Balzac's house in autumn

The blue outside the window was as blue as a wash, and the clouds that passed by from time to time increased the brightness of the sky, and the peaks of Issi and Meudon in the distance were immersed in light. I'm writing to you again, and I'm looking at them. If God really promises happiness on earth, that happiness is no more than that. In a letter to Madame Hanska, Balzac described his new home. In order to avoid the creditors, the writer moved into the five-room apartment with the garden in October 1840. Under the guise of Monsieur Tobler, he rented it from a butcher and lived here for seven years. It was in this room that Balzac revised his entire collection of novels, The Comedy of Man, and such works as The Woman Who Stirred the Water, The Rise and Fall of The Social Flowers, Aunt Becky, and Uncle Bunce were also directly created here.

At that time, Passy was just a small village on a hill, like a peach blossom garden, far from the city, overlooking Paris, until it was incorporated into the city in 1860. Balzac writes, "Here we can live as peacefully as we are in the countryside, and much cheaper than in Paris." "But today, it's hard to imagine the countryside, which has become a parisian community of the wealthy, crisscrossed by tall and elaborate Buildings in the Ottoman style on the edge of the Boulogne Forest. Only Balzac's former home, hidden on the edge of a hillside, in a sunken garden, is low and rustic, still vaguely maintaining its original appearance. The garden originally belonged to the Duke and Couple of Limour, who donated the garden to the municipality as part of their former residence. Because of Balzac, this house and garden that were slightly obtrusive in the surrounding environment have been preserved to this day.

In the autumn afternoon, the leaves of the horse chestnut trees begin to fall one after another, and the sky is as bright as it was a hundred years ago, and it is easy to find the former residence along rue Raynouard. From outside the fence, in the garden on the hill, the gray-roofed white-walled houses, with pale green doors and windows, are surrounded by dark greenery, and the Eiffel Tower is clearly visible in the distance behind the house, as if reminding us that we are not far from Paris. Enter the gate, descend the stone steps, and enter the garden. The garden is not large, and at the end there is a bust of the writer, his eyebrows are deeply locked, his lips are tight, silently watching the tourists resting in pairs around him. In the corner deep in the garden is a dappled and withered Sphinx, which seems to announce in this way that it is an old object in the garden. Like Oedipus, perhaps Balzac looked at it and guessed the riddle about man.

Only one study room in the living room remains in its original state, and the rest, plus the adjacent rooms bought by the municipal government more than a decade ago, have been set aside as exhibition halls. The study was so secluded and unpretentious that Balzac himself called it a "cell" and a "rat hole." A bookcase, a book box, a desk, and a marble bust of the writer given by the sculptor Dang Gehr by the window. Yet it was in this small space that Balzac constructed a vast and complex world. As Zola put it, "The Comedy of Man is like a Tower of Babel... This plaster and marble tower celebrates man's attempt to reach heaven... This craftsman erected it with his great and eternal instincts..."

Sometimes, we can't help but ask why Balzac had so much energy to write? In the display case next to the manuscript, a coffee pot used by the literary magnate is displayed, which Balzac regarded as "some kind of special paper and a special form of pen", because coffee pushed him to write continuously like an engine. The stimulation of high doses of caffeine can keep his brain excited for fifteen hours. To this end, he cooked his own "strong black and powerful" coffee every day, and he even predicted that he would die of "thirty thousand cups of coffee", in fact he drank far more than this amount.

In addition to the coffee pot, a "literary relic", there is also a more magical exhibit here, a cane that Balzac cane cane that keeps him out of the house, and a huge gold handle embedded with emerald turquoise. At the time, turquoise was a decoration used only by young girls, which made the cane very distracting. People can't help but speculate, what secrets are hidden in this handle? The female writer De Girardin even wrote a novel about it, called Balzac's Cane. In the book, she says that the cane has the magic of invisibility, "and Mr. Balzac observes accordingly, and watches the people who come and go, and they never think of anyone penetrating their minds; he observes the geniuses who jump from between the beds, the emotions wrapped in the nightgown, the delusions in the slippers, the anger hidden under the hat, the despair in the vests, and he writes them all into the book." ”

When visiting the former residence, there is always a magical power that allows us to connect with its former owner, enter the space where the writer once lived and created, and always seem to feel the resonance of the writer's endless thoughts in our bodies.