Before Balzac's day the novel had occupied itself almost exclusively with one theme--love; but the god of Balzac's contemporaries was money; therefore in his books money, or rather the lack of money, the desire of money, is the pivot on which society turns. The idea was audacious and novel. To enter in a work of fiction, a romance, into accurate details regarding the incomes and expenditure of the principal characters, in short, to treat money as of prime importance, was a perfectly new departure; and many denounced it as prosaic, nay, coarse; for it is always considered coarse to say what every one thinks, and what consequently all have tacitly agreed to conceal or to prevaricate about--and especially coarse to proclaim it in an art which is often regarded as the art of beautiful lying.
But Balzac was young yet; his poet's soul, though winter fell early in it, had its spring; he, too, felt constrained to make love and woman the central interest of a whole series of novels; and he treated the old theme with an originality which made it seem quite new. The stories in which he most successfully varied it form a distinct group among his works.
It was not beauty, at least not plastic beauty, which Balzac worshipped in woman. And one thing that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries was, that beauty did not impress him most when seen through the medium of art. A great proportion of the Romantic literature of France, as well as of Germany and Scandinavia, was art literature. Such an art-loving author as, for instance, Gautier (who soon became the head of a whole school), was actually prevented by his love of art from appreciating reality. He himself has told how disappointed he was the first time he went to paint a female figure from the life in Rioult's studio, and this in spite of the unquestioned beauty of the model and the classical grace of her outlines. "I have always," he confesses, "preferred the statue to the woman, marble to flesh." Significant words! Picture Gautier and Balzac together in the museum of antiquities in the Louvre, in that holy of holies, where the Venus of Milo shines in solitary majesty. The plastic poet hears, resounding from the marble, the loveliest of all the hymns of Greek art to the perfection of the human form. Gazing at Venus, he forgets his surroundings. Not so Balzac! His attention is promptly diverted from the goddess by the first Parisian lady who stops in front of her, wearing, in the fashion of the day, a long shawl in which there is not a fold from neck to heel, a coquettish hat, and tightly fitting gloves. He takes in at a glance all the little artifices of the fashionable toilette, the secrets of which are no secrets to him.[1]