Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A - Z | Page 4

du Tillet, that
jackal, with the same magnitude of operations worked out by that
elephant of a Nucingen. He has outlined and measured the exact
relation of each character to his environment in the same way he has
outlined and measured the bonds uniting the various characters; so well
that each individual is defined separately as to his personal and his
social side, and in the same manner each family is defined. It is the
skeleton of these individuals and of these families that is laid bare for
your contemplation in these notes of Messieurs Cerfberr and
Christophe. But this structure of facts, dependent one upon another by a
logic equal to that of life itself, is the smallest effort of Balzac's genius.
Does a birth-certificate, a marriage-contract or an inventory of wealth
represent a person? Certainly not. There is still lacking, for a bone
covering, the flesh, the blood, the muscles and the nerves. A glance
from Balzac, and all these tabulated facts become imbued with life; to
this circumstantial view of the conditions of existence with certain
beings is added as full a view of the beings themselves.
And first of all he knows them physiologically. The inner workings of
their corporeal mechanism is no mystery for him. Whether it is
Birotteau's gout, or Mortsauf's nervousness, or Fraisier's skin trouble,
or the secret reason for Rouget's subjugation by Flore, or Louis
Lambert's catalepsy, he is as conversant with the case as though he
were a physician; and he is as well informed, also, as a confessor
concerning the spiritual mechanism which this animal machine
supports. The slightest frailties of conscience are perceptible to him.
From the portress Cibot to the Marquise d'Espard, not one of his
women has an evil thought that he does not fathom. With what art,
comparable to that of Stendhal, or Laclos, or the most subtle analysts,
does he note --in The Secrets of a Princess--the transition from comedy
to sincerity! He knows when a sentiment is simple and when it is
complex, when the heart is a dupe of the mind and when of the senses.

And through it all he hears his characters speak, he distinguishes their
voices, and we ourselves distinguish them in the dialogue. The
growling of Vautrin, the hissing of La Gamard, the melodious tones of
Madame de Mortsauf still linger in our ears. For such intensity of
evocation is as contagious as an enthusiasm or a panic.
There is abundant testimony going to show that with Balzac this
evocation is accomplished, as in the mystic arts by releasing it, so to
speak, from the ordinary laws of life. Pray note in what terms M. le
Docteur Fournier, the real mayor of Tours, relates incidents of the
novelist's method of work, according to the report of a servant
employed at the chateau of Sache: "Sometimes he would shut himself
up in his room and stay there several days. Then it was that, plunged
into a sort of ecstasy and armed with a crow quill, he would write night
and day, abstaining from all food and merely contenting himself with
decoctions of coffee which he himself prepared." [Brochure of M. le
Docteur Fournier in regard to the statue of Balzac, that statue a piece of
work to which M. Henry Renault--another devotee who had established
Le Balzac--had given himself so ardently. In this brochure is found a
very curious portrait of Balzac, after a sepia by Louis Boulanger
belonging to M. le Baron Larrey.]
In the opening pages of Facino Cane this phenomenon is thus
described: "With me observation had become intuitive from early youth.
It penetrated the soul without neglecting the body, or rather it seized so
completely the external details that it went beyond them. It gave me the
faculty of living the life of the individual over whom it obtained control,
and allowed me to substitute myself for him like the dervish in Arabian
Nights assumed the soul and the body of persons over whom he
pronounced certain words." And he adds, after describing how he
followed a workman and his wife along the street: "I could espouse
their very life, I felt their rags on my back. I trod in their tattered shoes.
Their desires, their needs, all passed into my soul, or my soul passed
into them. It was the dream of a man awakened." One day while he and
a friend of his were watching a beggar pass by, the friend was so
astonished to see Balzac touch his own sleeve; he seemed to feel the
rent which gaped at the elbow of the beggar.

Am I wrong in connecting this sort of imagination with that which one
witnesses in fanatics of religious faith? With such a faculty Balzac
could not be, like Edgar Poe, merely