SAINTE-BEUVE AND BALZAC
577
comes from one of those pieces of admirable wntmg which, when
all is said, Balzac has in plenty, where the style is recast and unified
by the idea, where the sentence is a whole; that about the old maids
"living scattered about the town, where they might be looked on as
so many capillary vessels of a plant, aspiring after tittle-tattle and the
secrets of every household as leaves thirst for dew, mechanically suck–
ing them up and transmitting them to the Abbe Troubert, as leaves
transmit to the stalk the moisture they have breathed in." And a
few pages later comes the sentence denounced by Sainte-Beuve:
"Such was the substance of the remarks cast forth by the capillary
tubes of the great female confabulation and obligingly repeated by
the city of Tours." He dares to account for Balzac's success by say–
ing that he flattered the failings of women, in particular those of
them who were no longer in their first youth
(La Femme de Trente
Ans):
"My stern friend said: Henri IV conquered France town by
town, M. de Balzac has conquered his sickly public by infirmities.
Today, women of thirty, tomorrow those of fifty (there have even
been those of sixty), the day after tomorrow the anaemic, in Claes
the deformed, etc." And he dares add another reason for Balzac's
rapid spread of popularity throughout France: "It is his cleverness
in choosing the series of places where he will plant his successive
novels. In a street in Saumur the traveler will be shown the house
where Eugenie Grandet lived, and at Douai, Claes' house is probably
already decided on. !he owner of La Grenadiere, easy-going man
of Touraine that he is, must swell with modest pride. The author
earns the submission of every town where he installs his characters
by the compliments he pays it." That Sainte-Beuve, writing of Mus–
set's admission that he loved both sweetmeats and roses, should add:
"When one has loved so widely . .
."6
one can accept. But that
he should try to defame Balzac for the very vastness of his design,
for the multiplicity of his portraits, that he should call this an in–
timidating jumble: "Subtract
La Femme de Trente Ans, La Femme
Abandonnee, Le Requisitionnaire, La Grenadiere, Les Celibataires,
from his stories; subtract from his novels the story of
Louis Lambert
and his masterpiece
Eugenie Grandet,
what a mob of volumes, what
a cloud of stories, novels of all kinds, drolatic, economic, philosophic,
magnetic and theosophic, still remain!" -Well, but that was the
5 One of the things he liked saying, and he said it about Chateaubriand too.
