Goethe, final revision of Faust before his death.
1833 Meets Mme Hanska for the first time in Switzerland. Signs a contract for the publication of Studies of Nineteenth-Century Life, a collective work which will stretch to twelve volumes over the next four years. The Country Doctor, Eugénie Grandet.
1834 Birth of Marie du Fresnay, his supposed daughter by Maria du Fresnay. Becomes Mme Hanska’s lover. Meets Countess Guidoboni-Visconti. Has grand idea of recurring characters between novels, and begins adapting previous works to establish continuity. History of the Thirteen, The Quest of the Absolute.
1835 Spends three weeks with Mme Hanska in Vienna, the last time for eight years. Old Goriot, Seraphita and collected Philosophical Studies.
Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin.
1836 Birth of Lionel-Richard Guidoboni-Visconti, his supposed son. Death of Laure de Berny. Liquidates La Chronique de Paris, the journal purchased the previous year.
Serial publication of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers begins in England. Some months later, Balzac’s The Old Maid is serialized in La Presse, the first roman-feuilleton.
1837 Countess Guidoboni-Visconti settles his debts to save him from imprisonment. His tilbury is seized by the bailiffs. Travels to Italy, staying at the best hotels. Exhibition of his portrait in a monk’s habit by Louis Boulanger. César Birotteau.
1838 Visits George Sand (who begins a nine-year relationship with Chopin this year). Travels across Sardinia, Corsica and the Italian peninsula. Incurs further debt after speculating in Sardinian silver mines. The Firm of Nucingen.
1840 His play Vautrin opens and is banned. Launches the Revue parisienne, which folds; his review of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma appears in the third and final issue. Moves to Passy with his mother, and housekeeper/mistress Louise de Brugnol.
1841 Signs a publishing contract for The Human Comedy, his collective title since the previous year. Ursule Mirouet, A Murky Business.
1842 Compares human types to animal species in the preface to The Human Comedy. Has his portrait taken by a Daguerréo-typeur. Mme Hanska’s husband dies. The Black Sheep. His play The Resources of Quinola is a flop.
Gogol, Dead Souls. Verdi, Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzer).
1843 Visits Mme Hanska in St Petersburg. Sits for David d’Angers. His health is poor. Writes a letter of introduction to Mme Hanska for Liszt, who tries to seduce her. Completion of Lost Illusions, in three parts. Honorine.
1844 Due to ill health, travels and socializes little. Collects furniture and paintings. Modest Mignon, and publication of the beginning of The Peasantry.
Dumas, The Three Musketeers. Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed. Heine, New Poems.
1845 Travels in Europe with Mme Hanska, her daughter and her future son-in-law.
Poe, The Raven and Other Poems. Wagner, Tannhäuser.
1846 Mme Hanska delivers a stillborn baby, which would have been named Victor-Honoré. Cousin Bette.
1847 Mme Hanska visits for four months in Paris, and he makes her his legal heir. They winter in the Ukraine. Cousin Pons. Completion of A Harlot High and LOW.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights.
1848 Returns to Paris. Witnesses the sacking of the Tuileries. His play La Marâtre is a success with critics. Ill health prevents him working regularly. Returns to the Ukraine.
February Revolution. Second Republic. Louis Bonaparte is elected President. Revolutionary uprisings across Europe. Final abolition of slavery in French domains.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Gaskell, Mary Barton. Thackeray, Vanity Fair.
1849 Health deteriorates seriously. Starts work on projects he will never finish.
1850 Marries Mme Hanska in March, at Berdichev. (They are married for only five months.) On return to Paris in May, Balzac can no longer read or write. 18 August: Dies. A cast is taken of his writing hand. Hugo pronounces a funeral oration at Père Lachaise.
Courbet, A Burial at Ornans.
Further Reading
BIOGRAPHY
Hunt, Herbert J., Honoré de Balzac: A Biography (1957; New York: Greenwood Press, 1969). A short summary of Balzac’s life by one of his most scrupulous translators.
Maurois, André, Prometheus: The Life of Balzac (London: The Bodley Head Ltd, 1965). An engaging life by the biographer of Shelley, Proust, Hugo and Sand.
Robb, Graham, Balzac: A Biography (1994; London: Picador, 2000). The most recent to appear in English; Robb skilfully interweaves Balzac’s life with his work.
Zweig, Stefan, Balzac (1946; London: Cassell, 1970). Insightful and pays tribute to Balzac’s immense creative energy and vision.
INTERPRETATION
Butler, Ronnie, Balzac and the French Revolution (London and Canberra: Croom Helm; Totowa, ΝJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983). A study of Balzac’s preoccupation with the society that emerged from the Revolution.
Kanes, Martin, Critical Essays on Honoré de Balzac (Boston: G. Κ. Hall & Co., 1990). A collection of modern criticism and essays, with literary vignettes and letters by various authors.
Prendergast, Christopher, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama (London: Edward Arnold; New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978). An exploration and appreciation of the ‘melodramatic’ aspects of Balzac’s writing.
Tilby, Michael (ed.), Balzac (Modern Literatures in Perspective series) (London and New York: Longman, 1995). Critical essays presenting reactions to Balzac’s work from the time of its publication to the present day.
HISTORY
Hemmings, F. W. J., Culture and Society in France, 1789–1848 (Leicester University Press; New York: Peter Lang, 1987). A study of cultural change and social development in the period between the two revolutions.
Perrot, Michelle (ed.), A History of Private Life: 4. From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990). A Balzacian approach reflected in the title: a history of the private, everyday lives of individuals.
Part One
THE TWO POETS
1. A provincial printing-office
AT the time when this story begins, the Stanhope press and inking-rollers were not yet in use in small provincial printing-offices. Angoulême, although its paper-making industry kept it in contact with Parisian printing, was still using those wooden presses from which the now obsolete metaphor ‘making the presses groan’ originated. Printing there was so much behind the times that the pressmen still used leather balls spread with ink to dab on the characters. The bed of the press holding the letter-filled ‘forme’ to which the paper is applied was still made of stone and so justified its name ‘marble’. The ravenous machines of our times have so completely superseded this mechanism – to which, despite its imperfections, we owe the fine books produced by the Elzevirs, the Plantins, the Aldi and the Didots – that it is necessary to mention this antiquated equipment which Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard held in superstitious affection; it has its part to play in this great and trivial story.
Séchard had been one of those journeymen pressmen who, in the typographical jargon used by the workmen occupied in putting type together, are known as ‘bears’. No doubt this nickname is due to the to-and-fro motion, resembling that of a caged bear, which carried the pressmen backwards and forwards between the ink-block and the press. In retaliation, the ‘bears’ call compositors ‘monkeys’ because of the antics these persons continuously perform in snatching up the letters from the hundred and fifty-two boxes which contain them. In the calamitous period of 1793, Séchard was about fifty, and a married man. His age and marital status saved him from the great call-up which bore off almost all working-men to the armed forces. The old pressman was the only hand left in the printing-office whose owner, known as ‘the gaffer’, had just died, leaving a childless widow. It looked as if the business was doomed to immediate extinction: the solitary ‘bear’ could not change into a ‘monkey’ because, being a mere pressman, he could neither re
ad nor write. Taking no account of his incompetence, a ‘Representative of the People’, in a hurry to promulgate the eloquent decrees issued by the National Convention, invested the pressman with a licence as master printer and requisitioned the printing-press. After accepting this dangerous licence, Citizen Séchard indemnified his master’s widow by paying over his own wife’s savings, with which he bought the whole plant at half its value. So far so good, but the Republican decrees had to be accurately and punctually printed. Faced with this difficult problem, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard was lucky enough to come upon a nobleman from Marseilles who did not relish the idea of losing his estates by emigrating or of risking his head by showing himself in public, and could only earn his daily bread by taking on some sort of employment. And so Monsieur le Comte de Maucombe donned the humble overalls of a foreman in a provincial printing-office. He set up, read and himself corrected the decrees which imposed the death penalty on citizens who gave concealment to noblemen; the ‘bear’, who had now become the ‘gaffer’, struck them off and posted them up; and both of them came through safe and sound. By 1795 the squall of the Terror was over, and Nicolas Séchard had to find another factotum as compositor, proof-reader and foreman. An Abbé, who was destined to become a bishop under the Restoration for having refused to conform to the Civil Constitutions, replaced the Comte de Maucombe until the day when the First Consul re-established the Catholic religion. Later the Count and the bishop were to find themselves both sitting on the same bench in the House of Peers. Although in 1802 Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard was no better at reading and writing than in 1793, his ‘makings’ were enough for him to be able to engage a foreman. The journeyman once so unconcerned about his future had become quite a martinet to his ‘monkeys’ and ‘bears’. Avarice begins where poverty ends. No sooner had the printer espied the possibility of making a fortune than self-interest developed in him a material understanding of his craft, but he became greedy, wary and sharp-sighted. With him practice made a long nose at theory. In the end he was able to appraise at a glance the cost of a page or folio according to the kind of character required. He proved to his ignorant customers that heavy type cost more to set than light; and when it came to the smaller type he averred that this was more difficult to handle. Composing being that part of printing of which he understood nothing, he was so afraid of undercharging that he never made anything but excessive estimates. If his compositors worked on a time-contract he never took his eyes off them. If he knew that a paper-manufacturer was in difficulties, he bought his stock for next to nothing and put it in store. And so by now he was already owner of the building which had housed the printing-office from time immemorial. He had every sort of good luck: he lost his wife, and had only one son, whom he sent to the town lycée, not so much in order to have him educated as to prepare the way for a successor: he treated him harshly in order to prolong the duration of his paternal authority; thus, during holidays, he made him work at the type-case, telling him that he must earn his living so that one day he might repay his poor father who was bleeding himself white in order to educate him. When the Abbé departed, Séchard chose a new foreman from among his four compositors, one whom the future bishop had singled out as being as honest as he was intelligent. He was thus in a position to look forward to the time when his son would be able to run the business so that it might expand in young and able hands. David Séchard was a brilliant pupil at the lycée of Angoulême. Although the elder Séchard was only a ‘bear’ who had made good without knowledge or education and had a healthy contempt for learning, he sent his son to Paris to study more advanced typography; but he so vehemently recommended him to amass a fair sum of money in the capital, which he called the ‘working-man’s paradise’, and so often warned him not to count on dipping into his father’s purse, that it was obvious that he looked on his son’s sojourn in that ‘home of sapience’ as a means for gaining his own ends. While learning his trade in Paris, David completed his education: the foreman of the Didot works became a scholar. Towards the end of 1819 he left Paris without having cost his father a penny. The latter was now recalling him in order to hand over the management to him. At that time the Séchard press owned the only journal for legal notices that existed in the département. It also did all the printing for the prefectoral and episcopal administrations: these three clients were enough to give great prosperity to an energetic young man.
At that period precisely, a firm of paper-manufacturers, the brothers Cointet, purchased the second printer’s licence in the Angoulême district. Up to then Séchard senior had managed to keep it completely inoperative by taking advantage of the military crisis which, during the Empire, damped down all industrial enterprise. For this reason he had not bothered to buy it himself and his parsimony was destined to bring ruin in the end to his ancient printing-press. When he learnt of this acquisition, old Séchard thanked his stars that the conflict likely to ensue between his own establishment and that of the Cointets would be sustained by his son, and not himself. ‘I should have had the worst of it’, he told himself. ‘But a young man trained by the Didots will come out all right.’ The septuagenarian was sighing for the moment when he could take his ease. His knowledge of high-class typography was scanty, but, to compensate for this, he was known as a past master in an art which workmen printers have jestingly dubbed tipsiography: an art held in great esteem by the divine author of Pantagruel, but one whose cultivation, persecuted as it is by so-called Temperance Societies, has fallen more and more into disrepute. Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, true to the destiny which his patronymic marked out for him,1 was endowed with an unquenchable thirst. This passion for the crushed grape – a taste so natural with ‘bears’ that Monsieur de Chateaubriand has discovered its effects in the genuine bears of North America – had for long been kept within just bounds by his wife; but philosophers have observed that habits contracted in early life attack old age with renewed vigour. Séchard’s case confirmed this moral law: the older he grew, the more he loved imbibing. This passion left such marks on his ursine countenance as to make it truly unique: his nose had assumed the shape and contours of a capital A of triple canon size, while both of his veinous cheeks resembled the kind of vine-leaf which is swollen with violet, purple and often multi-coloured gibbosities: it made one think of a monstrous truffle wrapped round with autumn shoots. Lurking behind tufty eyebrows which were like two snow-laden bushes, his small grey eyes, sparkling with the cunning of avarice that was killing all other emotions, even fatherly affection, in him, showed that he kept his wits about him even when he was drunk. His cranium, completely bald on top, though it was still fringed with greying curls, called to mind the Franciscan friars in La Fontaine’s Tales. He was short and pot-bellied like many of those old-fashioned lampions which consume more oil than wick – for excesses of every sort urge the body along its appointed path. Drunkenness, like addiction to study, makes a fat man fatter and a thin man thinner. For thirty years Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard had been wearing the famous three-cornered municipal hat still to be seen on the heads of town-criers in certain provinces. His waistcoat and trousers were of greenish velvet. Finally, he wore an old brown frock-coat, stockings of patterned cotton and shoes with silver buckles. This costume, thanks to which the artisan was still manifest behind the bourgeois, was so suited to his vices and habits, so expressive of his way of life, that he looked as if he had come into the world fully clad: you could no more have imagined him without his clothes than you could imagine an onion without its peel.
If this aged printer had not long since shown how far his blind cupidity could go, his plan for retirement would suffice to depict his character. In spite of the expert knowledge that his son must have acquired while training in the great Didot firm, he was proposing to strike a profitable deal with him – one which he had long been meditating. If the father was to make a good bargain, it had to be a bad one for the son. For this sorry individual recognized no father-and-son relationship in business. If in the beginning he had t
hought of David as being an only child, he later had only looked on him as an obvious purchaser whose interests were opposed to his own: he wanted to sell dear, whereas David would want to buy cheap; therefore his son was an enemy to be vanquished. This transformation of feeling into self-interest, which in educated people is usually a slow, tortuous and hypocritical process, was rapid and undeviating in the old ‘bear’, who thus showed how easily guileful tipsiography could triumph over expertise in typography. When his son arrived home, the old man displayed the commercial-minded tenderness which wily people show to their intended dupes: he fussed over him as a lover might have fussed over a mistress; he took him by the arm and told him where to step in order not to get mud on his shoes; he had had his bed warmed, a fire lit, a supper prepared. Next day, after trying to get his son intoxicated in the course of a copious dinner, Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, by now well-seasoned, said to him: ‘Let’s talk business’: a proposal so strangely sandwiched between two hiccoughs that David begged him to put it off until the following morning. But the old ‘bear’ was too expert at drawing advantage from his own tipsiness to delay so long-prepared a battle. Moreover, he said, having had his nose so close to the grindstone for fifty years, he did not intend to keep it there one single hour more. Tomorrow his son would be the ‘gaffer’.