Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings/Chapter XVII

by Mary F. Sandars

1850 AND AFTER

Balzac's ill-health—Theophile Gautier and Victor Hugo—Balzac's grief about the unfinished "Comedie Humaine"—His interview with the doctor—Victor Hugo's account of his death-bed—Balzac's death and funeral—Life afterwards in the Rue Fortunee—Reckless extravagance—House rifled at Madame de Balzac's death—Fate of Balzac's MSS.—His merits as a writer.

When Balzac's friends came to visit him in the Rue Fortunee, they were much shocked by the change in his appearance. His breathing was short, his speech jerky, and his sight so bad that he was unable to distinguish objects clearly. Nevertheless, as Gautier says,^[1] every one felt such intense confidence in his wonderful constitution that it seemed impossible to think of a probably fatal result to his malady. Balzac himself, optimistic as ever, clung persistently to his hope of speedy recovery. His fame was now at its zenith, the series entitled "Les Parents Pauvres" had awakened the utmost enthusiasm; and the elite of the Parisian world were eager to flock to the Rue Fortunee to stare at the curiosities collected there, and to make the acquaintance of Balzac's rich and distinguished Russian wife.

However, in his native country, Balzac was destined never to receive a full guerdon of adulation and admiration; for though he was visited by a few friends, the doctors insisted on keeping him otherwise in the strictest retirement.

Theophile Gautier relates that he went to the Rue Fortunee to say good-bye to his friend before starting for Italy, and, though disappointed not to see him, was relieved about his health when told that he was out driving. However, a little later, a letter was brought to Gautier which had been dictated by Balzac to his wife, in which he explained that he had only gone to the Customhouse to get out some luggage, and had done this against the express orders of his doctors. However, he spoke cheerfully of his health, saying that he was feeling better, and that the next day the doctors intended to attack the chronic malady from which he was suffering. For two months at least he expected to be kept like a mummy, and not to be allowed to speak or to move; but there were great hopes of his ultimate recovery. If Gautier came again, he hoped for a letter beforehand naming the day and hour, that he might certainly be at home; as in the solitude to which he was doomed by the doctors, his friend's affection seemed to him more precious than ever. All this was written in Madame de Balzac's handwriting, and under it Balzac had scrawled: "I can neither read nor write!"^[2] Gautier left for Italy soon after this, and he never saw his friend again. He read the news of Balzac's death in a newspaper when he was at Venice, taking an ice at the Cafe Florian, in the Piazza of St. Mark; and so terrible was the shock, that he nearly fell from his seat. He tells us that he felt for the moment unchristian indignation and revolt, when he thought of the octogenarian idiots he had seen that morning at the asylum on the island of San Servolo, and then of Balzac cut off in his prime; but he checked himself, for he remembered that all souls are equal in the sight of God.

Victor Hugo also visited the invalid, and says that even a month before his death he was perfectly confident about his recovery, and was gay and full of laughter, discussing politics, stating his own legitimist views with decision, and accusing his visitor of being a demagogue. He said: "I have M. de Beaujon's house without the garden, but I am owner of the gallery leading to the little church at the corner of the street. A door on my staircase leads into the church. One turn of the key, and I am at Mass. I care more for the gallery than for the garden."^[3]

When Victor Hugo got up to go, Balzac accompanied him with difficulty to this staircase, to point out the precious door; and called to his wife, "Mind you show Hugo all my pictures." Though Balzac does not appear to have been very intimate with the great romantic poet in former years, he seems to have found special pleasure in his society at this time. Hugo was at the seaside when Balzac next sent for him. He hurried back,^[4] however, at the urgent summons, and found the dying man stretched on a sofa covered with red and gold brocade. Balzac tried to rise, but could not; his face was purple, and his eyes alone had life in them. Now that happiness in his married life had failed him, his mind had reverted to the yet unfinished "Comedie Humaine"; and he talked long and sadly of projected herculean labours, and of the fate of his still unpublished works. "Although my wife has more brains than I, who will support her in her solitude, she whom I have accustomed to so much love?" "Certainly," Victor Hugo remarks drily, "she was crying a great deal."

Nevertheless, though Balzac did at last realise his dangerous state, he had no idea that his end was approaching so near, and he still hoped to be able to add a few more stones to the edifice of the "Comedie Humaine," that great work, which was now again the principal object of his life, the one bright vision in a world of disappointment. In August, however, an agonising suspicion began for the first time to visit him momentarily, a terrible fear to assail him. What if there were not time after all? What if the creations which floated through his mind while he lay suffering and helpless, were never destined to be put into shape? What if his opportunity for work on earth were really over? It was a horrible idea; a fancy, he told himself, born only of weakness. Destiny must intend him to finish his appointed task. Robbed of everything else he had longed for, that one consolation surely remained. He would ask the doctor, would be content with no vague and soothing generalities, but would insist on knowing the exact truth. It could not—ah, it could not be as black as the nightmares of his imagination!

He approached the subject cautiously on the doctor's next visit.^[5] Perhaps, he said, he had after all never realised sufficiently the acuteness of his malady. He certainly felt terribly ill, and knew that he was losing ground; while, in spite of all his efforts, he was unable to eat anything. His duty required that he should bequeath a certain legacy to the public, and he had calculated carefully, and had discovered that he would be able in six months to accomplish his task. Could the doctor promise him that length of time? There was no answer to this searching question, but a shake of the head from the pitying doctor. "Ah," cried Balzac sorrowfully, "I see quite well that you will not allow me six months. . . . Well, at any rate, you will at least give me six weeks? . . . Six weeks with fever is an eternity. Hours are like days . . . and then the nights are not lost." Again the doctor shook his head, and Balzac once more lowered his claims for a vestige of life. "I have courage to submit," he said proudly; "but six days . . . you will certainly give me that? I shall then be able to write down hasty plans that my friends may be able to finish, shall tear up bad pages and improve good ones, and shall glance rapidly through the fifty volumes I have already written. Human will can do miracles." Balzac pleaded pathetically, almost as though he thought his interlocutor could grant the boon of longer life if he willed to do so. He had aged ten years since the beginning of the interview, and he had now no voice left to speak, and the doctor hardly any voice for answering. The latter managed, however, to tell his patient that everything must be done to-day, because in all probability to-morrow would not exist for him; and Balzac cried with horror, "I have then only six hours!" fell back on his pillows, and spoke no more.

He died the next day, and Victor Hugo gives us one more glimpse of him.^[6] The poet was told by his wife, who had visited Madame de Balzac during the day, that Balzac's last hour had come; and directly after dinner he took a cab and drove rapidly to the Rue Fortunee. "I rang. It was moonlight, occasionally veiled by clouds. The street was deserted. No one came. I rang a second time. The door was opened. A servant appeared with a candle. 'What does Monsieur want?' she said. She was crying.

"I gave my name. I was shown into the room on the ground floor. On a pedestal opposite the fireplace was the colossal bust of Balzac by David. In the middle of the salon, on a handsome oval table, which had for legs six gilded statuettes of great beauty, a wax candle was burning. Another woman came in crying, and said: 'He is dying. Madame has gone to her own rooms. The doctors gave him up yesterday.' After going into medical details, the woman continued: 'The night was bad. This morning at nine o'clock Monsieur spoke no more. Madame sent for a priest. The priest came, and administered extreme unction. Monsieur made a sign to show that he understood. An hour afterwards he pressed the hand of his sister, Madame Surville. Since eleven o'clock the death rattle has been in his throat, and he can see nothing. He will not last out the night. If you wish it, Monsieur, I will call M. Surville, who has not yet gone to bed.'

"The woman left me. I waited several minutes. The candle hardly lighted up the splendid furniture of the salon, and the magnificent paintings by Porbus and Holbein which were hanging on the walls. The marble bust showed faintly in the obscurity, like the spectre of a dying man. A corpse-like odour filled the house.

"M. Surville came in, and confirmed all that the servant had told me. I asked to see M. de Balzac.

"We crossed a corridor, went up a staircase covered with a red carpet and crowded with artistic objects—vases, statues, pictures, and stands with enamels on them. Then we came to another passage, and I saw an open door. I heard the sound of difficult, rattling breathing. I entered Balzac's room.

"The bedstead was in the centre of the room. It was of mahogany, and across the foot and at the head were beams provided with straps for moving the sick man. M. de Balzac was in this bed, his head resting on a heap of pillows, to which the red damask sofa cushions had been added. His face was purple, almost black, and was inclined to the right. He was unshaved, his grey hair was cut short, and his eyes open and fixed. I saw his profile, and it was like that of the Emperor Napoleon.

"An old woman, the nurse, and a servant, stood beside the bed. A candle was burning on a table behind the head of the bed, another on a chest of drawers near the door. A silver vase was on the stand near the bed. The women and man were silent with a kind of terror, as they listened to the rattling breathing of the dying man.

"The candle at the head of the bed lit up brilliantly the portrait of a young man, fresh-coloured and smiling, which was hanging near the fireplace. . . .

"I lifted the coverlet and took Balzac's hand. It was covered with perspiration. I pressed it. He did not respond to the pressure. . . .

"I went downstairs again, carrying in my mind the memory of that livid face, and, crossing the drawing-room, I looked again at the bust—immovable, impassive, proud, and smiling faintly, and I compared death with immortality."

Balzac died that night, Sunday, August 17th, 1850, at half-past eleven, at the age of fifty-one.

The dying man's almost complete isolation is strange, and the servant's news that M. Surville had not yet gone to bed has a callous ring about it. Perhaps, however, the doctors had told Madame de Balzac and Madame Surville that Balzac was unconscious, and they had therefore withdrawn, utterly exhausted by the fatigues of the night before. In any case, it seems sad, though possibly of no moment to the dying man, that several of his nearest relations should have deserted him before the breath had left his body. Our respect for the elder Madame de Balzac is decidedly raised, because, though there had occasionally been disagreements between her and her son, the true mother feeling asserted itself at the last, and she alone watched with the paid attendants till the end came.

However, some one was busy about the arrangements, as Balzac's portrait was taken by Giraud directly after his death, and a cast was made of his beautifully-shaped hand. His body was taken into the Beaujon Chapel before burial, so that he passed for the last time, as Victor Hugo remarks, through that door, the key of which was more precious to him than all the beautiful gardens which had belonged to the old Farmer-General.

The funeral service was held on Wednesday, August 20th, at the Church of Sainte Philippe du Roule. The rain was descending in torrents, but the procession, followed by a large crowd, walked the whole way across Paris to the Cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise, where the interment took place. The pall-bearers were Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Monsieur Baroche, and Sainte-Beuve. At the grave Victor Hugo spoke, finishing with the words: "No, it is not the Unknown to him. I have said this before, and I shall never tire of repeating it: it is not darkness to him, it is Light! It is not the end, but the beginning; not nothingness, but eternity! Is not this the truth, I ask you who listen to me? Such coffins proclaim immortality. In the presence of certain illustrious dead, we understand the divine destiny of that intellect which has traversed earth to suffer and to be purified. Do we not say to ourselves here, to-day, that it is impossible for a great genius in this life to be other than a great spirit after death?"^[7]

The Cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise had been one of Balzac's favourite haunts in the old half-starved days of the Rue Lesdiguieres. "Here I am back from Pere-la-Chaise," he wrote to his sister in 1820,^[8] "and I have brought with me some good big inspiring reflections. Decidedly, the only fine epitaphs are these: La Fontaine, Messena, Moliere, a single name, which tells all and makes one dream." Probably Madame Surville remembered these words and repeated them to Madame Honore de Balzac, for the monument erected to Balzac is a broken column with his name inscribed on it.

The fortunes of the inhabitants of the Rue Fortunee were not happy after Balzac's death. Madame Honore de Balzac's contemporaries considered that she as not really as overwhelmed with sorrow at her husband's death as she appeared to be, and that when she wrote heartbroken letters, she slightly exaggerated the real state of her feelings; but she assumed gallantly the burdens laid upon her by the state of pecuniary embarrassment in which her husband died. If Balzac had lived longer and had been able to work steadily, there is little doubt that he would in a few years have become a free man, as the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul tells us^[9] that in the years between 1841 and 1847, after which date his productions became very rare, he had enormously diminished the sum he owed.

Under Balzac's will his widow might have refused to acknowledge any liability for his debts, but she set to work bravely, with the aid of MM. Dutacq and Fessart, to make as much money as she could out of Balzac's published works, and to bring before the public those that were still unpublished. In this way, "Mercadet le Faiseur" was acted a year after Balzac's death, and "Les Petits Bourgeois" and "Le Depute d'Arcis" were published, the latter being finished, according to Balzac's wish, by Charles Rabou. "Les Paysans," which was to have filled eight volumes, and of which, as we have already seen, only a few chapters were written, presented great difficulty; but at last Madame de Balzac, aided by Champfleury and by Charles Rabou, managed to give some consistency to the fragment, and it appeared in the Revue de Paris in April, May and June, 1855. Unfortunately, however, no information was given as to the unfinished state in which it had been left by Balzac, and therefore no explanation was offered of the insufficiency of the denouement, and the inadequacy of the last chapters. Madame de Balzac worked hard, and long before her death in April, 1882, the whole of Balzac's debts were paid off.

This was most creditable to her; but side by side with her admirable conduct in this respect, she seems to have either actively abetted, or at any rate acquiesced in mad extravagance on the part of Madame Georges Mniszech, who with her husband, had come to live in the Rue Fortunee after Balzac's death. Perhaps Madame de Balzac was too busy with her literary and business arrangements, to pay attention to what was happening, or possibly maternal devotion prevented her from denying her beloved daughter anything she craved for. At all events the results of her supineness were lamentable, especially as M. Georges Mniszech was not capable of exercising any restraint on his wife; he being for some years before his death in 1881, in the most delicate state of health, both mental and physical.

Madame Georges Mniszech—after years of the wild Russian steppes, suddenly plunged into the fascinations of shopping in Paris, and left to her own devices—seems to have shown senseless folly in her expenditure. Additions were made to the house in the Rue Fortunee, though Balzac's rooms were left untouched; and the Chateau de Beauregard, at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, was bought as a country residence. Madame de Balzac and her daughter were, however, rich, and could quite afford to live comfortably, and even luxuriously. Their ruin seems to have been brought about by reckless expenditure on things which were of absolutely no use, and were only bought for the amusement of buying. Several sales of pictures took place, and on February 9th, 1882,^[10] the Chateau de Beauregard and its contents were sold by order of the President of the Civil Tribunal of Corbeil.

Madame de Balzac died in April of the same year; and the very day of her funeral, Madame Georges Mniszech's creditors pushed her and her maid into the street, and rifled the house in the Rue Fortunee. The booty was transported to the auction-room known as l'Hotel Drouot, and there a sale was held by order of justice of Balzac's library, his Buhl cabinets, and some of his MSS., including that of "Eugenie Grandet," which had been given to Madame Hanska on December 24th, 1833. During the shameless pillage of the house, the vultures who ransacked it found evidence of the most reckless, the most imbecile extravagance, proof positive that the wisdom, prudence, even the principles of poor Balzac's paragon the Countess Anna, had been routed by the glitter and glamour of the holiday city. One room was filled with boxes containing hats, and in another, piles of costly silks were heaped, untouched since their arrival from the fashionable haberdasher or silk mercer.^[11] Balzac's treasures, the curiosities he had amassed with so much trouble, the pictures of which he had been so proud, were ruthlessly seized; while precious manuscripts and letters, which would perhaps have brought in a hundred thousand francs if they had been put up for sale, were thrown out of the window by the exasperated throng.

The Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul rescued a page of the first of Balzac's letters to Madame Hanska which has been found up to this time, from a cobbler whose stall was opposite the house. The cobbler, when once started on the quest by the Vicomte, discovered many other letters, sketches, and unfinished novels, which had been picked up by the neighbouring shopkeepers, and were only saved in the nick of time from being used to wrap up pounds of butter, or to make bags for other household commodities. It was an exciting chase, requiring patience and ingenuity; and Balzac's former cook held out for years, before she would consent to sell a packet of letters which the Vicomte coveted specially. Sometimes incidentally there were delightful surprises, and occasionally real joys; as on the occasion when the searcher found at a distant grocer's shop, the middle of the letter, of which the first page had been saved from destruction at the hands of the cobbler.

The bitter dislike Balzac had evoked in the literary world, and his occasional obscurity and clumsy style, have militated very strongly against his popularity in his native land, where perfection in the manipulation of words is of supreme importance in a writer. While in France, however, Balzac's undoubted faults have partially blinded his countrymen to his consummate merits as a writer, and they have been strangely slow in acknowledging the debt of gratitude they owe to him, the rest or the world has already begun to realise his power of creating type, his wonderful imagination, his versatility, and his extraordinary impartiality; and to accord him his rightful place among the Immortals. Nevertheless we are still too near to him, to be able to focus him clearly, and to estimate aright his peculiar place in literature, or the full scope of his genius.

Some very great authorities claim him as a member of the Romantic School; while, on the other hand, he is often looked on—apparently with more reason—as the first of the Realists. His object in writing was, he tells us, to represent mankind as he saw it, to be the historian of the nineteenth century, and to classify human beings as Buffon had classified animals. No doubt this scheme was very imperfectly carried out: certainly the powerful mind of Balzac with its wealth of imagination, often projected itself into his puppets, so that many of his characters are not the ordinary men and women he wished to portray, but are inspired by the fire of genius. This fact does not, however, alter the aim of their creator. He intended to be merely a chronicler, a scientific observer of things around him; and though his works are tinged to a large extent with the Romanticism of the powerful school in vogue in his day, this object marks him plainly as the forerunner of the Realists, the founder of a totally new conception of the scope and range of the novel.

Theophile Gautier's words should prove to the modern reader, the debt of gratitude he owes to the inaugurator of a completely original system of fiction. Speaking of Balzac's impecunious and ambitious heroes, Gautier cries:^[12] "O Corinne, who on the Cape of Messina allowest thy snowy arm to hang over the ivory lyre, while the son of Albion, clothed in a superb new cloak, and with elegant boots perfectly polished, gazes at thee, and listens in an elegant pose: Corinne, what wouldst thou have said to such heroes? They have nevertheless one little quality which Oswald lacked—they live, and with so strong a life that we have met them a thousand times." Balzac's own words, speaking of his play "La Maratre,"^[13] might also serve for a motto for his novels: "I dream of a drawing-room comedy, where everything is calm, quiet, and amiable. The men play whist placidly by the light of candles with little green shades. The women talk and laugh while they work at their embroidery. They all take tea together. To sum up, everything announces good order and harmony. Well, underneath are agitating passions; the drama stirs, it prepares itself secretly, till it blazes forth like the flame of a conflagration."

Balzac is essentially a Realist, in his use of the novel as a vehicle for the description of real struggling life; with money and position, the principal desiderata of modern civilisation, powerful as determining factors in the moulding of men's actions. Life, as portrayed in the old-fashioned novel, where the hero and heroine and their love affairs were the sole focus of attraction, and the other characters were grouped round in subordinate positions, while every one declined in interest as he advanced in years, was not life as Balzac saw it; and he pictures his hero's agony at not having a penny with which to pay his cab fare, with as much graphic intensity, as he tells of the same young gentleman's despair when his inamorata is indifferent to him.

Nevertheless, if we compare Balzac with the depressing writers of the so-called Realist School, we shall find that his conception of life differed greatly from theirs. In Flaubert's melancholy books, even perfection of style and painstaking truth of detail do not dissipate the deadly dulness of an unreal world, where no one rises above the low level of self-gratification; while Zola considers man so completely in his physical aspect, that he ends by degrading him below the animal world. Balzac, on the other hand, believed in purity, in devotion, and unselfishness; though he did not think that these qualities are triumphant on earth. In his pessimistic view of life, virtue generally suffered, and had no power against vice; but he knew that it existed, and he believed in a future where wrongs would be righted.

He is a poet and idealist, and thus akin to the Romanticists—though he lacks their perfection of diction—in his feeling for the beauty of atmospheric effects, and also in his enthusiasm for music, which he loved passionately. The description of Montriveau's emotions when the cloistered Duchesse de Langeais plays in the church of Spain—and Balzac tells us that the sound of the organ bears the mind through a thousand scenes of life to the infinite which parts earth from heaven, and that through its tones the luminous attributes of God Himself pierce and radiate—is totally unrealistic both in moral tone, and in its accentuation of the power of the higher emotions. His intense admiration for Sir Walter Scott—an admiration which he expresses time after time in his letters—is a further proof of his sympathy for the school of thought, which glorified the picturesque Middle Ages above every other period of history.

Whichever school, however, may claim Balzac, it is an undisputed fact that he possessed in a high degree that greatest of all attributes—the power of creation of type. Le Pere Goriot, Balthazar Claes, Old Grandet, La Cousine Bette, Le Cousin Pons, and many other people in Balzac's pages, are creations; they live and are immortal. He has endowed them with more splendid and superabundant vitality than is accorded to ordinary humanity.

To do this, something is required beyond keenness of vision. The gift of seeing vividly—as under a dazzling light—to the very kernel of the object stripped of supernumerary circumstance, is indeed necessary for the portrayal of character; but although Dickens, as well as Balzac, possessed this faculty to a high degree, his people are often qualities personified, or impossible monsters. For the successful creation of type, that power in which Balzac is akin to Shakespeare, it is necessary that a coherent whole shall be formed, and that the full scope of a character shall be realised, with its infinite possibilities on its own plane, and its impotence to move a hairsbreadth on to another. The mysterious law which governs the conduct of life must be fathomed; so that, though there may be unexpected and surprising developments, the artistic sense and intuition which we possess shall not be outraged, and we shall still recognise the abiding personality under everything. Balzac excels in this; and because of this power, and also because—at a time when Byronic literature was in the ascendant, and it was the fashion to think that the quintessence of beauty could be found by diving into the depths of one's own being—he came forward without pose or self-consciousness, as a simple observer of the human race, the world will never cease to owe him a debt of gratitude, and to rank him among her greatest novelists.

Footnotes

1. "Portraits Contemporains: Honore de Balzac," by Theophile Gautier.
2. "Portraits Contemporains: Honore de Balzac," by Theophile Gautier.
3. "Choses Vues," by Victor Hugo.
4. See letter written by Madame Hamelin to the Countess Kisselef quoted in "Histoire des Oeuvres de Balzac," by the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, p. 406.
5. The following account of Balzac's interview with his doctor is taken from an article written by Arsene Houssaye in the Figaro of August 20th, 1883. It is right to add that the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, the great authority on Balzac, throws grave doubts on the accuracy of the story.
6. "Choses Vues, 1850: Mort de Balzac," by Victor Hugo.
7. "Funerailles de Balzac," in "Actes et Paroles," by Victor Hugo.
8. "Correspondance," vol. i. p. 24.
9. "La Genese d'un Roman de Balzac," by the Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.
10. "Life of Balzac," by Frederick Wedmore.
11. "Journal des Goncourts," vol. viii. P. 48.
12. "Portraits Contemporains: Honore de Balzac," by Theophile Gautier.
13. "Historiettes et Souvenirs d'un Homme de Theatre," by H. Hostein.