] “Correspondance,” vol. ii. p. 115.
Other early and lifelong friendships were with Madame Delannoy, who lent him money, and was in all ways kind to him, and with M. de Margonne, who lived at Sache, a chateau on the Indre, in the beautiful Touraine valley described in “Le Lys dans la Vallee,” and who had held Balzac on his knees when a child. Balzac often paid him visits, especially when he wanted to meditate over some serious work, as he found the solitude and pure air, and the fact that he was treated in the neighbourhood simply as a native of the country and not as a celebrity, peculiarly stimulating to his imagination and powers of creation. He wrote “Louis Lambert,” among other novels at the house of this hospitable friend. Madame de Margonne he did not care for: she was, according to his unflattering portrait of her, intolerant and devout, deformed, and not at all spirituelle. But she did not count for much; Balzac went to the house for the sake of her husband.
An intimacy was formed about this time between Balzac and La Touche, the editor of the Figaro, who, as has been already mentioned, helped him in the prosaic task of nailing up draperies. This intimacy must have been of great value to Balzac’s education in the art of literature, and is remarkable for that reason in the history of a man in whose writings small trace of outside influence can be descried, and who, except in the case of Theophile Gautier, seemed little affected by the thought of his contemporaries. Therefore, though a long way behind Madame de Berny — without whom Balzac, as we know him, would hardly have existed — La Touche deserves recognition for his work, however small, in moulding the literary ideals and forming the taste of the great writer. Besides this, his friendship with Balzac is almost unique in the history of the latter, in the fact that, for some reason we do not know, it was suddenly broken off; and that almost the only occasion when Balzac showed personal dislike almost amounting to hatred, in criticism, was when, in 1840, in the Revue Parisienne, he published an article on “Leo,” a novel by La Touche. He became, George Sand says, completely indifferent to his old master, while the latter — a pathetic, yet thorny and uncomfortable figure, as portrayed by his contemporaries — continued to belittle and revile his former pupil, while all the time he loved him, and longed for a reconciliation which never took place. La Touche had a quick instinct for discovering genius: he introduced Andre Chenier’s posthumous poems to the public, and launched Jules Sandeau and George Sand. But he was soured by seeing his pupils enter the promised land only open to genius, while he was left outside himself. Sooner or later, the eager, affected little hypochondriacal man with the bright eyes quarrelled with all his friends, and a rupture would naturally soon take place between the ultra-sensitive teacher, ready to take offence on the smallest pretext, and the hearty, robust Tourainean, who, whatever his troubles might be, faced the world with a laugh, who insisted on his genius with cheery egotism, and wh
o, in spite of real goodheartedness and depth of affection, was too full of himself to be always careful about the feelings of others. How much Balzac owed to La Touche we do not know; but though, as we have already seen, there were other reasons for his sudden stride in literature between 1825 and 1828, it is significant that “Les Chouans,” the first book to which he affixed his name, and in which his genius really shows itself, was written directly after his intercourse with this literary teacher. No doubt La Touche, who was cursed with the miserable fate of possessing the temperament of genius without the electric spark itself, magnified the help he had given, and felt extreme bitterness at the shortness of memory shown by the great writer, whom he vainly strove to sting into feeling by the acerbity of his attacks.
Never at any time did Balzac go out much into society, but his anonymous novels, though they did not bring him fame, had opened to him the doors of several literary and artistic salons, and he was a frequenter of that of Madame Sophie Gay, the author of several novels, one of which, “Anatole,” is said to have been read by Napoleon during the last night spent at Fontainebleau in 1814. Hers was essentially an Empire salon, antagonistic to the government of the Bourbons, and Balzac’s feelings were perhaps occasionally ruffled by the talk that went on around him, though more probably the interest he found in the study of different phases of opinion outweighed his party prepossessions. Those evenings must have been an anxious pleasure; for, with no money to pay a cab fare, there was always the agonising question as to whether on arrival his boots would be of spotless cleanliness, while the extravagance of a pair of white gloves meant a diminution in food which it was not pleasant to contemplate. Then, too, he felt savage disgust at the elegant costumes and smart cabriolets owned by empty-headed fops with insufferable airs of conquest, who looked at him askance, and to whom he could not prove the genius that was in him, or give voice to his belief that some day he would dominate them all. The restlessness and discomfort, and at the same time the sense of unknown and fascinating possibilities which are the birthright of talented youth, and in the portrayal of which Balzac is supreme, must have been well known to him by experience; and his almost Oriental love of beauty and luxury made his life of grinding poverty peculiarly galling.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1470