I suppose this is a somewhat voyeuristic, information-saturated age that assumes that one must share one's intimate thoughts without the guarantee of anyone reading them and even if they did, caring.
In spite of this web of assumptions, I profess my unconditional love for Honoré de Balzac, whose biography by Stefan Zweig, another departed soul I am shamelessly smitten with, I am currently reading.
Yesterday, I was speaking to a filmmaker who lives in my street--which is odd in itself, mind you, this is not the 6th, the 9th or the 17th, where most film-y people live; it's simply not cool enough. (Major Tangent: the street Le Sueur has been inhabited by a psychopathic murderer Dr. Petiot, the Gestapo and Wallis and Edward in their orgiastic days. In terms of feng shui, the place is the pits, but the limestone HPs would never tell you that.)
Point being that whilst being chat up by filmmaker and my friend Françoise, who (another Major Tangent) runs the dry cleaners "Le Sueur Pressing" and who I completely adore and literally eat her every word because she is like a character from a Woody Allen film, but she is real and in my life and she is French, and because she does her dry-cleaning with love, gives me a really good deal and gets thank you letters from the Elysée for properly cleaning a silk tie, something beyond me.
Right. So before that tangent we were standing in front of the Auberge St. Jean de Luz, where Françoise is half-in, half-out and smoking and I said to the bedraggled filmmaker,
"You know, you should read about him," reverentially pointing to the volume of Balzac by Zweig, "He had such heavy debts that chased him all his life... that it's completely reassuring."
Which is not quite what I meant to say. So then I said,
"Not because he had debts, but because he kept going no matter what."
And that is not even the half of it. Not only did he have the most beautiful sense of humor, loved the ladies for who they were and what they gave not what they appeared to be, put the most poignant and captive eye on the entire social cross-section of his century, but he did all this tirelessly with an absolutely horrific bourgeoise mother, who was obviously never loved enough (and she never stopped to wonder why), a father who couldn't really care less, a lifelong series of debts and the despondency of not finding true love until the year before he went tits up at 51 due to excess work and coffee.
I love this man and what is wonderful, when you see a beautiful soul that survives not only the material obstacles but the emotional ones: abandonment for years in heartless boarding schools and, the most chilling of all, that little bourgeois family tick where you are made to feel that if you are an artist you will never make it because you are wasting your time and everyone's money, is that the love he sollicites was confirmed by those who had a chance to know him. Many people stated that you could not meet him without loving him. I believe that this sparkle in the eye, that attraction, it's the soul's effort to remain in tact, to simply be, which is so totally astounding that one, who has the sensitivity to sense it, cannot help but be moved. I know Balzac had his enemies and critics (probably just jealous guys) but who had his courage?
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