Balzac | Page 9

by his excellencies.
Throughout Balzac's correspondence, as throughout his novels, there
are numerous remarks which are so many confessions of the hints he
received in the course of his English readings. In one passage he
exclaims: "The villager is an admirable nature. When he is stupid, he is
just the animal; but, when he has good points, they are exquisite.
Unfortunately, no one observes him. It needed a lucky hazard for
Goldsmith to create his /Vicar of Wakefield/." Elsewhere he says:
"Generally, in fiction, an author succeeds only by the number of his
characters and the variety of his situations; and there are few examples
of novels having but two or three /dramatis personae/ depending on a

single situation. Of such a kind, /Caleb Williams/, the celebrated
Godwin's masterpiece, is in our time the only work known, and its
interest is prodigious."
Sterne, even more than Scott, was Balzac's favourite model. Allusions
to him abound in the /Comedie Humaine/. /Tristram Shandy/ the
novelist appears to have had at his fingers' ends. Not a few of Sterne's
traits were also his own--the satirical humour, in which, however, the
humour was less perfect than the satire, the microscopic eye for all the
exterior details of life especially in people's faces and gestures and
dress; and both had identical notions concerning the analogy between a
man's name and his temperament and fate.
Scott and Cooper being Balzac's elder contemporaries, it happened that
their books were given to the French public in translation by one or the
other of the novelist's earlier publishers, Mame and Gosselin. His taste
for their fiction was no mere passing fancy. It was as pronounced as
ever in 1840, at which date, writing in the /Revue Parisienne/, he
declared that Cooper was the only writer of stories worthy to be placed
by the side of Walter Scott, and that his hero Leather-stocking was
sublime. "I don't know," said he, "if the fiction of Walter Scott
furnishes a creation as grandiose as that of this hero of the savannas and
forests. Cooper's descriptions are the school at which all literary
landscapists should study: all the secrets of art are there. But Cooper is
inferior to Walter Scott in his comic and minor characters, and in the
construction of his plots. One is the historian of nature, the other of
humanity." The article winds up with further praise of Scott, whom its
author evidently regarded as his master.
The part played by these models in Balzac's literary training was to
afford him a clearer perception of the essential worth of the Romantic
movement. Together with its extravagancies and lyricism, Romantic
literature deliberately put into practice some important principles which
certain forerunners of the eighteenth century had already unconsciously
illustrated or timidly taught. It imposed Diderot's doctrine that there
was beauty in all natural character. And its chief apostle, Hugo, with
the examples of Ariosto, Cervantes, Rabelais and Shakespeare to back

him, proved that what was in nature was or should be also in art, yet
without, for that, seeking to free art from law and the necessity for
choice.
This spectacle of a vaster field to exploit, this possibility of artistically
representing the common, familiar things of the world in their real
significance, seized on the youthful mind of him who was to create the
/Comedie Humaine/. It formed the connecting link between him and his
epoch, and in most directions it limited the horizon of his life.
CHAPTER II
BOYHOOD

For all his aristocratic name, Honore de Balzac was not of noble birth.
The nobiliary particule he did not add to his signature until the year
1830. In his birth certificate we read: "To-day, the 2nd of Prairial, Year
VII. (21st of May 1799) of the French Republic, a male child was
presented to me, Pierre-Jacques Duvivier, the undersigned Registrar, by
the citizen Bernard-Francois Balzac, householder, dwelling in this
commune, Rue de l'Armee de l'Italie, Chardonnet section, Number 25;
who declared to me that the said child was called Honore Balzac, born
yesterday at eleven o'clock in the morning at witness's residence, that
the child is his son and that of the citizen, Anne-Charlotte-Laure
Sallambier, his wife, they having been married in the commune of Paris,
eighth arrondissement, Seine Department, on the 11th of Pluviose, Year
V."
The commune referred to in the birth certificate was Tours. There in the
street now rechristened and renumbered and called the Rue Nationale, a
commemorative plate at No. 29 bears the following inscription:
"Honore de Balzac was born in this house on the 1st of Prairial, Year
VII. (20th of May 1799); he died in Paris on the 28th[*] of August
1850."
[*] The registered date of Balzac's death was the 18th of August. The

date on the commemorative plate is wrong. See also in