Part 10 (1/2)

From what we know of his relations with Madame Visconti, we may, however, suppose that his prejudice against the _perfide Albion_ was not very deep-rooted. Indeed in his sentiments, as in his conduct, consistency was conspicuous by its absence. We find this would-be Legitimist, absolutist, ultra-orthodox wors.h.i.+pper of every old-time privilege and doctrine, yet continually saying and doing things that savour more of the democratic than the aristocratic. Towards the disintegration of monarchic attachments, his fiction contributed at least as much as that of George Sand; and even his comic resistance to the compulsory service required of him in the National Guard showed how little he was inclined to accept for himself those doctrines of authority which he would fain impose on others.

Such incongruity between his theory and practice may have struck the members of the Academie Francaise, who manifested their disapproval of his candidature so unmistakably in 1839 that he withdrew in favour of Victor Hugo. This forced concession perhaps tinged the portrait he sketched of Hugo for Madame Hanska about the same time. ”Victor Hugo,”

he said, ”is an exceedingly witty man; he has as much wit as poetry in him. His conversation is most delightful, with some resemblance to that of Humboldt, but superior and allowing more dialogue. He is full of bourgeois ideas. He execrates Racine, and treats him as a sorry sort of man. On this point he is quite mad. His wife he has thrown over for J----; and gives for such conduct reasons of signal meanness (she bore him too many children; notice that J---- has borne him none). In fine, there is more good than bad in him. Although the good traits are an outcome of pride, and although in everything he is a deeply calculating man, he is amiable on the whole, and, besides, is a great poet. Much of his force, value, and quality he has lost by the life he leads, having overdone his devotion to Venus.”

Calling Hugo a great poet meant little in Balzac's mouth. Of poetry he made but small account, probably because he succeeded so ill in it himself. When poets appear in his stories, they are rarely estimable characters. For Lucien de Rubempre he has only little sympathy. The three specimens of Lucien's verse given in the novel he procured from his acquaintances. The sonnet to Marguerite was composed by Madame de Girardin; the one to Camellia, by La.s.sailly, and that to Tulipe, by Theophile Gautier.

A movement of disinterested generosity displayed by him in the same year was his fight, in conjunction with the artist Gavarni, on behalf of Sebastien Benoit Peytel. Peytel was a notary living at Belley, who, on the 20th of August 1839, was condemned to death by the Ain a.s.sizes on a charge of murdering his wife and man-servant. Balzac had known him some time before in Paris, when both were on the staff of the theatrical journal _Le Voleur_. The Court of Ca.s.sation was appealed to in vain and the sentence was carried out at Bourg on the 28th of October. As long as there seemed the slightest chance of preventing the execution, Balzac continued his efforts to save the notary, though blamed by his family and friends for his interference, which they set down as quixotic. Presumably Peytel had committed the crime in a fit of jealous pa.s.sion, to punish his wife's adultery. A curious drawing by Balzac exists in the first volume of his general correspondence, in which Gavarni is represented mocking the headsman; and, accompanying the design, is an autograph letter to Dutacq, managing director of the _Siecle_, referring to an article on the question published by the novelist in that paper.

The time and money he gave to this lost cause were all the more meritorious as his own concerns demanded greater attention than ever.

A new departure had occurred in journalism. The appearance of certain cheaper newspapers necessitated a change in the _roman feuilleton_; and the _Presse_ and _Siecle_, which had inaugurated the reform, and to both of which Balzac contributed fiction, laid down the principle that they would print only short tales complete in three or four numbers. This was hard on the novelist. For him to compress a story within artificial limits determined by an editor was a task even more difficult than to write a play.

It must have been the desire to escape from such servitude which induced him to launch into another adventure with a journal of his own. The _Revue Parisienne_, which he founded in July 1840, was not a newspaper but a magazine, intended to supply the public, at a reasonable price, with tales, novels, poetry, and articles of criticism both literary and political, and to give the same public for their money more than three times as much matter as they would get in other reviews. The success of Alphonse Karr's monthly _Guepes_, which was reported to be selling extraordinarily, encouraged him to believe that his own fame, wider spread in 1839 than in 1836, and greater, would suffice to a.s.sure a similar result. Author and editor combined, he made the three numbers of his review, which were all he was able to bring out, at any rate the equal of the older established monthlies.

In the three appeared his _Z. Marcas_, and _A Prince of Bohemia_, the former a resuscitation of the _Louis Lambert_ species of hero transformed into a politician. The _Russian Letters_, likewise political, furnish a very exact and comprehensive sketch of the general state of mind in Europe at the commencement of the Forties.

One article of criticism praised to the skies Stendhal's _Chartreuse de Parme_ published in the previous year. A letter he had addressed to Stendhal in April 1839 was more moderate in its tone, though eulogistic with its well-turned compliment: ”I make a fresco, and you have made Italian statues.” He blamed the writer in his letter for situating the plot of the _Chartreuse_ in Parma. ”Neither state or town,” he told him, ”should have been named. It should have been left to the imagination to discover the Prince of Modena and his minister.

Hoffman never failed to obey this law without exception in the rules of the novel. If everything be left undefined as regards reality, then everything becomes real.” In short, notwithstanding parts that were too long drawn out, he found the whole a fine piece of work; and, if a modern Machiavelli were to write a novel, it would be, he said, the _Chartreuse de Parme_.

Between the judicious language employed in the letter and the article of the _Revue Parisienne_, the difference was so enormous that Beyle himself remarked: ”This astonis.h.i.+ng notice, such as never one writer had from another, I read, let me own it, amid bursts of laughter.

Whenever I came to fresh flights of eulogy--and I met with them in every paragraph--I could not help thinking how my friends would look when they saw them.” ”The reason for this augmented enthusiasm must be sought,” says Sainte-Beuve, ”in the fact that Stendhal lent or gave Balzac a sum of five thousand francs in the interval, and thus received back a service of _amour propre_ for the service rendered in cash. Since the proof of this gift or loan was found in Beyle's papers, at his death, Sainte-Beuve's explanation seems well grounded; and yet, for Balzac's credit, one could have wished his praise more spontaneous.”

The cessation of the _Revue Parisienne_ forced its founder again to enter the ranks of paid contributors to the daily press, and to comply with its exigencies. Yet not entirely. His qualities and his defects alike led him frequently to break from restraint and to follow his own bent, maugre the complaints of readers, maugre editors' entreaties; and, even in the final phase of his production, there were some masterpieces supporting comparison with those of his best period.

At the end of the Thirties, he was again, like Bruce's spider, renewing his efforts to climb on to the stage. He had three pieces in hand, _La Gina_, _Richard the Sponge-Heart_, and his _School for Husbands and Wives_, already mentioned. The last he had now managed to carry through to its conclusion; and, in February 1839 there seemed to be some prospect of his getting it played. Pereme, an influential acquaintance of his in the theatrical world, had persuaded the Renaissance theatre to accept it on approval, but was less fortunate with regard to the fifteen thousand francs which Balzac had asked for on account. The roles were discussed and partially distributed. Henry Monnier and Frederick Lemaitre were to be chief actors on the men's side, Mesdames Theodore and Albert on the women's. On the 25th of the month, the author presented himself with his ma.n.u.script before the reading committee; and, to his intense annoyance and dismay, was compelled to put it back into his pocket. Either the committee feared the expense which the representation would have entailed, or else the elder Dumas, who was one of their most successful suppliers of dramas, and had recently fallen out with them, must have made up the quarrel just before Balzac's comedy was read. Whatever the reason was, the rejection of the piece grievously affected the novelist, who, besides losing a great deal of valuable time, had spent money to no purpose in having his comedy printed.

It must be acknowledged that, in dramatic composition, whatever Balzac had so far done by himself was done grudgingly, and, when possible, s.h.i.+fted on to other shoulders. Gozlan relates that La.s.sailly, who went to Les Jardies and lived there for some little time as a paid secretary, would be rung up at night, when his employer usually worked--rung up not once nor twice, but several times, to hear himself asked whether, in his waking or his dreaming, he had hatched any good plan; and poor La.s.sailly would have sorrowfully to avow that his brain had conceived nothing of any importance in the way of drama.

How Harel, the managing director of the Porte-Saint-Martin, was brought to give in the same twelve-month to the rejected of the Renaissance a firm promise that anything he liked to do for that theatre should be acted is an impenetrable mystery. But then Harel himself was an oddity, and he may have felt bowels of compa.s.sion for a _confrere_ so original. The story goes that once he tried to borrow thirty thousand francs from King Louis-Philippe. ”Ah! Monsieur Harel,”

replied the monarch, smiling, ”I was thinking of applying to you for a similar sum.”

The subject that, after much cogitation, Balzac chose for Harel's stage was _Vautrin_--the Vautrin of _Pere Goriot_ and the _Lost Illusions_--back at his old trade of acting Providence to a presumably fatherless and friendless young man, whose fortunes he sought to advance by means similar to those that had brought Lucien de Rubempre (we are antic.i.p.ating a little) to so miserable an end. In the concluding act of the play, the young man discovers that he has a family, and a father who is a n.o.ble; and he marries the girl he loves.

But Vautrin is arrested, and, although he has been the instrument of his protege's happiness, he is led off to prison once more. The theme, as treated, was a somewhat hackneyed one, and was further spoiled by ill-managed contrasts of the serious and comic, of which in any form the French stage was not tolerant. Objection has been made on the same score to the _School for Husbands and Wives_ at the Theatre Francais, where it had been offered after its rejection by the Renaissance.

Balzac himself had no great opinion of his dramatic arrangement of _Vautrin_. He had done wrong, he said, to put a romantic character on the stage. After the play was finished, he re-wrote nearly the whole of it; and, from what Theophile Gautier relates about the way in which it was primitively composed, we can well believe that the revision was necessary. When the treaty with Harel was signed, Balzac installed himself in the small apartment which he rented at his tailor's, No.

104 Rue de Richelieu, and sent for Gautier. ”I am going to read to Harel to-morrow,” he announced, ”a grand five-act drama.” ”Ah!”

replied Gautier; ”so I suppose you want us to hear it and to give you our opinion.” ”The play is not yet written,” answered Balzac coolly.

”You shall do one act; Ourliac, a second; Laurent Jan, a third; de Belloy, a fourth; and I, the fifth. There are not so many lines in one act. With all of us working together, we shall be able to complete it by to-morrow.” Objections were timidly put forward as to the hotch-potch that was likely to result from so improvized a method of work; but the hasty playwright overruled them all. It need hardly be said that the five acts were not ready on the morrow, nor for some time after. In fact, Laurent Jan was the only collaborator who gave any considerable help. To him, in acknowledgment, Balzac dedicated the piece, which was performed on the 14th of March 1840.

Knowing what a number of enemies he had among the Parisian journalists and critics, whom he had satirized with increased causticity in his latest fiction, the author endeavoured to pack the theatre with his friends, but there was a large leakage in the sale of tickets; and, on the eventful evening, the seats were occupied by a majority of persons hostile to him. He must have had an inkling of this; for, when sending a ticket to Lamartine, he said to him: ”You will see a memorable failure. I have done wrong, I believe, to appeal to the public.

_Morituri te salutant Caesar_.” The first portion of the performance was received, on the whole, favourably, though there was no enthusiasm; but, when Frederick Lemaitre, who was entrusted with the role of Vautrin, came on to the stage, in the fourth act, dressed as a Mexican general, and wearing his forelock of hair in a way that appeared to imitate a like peculiarity in the King, there was an outcry among the audience; and Louis-Philippe's son, who was present, was informed by complaisant courtiers that the travesty was intended as an insult to his father. The next day, Harel was advertized that the authorities forbade any other presentation of the piece; and, on the 16th, the Press, following the Government's lead, were practically unanimous in anathematizing the unhappy dramatist, the _Debats_ being particularly acrimonious, and a.s.serting that _Vautrin_ was a thoroughly immoral play.

Balzac's friends, Victor Hugo included, did what they could to get the interdiction raised; but the Minister was inflexible. All that he would consent to was an indemnity of five thousand francs offered through Cave, the Under-Secretary for Fine Arts. This, Balzac indignantly refused. One might have expected such continued ill-luck to prostrate its victim, at least momentarily. Gozlan went out to Les Jardies for the purpose of cheering the hermit up. He found him calm and collected. ”You see that strip of land bordering the garden over there?” the latter said, looking out of the window. ”Yes.” ”I am about to establish there a dairy, with an installation of the best kind, the cows of which will bring me in three thousand francs a year.” Gozlan stared. ”And you see the other strip down yonder farther than the wall?” ”Yes.” ”Well, I intend to plant that with rare vegetables of the sort that used to be supplied to the King's table. That will bring me in another three thousand francs a year.” Gozlan waited for what would come next. ”And you see the plot right facing the southern sun?”

”Yes.” ”Ah! there I shall plant a vineyard, which will furnish exquisite grapes that I can sell for wine-making in quant.i.ties sufficient to bring me in twelve thousand francs a year. This means a revenue of eighteen thousand francs annually. And then, the walnut-tree you see there--I can utilize it to the tune of two thousand francs a year.” ”How?” ”Ah! that is my secret. So we get a total of twenty thousand francs a year, which I shall gain by the refusal of my _Vautrin_.”

This was brave talk on the part of the obstacle-breaker, as he loved to call himself. 'Twas also the bravest temper he could a.s.sume in face of the outside world. To Madame Hanska he revealed more the cankering disappointment, just as he had a twelvemonth previously, after the mishap of the _School for Husbands and Wives_. He had fresh thoughts of leaving France, which being, for the nonce, a bear-garden, he said, he detested, and of going away to America, perhaps to Brazil, where he should soon grow rich. He even told her she might next hear from him at Havre or Ma.r.s.eilles, just as he was on the point of embarking for the other side of the Atlantic. He had been reading Fenimore Cooper again; and the descriptions given by this painter of Nature always aroused his roaming instincts. He envied especially Cooper's power and skill in reproducing the details of a landscape. Once, in a pastry-cook's shop that he had entered with Gozlan to devour a plate of macaroni, he brandished a book of Cooper's, which he had been carrying under his arm, while he recounted his fruitless efforts to get experts in botany to tell him how to describe the differences between certain gra.s.ses that he wanted to distinguish appropriately in his fiction. An English girl who had served him in the shop listened open-mouthed to the great man, whose name had been uttered by Gozlan; and, when the moment came for settling, marked her appreciation of what she had heard and seen by charging him nothing for the macaroni. Balzac, not to be outdone in generosity, made her a gift of his copy of Cooper, expressing his regret that he had not one of his own novels with him that he might have offered her instead.

No account of this macaroni feast figures in his almost daily letters at this time despatched to Madame Hanska. To her, if he mentioned his diet, its meagreness was emphasized rather. Being in one of his chronic hard-up crises, he excused himself for the intervals that had occurred between some of his previous epistles on the ground of having no ready money for the postage--the rates for Russia, it is true, were high; and he spoke of buying a bit of dry bread on the boulevards, or of intending to beg from Rothschild; then flourished his big debt at the end, quoting fantastic sums, variable as the barometer, which would oblige him sooner or later, notwithstanding his constant devotion to the Countess, whom he loved more than he loved G.o.d, to barter himself away to some agreeable young woman who should be willing to bestow her person upon him, plus a couple of hundred thousand francs. Once or twice there was really a question of his making a match through the good offices of his mother, of whom he none the less said fretfully that she did not think much about him. But, on each occasion, the negotiations fell through--why we do not learn.

Such information, maybe, he reserved for the various dames in Paris whose houses he still frequented. Madame de Girardin had managed to get him back; and some sort of relations had been re-established between him and her husband, mostly business, since Monsieur de Girardin continued to be editor of the _Presse_.

One day, Gozlan met him in the Champs Elysees, just as he had left Delphine's _salon_. He looked chilly and anxious. The chill he attributed to the unheated drawing-room that he had quitted; but it was due mostly to his condition of mind, then much exercised by something of prime importance to him, the finding of a name for a story which he had written but could not christen, in spite of protracted meditation. It was a man's name he wanted--a name unusual, striking, suggestive of the extraordinary nature of the person he had created. ”Why not try the names you see in the street?” said Gozlan incautiously. ”The very thing,” answered Balzac, whose face grew radiant. ”Come along with me. We will seek together.” Realizing too late into what an adventure he had allowed himself to be entangled, Gozlan tried in vain to escape. Protests were of no use. Balzac dragged him off; and, with noses in the air and absorbed gaze, the two men promenaded along the Rue Saint-Honore and a number of other streets, knocking up against the people they met and provoking a good deal of profane language from these latter, who regarded them as a couple of imbeciles. At length, Gozlan, like Columbus' sailors, having more than enough of the tramp, refused to play follow-my-leader any longer; and only after a long palaver was he dragged up one last narrow street dubbed variously the Rue du Bouloi, du Coq Heron, and de la Jussienne throughout its course. Here, suddenly, Balzac stopped dead, and pointed to the word _Marcas_, inscribed over a door. ”That's what I've been looking for,” he cried. ”It exactly suits my man. The person that owns the name ought to be some one out of the common,--an artist, a worker in gold, or something of the kind.” Inquiry proved that the real Marcas was a modest tailor. However, his name was selected, and the initial Z was tacked on to it for the book, Z being by the novelist's interpretation a letter of mystic import.