Posts Tagged ‘Honoré de Balzac’
The secret life of objects
The past does retain a physical presence for the biographer—in landscapes, buildings, photographs, and above all the actual trace of handwriting on original letters or journals. Anything a hand has touched is for some reason peculiarly charged with personality—Thomas Hardy’s simple steel-tipped pens, each carved with a novel’s name; Shelley’s guitar, presented to Jane Williams; Balzac’s blue china coffee-pot, with its spirit-heater, used through the long nights of Le Père Goriot and Les Illusions Perdues; other writers’ signet rings, worn walking sticks, Coleridge’s annotated books, Stevenson’s flageolet and tortoise-shell “Tusilita” ring. It is as if the act of repeated touching, especially in the process of daily work or creation, imparts a personal “virtue” to an inanimate object, gives it a fetishistic power in the anthropological sense, which is peculiarly impervious to the passage of time. Gautier wrote in a story that the most powerful images of past life in the whole of Pompeii were the brown, circular prints left by drinkers’ glasses on the marble slabs of the second-century taverna.
But this physical presence is none the less extremely deceptive. The material surfaces of life are continually breaking down, sloughing off, changing almost as fast as human skin…The more closely and scrupulously you follow someone’s footsteps through the past the more conscious do you become that they never existed in any one place along the recorded path. You cannot freeze them, you cannot pinpoint them, at any particular turn in the road, bend of the river, view from the window. They are always in motion, carrying their past lives over into the future.
—Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
Balzac on the power of coffee
Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale…Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
Coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive process, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects.
Coffee…reaches the brain by barely perceptible radiations that escape complete analysis: that aside, we may surmise that our primary nervous flux conducts an electricity emitted by coffee when we drink it. Coffee’s power changes over time. “Coffee,” Rossini told me, “is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time to write an opera.”
A writer’s routine: Honoré de Balzac
All writers have heard somewhere or other that Balzac had a horrendous routine. Two weeks to two months were spent on a book. During this time he went to bed after eight after a light dinner with white wine; he awoke and was back at his desk by 2 A.M., where he then wrote until six, drinking coffee from a pot kept permanently on the stove. At six he took a bath for an hour, than drank more coffee until his publisher came with proofs and took away corrected ones from the day before and new manuscript pages. From nine until twelve he wrote again, then breakfasted on eggs and more coffee. From one until six he worked at corrections.
When a book was done he then saw friends or mistresses, or disappeared from sight.