Women in the Life of Balzac

A quantity of books have been written about Balzac, some of which are very instructive, while others are nothing but compilations of gossip which give a totally wrong impression of the life, works and personality of the great French novelist. Having the honor of being the niece of his wife, the wonderful /Etrangere/, whom he married after seventeen years of an affection which contained episodes far more romantic than any of those which he has described in his many books, and having been brought up in the little house of the rue Fortunee, afterwards the rue Balzac, where they lived during their short married life, I can perhaps better appreciate than most people the value of these different books, none of which gives us an exact appreciation of the man or of the difficulties through which he had to struggle before he won at last the fame he deserved. And the conclusion to which I came, after having read them most attentively and conscientiously, was that it is often a great misfortune to possess that divine spark of genius which now and then touches the brow of a few human creatures and marks them for eternity with its fiery seal. Had Balzac been one of those everyday writers whose names, after having been for a brief space of time on everyone's lips, are later on almost immediately forgotten, he would not have been subjected to the calumnies which embittered so much of his declining days, and which even after he was no longer in this world continued their subterranean and disgusting work, trying to sully not only Balzac's own colossal personality, but also that of the devoted wife, whom he had cherished for such a long number of years, who had all through their course shared his joys and his sorrows, and who, after he died, had spent the rest of her own life absorbed in the remembrance of her love for him, a love which was stronger than death itself.

Having spent all my childhood and youth under the protection and the roof of Madame de Balzac, it was quite natural that every time I saw another inaccuracy or falsehood concerning her or her great husband find its way into the press, I should be deeply affected. At last I began to look with suspicion at all the books dealing with Balzac or with his works, and when Miss Floyd asked me to look over her manuscript, it was with a certain amount of distrust and prejudice that I set myself to the task. It seemed to me impossible that a foreigner could write anything worth reading about Balzac, or understand his psychology. What was therefore my surprise when I discovered in this most remarkable volume the best description that has ever been given to us of this particular phase of Balzac's life which hitherto has hardly been touched upon by his numerous biographers, his friendships with the many distinguished women who at one time or another played a part in his busy existence, a description which not only confirmed down to the smallest details all that my aunt had related to me about her distinguished husband, but which also gave an appreciation of the latter's character that entirely agreed with what I had heard about its peculiarities from the few people who had known him well, Theophile Gautier among others, who were still alive when I became old enough to be intensely interested in their different judgments about my uncle. After such a length of years it seemed almost uncanny to find a person who through sheer intuition and hard study could have reconstituted with this unerring accuracy the figure of one who had remained a riddle in certain things even to his best friends, and who in the pages of this extraordinary book suddenly appeared before my astonished eyes with all the splendor of that genius of his which as years go by, becomes more and more admired and appreciated.

One must be a scholar to understand Balzac; his style and manner of writing is often so heavy and so difficult to follow, reminding one more of that of a professor than of a novelist. And indeed he would have been very angry to be considered only as a novelist, he who aspired and believed himself to be, as he expressed it one day in the course of a conversation with Madame Hanska, before she became his wife, "a great painter of humanity," in which appreciation of his work he was not mistaken, because some of the characters he evoked out of his wonderful brain remind one of those pictures of Rembrandt where every stroke of the master's brush reveals and brings into evidence some particular trait or feature, which until he had discovered it, and brought it to notice, no one had seen or remarked on the human faces which he reproduced upon the canvas. Michelet, who once called St. Simon the "Rembrandt of literature," could very well have applied the same remark to Balzac, whose heroes will live as long as men and women exist, for whom these other men and women whom he described, will relive because he did not conjure their different characters out of his imagination only, but condensed all his observations into the creation of types which are so entirely human and real that we shall continually meet with them so long as the world lasts.

One of Balzac's peculiarities consisted in perpetually studying humanity, which study explains the almost unerring accuracy of his judgments and of the descriptions which he gives us of things and facts as well as of human beings. In his impulsiveness, he frequented all kinds of places, saw all kinds of people, and tried to apply the dissecting knife of his spirit of observation to every heart and every conscience. He set himself especially to discover and fathom the mystery of the "eternal feminine" about which he always thought, and it was partly due to this eager quest for knowledge of women's souls that he allowed himself to become entangled in love affairs and love intrigues which sometimes came to a sad end, and that he spent his time in perpetual search of feminine friendships, which were later on to brighten, or to mar his life.

Miss Floyd in the curious volume which she has written has caught in a surprising manner this particular feature in Balzac's complex character. She has applied herself to study not only the man such as he was, with all his qualities, genius and undoubted mistakes, but such as he appeared to be in the eyes of the different women whom he had loved or admired, and at whose hands he had sought encouragement and sympathy amid the cruel disappointments and difficulties of an existence from which black care was never banished and never absent. With quite wonderful tact, and a lightness of touch one can not sufficiently admire, she has made the necessary distinctions which separated friendship from love in the many romantic attachments which played such an important part in Balzac's life, and she has in consequence presented to us simultaneously the writer, whose name will remain an immortal one, and the man whose memory was treasured, long after he had himself disappeared, by so many who, though they had perhaps never understood him entirely, yet had realized that in the marks of affection and attachment which he had given to them, he had laid at their feet something which was infinitely precious, infinitely real, something which could never be forgotten.

Her book will remain a most valuable, I was going to say the most valuable, contribution to the history of Balzac, and those for whom he was something more than a great writer and scholar, can never feel sufficiently grateful to her for having given it to the world, and helped to dissipate, thanks to its wonderful arguments, so many false legends and wild stories which were believed until now, and indeed are still believed by an ignorant crowd of so-called admirers of his, who, nine times out of ten, are only detractors of his colossal genius, and remarkable, though perhaps sometimes too exuberant, individuality.

At the same time, Miss Floyd, in the lines which she devotes to my aunt and to the long attachment that had united the latter and Balzac, has in many points re-established the truth in regard to the character of a woman who in many instances has been cruelly calumniated and slandered, in others absolutely misunderstood, to whom Balzac once wrote that she was "one of those great minds, which solitude had preserved from the petty meannesses of the world," words which describe her better than volumes could have done. She had truly led a silent, solitary, lonely life that had known but one love, the man whom she was to marry after so many vicissitudes, and in spite of so many impediments, and but one tenderness, her daughter, a daughter who unfortunately was entirely her inferior, and in whom she could never find consolation or comfort, who could neither share her joys, nor soothe her sorrows.

In her convictions, Madame de Balzac was a curious mixture of atheism and profound faith in a Divinity before whom mankind was accountable for all its good or bad deeds. All through her long life she had been under the influence of her father, one of the remarkable men of his generation, who had enjoyed the friendship of most of the great French writers of the period immediately preceding the Revolution, including Voltaire; he had brought her up in an atmosphere of the eighteenth century with its touch of skepticism, and the Encyclopedia had always remained for her a kind of gospel, in spite of the fact that she had been reared in one of the most haughty, aristocratic circles in Europe, in a country where the very mention of the words /liberty/ and /freedom of opinion/ was tabooed, and that her mother had been one of those devout Roman Catholics who think it necessary to consult their confessor, even in regard to the most trivial details of their daily existence. Placed as she had been between her parents' incredulity and bigotry, my aunt had formed opinions of her own, of which a profound tolerance and a deep respect for the beliefs and convictions of others was the principal feature. She never condemned even when she did not approve, and she hated hypocrisy, no matter in what shape or aspect it presented itself before her eyes. This explains the courage she displayed when against the advice and the wishes of her family, she persisted in marrying Balzac, though it hardly helps us to understand from what we know of the latter's character, how he came to fall so deeply in love with a woman who in almost everything thought so differently from what he thought, especially in regard to those two subjects which absorbed and engrossed him until the last days of his life, religion and politics.

That he loved her, and that she loved him, in spite of these differences in their points of view, is to their mutual honor, but it adds to the mystery and to the enigmatical side of a romance that has hardly been equalled in modern times; and it accounts for the fact that some friction occurred between them later on, when my aunt found herself trying to restrain certain exuberances on the part of her husband regarding her own high lineage, about which she never thought much herself, though she had always tried to live up to the duties which it imposed upon her. I am mentioning this circumstance to explain certain exaggerations which we constantly find in Balzac's letters in regard to his marriage. His imagination was extremely vivid, and its fertility sometimes carried him far away into regions where it was nearly impossible to follow him, and where he really came to believe quite sincerely in things which had never existed. For instance in his correspondence with his mother and friends, he is always speaking of the necessity for Madame Hanska to obtain the permission of the Czar to marry him. This is absolutely untrue. My aunt did not require in the very least the consent of the Emperor to become Madame de Balzac. The difficulties connected with her marriage consisted in the fact that having been left sole heiress of her first husband's immense wealth, she did not think herself justified in keeping it after she had contracted another union, and with a foreigner. She therefore transferred her whole fortune to her daughter, reserving for herself only an annuity which was by no means considerable, and it was this arrangement that had to be sanctioned, not by the sovereign who had nothing to do with it, but by the Supreme Court of Russia, which at that time was located in St. Petersburg. Balzac, however, wishing to impress his French relatives with the grandeur of the marriage he was about to make, imagined this tale of the Czar's opposition, in order to add to his own importance and to that of his future wife, an invention which revolted my aunt so much that in that part of her husband's correspondence which was published by her a year or two before her death, she carefully suppressed all the passages which contained this assertion which had so thoroughly annoyed as well as angered her. I have sometimes wondered what she would have said had she seen appear in print the curious letter which Balzac wrote immediately after their wedding to Dr. Nacquart in which he described with such pomp the different high qualities, merits, and last but not least, brilliant positions occupied by his wife's relatives, beginning with Queen Marie Leszczinska, the consort of Louis XV, and ending with the husband of my father's stepdaughter, Count Orloff, whom the widest stretch of imagination could not have connected with my aunt.