Postcard from Paris: A fanboy at the house of Balzac
Before Tom Wolfe and the New Journalists of the 1960s, and today’s crop of narrative specialists, a driven French writer, swigging up to 50 cups of black coffee a day, was churning out novel after novel devoted to capturing what he called La Comedie Humaine. The Human Comedy used the tools of realism to paint a vivid panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte.
When it came to using characters, scenes, dialogue and most of all, a waterfall of concrete, sociological details about 19th century Paris and the French countryside, no one matches Honoré de Balzac. Yes, Emile Zola and Charles Dickens tilled the same realistic turf. For my money, though, Balzac was the best.
That may be because I’ve read more than a dozen of Balzac’s novels and stories, although that’s just a fraction of the 92 books, novelettes and stories he produced before he died in 1850 at the age of 51. And because Tom Wolfe gave him credit as one of the fathers of the so-called New Journalism of the 1960s, feeding us the four elements of narrative: scene-by-scene construction, third-person point of view, dialogue and status details (more on that one later).
So a visit to the museum that was one of his last houses still standing in Paris, a cottage nestled in the hills of the Passy neighborhood with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, was a must-see for this Balzac fanboy.
An online review suggested there wasn’t much to be found in Balzac’s house — an egregious mistake.
Where to start?
How about the room dedicated to the revisions of one novel, a 10-step process that put him heavily in debt because he was marking up proofs for which he had to pay.
A single page appears as if a rooster’s claws had been dipped in black ink and sent scurrying.
Victor Hugo, another devoted reviser, played in the Little League. If memory of the biographies I’ve read serves, Balzac used to run out the back door of an early attic apartment to flee debtors haranguing him for the cost of his proofs.
There was the room dedicated to the woodcuts of hundreds of the 2,500 characters who populated stories and which appeared in early editions of his books.
A sample woodcut and the novel in which it appeared:
If you look at the image of the single woodcut, you see the rich detail of a Balzac character at his desk where a quill and inkwell reign, his top hat and cane sit on the floor behind his stocking feet. They represent the carefully wrought portrayals based on what Wolfe, in The New Journalism anthology, described as status details, “a key device the so-called New Journalists borrowed from the literary realists of the previous century,” and one that the best narrative writers of today regularly employ:
“… the recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving towards children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist in a scene. Symbolic of what? Symbolic, generally, of people’s status in life, using that term in the broad sense of the entire behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or hope it to be. The recording of such details is not mere embroidery in prose. It lies as close to the center of the power of realism as any other device in literature. (Emphasis added.)
On our visit to Paris, cafe creme — espresso topped with foam we order as lattes at the Black Crow in St. Pete — is the drink of choice, sipped in prodigious quantities. Balzac wrote an homage to the tarry cups of brew he gulped by the dozen — exactly how many is in dispute, but it was a lot — every day.
Encased in glass is an inscribed porcelain coffee maker, a fan’s Limogean nod to Balzac’s coffee jones that fueled his writing, a process he describes in his “Treatise on modern stimulants”:
“…milled coffee, crushed, cold and anhydrous (a chemical word that means little or no water) taken on an empty stomach. The coffee falls into your stomach … attacks the delicate and velvety lining … From then on, everything becomes agitated: ideas march like the battalions of a great army. Memories charge in, flags flying: the high cavalry of logic rushes in … witticisms appear like snipers; characters rise up; the paper covers itself in ink, because the evening begins and ends with torrents of black water, as the battle does with gunpowder.”
On a visit later to the Rodin Museum, we found the master sculptor’s magisterial depiction of Balzac, wearing the monk’s robe he favored, a sartorial choice underlining the unrelenting devotion to his art.
First, Rodin created a study of the robe Balzac wore at home while working.
“In his concern for accuracy,” the Rodin Museum says, “Rodin dressed his study for the figure in a real dressing gown, giving it the shape he wanted by stiffening it with plaster. What emerged from the mold was a strange plaster ghost―an empty garment showing the position of the body it covered. This object enabled Rodin to create the very subtle drapery for his Monument to Balzac: his aim was for this part of the work to vibrate with the surrounding space, for the light to flow over its surface without creating too much contrast. The dressing gown was a materialization of the aesthetic Rodin developed at the turn of the century; its softness and fluidity broke away from the expression of power still reflected by the figure’s head.”
It’s a fitting realistic depiction of the leader of the realism movement in France.
And now, un autre cafe creme, s’il vous plait!