Balzac Part 3

How a matron of her age should have allowed the friendship of the commencement to develop into a liaison is one of those problems of s.e.xual psychology easier to describe in Balzac's own language than to explain rationally. We know that she was not happy with her husband, and can surmise that she entered upon the role she played without clearly foreseeing its dangers. No doubt, her desire to form this genius in the rough carried her away from her moorings, which, indeed, had never been very strong, since she had already once before in her married life had a lover. Besides there was her temperament, sensual and sentimental; and with it the tradition of the eighteenth-century morals, indulgent to illicit amours.

Most likely, the second phase of her relations with Balzac coincided with his temporary abandonment of authorship for business. It was in 1825 that he resolved to embark on publishing,[*] partly urged by the mute reproaches of his parents and partly allured by the prospect of rapidly growing rich. He had likewise some intention of bringing out his own books, both those previously written and those in preparation.

Of these latter there were a goodly number sketched out in a sort of note-book or alb.u.m, which his sister Laure called his _garde-manger_ or pantry. It was full of jottings anent people, places, and things that he had come across in the preceding l.u.s.trum.

[*] The initiator of this project was not Balzac, although his early biographers, Madame Surville included, gave him the credit for it.

The idea of taking up business was mooted to him first by a Monsieur d'a.s.sonvillez, an acquaintance of Madame de Berny, whom he used to see and talk with when staying, as he occasionally did, at the small apartment rented by his father in Paris. Just then Urbain Canel, the celebrated publisher of Romantic books, was thinking of putting on the market compact editions of the old French cla.s.sics, beginning with Moliere and La Fontaine; and Balzac, either already knowing him or being introduced to him by a mutual friend, was admitted to join in the undertaking. The money necessary for the partnership was lent to him by Monsieur d'a.s.sonvillez, who, as a sharp business man, imposed conditions on the loan which secured him from loss in case of failure.

The editions were to be library ones, ill.u.s.trated by the artist Deveria (who about this time painted Balzac's portrait), and were to be published in parts. The price was high, twenty francs for each work; and additional drawbacks were the smallness of the type and the poorness of the engravings. No success attended the experiment; at the end of a twelvemonth not a score of copies had been sold. By common consent the firm, which had been increased to four partners, broke up their a.s.sociation, and Balzac was left sole proprietor of the concern, the a.s.sets of which consisted of a large quant.i.ty of wastepaper, and the liabilities amounted to a respectable number of thousand francs.

Madame Surville attributes the fiasco to the professional jealousy of compet.i.tors, who discouraged the public from buying; but the cause of the discomfiture lay rather in the faulty manner in which the partners carried out their plan. Monsieur d'a.s.sonvillez being still an interested adviser, Balzac now submitted to him a project for retrieving his losses by adding a printing to his publishing business.

The stock and goodwill of a printer were to be bought, and a working type-setter, named Barbier, was to be a.s.sociated as a second princ.i.p.al in the affair, on account of his practical experience. The project was approved, and the elder Balzac was persuaded to come forward with a capital of about thirty thousand francs, this sum being required to pay out the retiring printer, Monsieur Laurens, and obtain the new firm's patent. Madame de Berny had already lent Honore money to help him in the publishing scheme. At present, she induced her husband to intervene with the Government so that the printing licence might be granted without delay.

The printing premises were situated at No. 17, Rue des Marais, Faubourg Saint-Germain, to-day Rue Visconti, near the Quai Malaquais.

The street, which is a narrow one, subsists nearly the same as it was a century ago. Older a.s.sociations, indeed, are attached to it. At No.

19 died Jean Racine in 1699, and Adrienne Lecouvreur in 1730. No. 17 was a new construction when Balzac went to it, having probably been built on the site where Nicolas Vauquelin des Yveteaux used to receive the far-famed Ninon in his gardens. On the impost, where formerly appeared the names Balzac and Barbier, now may be read "A. Herment, successeur de Garnier." The place is still devoted to like uses.

In the _Lost Illusions_, whose part-sequel _David Sechard_ reproduces Balzac's life as a printer, there is a description of the ground floor: "a huge room, lighted on the street-side by an old stained-gla.s.s window and on the inner yard-side by a cas.e.m.e.nt." The pa.s.sage in Gothic style led to the office; and on the floor above were the living rooms, one of which was hung with blue calico, was furnished with taste, and was adorned with the owner's first novels, bound by Thouvenin. In this "den," during the two years that he was engaged in the printing trade, were received the daily visits of her he called his _Dilecta_.

She could not give him the practical business qualities in which he was utterly lacking and for which his wonderful intuitions of commercial possibilities were no compensation; but she could smile at his enthusiasms and sympathize with his disappointments, which had their see-saw pretty regularly in the interval from the 1st of June 1826 to the 3rd of February 1828. A very fair trade was done; and, in fact, some of the books he printed were important: Villemain's _Miscellanies_, Merimee's _Jacquerie_, Madame Roland's _Memoirs_, not to speak of his own small _Critical and Anecdotal Dictionary of Paris Signboards_, published under a pseudonym, or rather anonymously, since it was signed _Le Batteur de Pave_, the "Man in the Street." But the senior partner, he who should have financed the concern with all the more wariness as d'a.s.sonvillez, the princ.i.p.al supplier of capital, had a mortgage upon the whole estate, allowed himself to be paid for his printing, more often than not, in bills for which no provision was forthcoming and in securities that were rotten. One debt of twenty-eight thousand francs was settled by the transfer of a lot of old unsaleable literature, which would have been dear at a halfpenny a volume. And then, when everything was in confusion--debtors recalcitrant and creditors pressing--what must he do but launch on another venture, buy the bankrupt stock of a type-founder, and start manufacturing. A fresh partner, Laurent, was admitted into the firm in December 1827, with a view to his exploiting the presumably auxiliary branch; and a prospectus was issued vaunting a process of type-founding, which Balzac was wrongly credited with having invented.

Within two months after this spurt, and while a fine alb.u.m was in preparation, which was to ill.u.s.trate the firm's improved method, Barbier withdrew from the partnership. His desertion would have at once spelt disaster, if Madame de Berny had not boldly stepped into the vacant place, with a power of attorney conferred on her by her husband, and pledged her credit for nine thousand francs. During three months longer, the tottering house continued to hold up; and then, under the avalanche of writs and claims, it fell. A pet.i.tion in bankruptcy was filed in April, and the estate was placed in the hands of an official receiver.

On reaching this crisis so big with consequences, Balzac had recourse to his mother, who, though little disposed in the past to humour his bent, consented now to every sacrifice in order to save his credit.

Her first step was to get her cousin Monsieur Sedillot to occupy himself with the liquidation, she authorizing him at the same time to make whatever arrangement he should judge best, and promising to accept it. She was most anxious to spare her husband, at present eighty-three years of age, the grief he must feel if informed of the full extent of the disaster. Alas! notwithstanding her precautions, the old man did learn the truth; and the shock hastened his end.

Within twelve months after the bankruptcy he met with a slight accident, which, acting on his enfeebled const.i.tution, was fatal to him.

Balzac's liabilities, at the moment of the failure, were one hundred and thirteen thousand francs. The effect of the liquidation was to reduce the number of creditors, so that his indebtedness was restricted to members of his own family and to Madame de Berny. The latter's claims were partly met by her son's taking over the business with Laurent, the other partner. Being thus reconst.i.tuted, the firm subsequently prospered. To-day it still carries on its affairs under the control of a Monsieur Charles Tuleu, who succeeded Monsieur de Berny. Madame Surville would have us believe that, if her parents had only supported Honore more unreservedly at the commencement, he could have realized a fortune; but all the facts of her brother's life go to prove the contrary.

Referring, a decade later, to these dark days, which loaded him with a burden of debt that he never shook off but increased by his natural inability to balance receipts and expenditure, he spoke of Madame de Berny's kindness, and declared that he had repaid the _Dilecta_ in 1836 the last six thousand francs he owed her, together with their five per cent interest. As on many other occasions, Balzac imagined something which had not been done, though he apparently believed what he a.s.serted. The following anecdote re-establishes the facts of the case.

Monsieur Arthur Rhone, a friend of the de Berny family, who used to visit the son Alexander in the office of the Rue des Marais, often admired on the mantelpiece a fine bust of Flora, modelled by Marin.

One day the printer said to him: "Do you know how much that bust cost me? . . . Fifteen thousand francs. I got it from Balzac, who owed me a great deal of money. Once when I was at his house in Pa.s.sy, he exclaimed: 'Since I can't pay you, take what you like from here to reimburse yourself.'" This work of art, a Louis XVI. gilt-bronze time piece, with its two candelabra, once also in Balzac's possession, was part payment of the balance due to the de Berny family, and was surrendered only in the forties.

The novelist, whose memory was so short in money matters, had a longer recollection of his moral obligations. In the letter above referred to, he confessed: "Without her (Madame de Berny) I should have died.

She often divined that I had not eaten for several days (here he was probably piling on the agony). She provided for everything with angelic kindness. Her devotion was absolute." It ended only with the _Dilecta's_ life.

In the _s.h.a.green Skin_, which embodies some of Balzac's youthful experiences, Raphael, the hero, was saved from committing suicide, after ruining himself, by an accident which forms the thread of the story. Possibly, during the bankruptcy proceedings, there may have been a fit of despair which urged the insolvent printer to end his own troubles in the Seine. If so, it was of short duration. A fortnight after he had quitted the Rue des Marais, the letter he wrote to General de Pommereul showed him planning out a fresh future.

"At last has happened," he said in it, "what many persons were able to foresee, and what I myself feared in beginning and courageously supporting an establishment the magnitude of which was colossal (!!!).

I have been precipitated, not without the previsions of my conscious mind, from my modest prosperity. . . . For the last month I have been engaged on an historical work of the highest interest; and I hope that, in default of a talent altogether problematic with me, my sketch of national customs will bring me luck. My first thought was for you; and I resolved to write and ask you to shelter me for two or three weeks. A camp-bed, a single mattress, a table, if only it is quadrupedal and not rickety, a chair and a roof are all that I require."

The General replied: "Your room awaits you. Come quick." And he went.

It was his definite entrance into literature, and his resumption of the search for wealth withal.

CHAPTER IV

FIRST SUCCESSES AND FAME

The historical novel that Balzac had set himself to write was the _Chouans_, this name being given to the Vendee Royalists who, under the leadership of the Chevalier de Nougarede, combated the Revolution and Napoleon. The scene being laid in Brittany, it was natural that, apart from health reasons, the author should wish to inspire his pen by a visit to the places he intended to describe.

His hostess at Fougeres has left us a description of her guest: "He was a little, burly man, clad in ill-fitting garments that increased his bulk. His hands were magnificent. He wore a most ugly hat; but, as soon as he took it off, one remarked nothing else besides his head. . . . Beneath his ample forehead, on which seemed to shine the reflection of a lamp, there were brown, gold-spangled eyes which expressed their owner's meaning as clearly as his speech. He had a big, square nose, and a huge mouth, which was perpetually smiling in spite of his ugly teeth. He wore a moustache, and his long hair was brushed back. At the time he came to us he was rather thin, and appeared to be half-starved. He devoured his food, poor fellow! For the rest, there was so much confidence, so much benevolence, so much _naivete_, so much frankness in his demeanour, his gestures, his ways of speaking and behaving that it was impossible to know him and not love him. . . . His good humour was so exuberant as to be contagious.

Notwithstanding the misfortunes he had just pa.s.sed through, he had not been with us a quarter of an hour before he made the General and me laugh till tears came into our eyes."

The _Chouans_, which his two or three months' sojourn at Fougeres enabled him to get on with rapidly, was completed after his return to Paris, and was published under his own name in 1829. Charles Vimont, who accepted and brought it out, paid him no more than a thousand francs. The book, although it was not badly written, and contained plenty of incident, very fair characterization, of the minor personages especially, and local colouring imitated from Walter Scott, made no great impression. For the ordinary reader it differed too little from the Romanticism with which he was familiar. Moreover, the action savoured too much of the melodramatic; and the character of Mademoiselle de Verneuil, and that of the Chouan chief, whom she had promised to deliver up to the emissaries of Fouche, were too nebulous to gain general sympathy, even with the heroine's tragic devotion.

There is, however, a fine sketch of Brittany and of its spirit of revolt; the numerous figures of the background are vigorously executed, and nearly all the episodes of the drama are skilfully presented. A perusal of the _Chouans_ makes us regret that there was hardly any return to this kind of composition in the author's after-work.

When embarking on his publishing enterprise, Balzac went to live in an apartment of the Rue Tournon, No. 2[*] close to the Luxembourg. He abandoned it for the Rue des Marais in 1826; and, this latter abode being given up in 1828, he removed on his return from Brittany to No.

4, Rue Ca.s.sini, where he remained for some years. A friend of his, Latouche--soon to become an enemy--helped him to liven up the walls of his study with the famous blue calico that had adorned his room over the printing office. Certain busybodies spread the report that he was furnishing his new apartment extravagantly; and Laure, to whose ear the tattle had come, ventured to allude to it in a letter reproaching him with remissness in writing home and to her. The accusation of extravagance, which later he really merited, was at this moment a trifle previous, money being scarce and credit also. "Stamps and omnibus fares are expenses I cannot afford," he a.s.sured his sister; "and I abstain from going out in order to save my clothes."

[*] Some early biographers state that the novelist went to the Rue Tournon after his bankruptcy. This is a mistake.

However, he was now on the point of scoring a literary success. In the same year as his _Chouans_ appeared his _Physiology of Marriage_, a book of satire and caricature having a distinct stamp of his maturer manner. Werdet, for a number of years his publisher and friend, relates in his _Portrait Intime_ that Balzac, while still in the Lesdiguieres Street garret, had gone one day to Alphonse Levava.s.seur and offered, in return for a royalty and a cash installment of two hundred francs, to supply him with a book to be ent.i.tled: _Manual of the Business Man, by a former Notary's Clerk_. It was agreed that the ma.n.u.script should be handed in at the end of the month; and the two hundred francs were paid down. In vain the publisher waited for his Manual. Ultimately he hunted out his debtor; and the latter had to confess that the long-promised ma.n.u.script had never been written. In order to calm the creditor's indignation, Balzac read to him some fragments of another book which he was really engaged upon. After listening for a while, Levava.s.seur's countenance grew serene: "I will pay you two thousand francs for this production when finished, Monsieur," he said; "and we will cancel the old transaction. Come with me. I will give you the first thousand francs now. The rest you shall have as soon as I get the last corrected proofs." "Dear publisher, your speech is golden," cried Balzac; "I accept." Nevertheless, the proofs were not delivered until 1829. The book immediately became popular. "From the day of its appearance," comments Werdet, "literature counted another master and France another Moliere."

The verdict is exact only if the _Physiology_ is regarded in conjunction with the novelist's after achievement in the domain of realistic fiction. Alone it would not rank so high. Flippant, cynical, immoral--these epithets, which were freely applied to it, all have their justification when one looks at the work from any other standpoint than that of its being a very amusing and clever exposition of s.e.x relations governed by interest and pa.s.sion. Both facts and philosophy are confined within an exceedingly narrow horizon, one in which the writer was most thoroughly at home, which explains why they bear the imprint of a mind already _blase_.

From a letter Balzac sent to Levava.s.seur, while finishing the last pages of the ma.n.u.script, it appears that he commenced his task as a jest and completed it with more serious purpose: "I intended to dash off a pleasantry," he told him, "and you came one morning and asked me to do in three months what Brillat-Savarin took ten years to do. I haven't an idea which is not the _Physiology_. I dream of it, I am absorbed by it."

The sale of the book was in a measure due to the sort of scandal it provoked. Ladies especially bought the volume to find out for themselves how far they had been maligned; and Levava.s.seur, who was pleased with his profits, introduced Balzac to Emile de Girardin, then chief editor of the _Mode_, to which paper he now began to contribute light articles, not to speak of other journals, which were only too glad to receive something from his pen. The extent to which the fair s.e.x read the _Physiology_ and were affected by it is ill.u.s.trated by a story that Werdet tells of a hoax perpetrated at Balzac's expense by a number of his society friends, who had cause to complain of his uppishness towards them, a treatment based not merely on the belief he entertained in his literary superiority, but on his pretensions to aristocratic descent. The story belongs more properly to the middle thirties, when he had been using the prefix "de" before his name already for some years, justifying himself on the ground that his father claimed issue from an old family that had resisted the Auvergne invasion and had begotten the d'Entragues stock. His father, moreover, so he said, had discovered doc.u.ments in the Charter House establishing a concession of lands made by a de Balzac in the fifth century; and a copy of the transaction had been registered by the Paris Parliament.

Between 1833 and 1836 one of the most celebrated Paris "sets" was that of the Opera "lions," seven young aristocratic sparks composing it, or, to be precise, six, together with the Chevalier d'Entragues de Balzac, as his friends jokingly dubbed him--he being an elder. It was the period of his first flush of prosperity, when he drove about in a hired carriage resplendent with the d'Entragues coat of arms, which cost him five hundred francs a month; had a majestic coachman in fine livery and a Tom Thumb groom; sported himself in gorgeous garments and strutted about in the Opera _foyer_, amidst the real or feigned admiration of his fellows.

To revenge themselves for their mentor's superciliousness towards them, the six other _lions_ induced a dancer at the Opera to play the part of a supposed Duke's daughter smitten with the great man's writings and person, a role she undertook the more willingly as, being well acquainted with the former, she was anxious to prove to him that he was not so perspicacious as he deemed himself. An Opera ball was chosen for the adventure; and Balzac was duly baited and taken in tow by the lady, whose mask only half concealed her beauty. Thus began a flirtation, with subsequent clandestine meetings, allowing the fair unknown to fool him to the top of her bent. The author wanted to propose for her hand to the Duke her father; but, cleverly using her knowledge of his books, the sly jade showed him that he would have no chance of being accepted. At last she hinted she would like to visit him in his author's sanctum; and the delighted novelist went to most lavish expense in fitting up a boudoir to receive her. The visit was presumably a secret one. Protected by a young man employed at the Opera, to whom she was engaged, and who accompanied her in the disguise of a negro, she went to the Rue des Batailles one evening and graciously listened to the enraptured conversation of her victim till towards midnight, when her mother, who was in the plot, came to fetch her. The novelist's fury and humiliation were extreme on his learning how neatly he had been tricked, and it was some time before he ventured to reappear in his accustomed haunts. As narrated by Werdet, the story is a good deal embellished, and some of the details that he gives were probably invented; but the main outline he vouches to be true.

Among the editors of journals who sought Balzac's collaboration after the publication of the _Physiology_ were Buloz of the _Revue de Paris_ and Victor Ratier of the _Silhouette_. To the latter of them, in 1831, he wrote from La Grenadiere, where he had gone to recruit, a letter revealing a curiously mixed state of mind in this dawning period of fame. He would seem to have been under a presentiment of the long years of struggle and incessant toil he was about to be involved in, and to have felt a shrinking of his physical nature from them.

"Oh! if you knew what Touraine is like," he exclaimed. "Here one forgets everything else. I forgive the inhabitants for being stupid.

They are so happy. Now, you know that people who enjoy much are naturally stupid. Touraine admirably explains the lazzarone. I have come to regard glory, the Chamber, politics, the future, literature, as veritable poison-b.a.l.l.s to kill wandering, homeless dogs, and I say to myself: 'Virtue, happiness, life, are summed up in six hundred francs income on the bank of the Loire. . . .' My house is situated half-way up the hill, near a delightful river bordered with flowers, whence I behold landscapes a thousand times more beautiful than all those with which rascally travellers bore their readers. Touraine appears to me like a _pate de foie gras_, in which one plunges up to the chin; and its wine is delicious. Instead of intoxicating, it makes you piggy and happy. . . . Just fancy, I have been on the most poetic trip possible in France--from here to the heart of Brittany by water, pa.s.sing between the most ravishing scenery in the world. I felt my thoughts go with the stream, which, near the sea, becomes immense. Oh, to lead the life of a Mohican, to run about the rocks, to swim in the sea, to breathe in the fresh air and sun! Oh, I have realized the savage! Oh, I have excellently understood the corsair, the adventurer --their lives of opposition; and I reflected: 'Life is courage, good rifles, the art of steering in the open ocean, and the hatred of man --of the Englishman, for example.' (Here Balzac is of his time.) Coming back hither, the ex-corsair has turned dealer in ideas. Just imagine, now, a man so vagabond beginning on an article ent.i.tled, _Treatise of Fashionable Life_, and making an octavo volume of it, which the _Mode_ is going to print, and some publisher reprint. . . . Egad! At the present moment literature is a vile trade. It leads to nothing, and I itch to go a-wandering and risk my existence in some living drama. . . . Since I have seen the real splendours of this spot, I have grown very philosophic, and, putting my foot on an ant-hill, I exclaim, like the immortal Bonaparte: 'That, or men, what is it all in presence of Saturn or Venus, or the Pole Star?' And methinks that the ocean, a brig, and an English vessel to engulf, is better than a writing-desk, a pen, and the Rue Saint-Denis."

About the events of the 1830 Revolution the novelist was apparently but little concerned. True, the change was one of dynasty only, not of _regime_, albeit Louis-Philippe posed rather as a plebiscitary monarch. Balzac's clericalism and royalism, which ultimately became so crystallized, were at this date in a position of unstable equilibrium.

At one moment his criticisms have an air of condemning the monarchic principle, at another they point to his being a pillar of the ancient system of things. On this occasion he was twitted by Madame Zulma Carraud, his sister's friend, with whom his relations grew more intimate as his celebrity augmented; and he defended himself by a confession of faith which forecast his endeavours--less persistent than his desires--to add the statesman's laurels to those of the _litterateur_. His doctrine, following the Machiavellian tradition, was that the genius of government consists in operating the fusion of men and things--a method which demonstrated Napoleon and Louis XVIII.

alike to be men of talent. Both of them restrained all the various parties in France--the one by force, the other by ruse, because the one rode horseback, the other in a carriage. . . . France, he continued, ought to be a const.i.tutional monarchy, with an hereditary Royal Family, a House of Lords extraordinarily powerful and representing property, etc., with all possible guarantees of heredity and privilege; then she should have a second, elective a.s.sembly to represent every interest of the intermediary ma.s.s separating high social positions from what was called the people. The bulk of the laws and their spirit should tend to enlighten the people as much as possible--the people that had nothing--workmen, proletaries, etc.--so as to bring the greatest number of men to that condition of well-being which distinguished the intermediary ma.s.s; but the people should be left under the most puissant yoke, in such a way that the individual units might find light, aid, and protection, and that no idea, no form, no transaction might render them turbulent. The richer cla.s.ses must enjoy the widest liberty practicable, since they had a stake in the country. To the Government he wished the utmost force possible, its interests being the same as those of the rich and the bourgeois, viz. to render the lowest cla.s.s happy and to aggrandize the middle cla.s.s, in which resided the veritable puissance of States. If rich people and the hereditary fortunes of the Upper Chamber, corrupted by their manners and customs, engendered certain abuses, these were inseparable from all society, and must be accepted with the advantages they yielded.

This conception of the cla.s.ses and the ma.s.ses which he afterwards set forth more fully in his _Country Doctor_ and _Village Cure_, partly explains why all his best work, besides being impregnated with fatalism, has such a constant outlook on the past. It was a dogma with him rather than a philosophy, and was clung to more from taste than from reasonable conviction. He believed in aristocratic prerogative, because he believed in himself, and ranked himself as high as, or rather higher than, the n.o.ble. This was at the bottom of his doctrine; but he was glad all the same to have his claim supported by such outward signs of the inward grace as were afforded by vague genealogy and the homage of the great. d.u.c.h.esses were his predilection when they were forthcoming; failing them, countesses were esteemed.

The d.u.c.h.ess d'Abrantes--one of his early admirers--to whom he dedicated his _Forsaken Woman_, was herself a colleague in letters; and he was able to render her some service through his relations with publishers. Their correspondence shows them to have been on very friendly terms. In one of his letters to her, he insisted on his inability to submit to any yoke, and reb.u.t.ted her insinuation that he permitted himself to be led--possibly the d.u.c.h.ess's hint referred to Madame de Berny. "My character," he said, "is the most singular one I have ever come across. I study myself as I might another person. I comprise in my five feet two every incoherence, every contrast possible; and those who think me vain, prodigal, headstrong, frivolous, inconsistent, foppish, careless, idle, unstable, giddy, wavering, talkative, tactless, ill-bred, impolite, crotchety, humoursome, will be just as right as those who might affirm me to be thrifty, modest, plucky, tenacious, energetic, hardworking, constant, taciturn, cute, polite, merry. Nothing astonishes me more than myself.

I am inclined to conclude I am the plaything of circ.u.mstances. Does this kaleidoscope result from the fact that, into the soul of those who claim to paint all the affections and the human heart, chance casts each and every of these same affections in order that by the strength of their imagination they may feel what they depict? And can it be that observation is only a sort of memory proper to aid this mobile imagination? I begin to be of this opinion."

Balzac appears to have been introduced to the d.u.c.h.ess d'Abrantes about the year 1830, when he was engaged in writing his _s.h.a.green Skin_, which, out of the numerous pieces of fiction produced within this and the next twelve months, added most to his notoriety, though inferior to such stories as the _House of the Tennis-playing Cat_, and even to the _Sceaux Ball_ in the more proper qualities of the novel.

The _s.h.a.green Skin_ is the adventure of a young man who, after sowing his wild oats and losing his last crown at the gaming table, goes to end his troubles in the river, but is prevented from carrying out his intention by being fortuitously presented with a piece of s.h.a.green skin, which has the marvellous property of gratifying its possessor's every wish, yet, meanwhile, shrinks with each gratification, and in the same proportion curtails its possessor's life. On this warp of fairy tale, the author weaves a woof of romance and reality most oddly blended. The imitations of predecessors are numerous. The style is turgid, the thought is shallow, the sentiment is exaggerated. But very little of the sober characterization soon to be manifested in other books is displayed in this one. The best that can be said is that the thing has the same cleverness as the _Physiology_, with here and there indications--and clear ones--of the novelist's later power. He himself grossly overestimated it, as, indeed, he overestimated not a few of his poorer productions--maybe because they cost him greater toil than his masterpieces, which generally, after long, unconscious gestation, issued rapidly and painless from him.

An amusing expression of this self-praise has come down to us in the puff he composed on the occasion of a reprint of the _s.h.a.green Skin_ by Gosselin in 1832. "The _Philosophic Tales_ of Monsieur de Balzac,"

it announced, "have appeared this week. The _s.h.a.green Skin_ is judged as the admirable novels of Anne Radcliffe were judged. Such things escape annalists and commentators. The eager reader lays hold of these books. They bring sleeplessness into the mansions of the rich and into the garret of the poet; they animate the village. In winter they give a livelier reflection to the sparkling log, great privileges to the story-teller. It is nature, in sooth, who creates story-tellers.

Vainly are you a learned, grave writer, if you have not been born a story-teller, and you will never obtain the popularity of the _Mysteries of Udolpho_ and the _s.h.a.green Skin_, the _Arabian Nights_, and Monsieur de Balzac. I have somewhere read that G.o.d created Adam, the nomenclator, saying to him: You are the story-teller. And what a story-teller! What verve and wit! What indefatigable perseverance in painting everything, daring everything, branding everything! How the world is dissected by this man! What an annalist! What pa.s.sion and what coolness!

"The _Philosophic Tales_ are the red-hot interpretation of a civilization ruined by debauch and well-being, which Monsieur de Balzac exposes in the pillory. The _Arabian Nights_ are the complete history of the luxurious East in its days of happiness and perfumed dreams. _Candide_ is the epitome of an epoch in which there were bastilles, a stag-park, and an absolute king. By thus taking at the first bound a place beside these formidable or graceful tale-tellers, Monsieur de Balzac proves one thing that remained to be proved; to wit, that the drama, which was no longer possible to-day on the stage, was still possible in the story--that our society, so dangerously sceptical, _blase_, and scornful, could yet be moved by the galvanic shocks of this poetry of the senses--full of life and colour, in flesh and blood, drunk with wine and l.u.s.t--in which Monsieur de Balzac revels with such delight. Thus, the surprise was great, when, thanks to this story-teller, we still found among us something resembling poetry--feasts, intoxication, the light o' love giving her caresses amidst an orgie, the br.i.m.m.i.n.g punch-bowl crowned with blue flames, the yellow-gloved politician, scented adultery, the girl indulging in pleasure and love and dreaming aloud, poverty clean and neat, surrounded with respectability and happy hazard--we have seen all this in Balzac. The Opera with its lemans, the pink boudoir and its flossy hangings, the feast and its surfeits; we have even seen Moliere's doctor reappear, such need has this man of sarcasm and grotesqueness.

The further you advance in the _s.h.a.green Skin_--vices, lost virtues, poverties, boredom, deep silence, dry-as-dust science, angular, witless scepticism, laughable egotism, puerile vanities, venal loves, Jewish second-hand dealers, etc.--the more astonished and pained you will be to recognize that the nineteenth century in which you live is so made up. The _s.h.a.green Skin_ is _Candide_ with Beranger's notes; it is poverty, luxury, faith, mockery; it is the heartless breast, the brainless cranium of the nineteenth century--the century so bedizened and scented, so revolutionary, so ill-read, so little worth, the century of brilliant phantasmagorias, of which in fifty years' time nothing will be seizable except Monsieur de Balzac's _s.h.a.green Skin_."