Honoré de Balzac's grave at Père Lachaise

Five months of marriage

Balzac spent eighteen years writing to a Polish countess, Ewelina Hańska, who had first contacted him anonymously as an admiring reader. He finally married her in Ukraine in March 1850, after her husband's death and a very long negotiation with the Tsar's administration over her estates.

They travelled back to Paris. He was already gravely ill — heart failure, complicated by decades of coffee, deadlines and debt — and he died on 18 August 1850, five months after the wedding, in a house on rue Fortunée that he had spent years and money he did not have preparing for her.

Hugo in the rain

The funeral was on 21 August. Victor Hugo, who had visited the deathbed, held one cord of the pall and delivered the eulogy at the graveside in heavy rain. It is one of the great pieces of nineteenth-century French oratory, and its argument is startling for a funeral: that Balzac had not been a novelist so much as a historian, and that La Comédie humaine was the true record of the age.

Hugo's line about the death being not darkness but light — ce n'est pas la nuit, c'est la lumière — is quoted on plaques all over France. Fewer people remember that he also said, standing in that rain, that all Balzac's books together formed one book, and that it was alive.

The slope, and Rastignac

Le Père Goriot ends here. Eugène de Rastignac, having buried the old man nobody else would bury, climbs to the high ground of Père Lachaise, looks down over the lit city between the Vendôme column and the Invalides dome, and says — to Paris, not to anyone in particular — À nous deux maintenant. Now it is between the two of us.

The view Balzac describes is largely gone; the trees have grown and the city has risen. But the geography is exactly right, and if you climb another division or two above the grave and look west on a clear evening you can still see what he was pointing at. It is worth doing. Very few writers are buried inside their own last paragraph.

The bust, and the other Balzac

The bronze on the column is by Pierre-Jean David d'Angers, the sculptor who spent his career making portrait medallions of everyone in French intellectual life. It is a conventional, dignified likeness: the great man, chin up, in the manner of a Roman.

The famous statue of Balzac — Rodin's, the one that looks like a menhir in a dressing gown, that the commissioning committee rejected in 1898 as a monstrosity, and that is now generally called the beginning of modern sculpture — is not here. A cast of it stands at the junction of boulevard Raspail and boulevard du Montparnasse, in the 6th. Seeing the two of them in the same week is a good short course in what happened to sculpture in fifty years.

Ewelina Hańska is buried with him. She survived him by thirty-two years, and spent much of that time managing the debts he left, which was the last long piece of work in a correspondence that had started with an anonymous fan letter.

Finding it

Division 48 is up the hill from the main gate — a genuine climb on cobbles, about fifteen minutes if you do not stop. From the Gambetta gate it is a fifteen-minute walk downhill instead, which is the argument our guided walk is built on.

Delacroix's black sarcophagus is one division away in 49, and Bartholomé's Monument aux Morts is below you at the roundabout. If you want the full geography, the map page sets out how the divisions run.