family when he extols the unlimited virtues of his /Predilecta/ and the Countess Anna.

After seventeen long years of waiting, with hope constantly deferred, Balzac at last attained his goal when, on March 14, 1850, Madame Hanska became Madame Honore de Balzac. His joy over this great triumph was beyond all adequate description, but he was unable to depart for Paris with his bride until April. After a difficult journey, the couple arrived at Paris in May, but the condition of Balzac's health was hopeless and only a few more months were accorded him. With his usual optimism, he always thought that he would be spared to finish his great work, and when informed by his physician on August 17 that he would live but a few hours, he refused to believe it.

Unless he had been self-centered, Balzac could never have left behind him his enormous and prodigious work. In spite of certain unlovely phases of his private character and failure to fulfil his literary and financial obligations, he was a man of great personal charm. Though at various times he was under consideration for election to the French Academy, his name is not found numbered among the "forty immortals." But he was the greatest of French novelists, a great creator of characters, who by some competent critics has been ranked with Shakespeare, and he has left to posterity the incomparable, though unfinished /Comedie humaine/, which is in itself sufficient for his "immortality."

CHAPTER II

RELATIVES AND FAMILY FRIENDS

BALZAC'S MOTHER

"Farewell, my dearly beloved mother! I embrace you with all my heart. Oh! if you knew how I need just now to cast myself upon your breast as a refuge of complete affection, you would insert a little word of tenderness in your letters, and this one which I am answering has not even a poor kiss. There is nothing but . . . Ah! Mother, Mother, this is very bad! . . . You have misconstrued what I said to you, and you do not understand my heart and affection. This grieves me most of all! . . ."

The above extract is sadly typical of a relationship of thirty years, 1820-1850, between a mother, on the one hand, who never understood or appreciated her son--and a son, on the other, whose longings for maternal affection were never fully gratified. To his mother Balzac dedicated /Le Medicin de Campagne/, one of his finest sociological studies.

Madame Surville has described Balzac's mother, and her own, as being rich, beautiful, and much younger than her husband, and as having a rare vivacity of mind and of imagination, an untiring activity, a great firmness of decision, and an unbounded devotion to her family; but as expressing herself in actions rather than in words. She devoted herself exclusively to the education of her children, and felt it necessary to use severity towards them in order to offset the effects of indulgence on the part of their father and their grandmother. Balzac inherited from his mother imagination and activity, and from both of his parents energy and kindness.

Madame de Balzac has been charged with not having been a tender mother towards her children in their infancy. She had lost her first child through her inability to nurse it properly. An excellent nurse, however, was found for Honore, and he became so healthy that later his sister Laure was placed with the same nurse. But she never seemed fully to understand her son nor even to suspect his promise. She attributed the sagacious remarks and reflections of his youth to accident, and on such occasions she would tell him that he did not understand what he was saying. His only reply would be a sweet, submissive smile which irritated her, and which she called arrogant and presumptuous. With her cold, calculating temperament, she had no patience with his staking his life and fortune on uncertain financial undertakings, and blamed him for his business failures. She suffered on account of his love of luxury and his belief in his own greatness, no evidence of which seemed sufficient to her matter-of-fact mind. She continued to misjudge him, unaware of his genius, but in spite of her grumbling and harassing disposition, she often came to his aid in his financial troubles.

Contrary to the wishes of his parents, who had destined him to become a notary, Balzac was ever dreaming of literary fame. His mother not unnaturally thought that a little poverty and difficulty would bring him to submission; so, before leaving Paris for Villeparisis in 1819 she installed him in a poorly furnished /mansard/, No. 9, rue Lesdiguieres, leaving an old woman, Madame Comin, who had been in the service of the family for more than twenty years, to watch over him. Balzac has doubtless depicted this woman in /Facino Cane/ as Madame Vaillant, who in 1819-1820 was charged with the care of a young writer, lodged in a /mansard/, rue Lesdiguieres.

After fifteen months of this life, his health became so much impaired that his mother insisted on keeping him at home, where she cared for him faithfully. On a former occasion Madame de Balzac had had her son brought home to recuperate, for when he was sent away to /college/ at an early age, his health became so impaired that he was hurriedly returned to his home. Balzac probably refers to this event in his life when he writes, in /Louis Lambert/, that the mother, alarmed by the continuous fever of her son and his symptoms of /coma/, took him from school at four or five hours' notice.

During the five years (1820-1825) that Balzac remained at home in Villeparisis, he longed for the quiet freedom of his garret; he could not adapt himself to the bustling family circle, nor reconcile himself to the noise of the domestic machinery kept in motion by his vigilant and indefatigable mother. She was of a nervous, excitable nature, which she probably inherited from her mother, Madame Sallambier. She imagined that he was ill, and of course there was no one to convince her to the contrary. Had she known that while she thought she was contributing everything to the happiness of those around her, she was only doing the opposite, we may be sure that she of all women would have been the most wretched.

Balzac having failed in his speculations as publisher and printer, was aided by his mother financially, and she figured as one of his principal creditors during the remainder of his life. (E. Faguet in /Balzac/, is exaggerating in stating that Madame de Balzac sacrificed her whole fortune for Honore, for much of her means was spent on her favorite son, Henri.)

M. Auguste Fessart was a contemporary of the family, an observer of a great part of the life of Honore, and his confidant on more than one occasion. In his /Commentaires/ on the work entitled /Balzac, sa Vie et ses Oeuvres/, by Madame Surville, he states that the portrait of Madame de Balzac is flattering--a daughter's portrait of a mother--and declares that Madame de Balzac was very severe with her children, especially with Honore, adding that Balzac used to say that he never heard his mother speak without experiencing a certain trembling which deprived him of his faculties. Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, in reviewing the /Commentaires/ of M. Fessart, notes the recurring instances in which pity is expressed for the moral and material sufferings almost constantly endured by Balzac in his family circle. These sufferings seem to have impressed him more than anything else in the career of the novelist. In speaking of Balzac's financial appeal to his family, M. Fessart notes: "And his mother did not respond to him. She let him die of hunger! . . . I repeat that they let him die of hunger; he told me so several times!" When Madame Surville speaks of their keeping Balzac's presence in Paris a secret, saying that it was moreover a means of keeping him from all worldly temptations, M. Fessart replies: "And of giving him nothing, and of allowing him to be in need of everything!" Finally, when Madame Surville speaks of her parents' not giving Balzac the fifteen hundred francs he desired, M. Fessart confirms this, saying that his family always refused him money.

A letter from Balzac to Madame Hanska testifies to this attitude of his family towards him: "In 1828 I was cast into this poor rue Cassini, in consequence of a liquidation to which I had been compelled, owing one hundred thousand francs and being without a penny, when my family would not even give me bread."

MM. Hanotaux et Vicaire, to whose admirable work we shall have occasion to refer often, state that Madame de Balzac advanced thirty- seven thousand six hundred francs for Balzac on August 16, 1822, and that his parents paid a total of forty-five thousand francs for him.

Having read M. Fessart's description of Madame de Balzac, one can agree with Madame Ruxton in saying that Balzac has portrayed his own youth in his account of the early life of Raphael in /La Peau de Chagrin/, Balzac's mother, instead of Raphael's father, being recognized in the following passage:

"Seen from afar, my life appears to contract by some mental process. That long, slow agony of ten years' duration can be brought to memory to-day in some few phrases, in which pain is resolved into a mere idea, and pleasure becomes a philosophical reflection . . . When I left school, my father submitted me to a strict discipline; he installed me in a room near his own study, and I had to rise at five in the morning and retire at nine at night. He intended me to take my law studies seriously. I attended school, and read with an advocate as well; but my lectures and work were so narrowly circumscribed by the laws of time and space, and my father required of me such a strict account, at dinner, that . . . In this manner I cowered under as strict a despotism as a monarch's until I became of age."

In confirmation of this idea, Madame Ruxton[*] quotes Madame Barnier, granddaughter of the Duchesse d'Abrantes, who knew both Balzac and his mother, and who describes her as a cold, severe, superior, but hard- hearted woman, just the opposite of her son. Balzac himself states: "Never shall I cease to resemble Raphael in his garret."

[*] In /La Dilecta de Balzac/, Balzac states that he has described his own life in /La Peau de Chagrin/. For a picture of Balzac's unhappy childhood drawn by himself, see /Revue des deux Mondes/, March 15, 1920.

After the death (June 1829) of her husband, Madame de Balzac lived with her son at different intervals, and during his extended tour of six months in 1832 she attended to the details of his business. With her usual energy and extreme activity, she displayed her ability in various lines, for she had to have dealings with his publisher, do copying, consult the library,--sending him some books and buying others,--have the servant exercise the horses, sell the horses and carriage and dismiss the servant, arrange to have certain payments deferred, send him money and consult the physician for him, not to mention various other duties.

While Madame de Balzac was certainly requested to do far more than a son usually expects of his mother, her tantalizing letters were a