August 20, 1850—Worn out from two decades of perhaps the most prolific output of any major novelist, the body of Honore de Balzac was laid to rest at the Cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise, as a large Parisian crowd—including pallbearers Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas—followed in a rain-drenched procession from the funeral mass at the Church of Sainte Philippe du Roule.
At the gravesite, Hugo delivered the eulogy for Balzac, paying tribute particularly to the deceased’s astonishing achievement in the more than 90 novels, novellas and short stories that Balzac collectively titled his La Comedie Humaine (The Human Comedy):
“All his books form but one book…a book which realizes observation and imagination, which lavishes the true, the esoteric, the commonplace, the trivial, the material, and which at times through all realities, swiftly and grandly rent away, allows us all at once a glimpse of a most sombre and tragic ideal. Unknown to himself, whether he wished it or not, whether he consented or not, the author of this immense and strange work is one of the strong race of Revolutionist writers. Balzac goes straight to the goal.”
With Dickens in London and Dostoyevsky in Moscow, Balzac pioneered the great realistic urban novel of the 19th century. His grand opus was filled with nearly 2,500 named characters from all walks of life, a number of whom reappear throughout. In their attempt to depict a particular place or society with exactitude, Tom Wolfe, John O’Hara and even the modernist William Faulkner can be thought of as his literary heirs.
Balzac needed every bit of his enormous energy to sustain not only this incredible achievement, but his gargantuan appetites for nearly everything. No sooner was he done pouring his heart out in a letter to a mistress than he’d take his maid—far closer to hand—to bed. If he could describe so well the instinct to acquire money and possessions, it was because he himself was gripped so tightly by it.
The most common image I summon of Balzac is of him working through the night—part of a punishing 15-hour-daily writing schedule—his eyes squinting because of his dim candlelight, downing one cup of thick, black coffee after another to stay awake.
Balzac’s description of the beneficial aspects of coffee deserves to be quoted at length:
“Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”
In such a state, Balzac could reach a kind of creative chaos, his pen scratching out entire pages of inserts that printers would puzzle over. You would think he’d have had mercy on his poor printers, since he had briefly been one himself. Nothing doing: that first 60,000-franc investment in the business left him with nothing except more debts than he’d ever be able to repay, along with a typically defiant statement of his condition: “A debt is a work of the imagination which no tax collector can understand.”
When he descended from his creative, caffeine-induced peak, Balzac could assess the physiological impact of his hastily consumed black brew:
“You will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counselled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate.”
“Immediate death” wasn’t his fate, but what followed was bad enough, a list of medical ills almost as long as his bibliography:
* a slight “brain congestion” and dizzy spills, eventually diagnosed as arachnoiditis;
At the gravesite, Hugo delivered the eulogy for Balzac, paying tribute particularly to the deceased’s astonishing achievement in the more than 90 novels, novellas and short stories that Balzac collectively titled his La Comedie Humaine (The Human Comedy):
“All his books form but one book…a book which realizes observation and imagination, which lavishes the true, the esoteric, the commonplace, the trivial, the material, and which at times through all realities, swiftly and grandly rent away, allows us all at once a glimpse of a most sombre and tragic ideal. Unknown to himself, whether he wished it or not, whether he consented or not, the author of this immense and strange work is one of the strong race of Revolutionist writers. Balzac goes straight to the goal.”
With Dickens in London and Dostoyevsky in Moscow, Balzac pioneered the great realistic urban novel of the 19th century. His grand opus was filled with nearly 2,500 named characters from all walks of life, a number of whom reappear throughout. In their attempt to depict a particular place or society with exactitude, Tom Wolfe, John O’Hara and even the modernist William Faulkner can be thought of as his literary heirs.
Balzac needed every bit of his enormous energy to sustain not only this incredible achievement, but his gargantuan appetites for nearly everything. No sooner was he done pouring his heart out in a letter to a mistress than he’d take his maid—far closer to hand—to bed. If he could describe so well the instinct to acquire money and possessions, it was because he himself was gripped so tightly by it.
The most common image I summon of Balzac is of him working through the night—part of a punishing 15-hour-daily writing schedule—his eyes squinting because of his dim candlelight, downing one cup of thick, black coffee after another to stay awake.
Balzac’s description of the beneficial aspects of coffee deserves to be quoted at length:
“Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”
In such a state, Balzac could reach a kind of creative chaos, his pen scratching out entire pages of inserts that printers would puzzle over. You would think he’d have had mercy on his poor printers, since he had briefly been one himself. Nothing doing: that first 60,000-franc investment in the business left him with nothing except more debts than he’d ever be able to repay, along with a typically defiant statement of his condition: “A debt is a work of the imagination which no tax collector can understand.”
When he descended from his creative, caffeine-induced peak, Balzac could assess the physiological impact of his hastily consumed black brew:
“You will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counselled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate.”
“Immediate death” wasn’t his fate, but what followed was bad enough, a list of medical ills almost as long as his bibliography:
* a slight “brain congestion” and dizzy spills, eventually diagnosed as arachnoiditis;
* stomach cramps;
* high blood pressure;
* hypertrophy (abnormal enlargement) of the left ventricle of the heart;
* facial twitches;
* hepatitis;
* hepatitis;
* headaches;
* poor eyesight;
* bronchitis.
Amazingly, amid all this physical trauma, Balzac produced some of his best work, including two late novels about poor relations, Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons. In a 1946 essay on these two works, collected in the anthology The Pritchett Century, British man-of-letters V.S. Pritchett perceptively assessed how the French novelist caught but transcended his time:
“Balzac arrived when the new money, the new finance of the post-Napoleonic world, was starting on its violent course; when money was an obsession and was putting down a foundation for middle-class morals. In these two novels about the poor relation, he made his most palatable, his least acrid and most human statements about this grotesque period of middle-class history.”
The authors I mentioned earlier as being heavily influenced by Balzac probably come as no surprise, but one who might is Henry James, whose growing obsession with every single word in his work is more reminiscent of Gustave Flaubert than the older French novelist. Why, then, in a celebrated 1902 piece, did James call Balzac “the only member of his tribe really monumental…the father of us all”?
Part of it is due to the fact that the two men were exploring the same territory, what James called “the money passion.” Both men came to adulthood in eras when a new economy overthrew all old moral restraints. It makes me wonder, in the era of “the Celtic Tiger” (and now, of course, that tiger’s toothlessness), who is—or is ready to become—the Irish Balzac?
Amazingly, amid all this physical trauma, Balzac produced some of his best work, including two late novels about poor relations, Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons. In a 1946 essay on these two works, collected in the anthology The Pritchett Century, British man-of-letters V.S. Pritchett perceptively assessed how the French novelist caught but transcended his time:
“Balzac arrived when the new money, the new finance of the post-Napoleonic world, was starting on its violent course; when money was an obsession and was putting down a foundation for middle-class morals. In these two novels about the poor relation, he made his most palatable, his least acrid and most human statements about this grotesque period of middle-class history.”
The authors I mentioned earlier as being heavily influenced by Balzac probably come as no surprise, but one who might is Henry James, whose growing obsession with every single word in his work is more reminiscent of Gustave Flaubert than the older French novelist. Why, then, in a celebrated 1902 piece, did James call Balzac “the only member of his tribe really monumental…the father of us all”?
Part of it is due to the fact that the two men were exploring the same territory, what James called “the money passion.” Both men came to adulthood in eras when a new economy overthrew all old moral restraints. It makes me wonder, in the era of “the Celtic Tiger” (and now, of course, that tiger’s toothlessness), who is—or is ready to become—the Irish Balzac?
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