TO "THE STRANGER," 1841, 1842

The abode that Balzac chose, on coming back to live within the city
walls, was not far from the Rue de Chaillot which had been his address
before he removed to Sevres. It was situated in what is now called the
Rue Raynouard, but then bore the name of the Rue Basse. In reality,
the street is low only at one end, to which it descends from some high
land that forms the Passy and Trocadero quarter, and, for some
distance, overhangs the Seine. The whole of the street is narrow and
winding, and still has an old-time provincial aspect, though the
modern building has begun to make its appearance in it, replacing the
ancient mansions surrounded by gardens with ever-encroaching blocks of
flats.

Balzac's new house was at Number 19 (at present Number 47). It stood
--and the house still stands--in a back garden, on a lower level than
the road, from which it was masked by houses fronting the causeway.
Any one approaching it from the side of the Rue Basse would enter the
common vestibule of one of these houses, go down some stone steps, and
would then find himself in a courtyard, opposite a fairly good-sized,
apparently one-storied cottage, with the tree adorned garden to the
right of him. Once inside the cottage, however, he would notice that
it was built on the extreme upper edge of a precipitous slope, and
that on the farther side the structure had lower stories, with an
issue through them into a lane at the rear leading to the Seine banks
and the lower portion of the Rue Basse. Whoever, therefore, inhabited
the cottage could quit it fore or aft, an advantage which must have
weighed with the incoming tenant, tracked as he was by creditors, and
hiding himself here under the name of Madame de Brugnol.

The insistence of these claimants on his purse was such that, acting
on the advice of his solicitor, Gavault, in the course of the year
1841, he executed a fictitious sale of Les Jardies for the sum of
seventeen thousand five hundred francs, his hope being to preserve his
hermitage for the days of wealth and ease to come. Meanwhile, he took
his mother to live with him. After giving him and her other son,
Henry, all she possessed, and the latter being now in the colonies,
where he ultimately died in poverty, she was dependent on what Honore
could pay her each month. The living-together arrangement was not very
successful. Madame Balzac's nervous, fretful temperament had not been
improved by age and tro