Literary Rogues (9 page)

Balzac eventually moved out of his parents' house and into an apartment of his own in Paris. “
The streets of Paris possess human qualities
and we cannot shake off the impressions they make upon our minds,” he said. While Balzac's characters frequented Parisian salons and clubs, the author himself did not participate in nightlife. Evenings were reserved for writing: he usually ate a light supper at five or six in the evening, lay down to sleep until midnight, and then began his writing, often in stretches of up to fifteen hours without a break. (He once claimed to have worked forty-eight hours in a row with only a three-hour nap.) He simply didn't have the time to go out. It's amazing he had time to do
anything
, really: between 1830 and 1842, he churned out seventy-nine novels.

Despite his striking resemblance to adult video star Ron Jeremy, Balzac received more than ten thousand perfumed letters from female admirers. His readers were taken with his humor, especially when he focused his wit on their spouses. “
The majority of husbands
remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin,” Balzac wrote.

“M. de Balzac is
not precisely beautiful
,” a newspaper reporter wrote at the height of Balzac's literary fame. “His features are irregular; he is fat and short.” While the sedentary profession of writing lends itself quite well to gluttony, Balzac indulged in food as if it were his only vice. He ate off his knife like a peasant and had to unbutton his shirt to avoid dripping food onto his clothing as he dove into his meal. Balzac was known to excuse his uncouth manners by quipping, “
All great men are monsters
.”

None of this dissuaded “
beautiful unknown women
” from showing up on his doorstep, looking for love. He turned down their advances, calling their attention “
rather tiresome
.” He rarely if ever availed himself of the bounty of womanly delights thrown at him—he was simply too busy writing to stop and smell their roses, so to speak.

Still, when the French literati's most eligible bachelor showed up for dinner, men feared for their wives. When Balzac visited the countess Clara Maffei in Milan, her husband urged her to stay alert. “
Since you have read his novels
, you can judge for yourself how familiar he is with women and with that subtle art of seduction,” Count Maffei wrote in a letter to his wife. “Do not suppose that the ugliness of his face will protect you from his irresistible power.”

A Polish woman, Ewelina Ha
ska, contacted him via a series of anonymous letters in 1832. This mysterious move intrigued him greatly and was in stark contrast to the fawning women who threw themselves at his feet. When they finally met in person, Ha
ska reportedly fainted at first sight: he was everything that she had dreamed of and more. Balzac was equally smitten. They shared a kiss under an oak tree, but things were not meant to be. Ha
ska was married. She promised her heart was Balzac's should she ever become a widow.

After her husband died in 1842, Ha
ska stalled and refused to remarry immediately. Was she having second thoughts? Balzac wondered. During this time, he was struggling with numerous health problems (nerve pain, heart disease, fevers) that slowed his output. “
My heart, soul, and ambition
will be satisfied with nothing but the object I have pursued for sixteen years: if this immense happiness escapes me, I shall no longer want anything, and shall refuse everything!” he wrote.

Eight years after her husband died, Ha
ska finally consented to marry Balzac. The wedding took place in 1850. “
Three days ago I married
the only woman I have ever loved,” he wrote to a friend. It was a bittersweet moment, though, as both the bride and groom likely knew that his maladies were terminal.

Balzac died just five months after his wedding, at the age of fifty-one, of pneumonia, a complication of his long-running illnesses. He never finished
La comédie humaine
.

Romanticism wasn't completely dead, but less melodramatic subject matters and plots were slowly gaining traction with the European reading public. “
There are no noble subjects
or ignoble subjects,”
Gustave Flaubert
(1821–1880) wrote. “There is no such thing as a subject. Style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.”

Like other Realists, his style was one lacking entirely in pretension. He believed that it wasn't the author's place to express his or her emotions or opinions in a novel. Of course, by taking the stance that the author is an impersonal chronicler of common people doing common things, Flaubert was making an authorial choice: his style was that he had no style. He also believed that the Realistic writer's purpose was to be the flag-bearer for “humanity” in the fight against the bourgeoisie, a political bent that made him less of an impartial observer than he would have cared to admit.

Like Balzac, Flaubert was a tireless worker. He endlessly revised his prose in an effort to find
le mot juste
—the right word. Not surprisingly, finding the right word for every sentence in a novel took quite a long time, and his creative output paled in comparison to that of Balzac and his peers. “
I pass entire weeks
without exchanging a word with a human being. My only company consists of a band of rats in the garret,” he once wrote in a letter (which, of course, is a form of communication, but we'll let that slide). Twentieth-century writer Dorothy Parker, who wrote one or two stories a year, could empathize with his struggles. She imagined “
that poor sucker Flaubert
rolling round on his floor for three days, looking for the right word.”

Flaubert's obsessive perfectionism left little time for love. Not to say that he didn't have sex: Flaubert had a healthy sexual appetite, as evidenced by the extensive collection of STDs he amassed over the years. He once lost all of his hair during treatment for a nasty syphilitic infection and constantly complained of sores on his penis—unsurprising facts, as most of his sexual encounters occurred in brothels. One of his favorite “pranks” was to pick the most repulsive girl he could find in a brothel and screw her in front of his friends, “
all without taking my cigar out of my mouth
. It was no fun for me: I just did it for the spectators.” Flaubert once stormed out of a brothel after a sixteen-year-old girl asked to check his penis for venereal diseases before engaging in intercourse. He also experimented with anal sex while on a tour of the Middle East with a friend. “We have considered it as our duty to try
this mode of ejaculation
,” he wrote.

Flaubert's first published novel,
Madame Bovary
, brought him wide acclaim. In
Madame Bovary
, Flaubert portrayed bourgeois French society with an objective tone that was quite shocking for the time. He “realistically” told the story of Emma Bovary, a bored, middle-class housewife whose extramarital affairs led to her eventual suicide. There was an undertone of distaste for the well-off, something that Flaubert didn't deny. “
Hatred of the bourgeois
is the beginning of virtue,” Flaubert once wrote in a letter.

When the novel was first serialized in
La Revue de Paris
in 1856, French prosecutors brought obscenity charges against Flaubert and the publisher who was set to release the book the following spring. The prosecutor, Ernest Pinard, believed that Emma's adulterous behavior was an offense to public morality. Flaubert's defense argued that, by shining his authorial light on vice, he was actually promoting virtue. “
Does the reading of such a book
give a love of vice, or inspire a horror of it?” his attorney said.

After a public trial that lasted exactly one day, Flaubert was acquitted on February 7, 1857. Thanks in no small part to the publicity generated by the trial,
Madame Bovary
became an instant bestseller when it was finally released.

Flaubert privately reveled in the controversy. “
You can calculate the worth of a man
by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it,” he wrote.
Madame Bovary
was later banned in Italy and the United States. Although it returned to print in both countries, the novel continues to appear on lists of “frequently challenged books” as the target of would-be book banners.

One of Flaubert's few close acquaintances was French novelist and memoirist
George Sand
(1804–1876), a free-living, free-thinking woman in the tradition of early feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft. Born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, she was fond of wearing men's clothing and smoking tobacco in public, both shocking behaviors for a woman in upper-class Parisian society. “
What a brave man she was
, and what a good woman,” her contemporary Ivan Turgenev wrote.

Sand married Baron Casimir Dudevant at the age of nineteen, and after nine years of unhappy marriage and two children, she left her husband. “She was
too imperious a machine
to make the limits of her activity coincide with those of wifely submissiveness,” American novelist Henry James wrote. Perhaps it was that she had grown tired of her husband sleeping with their maids; perhaps, as James and others have pondered, she was too intellectually curious to be content with the role that French wives were expected to play at the time.