Honoré de Balzac: His Life and Writings | Page 5

full of religious poetry, and who yet had the power in "Cesar
Birotteau" to invest prosaic and even sordid details with absolute
verisimilitude, or in the "Contes Drolatiques" would write, in Old
French, stories of Rabelaisian breadth and humour. The only solution
of these contradictions is that, partly perhaps by reason of great
physical strength, certainly because of an abnormally powerful brain
and imagination, Balzac's thoughts, feelings, and passions were
unusually strong, and were endowed with peculiar impetus and
independence of each other; and from this resulted a versatility which
caused most unexpected developments, and which fills us of smaller
mould with astonishment.
Nevertheless, steadfastness was decidedly the groundwork of the
character of the man who was not dismayed by the colossal task of the
Comedie Humaine; but pursued his work through discouragement, ill
health, and anxieties. Except near the end of his life, when, owing to
the unreasonable strain to which it had been subjected, his powerful
organism had begun to fail, Balzac refused to neglect his vocation even
for his love affairs--a self-control which must have been a severe test to
one of his temperament.
This absorption in his work cannot have been very flattering to the
ladies he admired; and one plausible explanation of Madame de
Castries' coldness to his suit is that she did not believe in the devotion
of a lover who, while paying her the most assiduous court at Aix,
would yet write from five in the morning till half-past five in the
evening, and only bestow his company on her from six till an early
bedtime. Even the adored Madame Hanska had to take second place
where work was concerned. When they were both at Vienna in 1835,
he writes with some irritation, apparently in answer to a remonstrance
on her part, that he cannot work when he knows he has to go out; and
that, owing to the time he spent the evening before in her society, he
must now shut himself up for fourteen hours and toil at "Le Lys dans la
Vallee." He adds, with his customary force of language, that if he does
not finish the book at Vienna, he will throw himself into the Danube!
The great psychologist knew his own character well when, in another

letter to Madame Hanska, who has complained of his frivolity, he cries,
indignantly: "Frivolity of character! Why, you speak as a good
/bourgeois/ would have done, who, seeing Napoleon turn to the right, to
the left, and on all sides to examine his field of battle, would have said,
'This man cannot remain in one place; he has no fixed idea!'"[*]
[*] "Lettres a l'Etrangere."
This change of posture, though consonant, as Balzac says, with real
stability, is a source of bewilderment to the reader of his sayings and
doings, till it dawns upon him that, through pride, policy, and the usual
shrinking of the sensitive from casting their pearls before swine, Balzac
was a confirmed /poseur/, so that what he tells us is often more
misleading than his silence. Leon Gozlan's books are a striking instance
of the fact that, with all Balzac's jollity, his camaraderie, and his flow
of words, he did not readily reveal himself, except to those whom he
could thoroughly trust to understand him. Gozlan went about with
Balzac very often, and was specially chosen by him time after time as a
companion; but he really knew very little of the great man. If we
compare his account of Balzac's feeling or want of feeling at a certain
crisis, and then read what is written on the same subject to Madame
Hanska, Balzac's enormous power of reserve, and his habit of
deliberately misleading those who were not admitted to his confidence,
may be gauged.
George Sand tells us an anecdote which shows how easily, from his
anxiety not to wear his heart upon his sleeve, Balzac might be
misunderstood. He dined with her on January 29th, 1844, after a visit to
Russia, and related at table, with peals of laughter and apparently
enormous satisfaction, an instance which had come under his notice of
the ferocious exercise of absolute power. Any stranger listening, would
have thought him utterly heartless and brutal, but George Sand knew
better. She whispered to him: "That makes you inclined to cry, doesn't
it?"[*] He answered nothing; left off laughing, as if a spring in him had
broken; was very serious for the rest of the evening, and did not say a
word more about Russia.
[*] "Autour de la Table," by George Sand.

Balzac looked on the world as an arena; and as the occasion and the
audience arose, he suited himself with the utmost aplomb to the part he
intended to play, so that under the costume and the paint the real Balzac
is