Part 4

The "_chemin des vaches_" of the sixteenth century became a country road by the passage of the drays that carted stone, from the Vaugirard quarries to the ferry on the southern shore, for the building of the Tuileries. The Pont Royal of Mansart has taken the place of the wooden bridge built above that ferry, and the ferry has given the name to that road, now Rue du Bac. Along its line, on both sides, _seigneurs_ and priests took land and built thereon. There are yet, behind the huge stone blocks of houses, immense tracts of grounds and of woodland, unsuspected by the wayfarer through the narrow, noisy street. One of the most extensive of these open spaces is owned by the Seminary of the Missions Étrangères, whose church is near the corner of Rue de Babylone. For two bishops, who had charge here in the time of Louis XIV., were erected two houses, exactly alike without and within, and these are now numbered 118 and 120 Rue du Bac. In the latter in the apartment on the ground floor, M. and Mme. de Châteaubriand installed themselves in 1838; having left their cottage and its domain in Rue d'Enfer, to the needy priests there. Here, in an angle of the front court, are the low stone steps that mount to their apartment.

[Illustration: Portal of Châteaubriand's Dwelling in Rue du Bac.]

Its dining-room and a chapel, arranged by them, gave on this court. The chapel has been thrown into, and made one with, the dining-room, but this is the only alteration since their time. His bedroom, and that of his wife--with her huge bird-cages behind--and the _salon_ between the two rooms, looked out on their garden, and beyond it on the vast grounds of the Missions Étrangères. The enchanting seclusion was dear to him in these last years, during which his only work was the completion and touching-up of his "Mémoires d'Outre Tombe." Select extracts from the manuscript were sometimes read by him to the group that assembled in the drawing-room at the _abbaye_, between four and six o'clock of every afternoon. The hostess sat on one side of the fireplace, her form grown so fragile that it seemed transparent for the gentle spirit shining out, like a radiant light within a rich vase. Châteaubriand "pontificated" in his arm-chair opposite, toying with the household cat, the while he tried to listen to the lesser men; "a giant bored by, and smiling pitifully down on, a dwarf world," is Amiel's phrase. When Châteaubriand spoke or read, it was with sonorous tones, and with attitude and gesture of a certain stateliness. He was always an artist in all details. His costume was simple and elegant. Short of stature, he made himself shorter by his way of sinking his head--"an Olympian head," says Lamartine--between his shoulders. Under his thick-clustering locks rose a noble forehead, power shone from his eyes, pride curled his lips--too often--and his expression gave assurance of a glacial reserve.

The day came when he found himself too feeble for the short walk between his house and the _abbaye_. Then his friend came to him. She and Madame de Châteaubriand had been sufficiently friendly, but that good lady gave her days to her prayer-books, and to reading her husband's books; which she never understood, albeit she had the finest mind of any woman he had known, he always asserted. She died in the winter of 1846-47, and her body was carried to the Infirmary, the care of which had been the occupation and the happiness of her later years. Jacques Récamier, when in mortal illness in 1830, had been brought to his wife's rooms in the _abbaye_, at her request and by special favor of the Mother Superior, and there he had died.

And now, Châteaubriand offered marriage to Madame Récamier, and she refused what she might have accepted, could it have come a few years earlier. "But, at our age," she asked, "who can question our intimacy, or prevent me taking care of you?" She was prevented only by the cataract that slowly blinded her, and she sat by his bedside, helpless, while Madame Mohl--who had remained Mary Clarke until the summer of 1847--wrote his necessary letters. That sympathizing woman, one of the few congenial to him, had only to come down from the apartment she had taken on the third floor of this house, overlooking the gardens; the apartment which she and her learned husband, Julius Mohl, made the social successor of the Récamier _salon_, through many years. Châteaubriand's death took place on July 4, 1848. He had lived to see the Orleans throne, which he hated, overthrown as he had foretold by the republic, which he did not love. His faithful lady stood by his deathbed, with Béranger, equally faithful to old friends, old customs, and old clothes, clad as we see him in his statue of Square du Temple.

Châteaubriand's funeral service, attended by all that was best in France, was solemnized in the Church of the Missions Étrangères, next door, and his body was laid in a rock of the harbor of Saint-Malo. Madame Récamier went back to her now desolate rooms. On May 10, 1849, she drove over to the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, on a visit to her niece, whose husband, M. Lenormant, was its librarian and had his apartment there. That night she died in that building, in a sudden seizure of cholera.

THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC

[Illustration: The Court of the Pension Vauquer.]

THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE BALZAC[1]

Set in the front wall of a commonplace house, in the broad main street of sunny Tours, a tablet records the birth of Balzac in that house, on the _27 Floréal, An VII._ of the Republic--May 16, 1799--the day of Saint-Honoré, a saint whose name happened to hit the fancy of the parents, and they gave it to their son. Many a secluded corner of the town, many a nook within and about its Cathedral of Saint-Gatien, many a portrait of its priests, has been brought into his books. And he has portrayed, with his artist hand, the country round about of the broad Loire and of bright Touraine, always vivid in his boyish reminiscences. In his life and his work, however, he was, first and always, a Parisian. To the great town, with all its mysteries and its possibilities, his favorite creations surely found their way, however far from it they started, drawn thither, as was drawn and held their creator, by its unconquerable authority.

His father had been a lawyer, forced for safety during the Revolution into army service, and when he was ordered from Tours, in 1814, to take charge of the commissariat of the First Division of the Army in Paris, he brought his family with him. Their abode was in Rue de Thorigny, one of the old Marais streets, and the boy, nearly fifteen, was put to school in the same street, and later in Rue Saint-Louis, hard by. Transformed as is this quarter, there yet remain many of the magnificent mansions with which it was built up in the days of its grandeur, and their ample halls and rooms and gardens serve admirably now as schools for boys and for girls. The young Honoré and his Louis Lambert are one in their pitiful memories of these schools and of their earlier schooling at the Seminary of Vendôme.

To please his father, the boy, when almost eighteen, went through the law course of the Sorbonne and the Collége de France. To please himself he listened, for the sake of their literary charm, to the lectures of Villemain and Cousin and Guizot, and would rehearse them with passion when he got home. But he had no love for the arid literature of the law, and was wont to linger, in his daily walks along the quays and across the bridges to and from his lecture-rooms, over the bookstalls, spending his modest allowance for old books, which he had learned already to select for their worth.

These studies ended, he entered the law office of M. de Merville, a friend of his father, with whom Eugène Scribe had just before finished his time, and to whom Jules Janin came for his training a little later. And these three, unknown to one another, were, as it happened, of the same mind in their revolt against the drudgery of the desk, and against the servitude of the attorney, coupled with certain competence as it might be; and in their preference for that career of letters, which might mean greater toil, but which brought immediate freedom and promised not far-off fame, and perhaps fortune, too.

The elder Balzac, severely practical, dreamed no dreams, and was horrified by his son's refusal to pursue the profession appointed for him. He foretold speedy starvation, and--perhaps to prepare Honoré for it--allowed him to try his experiment, for two years, on a hundred francs or less a month. So, the family having to leave Paris early in 1820, a garret--literally--was rented for the young author, and poorly furnished by his mother; a painstaking, hard-working, fussy old lady, who looked on him as a little boy all her life long, who drudged for him to his last days, and who felt it to be her duty to discipline him to hardship in these early days! This attic-room was at the top of the old house No. 9 Rue Lesdiguières, which was swept away by the cutting of broad Boulevard Henri IV. in 1866-67, its site being in the very middle of this new street. To wax sentimental--as has a recent writer--over the present No. 9 as Balzac's abode is touching, but hardly worth while, that house having no interest for us beyond that of being of the style and the period of Balzac's house, and serving to show the shabbiness of his surroundings. These did not touch the young author, whose garret's rental was within his reach, as was the _Librairie de Monsieur_; for he gives it the old Bourbon name, and how it got that name shall be told in our last chapter. It was the Library of the Arsenal, still open to students as in his days there, in the building begun by François I. for the casting of cannon, which he made lighter and easier of carriage, and the casting of which exploded the Arsenal within twenty years, and with it part of the adjacent Marais. The Valois kings rebuilt it, Henri IV. enlarged it, and gave it for a residence to his Grand Master of artillery, Sully, for whom he decorated the _salons_ as we see them to-day. You may climb the grand staircase, and stand in the rooms--their gildings fresh, their paintings bright--occupied by the great minister. In the cabinet that contains his furniture and fittings is an admirable bust of the King. And you seem to see the man himself, as he enters, his debonair swagger covering his secret shamefacedness for fear of a refusal of his stern treasurer to make the little loan for which he has again come to beg, to pay his last night's gambling or other debt of honor!

In this library by day, and in his garret by night, Balzac began that life of terrific toil from which he never ceased until death stopped his unresting hand. The novels he produced during these years were hardly noticed then, are quite unknown now; showing no art, giving no promise. He never owned them, and put them forth under grotesque pen-names, such as "Horace de Saint-Aubin," "Lord R'hoone"--an anagram of Honoré--and others equally absurd, all telling of his fondness for titles.

This garret, in which he lived for fifteen months, is vividly pictured in "La Peau de Chagrin," written in 1830, as Raphael's room in his early days, before he became rich and wretched. Balzac's letters to his sister Laure (Madame Laure de Surville) detail, with delightful gayety, his exposure to wind and wet within these weather-worn walls; and his ingenious shifts in daily small expenditure of _sous_ to make his income serve. He relates how he shopped, how he brought home in his pockets his scant provender, how he fetched up from the court-pump his large allowance of water. For he used it lavishly in making his coffee, that stimulation supplying the place of insufficient food, and carrying him through his nights of pen-work. Excessive excitation and excessive toil, begun thus early, went on through all his life, and he dug his too early grave with his implacable pen. His only outings, by day or by night, were the long walks that gave him his amazing acquaintance with every corner of Paris, and his solitary strolls through the great graveyard of Paris, near at hand. "_Je vais m'égayer au Père-Lachaise_," he writes to his sister; and there he would climb to the upper slopes, from which he saw the vast city stretched out. For he was fond of height and space, and we shall see how he sought for them in his later dwelling-places.

And in this storm-swept attic he had his first dreams of dwelling in marble halls. Extreme in everything, he could imagine no half-way house between a garret and a palace; he began in the one, he ended in the other, unable to find pause or repose in either!

Dreaming the dreams of Midas, he loved to plunge his favorite young heroes into floods of sudden soft opulence, and his longings for luxury found expression in those unceasing schemes for instant wealth which made him a kindly mock to his companions. His first practical project was started in 1826, during a temporary sojourn for needed rest and proper food at his father's new home in Villeparisis, eighteen miles from Paris, on the edge of the forest of Bondy. He speedily hurried back to Paris and turned printer and publisher; bringing out, among other reprints, the complete works of Molière and of La Fontaine, each with his own introduction, each in one volume--compact and inconvenient--and, at the end of the year which saw twenty copies of either sold, the entire editions were got rid of, to save storage, at the price by weight of their paper. This and other failures left him in debt, and to pay this debt and to gain quick fortune, he set up a type-foundry in partnership with a foreman of his printing-office. The young firm took the establishment at No. 17 Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, now Rue Visconti; named for the famous archæologist who had lived, and in 1818 had died, in that venerable mansion hard by on the corner of Rue de Seine and Quai Malaquais. We have already found our way to this short and narrow Rue Visconti, to visit Jean Cousin and Baptiste du Cerceau, and, last of all, the rival houses of Racine.

Balzac's establishment, now entirely rebuilt, was as typical a setting of the scene as any ever invented by that master of scene-setting in fiction. It may be seen, as it stood until very lately, in its neighbor No. 15, an exact copy of this vanished No. 17. Its frowning front, receding as it rises, is pierced with infrequent windows, and hollowed out by a huge, wide doorway, within which you may see men casting plates for the press, albeit the successors of "_Balzac et Barbier_" no longer set type nor print.

"_Balzac H. et Barbier A., Imprimeurs, Rue des Marais-Saint-Germain, 17_;" so appears the firm in the Paris directory for 1827. The senior partner had not yet assumed the particle "_de_," so proudly worn in later years when, too, he is labelled in the directory "_homme-de-lettres_," the title of "_imprimeur_," on which he prided himself because it meant wealth, having lasted only until the end of 1827 or the beginning of 1828. Printing-office and type-foundry were sold at a ruinous sacrifice, and Balzac was left with debts of about 120,000 francs; a burden that nearly broke his back and his heart for many years. He never went through that narrow street without groaning for its memories; and for a long time, he told his sister, he had been tempted to kill himself, as was tempted his hero of "La Peau de Chagrin." In his "Illusions Perdues" he has painted, in relentless detail, the cruel capacity of unpaid, or partially paid, debts for piling up interest. But the helpless despair of David Séchard was, in Balzac himself, redeemed by a buoyant confidence that never deserted him for long. To pay his debts, he toiled as did Walter Scott, whom Balzac admired for this bondage to rectitude, as he admired his genius. All through the "Comédie Humaine" he dwells on the burden of debt, the ceaseless struggle to throw it off, by desperate, by dishonorable, expedients.

On an upper floor of his establishment, Balzac had fitted up a small but elegant apartment for his living-place, his first attempt to realize that ideal of a bachelor residence such as those in which he installed his heroes. This was furnished, of course, on credit, and when failure came, he removed his belongings to a room at No. 2 Rue de Tournon, a house quite unchanged to-day. Here his neighbor was the editor of the "Figaro," Henri de la Touche--his intimate friend then, later his intimate enemy; a poor creature eaten by envy, whose specialty it was to turn against former friends and to sneer at old allies.

Here Balzac finished the book begun in his former room over his works, "Les Chouans." It was published in 1829, and was the first to bear his real name as author, the first to show to the reading world of what sterling stuff he was made. That stuff was not content with the book, good as it was, and he retouched and bettered it in after years. It brought him not only readers but editors and publishers; and before the end of 1830, he had poured forth a flood of novels, tales, and studies; among them such works as "La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote," "Physiologie du Mariage," "Gobseck," "Étude de Femme," "Une Passion dans le Désert," "Un Épisode sous la Terreur," "Catherine de Médicis," "Lettres sur Paris"--with "Les Chouans," seventy in all!

Werdet, one of Balzac's publishers--his sole publisher from 1834 to 1837--lived and had his shop near by, at No. 49 Rue de Seine. To his house, just as it stands to-day, the always impecunious young author used to come, morning, noon, and night for funds, in payment of work unfinished, of work not yet begun, often of work never to be done.

From Rue de Tournon he removed, early in 1831, to Rue Cassini, No. 1, as we find it given in the Paris _Bottin_ of that year. It is a short street of one block, running from Avenue de l'Observatoire to Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, and takes its name appropriately from the Italian astronomer, who was installed in the Observatory, having been made a citizen of France by Colbert, Louis XIV.'s great Finance Minister. It is a secluded quarter still, with its own air of isolation and its own village atmosphere. In 1831 it was really a village, far from town, and these streets were only country lanes, bordered by infrequent cottages, dear to the weary Parisian seeking distance and quiet. Three of them, near together here, harbored famous men at about this period, and all three have remained intact until lately for the delight of the pilgrim--that of Châteaubriand, No. 92 Rue Denfert-Rochereau, that of Victor Hugo, No. 27 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and this one of Balzac. His house, destroyed only in 1899, was on the southwest corner of Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques and Rue Cassini. It was a little cottage of two stories, with two wings and a small central body, giving on a tiny court. A misguided Paris journal has claimed, with copious letterpress and illustrations, the large building at No. 6 Rue Cassini for Balzac's abode. This is a lamentable error, one of the many met with in topographical research, by which the traditions of a demolished house are transplanted to an existing neighbor. This characterless No. 6 carries its own proof that Balzac could never have chosen it, even were we without the decisive proof given by the _cadastre_ of the city, lately unearthed by M. G. Lenôtre among the buried archives of the _Bureau des Contributions Directes_.

In the sunny apartment of the left wing dwelt Balzac and his friend, Auguste Borget; in the other wing, Jules Sandeau lived alone and lonely in his recent separation from George Sand. Their separation was not so absolute as to prevent an occasional visit from her, and an occasional dinner to her by the three men. She has described one of these wonderful dinners with much humor; telling how Balzac, when she started for her home--then on Quai Malaquais--arrayed himself in a fantastically gorgeous dressing-gown to accompany her; boasting, as they went, of the four Arabian horses he was about to buy; which he never bought, but which he quite convinced himself, if not her, that he already owned! Says Madame Dudevant: "He would, if we had permitted him, have thus escorted us from one end of Paris to the other." He so far realized his vision as to set up a tilbury and horse at this period--about 1832--and exulted in the sensation created by his magnificence as he drove, clad in his famous blue coat with shining buttons, and attended by his tiny groom, "_Grain-de-mil_."

This equipage and that gorgeous dressing-gown were but a portion of the bizarre splendor with which Balzac loved to relieve the squalor of his debt-ridden days. Here, his creditors forgetting, by them forgotten, as he fondly hoped, hiding from his friends the furniture he had salvaged from his wreck, he wantoned in silver toilet-appliances, in dainty porcelain and _bric-à-brac_; willing to go without soup and meat--never without his coffee--that he might fill, with egregious _bibelots_, his "nest of boudoirs _à la marquise_, hung with silk and edged with lace," to use George Sand's words; boudoirs which he has described in minute detail, placing them in the preposterous apartment of "La Fille aux Yeux d'Or."

In his work-room, apart and markedly simple and severe, he began that series of volumes, amazing in number and vigor, with which he was resolute to pay his enormous debts. Here, in this little wing, in the years between 1831 and 1838, he produced, among over sixty others of less note, such masterpieces as "La Peau de Chagrin," "Le Chef d'Oeuvre Inconnu," "Le Curé de Tours," "Louis Lambert," "Eugénie Grandet," "Le Médecin de Campagne," "Le Père Goriot," "La Duchesse de Langeais," "Illusion Perdues" (first part only), "Le Lys dans la Vallée," "L'Enfant Maudit," "César Birotteau," "Cent Contes Drôlatiques" (in three sections), "Séraphita," "La Femme de Trente Ans," and "Jésus-Christ en Flandres."

In addition to his books, he did journalistic writing, chiefly for weekly papers; and in 1835 he bought up and took charge of the "Chronique de Paris," aided by a gallant staff of the cleverest men of the day. It lived only a few months. In 1840 he started "La Revue Parisienne," written entirely by himself. It lived three months.