The Stones of Paris in History and Letters Volume Ii Part 2

In this library by day, and in his garret by night, Balzac began that life of terrific toil from which he never ceased until death stopped his unresting hand. The novels he produced during these years were hardly noticed then, are quite unknown now; showing no art, giving no promise. He never owned them, and put them forth under grotesque pen-names, such as "Horace de Saint-Aubin," "Lord R'hoone"--an anagram of Honore--and others equally absurd, all telling of his fondness for t.i.tles.

This garret, in which he lived for fifteen months, is vividly pictured in "La Peau de Chagrin," written in 1830, as Raphael's room in his early days, before he became rich and wretched. Balzac's letters to his sister Laure (Madame Laure de Surville) detail, with delightful gayety, his exposure to wind and wet within these weather-worn walls; and his ingenious shifts in daily small expenditure of _sous_ to make his income serve. He relates how he shopped, how he brought home in his pockets his scant provender, how he fetched up from the court-pump his large allowance of water. For he used it lavishly in making his coffee, that stimulation supplying the place of insufficient food, and carrying him through his nights of pen-work. Excessive excitation and excessive toil, begun thus early, went on through all his life, and he dug his too early grave with his implacable pen. His only outings, by day or by night, were the long walks that gave him his amazing acquaintance with every corner of Paris, and his solitary strolls through the great graveyard of Paris, near at hand. "_Je vais m'egayer au Pere-Lachaise_," he writes to his sister; and there he would climb to the upper slopes, from which he saw the vast city stretched out.

For he was fond of height and s.p.a.ce, and we shall see how he sought for them in his later dwelling-places.

And in this storm-swept attic he had his first dreams of dwelling in marble halls. Extreme in everything, he could imagine no half-way house between a garret and a palace; he began in the one, he ended in the other, unable to find pause or repose in either!

Dreaming the dreams of Midas, he loved to plunge his favorite young heroes into floods of sudden soft opulence, and his longings for luxury found expression in those unceasing schemes for instant wealth which made him a kindly mock to his companions. His first practical project was started in 1826, during a temporary sojourn for needed rest and proper food at his father's new home in Villeparisis, eighteen miles from Paris, on the edge of the forest of Bondy. He speedily hurried back to Paris and turned printer and publisher; bringing out, among other reprints, the complete works of Moliere and of La Fontaine, each with his own introduction, each in one volume--compact and inconvenient--and, at the end of the year which saw twenty copies of either sold, the entire editions were got rid of, to save storage, at the price by weight of their paper. This and other failures left him in debt, and to pay this debt and to gain quick fortune, he set up a type-foundry in partnership with a foreman of his printing-office. The young firm took the establishment at No. 17 Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, now Rue Visconti; named for the famous archaeologist who had lived, and in 1818 had died, in that venerable mansion hard by on the corner of Rue de Seine and Quai Malaquais. We have already found our way to this short and narrow Rue Visconti, to visit Jean Cousin and Baptiste du Cerceau, and, last of all, the rival houses of Racine.

Balzac's establishment, now entirely rebuilt, was as typical a setting of the scene as any ever invented by that master of scene-setting in fiction. It may be seen, as it stood until very lately, in its neighbor No. 15, an exact copy of this vanished No. 17. Its frowning front, receding as it rises, is pierced with infrequent windows, and hollowed out by a huge, wide doorway, within which you may see men casting plates for the press, albeit the successors of "_Balzac et Barbier_" no longer set type nor print.

"_Balzac H. et Barbier A., Imprimeurs, Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, 17_;"

so appears the firm in the Paris directory for 1827. The senior partner had not yet a.s.sumed the particle "_de_," so proudly worn in later years when, too, he is labelled in the directory "_homme-de-lettres_," the t.i.tle of "_imprimeur_," on which he prided himself because it meant wealth, having lasted only until the end of 1827 or the beginning of 1828. Printing-office and type-foundry were sold at a ruinous sacrifice, and Balzac was left with debts of about 120,000 francs; a burden that nearly broke his back and his heart for many years. He never went through that narrow street without groaning for its memories; and for a long time, he told his sister, he had been tempted to kill himself, as was tempted his hero of "La Peau de Chagrin." In his "Illusions Perdues" he has painted, in relentless detail, the cruel capacity of unpaid, or partially paid, debts for piling up interest. But the helpless despair of David Sechard was, in Balzac himself, redeemed by a buoyant confidence that never deserted him for long. To pay his debts, he toiled as did Walter Scott, whom Balzac admired for this bondage to rect.i.tude, as he admired his genius. All through the "Comedie Humaine" he dwells on the burden of debt, the ceaseless struggle to throw it off, by desperate, by dishonorable, expedients.

On an upper floor of his establishment, Balzac had fitted up a small but elegant apartment for his living-place, his first attempt to realize that ideal of a bachelor residence such as those in which he installed his heroes. This was furnished, of course, on credit, and when failure came, he removed his belongings to a room at No. 2 Rue de Tournon, a house quite unchanged to-day. Here his neighbor was the editor of the "Figaro," Henri de la Touche--his intimate friend then, later his intimate enemy; a poor creature eaten by envy, whose specialty it was to turn against former friends and to sneer at old allies.

Here Balzac finished the book begun in his former room over his works, "Les Chouans." It was published in 1829, and was the first to bear his real name as author, the first to show to the reading world of what sterling stuff he was made. That stuff was not content with the book, good as it was, and he retouched and bettered it in after years. It brought him not only readers but editors and publishers; and before the end of 1830, he had poured forth a flood of novels, tales, and studies; among them such works as "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote,"

"Physiologie du Mariage," "Gobseck," "etude de Femme," "Une Pa.s.sion dans le Desert," "Un episode sous la Terreur," "Catherine de Medicis,"

"Lettres sur Paris"--with "Les Chouans," seventy in all!

Werdet, one of Balzac's publishers--his sole publisher from 1834 to 1837--lived and had his shop near by, at No. 49 Rue de Seine. To his house, just as it stands to-day, the always impecunious young author used to come, morning, noon, and night for funds, in payment of work unfinished, of work not yet begun, often of work never to be done.

From Rue de Tournon he removed, early in 1831, to Rue Ca.s.sini, No. 1, as we find it given in the Paris _Bottin_ of that year. It is a short street of one block, running from Avenue de l'Observatoire to Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, and takes its name appropriately from the Italian astronomer, who was installed in the Observatory, having been made a citizen of France by Colbert, Louis XIV.'s great Finance Minister.

It is a secluded quarter still, with its own air of isolation and its own village atmosphere. In 1831 it was really a village, far from town, and these streets were only country lanes, bordered by infrequent cottages, dear to the weary Parisian seeking distance and quiet. Three of them, near together here, harbored famous men at about this period, and all three have remained intact until lately for the delight of the pilgrim--that of Chateaubriand, No. 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, that of Victor Hugo, No. 27 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and this one of Balzac.

His house, destroyed only in 1899, was on the southwest corner of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques and Rue Ca.s.sini. It was a little cottage of two stories, with two wings and a small central body, giving on a tiny court. A misguided Paris journal has claimed, with copious letterpress and ill.u.s.trations, the large building at No. 6 Rue Ca.s.sini for Balzac's abode. This is a lamentable error, one of the many met with in topographical research, by which the traditions of a demolished house are transplanted to an existing neighbor. This characterless No.

6 carries its own proof that Balzac could never have chosen it, even were we without the decisive proof given by the _cadastre_ of the city, lately unearthed by M. G. Lenotre among the buried archives of the _Bureau des Contributions Directes_.

In the sunny apartment of the left wing dwelt Balzac and his friend, Auguste Borget; in the other wing, Jules Sandeau lived alone and lonely in his recent separation from George Sand. Their separation was not so absolute as to prevent an occasional visit from her, and an occasional dinner to her by the three men. She has described one of these wonderful dinners with much humor; telling how Balzac, when she started for her home--then on Quai Malaquais--arrayed himself in a fantastically gorgeous dressing-gown to accompany her; boasting, as they went, of the four Arabian horses he was about to buy; which he never bought, but which he quite convinced himself, if not her, that he already owned! Says Madame Dudevant: "He would, if we had permitted him, have thus escorted us from one end of Paris to the other." He so far realized his vision as to set up a tilbury and horse at this period--about 1832--and exulted in the sensation created by his magnificence as he drove, clad in his famous blue coat with shining b.u.t.tons, and attended by his tiny groom, "_Grain-de-mil_."

This equipage and that gorgeous dressing-gown were but a portion of the bizarre splendor with which Balzac loved to relieve the squalor of his debt-ridden days. Here, his creditors forgetting, by them forgotten, as he fondly hoped, hiding from his friends the furniture he had salvaged from his wreck, he wantoned in silver toilet-appliances, in dainty porcelain and _bric-a-brac_; willing to go without soup and meat--never without his coffee--that he might fill, with egregious _bibelots_, his "nest of boudoirs _a la marquise_, hung with silk and edged with lace," to use George Sand's words; boudoirs which he has described in minute detail, placing them in the preposterous apartment of "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or."

In his work-room, apart and markedly simple and severe, he began that series of volumes, amazing in number and vigor, with which he was resolute to pay his enormous debts. Here, in this little wing, in the years between 1831 and 1838, he produced, among over sixty others of less note, such masterpieces as "La Peau de Chagrin," "Le Chef d'Oeuvre Inconnu," "Le Cure de Tours," "Louis Lambert," "Eugenie Grandet," "Le Medecin de Campagne," "Le Pere Goriot," "La d.u.c.h.esse de Langeais," "Illusion Perdues" (first part only), "Le Lys dans la Vallee," "L'Enfant Maudit," "Cesar Birotteau," "Cent Contes Drolatiques" (in three sections), "Seraphita," "La Femme de Trente Ans," and "Jesus-Christ en Flandres."

In addition to his books, he did journalistic writing, chiefly for weekly papers; and in 1835 he bought up and took charge of the "Chronique de Paris," aided by a gallant staff of the cleverest men of the day. It lived only a few months. In 1840 he started "La Revue Parisienne," written entirely by himself. It lived three months.

When once at work, Balzac shut himself in his room, often seeing no one but his faithful servant for many weeks. His work-room was darkened from all daylight, his table lit only by steady-flamed candles, shaded with green. A cloistered monk of fiction, he was clad in his favorite robe of white cashmere, lined with white silk, open at the throat, with a silken cord about the waist, as we see him on the canvas of Louis Boulanger. He would get to his table at two in the morning and leave it at six in the evening; the entire time spent in writing new ma.n.u.script, and in his endless correction of proofs, except for an hour at six in the morning, for his bath and coffee, an hour at noon for his frugal breakfast, with frequent coffee between-times. At six in the evening he dined most simply, and was in bed and asleep by eight o'clock.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Honore de Balzac.

(From the portrait by Louis Boulanger.)]

With no inborn literary facility, with an inborn artistic conscience that drove him on in untiring pursuit of perfection, he filled the vast chasm between his thought and its expression with countless pen-strokes, and by methods of composition all his own: the exact reverse of those of Dumas, writing at white heat, never rewriting; or of Hugo, who said: "I know not the art of soldering an excellence in the place of a defect, and I correct myself in another work." Balzac began with a short and sketchy and slip-shod skeleton, making no attempt toward sequence or style, and sent it, with all its errors, to the printer. Proofs were returned to him in small sections pasted in the centre of huge sheets; around whose wide borders soon shot from the central text rockets and squibs of the author's additions and corrections, fired by his infuriated fist. The new proofs came back on similar sheets, to be returned to the printer, again like the web and tracks of a tipsy spider. This was repeated a dozen or, it is said, a score of times, always with amplifications, until his type-setters became palsied lunatics. He overheard one of them, as he entered the office one day, say: "I've done my hour of Balzac; who takes him next?" Type-setter, publisher, author were put out of misery only when the last proof came in, at its foot the magic "_Bon a tirer_."

This stupendous work had been preceded and was accompanied by as stupendous preparation of details. He dug deep to set the solid foundations for each structure he meant to build. "I have had to read _so many_ books," he says, referring to his preliminary toil on "Louis Lambert." So real were his creations to him--more alive to his vision than visible creatures about--that he must needs name them fittingly, and house them appropriately. Invented nomenclature gave no vitality to them, in his view, and he hunted, on signs and shop-fronts wherever he went, for real names that meant life, and a special life.

"A name," as he said, "which explains and pictures and proclaims him; a name that shall be his, that could not possibly belong to any other." He revelled in his discovery of "Matifat," and "Cardot," and like oddities. He dragged Leon Gozlan through miles of streets on such a search, refusing every name they found, until he quivered and colored before "Marcas" on a tailor's sign; it was the name he had dreamed of, and he put "Z" before it, "to add a flame, a plume, a star to the name of names!"

His scenes, too, were set for his personages with appalling care, so that, as has been well said, he sometimes chokes one with brick and mortar. He knew his Paris as d.i.c.kens knew his London, and found in unknown streets or unfrequented quarters the scenes he searched long for, the surroundings demanded by his characters. If his story were placed in a provincial town, he would write to a friend living there for a map of the neighborhood, and for accurate details of certain houses. Or, he would make hurried journeys to distant places: "I am off to Gren.o.ble," or, "to Alencon"--he wrote to his sister--"where So-and-so lives:" one of his new personages, already a living acquaintance to him. In his artistic frenzy for fitting atmosphere he has, unconsciously, breathed his spirit of unrest into much of his narrative, and the reader plunges on, out-of-breath, through chapterless pages of fatiguing detail.

These excursions were not his only outings in later years. He got away from his desk during the summer months, for welcome journeys to his own Touraine, and to other lands, and for visits to old family friends. Always and everywhere he carried his work with him.

And he began to see the world of Paris, and to be seen in that world, notably in the famous _salon_ of Emile de Girardin and his young wife, Delphine Gay de Girardin, where the watchword was "Admiration, more admiration, and still more admiration." He met well-bred women and ill.u.s.trious men, whose familiar intercourse polished him, whose attentions gratified him. The pressure of his present toil removed for a while, he was fond of emerging from his solitude, and of flashing in the light of publicity. He was an interested and an interesting talker, earnest and vehement and often excited in his utterances; yet frank and merry, and vivid with a "Herculean joviality." His thick fine black hair was tossed back like a mane from his n.o.ble, towering brow; his nose was square at the end, his lips full and curved, and hidden partly by a small mustache. His most notable features were his eyes, brown, spotted with gold, glowing with life and light--"the eyes of a sovereign, a seer, a subjugator." A great soul shone out of them, and they redeemed and triumphed over all that was heavy in face and vulgar in body; for, with a thickness of torso like Mirabeau, and the neck of a bull, he had his own corpulence. Lamartine says that the personal impression made by Balzac was that of an element in nature; he gripped one's brain when speaking, and one's heart when silent.

Moreover, it was an element good as well as strong, unable to be other than good; and his expression, we know from all who saw it, told of courage, patience, gentleness, kindliness.

He was commonly as careless of costume as a vagrant school-boy in outgrown clothes. He would rush from his desk to the printer's or race away in search of names, clad in his green hunting-jacket with its copper b.u.t.tons of foxes' heads, black and gray checked trousers, pleated at the waist, and held down by straps pa.s.sing under the huge high-quartered shoes, tied or untied as might happen, a red silk kerchief cord-like about his neck, his hat, s.h.a.ggy and faded, crushed over his eyes--altogether a grotesque creature! In contrast, he was gorgeous in his gala toilet of the famous blue coat and ma.s.sive gold b.u.t.tons, and the historic walking-stick, always carried _en grande tenue_, its great k.n.o.b aglow with jewels sent him by his countless feminine adorers.

When Balzac removed with Sandeau, in 1838, to new quarters, he kept this apartment in Rue Ca.s.sini for an occasional retreat, perhaps for a friendly refuge against the creditors, who became more and more clamorous in their attentions. The two comrades furnished the lower floor of their new home most handsomely; mainly with the view of dazzling urgent publishers, who, as said Balzac, "would give me nothing for my books if they found me in a garret." Coming to drive a bargain, these guileless gentry found themselves too timid to haggle with the owners of such luxury. They could not know that that luxury was merely hired under cover of a friend's name, and lit up only by night to blind and bewilder them, while the haughty authors lived by day in bare discomfort, on a half-furnished upper floor.

Of this mansion only the site remains. It was at No. 17 Rue des Battailles, on the heights of Chaillot--the suburb between Paris and Pa.s.sy--and that street and the Balzac house have been cut away by the modern Avenue d'Iena. Retired and high as it was, with its grand view over river and town, it was not high enough nor far enough away for this lover of distance and height. He soon tried again to realize his ideal of a country home by buying, in 1838, three acres of land at Ville d'Avray, a quarter near Sevres, on the road to Versailles. On the ground was a small cottage called, in Louis XIV.'s time, "_Les Jardies_," still known by that name, and notable in our time as the country-home of Leon Gambetta, wherein he died. That home remains exactly as he left it, at No. 14 Rue Gambetta, Ville d'Avray, and has been placed among the National Monuments of France. It is a shrine for the former followers of the great tribune, who visit it on each anniversary of his death. The statue they have erected to their leader, alongside the house, may be most kindly pa.s.sed by in silence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Les Jardies.]

The glorious view from this spot--embracing the valley of Ville d'Avray, the slopes opposite, the great city in the distance--was a delight to Balzac. _Les Jardies_ was a tiny box, having but three rooms in its two stories, which communicated by a ladder-like staircase outside. He had tried to improve the place by a partial rebuilding, and the stairs were forgotten until it was too late to put them inside. A later tenant has enclosed that absurd outer staircase within a small addition. His garden walls gave him even more trouble, for they crumbled and slid down on the grounds of an irate neighbor.

The greater part of that garden has been walled off. Yet the poor little patch was a domain in his eyes; its one tree and scattered shrubs grew to a forest in his imagination, and his fancy pictured, in that confined area, a grand plantation of pineapples, from which he was to receive a yearly income of 400,000 francs! He had fixed on the very shop on the boulevards where they were to be sold, and only Gautier's cold sense prevented the great planter, as he saw himself, from renting it before he had grown one pineapple!

His rooms were almost bare of furniture, and this was suggested by his stage directions charcoaled on the plaster walls: "Rosewood panels,"

"Gobelins tapestries," "Venetian mirror," "An inlaid cabinet stands here," "Here hangs a Raphael." Thus he was content to camp for four or five years, hoping his house would yet be furnished, and perhaps believing it was already furnished.

At this time, and for many years, Balzac rented a room over the shop of his tailor Buisson, at the present No. 112 Rue de Richelieu. His letters came here always, and he used the place not only for convenience when in town, but, in connection with other shelters, for his unceasing evasion of pursuing creditors. A tailor still occupies that shop, and seems to be prosperous; probably able to collect his bills from prompter customers than was Balzac.

In 1843, forced to sell _Les Jardies_, he came back into the suburbs, to a house then No. 19 Rue Ba.s.se, at Pa.s.sy, now No. 47 Rue Raynouard of that suburb. On the opposite side of the street, at No. 40, is a modest house, hiding behind its garden-wall. This was the unpretending home of "_Beranger, poete a Pa.s.sy_," to quote the Paris _Bottin_. No.

47 is a plain bourgeois dwelling of two stories and attic, wide and low, standing on the line of the street; in the rear is a court, and behind that court is the pavilion occupied by Balzac. He had entrance from the front, and unseen egress by a small gate on the narrow lane sunk between walls, now named Rue Berton, and so by the quay into town. This was a need for his furtive goings and comings, at times.

Balzac's work-room here looked out over a superb panorama--across the winding Seine, over the Champ-de-Mars, and the Invalides' dome, and all southern Paris, to the hills of Meudon in the distance. This room he kept austerely furnished, as was his way; while the living apartments were crowded with the extraordinary collection of rare furniture, pictures, and costly trifles, which he had begun again to bring together. To it he gave all the money he could find or get credit for, and as much thought and labor and time as to his books, although with little of the knowledge that might have saved him from frequent swindlers. It was only his intimates who were allowed to enter these rooms, and they needed, in order to enter them, or the court or the house on the street, many contrivances and pa.s.swords, constantly changed. He himself posed as "_la Veuve Durand_," or as "_Madame de Bruguat_," and each visitor had to ask for one of these fict.i.tious persons; stating, with cheerful irrelevancy: "The season of plums has arrived," or, "I bring laces from Belgium." Once in, they found free-hearted greeting and full-handed hospitality, and occasional little dinners. The good cheer was more toothsome to the favored _convives_, than were the cheap acrid wines, labelled with grand names, made drinkable only by the host's fantastic fables of their vintages and their voyages; believed by _him_, at least, who dwelt always in his own domain of dreams.

These dinners were not extravagant, and there was no foolish expenditure in this household at Pa.s.sy. Balzac wrote later to his niece, that his cooking there had been done only twice a week, and in the days between he was content with cold meat and salad, so that each inmate had cost him only one franc a day. For this man of lavish outlay for genuine and bogus antiques, this slave to strange extravagances and colossal debts--partly imaginary--was painfully economical in his treatment of himself. He thought of money, he wrote about money. Before him, love had been the only pa.s.sion allowed in novels; he put money in its place and found romance in the Code. All through his life he worked for money to pay his debts, intent on that one duty. In October, 1844, he wrote two letters, within one week, to the woman who was to be his wife; in one of them he says that his dream, almost realized, is to earn before December the paltry twenty thousand francs that would free him from all debt; in the other he gloats over recent purchases of _bric-a-brac_, amounting to hundreds of francs. He saw nothing comically inconsistent in the two letters.

In all his letters, the saddest reading of all letters, there is this curious commingling of the comic and the sordid. Those, especially, written to his devoted sister and to the devoted lady who became his wife at the last, give us most intimate acquaintance with the man; showing a _man_, indeed, strong and vehement, steadfast and patient; above all, magnanimous. Self-a.s.sertive in his art, eager and insistent concerning it, he was quite without personal envy or self-seeking.

Said Madame Dudevant: "I saw him often under the shock of great injustices, literary and personal, and I never heard him say an evil word of anyone." Nor was there any evil in his life--a life of sobriety and of chast.i.ty, as well as of toil. At the bottom of his complex nature lay a deep natural affection. This giant of letters, when nearly fifty years old, signed his letters to his mother, "_Ton fils soumis_"; so expressing truly his feeling for her, from the day she had installed him in his mean garret, to that later day, when she fitted up his grand last mansion. In his letters to those dear to him, amid clamorous outcries about debts and discomforts, comes a deeper cry for sympathy and affection. Early in life, he wrote to his sister: "My two only and immense desires--to be famous and to be loved--will they ever be satisfied?" To a friend he wrote: "All happiness depends on courage and work." So, out of his own mouth, we may judge this man in all fairness.

From this Pa.s.sy home one night, Balzac and Theophile Gautier went to the apartment of Roger de Beauvoir, in the Hotel de Lauzun-Pimodan, on the Island of Saint-Louis; and thence the three friends took a short flight into a hashish heaven. Their strange experiences have been told by their pens, but to us, Balzac's night of drugged dreams is not so strange as his days of unforced dreams. That which attracts us in this incident is its scene--one of the grandest of the mansions that sprang up from the thickets of ile Saint-Louis, as _le Menteur_ has put it. Built in the middle years of the seventeenth century, it stands quite unchanged at No. 17 Quai d'Anjou, bearing, simply and effectively, every mark of Mansart's hand in his later years. Its first owner followed his friend Fouquet to the Bastille and to Pignerol; its next tenant came to it from a prison-cell, and went from it to the very steps of the throne. He was the superb adventurer, Antonin Nompar de Caumont, Duc de Lauzun, and his family name clings still to the place, and is cut in gold letters on the black marble tablet above the door. On that prettiest balcony in Paris, crowded the prettiest women of Paris, on summer nights, to look at the river fetes got up by their showy and braggart Gascon host. Through this portal have pa.s.sed Bossuet and Pere Lachaise, going in to convert the plain old Huguenot mother of de Lauzun, who lived retired in her own isolated chamber through the years of her son's ups and downs. When her family had gone, came the Marquis de Richelieu, great-nephew of the great Richelieu, with the bride he had stolen from her convent at Chaillot--the daughter of Hortense Mancini, niece of Mazarin, and of her husband, it is alleged. Then came the Pimodan, who was first of that name, and who gave it to his _hotel_. It is an admirable relic; its rooms, with their frescoed ceilings and their panelled walls, are as remarkable as those of the _chateau_ of Fontainebleau, and are not surpa.s.sed by any in Paris. The mansion is well worth a visit for itself and for its memories.

Balzac's Paris--the Paris for which his pen did what Callot and Meryon did for it with their needles--has been almost entirely pickaxed out of sight and remembrance. The Revolution, wild-eyed in its mad "Carmagnole," gave itself time to raze a few houses only, after clearing the ground of the Bastille, although it had meant much more destruction; the Empire cut some new streets, and planned some new quarters; the Bourbons came back and went away again, leaving things much as they had found them. It remained for Louis-Philippe to begin "works of public utility," an academic phrase, which being interpreted signified the tearing down of the old and the building up of the new, to gratify the grocers and tallow-chandlers whose chosen King he was, and to fill his own pocket. Yet much of Balzac's stage-setting remained until it was swept away by Haussmann and his master of the Second Empire. Such was the wretched Rue du Doyenne, that "narrow ravine" between the Louvre and Place du Carrousel, where Baron Hulot first saw _la Marneffe_, and where _la Cousine Bette_ kept guard over her Polish artist in his squalid garret; doubtless the very garret known to Balzac in his visits there, when it was tenanted by a.r.s.ene Houssaye, Gautier, Gavarni, and the rest of "Young France, harmless in its furies." That house, one of a block of black old eighteenth-century structures, stood where now is the trim little garden behind the preposterous statue of Gambetta.

History and fiction meet on the steps of Saint-Roch. There Cesar Birotteau, the ambitious and unlucky perfumer, was "wounded by Napoleon," on the _13 Vendemiaire_, the day that put the young Corsican's foot into the stirrup, and gave to the sham-heroic Cesar that sounding phrase, always thereafter doing duty on his tongue. He was carried to his shop in Rue Saint-Honore, on its northern side near Rue de Castiglione, and hid and bandaged and nursed in his _entresol_.

This part of Rue Saint-Honore and its length eastward, with its narrow pavement and its tall, thin houses, is still a part of the picture Balzac knew and painted; but the business district hereabout has greatly changed since his day. The Avenue de l'Opera, and all that mercantile quarter dear to the American pocket, the Bourse and the banking-houses about, date from this side of his Paris. Nucingen would be lost in his old haunts, and Lucien de Rubempre could not recognize the newspaper world of our day.

The _hotels_ of the Faubourg Saint-Germain--the splendid mansions of the splendid eighteenth century, where his Rastignac and his lesser pet swells lorded it--are now, in many cases, let out in apartments, their owners content with the one floor that is in keeping with their diminished fortunes. Undiminished, however, are their traditions and their prejudices, albeit "_Le Faubourg_" exists no longer, except as an att.i.tude of mind. Yet, here on the left bank, are still to be found some of the scenes of the "Comedie Humaine." On Quai Voltaire, alongside the house in which Voltaire died, is the very same shop of the antiquary, from whom Raphael de Valentin bought the _peau de chagrin_. Balzac knew it well, doubtless was swindled there, and to-day you will find it as crowded with curiosities, as begrimed with dust, as suggestive of marvels hid in its dusky corners, as when he haunted it.

Raphael de Valentin lived in the _hotel-garni_ Saint-Quentin, Rue des Cordiers. Long before his day, Rousseau had been a tenant of a dirty room in the same dirty _hotellerie_, going there because of the scholarly neighborhood of the place and of its memories, even at that time. Leibnitz, in 1646, had found it a village inn in a narrow lane, hardly yet a street. Gustave Planche lived there, and Hegesippe Moreau died there in 1838--a true poet, starved to death. The old inn and all its memories and the very street are vanished; and the new buildings of the Sorbonne cover their site.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Antiquary's Shop, and in the background the house where Voltaire died.]

"One of the most portentous settings of the scene in all the literature of fiction. In this case there is nothing superfluous; there is a profound correspondence between the background and the action." Such is the judgment of so competent a critic as Mr. Henry James, concerning the house in which is played the poignant tragedy of "Pere Goriot." You will, if you love Balzac, own to the truth of this statement, when you look upon this striking bit of salvage. It stands, absolutely unchanged as to externals, at No. 24 Rue Tournefort; a street named in honor of the great botanist who cleared the track for Linnaeus. In Balzac's day, this street was known by its original name of Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve; one of the most ancient and most isolated streets on the southern bank. Once only, through the centuries, has its immemorial quiet been broken by unseemly noise, when, in the days of Francois I., a rowdy gambling-den there, the "_Tripot des 11,000 Diables_," did its utmost to justify its name. The street seems to creep, in subdued self-effacement, over the brow of Mont-Sainte-Genevieve, away from the Paris of shops and cabs and electric light. The house stands narrow on the street, its gable window giving scanty light to poor old Goriot's wretched garret; framed in it, one may fancy the patient face of the old man, looking out in mute bewilderment on his selfish, worldly daughters. The place no longer holds the "_pension bourgeoise de deux s.e.xes et autres_" of the nave description on the cards of Madame Vauquer, _nee_ Conflans; and is now let out to families and single tenants. Its gate-way stands always open, and you may enter without let or hindrance into the court, and so through to the tiny garden behind, once the pride of Madame Vauquer, no longer so carefully kept up. You peep into the small, shabby _salle-a-manger_, on the entrance floor of the house, and you seem to see the convict Vautrin, manacled, in the clutch of the _gens-d'armes_, and, cowering before him, the vicious old maid who has betrayed him. That colossal conception of the great romancer had found his ideal hiding-place here, as had the forlorn father his hiding-place, in his self-inflicted poverty. All told, there is no more convincing pile of brick and mortar in fiction; sought out and selected by Balzac with as much care and as many journeys as d.i.c.kens gave to his hunt for exactly the right house for Sampson and Sally Bra.s.s.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Pension Vauquer.]

While Balzac was still at Pa.s.sy, after long searching for a new home, he made purchase, as early as 1846, in the new quarter near the present Parc Monceaux. That name came from an estate hereabout, once owned by Philippe egalite; and his son, the King of the French, and the shrewdest speculator among the French, was just at this time exploiting this estate, in company with lesser speculators. The whole suburb was known as the Quartier Beaujon, from a great banker of the eighteenth century, whose grand mansion, within its own grounds, had been partly demolished by the cutting of new streets, leaving only out-buildings and a pavilion in a small garden. This was the place bought by Balzac; the house and grounds, dear as they were, costing much less, as he found, than his furniture, bronzes, porcelains, and pottery, paintings and their frames--all minutely described in the collection of _le cousin Pons_. He made a museum, indeed, of this house, bringing out all his hidden treasures from their various concealments here and there about town. There was still a pretence of poverty regarding his new home; he would say to his friends, amazed by the display: "Nothing of all this is mine. I have furnished this house for a friend, whom I expect. I am only the guardian and doorkeeper of this _hotel_."

The pretty mystery was resolved within a few months, and its solution explained Balzac's frequent and long absences from Paris after the winter of 1842-43. These months had been pa.s.sed at the home of Madame eve de Hanska, the Polish widow who was to be his wife. Her home was in the grand _chateau_ of Wierzchownie, in the Ukraine, whose present owner keeps unchanged the furniture of Balzac's apartment, where is hung his portrait by Boulanger, a gift to Madame de Hanska from her lover. And from there he brought his bride to Paris in the summer of 1850, their marriage dating from March of that year, after many years of waiting in patient affection. She had made over--with Balzac's cordial consent--nearly the whole of her great fortune to her daughter, her only child, and to that daughter's husband, retaining but a small income for herself. It was--and the envious world owned that it was--truly a love-match. They came home to be welcomed, first of all, by Balzac's aged mother; who had, during his absence, taken charge of all the preparations, with the same anxious, loving care she had given to the fitting-up of his garret thirty years before. She had carried out, in every detail, even to the arrangement of the flowers in the various rooms, the countless directions he had sent from every stage of the tedious journey from Wierzchownie.

"And so, the house being finished, death enters," goes the Turkish proverb. This undaunted mariner, after his stormy voyage, gets into port and is ship-wrecked there. His premonition of early years, written to his confidant Dablin in 1830, was proven true: "I foresee the darkest of destinies for myself; that will be to die when all that I now wish for shall be about to come to me." As early as in the preceding summer of 1849, he had ceased to conceal from himself any longer the malady that others had seen coming since 1843. The long years of unbroken toil, of combat without pause, of stinted sleep, of insufficient food, of inadequate exercise, of the steady stimulation of coffee, had broken the body of this athlete doubled with the monk.