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Updated: May 16, 2025
You will get only my vote. 'It is your vote especially I want. 'Are you quite in earnest? 'Quite. Balzac quitted me. The election was virtually decided. For political motives. The candidature of Monsieur Vatout had a majority of supporters. I tried to canvass for Balzac, but met with no success.
Of this sum he spent only 160,000 francs. He was greatly amazed and very agreeably surprised on arriving in London to find that the balance of the 500,000 francs remained at his disposal. M. Vatout is with the Royal Family. For the whole of them there are but three servants, of whom one, and one only, accompanied them from the Tuileries.
Beneath this lightness, however, there was an intention. This giddiness was fraught with deep meaning. The brave party that leads the Academy, for there are parties everywhere, even at the Academy, hoped, public attention being directed elsewhere, politics absorbing everything, to juggle the seat of Chateaubriand pell-mell with the seat of M. Vatout; two peas in the same goblet.
The chief librarian was Vatout, whose works, and perhaps too some well-known songs, have gained him a seat in the Academy. But Vatout was never in the library by any chance. The real librarian, and a very worthy fellow he was, was a man of the name of Tallencourt.
My father had quite a special talent for varying these answers of his, which he always extemporised. They were taken down in shorthand, and made over to Vatout to have a final polish put on them before being sent to the Moniteur. The witty academician abhorred this duty, which he irreverently styled "dressing the royal macaroni."
This strange alliance, I do not say of names, but of words, "replace MM. de Chateaubriand and Vatout," did not stop it for one minute. The Academy is thus made; its wit and that wisdom which produces so many follies, are composed of extreme lightness combined with extreme heaviness. Hence a good deal of foolishness and a good many foolish acts.
In each of these he obtained two votes; and since the second election was to fill the chair of Monsieur Vatout, who died after occupying it during a twelvemonth, it would seem that Victor Hugo, deceived by his memory, confused the two events.
And that is how Honore de Balzac had two votes in his favour at the Academy." This story is inexact chronologically. Balzac was not a candidate in 1847-48, when Monsieur Vatout was chosen, but at two later elections, those of the 11th and 18th of January 1849.
I asked him point blank, 'For whom are you voting? 'For Vatout, as you know. 'I know it so little that I ask you to vote for Balzac. 'Impossible! 'Why? 'Because my bulletin is ready. See. 'Oh! that makes no matter. And on two bits of paper I wrote in my best hand: 'Balzac. 'Well! quoth Pongerville; 'well! you will see. The apparitor who was collecting the votes approached us.
In the course of his fourscore splendid miserable years, he never had but one friend, and he ruined and left her. Poor La Valliere, what a sad tale is yours! "Look at this Galerie des Glaces," cries Monsieur Vatout, staggering with surprise at the appearance of the room, two hundred and forty-two feet long, and forty high.
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