Part 6
James, concerning the house in which is played the poignant tragedy of "Père Goriot." You will, if you love Balzac, own to the truth of this statement, when you look upon this striking bit of salvage. It stands, absolutely unchanged as to externals, at No. 24 Rue Tournefort; a street named in honor of the great botanist who cleared the track for Linnæus. In Balzac's day, this street was known by its original name of Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève; one of the most ancient and most isolated streets on the southern bank. Once only, through the centuries, has its immemorial quiet been broken by unseemly noise, when, in the days of François I., a rowdy gambling-den there, the "_Tripôt des 11,000 Diables_," did its utmost to justify its name. The street seems to creep, in subdued self-effacement, over the brow of Mont-Sainte-Geneviève, away from the Paris of shops and cabs and electric light. The house stands narrow on the street, its gable window giving scanty light to poor old Goriot's wretched garret; framed in it, one may fancy the patient face of the old man, looking out in mute bewilderment on his selfish, worldly daughters. The place no longer holds the "_pension bourgeoise de deux sexes et autres_" of the naïve description on the cards of Madame Vauquer, _née_ Conflans; and is now let out to families and single tenants. Its gate-way stands always open, and you may enter without let or hindrance into the court, and so through to the tiny garden behind, once the pride of Madame Vauquer, no longer so carefully kept up. You peep into the small, shabby _salle-à-manger_, on the entrance floor of the house, and you seem to see the convict Vautrin, manacled, in the clutch of the _gens-d'armes_, and, cowering before him, the vicious old maid who has betrayed him. That colossal conception of the great romancer had found his ideal hiding-place here, as had the forlorn father his hiding-place, in his self-inflicted poverty. All told, there is no more convincing pile of brick and mortar in fiction; sought out and selected by Balzac with as much care and as many journeys as Dickens gave to his hunt for exactly the right house for Sampson and Sally Brass.
[Illustration: The Pension Vauquer.]
While Balzac was still at Passy, after long searching for a new home, he made purchase, as early as 1846, in the new quarter near the present Parc Monceaux. That name came from an estate hereabout, once owned by Philippe Égalité; and his son, the King of the French, and the shrewdest speculator among the French, was just at this time exploiting this estate, in company with lesser speculators. The whole suburb was known as the Quartier Beaujon, from a great banker of the eighteenth century, whose grand mansion, within its own grounds, had been partly demolished by the cutting of new streets, leaving only out-buildings and a pavilion in a small garden. This was the place bought by Balzac; the house and grounds, dear as they were, costing much less, as he found, than his furniture, bronzes, porcelains, and pottery, paintings and their frames--all minutely described in the collection of _le cousin Pons_. He made a museum, indeed, of this house, bringing out all his hidden treasures from their various concealments here and there about town. There was still a pretence of poverty regarding his new home; he would say to his friends, amazed by the display: "Nothing of all this is mine. I have furnished this house for a friend, whom I expect. I am only the guardian and doorkeeper of this _hôtel_."
The pretty mystery was resolved within a few months, and its solution explained Balzac's frequent and long absences from Paris after the winter of 1842-43. These months had been passed at the home of Madame Ève de Hanska, the Polish widow who was to be his wife. Her home was in the grand _château_ of Wierzchownie, in the Ukraine, whose present owner keeps unchanged the furniture of Balzac's apartment, where is hung his portrait by Boulanger, a gift to Madame de Hanska from her lover. And from there he brought his bride to Paris in the summer of 1850, their marriage dating from March of that year, after many years of waiting in patient affection. She had made over--with Balzac's cordial consent--nearly the whole of her great fortune to her daughter, her only child, and to that daughter's husband, retaining but a small income for herself. It was--and the envious world owned that it was--truly a love-match. They came home to be welcomed, first of all, by Balzac's aged mother; who had, during his absence, taken charge of all the preparations, with the same anxious, loving care she had given to the fitting-up of his garret thirty years before. She had carried out, in every detail, even to the arrangement of the flowers in the various rooms, the countless directions he had sent from every stage of the tedious journey from Wierzchownie.
"And so, the house being finished, death enters," goes the Turkish proverb. This undaunted mariner, after his stormy voyage, gets into port and is ship-wrecked there. His premonition of early years, written to his confidant Dablin in 1830, was proven true: "I foresee the darkest of destinies for myself; that will be to die when all that I now wish for shall be about to come to me." As early as in the preceding summer of 1849, he had ceased to conceal from himself any longer the malady that others had seen coming since 1843. The long years of unbroken toil, of combat without pause, of stinted sleep, of insufficient food, of inadequate exercise, of the steady stimulation of coffee, had broken the body of this athlete doubled with the monk. Years before, he had found that the inspiration for work given by coffee had lessened in length and strength. "It now excites my brain for only fifteen days consecutively," he had complained; protesting that Rossini was able to work for the same period on the same stimulus! So he spurred himself on, listening to none of the warnings of worn nature nor of watchful friends. "Well, we won't talk about that now," was always his answer. "In the olden days," says Sainte-Beuve, "men wrote with their brains; but Balzac wrote, not only with his brains, but with his blood." And now, he went to pieces all at once; his heart and stomach could no longer do their work; his nerves, once of steel and Manila hemp, were torn and jangled, and snapped at every strain; his very eyesight failed him. The most pitiful words ever penned by a man-of-letters were scrawled by him, at the end of a note written by his wife to Gautier, a few weeks after their home-coming: "_Je ne puis ni lire ni écrire._"
"On the 18th August, 1850"--writes Hugo in "Choses Vues"--"my wife, who had been during the day to call on Madame Balzac, told me that Balzac was dying. My uncle, General Louis Hugo, was dining with us, but as soon as we rose from table, I left him and took a cab to Rue Fortunée, Quartier Beaujon, where M. de Balzac lived. He had bought what remained of the _hôtel_ of M. de Beaujon, a few buildings of which had escaped the general demolition, and out of them he had made a charming little house, elegantly furnished, with a _porte-cochère_ on the street, and in place of a garden, a long, narrow, paved court-yard, with flower-beds about it here and there."
[Illustration: Plaque marking place of death of Balzac]
It was to No. 14, Allée Fortunée, that Hugo drove. That suburban lane is now widened into Rue Balzac, and where it meets Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré there is a bit of garden-wall, and set in it is a tablet recording the site of this, Balzac's last home. The house itself has quite vanished, but one can see, above that wall, the upper part of a stone pavilion with Greek columns, built by him, it is believed.
"I rang," continues Hugo; "the moon was veiled by clouds; the street deserted. No one came. I rang again. The gate opened; a woman came forward, weeping. I gave my name, and was told to enter the _salon_, which was on the ground floor. On a pedestal opposite the fireplace was the colossal bust by David. A wax-candle was burning on a handsome oval table in the middle of the room.... We passed along a corridor, and up a staircase carpeted in red, and crowded with works of art of all kinds--vases, pictures, statues, paintings, brackets bearing porcelains.... I heard a loud and difficult breathing. I was in M. de Balzac's bedroom.
"The bed was in the middle of the room. M. de Balzac lay in it, his head supported by a mound of pillows, to which had been added the red damask cushions of the sofa. His face was purple, almost black, inclining to the right. The hair was gray, and cut rather short. His eyes were open and fixed. I saw his side face only, and thus seen, he was like Napoleon.... I raised the coverlet and took Balzac's hand. It was moist with perspiration. I pressed it; he made no answer to the pressure...."
The bust that Hugo saw was done by David d'Angers; a reduced copy surmounts Balzac's tomb. His portrait, in water-color, painted, within an hour after his death, by Eugène Giraud, is a touching portrayal of the man, truer than any made during life, his widow thought. While long suffering had wasted, it had refined, his face, and into it had come youth, strength, majesty. It is the head of the Titan, who carried a pitiable burden through a life of brave labor.
Balzac's death was known in a moment, it would seem, to his creditors, and they came clamoring to the door, and invaded the house--a ravening horde, ransacking rooms and hunting for valuables. They drove the widow away, and she found a temporary home with Madame de Surville, at 47 Rue des Martyrs. This house and number are yet unchanged. Cabinets and drawers were torn open, and about the grounds were scattered his letters and papers, sketches of new stories, drafts of contemplated work--all, that could be, collected by his friends, also hurrying to the spot. They found manuscripts in the shops around, ready to enwrap butter and groceries. One characteristic and most valuable letter was tracked to three places, in three pieces, by an enthusiast, who rescued the first piece just as it was twisted up and ready to light a cobbler's pipe.
"He died in the night," continues Hugo. "He was first taken to the Chapel Beaujon.... The funeral service took place at Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. As I stood by the coffin, I remembered that there my second daughter had been baptized. I had not been in the church since.... The procession crossed Paris, and went by way of the boulevards to Père-Lachaise. Rain was falling as we left the church, and when we reached the cemetery. It was one of those days when the heavens seemed to weep. We walked the whole distance. I was at the head of the coffin on the right, holding one of the silver tassels of the pall. Alexandre Dumas was on the other side.... When we reached the grave, which was on the brow of the hill, the crowd was immense.... The coffin was lowered into the grave, which is near to those of Charles Nodier and Casimir Delavigne. The priest said a last prayer and I a few words. While I was speaking the sun went down. All Paris lay before me, afar off, in the splendid mists of the sinking orb, the glow of which seemed to fall into the grave at my feet, as the dull sounds of the sods dropping on the coffin broke in upon my last words."
Yes, stretched before his grave, lies all Paris, as his Rastignac saw it, when he turned from the _fosses-communes_, into which they had just thrown the body of Père Goriot, and with his clinched fist flung out his grand defiance toward the great, beautiful, cruel city: "_À nous deux, maintenant!_"
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Just as Balzac was a victim of calumny during life, so, since death, has he suffered from carelessness. It is almost impossible to make sure of incidents and dates in his career. These errors begin with his birth, which is placed on the 20th May by many writers, and is so cut on the memorial tablet in Paris. In this text, his birth-date is fixed on the 16th May, on the strength of his family records, and the statements of his life-long friends. Of these, some say that he was born on the _27 Floréal_, and others on the day of Saint-Honoré. No figuring can make these dates fall on any other day than the 16th May. As for the many conflicting statements concerning him that have been handed down, in the absence of indisputable evidence, those alone are accepted here which are most nearly in keeping with the proven facts and dates in his life.
THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS
[Illustration: The Figure of d'Artagnan. (From the Dumas Monument, by Gustave Doré.)]
THE PARIS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS
It was in 1823 that Alexandre Dumas, in his twenty-first year, took coach for Paris from his boyhood-home with his widowed mother, at Villers-Cotterets. He was set down at the principal landing-place of the provincial diligences in Place des Victoires, and found a room near by in an inn at No. 9 Rue du Bouloi. Its old walls are still there on the street and in the court, and the Hôtel de Blois still awaits the traveller. Thence he started on foot, at once, for No. 64 Rue du Mont-Blanc, the home of the popular Liberal spokesman in the Chamber of Deputies, General Foy, an old comrade-in-arms of General Dumas, to whom his son brought a letter of introduction.
About that house, two years later, a few days after November 28, 1825, all Paris assembled, while all France mourned, for the burial of this honest man, whose earnest voice had been heard only in the cause of freedom and justice. Marked by a tablet, his house still stands, and is now No. 62 Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin--the renamed Rue du Mont-Blanc--on the corner of Rue de la Victoire.
Besides this letter, young Dumas carried only a meagre outfit of luggage, and such meagre education as may be picked up by a clever and yet an idle lad, in a notary's office in a provincial town. Indeed, when he was made welcome by General Foy, he was questioned, too; and, to his chagrin, he was found to be without equipment for any sort of service. On the strength, however, of his "_belle écriture_," he obtained, through the influence of the general, a petty clerkship in the household of the Duc d'Orléans, coming naturally enough to the boy from Villers-Cotterets, the country-seat of the Orleans family. Its stipend of 1,200 francs a year was doubtless munificent in the eyes of Orleans thrift, and was certainly sufficient for the needs then of the future owner of Monte-Cristo's millions. He earned his wage and no more; for his official pen--at his desk in the Palais-Royal--while doing its strict duty on official documents, was more gladly busied on his own studies and his own paper-spoiling. For the author within him had come to life with his first tramping of the Paris streets and his first taking-in of all that they meant then.
The babies, begotten by French fathers and mothers during the Napoleonic wars, and during those tremendous years at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, breathed, full-lunged, an air of instant and intense vitality. Now, come to stalwart manhood, that mighty generation, eager to speed the coming of red-blooded Romanticism and the going of cold and correct Classicism, showed itself alert in many directions, notably prolific in literature and the arts, after the sterility of so many years.
When Dumas came to Paris, Lamartine had already, in 1820, charmed the public by the freshness and grace of his "Méditations." His admirers were content with the sonorous surface of his vague, spiritual exaltations, satisfied not to seek for any depth below. Hugo, barely twenty, had thrilled men with the sounding phrases of his "Odes et Ballades." These two, coming behind Chénier the herald and Châteaubriand the van-courier, were imposing pioneers of the great movement. Even more popular than these two Royalist poets, as they were regarded, was Casimir Delavigne--already installed over Dumas as Librarian at the Palais-Royal--rather a classicist in form, yet hailed as the poet and playwright of the Liberal Opposition. Soulié, not so well known now as he merits, won his first fame in 1824 by his poems and plays. De Vigny had brought out his earliest poems in 1822; and now, "isolated in his ivory tower," he was turning the periods of his admirable "Cinq-Mars." De Musset was getting ready to try his wings, and made his first open-air flight in 1828; a flight alone, for the poet of personal passion joined no flock, ever. Gautier was serving his apprenticeship to that poetic art, to whose service he gave a life-long devotion and the most perfect craftsmanship in all France.
"They all come from Châteaubriand," said Goethe, of these and of other rhymesters of that time. Châteaubriand himself had closed his career as poet and as imaginative writer as far back as 1809, and had by now taken his rank as a classic in literature, and in life as a Peer of France and a Minister of the Bourbons.
But of all the singers of that day it was to Béranger that the public ear turned most quickly and most kindly; even though he, then forty-three years of age, might also seem to be of an earlier generation. Those others touched, with various fingers, the lyre or the lute; he turned a most melodious hand-organ, with assured and showy art, and around it the captivated crowd loved to throng, with enraptured long ears. His cheaply sentimental airs were hummed and whistled all over France, and, known to everybody everywhere, there was really no need of his putting them in type on paper, and no need of his being sent to prison for that crime by Charles X. Yet he had his turn, soon again, and his _chansons_, as much as any utterance of man, upset the Bourbon throne and placed Louis-Philippe on that shaky seat. That most prosaic of monarchs was sung up to the throne, and the misguided poet soon found him out for what he was.
In prose, during these years, Nodier, Librarian at the Arsenal, was plying his refined and facile pen. Mérimée showed his hand in 1825, not to clasp, with any show of sympathy, the hand of any fellow-worker, yet willing to take his share of the strain. Guizot, out of active politics for a time, did his most notable pen-work between 1825 and 1830. His untiring antagonist, Thiers, not yet turned into the practical politician, produced, between 1823 and 1827, his "History of the French Revolution," voluminous and untrustworthy; its author energetically earning Carlyle's epithet, "a brisk little man in his way." His life-long crony, Mignet, was digging vigorously in dry, historic dust. Sainte-Beuve left, in 1827, his medical studies for those critical studies in which he soon showed the master's hand; notably with his early paper on Hugo's "Odes et Ballades." Michelet was finding his _métier_ by writing histories for children. The two Thierry brothers, Augustin and Amédée, proved the genuine historian's stuff in them as early as 1825. Balzac was working, alone and unknown, in his garret; and young Sue was handling the naval surgeon's knife, before learning how to handle the pen.
And nearly all of these, nearly all the fine young fellows who made the movement of 1830, had got inspiration from Villemain, who had spoken, constantly and steadfastly, from his platform in the Sorbonne during the ten years from 1815 to 1825, those sturdy and graphic words which gave cheer and courage to so many.
There were a similar vitality and fecundity in painting and music and their sister arts, and the brilliant host stirring for their sake might be cited along with the unnumbered and unnamable pen-workers of this teeming decade.
Less aggressive was the theatre. Scribe had possession, flooding the stage with his comedies, vaudeville, opera-librettos, peopling its boards with his pasteboard personages. There was call for revolt and need of life. Talma, near his end, full of honors, devoted to his very death to his art, longed to fill the rôle of a _man_ on the boards, after so many years' impersonation of bloodless heroes. So he told Dumas, who had come to see him only two weeks before his death, in 1826, when the veteran thought he was recovering from illness--an illness acceptable to the great tragedian, for it gave him, he pointed out with pride, the lean frame and pendent cheeks, "beautiful for old Tiberius"--the new part he was then studying. Death came with his cue before that rôle could be played.
This wish for a real human being on the boards came home to Dumas, when he saw the true Shakespeare rendered by Macready and Miss Smithson at the Salle Favart in 1826. It was Shakespeare, in the reading before and now in the acting, that helped Dumas more than any other influence. No Frenchman has comprehended more completely than Dumas the Englishman's universality, and he used to say that, after God, Shakespeare was the great creator. His first attempt to put live men and women on the stage, in "Christine," was crowded out by a poorer play of the same name, pushed by the powers behind the Comédie Française. But on its boards, on the evening of February 16, 1829, was produced his "Henri III. et sa Cour," an instantaneous and unassailable success. He might have said, in the words of Henri IV. at Senlis, "My hour has struck"; for from that hour he went on in his triumphant dramatic career. The Romantic drama had come at last, with its superb daring, its sounding but spurious sentiment, its engorgement of adjectives, and its plentiful lack of all sense of the ludicrous. Perhaps if it had not taken itself so seriously, and had been blessed with a few grains of the saving salt of humor, it had not gone stale so soon.