Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was one of realism’s self-proclaimed leaders—and also an unlikely sex symbol who inspired Byronic devotions of love from his female fans.
As a young man, Balzac was the quintessential “nice guy,” a friend to many women but a lover to none. He tried everything in his power to gain the attention of the opposite sex, but always came up short. Once, he took dancing lessons in preparation to woo ladies with his gracefulness on the dance floor. When, after months of preparation, he made his grand entrance in a ballroom in front of a crowd of women, he slipped and fell. Cue laughter. He never danced again.
In one of his novels, he describes what very well may have been his plight, pre-fame: “Women one and all have condemned me. I determined to revenge myself on society; I would dominate the feminine intellect, and so have the feminine soul at my mercy.” Indeed, the young Balzac had two “immense and sole desires—to be famous and to be loved.”
At his father’s insistence, Balzac interned at a legal firm after his schooling was complete, but he balked when it came time to declare law as his vocation. He begged his parents to allow him to try his hand at writing instead. Although his mother was steadfastly against the idea, Balzac’s father granted his wish. Two years, his father said. Two years to begin making a living as an author. If he couldn’t do that, Balzac would enter the legal profession—and never look back.
His family rented him an attic apartment in Paris, chosen because of its proximity to a local public library. To avoid embarrassment over their son’s career path (which would surely lead to a life of poverty, even if he was “successful”), his parents told friends and neighbors that Balzac had left town to visit a cousin. Balzac fictionalized his journey into the literary ether as “the pleasure of striking out in some lonely lake of clear water, with forests, rocks, and flowers around, and the soft stirring of the warm breeze.” In reality, he was sitting in a drafty, uncomfortable attic room, with barely enough money to eat more than a piece of bread most days.
After a year and a half, Balzac emerged from his exile, proudly clutching a play titled Cromwell. Balzac’s family gathered at their home to hear their son recite from his masterpiece. They even invited one of his former teachers to the event. When Balzac began reading, his audience was sitting in rapt silence; when he ended, his audience was sitting in rapt silence. When no feedback was forthcoming, his family asked his former teacher for feedback. Balzac, he said, should “do anything, no matter what, except literature.” Balzac’s mother insisted that her son give up his dreams and return home immediately.
Balzac moved back into his parents’ house, but his dreams were far from shattered. He continued writing, churning out numerous novels over the next several years despite the distractions and discouragements he experienced living at home. To his parents’ surprise, publishers were willing to take a chance on his work. Although there is little of Balzac’s familiar genius in these early books (all of which were either written under pseudonyms or with collaborators), they kept him from being forced to get a “real job.”
His artistic breakthrough came in 1829, when he published Les Chouans, the first novel he signed his name to. He became more confident, his ambitions nearly overtaking him for the next several years. In 1832, Balzac ran into his sister’s apartment and exclaimed, “I am about to become a genius.” He had spontaneously conceived of what would be his masterwork, La comédie humaine, a panoramic portrait of all aspects of society that would tie together his published fiction. He didn’t owe this revelation to illegal drugs or alcohol—Balzac’s poison of choice was coffee. He allegedly drank up to fifty cups of black coffee every day. The caffeine powered him through long stretches of time where he would shut himself off from the outside world, sometimes up to three weeks at a time. When he didn’t have any brewed coffee handy, he swallowed a handful of crushed coffee beans. “Coffee is a great power in my life,” Balzac said. “I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides.”
Under the pseudonym “Le Comte Alex de B.” he wrote a book about opium abuse, L’opium. It’s unclear whether he had any firsthand knowledge or whether he was simply trying to make a quick buck by capitalizing on the success of Thomas De Quincey’s opium diaries. He did try hashish once, though, with Baudelaire at the Hôtel Pimodan in Paris, where the artist François Boissard ran a hashish club from 1845 to 1849 to test the effects of the drug on creativity. Balzac “heard some celestial voices” during their session but didn’t find the experience worth repeating. According to Baudelaire’s account, however, Balzac actually just sniffed the drug and passed it back to Baudelaire without inhaling.
Balzac eventually moved out of his parents’ house and into an apartment of his own in Paris. “The streets of Paris possess human qualities and we cannot shake off the impressions they make upon our minds,” he said. While Balzac’s characters frequented Parisian salons and clubs, the author himself did not participate in nightlife. Evenings were reserved for writing: he usually ate a light supper at five or six in the evening, lay down to sleep until midnight, and then began his writing, often in stretches of up to fifteen hours without a break. (He once claimed to have worked forty-eight hours in a row with only a three-hour nap.) He simply didn’t have the time to go out. It’s amazing he had time to do anything, really: between 1830 and 1842, he churned out seventy-nine novels.
Despite his striking resemblance to adult video star Ron Jeremy, Balzac received more than ten thousand perfumed letters from female admirers. His readers were taken with his humor, especially when he focused his wit on their spouses. “The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin,” Balzac wrote.
“M. de Balzac is not precisely beautiful,” a newspaper reporter wrote at the height of Balzac’s literary fame. “His features are irregular; he is fat and short.” While the sedentary profession of writing lends itself quite well to gluttony, Balzac indulged in food as if it were his only vice. He ate off his knife like a peasant and had to unbutton his shirt to avoid dripping food onto his clothing as he dove into his meal. Balzac was known to excuse his uncouth manners by quipping, “All great men are monsters.”
None of this dissuaded “beautiful unknown women” from showing up on his doorstep, looking for love. He turned down their advances, calling their attention “rather tiresome.” He rarely if ever availed himself of the bounty of womanly delights thrown at him—he was simply too busy writing to stop and smell their roses, so to speak.
Still, when the French literati’s most eligible bachelor showed up for dinner, men feared for their wives. When Balzac visited the countess Clara Maffei in Milan, her husband urged her to stay alert. “Since you have read his novels, you can judge for yourself how familiar he is with women and with that subtle art of seduction,” Count Maffei wrote in a letter to his wife. “Do not suppose that the ugliness of his face will protect you from his irresistible power.”
A Polish woman, Ewelina Haska, contacted him via a series of anonymous letters in 1832. This mysterious move intrigued him greatly and was in stark contrast to the fawning women who threw themselves at his feet. When they finally met in person, Haska reportedly fainted at first sight: he was everything that she had dreamed of and more. Balzac was equally smitten. They shared a kiss under an oak tree, but things were not meant to be. Haska was married. She promised her heart was Balzac’s should she ever become a widow.
After her husband died in 1842, Haska stalled and refused to remarry immediately. Was she having second thoughts? Balzac wondered. During this time, he was struggling with numerous health problems (nerve pain, heart disease, fevers) that slowed his output. “My heart, soul, and ambition will be satisfied with nothing but the object I have pursued for sixteen years: if this immense happiness escapes me, I shall no longer want anything, and shall refuse everything!” he wrote.
Eight years after her husband died, Haska finally consented to marry Balzac. The wedding took place in 1850. “Three days ag
o I married the only woman I have ever loved,” he wrote to a friend. It was a bittersweet moment, though, as both the bride and groom likely knew that his maladies were terminal.
Balzac died just five months after his wedding, at the age of fifty-one, of pneumonia, a complication of his long-running illnesses. He never finished La comédie humaine.
Romanticism wasn’t completely dead, but less melodramatic subject matters and plots were slowly gaining traction with the European reading public. “There are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects,” Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) wrote. “There is no such thing as a subject. Style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.”
Like other Realists, his style was one lacking entirely in pretension. He believed that it wasn’t the author’s place to express his or her emotions or opinions in a novel. Of course, by taking the stance that the author is an impersonal chronicler of common people doing common things, Flaubert was making an authorial choice: his style was that he had no style. He also believed that the Realistic writer’s purpose was to be the flag-bearer for “humanity” in the fight against the bourgeoisie, a political bent that made him less of an impartial observer than he would have cared to admit.
Like Balzac, Flaubert was a tireless worker. He endlessly revised his prose in an effort to find le mot juste—the right word. Not surprisingly, finding the right word for every sentence in a novel took quite a long time, and his creative output paled in comparison to that of Balzac and his peers. “I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being. My only company consists of a band of rats in the garret,” he once wrote in a letter (which, of course, is a form of communication, but we’ll let that slide). Twentieth-century writer Dorothy Parker, who wrote one or two stories a year, could empathize with his struggles. She imagined “that poor sucker Flaubert rolling round on his floor for three days, looking for the right word.”
Flaubert’s obsessive perfectionism left little time for love. Not to say that he didn’t have sex: Flaubert had a healthy sexual appetite, as evidenced by the extensive collection of STDs he amassed over the years. He once lost all of his hair during treatment for a nasty syphilitic infection and constantly complained of sores on his penis—unsurprising facts, as most of his sexual encounters occurred in brothels. One of his favorite “pranks” was to pick the most repulsive girl he could find in a brothel and screw her in front of his friends, “all without taking my cigar out of my mouth. It was no fun for me: I just did it for the spectators.” Flaubert once stormed out of a brothel after a sixteen-year-old girl asked to check his penis for venereal diseases before engaging in intercourse. He also experimented with anal sex while on a tour of the Middle East with a friend. “We have considered it as our duty to try this mode of ejaculation,” he wrote.
Flaubert’s first published novel, Madame Bovary, brought him wide acclaim. In Madame Bovary, Flaubert portrayed bourgeois French society with an objective tone that was quite shocking for the time. He “realistically” told the story of Emma Bovary, a bored, middle-class housewife whose extramarital affairs led to her eventual suicide. There was an undertone of distaste for the well-off, something that Flaubert didn’t deny. “Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of virtue,” Flaubert once wrote in a letter.
When the novel was first serialized in La Revue de Paris in 1856, French prosecutors brought obscenity charges against Flaubert and the publisher who was set to release the book the following spring. The prosecutor, Ernest Pinard, believed that Emma’s adulterous behavior was an offense to public morality. Flaubert’s defense argued that, by shining his authorial light on vice, he was actually promoting virtue. “Does the reading of such a book give a love of vice, or inspire a horror of it?” his attorney said.
After a public trial that lasted exactly one day, Flaubert was acquitted on February 7, 1857. Thanks in no small part to the publicity generated by the trial, Madame Bovary became an instant bestseller when it was finally released.
Flaubert privately reveled in the controversy. “You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it,” he wrote. Madame Bovary was later banned in Italy and the United States. Although it returned to print in both countries, the novel continues to appear on lists of “frequently challenged books” as the target of would-be book banners.
One of Flaubert’s few close acquaintances was French novelist and memoirist George Sand (1804–1876), a free-living, free-thinking woman in the tradition of early feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft. Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, she was fond of wearing men’s clothing and smoking tobacco in public, both shocking behaviors for a woman in upper-class Parisian society. “What a brave man she was, and what a good woman,” her contemporary Ivan Turgenev wrote.
Sand married Baron Casimir Dudevant at the age of nineteen, and after nine years of unhappy marriage and two children, she left her husband. “She was too imperious a machine to make the limits of her activity coincide with those of wifely submissiveness,” American novelist Henry James wrote. Perhaps it was that she had grown tired of her husband sleeping with their maids; perhaps, as James and others have pondered, she was too intellectually curious to be content with the role that French wives were expected to play at the time.
She proceeded to have affairs with many famous men, including poet Alfred de Musset and composer Frédéric Chopin. “There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved,” she wrote. Baroness Dudevant was rumored to be involved with actress Marie Dorval. “In the theater or in your bed, I simply must come and kiss you, my lady, or I shall do something crazy!” Dudevant wrote to the actress.
Baroness Dudevant published her debut novel, Rose et Blanche (“Pink and White”), in 1831. The book, cowritten by one of her lovers, Jules Sandeau, appeared under the name “Jules Sand.” The first novel she wrote entirely on her own, Indiana, was published a year later under the name “George Sand,” a moniker she assumed for the rest of her life. A few years later, in 1835, she legally separated from her husband and took her children with her.
Although Sand had her critics (who despised her as much for dressing in men’s clothing and smoking tobacco as for her work), she also had her fans and supporters. “She has a grasp of mind which, if I cannot fully comprehend it, I can very deeply respect,” her more conservative contemporary Charlotte Brontë wrote. Balzac, a close friend of Sand’s who called her his “brother George,” passionately defended her work against critics.
One of her closest platonic friendships was with Flaubert. She was more than a decade and a half older than him, and Flaubert playfully addressed her as “Master” in their letters. Sand was more relaxed than the uptight Flaubert, and frequently tried to get him to lighten up. “Spare yourself a little, take some exercise, relax the tendons of your mind,” she wrote, later adding some romantic advice: “Not to love is to cease to live.” Flaubert would have none of it. He attributed his physical aches and pains and social awkwardness to the “charming profession” of writing. “That is what it means to torment the soul and the body,” he wrote to her.
Both Sand and Flaubert stood aligned against a world hostile to writers. “I believe that the crowd, the common herd, will always be hateful,” he wrote to her. “The only important thing is a little group of minds always the same—which passes the torch from one to another.” Sand passed away in 1876, and Flaubert died four years later.
Sand saw herself as a trailblazer for other female authors—and women in general. “The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter,” she wrote in one of her novels. “I shall have opened the way for other women.”
8
The Fleshly School
“Men and women know from birth that in evil lies all pleasure.”
—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a harsh critic of George Sand—and of female authors in ge
neral. “Women write and write, with an exuberant rapidity; their hearts speak and chatter in reams. Usually they know nothing of art, or measure, or logic; their style trails and flows like their garments,” he wrote. Sand “dashes off her masterpieces as if she were writing letters. Has it not been said that she writes her books on stationery?” Baudelaire reserved his worst criticism for Sand on a more personal level, calling her stupid, heavy, and garrulous. “The fact that there are men who could become enamored of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation.”
Baudelaire’s dislike for Sand may be partially attributed to her ignoring his request to put one of his friends, the beautiful but untalented actress Marie Daubrun, in one of her plays in 1855. But another, more insidious, reason for his hatred can be traced to his jealousy of her voluminous creative output that far overshadowed his own slim volume of work. Baudelaire was a brilliant poet and critic who suffered from many addictions (laudanum, expensive clothes, prostitutes) and whose story is a case study of wasted talent.
As a young man, Baudelaire was expelled from school close to graduation. He would later take the exams to graduate, but for the moment had nothing to do. The eighteen-year-old bounced around Paris between relatives’ couches, but found the idle lifestyle untenable. “At school I read, I cried, sometimes I fell into a rage; but at least I was alive, which is more than I am now,” he wrote to his mother. “I’m lower than a snake’s belly, and bad, bad, and no longer bad in a pleasant way. There is nothing now but lassitude, glumness, and boredom.”
His stepfather, worried about Baudelaire’s directionless lifestyle, tried to turn the young boy into a man by sending him to India. “The moment has come when something must be done to prevent your brother’s utter ruin,” his stepfather wrote to Baudelaire’s half-brother, Alphonse. Unfortunately, the trip (cut short by Baudelaire, who was bored with the sea) only served to solidify Baudelaire’s taste for a bohemian lifestyle. His stepfather, a high-ranking government official, offered to pull strings for Baudelaire and get him a cushy office job in Paris.
Literary Rogues Page 6