Les Jardies attracted a great deal of attention from the public when Balzac bought it with the honorable intention of making an investment for his mother. While riding on the railway that passes Ville-d'Avray, every passenger would look with curiosity at that little house, half cottage, half chalet, which rose in the middle of a clay slope.
This plot of land, in Balzac's opinion, was the best in the world; formerly, he asserted, a certain celebrated wine was grown there, and the grapes, thanks to an unparalleled exposure, baked like the grapes of Tokaj on the Bohemian hills. The sun, it is true, had the freedom to ripen the crop in this place, where there existed only a single tree. Balzac tried to enclose this property with walls, which became famous for obstinately collapsing or sliding all in one piece down the steep escarpment, and he dreamed of the most fabulous and the most exotic crops for this heavenly place. Here comes naturally the anecdote of the pineapples, which has been so often repeated that I would not tell it again except to add one truly characteristic trait. Here is the project: one hundred thousand feet of pineapples were planted within the boundaries of Les Jardies, transformed into greenhouses that required only limited heat due to the sunniness of the site. The pineapples were going to be sold for five francs instead of the one louis that they ordinarily cost, for a total of five hundred thousand francs; from this sum it was necessary to deduct one hundred thousand francs for the costs of cultivation, equipment, and coal; there remained therefore a net profit of four hundred thousand francs which would constitute a splendid profit for the happy proprietor, "without the least bit of writing," he added. That was nothing, Balzac had a thousand projects like this; but the beauty of this was that we sought together, on the Boulevard Montmartre, a shop for the sale of the pineapples that were still in the form of seeds. The shop was to be painted black with thin gold stripes, and carry on its sign, in enormous letters: "PINEAPPLES FROM LES JARDIES."
For Balzac, the one hundred thousand pineapples were already raising their plumes of serrated leaves above their great lozenged cones under immense glass roofs: he saw them; he swelled in the high temperature of the greenhouse, he breathed in the tropical scent through his passionately open nostrils; and when, having returned to his home, he watched, while leaning on the window, the snow descend silently onto the bare slopes, he still only gave up his illusion with difficulty.