Balzac

CHAPTER V.
THE THINKER

“Un écrivain doit se regarder comme un instituteur des hommes.” – Bonald.

Balzac, to borrow a Hindu expression, was “an artificer who built like a giant and finished like a jeweler.” The groundwork of the “Comédie Humaine” was grandly conceived and admirably executed; and though a few of the balconies of its superb superstructure are incomplete, yet as, happily, masterpieces are ever eternally young, it shows no signs of decay, and there is little danger of its falling in ruins.

For the decoration of this work, Balzac brought a subtle analysis of men, women, and things, and adorned it all with brilliant ideas and profound reflections, of which the saddest were dug from his own sufferings, and not, as a great writer has said, from the hearts of his mistresses.

As everything that he wrote is more or less worthy of attention, a complete collection of his theories and teachings would be as impossible, as an arrangement of Emerson’s best thoughts, and in any event would ill befit the unpretentious character of this treatise. For his elaborate monographs on religion, morality, society, politics, science, and art, the reader must turn to the complete edition of his writings; for in these pages the attempt will be made to render only a handful of unsorted aphorisms and reflections, taken at random, of which the majority will be found to touch merely upon every-day topics, and that in the lightest possible vein.

With this brief explanation, for which your indulgence is requested, the crier gives way to the thinker.

A woman is to her husband that which her husband has made her.

It is still a question, both in politics and marriage, whether empires are overthrown and happiness destroyed through over-confidence or through too great severity.

A husband risks nothing in affecting to believe his wife, and in patiently holding his tongue. Of all things, silence worries a woman most.

It is, perhaps, only those who believe in God who do good in secret.

Statesmen, thinkers, men who have commanded armies, – in a word, those who are really great, – are natural and unaffected, and their simplicity places one at once on an equality with them.

Comprehension is equality.

Discussion weakens all things.

Genius is intuition.

The most striking effects of art are but rough counterfeits of nature.

To the despair of man, he can do nothing, either for good or for evil, but that which is imperfect. His every work, be it intellectual or physical, is stamped with the mark of destruction.

Avarice begins where poverty ends.

Dignity is but the screen of pride; from behind it we rage at our ease.

There are certain rich organizations, on whom the extremes of happiness and misery produce a soporific effect.

The most natural sentiments are those which are acknowledged with the greatest repugnance.

The first requisite of revenge is dissimulation. An avowed hatred is powerless.

It is in the nature of women to prove the impossible by the possible, and to destroy facts with presentiments.

Power does not consist in striking hard and often, but in striking with justice.

To stroll about the streets is in itself a science; it is the gastronomy of the eye.

Nowadays, to be hopelessly in love, or to be wearied of life, constitutes social position.

Love is immense, but it is not infinite, while science has limitless depths.

Prosperity brings with it an intoxication, which inferior natures never resist.

It is but the heart that does not age.

The graces of manner and conversation are gifts of nature, or the fruit of an education begun at the cradle.

As soon as a misfortune occurs, some friend or other is always ready to tell us, and to run a dagger into our hearts, while expecting us to admire the handle.

It is frequently at the very moment when men most despair of their future that their fortune begins.

To talk of love is to make love.

A married woman is a slave who needs a throne.

The grandeur of desires is in proportion to the breadth of the imagination.

A husband who leaves nothing to be desired is lost.

There is no greater incentive to life than the conviction that our death would bring happiness to others.

Where there is no self-respect solitude is hateful.

A lover has all the virtues and all the defects that a husband has not.

The more one judges the less one loves.

Chance is the great romancer; to be prolific one has but to study it.

Grief as well as pleasure has its initiation.

Apart from the comedian, the prince, and the cardinal, there is a man at once prince and comedian, – a man robed in magnificent vestments. I speak of the poet, who appears to do nothing, yet who reigns above humanity when he has known how to depict it.

Woman’s virtue is perhaps a question of temperament.

To live by the pen is a labor which galley-slaves would refuse; they would prefer death. To live by the pen consists in creating, – creating to-day, to-morrow, forever, … or to appear to, and the appearance costs as much as the reality.

I have never seen a badly dressed woman who was agreeable and good-humored.

A woman’s instinct is equivalent to the perspicacity of the wise.

In France, a witticism is to be heard on the scaffold as well as at the barricades, and some Frenchman or other will, I am sure, joke at the general sessions of the last judgment.

All soldiers look alike.

In love, chance is the providence of women.

Literature and politics are to women to-day that which religion was to them formerly, – the last asylum of their pretensions.

True sentiments are magnetic.

Misfortune creates in certain natures a vast desert, which reëchoes with the voice of God.

It is from the shock of characters, and not from conflict of ideas, that antipathies are born.

When intelligent men begin to explain their dispositions or give the key to their hearts they are most assuredly drunk.

There are but few moral wounds which solitude cannot cure.

When a woman is no longer jealous of her husband the end is come; she no longer loves him. Conjugal affection expires in her last quarrel.

A woman who is guided by her head, and not by her heart, is a terrible companion: she has all the defects of a passionate woman, with none of her good qualities; she is without mercy, without love, without virtue, without sex.

The revelation of chastity in man is inexpressibly radiant.

Misery is a tonic to some; to others it is a dissolvent.

A woman who has a lover becomes very indulgent.

Power is clement, it is open to conviction, it is just and undisturbed; but the anger engendered by weakness is pitiless.

Monomanias are not contagious; but where the insanity lurks in constant discussions and in the manner in which things in general are regarded, then it may become so.

One of the misfortunes to which great minds are subjected is that they are forced to understand all things, – vices as well as virtues.

Beauty is like nobility: it cannot be acquired.

Nothing good is to be expected of those who acknowledge their faults, repent, and then sin again. The truly great acknowledge their faults to no one, but they punish themselves accordingly.

Do not fear to make enemies, – unfortunate is he who has none; but try to give no cause for ridicule, and avoid the appearance of evil.

There is as much mud in the upper ranks of society as in the lower, but in the former it is gilded.

The most superb vengeance is the disdain of one at hand.

Laws are not always so cruel as are the usages of the world.

Historians are privileged liars, who lend their pen to popular beliefs in the same manner that our newspapers express but the sentiments of their readers.

A lover is a herald who proclaims a woman’s merit, beauty, or wit. What does a husband proclaim?

A woman’s real physiognomy does not begin until she is thirty. Up to that age, the painter finds in her face but pink and white, and a repetition of the uniform and depthless smiles of love and youth.

Science consists in imitating nature.

Through a peculiar mental contraction, women see only the defects in a man of talent, and in a fool but his good qualities.

Love may be heard in the voice before it is seen in the eyes.

The heart of a woman of twenty-five is as little like that of a girl of eighteen as the heart of a woman of forty is like that of a woman of thirty: each age creates a new woman.

Love has its escutcheon.

Man clings to life in proportion to its infamy: it is then a protestation, a vengeance of every moment.

Glory is the deification of egotism.

He who foresees a bright future marches through the miseries of existence like an innocent man led to the scaffold. He knows not shame.

The slow execution of works of genius demands either a ready fortune or a cynical indifference to poverty.

No man can flatter himself that he knows a woman and makes her happy until he sees her continually at his feet.

The Orientals sequestrate their women. A woman who loves should sequestrate herself.

A cornice is the sweetest, the most submissive, the most indulgent confidant that a woman can find when she does not dare to look her interlocutor in the face. The cornice of a boudoir is an institution. It is a confessional minus the priest.

True love appears in but one of two ways: either at first sight, which is doubtless an effect of second sight; or else in the gradual fusion of two natures, which is the realization of Plato’s androgyne.

A mother’s heart is an abyss in whose depths forgiveness is always to be found.

The practice of religion sometimes causes a mental ophthalmia.

Life is made up of varied accidents, of alternating griefs and joys. Dante’s Paradise, that changeless blue and sublime expression of the ideal, is to be found but in the soul; and to demand it from the actualities of existence is a luxury against which nature hourly protests.

It is despair, not hope, which gives the real measure of our ambitions. We give ourselves up in secret to the beautiful poems of hope, but grief stands before us, unveiled.

The most ordinary and respectable of men will, when with others, try to appear the rake.

Human justice is, I think, the development of the thought which floats through space.

Through an inexplicable phenomenon, there are many who have hope, but are lacking in faith. Hope is the flower of desire; faith is the fruit of certainty.

A petty work engenders pride, while modesty is born of great achievements.

The problem of eternal beatitude is one whose solution is known but to God. Here below, poets bore their readers to death with their pictures of Paradise.

It costs more to satisfy a vice than to feed a family.

A husband should never permit himself to say anything against his wife in the presence of a third person.

Love prefers contrasts to similitudes.

The sentiment of wrong doing is in proportion to the purity of the conscience, and an act which to one is barely a fault will assume to another the dimensions of a crime.

Woman lives by sentiment, where man lives by action.

Probity, like virtue, should be divided into two classes: to wit, negative and positive. The former would refer to those who are honest so long as no occasion to enrich themselves is offered; while the latter would refer to those who face temptation and resist it.

Woman, as a rule, feels, enjoys, and judges successively; hence, three distinct periods, of which the last coincides with the melancholy approach of old age.

A lover is never in the wrong.

Distrust a woman who speaks of her virtue.

In love, there is nothing so persuasive as courageous stupidity.

Weak natures are reassured as easily as they are alarmed.

The most incurable wounds are those which are made by the tongue or the eye, by mockery or by disdain.

To two lovers the rest of the world is but landscape.

Expiation is not obliteration.

A virtuous woman has a fibre more or a fibre less than other women. She is stupid or sublime.

Language in the magnificence of its phases has nothing as varied and as eloquent as the correspondence of the eyes and the harmony of smiles.

The slave has his vanities; he would prefer to obey only the greatest of despots.

Customs are the hypocrisies of nations.

It is not enough for a man to be honest; he must appear so.

If a man is superstitious he is never thoroughly miserable. A superstition is a hope.

Expressionless beauty is an imposture.

A lack of taste in dress is a defect inseparable from a false conception of religion.

It is more difficult to explain the difference which exists between those who are swell and those who are not than it is for those who are not to efface the difference.

If a man is clever he will appear at once to yield to a woman’s whim, and then, while suggesting a reason or two for its non-execution, he will leave to her the right of changing her mind as often as she chooses.

A woman who is happy does not go into society.

Love is not simply a sentiment; it is an art.

Doubt has two faces, of which one turns to the light, and the other to darkness.

A husband should never fall asleep first nor wake up last.

That expression of peace and serenity, which sculptors give to the faces which are intended to represent Justice and Innocence is a young girl’s greatest charm; if it is assumed, girlhood is dead within her.

In the lower classes women are not only superior to men, but, as a rule, govern them completely.

To forestall the desires of a lover is a fault in women which few men forgive. The majority of them see but degradation in this celestial flattery.

When a love-letter is so well written that it would afford pleasure to any third person who might read it, it emanates most assuredly from the brain, and not from the heart.

It takes an old woman to read an old woman’s face.

It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than now and then.

The woman who has laughed at her husband can love him no longer. A man should be to the woman who loves him a being full of force and greatness, and continually imposing. Households cannot last without despotism. Nations, reflect upon it!

A man seldom passes without remorse from the position of confidant to that of rival.

When two women could kill each other, and each sees a poisoned dagger in the other’s hand, they present a picture of harmony which is touching and untroubled until one of them accidentally drops her weapon.

Study is so motherly and good that it is almost a sin to ask of it other rewards than the pure and sweet delights with which it nourishes its children.

We must handle many lamps of Aladdin before we find that the real one is chance, or labor, or genius.

In the life of every woman there is a moment when she understands her destiny, and in which her organization, hitherto dumb, speaks authoritatively. It is not always a man who wakes this sixth and sleeping sense; it may be an unexpected spectacle, a landscape, something she has just read, a religious ceremony, a concert of natural flowers, the caressing notes of a strain of music; in a word, some unexpected movement of the soul or body.

However malicious a man may be, he can never say anything worse of women than they think of themselves.

One may be both a great man and a wicked one, as one may be a fool and a perfect lover.

The ancients were right in their worship of beauty. Has not some traveler or other told us that wild horses choose the most beautiful among them for leader? Beauty is the spirit of all things. It is the seal which Nature has placed on her most perfect creations. It is the truest of symbols, and the one the most rarely encountered. Who has ever thought of a deformed angel?

We allow others to elevate themselves above us, but we never forgive those who refuse to descend to our level.

The customs of every class of society are more or less alike, and differ only in degrees. High life has a slang of its own, but its slang is termed “style.”

A fact worthy of notice is the extent to which we make engagements with ourselves, and the manner in which we create our own lot in life. Chance has assuredly not so much to do with it as we think.

The weakest of thinking creatures is wounded in that which is most dear when performing, at the command of another, that which would have been done unordered; and the most odious of all tyrannies is that which continually divests of intention the merit of its actions and thoughts. The word which is the easiest to pronounce and the sentiment which is the sweetest to express dies within us when we feel that it is commanded. We abdicate without having reigned.

The art of marriage, as of literature, consists solely in graceful transitions.

Events are never absolute. Their results depend entirely on the individual. Misfortune is a stepping-stone to genius, a treasure to the adroit, but to the weak an abyss.

To forget is the great secret of strong and creative lives, – to forget utterly, after the manner of Nature, who knows no past, and who each hour recommences the mysteries of her indefatigable parturitions. It is the weak who live with grief, and who, instead of changing it into apothegms of existence, toy and saturate themselves therewith, and retrograde each day to consummated misfortunes.

There are incommensurable differences between the man who mingles with others and him who dwells with nature. Once captured, Toussaint Louverture died without uttering a word, while Napoleon, on his rock, chattered like a magpie; he wished to explain himself.

Man has a horror of solitude, and of all solitudes the purely moral is the most terrible. The early anchorites lived with God. They dwelt in the spiritual world, which is the most populous of all. Misers inhabit a world of fantasy and delight; for the miser has everything, even to his sex, in his brain. Man’s first thought, then, be he leper or galley-slave, is to find an accomplice to his destiny. To the satisfaction of this aim, which is life itself, he employs all his strength and all his power. Without this sovereign desire, could Satan have found companions?

Solitude is inhabitable only by the man of genius, who peoples it with ideas, or by the contemplator of the universe, who sees it illuminated by the light of heaven and animated by the voice of God. To others solitude is to torture as the mind is to the body. It is suffering multiplied by the infinite.

The moral of all things has puddles, from which the world’s dishonored, as they drown, throw mud on others.

The study of the mysteries of thought, the discovery of the organs of the soul, the geometry of the forces, the phenomena of its power, the appreciation of the faculty which we seem to possess of moving independently of the body, – in a word, the laws of its dynamics, and those of its physical influence will constitute the coming centuries’ glorious share in science.

We are obliged to accept the ideas of the poet, the picture of the painter, the statue of the sculptor; but we all of us interpret music according to our grief or our happiness, our hopes or our despair. Where other arts circle our thoughts, and fix them on a determined object, music sends them flitting over the expanses of nature which it has the power to depict.

Thought is the key to every treasure. It brings to us a miser’s joy without his cares.

There is not a forest without its significance, not a high-way nor a by-way which does not present analogies with the labyrinth of human thought. What man, whose mind is cultivated or whose heart has suffered, ever walked in a forest that the forest did not speak to him? Insensibly there arises a voice, either consoling or terrible, and often consoling and terrible. If the cause of the grave and mysterious sensation which then seizes him be sought, it will be found, I think, in the sublime spectacle of creatures obeying the destinies to which they are immutably subjected. Sooner or later an overwhelming sentiment of the permanence of nature fills the heart, and the thought turns irresistibly to God.

The more illegal the gain, the greater its attraction. Such is the heart of man.

An out-and-out criminal rarely exists, for there are few among us who do not permit themselves one or two good actions, at least. Be it from curiosity, from pride, for the sake of contrast, or by accident, every man has had his moment of kindliness and benevolence.

When we condemn a fellow creature in refusing to him forever our esteem, we have but ourselves to rely on; and even so, have we the right to make our hearts a tribunal, and summon our neighbor there? Where would the law be, in what would the measure of judgment consist? That which is our weakness is perhaps his strength. To so many different beings so many different circumstances for each act, for no two occurrences are ever the same. Society alone has the right to repress its members. As to punishment, I contest it; the curb is sufficient, and cruel enough at that.

The genius is he who perpetually impresses his deeds with his thought.

When a man feels that he is destined to great things, it is difficult for him to conceal it. The bushel has always crevices through which the light must pass.

Women of the world have a marvelous talent for diminishing their faults. They can efface anything with a smile, a question, or a feigned surprise. They remember nothing, and explain everything; they become astonished, ask questions, criticise, amplify, quarrel, and wind up by chasing their faults away, as easily as they would a spot with a bit of soap. You know them to be black, and in a moment they have become white and innocent. As for you, consider yourself lucky if, in the mean time, they have not found you guilty of some unpardonable sin.

The fortune of a new word is made when it answers to a class of men or things which otherwise could not be described without periphrasis.

One of the most important rules in the science of manners is that you preserve an almost absolute silence concerning yourself. Play the comedy, some day, of speaking of your own interests to ordinary acquaintances, and you will see feigned attention swiftly followed by indifference, and then by weariness, until every one has found a pretext for leaving you. But if you wish to group about you the sympathies of all, and to be considered a charming and agreeable fellow, talk to them of themselves, seek some way of bringing each into action in turn; then they will smile at you, think well of you, and praise you when you are gone.

There is no ease in the gestures of a soulless woman.

Instincts are implacable. If we disobey them we are punished. There is one in particular which the animal obeys unhesitatingly: it is the one which commands us to avoid the person who has once injured us, whether the injury was intentional or accidental. The creature that has harmed us once will be always harmful: whatever his rank may be, however nearly he may be related to us, break with him at once; he is an envoy of our evil genius.

Prudence consists in never threatening; in facilitating an enemy’s retreat; in not treading, as the proverb has it, on the serpent’s tail; and in avoiding, as one would a murder, an injury to the self-esteem of an inferior. However damaging to one’s interest an act may be, in the long run it is overlooked and explained in a thousand different ways; but wounded pride bleeds always, and never forgives.

When two people are constantly together, hatred and love grow apace; every moment brings a new reason for stronger affection or increased detestation.

Love and hate are sentiments which feed on themselves, but of the two hate is the stronger. Love is limited; its strength comes of life and prodigality. But hate is like death; it is in one sense an active abstraction; it subsists above men and things.

To invent is lingering death; to copy is to live.

If men were frank, they would acknowledge that misfortune has never taken them entirely unawares, nor without first sending to them some visible or occult warning. Many have not understood the meaning of these mysterious monitions until after the shipwreck.

A singular fascination attaches to celebrity, however acquired, and it would seem that with women, as formerly with families, the glory of a crime effaced the shame. As certain families boast of decapitated ancestors, so does a pretty woman become more attractive through the renown of a terrible betrayal. We are pitiless only to vulgar sentiments and commonplace adventures.

No moralist will deny that the well-bred, yet corrupt, are much more agreeable than the strictly exemplary; for, having sins to ransom, they are very indulgent to the defects of others. Virtue, on the contrary, considers herself sufficiently beautiful to dispense with any effort at being agreeable; and besides, those who are really virtuous have all a few slight suspicions about their position, and, feeling that they have been duped at the great bazaar of life, their speech has that bitter savor which is peculiar to those who affect to be misunderstood.

The woman who is deformed, yet whose husband considers her figure shapely; the woman who limps, yet whose husband would not have her otherwise; the woman who is old, and yet seems young, are the happiest creatures in the feminine world. The glory of a woman is in making her defects beloved. To forget that a woman who limps does not walk as she should is the effect of momentary fascination, but to love her because she does so is the deification of her infirmity. In the gospel of women, this sentence, I think, should be written: Blessed are the imperfect, for theirs is the kingdom of love. Beauty certainly must be a misfortune to a woman, for its transient charm is the mainspring of the sentiment which it inspires, and the beautiful woman is loved on the same principle that leads a man to marry an heiress. But the woman who is not dowered with the fragile advantages which the children of Adam seek is alone capable of inspiring that mysterious passion which never wanes; to her true love is given, and with it the deathless embrace of the soul. The most celebrated attachments in history were almost all inspired by women in whom the vulgar would have found defects, – Cleopatra, Jeanne de Naples, Diane de Poitiers, Mademoiselle de la Vallière, Madame de Pompadour; in a word, the women whom love has rendered most celebrated were wanting neither in imperfections nor in infirmities, while the majority of women whose beauty has been cited as perfect witnessed an unfortunate termination to their love affairs. The cause of this apparent contradiction is to be found in the fact that the charm of physical beauty is limited, while psychological attractions possess an infinite power; and this, it may be noted, is undoubtedly the moral of the fabulization of the “Thousand and One Nights.”

Suicide appears to me to be the climax of a moral disorder, as natural death is the climax of a physical one. Inasmuch, however, as the moral faculties are subjected to the laws of volition, should not their cessation coincide with the manifestations of the intelligence? It is the thought, therefore, and not the pistol, that kills. Besides, the fact that an accident may destroy us at the moment when life is most enjoyable should absolve the voluntary termination of an unhappy existence… Suicide is the effect of a sentiment which may be termed self-esteem, in contradistinction to that of honor. When a man no longer respects himself and finds himself no longer respected, when the actuality of existence is at variance with his hopes, he kills himself, and thereby offers homage to the world in refusing to remain before it divested of his virtues or of his splendors… Suicide is of three distinct classes: first, there is the suicide which is but the crisis of a long illness, and undoubtedly belongs to pathology; then, there is the suicide which is caused by despair; and lastly, the suicide from ratiocination. Of these three, the first alone is irrevocable. Sometimes the three classes unite, as in the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau… Suicide was permitted by Epicurus. It was the finishing touch to his philosophy. Where there was no enjoyment to the senses it was right and proper for the animated being to seek repose in inanimate nature. Man’s only aim consisting in happiness, or in the hope of happiness, death became a benefit to him who suffered, and who suffered hopelessly. He did not recommend suicide, nor did he blame it; he was content to say, “Death is not a subject for laughter, nor is it a subject for tears.” More moral and more imbued with the sentiment of duty, Zeno in certain cases forbade suicide to the stoic. Man, he taught, differs from the brute in that he disposes sovereignly of his person; divested of the right of life and death over himself, he becomes the slave of men and events. To man, therefore, freedom in all things should belong: freedom from passions, which should be sacrificed to duties; freedom from fellow creatures in exhibiting the steel or the poison which disarms attack; freedom from destiny in setting a limit beyond which it can have no effect… Among the atheists of to-day, the coward alone accepts a dishonored life.