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That's what I call an old man. Now, said the Professor, you don't mean to tell me that I have got to that yet? What age is that? said I, statistically. Fifty-two years, answered the Professor. Balzac ought to know, said I, if it is true that Goethe said of him that each of his stories must have been dug out of a woman's heart. But fifty-two is a high figure.
What could be more wonderful than his El Verdugo, which gives us a brief horror while compelling our admiration? What, outside of Balzac himself, could be more terrible than Gobseck, a frightful study of avarice, containing a deathbed scene which surpasses in dreadfulness almost anything in literature?
Balzac's mother certainly had a hard life, and from what we hear of her nervous, excitable nature inherited apparently from her mother, Madame Sallambier we can hardly be astonished when Balzac writes to Madame Hanska, in 1835, that if her misfortunes do not kill her, it is feared they will destroy her reason.
His ideas regarding French literature; of Maupassant; of Balzac. His views of American literature and the source of its strength; his discussion of various American authors and leaders in philanthropic movements; his amazing answer to my question as to the greatest of American writers. Our walks together; his indiscriminate almsgiving; discussion thereupon. His view of travel.
The record is, indeed, a splendid one which contains, in poetry and drama, the names of Villon, Ronsard, Corneille, Molière, Racine, La Fontaine, Chénier, Lamartine, Hugo, Vigny, Gautier, Baudelaire, Verlaine; and in prose those of Froissart, Rabelais, Montaigne, Pascal, Bossuet, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Montesquieu, Saint-Simon, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Flaubert, and Maupassant.
Madame de Berny died in July, having had a last pleasure in perusing the story that immortalized her affection for the novelist. Balzac had been intending to pay her a farewell visit; but he was then in the midst of embarrassments of all kinds, and the journey was postponed until it was too late.
So forthwith I sent him 'God's Garrison', and it was quickly followed by 'The Three Outlaws', 'The Tall Master', 'The Flood', 'The Cipher', 'A Prairie Vagabond', and several others. At length came 'The Stone', which brought a telegram of congratulation, and finally 'The Crimson Flag'. The acknowledgment of that was a postcard containing these all too-flattering words: "Bravo, Balzac!"
But, as always when a compelling literary force appears, Balzac without any question dominates in the first half of the nineteenth century: more than this, he sets the mold of the type which marks the second half. In fact, the modern Novel means Balzac's recipe. English fiction, along with that of Europe, shares this influence.
But Balzac, retorting that whatever service had been rendered was not to himself but by himself, dismissed his visitors with the words: "We have spent an hour, gentlemen, in useless talk. You have made me lose two hundred francs. For me, time is money. I must work. Good-day."
And this story, with the contrasted picture of Levin's domesticity that completes it, is laid out exactly as Balzac did not lay out his story of Eugénie; it is all presented as action, because Tolstoy's eye was infallibly drawn, whenever he wrote, to the instant aspect of his matter, the play itself.
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