Repertory of the Comedie Humaine Part 1 | Page 7

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 a narrator of nightmares. He was
preserved from the fantastic by another gift which seems contradictory
to the first. This visionary was in reality a philosopher, that is to say, an
experimenter and a manipulator of general ideas. Proof of this may be
found in his biography, which shows him to us, during his college days
at Vendome, plunged into a whirl of abstract reading. The entire
theological and occult library which he discovered in the old Oratorian
institution was absorbed by the child, till he had to quit school sick, his
brain benumbed by this strange opium. The story of Louis Lambert is a
monograph of his own mind. During his youth and in the moments
snatched from his profession, to what did he turn his attention? Still to
general ideas. We find him an interested onlooker at the quarrel of
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, troubling himself about the
hypothesis of the unity of creation, and still dealing with mysticism;

and, in fact, his romances abound in theories. There is not one of his
works from which you cannot obtain abstract thoughts by the hundreds.
If he describes, as in /The Vicar of Tours/, the woes of an old priest, he
profits by the opportunity to exploit a theory concerning the
development of sensibility, and a treatise on the future of Catholicism.
If he describes, as in /The Firm of Nucingen/, a supper given to
Parisian /blases/, he introduces a system of credit, reports of the Bank
and Bureau of Finance, and--any number of other things! Speaking of
Daniel d'Arthez, that one of his heroes who, with Albert Savarus and
Raphael, most nearly resembles himself, he writes: "Daniel would not
admit the existence of talent without profound metaphysical knowledge.
At this moment he was in the act of despoiling both ancient and
modern philosophy of all their wealth in order to assimilate it. He
desired, like Moliere, to become a profound philosopher first of all, a
writer of comedies afterwards." Some readers there are, indeed, who
think that philosophy superabounds with Balzac, that the surplus of
general hypotheses overflows at times, and that the novels are too
prone to digressions. Be that as it may, it seems incontestible that this
was his master faculty, the virtue and vice of his thought. Let us see,
however, by what singular detour this power of generalization--the
antithesis, one might say, of the creative power--increased in him the
faculty of the poetic visionary.
It is important, first of all, to note that this power of the visionary could
not be put directly into play. Balzac had not long enough to live. The
list of his works, year by year, prepared by his sister, shows that from
the moment he achieved his reputation till the day of his death he never
took time for rest or observation or the study of mankind by daily and
close contact, like Moliere or Saint- Simon. He cut his life in two,
writing by night, sleeping by day, and after sparing not a single hour
for calling, promenades or sentiment. Indeed, he would not admit this
troublesome factor of sentiment, except at a distance and through
letters--"because it forms one's style"! At any rate, that is the kind of
love he most willingly admitted--unless an exception be made of the
mysterious intimacies of which