Was Balzac wrong or right? Is tobacco, as he maintained, a deadly poison and does it intoxicate those that it does not turn stupid? Is it the opium of the Occident that dulls the will and the intelligence? These are questions that I cannot answer; but I am going to list here the names of some celebrated personages of our age, some of whom smoked while the others did not smoke: Goethe, Heinrich Heine, uniquely for Germans, did not smoke; Byron smoked; Victor Hugo does not smoke, neither does Alexandre Dumas père; on the other hand Alfred de Musset, Eugène Sue, Georges Sand, Mérimée, Paul de Saint-Victor, Emile Augier, Ponsard, smoked and still smoke; however they are not exactly imbeciles.
This aversion, moreover, was shared by nearly all men who were born in our century or a little before. Only sailors and soldiers smoked then; at the odor of the pipe or the cigar, women fainted: they have become much tougher since then, and more than one pair of rosy lips has pressed with love the golden tip of a cigar, in a sitting room turned into a smoking room. Dowagers and turbaned mothers alone have preserved their old antipathy, and stoically watch their unfashionable salons be deserted by the youth.
Every time that Balzac is obliged, for the credibility of the story, to allow one of his characters to indulge in this horrible habit, his brief and disdainful sentence betrays a secret disapproval: "As for de Marsay," he said, "he was busy smoking cigars." And he must have really loved this captain of dandyism to permit him to smoke in his work.
A fragile and elegant young woman had without doubt inspired this aversion in Balzac, although that is a question that I cannot answer definitively. Still it's true that the tax collector never earned a sou from him. Regarding women, Balzac, who described them so well, must have known them, and one understands the sense that the Bible attaches to this word. In one of the letters that he writes to Madame de Surville, his sister, Balzac, quite young and completely unknown, sets down an ideal for his life in two words: "To be celebrated and to be loved." The first part of this program, which all artists map out for themselves, had been realized in every way. Was the second also accomplished? The opinion of the most intimate friends of Balzac is that he practiced the chastity that he recommended to others, and shared at most platonic love; but Madame de Surville laughs at this idea, with a smile of feminine delicacy and full of discreet reserve. She maintains that her brother was unfailingly discreet, and that if he had wanted to speak, he would have had many things to say. This must be true, and without doubt the safe of Balzac contained more of the notes with delicate, sloping handwriting than the lacquered box of Canalis. There is, in his work, the scent of a woman: odor di femina; when one enters there, one hears behind the doors that close on the hidden staircase the rustling of silk and the creaking of shoes. The semicircular and padded salon on the Rue de Batailles, of which I have quoted the description inserted by the author in La Fille aux Yeux d'Or, did not remain completely virginal, as many of us had assumed. In the course of our close friendship, which lasted from 1836 until his death, only once did Balzac make allusion, with the most respectful and the most tender terms, to an attachment of his early youth, and even then he gave me only the first name of the person whose memory, after so many years, still made his eyes moisten. Had he said any more to me, I certainly would not have abused his confidences; the genius of a great writer belongs to all of the world, but his heart is his own. I touch only briefly on this tender and delicate side of Balzac's life, because I have nothing to say that does not honor him. This reserve and this mystery are those of a gentleman. If he was loved as he wished in the dreams of his youth, the world knows nothing of it.