The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (65 page)

He had a talent for making every experience a point of departure for another novel, and few people he knew escaped becoming figures in his novels. “I have undertaken the history of a whole society. I have often described my plan in this one sentence: ‘A generation is a drama with four or five thousand outstanding characters.’ That drama is my book.” He did not quite come up to that number, but there are about two thousand characters in the novels and stories that make up his human comedy.

Balzac’s own uneventful life, on a narrow stage, might have seemed meager material for fiction. Oscar Wilde insisted that “Balzac is no more a realist than Holbein was. He created life, he did not copy it.” Born in Tours, a provincial capital in north-central France, to a civil-servant father, from his earliest years he savored a family obsessed with money and status. His father, Bernard-François, had married Laure, the much younger
daughter of a substantial family of cloth merchants, and had received a valuable farm as dowry. The Balzacs tried to acquire social status by adding the unmerited aristocratic “de” to their family name, and in other ways. His eccentric father read widely in Rabelais, Rousseau, and Sterne, and was obsessed with his health. He said he hoped to live to be a hundred and fifty and invested in longevity through the Tontine, a financial scheme by which those who contributed received dividends during their lifetime and the accumulated capital was finally awarded to the last survivor. To protect his investment, Bernard-François drank little wine but lots of milk, swallowed the sap of trees, chewed bark, and retired early after frugal meals.

Fifteen months after Bernard-François’s marriage, Laure gave birth to a son whom she fed at her own breast but who died after twenty-three days. When her second child, Honoré, was born on May 20, 1799, she sent him away to a wet nurse. This was not unusual in the middle classes at the time, but he never forgave her for it. “Who can say how much physical or moral harm was done me by my mother’s coldness? Was I no more than the child of marital duty, my birth a matter of chance …? Put out to nurse in the country, neglected by my family for three years, when I was brought home I counted for so little that people were sorry for me.” At the age of four he was sent off to the Collège de Vendôme, run by the Oratorian Brothers.

Shockingly liberal by the standards of the time, the school defied military conventions by calling boys to class with a bell instead of a drum. Other schools had edifying books read aloud during meals to prevent vagrant thoughts, but the Oratorians actually allowed conversation. Yet, “for the sake of good conduct and discipline, and to preserve the progress made during the year,” the school allowed no holidays. Pupils were punished by striking their knuckles with a leather rod or by imprisonment in an improvised dungeon, six feet by six feet, beneath the stairs in each dormitory. During his six years at the school, Honoré’s mother came to visit him only twice. As an adult Balzac discovered that he had been so promptly sent away to school because his mother was about to bear the illegitimate child of a young officer from a neighboring town. Hoping to stop gossip, or in a show of bravado, Madame Balzac actually persuaded the officer to act as the child’s godfather. This half-brother, Henri, became their mother’s favorite, much to the irritation of Honoré and his sister, Laure, who called themselves “the children of conjugal duty.”

At the fall of Napoleon in 1814, the family moved to Paris. For the next two years Honoré was again shipped off to board while he concluded his studies at the Lycée Charlemagne, without distinction. At his family’s urging he studied law at the Sorbonne and apprenticed as a clerk in a law office. More to his interest were the courses by Guizot and Cousin. The lectures he heard at the Museum of Natural History also left a permanent
mark. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844), the naturalist turned philosopher, expounded the “unity of composition” of all creatures against Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), the founder of comparative anatomy, who saw variety within four types of structure. For all his life Balzac never quite made up his mind between a mystic unity and the infinitude of facts.

Despite family pressure he never found the lawyers’ ways of thought congenial, and his whimsies made him a menace in the staid chambers. “Monsieur Balzac is requested not to come today,” the head clerk once wrote him, “because there is a great deal of work to be done.” Honoré passed the law examinations, but was still determined not to be a lawyer. He had already formed his ambition to be a writer. His mother agreed to give Honoré a chance to prove his writing talent, and out of the father’s modest pension the family would stake him for two years at fifteen hundred francs a year in a spartan attic room in Paris. To fend off the neighbors’ sneers for indulging their son in so erratic a career, they pretended that he had gone away to live with a cousin. Meanwhile Honoré must not be seen in Paris, and must go out only after dark.

During this trial period he wrote an unsuccessful tragedy,
Cromwell
(1819), and numerous other items that he later called “literary hogwash.” Friends counseled that Balzac was plainly not suited for literature, and he feared that they might find him a job. Then he would become “a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack doing its thirty turns a day and eating, drinking and sleeping at fixed hours. I shall be like everyone else. And that’s what they call living, that life at the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again.… I have not yet smelt the flowers of life and I’m in the only season when they blossom.… I’m hungry and nothing is offered to appease my appetite. What do I want?… I want ortolans; for I have only two passions, love and fame, and nothing has happened to satisfy either, and never will.”

Despite the fortunes Balzac eventually earned from his writing, he would never be self-supporting. His appetite for luxuries was insatiable, never limited by his income. Instead of spending his meager garret allowance “sensibly on rent and laundry and food,” “the first thing you did,” his sister, Laure, scolded, “was to buy a mirror in a gilt frame and a picture for your room.” A congenital bankrupt and an obsessive shopper, he was a genius at finding ways to be extravagant.

For the next years his writing frenzy would be occasionally interrupted by an assortment of spectacularly unsuccessful business enterprises. These included a project for cheap pocket editions of French classics, a plunge into worthless railroad stock, an untested new printing process called Fontereotype, an effort to corner the pineapple market, and a get-rich-quick scheme to exploit the heaps of slag from ancient Roman silver mines in Sardinia.

…

Balzac’s love life, too, was full of extravagant hopes and unfulfilled expectations. His first grand passion was Mme. Laure de Berny, a friend of his mother, whom he met in 1822, when she was still married to an older man who was blind and had left her to manage the family estate. The mother of nine children, of whom seven survived, she engaged Balzac to tutor the five who remained at home. Although forty-five, and older than his mother, she became his first tutor in the ways of love. She appealed to the young man of twenty-three both for herself, still warm and attractive, and for the imagined world from which she came—the court of Louis XVI at Versailles, where her mother had been a lady of the bedchamber. Over the next years Mme. de Berny, his Dilecta (Chosen one), remained his mistress, companion, counselor, and editor. When she died in 1836 he was deeply shaken.

By 1832 he had already become friendly with Eveline Hanska, an attractive Polish countess married to the Ukrainian owner of vast estates. She was to be his other grand passion. After her adoring fan letters to which he responded warmly, they arranged a rendezvous in Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where she brought her husband. Balzac reported to his sister, Laure:

His passion for his Eve was reinforced by frequent later rendezvous in the Ukraine, Paris, and elsewhere. They did finally marry in March 1850, just five months before his death, when Balzac was half blind and desperately ill.

Overlapping and in between Balzac’s meetings with these two women were many transient passions. His tastes were ample but not indiscriminate. His closest lifelong friends were his sister, Laure, and Mme. Zulma Carraud, wife of the director of studies at Saint-Cyr, who saw the genius in him, and offered the solace of her household whenever needed. English women, he said, interested him for their whiter skin and their national reticence. There was his liaison with the “Contessa” Frances Lovell, Mme. de Visconti, who finally yielded on the enormous white divan that he had designed especially for her, and the stunning Jane Digby, Lady Ellenborough. He was
tantalized by the Marquise (later Duchess) de Castries who, he said, “let it appear that there was the most noble of harlots concealed within her … that she would become the most ravishing of mistresses by the act of removing her corset”—which she never did, at least not for him.

He seemed always alert for new people, men or women, to put in his novels. And though women were playing a smaller role than men in French public life, he explored the many roles they did play. With no firsthand experience of high politics, high finance, or military command, with scant knowledge even of the landscape of his country, and little acquaintance with peasants, farmers, or workers, he still found enough scenes and characters for his own kind of panorama. As the workshop for his human comedy he set up an elegantly furnished apartment in the Rue Cassini that he hoped would be refuge from his creditors. Attached to the scabbard on a plaster statuette of his idol Napoleon a paper read, “What he did not achieve by the sword I shall achieve by the pen. Honoré de Balzac.” He never lacked for grandiose metaphors. As “the Secretary of Society,” he aimed “to compete with the Civil Register.” “You can’t imagine what La Comédie humaine is! To compare literature with architecture, it’s more immense than the Cathedral of Bourges.”

But when could he garner the experience needed for his fourteen or sixteen hours a day writing at his desk? His routine was regular and relentless, as he described it in March 1833:

He followed this schedule with occasional interruptions, terminated only by his fatal illness. Driven by “the terrible demon of work, seeking words out of the silence, ideas out of the night,” he dressed for his work as if for a ritual—in his famous white monkish robe, with a belt of Venetian gold, from which hung a paper knife, scissors, and a gold penknife, and wearing Moroccan slippers. We like to imagine that he felt the joy of creation, to match his pride in the product. But he never ceased to resent the pressure to produce. “To be for ever creating!” he complained. “Even God only created for six days!”

He continually blamed the pressure on his need for money. After the failure of his play
Quinola
in 1842 he declared, “I’m going to do what I’ve
been doing for the past fifteen years, to bury myself in the depths of work and creation, which has the advantage that its pangs cause you to forget other sufferings. I have to earn 13,000 francs by my pen during the next month.” His lawyer insisted that he sell Les Jardies, the property outside Paris on the route to Versailles, which he had dreamed of fitting out as a retreat for himself and his beloved Eve Hanska. Balzac’s fancy had transformed it into something unprecedented in France, a profitable pineapple plantation under glass, and he could not bear parting with this imagined Eden.

To hide from his creditors he changed residences and lodged under assumed names. Though he was not generously paid by the publishers, who were always pressing him for more, he still could have lived comfortably on his fifteen thousand francs a year from his books, if he had not suffered from chronic extravagance. Bills survive for his order of fifty-eight pairs of gloves at one time, with comparable bills from his fashionable tailor and his jeweler. Notorious for his jeweled walking sticks, he had a penchant for statues of Napoleon, and he embellished his red-leather-upholstered study and his books with the coat of arms of his putative ancestors. In 1828 his friend and publisher, Henri Latouche, wrote him in dismay:

Balzac’s lifelong and finally futile campaign to be elected one of the “immortals” of the Académie Française seemed as much motivated by a passion for money as for prestige. After 1836 he declared that he would get in even if he had to batter down the Académie’s doors with cannon fire. The prize was an annual salary of two thousand francs plus another six thousand for serving on the Dictionary Committee, and probably a life peerage.