Physical 'decadence', as Balzac called it, was really a very
small and unavoidable problem, His body was preparing for
retirement and the life of love and leisure he had promised
and denied himself for so long. Like Crevel's majestic waistline in La
Cousine Bette, corpulence was the mark of a successful, self-made man,
a man who weighed heavily in the scales of history, and as Balzac's
slimming tips remind us (long walks before breakfast, washing in cold
water and no café au lait), Eveline was equal to him in that respect.
True, he had had heart problems, but he did not associate illness with
obesity. The main source of anxiety was a question Balzac never asked
directly in his letters but which casts a bigger shadow than his waistline
over his remaining years: why was the wedding postponed until he
was almost dead? The imaginative answer is that Balzac was fulfilling
the prophecy he had often made: death would be waiting for him at
the finishing-line. The other answer, which may be just a more detailed
version of the first, is that Eveline had the prudence Balzac had been
looking for in a wife ever since he placed himself under the tutelage of
Mme de Berny.

There were, of course, his debts, to which we shall bid farewell at
this point before Eveline begins to pay them off. Balzac had been
insolvent now for two decades, often short of pocket-money but rarely
of credit. For him, this was a point in his favour; he looked forward
to hearing her cry of admiration when she perused his accounts. ¹
Perhaps it was a reasonable expectation. If she could have read the
biography of Balzac's money published in 1938 by René Bouvier and
Édouard Maynial, she would have seen his various financial disasters
rippling on for years like the after-shocks of earthquakes, though she
may well have been impressed by the fact that he did in the end
achieve a kind of mobile stability. It was a pity Balzac was never able

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