1829 - 1832
Work and increasing fame—Emile de Girardin—Balzac's early relations with the Revue de Paris and quarrel with Amedee Pinchot—First letters from Madame Hanska and the Marquise de Castries—Balzac's extraordinary mode of writing—Burlesque account of it from the Figaro.
The record of the next few years of Balzac's life is a difficult one, so many and varied were the interests crowded into them, so short the hours of sleep, and so long the nights of work, followed without rest by an eight hours' day of continual rush. Visits to printers, publishers, and editors, worrying interviews with creditors, and letters on business, politics, and literature, followed each other in bewilderingly quick succession, and the only respite was to be found in occasional talks with such friends as Madame de Berny, Madame Carraud, or the Duchesse d'Abrantes.
Success was arriving. But success with Balzac never meant leisure, or
relief from a heavy burden of debt; it merely gave scope for enormous
prodigies of labour. His passion for work amounted to a disease; and
who can measure the gamut of emotion, ranging from rapture down to
straining effort, which was gone through in those silent hours of
darkness, when the man, the best part of whom lived only in solitude
and night, sat in his monk's habit, before a writing-table littered
with papers? Then, impelled by the genius of creation, he would allow
his imagination full sway, and would turn to account the material
collected by his keen powers of observation and his unparalleled
intuition. It was strenuous labour, with the attendant joy of calling
every faculty, including the highest of all—that of creation—into
activity, and the hours no doubt often passed like moments. But the
fierce battling with expression, the effort to tax super-abundant
powers to the utmost, left their mark; and in the morning Balzac would
drag himself to the printer or publisher, with his hair in disorder, his lips dry, and his forehead lined.
Jules Sandeau, who had been taken by Balzac to live with him, and who
remarked that he would rather die than work as he did, says that
sometimes, when the passion and inspiration for writing were strong on
him, he would shut himself up for three weeks in his closely curtained
room, never breathing the outside air or knowing night from day. When
utterly exhausted, he would throw himself on his pallet-bed for a few
hours, and slumber heavily and feverishly; and when he could fast no
longer, he would call for a meal, which must, however, be scanty, because digestion would divert the blood from his brain. Otherwise, hour after hour, he sat before his square table, and concentrated his powerful mind on his work, utterly oblivious of the fact that there was anything in the world save the elbowing, crushing throng of phantom—yet to him absolutely real—personages, whom he took into his being, and in whose life he lived. For the time he felt with their feelings, saw with their eyes, became possessed by them, as the great actor becomes possessed by the personality he represents. "C'etait un voyant, non un observateur," as Philarete Chasles said with truth.