XIV

BALZAC

BUT Balzac was young yet; his poet's soul, though winter fell early in it, had its spring; he, too, felt constrained to make love and woman the central interest of a whole series of novels; and he treated the old theme with an originality which made it seem quite new. The stories in which he most successfully varied it form a distinct group among his works.

It was not beauty, at least not plastic beauty, which Balzac worshipped in woman. And one thing that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries was, that beauty did not impress him most when seen through the medium of art. A great proportion of the Romantic literature of France, as well as of Germany and Scandinavia, was art literature. Such an art-loving author as, for instance, Gautier (who soon became the head of a whole school), was actually prevented by his love of art from appreciating reality. He himself has told how disappointed he was the first time he went to paint a female figure from the life in Rioult's studio, and this in spite of the unquestioned beauty of the model and the classical grace of her outlines. "I have always," he confesses, "preferred the statue to the woman, marble to flesh." Significant words! Picture Gautier and Balzac together in the museum of antiquities in the Louvre, in that holy of holies, where the Venus of Milo shines in solitary majesty. The plastic poet hears, resounding from the marble, the loveliest of all the hymns of Greek art to the perfection of the human form. Gazing at Venus, he forgets his surroundings. Not so Balzac ! His attention is promptly diverted from the goddess by the first Parisian lady who stops in front of her, wearing, in the fashion of the day, a long shawl in which there is not a fold

from neck to heel, a coquettish hat, and tightly fitting gloves. He takes in at a glance all the little artifices of the fashionable toilette, the secrets of which are no secrets to him.1

Here, then, we have the first characteristic feature in Balzac's work. No artistic tradition stands between him and the woman of the period. He studied no statue, worshipped no goddess, did no homage to ideal beauty; he saw and understood woman exactly as she was then, with her gowns, shawls, gloves, and hats, her caprices, virtues, temptations, and faults, her nerves and passions, with all their traces of unnaturalness, morbidness, and ennui. He loves her as she is. And he is not satisfied with studying her in the street, in the boudoir, or even in the bedchamber; he is not satisfied with analysing her soul; he inquires into the physiological causes of the psychological phenomena, into the sufferings and the diseases of women. He does more than merely indicate all that the weak and suffering sex silently endures.

The second characteristic feature is, that it is not the young girl, nor even the young married woman, whom Balzac represents as the object of love; his chief female type, which has taken its name from the title of one of his stories, is la femme de trente ans. He discovered and proclaimed the simple truth that in such a climate as that of the north of France, a woman is not at her best, either physically or spiritually, at the age of eighteen. He described the woman who has left her first youth behind her, who feels more profoundly, thinks more maturely, has already suffered disappointments, but is still capable of intense, unalloyed feeling. Life has already set its mark upon her-here a line of suffering, and there a wrinkle-but she is still in full possession of all the attractions of her sex. She is melancholy; she has tasted happiness and has tasted suffering, is misunderstood or lonely; she has often been deceived, but is still waiting, capable of inspiring the strong, ardent passions which draw their nourishment from compassion. And, curiously enough, she is not seen and described from the point of view of the man of her own age, but from that of a younger man, with little experience of life. The vernal 1 Cf. Th. Gautier, Portraits contemporains, p. 108.

emotion, the ardent desire, the naïve enthusiasm, the unconscious idealisation of youthful passion, surround this no longer perfectly youthful figure with a glorifying halo, embellish, rejuvenate, deify the woman whose real attractions are her refinement, her feminine seriousness, and the grace born of genuine passion. The delineation is never idealistic in the sense that George Sand's delineations are; for nothing is suppressed of what women, when they talk or write of their own sex, are accustomed to ignore of what even George Sand passes over in silence when she is describing women for whom she desires to awaken sympathy and admiration. Το George Sand woman is above all a soul; to Balzac she is a natural phenomenon, and therefore not flawless, either physically or spiritually. His idealisation is either purely external (the transfiguring power of certain lights, of the erotic situation, &c.), or else it consists in passion for a certain limited time invalidating everything else, everything previous, and ennobling with its glow. Maternal love, wifely love, the bashful tenderness of the young girl, are painted by Balzac during this period with as masterly a touch as the unbridled erotic passion of the courtesan.1

He shows us the Frenchwoman of four different historical periods.

First, the Frenchwoman of the days of the Revolution. In that little masterpiece, Le Réquisitionnaire, one of his few perfectly proportioned stories, he represents, with the Reign of Terror as a background, a mother's love for her son. The little out-of-the-way town and Madame de Dey's curious house are drawn with a few strokes. Apprehension of the possible fate of a son who has been condemned to death; the expectation of his arrival in the disguise of a soldier who is to be quartered on her; the terrible anxiety, increasing from hour to hour till late at night; the apparently mysterious arrival of the young soldier who, unseen by the mistress of the house, is at once conducted to the bedchamber comfortably prepared for him; the mother's torturing restlessness

1 See Le Message, La Grenadière, La Femme abandonnée, La grande Brétèche, Madame Firmiani, Une Fille d'Ève, and La Femme de trente Ans, which last work is a collection of stories not originally written in connection with each other.

VOL. V.

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and almost uncontrollable joy when she hears his steps in the room above, but feels obliged, in order not to betray his arrival, to continue her conversation in the drawing-room; her hurried entrance into his room, and the frightful discovery that the person who has arrived is not her son, but a real recruit-all this, compressed into a few pages, is described with extraordinary power and truth to nature.

Next Balzac paints the women of the Napoleonic period, upon a background of military pomp and splendour, in all the glow and warmth of their admiration for the successful warriors. His picture bears the impress of the restless, pleasure-seeking haste with which life was lived at a time. when it was possible for the young woman "to become fiancée, wife, mother, and widow between a first and a fifth bulletin from the Grande Armée," and when the near prospect of widowhood or honours or an immortal name, made the women more reckless and the officers more seductive. A period and a distinct female type are represented in the description of the review in the Tuileries Gardens, and of the evening party at the time of the battle of Wagram (in La Femme de trente Ans and La Paix du Ménage).

But it is not until the plots of his stories are laid in the days of the restored Legitimist monarchy that Balzac finds his true province, and produces his most acutely observed, skilfully drawn female types and his most wonderful psychological analyses. Eminenty fitted as he was, with his unshrinking eye and his hard hand, to paint the dulness and the dishonesty of the reign of the Citizen King, he was poet enough to look back regretfully from the prosaic days of the plutocracy to the refined elegance and freer, gayer tone of the days of the Legitimist Monarchy. That had still been an aristocratic period; and Balzac, who, without any proper claim to the title, regarded himself as an aristocrat, had no small respect for the aristocracy; the high-born, well-bred, beautiful woman was in his eyes the flower of humanity. He was of the generation that worshipped Napoleon; Napoleon's name appears on every tenth page of his novels, and (like Victor Hugo) he dreamed of rivalling, in his own domain of literature, the Emperor's world-wide dominion; in his study

stood a statuette of Napoleon, and on the scabbard of the sword he had written: "What he has conquered with the sword I will conquer with the pen." But, granted all this, he nevertheless, with his dreams, his weaknesses, his vanities and his refinements, belonged to the Legitimist Monarchy, for which, moreover, the fact that his youth had been spent under it gave him a warmer feeling. In the days of gilded state-coaches and old French ceremonial, under the shelter of ecclesiasticism and frivolity, it had been possible for liberal ideas and humane morals to thrive in the higher classes of society; they disappeared when money ascended the throne. The social life of Paris lost that refined charm for which it had been so famous. It is not surprising, then, that Balzac painted the fair sinners of the Faubourg St. Germain with a lenient hand and flattering colours. One of the most eminent women of the day, the charming Delphine de Girardin, whose salon was a fashionable resort, was a true friend to Balzac as well as to Hugo and Gautier; but as far as his works are concerned, he undoubtedly learned more from the two duchesses who personified to him the greatness of Imperial France and the gay refinement of the ancien régime, and with whom he became intimate almost at the beginning of his literary career. These were Madame Junot, the Duchess of Abrantés, whom he assisted in her literary pursuits, and the Duchesse de Castries, who began their acquaintance by writing anonymously to him of her interest in his works, and to whom a probably unrequited passion on his side and violent jealousy on hers long bound him. She appears in his Histoire des Treize under the name of the Duchesse de Langeais.

At the beginning of the Thirties, Balzac has, of course, not yet begun to write of society under the Constitutional Monarchy, its women and their passions. This happens later. And when it does happen, what we observe is, that he as a rule envisages this new material much more gloomily and austerely. The feeling of spring has vanished. Woman and love still form the centre of interest in many of the books. But affection has become passion and passion has become depravity. We read little of unselfish feeling and