Description of the attraction
The Balzac House Museum is located in Passy - where the writer lived for seven years, from 1840 to 1847. It was not an easy time for him - suffice it to say that Balzac rented a house on Rue Reynouard under the name of Monsieur de Bruignol, taking the name of his housekeeper so that creditors would not find it. According to Balzac, they hounded him like a hare.
The modest house attracted the writer by the fact that it had an exit to the neighboring Burton Street - in the event of the arrival of the creditor, it was possible to escape. And friends, when they came, pronounced the password. It was not a game - after unsuccessful investments in publishing, all of his property had just been confiscated from the writer, and he could no longer take risks.
At the same time, Balzac must have liked the small garden that looked out onto the windows of his five-room apartment on the top floor. It was quiet, and nothing distracted from work. And he worked like a machine. “To work,” Balzac wrote, “means always getting up at midnight, writing until 8 am, having breakfast in fifteen minutes and working again until five, having lunch, going to bed and starting all over again the next day.”
The museum has examples of this strenuous work - facsimiles of Balzac's manuscripts. Strikethrough, marginal insertions, strikethrough again - one page could be rewritten 16 times! Here, in the house on the Rhineuar, were created "The Life of a Bachelor", "Cousin Betta", "Dark Affair" and other parts of the epoch-making multivolume work entitled "The Human Comedy" by Balzac. Here he wrote letters to Evelina Hanska, a woman with whom he corresponded for 18 years before he could get married (she was married). Exhausted by years of feverish work, Balzac died five months after the wedding.
After the death of his widow, the writer's belongings were scattered, but still the museum managed to exhibit Balzac's original desk, chair, walking stick, and a teapot with a coffee pot. The museum also exhibits letters, daguerreotypes, portraits, drawings, engravings; on the ground floor there is a library - manuscripts, original and subsequent editions of Balzac's novels, books that belonged to him, and simply books and magazines of that time.
