Women in the Life of Balzac

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WOMEN IN THE LIFE OF BALZAC

BY

JUANITA HELM FLOYD




TO

MY SISTER NANNIE



" . . . for no one knows the secret of my life,
and I do not wish to disclose it to any one."
_Lettres a l'Etrangere_, V. I, p. 418, July 19, 1837.



PREPARER'S NOTE

This text was originally published in 1921 by Henry Holt and
Company.



PREFACE

In presenting this study of Balzac's intimate relations with various
women, the author regrets her inability, owing to war conditions, to
consult a few books which are out of print and certain documents which
have not appeared at all in print, notably the collection of the late
Vicomte de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul.

The author gladly takes this opportunity of acknowledging her deep
gratitude to various scholars, and wishes to express, even if
inadequately, her appreciation of their inspiring contact; especially
to Professor Chester Murray and Professor J. Warshaw for first
interesting her in the great possibilities of a study of Balzac. To
Professor Henry Alfred Todd she is grateful for his sympathetic
scholarship, valuable suggestions as to matter and style, and for his
careful revision of the manuscript; to Professor Gustave Lanson, for
his erudition and versatile mind, which have had a great influence; to
Professor F. M. Warren, for reading a part of the text and for many
general ideas; to Professor Fernand Baldensperger, for reading the
text and for encouragement; to Professor Gilbert Chinard, Professor
Earle B. Babcock and Professor LeBraz for re-reading the text and for
valuable suggestions; and to Professor John L. Gerig for his
sympathetic interest, broad information, and inspiring encouragement.

To still another would she express her thanks. The Princess Radziwill
has taken a great interest in this work, which deals so minutely with
the life history of her aunt, and she has been most gracious in giving
the author much information not to be found in books. She has made
many valuable suggestions, read the entire manuscript, and approved of
its presentation of the facts involved.

JUANITA H. FLOYD.
Evansville, Indiana.



INTRODUCTION

A quantity of books have been written about Balzac, some of which are
very instructive, while others are nothing but compilations of gossip
which give a totally wrong impression of the life, works and
personality of the great French novelist. Having the honor of being
the niece of his wife, the wonderful _Etrangere_, whom he married
after seventeen years of an affection which contained episodes far
more romantic than any of those which he has described in his many
books, and having been brought up in the little house of the rue
Fortunee, afterwards the rue Balzac, where they lived during their
short married life, I can perhaps better appreciate than most people
the value of these different books, none of which gives us an exact
appreciation of the man or of the difficulties through which he had to
struggle before he won at last the fame he deserved. And the
conclusion to which I came, after having read them most attentively
and conscientiously, was that it is often a great misfortune to
possess that divine spark of genius which now and then touches the
brow of a few human creatures and marks them for eternity with its
fiery seal. Had Balzac been one of those everyday writers whose names,
after having been for a brief space of time on everyone's lips, are
later on almost immediately forgotten, he would not have been
subjected to the calumnies which embittered so much of his declining
days, and which even after he was no longer in this world continued
their subterranean and disgusting work, trying to sully not only
Balzac's own colossal personality, but also that of the devoted wife,
whom he had cherished for such a long number of years, who had all
through their course shared his joys and his sorrows, and who, after
he died, had spent the rest of her own life absorbed in the
remembrance of her love for him, a love which was stronger than death
itself.

Having spent all my childhood and youth under the protection and the
roof of Madame de Balzac, it was quite natural that every time I saw
another inaccuracy or falsehood concerning her or her great husband
find its way into the press, I should be deeply affected. At last I
began to look with suspicion at all the books dealing with Balzac or
with his works, and when Miss Floyd asked me to look over her
manuscript, it was with a certain amount of distrust and prejudice
that I set myself to the task. It seemed to me impossible that a
foreigner could write anything worth reading about Balzac, or
understand his psychology. What was therefore my surprise when I
discovered in this most remarkable volume the best description that
has ever been given to us of this particular phase of Balzac's life
which hitherto has hardly been touched upon by his numerous
biographers, his friendships with the many distinguished women who at
one time or another played a part in his busy existence, a description
which not only confirmed down to the smallest details all that my aunt
had related to me about her distinguished husband, but which also gave
an appreciation of the latter's character that entirely agreed with
what I had heard about its peculiarities from the few people who had
known him well, Theophile Gautier among others, who were still alive
when I became old enough to be intensely interested in their different
judgments about my uncle. After such a length of years it seemed
almost uncanny to find a person who through sheer intuition and hard
study could have reconstituted with this unerring accuracy the figure
of one who had remained a riddle in certain things even to his best
friends, and who in the pages of this extraordinary book suddenly
appeared before my astonished eyes with all the splendor of that
genius of his which as years go by, becomes more and more admired and
appreciated.

One must be a scholar to understand Balzac; his style and manner of
writing is often so heavy and so difficult to follow, reminding one
more of that of a professor than of a novelist. And indeed he would
have been very angry to be considered only as a novelist, he who
aspired and believed himself to be, as he expressed it one day in the
course of a conversation with Madame Hanska, before she became his
wife, "a great painter of humanity," in which appreciation of his work
he was not mistaken, because some of the characters he evoked out of
his wonderful brain remind one of those pictures of Rembrandt where
every stroke of the master's brush reveals and brings into evidence
some particular trait or feature, which until he had discovered it,
and brought it to notice, no one had seen or remarked on the human
faces which he reproduced upon the canvas. Michelet, who once called
St. Simon the "Rembrandt of literature," could very well have applied
the same remark to Balzac, whose heroes will live as long as men and
women exist, for whom these other men and women whom he described,
will relive because he did not conjure their different characters out
of his imagination only, but condensed all his observations into the
creation of types which are so entirely human and real that we shall
continually meet with them so long as the world lasts.

One of Balzac's peculiarities consisted in perpetually studying
humanity, which study explains the almost unerring accuracy of his
judgments and of the descriptions which he gives us of things and
facts as well as of human beings. In his impulsiveness, he frequented
all kinds of places, saw all kinds of people, and tried to apply the
dissecting knife of his spirit of observation to every heart and every
conscience. He set himself especially to discover and fathom the
mystery of the "eternal feminine" about which he always thought, and
it was partly due to this eager quest for knowledge of women's souls
that he allowed himself to become entangled in love affairs and love
intrigues which sometimes came to a sad end, and that he spent his
time in perpetual search of feminine friendships, which were later on
to brighten, or to mar his life.

Miss Floyd in the curious volume which she has written has caught in a
surprising manner this particular feature in Balzac's complex
character. She has applied herself to study not only the man such as
he was, with all his qualities, genius and undoubted mistakes, but
such as he appeared to be in the eyes of the different women whom he
had loved or admired, and at whose hands he had sought encouragement
and sympathy amid the cruel disappointments and difficulties of an
existence from which black care was never banished and never absent.
With quite wonderful tact, and a lightness of touch one can not
sufficiently admire, she has made the necessary distinctions which
separated friendship from love in the many romantic attachments which
played such an important part in Balzac's life, and she has in
consequence presented to us simultaneously the writer, whose name will
remain an immortal one, and the man whose memory was treasured, long
after he had himself disappeared, by so many who, though they had
perhaps never understood him entirely, yet had realized that in the
marks of affection and attachment which he had given to them, he had
laid at their feet something which was infinitely precious, infinitely
real, something which could never be forgotten.

Her book will remain a most valuable, I was going to say the most
valuable, contribution to the history of Balzac, and those for whom he
was something more than a great writer and scholar, can never feel
sufficiently grateful to her for having given it to the world, and
helped to dissipate, thanks to its wonderful arguments, so many false
legends and wild stories which were believed until now, and indeed are
still believed by an ignorant crowd of so-called admirers of his, who,
nine times out of ten, are only detractors of his colossal genius, and
remarkable, though perhaps sometimes too exuberant, individuality.

At the same time, Miss Floyd, in the lines which she devotes to my
aunt and to the long attachment that had united the latter and Balzac,
has in many points re-established the truth in regard to the character
of a woman who in many instances has been cruelly calumniated and
slandered, in others absolutely misunderstood, to whom Balzac once
wrote that she was "one of those great minds, which solitude had
preserved from the petty meannesses of the world," words which
describe her better than volumes could have done. She had truly led a
silent, solitary, lonely life that had known but one love, the man
whom she was to marry after so many vicissitudes, and in spite of so
many impediments, and but one tenderness, her daughter, a daughter who
unfortunately was entirely her inferior, and in whom she could never
find consolation or comfort, who could neither share her joys, nor
soothe her sorrows.

In her convictions, Madame de Balzac was a curious mixture of atheism
and profound faith in a Divinity before whom mankind was accountable
for all its good or bad deeds. All through her long life she had been
under the influence of her father, one of the remarkable men of his
generation, who had enjoyed the friendship of most of the great French
writers of the period immediately preceding the Revolution, including
Voltaire; he had brought her up in an atmosphere of the eighteenth
century with its touch of skepticism, and the Encyclopedia had always
remained for her a kind of gospel, in spite of the fact that she had
been reared in one of the most haughty, aristocratic circles in
Europe, in a country where the very mention of the words _liberty_ and
_freedom of opinion_ was tabooed, and that her mother had been one of
those devout Roman Catholics who think it necessary to consult their
confessor, even in regard to the most trivial details of their daily
existence. Placed as she had been between her parents' incredulity and
bigotry, my aunt had formed opinions of her own, of which a profound
tolerance and a deep respect for the beliefs and convictions of others
was the principal feature. She never condemned even when she did not
approve, and she hated hypocrisy, no matter in what shape or aspect it
presented itself before her eyes. This explains the courage she
displayed when against the advice and the wishes of her family, she
persisted in marrying Balzac, though it hardly helps us to understand
from what we know of the latter's character, how he came to fall so
deeply in love with a woman who in almost everything thought so
differently from what he thought, especially in regard to those two
subjects which absorbed and engrossed him until the last days of his
life, religion and politics.

That he loved her, and that she loved him, in spite of these
differences in their points of view, is to their mutual honor, but it
adds to the mystery and to the enigmatical side of a romance that has
hardly been equalled in modern times; and it accounts for the fact
that some friction occurred between them later on, when my aunt found
herself trying to restrain certain exuberances on the part of her
husband regarding her own high lineage, about which she never thought
much herself, though she had always tried to live up to the duties
which it imposed upon her. I am mentioning this circumstance to
explain certain exaggerations which we constantly find in Balzac's
letters in regard to his marriage. His imagination was extremely
vivid, and its fertility sometimes carried him far away into regions
where it was nearly impossible to follow him, and where he really came
to believe quite sincerely in things which had never existed. For
instance in his correspondence with his mother and friends, he is
always speaking of the necessity for Madame Hanska to obtain the
permission of the Czar to marry him. This is absolutely untrue. My
aunt did not require in the very least the consent of the Emperor to
become Madame de Balzac. The difficulties connected with her marriage
consisted in the fact that having been left sole heiress of her first
husband's immense wealth, she did not think herself justified in
keeping it after she had contracted another union, and with a
foreigner. She therefore transferred her whole fortune to her
daughter, reserving for herself only an annuity which was by no means
considerable, and it was this arrangement that had to be sanctioned,
not by the sovereign who had nothing to do with it, but by the Supreme
Court of Russia, which at that time was located in St. Petersburg.
Balzac, however, wishing to impress his French relatives with the
grandeur of the marriage he was about to make, imagined this tale of
the Czar's opposition, in order to add to his own importance and to
that of his future wife, an invention which revolted my aunt so much
that in that part of her husband's correspondence which was published
by her a year or two before her death, she carefully suppressed all
the passages which contained this assertion which had so thoroughly
annoyed as well as angered her. I have sometimes wondered what she
would have said had she seen appear in print the curious letter which
Balzac wrote immediately after their wedding to Dr. Nacquart in which
he described with such pomp the different high qualities, merits, and
last but not least, brilliant positions occupied by his wife's
relatives, beginning with Queen Marie Leszczinska, the consort of
Louis XV, and ending with the husband of my father's stepdaughter,
Count Orloff, whom the widest stretch of imagination could not have
connected with my aunt.

I cannot refrain from mentioning here an anecdote which is very
typical of Balzac. He was about to return to Paris from Russia after
his marriage. My aunt coming into his room one morning found him
absorbed in writing a letter. Asking him for whom it was intended she
was petrified with astonishment when he replied that it was for the
Duke de Bordeaux, as the Comte de Chambord was still called at the
time, to present his respects to him upon his entrance into his
family! My aunt at first could not understand what it was he meant,
and when at last she had grasped the fact that it was in virtue of her
distant, very distant, relationship with Queen Marie Leszczinska that
he claimed the privilege of cousinship with the then Head of the Royal
House of France, it was with the greatest difficulty and with any
amount of trouble that she prevailed upon him at last to give up this
remarkable idea, and to be content with the knowledge that some
Rzewuski blood flowed in the veins of the last remaining member of the
elder line of the Bourbons, without intruding upon the privacy of the
Comte de Chambord, who probably would have been somewhat surprised to
receive this extraordinary communication from the great, but also
snobbish Balzac.

It was on account of this snobbishness, which had something childish
about it, that he sometimes became involved in discussions, not only
with my aunt, but also with several of his friends, Victor Hugo among
others, who could not bring themselves to forgive him for thinking
more of the great and illustrious families with which his marriage had
connected him than of his own genius and marvelous talents. Hugo most
unjustly accused my aunt of encouraging this "aberration," as he
called it, of Balzac's mind; in which judgment of her he was vastly
mistaken, because she was the person who suffered the most through it,
and by it. But this unwarranted suspicion made him antagonistic to
her, and probably inspired the famous description he left us of
Balzac's last hours in the little volume called _Choses vues_. This
was partly the cause why people afterwards said that my aunt's married
life with the great writer had been far from happy, and had resolved
itself into a great disappointment for both of them. The reality was
very different, because during the few months they lived together,
they had known and enjoyed complete and absolute happiness, and Madame
de Balzac's heart was forever broken when she closed with pious hands
the eyes of the man who had occupied such an immense place in her
heart as well as in her life. Many years later, talking with me about
those last sad hours when she watched with such tender devotion by his
bedside, she told me with accents that are still ringing in my ears
with their wail of agony: I lived through a hell of suffering on that
day.

Nevertheless she bore up bravely under the load of the unmerited
misfortunes which had fallen upon her. Her first care, after she had
become for the second time a widow, was to pay Balzac's debts, which
she proceeded to do with the thoroughness she always brought to bear
in everything she undertook. She remained upon the most affectionate
terms with his family, and it was due to her that Balzac's mother was
able to spend her last years in comfort. These facts speak for
themselves, and, to my mind at least, dispose better than volumes on
the subject could do of the conscious or unconscious calumny cast by
Victor Hugo on my aunt's memory. It must here be explained that the
real reason why he did not see her, when he called for the last time
on his dying friend, and concluded so hastily that she preferred
remaining in her own apartments than at her husband's side, consisted
in the fact that she did not like the poet, who she instinctively
felt, also did not care for her, so she preferred not to encounter a
man whom she knew as antagonistic to herself at an hour when she was
about to undergo the greatest trial of her life, and she retired to
her room when he was announced. But Hugo, who had often reproached
Balzac for being vain, had in his own character a dose of vanity
sufficient to make him refuse to admit that there could exist in the
whole of the wide world a human being who would not have jumped at the
chance of seeing him, even under the most distressing of
circumstances.

I have said already that my aunt's opinions consisted of a curious
mixture of atheism and a profound belief in the Divinity. Her mind was
far too vigorous and too deep to accept without discussion the dogmas
of the Roman Catholic Church to which she belonged officially, and she
formed her own ideas as to religion and the part it ought to play in
human existence. She held the firm conviction that we must always try,
at least, to do what is right, regardless of the sorrow this might
entail upon us. In one of her letters to my mother, she says:

"You will know one day, my dear little sister, that what one cares
the most to read over again in the book of life are those
difficult pages of the past when, after a hard struggle, duty has
remained the master of the battle field. It has buried its dead,
and brushed aside all the reminders that were left of them, and
God in his infinite mercy allows flowers and grasses to grow again
on this bloody ground. Don't think that by these flowers, I mean
to say that one forgets. No, on the contrary, I am thinking of
remembrance, the remembrance of the victory that has been won
after so many sacrifices; I am thinking of all those voices of the
conscience which come to soothe us, and to tell us that our Father
in Heaven is satisfied with what we have done."

A person who had intimately known both Balzac and my aunt said one day
that they completed each other by the wide difference which existed in
their opinions in regard to the two important subjects of religion and
politics. The remark was profoundly true, because it was this very
difference which allowed them to bring into their judgments an
impartiality which we seldom meet with in our modern society. They
mutually respected and admired each other, and even when they were not
in perfect accord, or just because they were not in perfect accord as
to this or that thing, they nevertheless tried, thanks to the respect
which they entertained for each other, to look upon mankind, its
actions, follies and mistakes, with kindness and indulgence. The
curious thing in regard to their situation was that my aunt who had
been born and reared in one of the most select and prejudiced of
aristocratic circles, never knew what prejudice was, and remained
until the last day of her life a staunch liberal, who could never
bring herself to ostracize her neighbor, because he happened to think
or to believe otherwise than she did herself. She was perfectly
indifferent to advantages of birth, fortune or high rank, and she was
rather inclined to criticize than to admire the particular society and
world amidst which she moved. Balzac on the contrary, though a
_bourgeois_ by origin, cared only for those high spheres for which he
had always longed since his early youth, and of which a sudden freak
of fortune so unexpectedly had opened him the doors. In that sense he
was the _parvenu_ his enemies have accused him of being, and he often
showed himself narrow minded, until at last his wife's influence made
him consider, without the disdain he had affected for them before,
people who were not of noble birth or of exalted rank. On the other
hand, Madame de Balzac, thanks to her husband's Catholic and
Legitimistic tendencies and sympathies, became less sarcastic than had
been the case when she had, perhaps more than she ought, noticed the
smallnesses and meannesses of the particular set of people who at that
period constituted the cream of European society. They both came to
acquire a wider view of the world in general, thanks to their
different ways of looking at it, and this of course turned to their
great mutual advantage.

I will not extend myself here on the help my aunt was to Balzac all
through the years which preceded their marriage, when there seemed no
possibility of the marriage ever taking place. She encouraged him in
his work, interested herself in all his actions, praised him for all
his efforts, tried to be for him the guide and the star to which he
could look in his moments of dark discouragement, as well as in his
hours of triumph. Without her affection to console him, he would most
probably have broken down under the load of immense difficulties which
constantly burdened him, and he never would have been able to leave
behind him as a legacy to a world that had never property appreciated
or understood him, those volumes of the _Comedie humaine_ which have
made his name immortal. Madame Hanska was his good genius all through
those long and dreadful years during which he struggled with such
indomitable courage against an adverse fate, and her devotion to him
certainly deserved the words which he wrote to her one day, "I love
you as I love God, as I love happiness!"

All this has taken me very far from Miss Floyd's book, though what I
have just written about my uncle and aunt completes in a certain sense
the details she has given us concerning the wonderful romance which
after seventeen years of arduous waiting, made Madame Hanska the wife
of one of the greatest literary glories of France. Her work is
magnificent and she has handled it superbly, and reconstituted two
remarkable figures who were beginning to be, not forgotten, which is
impossible, but not so much talked about by the general public, who a
few years ago, had shown itself so interested in their life history as
it was first disclosed to us in the famous _Lettres a l'Etrangere_,
published by the Vicomte Spoelberch de Lovenjoul. She has also cleared
some of the clouds which had been darkening the horizon in regard to
both Balzac and his wife, and restored to these two their proper
places in the history of French literature in the nineteenth century.
She has moreover shown us a hitherto unknown Balzac, and a still more
unknown _Etrangere_, and this labor of love, because it was that all
through, can only be viewed with feelings of the deepest gratitude by
the few members still left alive of Madame de Balzac's family, my
three brothers and myself. I feel very happy to be given this
opportunity of thanking Miss Floyd, in my brothers' name as well as in
my own, for the splendid work which she has done, and which I am quite
certain will ensure for her a foremost place among the historians of
Balzac.