# The New International Encyclopædia/Balzac, Honoré de

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​BALZAC, bal'zak', Honoré de (1799-1850). The greatest novelist of France, and, according to some critics, of the world, if we regard at once the quantity of his work, the multitude and variety of his creations of character, his coordination of them into a microcosmic picture of the society of his time, and the scope and depth of his insight into the sordid ambitions and ideal impulses that actuate human life. His own career had given him a varied and acute experience. He was born at Tours, May 16, 1799, the first of four children of well-to-do bourgeois, self-indulgent, a little Rabelaisian, and not at all literary. His infancy was passed with a foster-mother in the country. He showed no cleverness in his studies, and found no appreciation at home, but he was a diligent pupil of the 'truant school.' His wanderings along the vine- ards of the Loire and in the noisy cooper-shops of the suburbs of Tours have left picturesque traces throughout his work, especially in the Contes Drolatiques, and he has borne an eloquent witness to the pathos of his school life in Louis Lambert.
Balzac had very early what his sympathetic sister Laura calls" 'the intuition of reno.' A family misfortune was to him a kind providence, for it brought him at nineteen to Paris and stimulated his literary activity by contact with Guizot, Villemain, and Cousin. His novels, especially Crsar Birotlenu, attest his three years' study of' law : but he refused to practice, and in spite of discouragements, domestic and public, he devoted himself to literature, doubting some- times his power, but never his vocation. It took bim ten years (1810-20) to learn his trade, the management of his novelistic tools. His work in this period ranks with that of Pigault-Lebrun. Onlv in the light of the future can it be said to show even promise of the kind of excellence which he was to realize. Harassed liy poverty, op- pressed by debts due to caprice and bad judg- ment, he worked indefatigably, and at last pro- duced in Les Chouans (1820) a story of Brittany in 1700, one of the first and best of the his- torical novels of France, though its attempted imitation of Scott is more obvious than success- ful. hat follows Les Chouans. good and bad, was admitted by Balzac to a place in his works; what went before, he ignored. The next six years were years of marvelous fertility, sustained excellence, and progressing power, fostered by intercourse with Hugo, Vigny, Lamartine, and George Sand. He made useful aristocratic acquaintances also, the Duchcsse d'Abrant&s and iladame de Castries, his Duchesse de Langeais. Then he fell under the spell of a Polish lady, Madame Hanska, whom ho lia.l met some vears before, and till the death of M. Hanska, iii 1842, his production and development suffer some check, to revive again for the complete flowering of his genius for five years (1842-47). After that he became more and more absorbed in plans for marriage with Madame Hanska, and hindered from work by illness and by visits to the Russian estates of his betrothed, whom he married there a few months before his death. Balzac's correspondence with his sister and his recently published letters to Madame Hanska are a sufficient revelation of his ​ character. To an intense imagination that made him at times a visionary, he joined an intense application that made him at times a recluse. In thought, the child was a man; in action the man was a child, capricious and prodigal, full of schemes that made others rich and kept him poor: restless, passionate, morbid sometimes, especially in the hope deferred of his unfortunate relation to Madame Hanska, but never forfeiting sympathy, because always frank and almost childlike in his broad humanity. There was something awesome in the intensity with which he lived out his fifty years. Hugo expressed this when he said at his grave in Père Lachaise that "such coffins proclaim immortality. We feel the divine destiny of that intellect which has traversed earth to suffer and be purified. So great a genius in his life cannot but be a great spirit hereafter."
In any survey of Balzac's work it is well to consider first what he tried to do. He explains this in the preface to his novels collected under the title La Comédie Humaine. He says his thought was to do for human nature what had recently been done for zoölogy — to show that all society was bound together by a unity of composition, diversified by evolution in varied environments, so that there were species of men as of animals. The soldier, the lawyer, the workman, the scholar, the statesman, would show as distinct and abiding characteristics as the wolf, the shark, the ass, the raven, and the sheep. But this, he continues, would require several thousand characters; and how should he give unity to his creations? He would let society tell its own story. He would be its secretary, draw up an inventory of its virtues and vices, gather the facts of its passions, compose types for it by uniting homogeneous natures, and so produce a history of manners from the point of view of a conservative, a Christian, and a monarchist, who knew through friends the Old Régime and the Republic, and had lived under the Empire, the Bourbons, and the democratic monarchy of July. His novels were to be as a secretary's minutes, ideal in conception, but real in detail, shrinking from neither vice nor passion, because these are the motive forces that melt and recast human nature, but giving to religion its due place, and making virtue not only lovable but interesting. That is what he undertook to do, and though his work is incomplete, he left no part unessayed. He has a right to ask that his work be judged as a whole, by the good as well as by the evil. Like that other Comedy of Dante, his Human Comedy has its Hell, but it has also its Purgatory and its Paradise. Balzac is by some considered immoral; others pronounce his work as a whole serious in purpose, high and edifying in tone.
The Comédie Humaine, as it stands, vast yet unfinished, has been compared by Zola to a cyclopean palace, with splendid halls and wretched corners, with broad corridors and narrow passages, and superpiled stories in varied architecture. Two thousand characters cross its stage; and in their mimic life, which to Balzac for the time became reality, they formulate the chief types and events of social existence in such a variety of setting that his comedy has not only its genealogy but its geography. It is a work of criticism, analysis, and investigation, to be enjoyed in its parts, but to be understood only as a whole. Balzac divided his Human Comedy into Scenes of Private Life, of Provincial Life, of Parisian Life, of Country Life, of Politics and War, and to these he added Studies, philosophical and analytic. There are those who admire the analytic acumen displayed in this division; but as Balzac frequently transferred tales and novels from one to another group to suit his fancy or a publisher's convenience, it seems time wasted to stress the classification. It is more philosophical to study his work as it grew in his mind — that is, chronologically — and then to treat it briefly in its entirety. Les Chouans was followed by six Scènes de la Vie Privée (1830), of which El Verdugo is a masterly tale of terror, and Gobseck one of the world's great studies of morbid avarice. La Maison du Chat-qui-pélote (1830), written before these, though published a little later, in its plea for conventional marriage shows Balzac to be a master in social psychology. And, as though he would excel at once in every genre, the same year witnesses the Dresden-shepherdess introduction and the luridly romantic close of Une Double Famille; the curious Macchiavellianism of Les Deux Rèves; Adieu, a masterpiece of tragic pathos; the fantastic L'Elixir de Longue Vie; two stories of abnormal love, Sarrasine and Une Passion dans le Désert; and, finally, an acute study of the purification of religious feeling through persecution in Une Episode sous la Terreur. And with all this came contributions to journals whose titles for this year alone fill two octavo pages of Louvenjoul's Histoire des Œuvres de Honoré de Balzac.
A marvelous fertility characterized the next three years, till his first meeting with Madame Hanska (1833). Much of this time he passed away from Paris, to avoid interruptions. The more important works of 1831 are La Femme de Trente Ans (incomplete), L'Enfant Maudit (incomplete), Le Réquisitionnaire, Les Exilés (a wonderful evocation of Paris in 1308, setting ajar the gate that was to open on the spirit world in Louis Lambert and Séraphita); Le Chef d'Œuvre inconnu; the remarkable L'Auberge Rouge; the curiously mystic Peau de Chagrin; the mediæval legend, Jésus-Christ en Flandre; a remarkable study of avarice, Maître Cornélius; and, outside the frame of the Human Comedy, the Contes Drôlatiques. The work of 1832 is even more remarkable. It touches the depths of horror in La Grande Bretéche, rises to philosophic heights in Louis Lambert, deals gracefully with romantic honor in Madame Firmiani, and with romantic love in La Bourse; becomes pitiful in Colonel Chabert, and tragic in Le Message; gives an exquisite picture of child-life in La Grenadière, preaches a stern social morality in La Femme Abundonnée, epitomizes the French clergy of the Restoration in Le Curé de Tours, unveils the courtesan morals of the Renaissance in Les Marana, and crowns the year with the mystic Louis Lambert. And during 1833 also, he tells a correspondent that he lives in "an atmosphere of thoughts, ideas, plans, works, conceptions, that mingle, bubble, and sparkle in my brain." Of these, the Contes Drôlatiques show the effervescing of a joyous animal nature; Férragus is a sort of detective story; Le Médecin-de-campagne is photographic in its reproduction of peasant thought and country scenes, and Eugénie Grandet is Balzac's greatest study of ava​ rice, and perhaps his greatest novel. No wonder that in January, 1834, Balzac complains that he is "dazed with ideas and hungry for rest." Yet this year produced Père Goriot, thought by many to be his best novel; La Duchesse de Langeais, Le recherche de l'absolu, part of Séraphita, and many revisions of older work. Balzac now begins to suffer, naturally, from neuralgia, but in 1835 writes a fine study of remorse, Une drame au bord de la mer; an inferior one, Melmoth Réconcilié; the weirdly sensuous La fille aux Yeux d'Or; and that subtly humorous 'bride's breviary,' Le Contrat de Mariage. His one long novel of the year, Séraphita, is an exquisitely mystic poem in prose, a hymn to the purification of human passion by a sublime aspiration for the divorce of sentiment from sense, first and best product of that love of his for Madame Hanska, which almost immediately became a distraction and a hindrance to his genius.
With 1836 we enter on a period of arrested development, although that year offers the charming Messe d'Athée; the ultra romantic Lys dans la Vallée; the admirable last part of L'Enfant Maudit; a classic study of La Vieille Fille, the French School for Scandal; L'Interdiction, a legal romance, and some less significant work. Les Employés marks in 1837 the lowest ebb of the mature Balzac. Gambara, César Birotteau, and the Contes Drôlatiques complete the work of that year; and 1838 is as relatively insignificant, with Le Cabinet des Antiques, La Maison Nucingen, Une Fille d'Eve, and the first part of what was to become a great novel, Les Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes. In this year he bought a country house, 'Les Jardies,' where Gambetta met his death, and where Balzac did most of his work until, in 1843, he bought and fitted up, in long-deferred hope of marriage, the city house in which he died. His country life lent a passing freshness to Le Curé de Village (1839) and to the early parts of Béatrix, a curious study of the instinct of social conformity common to all phases of feminine affection — the platonic, the cerebral, and the venal. To 1830 belongs also Massimilla Doni, and 1840 brought Le Secret de la Princesse de Cadignan, the fine Seconde étude de Femme, Pierrette, La Muse du Département, part of Les Illusions Perdues, with some very inferior work. Then something of his old exuberance returns, and 1841 sees Une Ténébreuse Affaire, the terrible Bachelor Housekeeping (La Rabouilleuse), Ursule Mirouet, Les Mémoires de deux jeunes Mariées, La Fausse Maitresse, and Le Martyr Calviniste. The year 1842 is unimportant in production, but memorable for the first collected publication of the Human Comedy under that title, with its evolutionist preface, and for additions and revisions to which this gave occasion. In 1843 Balzac spins copy in Honorine, finishes La Muse du Departement and Les Illusions Perdues, a satire on French journalism, his longest novel, and by the number of its characters and the ramifications of its plot, one of the chief radiating points in the study of the psychology of La Comédie Humaine. He visited Madame Hanska, now a widow, this year in Russia, and in 1845 and 1846 twice in Italy and once in Germany; but he now worked, as he says, "with a fury more than French — Balzacian." In 1844 he printed the playfully romantic Modeste Mignon, completed Béatrix and Les Petits Bourgeois (printed, 1854), and published all that appeared during his lifetime of Les Paysans, the most sternly realistic of his novels. The years 1845 and 1846 produced only trivial work; but he was working on four great novels that were to crown his genius, La Cousine Bette, Cousin Pons, Les Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes, and L'Envers de l'Histoire Contemporaine, that was to close the Human Comedy with its noblest conception of Christian womanhood. Sickness made his last years unfruitful; and his posthumous Député d'Arcis is largely by his literary executor, Charles Ribou. Balzac's attempts in drama, except possibly Mercadet (first acted in 1831), are not significant.
Balzac died in Paris, August 18, 1850, at the height of his fame; but he was hardly appreciated at his true value until the epoch-making study of Taine (1865) showed him to be truly classic, one of the world's greatest creators in imaginative literature. The dominant trait in his style, imagination, and thought is exuberant virility. He has the animal and the intellectual intemperance of a romantic realist. He observes with minute accuracy, but it is with a poet's vision. He is of his world, yet he dominates it. No depths, no heights, of human nature seem foreign to him. His qualities become his defects. He is embarrassed at once by his wealth of ideas and of words. At his best his style is admirable, but it often staggers and occasionally falls under over-elaboration. In construction the stories lack proportion, but in character-drawing he stands next to Shakespeare. Here are the money-grubbers and the money-spenders, studied realistically and in symbolic types; cynics who mock the pleasures they pursue; parasites of social disease; fresh young girls; restless 'women of thirty'; poor relatives; philanthropists; saints — a social microcosm. Here is a novelist who tried to see life steadily and whole, to correlate all the material, moral, and social factors of modern society. With Shakespeare and Saint-Simon, says Taine, Balzac is "the greatest storehouse of documents that we have on human nature."
Balzac's works: 24 vols, fiction separately; Human Comedy, 47 vols.; Droll Stories, 3 vols.; Drama, 2 vols.; Correspondence, 2 vols.; Letters to Madame Hansha, 1 vol. The youthful Works are published in 10 vols.
Bibliography. The more essential books for a studv of Balzac are Louvenjoul, Histoire des Œuvres de Honoré de Balzac (Paris, 1886); Cerfbeer and Christophe, Répertoire de la Comedie Humaine (Paris, 1887), a dictionary of characters. For abstracts of plots consult Barrière, L'Œuvre de Balzac (Paris, 1890); for criticism, Louvenjoul, La Genèse d'un roman de Balzac: Les Paysans (Paris, 1901); the essays of Taine, Sainte-Beuve, Faguet, Zola, Paul Flat, Doumic, and Wells, Century of French Fiction; for biography: Wormley, Memoir of Balzac (Boston, 1892; defective); Ferry, Balzac et ses Amis (Paris, 1888); Lemer, Balzac, sa Vie et ses Œuvres (Paris, 1892). Translations, fairly complete and satisfactory, of the Human Comedy are published in London, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. The last contains valuable editorial and critical comment by W. P. Trent. Saltus, Balzac (Boston, 1888) has a good bibliography.