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The piece was not performed in its author's life-time; but friends were acquainted with it already in 1840, when Gautier and the rest of the inner circle were summoned to Les Jardies to hear the hermit read it, differing considerably then from the arrangement that was ultimately played.
The wall was decidedly important, as Balzac's fortune was to be made by the contents of the garden at Les Jardies, and it would not have been satisfactory for strangers to be able to wander there at will. Balzac's new plan for becoming rich was to cover most of his territory with glass houses, and to plant 100,000 feet with pineapples.
This soon acquired celebrity as "Les Jardies," and gave much amusement to the Parisians, who were never tired of inventing stories about Balzac's villa. In March, 1838, before he settled in his new abode, he started on a journey to Sardinia to investigate matters himself about the mines.
Then this man, who had exercised the powers of a dictator, who had levied armies and shaken governments, and through whose hands there had passed thousands of millions of francs, sought for a country home. He found for sale a small estate which had once belonged to Balzac, and which is known as Les Jardies.
The insistence of these claimants on his purse was such that, acting on the advice of his solicitor, Gavault, in the course of the year 1841, he executed a fictitious sale of Les Jardies for the sum of seventeen thousand five hundred francs, his hope being to preserve his hermitage for the days of wealth and ease to come. Meanwhile, he took his mother to live with him.
This might have been gradually saved and the interest meantime given regularly, if he had been willing to live well within his income. With his system of spending not only what he earned but hoped to earn each year, perpetual insolvency was inevitable. At Les Jardies he had small creditors as well as great, fear of whom haunted him to the extent of curtailing his walks abroad.
Six or eight times in the course of the night would this scene be repeated; and at last Lassailly, who was delicate, became seriously ill and had to leave Les Jardies, ever after looking back on the terrible Balzac and his appalling night-watches, as a nightmare to be recalled with a shudder. However, in the end the Renaissance refused the drama.
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.
This Brunetiere implicitly admits when he says that most of Balzac's novels are, so to speak, inquiries, collections of documents. The year 1838 closed questioningly for the hermit at Les Jardies.
An intercourse which, without being especially cordial, was fairly frequent had been established between these two great writers as a result of their joint labours on the committee of the Society of Men of Letters. During the month of July, 1839, Victor Hugo breakfasted with Balzac at Les Jardies, in company with Gozlan, for the purpose of discussing the great project of the Manifesto.
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