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Updated: June 11, 2025
Leon Gozlan went to see Balzac the day after the performance, and found him outwardly calm, but his face was flushed, his hands burning, and his lips swollen, as though he had passed through a night of fever. He did not mention the scene of the night before, but talked eagerly of a plan to start a large dairy at Les Jardies, and to provide Paris and Versailles with rich milk.
Gozlan relates that Lassailly, who went to Les Jardies and lived there for some little time as a paid secretary, would be rung up at night, when his employer usually worked rung up not once nor twice, but several times, to hear himself asked whether, in his waking or his dreaming, he had hatched any good plan; and poor Lassailly would have sorrowfully to avow that his brain had conceived nothing of any importance in the way of drama.
After he had built and was living in his somewhat fantastical villa of Les Jardies at Sèvres, close to Paris, he invites a friend to stay with him on these terms: "I can take you to board at forty sous a day, and for thirty-five francs you will have fire-wood enough for a month." In his joke he is apt to betray the same preoccupation.
Nevertheless, no friendships made up for the want of a wife, and home, the two things for which he yearned; and he writes sadly: "I have much need now of having my wounds tended and cured, and of being able to live without cares at Les Jardies, and to pass my days quietly between work and a wife.
But he had lived there through some beautiful dreams and great hopes. In Retirement. Upon leaving Les Jardies, Balzac took refuge in the village of Passy, at No. 19, Rue Basse, and there buried himself. Under the name of M. de Brugnol he had hired a small one-storey pavilion, situated in a garden and hidden from sight by the houses facing on the street.
Some of her capital and some of his own, probably the sum accruing from the sale of Les Jardies, at present definitive, had been invested in North Railway Shares. Besides, not a few of his paintings and antique pieces of furniture had been paid for with advances from her strong-box. The two works that issued from his new effort of creation were Cousin Bette and Cousin Pons.
Les Jardies, where Balzac had decided to take up his residence, was built on the further side of the hill of Saint Cloud, facing the south, and with Ville d'Avray to the west. In front, there was the rising ground of the forest of Versailles; to the east, the outlook was down on Sevres and, beyond it, on Paris, with the city's smoky atmosphere fringing the uplands of Meudon and Bellevue.
Within the twelvemonth, a distraint was levied upon him for non-payment of moneys that were owing. Lemer, one of his biographers, narrates that, paying a visit to Les Jardies at this date, for the purpose of soliciting the novelist's collaboration in an international album, he not only received a promise of help but an invitation for himself and a companion to remain and dine off a leg of mutton.
"Vautrin" La Revue Parisienne Societe des Gens-de-Lettres Balzac leaves Les Jardies, and goes to the Rue Basse, Passy Death of M. de Hanski "Les Ressources de Quinola" "La Comedie Humaine" Balzac goes to St. Petersburg to meet Madame Hanska Her reasons for deferring the marriage. The sad fate of "L'Ecole des Menages" did not long discourage Balzac.
A few weeks later they came back to France together, and occupied the little country house, Les Jardies, in which, some decades later, occurred Gambetta's mysterious death. What is the secret of this strange love, which in the woman seems to be not precisely love, but something else? Balzac was always eager for her presence.
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