Works of Honore De Balzac

by Honoré de Balzac

  BALZAC AND MADAME HANSKA by Elbert Hubbard

  An extract from ‘Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers’

  A thought entered my heart, such as God sends to make us willing to bear our griefs. I resolved to instruct and raise this corner of the earth, as a teacher brings up a child. Do not call it benevolence; my motive was the need I felt to distract my mind. I wanted to spend the remainder of my days in some arduous enterprise.

  The changes to be introduced into this region, which Nature has made so rich and man made so poor, would occupy my whole life; they attracted me by the very difficulty of bringing them about. I wished to be a friend to the poor, expecting nothing in return. I allowed myself no illusions, either as to the character of the country people or the obstacles which hinder those who attempt to ameliorate both men and things. I made no idyls about my poor; I took them for what they were.

  — Balzac in “The Country Doctor”

  BALZAC

  Balzac was born in the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-nine. The father of Balzac, by a not unusual coincidence, also bore the name of Balzac. And yet there was only one Balzac. This happy father was an officer in the commissary department of Napoleon’s army, and so never had an opportunity to win the bauble reputation at the cannon’s mouth, nor show his quality in the imminent deadly breach. He died through an earnest but futile effort, filled with the fear of failure, to so regulate his physical life that repair would exactly equal waste, and thus live on earth forever.

  The mother of our great man was a beauty and an heiress. Her husband was twenty-five years her senior. She ever regarded herself as one robbed of her birthright, and landed at high tide upon a barren and desert domestic isle. Honore, her first child, was born before she was twenty. Napoleon was at that time playing skittles with all Europe, and the woman whom Fate robbed of her romance worshiped at the shrine of the Corsican, because every good woman has to worship something or somebody. She saw Napoleon on several occasions, and once he kissed his hand to her when she stood in a balcony and he was riding through the street. And there their intimacy ended, a fact much regretted in print by her gifted son years afterward.

  Six years of Balzac’s life, from his sixth to his thirteenth year, were spent in a monastery school, a place where fond parents were relieved by holy men of their parental responsibilities, for a consideration.

  Not once in the six years’ time was the boy allowed to go home or to visit his parents. Once a year, at Easter, his mother came to see him and expressed regret at the backward state of his mind.

  Balzac’s education was gotten in spite of his teachers, and by setting at naught the minute and painstaking plans of his mother. This mother lived her life a partial invalid, whimsical, querulous, religious overmuch, always fearing a fatal collapse; in this disappointed, for she finally died peacefully of old age, going to bed and forgetting to waken. She was long to survive her son, and realize his greatness only after he was gone, getting the facts from the daily papers, which seems to prove that the newspaper does have a mission.

  Possibly the admiration of Balzac’s mother for the little Corporal had its purpose in God’s great economy. In any event her son had some of the Corsican’s characteristics.

  In the big brain of Balzac there was room for many emotions. The man had sympathy plus, and an imagination that could live every life, feel every pang of pain, know every throb of joy, die every death. In stature he was short, stout, square of shoulder and deep of chest. He had a columnar neck and carried his head with the poise of a man born to command.

  The scholar’s stoop and the abiding melancholy of the supposed man of genius were conspicuous by their absence. His smile was infectious, and he was always ready to romp and play. “He has never grown up: he is just a child,” once said his mother in sad complaint, after her son had well passed his fortieth milestone.

  The leading traits in the life of Balzac were his ability to abandon himself to the task in hand, his infinite good-nature, his capacity for frolic and fun, and his passion to be famous and to be loved.

  Napoleon never took things very seriously. It will be remembered that even at Saint Helena, when in the mood, he played jokes on his guards, and never forgot his good old habit of stopping the affairs of State to pinch the ears of any pretty miss, be she princess or chambermaid, who traveled without an escort.

  Upon a statuette of Napoleon, Balzac in his youth once wrote this: “What he began with the sword I will finish with the pen.”

  Only once did Balzac see Napoleon, probably at that last review at the Carrousel, and he describes the scene thus in one of his novels: “At last, at last! there he was, surrounded with so much love, enthusiasm, devotion, prayer — for whom the sun had driven every cloud from the sky. He sat motionless on his horse, six feet in advance of the dazzling escort that followed him. An old grenadier cried: ‘My God, yes, it was always so — under fire at Wagram — among the dead in the Moskowa he was quiet as a lamb, yes, that is he!’ Napoleon rode that little white mare, so gentle and under such perfect control. Let others ride plunging chargers and waste their energy and the strength of their mount in pirouettes for the admiration of the bystanders — Napoleon and his little white horse were always quiet when all around there was confusion. And the hand that ruled the Empire stroked the mane of the little white mare, so docile that a girl of ten would have been at home on her back. That is he — under fire at Wagram, with shells bursting all around — he strokes the mane of his quiet horse — that is he!”

  And right here may be a good place to quote that other tribute to the Corsican, by a man who was best qualified to give it — the Iron Duke Wellington: “It is very true that I have said that I considered Napoleon’s presence in the field equal to forty thousand men in the balance.”

  As Balzac emerged out of boyhood into man’s estate he seemed to have just one woman friend, and this was his grandmother. He didn’t seem to care for much more. With her he played cards, and she used to allow him to win small sums of money. With this money he bought books — always books.

  He had great physical strength, but was beautifully awkward. The only time he ever attempted to dance he slipped and fell, to the great amusement of the company. He fled without asking the dancing-master to refund his tuition.

  He was morbidly afraid of young women, and as fear and hate are one, he hated women, “because they had no ideas,” he said. His head was stuffed with facts, and his one amusement was attending the free lectures at the Sorbonne. Here he immersed himself with data about every conceivable subject, made infinite notebooks, and sought vainly for some one with whom he could talk it all over.

  In the absence of a wise companion with whom he could converse, he undertook the education of his brother Henry, who was not exactly a prodigy and could not get along at school. Great people are teachers through necessity, for it is only in explaining the matter to another that we make it clear to ourselves. Not finding enough to do in teaching his brother, Balzac advertised to tutor boys who were backward in their studies.

  His first response came from Madame De Berney, who had a boy whom the teachers could not control.

  That is the way: we buy our tickets to one place and Fate puts us off at another! “Put me off at Buffalo,” we say, and in the morning we find ourselves on the platform at Rochester.

  Madame De Berney was the mother of nine, and she was just twenty-two years older than Balzac. The son she wished to have tutored was weak in body and not strong in mind. He was in his twentieth year, within a year of the same age as Balzac.

  Balzac made a companion of the youth, treating him as an equal; and by his bubbling good-nature and eager, hungry desire to know, inspired his pupil with somewhat of his own enthusiasm.

  And in winning the pupil, of course he caught the sympathetic interest of the mother. No love-affair had ever come to Balzac — women had no minds: all they could do was to dance!

  Madame De Berney was old enough to put Balzac at his ease. Sh
e it was who discovered him — no De Berney, no Balzac. And on this point the historians and critics are all agreed.

  Madame De Berney was a gentle, intelligent, sympathetic and pathetic figure. She was no idle woman, warm on the eternal quest. She was a home-body intent on caring for her household.

  Her husband was many years her senior, and at the time Balzac appeared upon the scene, De Berney, had he been consistent, would have passed off; but he did not, for paralytics are like threatened people — good life-insurance risks.

  A woman of forty-two is not old — bless my soul! I’ll leave it to any woman of that age.

  And Balzac at twenty was as old as he was at forty-two: a little more so perhaps, for as the years passed he grew less dogmatic and confident. At twenty we are likely to have full faith in our own infallibility.

  Madame De Berney was the daughter of a musician in the court of Marie Antoinette. In fact, the queen had stood as her godmother and she had grown up surrounded by material luxury and a mental wilderness, for be it known that members of royal households, like the families of millionaires, are likely to be densely ignorant, being hedged in, shielded, sheltered and protected from the actual world that educates and evolves.

  Madame De Berney had been married at the age of sixteen by the busy matchmakers, and her life was one of plain marital serfdom. Her material wants were supplied, but economic freedom had not been hers, for she was supposed to account to her husband for every sou. Marriage is often actual slavery, and it was such for Madame De Berney, until De Berney got on pretty good terms with locomotor ataxia and placed his foot on one spot when he meant to put it on another.

  Portraits of Madame De Berney show her to be tall, slender, winsome, with sloping shoulders, beautiful neck, and black, melancholy curls drooping over her temples, making one think of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the presence of such a woman, one would naturally lower his voice. Half-mourning was to her most becoming. Madame De Berney was receptive and sympathetic and had gotten a goodly insight into literature. She had positive likes and dislikes in an art way. There were a few books she had read and reread until they had become a part of her being. At forty-two a woman is either a drudge, a fool or a saint. Intellect shines out and glows then if it ever does. From forty to sixty should be a woman’s mental harvest-time. Youth and youth’s ambitions and desires are in abeyance. If Fate has been kind she has been disillusioned, and if Destiny has used her for a doormat, no matter.

  The silly woman is one who has always had her own way, and is intent on conquest as Chronos appropriates her charms and gives bulk for beauty.

  The drudge is only a drudge, and her compensation lies in the fact that she seldom knows it.

  Madame De Berney had been disillusioned, and intellectual desire was glowing with a steady, mellow light. She wanted to know and to be. And shooting through space comes Balzac, a vagrant comet, and their orbits being the same, their masses unite and continue in one course, bowled by the Infinite.

  The leading impulse in the life of Balzac was to express: to tell the things he knew and the things he imagined. To express was the one gratification which made life worth living. And so he told Madame De Berney’s son, and then Madame came into the class and he told her. We talk to the sympathetic and receptive: to those who are masters of the fine art of listening.

  Soon the lessons were too advanced for the son to follow, and so Balzac told it all to Madame. She listened, smiled indulgently, sighed. They walked in the park and along country lanes and byways; the young tutor talked and talked, and laughed and laughed.

  Balzac’s brain was teeming with ideas, a mass and jumble of thoughts, ideas, plans and emotions. “Write it out,” said Madame — in partial self-defense, no doubt. “Write it out!”

  And so Balzac began to write poetry, plays, essays, stories. And everything he wrote he read to her. As soon as he had written something he hastened to hunt up “La Dilecta,” as he called her.

  Their minds fused in an idea — they blended in thought. He loved her, not knowing when he began or how. His tumultuous nature poured itself out to her, all without reason.

  She became a need to him. He wrote her letters in the morning and at night. They dined together, walked, talked, rowed and read.

  She ransacked libraries for him. She sold his product to publishers. They collaborated in writing, but he had the physical strength that she had not, so he usually fished the story out of the ink-bottle and presented it to her.

  He began to be sought after. Fame appeared on the horizon. Critics rose and thundered. Balzac defied all rules, walked over the grammar, defiled the well of classic French. He invented phrases, paraphrased greatness, coined words. He worked the slide, glide, the ellipse — any way to express the thought. He forged a strange and wondrous style — a language made up of all the slang of the street, combined with the terminologies of the laboratory, law, medicine and science. He was an ignoramus.

  But still the public read what he wrote and clamored for more, because the man expressed humanity — he knew men and women.

  Balzac was the first writer to discover that every human life is intensely interesting; not merely the heroic and the romantic.

  Every life is a struggle; and the fact that the battles are usually bloodless, and the romance a dream, makes it no less real.

  Balzac proved that the extraordinary and sensational were not necessary to literature. And just as the dewdrop on the petal is a divine manifestation, and every blade of grass is a miracle, and the three speckled eggs in an English sparrow’s nest constitute an immaculate conception, so every human life, with its hopes, aspirations, dream, defeats and successes, is a drama, joyous with comedy, rich in melodrama and also dark and somber as can be woven from the warp and woof of mystery and death.

  Balzac wrote a dozen books or more a year. Of course he quarreled with Barabbas, and lawsuits followed, where both sides were right and both sides were wrong. Balzac hadn’t the time to look after business details. He would sign away his birthright for a month’s peace, forgetful of the day of reckoning. He supported his mother and brothers and sisters, loaned money to everybody, borrowed from La Dilecta when the bailiffs got too pressing, and all the time turned out copy religiously. He practised the eight-hour-a-day clause, but worked in double shifts, from two A.M. to ten A.M., and then from noon until eight o’clock at night. Then for a month he would relax and devote himself to La Dilecta. She was his one friend, his confidante, his comrade, his mother, his sweetheart.

  No woman was ever loved more devotedly, but the passionate intensity of the man’s nature must have been a sore tax at times on her time and strength. A younger woman could not have known his needs, nor ministered to him mentally. He was absorbed in his work and in his love, and these were to him one.

  He had won renown, for had he not called down on his head the attacks of the envious? His manuscripts were in demand.

  Balzac was thirty years of age; Madame De Berney was fifty-two. The sun for him had not reached noon, but for her the shadows were lengthening toward the East. She decided that she must win — he should never forsake her!

  He had not tired of her, nor she of him. But she knew that when he was forty she would be sixty: he at the height of his power and she an old woman. They could never grow old together and go down the hill of life hand in hand.

  So Madame De Berney with splendid heroism took the initiative. She told Balzac what was in her mind, all the time trying to be playful, as we always do when tragedy is tugging at our hearts. Soon she would be a drag upon him, and before that day came it was better they should separate. He declined to listen, swore she could not break the bond; and the scene from being playful became furious. Then it settled down, calmed, and closed as lovers’ quarrels usually do and should.

  The subject came up again the next week and with a like result. Finally Madame De Berney resorted to heroic treatment. She locked herself in her rooms, and gave orders to the butler that Monsieur Balzac should not be a
llowed to enter the house, and that to him she was not at home.

  “You shall not see me grow old and totter, my body wither and fail, my mind decline. We part now and part forever, our friendship sacred, unsullied, and at its height. Good-by, Balzac, and good-by forever!”

  Balzac was dumb with rage, then tears came to his relief, and he cried as a child cries for its mother. The first paroxysm passed, anger took the place of grief: he found time to realize that perhaps there were other women besides La Dilecta — possibly there were other Dilectas. She had struck a blow at his pride — the only blow, in fact, he ever received.

  Among Balzac’s various correspondents — for successful men always get letters from sympathetic unknowns — was one Madame Hanska, in far-off Poland. From her letters she seemed intelligent, witty, sympathetic. He would turn to her in his distress, to Madame Hanska — where was that last letter from her? And did he not have her picture somewhere: let us see, let us see!

  And as for Madame De Berney: when she gave liberty to Balzac it was at the expense of her own life. “If I could only forget, if I could only forget!” she said. And so she lingered on for four years, and then sank into that forgetfulness which men call death.

  Balzac wrote of her as “Madame Hanska,” and to her husband he referred as “Monsieur Hanski,” a distinction that was made by the author as inference that Monsieur Hanska was encroaching on some one else’s domain, with designs on the pickle-jar of another.