Théophile Gautier

“ Some, although absurdly outside the realm of possibility, stop you like a portrait. One could give them a name.
When one listened to Balzac, a whole carnival of extravagant and real puppets frolicked before your eyes, wearing on their shoulders a colorful phrase, waving long sleeves of epithets, blowing their noses noisily with an adverb, smacking themselves with a bat of antitheses, pulling you by the tail of your coat, and whispering into your ear your secrets in a disguised and nasal voice, pirouetting, whirling in the midst of a sparkle of lights and of glitter. ”

“ Who has not discovered during days of distress, forgotten in pants or in a vest, a few glorious coins appearing at just the right time and saving you from the calamity that youth fears the most: to fail to provide a beloved woman with a carriage, a bouquet, a small bench, a show program, a tip to the usherette or some trifles of this type?
Balzac excels in the portrayal of youth who are poor, as they almost always are, entering into their first struggles with life, prey to the temptation of pleasures and luxury, and experiencing profound miseries due to their high hopes. ”

“ This devil of a man had such a powerful vision that he described to each of us, in the most minute details, the splendid and glorious life that the association would procure for us. As we listened to him, we believed ourselves already leaning, at the heart of a beautiful mansion, against the white marble of the fireplace, red ribbons around our necks, a shining badge over our hearts, receiving with an affable air the greatest politicians, artists and writers, who were shocked by our rapid and mysterious fortune. For Balzac, the future did not exist, everything was in the present ”

“ In the course of our close friendship, which lasted from 1836 until his death, only once did Balzac make allusion, with the most respectful and the most tender terms, to an attachment of his early youth, and even then he gave me only the first name of the person whose memory, after so many years, still made his eyes moisten. Had he said any more to me, I certainly would not have abused his confidences; the genius of a great writer belongs to all of the world, but his heart is his own. ”

“ Balzac owes nothing to antiquity; for him there are neither Greeks nor Romans, and he has no need to cry for deliverance from them. One does not find in the composition of his talent any trace of Homer, of Virgil, of Horace, not even of De Viris Illustribus; nobody was ever less classical.
Balzac, like Gavarni, observed his contemporaries; and, in art, the supreme difficulty is to portray that which one sees before one's eyes; one can pass through one's time without appreciating it, and that is what many eminent minds have done. ”

“ This garret was perched on the Rue de Lesdiguières, number nine, near the Arsenal, whose library offered its resources to the young laborer. Without a doubt, to pass from an abundant and luxurious house to a miserable hovel would be difficult at any age other than 21, which was the age of Balzac; but if the dream of every child is to have boots, that of every young man is to have a room, a room all to himself, whose key he carries in his pocket, although he can stand upright only at its center: a room, it's the trappings of virility, it's independence, personality, love! ”

“ Where a writer of lesser genius would have drawn a portrait, Balzac has created a figure. Men do not have as many muscles as Michelangelo gives them to suggest the idea of strength. Balzac is full of such useful exaggerations, of those dark strokes that enhance and support the outline; he dreams while writing, like the masters, and leaves his mark on everything. As this is not a literary critique, but a biographical study that I am writing, I will not take these remarks farther than necessary. ”

“ Perhaps this could be the place to define the truth as understood by Balzac; in this time of realism, it is good to be understood on this point. The truth of art is not that of nature; everything that is represented through the means of art necessarily contains some element of the conventional; make it as small as possible, it still exists, be it perspective in painting, language in literature. Balzac accentuates, magnifies, enlarges, prunes, adds, shadows, illuminates, avoids or approaches men or things according to the effect that he wants to produce. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The school of Victor Hugo, in love with the sixteenth century and the Middle Ages, specialized in patterns, in rhythms, in structure, rich in words, breaking prose with the gymnastics of verse, and modeling itself on a master confident in his methods, would do nothing other than that which was well written, that is to say worked and toned beyond measure, and found the portrayal of modern manners to be useless, conventional, and lacking in lyricism. Balzac, despite the popularity that he had begun to enjoy among the public, was not admitted among the gods of Romanticism, and he knew it. ”

“ Ideal beauty, with its serene and pure lines, was too simple, too cold, too harmonious for this complicated, exuberant and diverse genius. He also says somewhere: "It is necessary to be Raphaël to portray many virgins." Character pleased him more than style, and he preferred looks to beauty. In his portraits of women, he never fails to put a mark, a crease, a wrinkle, a red blemish, a softened and tired corner, a vein that is too apparent, some detail indicating the bruises of life that a poet, in tracing the same image, would surely have suppressed, mistakenly without a doubt. ”

“ He read with a careless eye the stanzas of white marble with which Greek art sung the perfection of the human form. In the museum of antiquities, he looked at the Venus de Milo without great ecstasy, but the Parisian woman who has stopped in front of the immortal statue, draped in her long cashmere shawl running without a crease from the neck to the heel, wearing her hat with a veil from Chantilly, gloved with her tight Jouvin gloves, showing from under the hem of her flounced dress the polished tip of her worn boots, made his eyes sparkle with pleasure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If the strategic work is greater, the material labor is less. Several dramas are necessary to fill a volume, and while you promenade or rest idly with slippers on your feet, the footlights are illuminated, the scenery descends from the ceiling, the actors recite and gesticulate, and you find yourself having made more money than you would have by scribbling for an entire week bent painfully over your desk. Such melodrama has more value to its author than Notre‐Dame de Paris to Victor Hugo and Les Parents Pauvres to Balzac. ”

“ No one could absolutely comprehend the life of another; in such a case, there are motives that remain obscure, unknown details, actions of which one loses track. In even the most faithful portrait, some creativity is necessary. Balzac has thus created much more than he saw. His rare faculties of the analyst, of the physiologist, of the anatomist, have merely served the poet in him, just as the assistant serves the professor at his lectern when he passes him the substances that he needs for his demonstrations. ”

“ Work absolutely ruled the life of Balzac, and if, as he himself says with touching sensitivity in a letter to his sister, he has painlessly sacrificed the joys and distractions of existence to this jealous god, it cost him to renounce all company that might have led to friendship. To reply with a few words to a long letter became for him who was overburdened with labor a prodigality that he could rarely permit himself ”

“ What a loss for letters, what a void in the human spirit if the young man had bowed before the experience of the old man and listened to his counsel, which, certainly, was most wise, because there was not the least spark of genius nor even of talent in this rhetorical tragedy! Happily Balzac, under the pseudonym of Louis Lambert, had not composed for nothing at the college of Vendôme the Traité de la Volonté. ”

“ L'Histoire des Treize is nothing but this idea enlarged and complicated: one powerful unit composed of multiple beings acting unquestioningly toward an accepted and suitable goal. We know what gripping, mysterious and terrible effects he has drawn from this starting point in Ferragus, La Duchesse de Langeais, and La Fille aux Yeux d'Or; but real life and the intellectual life were not as clearly separated for Balzac as they were for certain authors, and his creations followed him outside of his study. ”

“ His nascent glory, strengthened each month with new rays, shined with all of the splendors of the aurora; certainly he shined brightly like his contemporaries Lamartine, Victor Hugo, de Vigny, de Musset, Sainte‐Beuve, Alexandre Dumas, Mérimée, George Sand, and many others; but at no time in his life did Balzac carry himself as the Grand Lama of literature, and he was always good company ”

“ Although he is dead, Balzac still has detractors; on his memory are thrown the banal reproach of immorality, the last insult of powerless and jealous mediocrity, or even of total stupidity. The author of La Comédie Humaine not only is not immoral, but he is actually a strict moralist. Monarchical and catholic, he defends authority, exalts religion, preaches duty, reprimands passion, and does not accept happiness except in marriage and the family. ”

“ Study lends a sort of magic to everything that surrounds us. The meager desk upon which I wrote and the brown leather that covered it, my piano, my bed, my armchair, the peculiar wallpaper, my furniture, all of these things came to life and became for me humble friends, silent partners in my future. ”