Yet he followed my advice to hold off on renting the shop until the following year in order to avoid an unnecessary expense.
I write my reminiscences as they return to me, without trying to place in order things which are better left apart. Besides, as Boileau said, transitions are the great difficulty of poetry, and of newspaper articles too, I will add; but modern journalists have neither as much conscience nor even more importantly as much leisure as the legislator of Parnasse.
Madame de Girardin professed for Balzac a lively admiration that he appreciated and that he acknowledged with his frequent visits, he who was so justifiably stingy with his time and his working hours. Never did a woman possess to such a high degree as Delphine, as I permitted myself to call her familiarly when we were together, the ability to stir the minds of her guests. With her, we always found ourselves to be particularly eloquent and each left her salon enthralled with himself. There was no stone so hard that she could not make a spark fly from it, and with Balzac, as you would expect, it was not necessary to strike the stone for very long: he sparkled and then lit up right away. Balzac was not precisely what one would call a talker, but he was quick with a reply, throwing a fine and decisive word into a discussion, changing the thread of the discourse, touching everything with lightness, and never going past a half smile: he had a verve, an eloquence, and an irresistible brio; and, as each person became silent to listen to him, with him, to the general satisfaction, the conversation would quickly descend into a soliloquy. The starting point was soon forgotten and he passed from an anecdote into a philosophical reflection, from an observation on manners to a local description; as he spoke his complexion would redden, his eyes would develop a distinctive luminosity, his voice would take on different inflections, and sometimes he would roar with laughter, amused by comic images that he saw before he described them. He announced in this way, like a sort of fanfare, the entry of his characters and his humorous comments, and his hilarity was soon shared by his assistants. Although this was the age of dreamers with hair hanging loosely like a willow, of weepers in their garrets and of disillusioned Byronians, Balzac had that robust joy and power that one would attribute to Rabelais, and that Molière did not show except in his plays. His loud laugh coming from his sensual lips was that of a kindly god amused by the spectacle of the human marionettes, and who is distressed by nothing because he understands everything and grasps at once both sides of things. Neither the worries of an often precarious situation, nor the tedium of money, nor the fatigue of excessive work, nor the confinement of the study, nor the renunciation of all of the pleasures of life, nor even sickness could strike down this Herculean joviality, in my opinion one of the most striking characteristics of Balzac. He knocked out the hydras while laughing, happily tore the lions in two, and carried as if it were a hare the boar of Erymanthe on the mountainous muscles of his shoulders. At the least provocation this gaiety would burst forth and cause his strong chest to heave, which might surprise a person with a delicate constitution, but it had to be shared, no matter how much effort one made to remain serious. Do not believe however that Balzac was seeking to entertain his audience: he obeyed, affected by a kind of internal euphoria and painting with rapid strokes, with a comic intensity and an incomparable talent for satire, the bizarre phantasmagoria that danced in the dark chamber of his brain. I do not know how to better compare the impression produced by certain of his conversations than with that which one experiences while leafing through the strange drawings of Songes Drolatiques, by the master Alcofribas Nasier. These are of monstrous personages, composed of the most hybrid elements. Some have for a head a bellows in which the hole represents the eye, while others have an alembic flute for a nose; these ones walk with wheels in place of feet; those ones have the rounded belly of a cooking pot and wear a lid in place of a hat, but an intense life animates these fanciful beings, and one recognizes in their grimacing faces the vices, the follies and the passions of man. Some, although absurdly outside the realm of possibility, stop you like a portrait. One could give them a name.