.

CHAPTER II

BOYHOOD

For all his aristocratic name, Honore de Balzac was not of noble
birth. The nobiliary particule he did not add to his signature until
the year 1830. In his birth certificate we read: "To-day, the 2nd of
Prairial, Year VII. (21st of May 1799) of the French Republic, a male
child was presented to me, Pierre-Jacques Duvivier, the undersigned
Registrar, by the citizen Bernard-Francois Balzac, householder,
dwelling in this commune, Rue de l'Armee de l'Italie, Chardonnet
section, Number 25; who declared to me that the said child was called
Honore Balzac, born yesterday at eleven o'clock in the morning at
witness's residence, that the child is his son and that of the
citizen, Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, his wife, they having been
married in the commune of Paris, eighth arrondissement, Seine
Department, on the 11th of Pluviose, Year V."

The commune referred to in the birth certificate was Tours. There in
the street now rechristened and renumbered and called the Rue
Nationale, a commemorative plate at No. 29 bears the following
inscription: "Honore de Balzac was born in this house on the 1st of
Prairial, Year VII. (20th of May 1799); he died in Paris on the
28th[*] of August 1850."

[*] The registered date of Balzac's death was the 18th of August. The
date on the commemorative plate is wrong. See also in a subsequent
chapter, M. de Lovenjoul's remark on the subject.

This former capital of Touraine, which the novelist says disparagingly
in the _Cure of Tours_ was in his time one of the least literary
places in France, has had, at any rate, an honourable past. It was one
of the sixty-four towns of Gaul that, under Vercingetorix, opposed the
conquest of Caesar; and to it, in 1870, the French Government retired
when the Germans marched on the capital. Its ancient industry in silk
stuffs, established by Louis XI. in the fifteenth century, raised its
population to eighty thousand. By revoking the Edict of Nantes, King
"Sun" chased away three thousand of the wealthy, manufacturing
families, who migrated to Holland; and Tours lost, with a quarter of
its inhabitants, its weaving supremacy, which fell into the hands of
Lyons. Situated on the Loire, in a rich but flat district, its
surroundings are less interesting than its own architectural
possessions, including a cathedral of mingled Gothic and later styles,
a bit of the N