Part 18 (1/2)

Scribe borrowed largely from the _Comedie Humaine_. His _Sheriff_ libretto for Halevy's music at the Opera Comique in 1839 was a transmogrification of _Master Cornelius_. Balzac's Cornelius is Louis XI's money-lender, who lives with his sister in an old mansion, next to a house with the King's natural daughter, Marie de Sa.s.senage, occupies with her husband, the Comte de Sainte-Vallier. The old money-lender, perceiving that his gold is disappearing, has had four of his apprentices hanged on suspicion. The like fate now threatens Marie's lover, Georges d'Estouteville, who in order to see her more safely, has persuaded Cornelius to let him stay in his dwelling one night.

Marie appeals to the King to spare her lover's life, and Louis, on investigating the matter, discovers that Cornelius is a somnambulist, and has been robbing himself and burying his gold. On being told of this, the old money-lender has no peace of mind, fearing the King will take all his treasure, and ultimately cuts his own throat. In Scribe's parody, for a parody the piece virtually is, the scene is laid in England. John Turnel, the Sheriff of London, is the somnambulist, and he suspects his own daughter and his cook of stealing his money. But, differing from Cornelius, he accepts the situation when the truth is revealed to him under circ.u.mstances that make him as ridiculous as the spectre of Tappington in the _Ingoldsby Legends_; and, as a comic opera generally ends happily, he consents to the marriage of his daughter, Camilla, and of Keat, the cook, with their respective swains.

An English setting was likewise given by Scribe to his play of _Helene_, suggested by Balzac's _Honorine_, which was staged at the Gymnase in 1846. Helene is a young orphan who draws and paints for her living, and has the good fortune to have all her canvases bought at advantageous prices by a rich dealer named Crosby. But suddenly she learns that the dealer is acting in behalf of a certain Lord Clavering, and, fearing some underhand designs, she refuses to keep the money that has been paid her. Smitten by her disinterestedness as well as by her beauty, Lord Clavering would gladly marry her, but is bound by his word plighted to Lord Dunbar's daughter. However, the latter elopes with another n.o.bleman, and Clavering marries Helene.

This pretty theme, developed by the actress Rose Cheri, made a huge hit.

Nearly as great was the actress's success at the same theatre in 1849, when she played the princ.i.p.al role in Clairville's _Madame Marneffe_ a version of _Cousin Bette_, but very much modified, since Bette is eliminated altogether, and Valerie Marneffe, instead of being a depraved creature, is merely a clever woman of the world, who avenges her father's ruin on the Baron Hulot and Crevel, they being mainly responsible for it. When Balzac was at Wierzchownia, on his last visit, he wrote to his mother asking her to go to the theatrical agent's in order to receive his third of the receipts produced by the piece. These author's royalties must have helped his purse considerably.

In the year after the novelist's death, the applauded representation of _Mercadet_, at the Gymnase, stimulated other managers of theatres to go on exploiting his _Comedy_. In September, the _s.h.a.green Skin_, arranged by Judicis, was played at the Ambigu-Comique, with _tableaux_ of almost literal imitation, yet bringing to life again, in the denouement, the chief _dramatis personae_, and making the whole drama a dream.

At the Comedie Francaise, in 1853, Barriere and de Beauplan produced a five-act prose play drawn from the _Lily in the Valley_. The novel was an awkward one to dramatize, there being very few elements in it capable of yielding situations for the stage. So the result was poor.

A better thing was made in 1859 by de Keraniou out of the _Sceaux Ball_. On it he based an agreeable piece ent.i.tled _n.o.blesse Oblige_, with a delicately interpreted love scene in it which met with appreciative audiences at the Odeon.

One more example, that of _Cousin Pons_, may be given to close the list of these adaptation, which are fully treated in Edmond Bire's interesting book dealing with certain aspects of Balzac's life and work. _Cousin Pons_ was staged at the Cluny Theatre in 1873. Alphonse de Launay, the author of the play, keeps to his text fairly well; but he adds a love episode which thrusts the friends.h.i.+p of the two musicians into the second place. Moreover, after the death of Pons, Schmucke lives to inherit his fortune and the Camusots are checkmated.

CHAPTER XVII

CONCLUSION: THE MAN AND HIS PORTRAITS

It may be affirmed, without thereby disparaging the _Comedie Humaine_, that Balzac's personality is even more interesting than his work; and this is a sufficient excuse for returning to it in a last chapter and trying, at the risk of repet.i.tion, to make its presentment completer by way of supplement and summary.

The interest does not arise alone from the contrasts of his foibles, which, forsooth, are nearly always comic--when they are not tragic. We are just as much attracted by the contrasts of his qualities, and by the interplay of the former with the latter--the victories and defeats, the glimpses of immense possibility, the struggles between temperament and environment, all these having a fullness of display rarely found in human nature.

Besides the portraits in painting or sculpture executed of the novelist by Deveria, Boulanger, David d'Angers, and others, some mention of which has already been made, there was one begun by Meissonier, who unfortunately did not finish it. Monsieur Jules Claretie states that the canvas on which it was drawn was subsequently covered by the artist's _Man choosing a Sword_, to-day in the Van Prael collection at Brussels. About Boulanger's picture Theophile Gautier has a good deal to tell us in his article of 1837, published in the _Beaux Arts de la Presse_; and it scarcely agrees with Balzac's condemnation of the portrait as a daub, when he saw the canvas some years later in Russia. Remarking on the difficulty of rendering the novelist's physiognomy, on account of its mobility and strange aspect, Gautier gives it as his opinion that Boulanger succeeded perfectly in seizing the complex expression which seemed to escape all efforts of the brush. The description is a long one; and any one desirous of comparing with each other the impressions received by Balzac's contemporaries who came into close contact with him would do well to read it after this description by Lamartine. In the tenth of his lectures on Literature during the year 1856, the author of _Jocelyn_, speaking of what he had observed, said:--

”His exterior was as uncultivated as his genius. It was the shape of an element: big head, hair scattered over his collar and cheeks like a mane that scissors never trimmed, lips thick, eyes soft but of flame; costume clas.h.i.+ng with every elegance; clothes too small for his colossal body; waistcoat unb.u.t.toned; linen coa.r.s.e; blue stockings; shoes that made holes in the carpet; an appearance as of a schoolboy on holiday, who has grown during the year and whose stature has burst his garments. Such was the man that by himself wrote a whole library about his century, the Walter Scott of France, not the Walter Scott of landscape and adventure, but what is much more prodigious, the Walter Scott of characters, the Dante of the infinite circles of human life, the Moliere of read comedy, less perfect but more fertile than the Moliere of played comedy. Why does not his style equal his conception?

France would then have two Molieres, and the greater would not be he who lived first.”

Returning to the same subject in his hundred and sixth lecture, eight years later, Lamartine continued:--

”He bore his genius so simply that he did not feel it. He was not tall, and, however, the lighting up of his face and the mobility of his body prevented his small stature from being noticed; but this height swayed like his thought. Between the ground and him there appeared to be a certain margin; now, he stooped down to pick up a sheaf of ideas; now, he stood on tiptoe to follow the soaring of his thought into the infinite. He was big, thick-set, square-shouldered-and-hipped. His neck, chest, body, thighs, and limbs were mighty. There was much of the ampleness of Mirabeau, but no heaviness; there was so much soul that this carried that lightly. The weight seemed to give him force and not to take it from him. His short arms gesticulated with ease; he talked as an orator speaks. His voice resounded with the somewhat savage energy of his lungs, but it had neither roughness nor irony nor anger. His legs, on which he waddled a little, carried his bust smartly; his hands, plump and broad, expressed his whole thought by their waving movements. Such was the man in his stalwart frame. But, in front of the face, one forgot the framework. The speaking countenance, from which it was impossible to detach one's gaze, both charmed and fascinated the beholder. His hair floated over the forehead in large locks; his black eyes pierced like arrows blunted by benevolence; they entered yours confidently as if they were friends; his cheeks were full, rosy, and strongly coloured; the nose was well modelled, yet a trifle long; his lips, gracefully limned, ample and raised at the corners; his teeth, unequal, broken, and blackened by cigar-smoke; his head often inclining towards the neck, then proudly raised during speech. But the dominating trait of his face, even more than intelligence, was communicative kindness. He charmed your mind when he spoke, and, when not speaking, he charmed your heart. No pa.s.sion of hatred or envy could have been expressed by this physiognomy; it would have been impossible for him not to be kind. Yet it was not a kindness of indifference or nonchalance, as in the epicurean face of a La Fontaine; it was a loving kindness, intelligent with regard to itself and others, which inspired grat.i.tude and the outpouring of the heart, and defied a person not to love him.

A gay childishness was the characteristic of this figure, a soul on holiday when he laid down his pen to forget himself with his friends.

. . . But, when I saw him some years later, what gravity did that which was serious not inspire in him? what repulsion did his conscience not evince towards evil? What difficult virtues did his apparent joviality not conceal?”

This tribute of an intimate, as generous as that of Hugo and perhaps more sincere, may pa.s.s without comment in so far as it concerns the outer man. On the moral side its exact.i.tude may be questioned, both for what it omits and what it a.s.serts. The omissions are considerable.

The a.s.sertions deal too exclusively with that conduct which people generally exhibit in their most amicable relations with each other.

Balzac's kindness of heart came out in not a few experiences of his life; but deeper than these ephemeral bursts of generosity were selfishnesses that were enormous and persistent. The impulsive energy, the huge boyishness, the appet.i.tes physical and mental that age never trained nor chastened were phenomena that all his friends noted, though the manifestations differed.

Some lines of Gozlan's in his _Balzac in Slippers_, form a good sequel to Werdet's account of the Gargantuan dinner. ”Balzac drank nothing but water,” says Gozlan, but this must have been on Fridays; ”and ate but little meat. On the other hand, he consumed great quant.i.ties of fruit. . . . His lips palpitated, his eyes lit up with happiness, at the sight of a pyramid of pears or fine peaches. Not one remained to go and relate the rout of the others. He devoured them all. He was superb in vegetable Pantagruelism, with his cravat taken off, his s.h.i.+rt unb.u.t.toned at the neck, his fruit-knife in hand, laughing, drinking water, carving into the pulp of a doyenne pear. I should like to add--and talking. But Balzac talked only little. He let others talk, laughed at intervals, silently, in the savage manner of Leather-stocking, or else, he burst out like a bomb, if the sentence pleased him. It needed to be pretty broad, and was never too broad. He melted with pleasure, especially at a silly pun inspired by his wines, which were delicious.”

Another portrait drawn of the novelist by a contemporary, interpreting the inner man, but less flattering to the great delineator of character, is not free from satire and narrowness; but some of the traits it outlines are closely and accurately observed. In his _Histoire du Quarante et Unieme (Academy) Fauteuil_, a.r.s.ene Houssaye wrote: ”Monsieur de Balzac--that haughty rebel who would fain have been a founder, that refined Rabelais who discovered a woman where Rabelais had discovered only a bottle--Monsieur de Balzac dreamed of the gigantic, yet without being an architect of Cyclopean times.

Consequently, when he tried to build his temple of Solomon, he had neither marble nor gold enough to his hand. For his _human comedy_ he often lacked actors, and had to resign himself frequently to making the understudies play. It is the fas.h.i.+on to-day to raise Balzac to the level of the dominating geniuses of the world, such as Homer, Saint Augustine, Shakespeare and Moliere; but for the mind that has accurate vision, how many rocks are overturned on this Enceladus, what staircases are forgotten in his Tower of Babel, as in his Jardies house! Balzac was half a woman, as George Sand was half a man. He had a woman's curiosities, he had also her contradictions. Balzac believed himself religious; but his church was the witches' sabbath, and his priest was not Saint Paul but Swedenborg, if not Mesmer; his Gospel was the conjuror's book, perhaps that of Pope Honorius--Honorius de Balzac. He believed himself a politician, and endeavoured to continue de Maistre; he fancied he was glorifying authority, whereas he realized the perpetual apotheosis of force; his heroes were named indifferently Moses or Attila, Charlemagne or Tamerlane, Ricci, the General of the Jesuits, or Robespierre, the profaner of the sanctuary, Napoleon or Vautrin. The _History of the Thirteen_ will remain as the grandiose and monstrous defence of personal force defying the social.

But will it not remain also, by the side of Hegel's philosophy, as an eloquent codicil to those testaments of individual sovereignty signed by Aristophanes, Montaigne, and Voltaire? He believed himself a spiritualist, and, sublime sawbones, he studied only in the medical amphitheatre. He entered a drawing-room only through the kitchen and the dressing-room. He was always ignorant of that fine saying of Hemsterhuys: 'This world is not a machine but a poem.' He believed himself a painter of manners, and he invented the manners. His women who are so vividly alive, Madame de Langeais or La Torpille, have never been intimate with any other company than that of Monsieur de Balzac. As other great artists, he created his world, a strange world which has consoled and welcomed all the outcasts of the real world, an impossible world which has more than once painted the actual one in its likeness. What charming women of the provinces have since developed into a Eugenie Grandet, a Madame de Mortsauf, a Madame Claes! . . . What was wanting to Balzac in the h.e.l.l of life, whose every spiral he descended, was virginity in love and ingenuousness in poetry. He always lost himself in the difficult places of style; and himself wept over the lack. When he wrote the _Search for the Absolute_, he was in quest of the ideal; but the ideal is that which one had inside one's self, just as love is. The studies of the chemist and alchemist, of the doctor and jurist, do not light the flame of Prometheus.”