This is how Sainte-Beuve introduces Guez de Balzac: “No one represents more ingenuously than he the man of letters seen as a type, in his primitive solemnity, in his state of pure preservation and of provincial gentlemanliness, in his absolute respect for all that is the costume and pomp of language, in his perfect ineptitude in everything else.”¹⁹⁹

“… like Guez de Balzac, who, when the Abbé de Saint-Cyran spoke to him about salvation and grace, could only say: ‘How wonderful!’ To which Saint-Cyran, in exasperation, one day replied: ‘You give me the impression, Monsieur de Balzac, of a man who, on seeing a mark on his face in the mirror, finds nothing else to say except that the mirror is good and fine.’²⁰⁰ And Balzac then, struck by the fairness of the comparison and the appropriateness of the imagery, couldn’t resist exclaiming: ‘Oh, how very finely put!’ At which point, Saint-Cyran despaired of him and of all those minds who are all for expression and imagery.”

Guez de Balzac, fancy cocotte of the written word, enjoyed admiring the austerity of Port-Royal from a distance. And Saint-Cyran, the most severe and ferocious of the pères, made him shiver with delight when he showed him contempt and scorn. It once took Balzac three months to compose and hone a letter to Saint-Cyran. From the outset he wove hyperbole and metaphor into it, but along with solid vanity he also displayed the worry of a timid lover: “I know you will not like this language and will frown at this letter of mine.” But he immediately flew off again: “You have to admit, monsieur, that you’re the greatest tyrant in the world today; that your authority will raise fear in every soul and, when you speak, there is no way that people can hold their own opinion if it does not correspond to yours … But one certainly finds pleasure at letting oneself be forced to happiness and falling into the hands of a man who exercises no violence other than one that profits those who suffer it.”

Saint-Cyran propped that long letter on the mantelpiece, unopened. When he himself wrote to Monsieur d’Andilly, he mentioned a “letter from Monsieur de Balzac that I intend to read in three days’ time.” One month later, greatly agitated at having had no reply, Balzac begged a friend to approach Saint-Cyran to ask whether he had ever received the letter. Saint-Cyran replied that he had certainly received it, indeed he apologized for the delay and would put matters right immediately: in front of Balzac’s friend, he wrote a short answer that was much admired.

“The famous writer therefore spent thirty uninterrupted years on his estate, entirely absorbed in the contemplation of himself and his literary work, which had been precocious and brilliant, yet had never matured.²⁰¹ His enemies called him Narcissus; indeed he spent all day gazing at himself in the Charente canal, or in that Mirror of rhetoric that seemed so beautiful to him. He never renewed his spirit in the world and through contact with men. He ended up swelling in emptiness. Solitude ruined his spirit, just as the world ruins it for others.”