The Maison de Balzac. {Photograph} by Bailey Trela.
The Maison de Balzac is positioned within the sixteenth arrondissement at 47, rue Raynouard, Paris, within the coronary heart of the previous village of Passy. If you happen to go to, likelihood is you’ll method it alongside the rue de l’Annonciation, which is pleasantly quiet and completely shaded, and boasts, in keeping with Google Maps, a Pizza Hut that I don’t keep in mind seeing once I visited in April. What I do keep in mind seeing was an unaccompanied Alsatian with some kind of harness girding its chest, loping by way of a small close by park. After I seemed round, vaguely nonplussed, I seen a clinique vétérinaire immediately throughout the road.
If I’d needed to clarify to myself why, with solely three days to spend in Paris, I felt such an acute want to go to the house the place Honoré de Balzac, a author I wasn’t even that conversant in, had composed the majority of The Human Comedy, a fictional undertaking I’d barely even dipped my toes into, I’m unsure what I might have stated. Most likely it simply appeared that if anybody would have had an attention-grabbing home, it will have been him. Open one among his novels at random, and likelihood is you’ll discover a gratuitous description of a room and its furnishings, a flurry of signifiers that, immediately, can appear exhausting to position. Take Monsieur Grandet’s front room, for example, because it seems within the opening chapter of Eugénie Grandet. We study the room has two home windows that “gave on to the road,” that its ground is picket, that “gray, picket panelling with vintage moulding lined the partitions from prime to backside,” that its ceiling is dominated by uncovered beams. “An previous copper clock, inlaid with tortoiseshell arabesques, adorned the white, badly carved, stone chimney-piece,” Balzac goes on. “Above it hung a greenish mirror, whose edges, bevelled to point out its thickness, mirrored a skinny stream of sunshine alongside an old school pier-mirror of damascened metal.” I don’t know what a pier-mirror is, and I couldn’t start to distinguish an old school mannequin from a sleeker, extra fashionable one. In a way, this sense of being misplaced was a part of the enchantment of Balzac’s world as I’d imagined it.
Which is one other approach of claiming that once I contemplated a kind of generic Balzacian area, a imaginative and prescient of plushness, of pure and overwhelming materials profusion would unfurl in my thoughts: a bit room fitted out with darkish wooden and damask curtains, gilt mirrors and stubbornly bombé furnishings, its walnut cabinets and limestone mantelpieces providing secure quarters to a full vary of dandy’s trinkets, like engraved pistols and silver-handled driving whips and even, glowing palely within the manufactured nightfall like a sturdy snowball, a high-quality Sèvres sugar bowl—each element, all the way down to the motes of light-struck mud spinning within the sepia-toned air, tuned exactly to some excellent of costive, pricey languor. You realize, luxus, because the Romans will need to have executed it. Who wouldn’t need to disappear into this?
So, right here I used to be. There was a false begin: a nice little gate with a plastic-sheathed slip of paper taped to it declaring that the gate was not the doorway to the Maison de Balzac. By means of the gate I may see a set of steps main all the way down to the grounds of the museum, which occupies a kind of plateau between the rue Raynouard above and the rue Berton under, however I used to be directed as an alternative down the street some thirty yards, to a squat, flat-roofed, glass-walled hutch. After I entered, the younger lady manning the data desk swiftly rerouted me to a facet door, which deposited me on the prime of a set of open-air stairs that, it seems, are utterly accessible from the road. Dizzily, I descended.
The bottom ground of the customer middle is occupied by the Rose Bakery, a contemporary assemblage of plate glass and black metal that appears, topologically, to bend all the pieces into its orbit, like a black gap of dangerous style. Spacewise, the Maison de Balzac appeared unbalanced, as if each effort had been made to maintain my eyes directed away from the precise dwelling the place Balzac had lived. A half-kempt backyard occupies many of the grounds, whereas the house itself is tucked away in a nook. Checked out immediately, the home is strikingly modest—a low, nearly defensive-looking construction, huddled on the hillside like a barnacle. I went in.
Inside guests are confronted, not with the constructing blocks of a house—trinkets, chairs, rugs—however with depictions of the person himself: twenty or so visions of Balzac, the majority of them markedly ugly. Right here, for example, is a caricature by the lithographer Benjamin Roubaud, wherein Balzac appears like a swollen, by some means conceited thumb. In case your style veers extra fashionable, admire Balzac, Monumental Head by Auguste Rodin, a slabby, gleaming bust that appears to be actively melting earlier than your eyes and that totally delivers on the promise of its title: it’s a head, and it’s monumental. And for a really explicit viewers, right here’s a sculpture of Balzac as a surprisingly svelte seal, leaning again coquettishly as if simply surfaced from the seas of some sexually complicated fever dream. (Apparently the statuette was made by Hanz Lerche to capitalize on the adverse response to Rodin’s Monument to Balzac, whose harshest critics famous the work’s Pinnipedian affinities.)
Seven aggressively productive years of Balzac’s life had been spent right here. In 1840, harried by collectors in Paris and trying to disappear, he fled to the western suburb of Passy, going as far as to hire the property below the identify of his housekeeper, Louise Breugniot. Naturally, a way of guardedness animates the house. In his biography of Balzac, Graham Robb describes it as “a crafty little home,” partly hidden between an higher street and a decrease street, whereas the author Gérard de Nerval, Balzac’s shut pal, referred to it as “an upside-down home.” It was right here that Balzac went about his customary routines, composing his novels within the early morning hours and taking breaks to jot down passionate, prolonged letters to his mistress Eveline Hańska, the Polish noblewoman he later married, or gorge on stone fruits and pomes. Balzac was, by all accounts, extraordinarily keen on pears, and their delicate, rounded scent pervaded the house in Passy.
These and different traces of life had all however disappeared. The one room maintained within the fashion of the time is Balzac’s writing room, a kind of humble dice containing a small private library, a portray, and the writing desk on which he composed nearly all of The Human Comedy, cranking out as much as twenty pages a day—this earlier than the arrival of prescription amphetamines. The wall textual content describes the room as a “modest examine” and, in what looks as if an unnecessarily merciless appositive phrase, “a small room in a banal condominium in a village on the outskirts of Paris.” The flooring had been creaky, the well-known crimson writing chair blanched by the solar, however there was one thing within the air—perhaps it was simply mud. Then once more, perhaps it was the poignant truth {that a} man who insisted on richly imagining the areas his characters inhabited, typically to a plot-slackening fault, had executed all of it from an area that was, comparatively talking, barren.
Scattered concerning the floor ground of the home are just a few different curios, together with a bronze solid of Balzac’s pen hand, wanting by some means pudgier in isolation; the porcelain cafetière that provided his reputed fifty every day cups of espresso (Balzac drank his espresso black and unfiltered and described its impact in combustive phrases, even going as far as to check, in a brief tract he wrote on fashionable stimulants, the black grains of floor espresso to gunpowder); and his cane, its deal with wrapped in gold and studded with turquoise florets. The cane, which you nearly definitely didn’t learn about, made such a splash on the Parisian scene that it impressed Delphine de Girardin to jot down a novella, Balzac’s Cane (La Canne de M. de Balzac), wherein Balzac lends his magical, invisibility-granting aide à la marche to a younger man in hassle. (I’ve not learn this e book.)
I did one other walk-through of the home, not desirous to miss something, although it appeared I hadn’t. Outdoors, the solar was nonetheless out. I sat down on a bench exterior of the Rose Bakery in entrance of a protracted picket desk and took out my Balzac—an previous mass-market paperback version of Outdated Goriot with one calamitous crack within the backbone, which I’d been cautious to are likely to all through the journey. I learn half a web page and didn’t really feel something specifically, which appeared like a disgrace. (Later, once I completed the e book, I’d assume to attach Rastignac’s last place, perched on the highest level of Père Lachaise and gazing down on the “buzzing hive” of Paris, with the Maison de Balzac’s personal lofty station, overlooking numerous buildings, together with the Turkish embassy.) To my proper, an older lady with frosty blond hair and a black fur stole sat down with a paper thimble of espresso and started to smoke a cigarette so skinny it appeared like a scratch on the air. Which not less than was very French of her.
Along with its backyard, the Maison de Balzac boasts a big garden of pure grass, erratically tufted. Nobody gave the impression to be benefiting from it, and ultimately I seen a collection of pale inexperienced indicators posted right here and there at foot stage, on every of which was written, in a looping white script, “Pelouse au repos.” I googled it, and realized that the garden was resting. There was a pigeon, unaware of this beneficiant Gallic coverage, exercising the garden. It moved about and settled by an indication. It’d make a great image, I assumed, although by the point I’d gotten my telephone out, he’d flown away.
Bailey Trela is a contributing author for the Cleveland Evaluate of Books. His criticism has appeared in Commonweal, The Baffler, Frieze, and elsewhere.
