Children of Fire - Honore

"I worked for 19 hours yesterday, and it looks like 20 today, maybe even 22. The newspaper has advanced a payment, and now I have to work for it. That means writing, proofreading and editing about 16 to 20 pages a day. I can hardly afford any breaks...".

This entry was made on October 30, 1846. To be fair, the end of October 1846 was rather an exception, as far as Honore de Balzac was concerned. As a rule, he would work only 12 hours a day, as he occasionally mentioned in his letters to his future wife, Eveline Hanska. "It was a pretty routine day: I woke up, had my supper, and set to work. I was writing for 8 hours or so, then took a breakfast break and continued working for 4 more hours. Afterwards, my daily walk before dinner - and back to bed right after it". Given such a crystal-clear picture, it's hardly surprising that it took the writer mere seven years to produce 24 volumes of "The Human Comedy" - or that he burned out like a candle in no time, and died a bad death at 51.

It's not that Balzac was completely deaf to reason. After all, he left Paris and moved to the quiet suburb of Passy to stop being "hamster on a wheel". "Farewell, the Capital of Noise. I shut your gates and turn my back to you to find my peace in a rural backwater". Passy was located about two kilometers away from the heart of the city but the distance didn't prevent the dichotomy: whatever is not Paris must be a backwater! Back in the 19th century, the place was indeed pretty bucolic. The writer lived in a rather spacious enfilade house with a gray tile roof, while both the entrance gate and the shutters were green. The house's main attraction was an adjoining garden sporting fancy chairs, green bushes and trees bursting of colours. The garden would be a perfect sanctuary for solitary walks and creative contemplations - but for the fact that it often was full of people, because the house didn't belong to Balzac but was rather used as a guesthouse! On the flip side, the revolving-door lodging provided the writer (who was careful enough to keep his incognito) with a whole gamut of individuals coming from all walks of life and serving as perfect prototypes for his future characters. It would be tempting to presume that it was in that house that Balzac spotted the prototype for his arguably the most famous character - Eugene de Rastignac - but it's unlikely. Rastignac, whose name became synonymous with "a charming and unscrupulous go-getter", preferred less reputable and significantly cheaper guesthouses that were located much closer to the hustle-and-bustle of the capital. On the other hand, Rastignac's influential benefactress, Delpfine de Nucingen, could indeed have been Balzac's temporary neighbour - at least, a bust of a young noblewoman, who later became famous as a hostess of popular events for high society, suggests so.

The bust is exhibited in a Passy literary museum known as the "Maison de Balzac" - and it's one of many exhibits devoted to the characters created by the writer. The walls of the main room are covered with red velvet protected by thick glass. Hundreds of miniature drawings are scattered all over the velvet, each drawing providing detailed information about the character depicted in it. The drawings are deliberately exaggerated but without being reduced to caricatures. The artist managed to achieve a perfect compromise between portraying the characters as unique individuals and typical representations of their psychological type and/or social group. For instance, one immediately recognizes Rastignac's audacious foppishness or conceited pomposity of the noblemen duped by their own wives to help promoting the above fopling to the elite.

Nowadays, one can clearly see the Eiffel Tower from the vantage point of Balzac's garden but the writer (who died decades before it was erected) had no such privilege. It might be for that reason that he would look around rather than up - and write about human psychology and daily life rather than elevated ideals. In his case, the fire within created a scientist of humanity, not a revolutionary reformer like a certain German monk who had lived more than 300 years earlier - and was preceded by a Hungarian princess...