The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (66 page)

Would Balzac have written, and what might he have written, if he had not been driven to pay for his extravagances? When the prospects of sharing Eve Hanska’s (or someone else’s) fortune seemed to take off the financial pressure, or when illness or travel interfered with his purchases, he did write less. We must, then, be grateful for the prodigal tastes that moved him to create. And for the sanguine disposition that made him believe he could somehow keep ahead of his creditors. Despite Balzac’s sour view of human
nature and his surgical accounts of the mercenary strain in mankind, he had an optimism about his own talent and the immortality of his work. This Baudelaire (1821–1867) noted in Balzac and other writers of genius. “However great may be the sorrows that overtake them, however discouraging the human spectacle, their healthy temperaments always in the end prevail, and perhaps something better, which is a deep natural wisdom.”

In the arts and letters, Balzac’s Paris was a stage for giants. He knew Delacroix (1798–1863), one of whose paintings (
Girl with the Perroquet
) probably inspired his novel
La Fille aux yeux d’or
. He was a close friend of Gautier (1811–1872), a friend and rival of Victor Hugo (1802–1885) and of Eugène Sue (1804–1857), a confidant of George Sand (1804–1876), a target of Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869), and an acquaintance of Rossini (1792–1868). Despite his herculean work schedule he wallowed in Parisian salon life, staying active in the arena of literary abuse and sycophancy.

It was an age, too, of volatile and oscillating political fortunes—from the
ancien régime
of Louis XVI, through the Revolution of 1789, the Terror of 1793–94, the Directory (1795–99), the Consulate (1799–1804), the Napoleonic Empire (1804–14), the Restoration Monarchy of Louis XVIII (1814–30), the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe (1830–48), the Revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic (1848–52) to follow. It was an age of volatile Paris mobs and ephemeral monarchs, and of stirring slogans—an hourglass political world that was periodically turned upside down. Today’s patriot was tomorrow’s traitor. People went to the café to read the partisan press but avoided incriminating themselves as subscribers.

Balzac was a fairly consistent royalist and Catholic, anything but a reformer or a politician. When he ran for the National Assembly in April 1848 he received 20 votes, while in Paris alone his opponent Lamartine received 159,800. A few days before the election he had published his personal manifesto. “Between 1789 and 1848 France, or Paris if you prefer, has changed its constitution every fifteen years. Is it not time, for the honour of our country, to devise and institute a form, an empire, a durable system of rule, so that our prosperity, our commerce, and our arts, which are the lifeblood of our commerce, credit and our renown, in short, all the fortunes of France, may not be periodically imperilled?” But he had no prescription. “We have
liberty
to die of hunger,
equality
in misery, the
fraternity
of the street-corner.”

To his vehicle, the novel, he gave a new classic shape, creating the novel of ideas. While he experimented with many forms, he wrote most of his novels as narratives in the third person. But he wrote others in the first person “to give the greatest intensity of life” to his characters. He wrote one long novel in the form of letters. And in another he gathered the story in
fragments from three people.
Droll Stories
(
Contes drolatiques
, 1832–37) showed his grandiose literary ambitions by echoing Boccaccio and Rabelais.

His era had been dominated by wholesale issues—
Ancien Régime
vs. the Republic, the Rights of Man vs. the Legitimacy of Monarchs, Bourbon vs. Orléans—and by conventions, constitutions, emperors, and demagogues. A refugee from public controversy, Balzac provided a new kind of secret history. Many literate Frenchmen must have felt they had exhausted their concern for the state and society. Within a few decades they had seen the extravagant court of Louis XVI, the horrors of the guillotine, the glories of Napoleon, the surgings of the Paris mobs, the rivalries of ancient dynasties, the failed promises of legislation. Was this not the time for a modern Procopius to privatize history? To seek asylum in the lives, the hopes, the mysteries of individual men and women?

So he made the novel into his modern kind of history, more amorphous and miscellaneous than the respected classic forms, more elusive and more intimate. “The historian of manners,” he noted, “obeys harsher laws than those that bind the historian of facts. He must make everything seem plausible, even the truth; whereas in the domain of history properly so called, the impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred.” The novelists’ version was “in the depiction of the causes that beget the facts, in the mysteries of the human heart whose impulses are neglected by the historians.” Balzac’s Human Comedy was a grand mosaic of his epoch, with many themes but no plot. Each hero is moved by some dominant passion—for money, love, or social position. Relentlessly contemporary and comprehensive, he still drew only the classes of Frenchmen he knew. He did not write about peasants or workers, but wrote about authors, artists, journalists, businessmen, speculators, charlatans, ne’er-do-wells, landowners, merchants, and the women whom they loved and who loved them. In Stefan Zweig’s phrase, he was “a literary Linnaeus.”

Balzac’s youthful “literary hogwash” written before 1829 was unsigned. The first novel published under his name, and the earliest work to be incorporated in
La Comédie humaine
was
Les Chouans
(1829), about royalist guerrillas in western France in 1799. He was already irritating publishers by endless proof corrections, which ran up printing costs. “What the devil has got into you,” his publisher Latouche exclaimed. “Forget about the black mark under your mistress’s left tit, it’s only a beauty spot.”
Les Chouans
was praised by reviewers but did not sell. His next book,
La Physiologie du marriage
, published later that year, a surefire attention-getter, set him on the road to fame, or at least notoriety. In it “a young bachelor” revealed the knowledge of women he had acquired in thirty years of unmarried life. Insisting that “marriage is not born of Nature,” Balzac realistically separated romantic love from the biological drive to reproduce.
Marriage, he explained, was an ongoing civil (or domestic) war in which, as in other wars, superior force and guile made the winner. The book was especially popular with women, whose grievances it exposed.

At thirty-four years of age he had already published two dozen novels and numerous tales under his own name, and had sketched his large scheme. “Salute me,” he exclaimed to his sister, Laure, and her husband when he visited them in 1833, “I am on the way to becoming a genius!” By 1838, he predicted, “the three sections of this vast work will be, if not entirely complete, at least super-imposed so that the reader will be able to judge it as a whole.” In a letter to Eve Hanska in 1834 he outlined his ambitious project.

From anyone else, such a program would have seemed pretentious. But Balzac would justify his publisher Latouche’s description of him as “that volcano of novels who can turn out one in six weeks.”

It was essential to this grandiose concept that the whole work never be completed. Their coherence would come from documentary truth. Following the prescription of Balzac’s country doctor, “We proceed from ourselves to men, never from men to ourselves.” With his “prodigious taste for detail,” he would capture the personal nature of experience. “The author firmly believes that details alone will henceforth determine the merit of works improperly called
romans
[novels, or romances].” This sometimes overwrought detail, along with the dominant, usually unappealing, passions of his characters, repels many American readers nowadays.

To give historical coherence to his whole comedy, Balzac pioneered the multinovel saga. Keeping characters alive from novel to novel, he allowed
them to age, develop, or disintegrate. Although Old Goriot died, his ambitious daughter, Mme. de Nucingen, and her husband lived on in many novels. He referred readers to earlier novels—“See
Le Père Goriot”
—in which the same character had appeared. After a dormant period, characters would reemerge to remind us they are still alive. Over the twenty-five years of his writing they created their own problems as they aged.

Few, even among Balzac admirers, have read the bulk of his ninety-odd novels. But his passion for accurate history and his grand scheme make any of them a window into his
Comédie humaine
. Despite the complexity of his plan Balzac insisted, “I love simple subjects.” In the English-speaking world his most popular novels would include
Eugénie Grandet
, “A Scene from Provincial Life” (1833), the tale of an enterprising small-town miser, the mayor of Saumur, and the struggle between two families for the hand and fortune of his heiress. We follow his profitable speculations in securities appreciated by the Restoration, and witness his daughter’s unhappy widowhood. “The pale cold glitter of gold was destined to take the place of all warmth and colour in her innocent and blameless life, and lead a woman who was all feeling to look on any show of affection with mistrust.… Such is the story of this woman, who is in the world but not of the world, who, made to be a magnificent wife and mother, has no husband, children, or family.” The theme of
Le Père Goriot
, “A Scene from Private Life” (1835), set in Paris, Balzac summarized in his notebook. “A worthy man—middle-class boarding-house—600 francs income—stripped himself to the bone for his two daughters, who each have 50,000 a year—dies like a dog.” As we follow the frustration of Old Goriot we meet his two daughters, the cynical ex-convict Vautrin who aims to corrupt the young Rastignac from the provinces, the warm-hearted medical student Bianchon, and other boarders. All these figures reappear in later segments of
La Comédie humaine
.

La Peau de chagrin
(The Wild Ass’s Skin; 1831), one of the Philosophical Studies, opens our window on Balzac’s mysticism, the improbable complement to his passion for the concrete. This other Balzac is the enthusiast for mesmerism, cosmic unity, and the “life force.” In this odd novel he elaborated a simple item in his notebook, “The discovery of a skin representing life. An oriental fable.” The young Raphael, about to commit suicide by jumping into the Seine, wanders into an antique shop. There the mysterious dealer offers him the magic skin of a wild ass. The Sanskrit inscription on the skin promises its owner, “Express a desire and thy desire shall be fulfilled. But let thy wishes be measured against thy life. Here it lies. Every wish will diminish me and diminish thy days.” The dealer who sells him the skin has lived to be a hundred because he has never expressed a desire. Raphael accepts the bargain and we follow his wishes to the fatal end. He has taken the counsel of Rastignac: “Dissipation, my dear fellow, is a way
of life. When a man spends his time squandering his fortune, he’s very often on to a good thing: he is investing his capital in friends, pleasures, protectors and acquaintances.”

In
The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau
(1837), one of his “Scenes from Parisian Life,” the charlatan hero prospers by selling a “cephalic oil” supposed to make hair grow. Haunted by the specter of bankruptcy (as Balzac himself had been), he is “killed by the idea of financial probity as by a pistol-shot.” And one of his most copious and vivid novels,
Lost Illusions
(1837, 1839, 1843), depicts the vices, foibles, and charms of the Paris beau monde through the struggles of an aspiring young poet from the provinces. He has no money but becomes the protégé of an influential patroness. He discovers that in the literary world, too, only money counts. Abandoned by his patroness, he turns to journalism, trying to make his way in the corrupt scandalmongering press, but when he finally returns to his home in the provinces he finds it no less corrupt than Paris.

Balzac’s Human Comedy for the reading public was never quite separate from the world he was re-creating. Just before he lost consciousness in August 1850, Balzac is reported to have recalled the skillful doctor whom he had created in
Le Père Goriot
, and he said, “Only Bianchon can save me.”

E
VEN
if Dickens had not been a great event in English literature, he would be a great event in English history. For, as G. K. Chesterton reminds us, “the man led a mob. He did what no English Statesman, perhaps, has really done; he called out the people.” Dickens’s career was a grand literary love affair with the English public, not just the reading public but the whole listening public.