SAINTE-BEUVE AND BALZAC
563
Flaubert himself, for he understood that the writer's life is centered
in his work, and that the remainder only exists "to provide an illu–
sion to describe." Balzac puts the achievements of life and of litera–
ture on exactly the same level.
"If
the
Comedie Humaine
does not
make a great man of me," he writes to his sister, "this achievement
wiIl" (the achievement of his marriage to Mme. Hanska).l
But if you come to think of it, the verisimilitude of some of
his
pictures may be due to that same vulgarity. Even
in
those of us
whom high-mindedness specifically impels to reject vulgar motives,
to condemn and disinfect them, those motives may exist, fundamental
though transfigured. In any case, though an ambitiously-minded man
should feel an ideal love-even though his ambitious thoughts may
not be transfigured by it-that love, alas! is not the whole of
his
life and often is no more than the few best days of his youth. It
is with that part of himself alone that a writer composes
his
book;
but there is a whole part which is left out. And so what force of
truth we acknowledge when we see Vandenesse or Rastignac im–
pulsively falling in love, knowing that Vandenesse and Rastignac are
cold-hearted climbers whose whole lives have been ambition and
scheming; and again when these youthful romances of theirs (yes, al–
most more their romances than Balzac's) are forgotten things which
they only refer to with smiles, with the smiles of those who have really
forgotten, and the love affair with Mme. de Mortsauf is discussed by
third parties, or even by the hero himself, just as if it were any other
adventure, and without even a sense of grief that its remembrance
should not have filled their whole lives. To reach such a degree of
truth to life-life as the worldly and the experienced know it, where
it is agreed that love is fleeting, a youthful vagary, that ambition
and lust have more than a hand in it, that one day all that kind
of thing won't seem very important, etc.-to show that the most ro–
mantic feelings may be no more than a play of refracted light trans–
figuringly directed on his ambitions by the ambitious man himself
and to show this, consciously or unconsciously, in the most compelling
way, that is by showing objectively as the bleakest of adventurers
1 But are we slightly surfeited with truth as conceived by Flaubert, MaHar–
me, etc., and beginning to crave the infinitesimal amount of truth that may
lie in the antithetical falsehood (like someone who will need salt after a long and
beneficial "salt-free" treatment, like those savages who feel "sick-mouthed," and,
so M. Paul Adam tells us, fall on other savages in order to consume the salt
in their skin)?
