Part 12 (1/2)
Why did Balzac write his _Monography of the Parisian Press_? Not altogether from a pure motive, one must own. There is too much gall in his language, too much satire in the thought. He was sufficiently acquainted with the inner ring of journalistic life to be able to say truly what were its blemishes; and, without doubt, at the time when he composed the chief of his novels, these had a prejudicial effect on literature as on other phases of activity. But his pamphlet, besides its indiscriminate condemnations, erred in adopting a style which rendered the turning of the tables only too easy. And Jules Janin, whom he had already indisposed by sketching a seeming portrait of him in the _Provincial Great Man in Paris_, came down heavily on the daring satirist in the _Debats_ of the 20th of February 1843. The retort, so he informed Madame Hanska, made him laugh immoderately.
Perhaps; but the laugh must have been somewhat forced--what the French call ”yellow.”
In the _Monography_, men of letters, baptized by the novelist _gendelettres_--one of the few words coined by Balzac which have become naturalized--may be divided into several categories. First, there are the _publicistes_, occupied in scratching the pimples of the body politic. From these pimples they extract a book which is a mystification. Not far removed from the _publicistes_ are the chief managing editors and proprietors general, big wigs who sometimes become prefects, receivers general, or theatrical directors. The type of this cla.s.s is glory's porter, speculation's trumpeter, the electorate's _Bonneau_. He is set in motion by a ballet-dancer, a cantatrice, an actress; in short, he is a brigand-captain, with other brigands under him. And of the latter:--There are the _Premiers Paris_, alias, first tenors. In writing _Premiers Paris_, it is impossible for a man to avoid mental warp and rapid deterioration. In such writing, style would be a misfortune. One must know how to speak jesuitically; and, in order to advance, one must be clever in getting one's ideas to walk on crutches. Those who engage in the trade confess themselves corrupt; like diplomatists, they have as a pension the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, a few librarians.h.i.+ps, even archives.h.i.+ps.
Next to the _Premiers Paris_ come the _Faits Paris_; then the _Camarillists_, other banditti commissioned to distort Parliamentary speeches; then the newspaper Politicians, who have not two ideas in their heads. If appointed under-officials, they would be unable to administer the sweeping of the streets. Consequently, the more incapable a man is, the better he is qualified to become the Grand Lama of a newspaper. Indeed, nothing is more explicable than politics.
It is a game at ninepins.
In addition to its Politicians, the newspaper has its _Attaches_. The _Attaches_ of the Republican party are watched very closely. One day two Republicans meet, and the first says to the second: ”You have sold yourself; people find you are getting fatter.” Whence it follows that any paper knowing its trade will have only exceedingly thin _Attaches_; otherwise your _Attache_ will be a mere detached _Attache_, that is to say, a sort of paid spy, who is mostly a professor of rhetoric or philosophy. He will dine at all tables, with mission to attack political leaders; he runs in and out of newspaper offices, like a dog seeking his master; and, when he has bitten sharply, he becomes the professor of a fantastic science, the private secretary of some cabinet, or else consul-general.
Afterwards come the _gendelettre_ pamphleteers. According to the author of the _Monography_, the pamphlet is the brochure masterpiece; and he himself is its most ill.u.s.trious exponent. The Abbe de Lamennais does not know how to speak to the proletariat. He is not Spartacus enough, not Marat enough, not Calvin enough; he does not understand how to storm the positions of the ign.o.ble bourgeoisie at present in power.
Following on are the _gendelettre-vulgarisateurs_, who have invented Germany. The type of this cla.s.s is appointed professor in the College de France. He marches at the head of the Nothingologues; he is the almighty king of the Sorbonne. Such people are the skin parasites of France. The Nothingologue is ordinarily _mon.o.bible_;[*] and, as the bourgeoisie are essentially lacking in intelligence, they are infatuated with him. The _Mon.o.bible_ becomes a director of ca.n.a.ls, railways, the defender of negroes, or else the advocate of slavery; in a word, the Nothingologue is an important man, quite as the convinced _gendelettre_, who reserves to himself the Council of State, and as the sceptic _gendelettre_, who becomes Master of Requests or Governor of the Marquisas Isles.
[*] In Balzac's use of the word: A man who has written only one book and boasts of it always.
Replying to this diatribe, with its medley of shrewdness and exaggeration, Janin pointed out that it insulted Quinet, professor at the College de France; Sainte-Beuve, the poet, novelist, and critic, the historian of Port-Royal; Philarete Chasles, professor of Foreign Literature; Loeve Weimars, Consul at Bagdad; not to speak of Planche, Berlioz, Michel and Chevalier; and that it came amiss from a man who had lived and still lived on newspapers; who himself had been the chief managing editor, tenor, Jack-of-all-trades, canard-seller, camarillist, politician, premier-Paris, fait-Paris, _detache-attache_, pamphleteer, translator, critic, euphuist, bravo, incense-bearer, guerillero, angler, humbug, and even, what was more serious, the banker of a paper of which he was the only, unique, and perpetual _gendelettre_, and which, so admirably written, cleverly conducted, and signed with so great a name, did not live six months.
Within a very few years, Janin was to bury the hatchet of polemics beside Balzac's grave, and, forgetting the soreness generated in him by the _Monography of the Press_ to const.i.tute himself the dead author's apologist.
Besides his continuation of Lucien de Rubempre's story in the _Splendour and Wretchedness of Courtezans_, Balzac published, in the year 1843, two complete novels, viz. _Honorine_, and _The Muse of the County_, and a portion of an historical study on Catherine de Medici.
This last work, to which the _Calvinist Martyr_ belongs, was undertaken with the idea of composing, as he said, a retrospective history of France treated clairvoyantly, and, as the fragment shows, with his peculiar bias towards despotism. In the experiment made with _Catherine de Medici_, he started out thinking to justify and rehabilitate her memory. Instead, he found himself obliged to exhibit her committing the worst actions imaginable; and, his conclusions not concording with his premises, he abandoned further incursions into the past. History is a dangerous ground for a doctrinaire to investigate.
The former of the two novels is mainly psychological. The wife of a Count Octave, having quitted her husband for another, has repented of her fault and separated from her lover, but, through shamefastness, will not return to her husband. She seeks to gain a livelihood by flower-making; and her husband, who still loves her and is full of forgiveness, helps her secretly to obtain orders. At length, by the good offices of a secretary and the latter's uncle, a priest, he pleads with his wife more efficaciously, and induces her to return to him, yet without her pardoning herself; and she dies in giving birth to a child, dies because she wishes, rather from wounded pride, it would appear, than on account of her husband, to whose affection she is strangely insensible. The heroine is not particularly interesting with her morbidness and hysterical posing; she probably stands for one of Balzac's principles, and his principles are the most tedious thing about him.
With the _Muse of the County_, which the author declared to be Constant's _Adolphe_ treated realistically, we are back in the truer Balzacian manner. Dinah de la Baudraye--a Sancerre Catherine de Vivonne--married to an apology for a man, is human flesh and blood; and her love for the journalist Etienne Lousteau is natural, though culpable. Indeed, her subsequent devotion to this shallow egotist is not without greatness. Here the novelist, as much by his wit as by his denouement, gives perhaps the best practical condemnation of adultery.
”Bah!” says the little de la Baudraye, ”do you call it vengeance, because the Duke of Bracciano will kill his wife for putting him into a cage and showing herself to him in her lover's arms. Our tribunals and society are much more cruel.”
”In what?” asked Lousteau.
”In letting the woman live with a slender allowance. Every one turns away from her. She has neither dress nor consideration, two things which are everything to a woman.”
”But she has happiness,” replied Madame de la Baudraye grandly.
”No!” replied the husband, lighting his candle to go to bed; ”for she has a lover.”
Dinah's punishment is of this kind. Persuaded at length to go back to the house of her husband, who had been made a peer of France and accepts Lousteau's children with her, she lives to see her former lover and father of her children sink so low that she must despise him, while still occasionally tempted to yield to his caresses.
When Alexandre Dumas, the younger, was received into the French Academy in 1875, the Count d'Haussonville, who welcomed him, a.s.serted that the elder Dumas, like Balzac, Beranger, de Lamennais and others, had preferred to remain an outsider. In the case of Balzac, the Count was mistaken. The so-called preference was Hobson's choice. He stayed outside only because he could not get in. Between 1839 and 1849, he made several attempts to secure the promise of a number of votes sufficient to elect him. Having stood aside at the earlier date in favour of Victor Hugo, who was admitted in 1841, he thought he might count on a reciprocal service from the poet. And, on Bonald's death in the same year, he asked him, during the visit to Les Jardies, to use his influence with his colleagues in the Academy. ”Hugo promised but little,” says Gozlan; and Balzac had to wait for a better opportunity.
This happened at the end of 1843, when Campenon died, and a vacancy occurred which he might reasonably claim to fill. Encouraged at present by Hugo and Charles Nodier, he began the round of visits required by Academy etiquette; but soon discovered that the members whose votes he solicited did not consider him rich enough. He therefore withdrew from the list of candidates, writing to Nodier that, if he could not succeed in entering the Academy while in honourable poverty, he would never present himself at the moment when prosperity should have bestowed her favours on him.
And, so far as personal solicitation was concerned, he never did.
Though not abandoning his desire of belonging to the Forty, and esteeming rightly that the value of his work ent.i.tled him to a place among them, he felt after this rebuff that, if a fresh proposal were made, it should come from the other side. He might have done more to provoke it had not Madame Hanska been against his taking any further action in the matter, however indirect. Maybe she realized better than he did the uselessness of his candidature. The enemies he had in the Academy and its entourage were too powerful for his claims to be considered. Many years afterwards, Victor Hugo related that the novelist put himself forward for the vacancy left by Ballanche's death at the end of 1847, and apropos added the following anecdote.
”I was driving,” he said, ”down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, when in front of the Church I perceived Monsieur de Balzac, who beckoned to me to stop. I was going to get out of the carriage, but he prevented me, and said: 'I was just coming to see you. You know I am on the list for the Academy.' 'Really!' 'Yes. What do you think of my chances?'
'You are too late, I fear. You will get only my vote.' 'It is your vote especially I want.' 'Are you quite in earnest?' 'Quite.' Balzac quitted me. The election was virtually decided. For political motives.
The candidature of Monsieur Vatout had a majority of supporters. I tried to canva.s.s for Balzac, but met with no success. It vexed me to think that a man of Balzac's calibre should have only one vote, and I reflected that if I could obtain a second one, I might create some change of opinion. How was I to gain it? On the election day I was sitting beside the excellent Pongerville, one of the best of men. I asked him point blank, 'For whom are you voting?' 'For Vatout, as you know.' 'I know it so little that I ask you to vote for Balzac.'
'Impossible!' 'Why?' 'Because my bulletin is ready. See.' 'Oh! that makes no matter.' And on two bits of paper I wrote in my best hand: 'Balzac.' 'Well!' quoth Pongerville; 'well! you will see.' The apparitor who was collecting the votes approached us. I handed him one of the bulletins I had prepared. Pongerville, in his turn, stretched out his hand to put Vatout's name in the urn; but, with a friendly tap on his fingers, I caused his paper to flutter to the floor. He looked, appeared irresolute for a moment; and, as I presented him with the second bulletin, on which Balzac's name was inscribed, he smiled, took it, and gave it with good grace. And that is how Honore de Balzac had two votes in his favour at the Academy.”
This story is inexact chronologically. Balzac was not a candidate in 1847-48, when Monsieur Vatout was chosen, but at two later elections, those of the 11th and 18th of January 1849. In each of these he obtained two votes; and since the second election was to fill the chair of Monsieur Vatout, who died after occupying it during a twelvemonth, it would seem that Victor Hugo, deceived by his memory, confused the two events. As for the conversation with Balzac, it probably refers to the candidature which the novelist did begin in 1844; and either Hugo's age in 1877, when he told the story, or his capacity for embellis.h.i.+ng was responsible for the interview being tacked on to the election incident of 1849.