Balzac, Honoré de, 1799-1850; Novelists, French -- 19th century -- Biography
The Country Doctor proved a source of nothing but disappointments to
Balzac, who received an adverse decision from the courts, in the
lawsuit bought by Mame, because he had failed to furnish copy at the
stipulated dates, and found himself facing a judgment of three thousand
francs damages, besides another thousand francs for corrections made at
his expense. The cost of the latter was, for that matter, always
charged to him by his publishers in all his contracts, because his
method of work raised this item to an unreasonable sum. For one of his
short stories, Pierette, Balzac demanded no less than seventeen
successive revised proofs. And his corrections, his additions and his
suppressions formed such an inextricable tangle that the typesetters
refused to work more than an hour at a time over his copy.
The failure of the work on which he had counted so much and the loss of
his lawsuit did not discourage him. To borrow his own phrase, he
"buried himself in the most frightful labours." Between the end of 1833
and 1834 he produced Eugenie Grandet, The Illustrious Gaudissart, The
Girl with the Golden Eyes, and The Search for the Absolute. The paper
which he used for writing was a large octavo in form, with a parchment
finish. His manuscripts often bore curious annotations and drawings. On
the cover of that of Eugenie Grandet he had drawn a ground plan of old
Grandet's house, and had compiled a list of names, from which he chose
those of the characters in the story. Balzac attached an extreme
importance to proper names, and he did not decide which to give to his
heroes until after long meditation, for he believed that names were
significant, even to the extent of influencing their destinies. The
manuscript of The Search for the Absolute bears witness to his constant
preoccupation about money. He had inscribed on it the following account:
Total for June 7,505 francs.
Total for July 1,500 francs.
Floating debt 3,700 francs.
12,705 francs.
And melancholically he wrote below it, "Deficit, 1,705!" His writing
was small, compressed, irregular and often far from easy to read; when
he suppressed a passage, he used a form of pothook erasure which
rendered the condemned phrase absolutely illegible.
In 1834, Honore de Balzac, while still keeping his apartment in the Rue
Cassini, transferred his residence to Chaillot, No. 13, Rue des
Bastailles (now the Avenue d'Iena), in a house situated on the site of
the hotel of Prince Roland Bonaparte. This was his bachelor quarters,
where he received his letters, under the name of Madame the Widow
Durand. He had by no means abandoned his projects of luxurious
surroundings, and in The Girl with the Golden Eyes he has given a
description of his own parlour, which shows that he had in a measure
already realised his desires:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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