By Lechi Eke
Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) was a French novelist; the second of five children born to a father who came from a poor background (his parents were artisans) in Tarn, a place in southern France.
His father left Tarn in 1760 for Paris with just one Loius coin and a name worth nothing, but determined to change his fortune. By 1776, he had landed a job in Paris as the Secretary to the King’s Council and a Freemason, and had also changed his name from Bernard-Francois Balssa to a nobler sounding name, Balzac.
Later in life, his son, Honore, would without official notification, add ‘de’ to the name to make it royal!
Balzac had a difficult childhood. Born by a mother (from a wealthy family – of course that was the reason for the match) who at eighteen married a man of fifty whom she loved not, but knew she was a gift to him for services he rendered her family, Honore and siblings suffered parental distancing or frostiness from an early age. He spent the first four years of his life with a wet nurse cum governess.
That was the fashion at the time. Middle and upper class families despite Jean Jacques Rousseau’s popular philosophical book, Emile, persuading young mothers to nurse their infants at home, some mothers still found it fashionable to engage wet nurses and governesses to help them raise their babies. Even when such children eventually return home, they hardly enjoy cuddly love from their especially, mothers.
This was the unpalatable experiences of de Balzac children. It was said to have affected the author’s psychology. In his 1835 novel titled Le Lys dans la vallee (The Lily in the Valley), Balzac shared what is thought to be his experiences during his four years of being under a caregiver. He portrayed in this novel, a wicked governess whose name was Caroline, who was a facsimile of his former caretaker.
The Realist writer’s difficult childhood continued through his growing up years. When he was ten, he was sent to Oratorian Grammar school in Vendome for seven years. Here, he found life extremely difficult. He failed to memorise fast, and was often punished and sent to the alcove. To add salt to injury, he was always broke from being given little to nothing as pocket money thus making him an object of ridicule to his schoolmates.
Being sent to the alcove as often as the janitor of his school remembered – “… I had the honour of escorting (him) to the dungeon more than a hundred times!” said the janitor. This became a blessing in disguise for young Balzac. He had ample time to read every book which came his way, even to the point of reading dictionaries for want of other books. He devoured books on History, Literature, Physics, Religion, Philosophy, and whatever he could lay his hands on.
Balzac hated the Oratorian School blaming his recurring ill-health on “intellectual congestion.” His grandmother also had exclaimed when he was sent home on grounds of ill health, “Look, how the academy returns the pretty ones we sent them!”
Incidentally, while Balzac had been made to spend most of his school time in the alcove as correctional punishment, his father was busy writing against the practice of sending people to prison as a correctional measure instead of putting them to useful roles in the society.
While the elder Balzac didn’t think that prisons delivered the expected result of correction, the younger Balzac’s life showed that prisons or isolating people in penitentiaries don’t yield expected result.
It turned out that school wasn’t Balzac’s thing. When the family moved to the metropolis from Vendome, Honore was made to spend the next two and half years there with private tutors and schools. This made life so unbearable for him that he attempted jumping off the bridge over the Loire River to take his life.
However, his next call (1816) was Sorbonne (now a university), a college (of law, arts and the humanities) in Paris to study. Fortunately he had very famous professors: Francois Guizot who would become Prime Minister of France – he was professor of History; and his lecturer on French and Classical Literature was Abel-Francois Villemain who just arrived from Charlemagne. Balzac loved his Philosophy lecturer most, Victor Cousins, because he encouraged his students to think independently, what we would call today, ‘Thinking outside the box!’
So when school was over, Balzac’s father talked him into following his footsteps as a lawyer. So the young man went into training/work in the chamber of a family friend of his father’s for three years. Here, his observation and experiences of human behaviours sank lower.
In the end (1819) when Balzac finished from his Law training, his boss, Victor Passez offered Balzac to succeed him. The young man declined. As he wrote later, he was tired of being “a clerk, a machine, a riding-school hack, eating and drinking and sleeping at fixed hours. I should be like everyone else. And that’s what they call living, that life at the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again…I am hungry and nothing is offered to appease my appetite.”
At this juncture, Balzac announced his intention to become a writer.
This caused him his close ties with his family. Although he wasn’t ostracized, but the English critic, George Saintsbury, described Honore Balzac’s situation after his estrangement from his family thus: that he lived “in a garret furnished in the most Spartan fashion, with a starvation allowance and an old woman to look after him.” So, Balzac was placed on a very meagre allowance and left in a terrible accommodation while the family moved to Villeparisis, to a house 20 miles outside the capital city.
Balzac’s early attempt at writing wasn’t easy. His first attempt at a five-act tragedy titled Cromwell which he took to read to his family, failed to impress them. He struggled through writing short stories that were commercially viable, but did not fly.
The author spent the next couple of years churning out bad literature and grappling with all kinds of business ventures which failed through. He tried his hands in publishing, printing; in reprocessing slags (metal dross) from Roman mines, and transporting oak woods from Ukraine to France – nothing came out of those ventures!
In 1832, after several failed attempts at writing a good novel, an idea hit Balzac of an enormous series of books that would paint a panoramic portrait of “all aspects of society.” Balzac ran to his sister’s house and declared to her, “I am about to become a genius!”
First, he called the book, Studies of Manners or The Ways of the World, but it became known as La Comedie Humaine (Human Comedy) and he gathered all the fictions he had written and published in his life under pseudonym in this book, to publish it in his own name. This became his greatest achievement!
“As he discovered the novel, Balzac discovered himself,” wrote Biographer Graham Robb in discussing how important Balzac’s early writing experiences and fumbling were. Also, American critic, Samuel Rogers, agreed as he wrote of those early Balzac fumbling, “Without the training they gave Balzac, as he groped his way to his mature conception of the novel, and without the habit he formed as a young man writing under pressure, one can hardly imagine his producing La Comédie Humaine.”
In 1840, he released a novel titled, Le Notaire wherehe exposes the unpalatable human behaviours through the eyes of “a young person in the legal profession” whom he wrote, “sees”, “The oily wheels of every fortune, the hideous wrangling of heirs over corpses not yet cold, the human heart grappling with the Penal Code.”
Balzac built his painful childhood into his writings such as La Comedie Humaine and Louis Lambert (1832) where he shared his painful experiences at the Oratorian grammar school, Vendome. He used personal experiences and lives of others in his writings.
He was well-known for his writing which carried “unfiltered view of society and a keen scrutiny of detail.” He investigated countless human motives in his works. The social order was seen through his eyes as a community where class, money and personal ambition became “key players”.
It is written about him that “Balzac concerned himself overwhelmingly with the darker essence of human nature and the corrupting influence of middle and high societies. His mission was to observe mankind in its most representative state, frequently wandering through the street incognito among the masses of Parisian society to undertake his research.”
The author had literary successes with some of his later works such as: El Verdugo, which was about a 30 year old man who killed his father. The irony of it was that Balzac was 30, and his father died around that time. And it was the time he added the aristocratic prefix to his surname, “de”. It was a new beginning for him.
This literary success followed with his release of another novel in 1831 titled, La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin or the Magic Skin). It is a fable about a young man named Raphael who is downcast. However, fortune smiles on him when he finds an animal skin with promises of power and wealth. His life changes as he receives these things, but he is unable to manage them and they become his destruction. He loses his health and ends up in destructive confusion.
De Balzac uses this tale to show how treacherous life is, like the wriggling body of a snake!
Balzac’s first bestseller was his 1833 novel, Eugenie Grandet, a story about a young woman with miserly tendencies inherited from her father. This novel is dedicated to “a certain Marie” later discovered to be his married lover, and the mother of his only child. This became the most critically acclaimed book of his career. The characters are dynamic and complex.
He followed this up with La Duchesse de Langeais which is his most magnificent novel!
In Le Pere Goriot (Old Father Goriot (1835)), Balzac rages at a society that has too much love for money. It is a transposition of King Lear to 1820 Paris. This book bears a reflection of Balzac himself as father and mentor to his troubled young secretary, Jules Sandeau.
At this time, Balzac was a father to his child by his married lover, Marie Du Frasney (she was his source of inspiration for writing the magnificent novel, Eugenie Grandet). I believe he was probing love through the eyes of a father which he had become to his love-child, Marie-Caroline Du Frasney (born 1834).
Balzac has so many other novels, many of them serialized like Charles Dickens’ with no preplanned pages. He also dabbled into magazine publishing called, Chronique de Paris. We cannot possibly exhaust his works here in this column.
History records Honore de Balzac as the founder of Literary Realism.
Balzac’s writings depict characters that are completely human in the sense that his major characters are versatile and his minor characters are both intricate and ethically indistinct. Even inanimate objects take on life in his works. For example, the city of Paris which forms most of his setting, takes on human qualities in his writings.
Very true of Balzac’s work is this quotation: “Balzac’s extensive detail, especially the detail of objects, to illustrate the lives of his characters made him an early pioneer of literary realism. While he admired and drew inspiration from the Romantic style of Scottish novelist Walter Scott, Balzac sought to depict human existence through the use of particulars.”
His work ethics is however, worth mentioning. He was said to eat early dinner – 5-6pm and sleep from then until midnight. Then he worked from 1am until 8am. He was a very hard worker who believed in bettering his fortune through personal efforts. He usually worked for 15 hours at a stretch although he claimed working 48 hours once with a three hour break in-between.
He was a meticulous person, editing and re-editing his works which explains why some of his published books appear different from the original copies. Although he was said to be a kind of hobo and a hermit, he never lost touch with the social spheres which fed his writing. Of his being a hobo, this was reflective in his many unfinished works including the novel, Human Comedy.
About this unsettled kind of lifestyle, Sir Victor Pritchett wrote of Balzac, “The vanishing man, who must be pursued from the rue Cassini to…Versailles, Ville d’Avray, Italy, and Vienna can construct a settled dwelling only in his work.”
Honore made friends with especially important people of his time such as Victor Hugo (author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame) who became one of his pall bearers at his death, Jean de Margonne (he was also his mother’s lover and the father of her last child after his father died. In his palatial house (Chateau de Saché – today, a museum dedicated to Honore de Balzac) Balzac wrote many of his novels).
Also he was friends with French poet, literary critic and dramatist, Theophile Gautier, and Pierre-Marie-Charles de Bernard du Grail de la Villette (Charles de Bernard was a French writer of Balzac’s time from a very influential background).
Saintsbury wrote of Balzac, that he did not spend too much time in the clubs and salons of Paris like some of his characters because he was very busy, and because Balzac felt that “It was his business not to frequent society, but to create it.”
Balzac married late in life.
Countess Ewelina Hanska (nee Rzewuska) married to a man 20 years her senior (a wealthy Polish landowner near Kiev named Marshal Waclaw Hanski) wrote Balzac anonymously from Odessa (near Kiev) to express her unhappiness at Balzac’s negative treatment of women in his novel, La Peau de Chagrin. With no name and address, Balzac replied by placing an advert in the Gazette de France with hope the person would see it. That was how the couple began a 15-year correspondence relationship that ended in marriage after Ewelina’s husband died in 1841.
Unfortunately, the ten hours journey to and from Ewelina’s family place at Verhivnya Park in Volhynia, to St. Barbara’s Catholic Church in Berdychiv (Russia’s former banking city, now in Ukraine), for their wedding, cut short the “happily ever after” of the new couple’s marital bliss.
The couple had waited from 1843 to marry because Tsar Nicholas denied them permission to marry, plus Balzac’s failing health and financial instability.
On 14 March, 1850, Ewelina and Honore tied the knots. The ten hours journey to and from church left her feet swollen and difficult to walk; it also affected her husband’s heart. Ewelina wrote to her daughter that Balzac was growing weak and sweating profusely. They returned to Paris on his 51st birthday, May 20, and on Sunday 18 August 1850, Balzac died.
His funeral was attended by every writer in Paris including Gustave Courbet, Duman pere, and Dumas fils, Frederick Lemaitre, representatives of Legion d’honneur, etc. At the funeral, Victor Hugo stated “Today we have people in black because of the death of a man of talent; a nation in mourning for a man of genius.”
Marcel Proust, Henry James, Emile Zola, William Saroyan, Gustave Flaubert and many other writers of fiction were influenced by Honore de Balzac. Critic Richard Lehan wrote, “What Balzac started, Flaubert helped finish.” Writing further, Lehan observed, “Balzac was the bridge between the comic realism of Dickens (Charles) and the naturalism of Zola.”
Many of Balzac’s works have been great inspirations to many philosophers such as Karl Max, Friedrich Engels, and filmmaker, Francois Truffaut, among others.
Balzac’s vision of society as one in which class, money and personal ambition are key players is undisputable. Friedrich Engel wrote of Balzac, “I have learned more (from Balzac) than from all the professional historians, economics and statisticians put together.”
Balzac over the years had received high praises from critics as varied as Walter Benjamin and Camille Pagila. African-American novelist, James Baldwin (1924-1987), also praised Balzac’s writing in 1984: “I’m sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not *met Balzac. (He taught me) the way that country and its society works.”
*I believe that Baldwin wrote about meeting Balzac in his works since the latter died in 1850 and Baldwin was born in 1924.
A detailed analysis of Balzac’s story Sarrasine and a key work in structuralism literary criticism was published by Roland Barthes in 1970. Fellow French novelist, Emile Zola regarded Balzac as the “father of the naturalist novel.” Zola was of the opinion that “Romantics saw the world through a coloured lens, the naturalist sees through a clear glass.”
Some critics believe that Balzac’s realism is pessimistic and of analytical realism which depicts human behaviour as being linked to the environment.
Many of Balzac’s works have been made into films and television series by the BBC and others in the 20th century.