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Honoré de BALZAC

Lettre autographe signée à Sophie Kozlowska : "je suis sur les dents ! [...] Je suis ivre de ma pièce"

[Paris] 12 mars 1842, 13,5x26cm, 4 pages sur un feuillet.

Autograph letter signed by Honoré de Balzac to Sophie Koslowska. 4 pages in black ink on a bifolium.
Usual folds. Very small lacks of paper along the horizontal fold of the first leaf. Published in his Correspondance 1819-1850, II. Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1875, pp. 31-33.
A long, feverish letter by Balzac, a few days before the premiere of Les Ressources de Quinola at the Odéon theater. The writer writes to his close friend Sophie Kozlowska, daughter of Prince Kozlowski about the chaotic final preparations, and urges her to fill the theater with all of Paris's Russian high society.
Balzac wrote this important letter just as he was about to take one of the biggest gambles of his career. The writer wanted to convene a real audience For the premiere of Les Ressources de Quinola, and have the play performed in front of a full house of paying spectators - instead of using the famous claqueurs (clappers) traditionally seated in the parterre to encourage audience reactions. His failed attempt was so publicized by all the newspapers, that this performance proved the very necessity of claqueurs: “The author preferred peril. Such is the reason for this first performance, in which so many people were displeased to have been elevated to the dignity of independent judges” (Editor's notes in Balzac's Oeuvres complètes, A. Houssiaux, 1855).
Disregarding Kozlowska's fragile health (“La Mina wrote me that you were ill, and it struck me as a blow as if someone had told Napoleon that his aide-de-camp had died”), Balzac set about filling the twelve hundred seats of the Théâtre-Français with all the high-ranking and wealthy spectators Paris had to offer. He relied on the relations of his “carrissima Sofia” to pay for the priciest seats – an inclination that earned him accusations of speculation. He indeed takes particular care going over prices in the letter:

“We'll play next Wednesday, barring any misfortune. The first seatings with four places are one hundred francs a box, and everyone wants to be there. But the fashionable place, where the Aguados, the Rothschilds, the Doudeauvilles, the Castries, etc., are, is the loge des premières fermées, because one feels at home. [...] - Lamartine has asked me for a box: I'll put him between the Russians. Princess Troubetskoï is not the same one whose husband I know. See to it that you write to the prince, - And don't forget your Makanof [...] So: balconies, twenty-five francs; stalls, twenty francs; premières découvertes, twenty-five francs a seat; secondes découvertes, twenty francs; secondes fermées, twenty-five francs; baignoires, twenty francs a seat. [...] Ah! if you only knew what wealth of beautiful women! There will be no clappers in the parterre, which is priced at five francs [...] Write a note to Princess Constantine Razumovska. I don't dare do it myself. For you and for your mother, you will go to the premières découvertes; I will place you well.”

These hurried lines reveal Balzac's great expectations. He deeply believed in the merits of his comedy play about a man of industrial genius in 16th-century Spain – although the play's reception certainly suffered from Balzac's poor choices during its premiere. The writer expected to solve his financial difficulties and travel with his beloved Madame Hanska following the play's sucess. Having finished writing the final acts in a hurry, he describes the terrible days leading up to the premiere:

“I'm overwhelmed, on edge! I have the actors rehearse in the morning, the entire cast during the day, and the actresses in the evening. There are twenty thousand francs worth of costumes in the play. The sets are brand new. I'm told that the work is a masterpiece, and that makes me shudder! It will always be frighteningly solemn”.

Some lines even border on the paranoid, abundantly underlined with raging lines:

“Tell all your Russians that I need the names and addresses, with their written and personal recommendation, for those of their friends (men) who will want stalls. I get fifty a day, under false names, who refuse to give their addresses; enemies who want to bring down the play [crossed out multiple times]. We are obliged to take the strictest precautions.
In five days, I won't know what I'm doing. I'm drunk on my play.
There's a sick actor. [...] ”

A wonderful manuscript showing Balzac struggling to overturn the traditions of French theater – much like his character Fontanarès in the play: “a man of progress, rational, up against the hassles of a mass of imbeciles, useless or backward people, who above all do not want to undergo change” (Laélia Véron).

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