[*] “La Genese d’un Roman de Balzac,” p. 105, by the Vicomte de
Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.
With Victor Ratier, Balzac contemplated a partnership in writing for the theatre, though he thought Ratier hardly sufficiently industrious to make a satisfactory collaborator. However, he threatened him in case of laziness with a poor and honest young man as a rival, and, to rouse Ratier to energy, remarked that the unnamed prodigy was, like himself, full of courage, whereas Ratier resembled “an Indian on his mat.”[*] Balzac’s imaginative brain was to supply the plot and characters of each drama; but he was careful, as in the case of his early novels, that his name should not appear, as the plays were to be mere vaudevilles written to gain money, and would certainly not increase their author’s reputation. Ratier was therefore to pose as their sole author, and was to undertake the actual writing of the play, unless he were too lazy for the effort, when the honest and unfortunate young man would take his place. The pecuniary part of the bargain was not mentioned, except the fact that both partners would become enormously rich; and that result is so invariable a characteristic of Balzac’s schemes that it need hardly be noticed. However, this brilliant plan came to nothing, not, as we may suppose, from any failure on the part of the indolent Ratier — as there was in this case his unnamed rival to fall back upon — but most probably because its promoter had not a moment’s leisure in which to think of it again.
[*] “Correspondance,” vol. i. p. 115.
Towards the end of 1830 he began to write for the Revue de Paris, a journal with which his relations, generally inharmonious, culminated in the celebrated lawsuit of 1836. The review was at this time the property of a company; and the sole object of the shareholders being to obtain large dividends, they adopted the short-sighted policy of cutting down their payment to authors, a course which led to continual recriminations, and naturally made the office of chief editor very difficult. When Balzac first wrote for the review, Charles Rabou held this post, following Dr. Veron; but he resigned in a few months, and was succeeded in his turn by Amedee Pichot. With him Balzac waged continual war, finally dealing a heavy blow to the review by deserting it altogether in 1833.
The cause of the dispute, in the first instance, was one which often reappears in the history of Balzac’s relations with different editors. Being happily possessed of devoted friends, who allowed him complete freedom while he stayed with them, he found it easier to write in the quiet of the country than amidst the worries and distractions of Paris. In 1830, after travelling in Brittany, he spent four months, from July to November, at La Grenadiere, that pretty little house near to Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, which he coveted continually, but never succeeded in acquiring. In 1834 he thought the arrangements for its purchase were at last settled. After three years of continual refusals, the owners had consented to sell, and he already imagined himself surrounded with books, and established for six months at a time at this studious retreat. However, pecuniary difficulties came as usual in the way, and except as a visitor, Balzac never tasted the joys of a country life.
From La Grenadiere he wrote a remarkable letter to Ratier,[*] full of love for the beauty of nature, a feeling which filled him with a sense of the littleness of man, and expressing also that uncomfortable doubt which must occasionally assail the mind of any man possessed of powerful physique as well as imagination — the doubt whether the existence of the thinker is not after all a poor thing compared with that of the active worker, who is tossed about, risks his life, and himself creates a living drama. He finishes with the words: “And it seems to me that the sea, a man-of-war, and an English boat to destroy, with a chance of drowning, are better than an inkpot, and a pen, and the Rue Saint-Denis.”
[*] “Correspondance,” vol. i. p 98.
In May, 1831, Balzac was again away from Paris, this time taking up his abode in Nemours, where he describes himself as living alone in a tent in the depths of the earth, subsisting on coffee, and working day and night at “La Peau de Chagrin,” with “L’Auberge Rouge,” which he was writing for the Revue de Paris, as his only distraction.
These absences did not apparently cause any friction; but when, in November, 1831, Balzac went to Sache to stay with M. de Margonne, and then moved on to the Carrauds, he left “Le Maitre Cornelius,” which he was writing for the Revue de Paris, in an unfinished and uncorrected condition. Thereupon, Amedee Pichot, who naturally wanted consecutive numbers of the story for his magazine, committed what was in Balzac’s eyes an unpardonable breach of trust, by publishing the uncorrected proofs, leaving out or altering what he did not understand. Balzac was furious at his signature being appended to what he considered unfinished work. Amedee Pichot was also very angry, because Balzac had unduly lengthened the first part of the story, and had kept him two months waiting for the finish. Therefore, as diligence was the only mode of transit, and it was necessary that “Le Maitre Cornelius” should end with the year, it was impossible to send the proofs before printing for correction to Angouleme. Nevertheless, as he had undoubtedly exceeded his rights as editor, he thought it wise to temporise, and wrote an explanatory and conciliatory letter; and as this did not pacify Balzac, he dispatched a second of similar tenor. However, a few days later, on January 9th, 1832, he felt compelled by the tone of Balzac’s correspondence to send a third beginning: “Sir, I find from the tone of your letter that I am guilty of doing you a great wrong. I have treated on an equality and as a comrade a superior person, whom I should have been contented to admire. I therefore beg your pardon humbly for the ‘My dear Balzac’ of my preceding letters. I will preserve the distance of ‘Monsieur’ between you and me.”[*]
[*] “Une Page Perdue de Honore de Balzac,” by the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul; from which the whole account of the dispute between Balzac and Pichot is taken.
However, Balzac was furious. His respect for his own name and his intense literary conscientiousness were stronger even than his desire for money, and it was a very black crime in his eyes for any one to produce one of his works before the public until it had been brought to the highest possible pitch of perfection. This intense anxiety to do his best, which caused him the most painstaking labour, often pressed very hardly on managers of magazines. He was generally paid in advance, so that his money was safe; and though he could be absolutely trusted to finish sooner or later what he had undertaken, he showed a lofty indifference to the exigencies of monthly publication. Moreover, as is shown in the evidence given later on during his lawsuit with the Revue de Paris, he would sometimes, in his haste for money, accept new engagements when he already had a plethora of work in hand. Nevertheless, whatever the failures to fulfil a contract on his part might be, he was implacable towards those who did not rightly discharge their obligations to him; and Pichot was never forgiven. In September, 1832, after endless disputes about the rate and terms of payment, the most fertile source of recriminations between Balzac and his various publishers and editors, a formal treaty was drawn up between the great writer, who was at Sache, and Amedee Pichot, as director of the Revue de Paris. By this, with the option of breaking the connection after six months, Balzac undertook to write for the Revue for a year, being still entitled during that time to furnish articles to the Renovateur, the Journal Quotidienne Politique, and L’Artiste. In spite of this legal document, there were many disputed points; and the letters which passed between the two men, and which now began with the formal “Monsieur,” were full of bickerings about money matters, about Balzac’s delay in furnishing copy, and about the length of his contributions. On one occasion Pichot is severe in his rebukes, because Balzac has prevented the Duchesse d’Abrantes from providing a promised article, by telling her that his own writing will fill two whole numbers of the Revue. On another, it is curious to find that Balzac, who was rather ashamed of the immoral reputation of his works, thanks M. Pichot quite humbly for suppressing a passage in the “Voyage de Paris a Java,” which the director considered unfit for family perusal, and excuses
himself on the subject with the naive explanation that he was at the same time writing the “Contes Drolatiques”![*] Finally, in March, 1833, after six months of the treaty had expired, Balzac withdrew altogether from the Revue de Paris. He gave no explicit explanation for this step; but in 1836, at the time of his lawsuit with the Revue de Paris, he stated as the reason for his desertion that he considered Pichot to be the author, under different pseudonyms, of the adverse criticism of his novels which appeared in its pages. In the Revue he had, among other novels, brought out the beginning of “L’Histoire des Treize,” and the parsimonious shareholders now had the mortification of seeing the great man carry his wares to L’Europe Litteraire; while the Revue de Paris, in consequence of his desertion, declined in popularity.
[*] “Autour de Honore de Balzac,” by the Vicomte de Spoelberch de
Lovenjoul.
Balzac was now fairly launched on the road of literary fame, and some of his writings at this time had a momentous influence on his life. In April, 1830, Madame Hanska, his future wife, read with delight, in her far-off chateau in Ukraine, the “Scenes de la Vie Privee,” containing the “Vendetta,” “Les Dangers de l’Inconduite,” “Le Bal de Sceaux, ou Le Pair de France,” “Gloire et Malheur,” “La Femme Vertueuse” and “La Paix de Menage” — two volumes which Balzac had published as quickly as he could, to counteract the alienation of his women-readers by the “Physiologie du Mariage.” In August, 1831, appeared “La Peau de Chagrin,” which so disappointed Madame Hanska by its cynical tone, that she was impelled to write the first letter from L’Etrangere, which reached Balzac on February 28th, 1832, a date never to be forgotten in the annals of his life. He was not, however, very exact in remembering it himself, and in later life sometimes became confused in his calculations between the number of years since he had received this letter, and the time which had elapsed since he first had the joy of meeting her. “La Peau de Chagrin” greatly increased Balzac’s fame, and in October, 1831, another anonymous correspondent, Madame la Marquise de Castries, also destined to exercise a strong, though perhaps transitory, influence over Balzac, had written to deprecate its moral tone, as well as that of the “Physiologie du Mariage.” Balzac answered her that “La Peau de Chagrin” was only intended to be part of a whole, and must not be judged alone; and the same idea is enlarged upon in a letter to the Comte de Montalembert,[*] written in August, 1831, which shows Balzac’s extreme anxiety not to dissociate his writings from the cause of religion. In it he explains, with much insistence, that, in site of the apparent scepticism of “La Peau de Chagrin,” the idea of God is really the mainspring of the whole book, and on these grounds he begs for a review in L’Avenir. The letter also contains an announcement which is interesting as a proof that two years before the date given by his sister, the idea of his great systematic work was already formulated, and that in his imagination it had assumed colossal proportions. He says: “‘La Peau de Chagrin’ is the formula of human life, an abstraction made from individualities, and, as M. Ballanche says, everything in it is myth and allegory. It is therefore the point of departure for my work. Afterwards individualities and particular existences, from the most humble to those of the King and of the Priest, the highest expressions of our society, will group themselves according to their rank. In these pictures I shall follow the effect of Thought on Life. Then another work, entitled ‘History of the Succession of the Marquis of Carabas,’ will formulate the life of nations, the phases of their governments, and will show decidedly that politics turn in one circle, and are evidently stationary; and that repose can only be found in the strong government of a hierarchy.”
[*] Letters sent by the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul to the Revue Bleue, November 14th, 1903.
The “Peau de Chagrin,” which is a powerful satire on the vice and selfishness of the day, suffers in its allegorical, though not in its humanly interesting side, by the vivid picture it gives of Balzac’s youth; as, in spite of the introduction of the influence of the magic Ass Skin, the account of Raphael in the early part of the book, as the frugal, determined genius with high intellectual aspirations, does not harmonise with his weak, despicable character as it unfolds itself subsequently. The critics exercised their minds greatly about the identity of the heroines, the beautiful and heartless Fedora — in whom apparently many ladies recognised their own portrait — and the humble and exquisite Pauline, type of devoted and self-forgetting love. Mademoiselle Pelissier, who possessed an income of twenty-five thousand francs, and had a house in the Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg, where she held a salon much frequented by political personalities of the day, was identified by popular gossip as the model of Fedora. It was said by Parisian society that Balzac was anxious to marry her, but that the lady, who afterwards became Madame Rossini, refused to listen to his suit, though she confessed to a great admiration for his fascinating black eyes.
The original of Pauline has never been discovered, but, possibly with a few traits borrowed from Madame de Berny, she is what Balzac describes in the last pages of “La Peau de Chagrin” as an “ideal, as a visionary face in the fire, a face with unimaginable delicate outlines, a floating apparition, which no chance will ever bring back again.”
Since the year 1830 Balzac had lodged in the Rue Cassini, a little, unfrequented street near the Observatory, with a wall running along one side, on which was written “L’Absolu, marchand de briques,” a name which Theophile Gautier fancies may have suggested to him the title of his novel “La Recherche de l’Absolu.” Borget, Balzac’s great friend and confidant, had rooms in the same house; and later on, when Borget was on one of his frequent journeys, these rooms were occupied by Jules Sandeau, after his parting with George Sand. In despair at her desertion, he tried to commit suicide; and Balzac, touched with pity at his forlorn condition, proposed that he should come to Borget’s rooms, and took complete and kindly charge of him — a generosity which Sandeau, after having lived at Balzac’s expense for two years, repaid in 1836, by deserting his benefactor when he was in difficulties.
Balzac was now in the full swing of work. He writes to the Duchesse d’Abrantes in 1831:[*] “Write, I cannot! The fatigue is too great. You do not know that I owed in 1828, above what I possessed. I had only my pen with which to earn my living, and to pay a hundred and twenty thousand francs. In several months I shall have paid everything, and I shall have arranged my poor little household; but for six months I have all the troubles of poverty, I enjoy my last miseries. I have begged from nobody, I have not held out my hand for a penny; I have hidden my sorrows, and my wounds.”
[*] “Correspondance,” vol. i. p. 131.
Poor Balzac! over and over again we hear the same story about the beautiful time in the future, which he saw coming nearer and nearer, but which always evaded his grasp at the last. Very often, when he appears grasping and dictatorial in his business dealings, we may trace his want of urbanity to some pressing pecuniary anxiety, which he was too proud to reveal. No doubt these difficulties often sprang from his extraordinary want of reflection and prudence, as his desire to make a dashing appearance before the world led him frequently into the most senseless extravagance. For instance, when he went out of Paris in June, 1832, intending to travel for several months, he left behind him two horses with nothing to do, but naturally requiring a groom, food, and stabling; and it was not till the end of July that, on his mother’s recommendation, he sent orders that they were to be sold. His money affairs are so complicated, and his own accounts of them so conflicting, that it is impossible to understand them thoroughly. Apparently, however, from 1827 to 1836 he could not support himself and satisfy his creditors without drawing bills. These he often could not meet, and had to renew; and the accumulated interest on these obligations formed a floating debt, which was from time to time increased by some new extravagance.
In his vain struggles to escape, he worked as surely no man has ever worked before or since. In 1830 he brought out about seventy, and in 1831 about seventy-five publ
ications, including novels, and articles serious and satirical, on politics and general topics; and in twelve years, from 1830 to 1842, he wrote seventy-nine novels alone, not counting his shorter compositions. Werdet, who became his publisher in 1834, gives a curious account of his doings; and this may, with slight modifications, be accepted as a picture of his usual mode of life when in the full swing of composition.
Works of Honore De Balzac Page 1472