The whole association would push, praise, and extol, by articles, advertisements and conversations, any one of its members who had just published a book or staged a drama. Whoever showed himself to be hostile to one of the horses would provoke the kicks of the entire stable; Le Cheval Rouge would not forgive: the culpable became the target of insults, cutting remarks, pin pricks, taunts and other means of driving a man to despair, which are well known by the smaller newspapers.
I smile while betraying after so many years the innocent secret of this literary freemasonry, which had no other result than some persuasive words for a book whose success did not require them. But, at that time, we took the thing seriously, we imagined ourselves to be the Treize themselves in person, and I was surprised to find that obstacles still existed; but the world is so badly designed! What an important and mysterious air we had in challenging other men, poor conventional men who in no way doubted our power.
After four or five meetings, Le Cheval Rouge ceased to exist; most of the chevaux could not afford to pay for their oats in this symbolic manger, and the association which was going to seize total control was dissolved, because its members often lacked the fifteen francs to pay their share. Each one now dove back alone into the chaos of life, fighting his own fight, and it is this that explains why Balzac was not a member of the Academy and died a simple knight of the Legion of Honor.
The idea however was good, for Balzac, as he himself says of Nucingen, could not have a bad idea. Others who have succeeded have set to work without surrounding themselves with the same romantic fantasies.
Thrown off of one chimera, Balzac very quickly mounted a new one, and he set out for another voyage in the blue with that childlike innocence which in him was combined with the profoundest sagacity and the shrewdest intellect.
So many bizarre projects he has described to me, so many strange paradoxes he has defended to me, always with the same good faith! Sometimes he would maintain that one should live on nine sous a day, sometimes he would require one hundred thousand francs in order to be most comfortable. Once, when I asked him to reconcile the accounting, he responded to the objection that thirty thousand francs still remained unallocated. "Ah well! That is for the butter and the radishes. In what even slightly proper house does one not eat thirty thousand francs of radishes and butter?" I wish I could portray the look of sovereign disdain he cast on me as he gave that triumphal reason; that look said: "Decidedly Theo is nothing but a contemptible person, a skinned rat, a pitiful spirit; he understands nothing of a grand existence and he has all his life eaten only the salted butter of Brittany."