Balzac, Honoré de

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BALZAC, HONORÉ DE

BALZAC, HONORÉ DE (1799–1850), French novelist best known for his La Comédie humaine.

Basically dishonest in love and business, Honoré de Balzac often carried on several affairs at once, even while courting Madame Evelina Hanska, the love of his life, and he viewed debt and contracts as little more than inconveniences until backed against a wall and threatened with prison. Nonetheless, despite his personal flaws, few would disagree that he was one of the great artists of the Western world, a master craftsman who invented devices that became commonplace in the subsequent novel. Proust took the basic idea for the organization of A la recherché du temps perdu from Balzac, and virtually all major writers that followed helped themselves to the devices he devised for making his characters come vibrantly alive. He wrote some ninety novels, thirty short stories, five plays, and numerous articles, essays, and letters. None of his fictive works are failures; all can still be read with pleasure. At least a dozen continue to strike readers with the admiration normally reserved for masterpieces. In the course of producing several thousand characters for La Comédie humaine, he helped bring the European novel to maturity

Though a thoroughly mediocre student, young Balzac managed to finish his coursework and in 1816 passed his baccalaureate in law. In the midst of the rejoicing, however, Balzac announced that the law was not for him; he would be a famous author. The family finally promised to support him for two years in a garret while he tried writing, but by 1821 he had still not published anything. He turned to potboilers. Although it is traditional for scholars to find evidence of Balzac's genius in these appalling novels, it takes a considerable amount of good will to do so. Balzac himself termed L'Héritière de Birague (1822) "veritable literary pig swill." But he was writing and learning the craft.

At least as important as his writing was the relationship he established with Madame Laure de Berny, a neighbor in Tours. She was born in 1777 and raised at Versailles under the monarchy. Not only had she retained the courtly graciousness of her youth, she had many amusing stories about the court. Balzac found her irresistible. Much of Balzac's vaunted insight into women was due to Mme de Berny's frankness. Mme de Berny did not occupy all of Balzac's time, however. He made another middle-aged conquest in an impoverished Napoleonic duchess, Mme d'Abrantès. While continuing to write, he was encouraged by some small critical success with Wann-Chlore (1826). Still, financial success eluded him.

Encouraged by his family, several friends, and his mistresses, he decided to become a businessman. The endeavor set a pattern that would be repeated with few variations through the course of his life. After becoming enthusiastic about some possibility, he invested what funds he had, borrowed more from family, friends, and mistresses, and, then, by one means or another, lost it all. Though the experiences always provided fodder for his creative works, they were otherwise disastrous.

Many of the elements of what would later become La Comédie humaine are apparent in Les Chouans, the novel Balzac published in 1829 and the first he signed with his own name (to which he added the aristocratic "de"). Although the work is held together by a melodramatic love affair that catered to the public's taste, the novelist rises above the popular elements with an artistic portrayal of his society. From 1829 until 1846, Balzac was to work at a fever pitch, often publishing five or six works a year, with as many others at various stages of completion.

Literary success arrived in 1831. With the acclaim of his novels, financial independence should have followed, but the bills for his tailor, for wine, bookbinding, gloves, entertaining, and finally for a tilbury carriage with a fashionable "tiger" to hold the whip were staggering. Since neither thrift nor moderation were a part of his character, he was forced to develop extraordinarily clever stratagems to avoid his creditors. Most important, he wrote furiously. The year 1831 brought another masterwork, La Peau de chagrin. Here, Balzac opens with an impoverished young man, Raphaël de Valentin, living in a garret and struggling to complete a seminal work on the human will. At the moment when Raphaël has been driven by poverty and failure to consider suicide, he is given a magic skin that permits him to do as he wishes by focusing his will. As he wills and receives his wish, however, the skin shrinks, thus reducing the span of his life.

The young novelist was receiving letters from female fans who recognized themselves in his characters. No one knows how many adventures they occasioned, but there were certainly several and at least one child. The most important letter arrived in 1832, signed L'Etrangère (the Foreigner or Stranger). A fabulously wealthy Polish countess, married to a man twenty-two years her senior, Evelina Hanska began an affair that was to last, more or less, until Balzac's death.

Eugénie Grandet, one of Balzac's most widely acclaimed masterpieces, appeared in 1833. In spite of being surrounded by gross materialism, the heroine establishes and pursues the spiritual values central to her love of Charles and of the Church. La Recherche de l'absolu (1834) considers another kind of spiritualism. Balthazar Claës, an insane scientist who suffers from the monomania that marks so many of Balzac's characters, focuses not on money but on the attempt to find the hypostasis or essential force underlying reality.

Scholars cite Le Père Goriot (1834–1835) as the work in which Balzac first made use of the device of systematically reappearing characters. For the novel, he took half a dozen characters from previous novels and short stories. He also mixed in the names of historic personages and added a number of new creations. Goriot's dual plots of a dying father and of a young man determined to use any means to rise in society are subordinated to the vision of a degraded world in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, where familial love has no more value than it will bring in cold cash.

In the midst of all this, Balzac was also writing articles, essays, and stories for various reviews and newspapers. Because of modern printing methods and machinery, high-volume, low-cost periodicals became possible. The addictive phrase "continued in the next installment" provided a faithful reader-ship, and "art" became the business of serialized novels. Editors and publishers solicited Balzac's work. Reading rooms waited impatiently for the next installments. Illusions perdues (1837–1843) describes the revolutionary changes taking place in printing and publication and, as well, the process of speculation, credit, debt, and bankruptcy.

No one could maintain Balzac's pace, and, in the midst of long hours with pen, manuscripts, and proofs, he had a stroke. It did not slow him for long, however. Soon he began an affair with the Countess Guidoboni-Visconti, continued his abundant correspondence with Mme Hanska claiming undying fidelity, and of course wrote more novels and short stories, including "La messe de l'athée" (1836), "Facino Cane" (1836), Gambara (1837), Les Employés (1837), and Massimilla Donni (1839). Another novel, Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau (1837), tells the story of one of the thousands who came to Paris to make their fortunes. Unlike many, César does very well, until his notary Roguin embezzles his money and flees. The novel continues the writer's investigation of the world of the small shopkeeper and the demon of speculation. In Béatrix (1839–1845), he told the thinly veiled story of Franz Liszt (1811–1886) and Marie-Catherine-Sophie d'Agoult (1805–1876), if not of George Sand (Amandine Dudevant, 1804–1876) and Jules Sandeau (1811–1883).

Eighteen forty-two was an important year for the novelist. Most significant was the publication of the first volume of his monumental cycle, La Comédie humaine. The collective title was shrewd. Not only did Comédie suggest the personal dramas that would satisfy the hungers of a nineteenth-century audience, it promised something with the significance and beauty of Dante's Divine Comedy. In the Avant-propos, Balzac announced that he was a naturalist who would study the various varieties of human beings—whether soldiers, shopkeepers, or criminals—in the same way that scientists investigate plants and animals. The size of Balzac's project and the ultimate shape were outlined several times. He explained that his cycle would be broken into three parts or études. The Études de mœurs (Studies of manners) would consider particular social "effects," with a view to universals and types. The subsequent Études philosophiques (Philosophical studies) would portray the causes: life struggling with desire. And in the terminal Études analytiques (Analytical studies), he would deal with the overriding principles that governed the preceding sections.

It was also in 1842 that Balzac learned that Mme Hanska's husband had passed away. Unfortunately, her ardor had cooled, and his staggering debts chained him to his desk. Even his now impoverished mother was beginning to press for repayment. In his late forties, as he approached the end of his life, he had no peace. Bailiffs beat on the doors of both his hideaways; his tilbury was seized; his investments in the Northern Railways had soured; Louise de Brugnol had stolen Mme Hanska's letters and was blackmailing him; the French Academy preferred mediocrities to him; jealous journalists pilloried him; and worst of all, his lifetime dream of marriage into aristocracy and wealth was crumbling around him. He fell into depression, unable to work.

Fortunately, his fire was reignited when Mme Hanska suddenly announced a visit to Paris. He found the energy to complete La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin (1847, part four of Splendeurs et misères de courtisanes), and more important, since they represent two stars in his crown, he finished La Cousine Bette (1846) and Le Cousin Pons (1847). The terrible account of cousin Bette uses an everyday story of jealousy and weakness to demonstrate how France can be destroyed by its own demons, by the self-indulgence of the idle "haves" that was feeding the envious hatred of the "have-nots." Both of Les Parents pauvres paint a France where family, church, and state are so weakened that the depredations of self-centered greed and lust can be controlled only by an evil genius like Vautrin, who was named chief of police.

Balzac's health had definitely turned. His eyes were not functioning properly, he frequently had trouble getting his breath, and his heart was acting up. He wanted nothing so much as to flee Paris and marry his dream. Once he arrived at Mme Hanska's estates in Ukraine, he had another heart attack. Nonetheless, when Mme Hanska finally received the tsar's permission for the marriage, the dying Balzac and gout-suffering Mme Hanska made the long trip to the church in Berdichev and were married on 14 March 1850. Though he perked up on returning to Paris, Balzac was soon bedridden and would die just a few months later on 18 August. "La peau de chagrin," the magic skin, had shrunk to nothing.

Though Balzac's personal life was distressing, he was a genius, and he bestowed the work of a genius on the world. La Comédie humaine includes sufficiently numerous masterpieces to have made half a dozen writers famous. It stands comfortably with the great opuses of the Western world, and was to have enormous impact on the novel of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Russia, England, and, as well, of the Americas. Looking at the matter more than a hundred years later, though Charles Baudelaire's aesthetic importance has been more profound, perhaps only François Rabelais (c. 1494–c. 1553) and Marcel Proust (1871–1922) rival Balzac in impact and only Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Voltaire (1694–1778), and Victor Hugo (1802–1885) have had more impressive international influence. Truly, Balzac was a giant.