Do not imagine after these reflections that Balzac was austere and prudish in his speech: the author of Les Contes Drolatiques had been nourished with too much Rabelais and was too pantagruelistic to be unable to laugh; he knew good stories and invented them: his broad jokes interspersed with Gallic crudities would have made the sanctimonious and horrified members of society cry out shocking; but his laughing and talkative lips were sealed like a tomb when there was a question of a serious sentiment. He scarcely allowed his closest friends to surmise his love for a foreign woman of distinction, a love of which one can speak, since it was crowned by marriage. It was that passion that had been felt for a long time that necessitated his distant excursions, although their object remained until the last day a mystery for his friends.
Absorbed by his work, Balzac did not think until rather late of the theater, for which the general opinion judged him, wrongly to my mind, after a few more or less risky efforts, to be hardly suited. He who created so many types, analyzed so many characters, gave life to so many people, should succeed on the stage; but, as I have said, Balzac was not spontaneous, and one cannot correct the proofs of a drama. If he had lived, after a dozen works, he would assuredly have found his form and attained success; La Marâtre that played at the Théâtre-Historique was close to a masterpiece. Mercadet, lightly edited by an intelligent arranger, enjoyed a long posthumous success at the Gymnase.
Nevertheless, the factor that motivated his efforts was mostly, I must say, the idea of a windfall that would liberate him all at once from his financial predicament rather than a real vocation. Theater, as we know, is much more profitable than books; the continuing nature of the performances, on which a rather large royalty is drawn, produces quickly by accumulation some considerable sums. If the strategic work is greater, the material labor is less. Several dramas are necessary to fill a volume, and while you promenade or rest idly with slippers on your feet, the footlights are illuminated, the scenery descends from the ceiling, the actors recite and gesticulate, and you find yourself having made more money than you would have by scribbling for an entire week bent painfully over your desk. Such melodrama has more value to its author than Notre-Dame de Paris to Victor Hugo and Les Parents Pauvres to Balzac.