Balzac, The Human Comedy

Last night I couldn't sleep. So I did myself the favor of throwing blanket and sheet aside, getting up out of bed and tiptoing down the stairs so as not to wake my helpmate whose peaceful slumber I, for a reason unknown to me, felt a responsibiity to preserve. 

Every floorboard squeaked, every wooden step--fourteen of them top to bottom, to be exact--made some sort of noise but not quite enough noise to wake her, and before I knew it I had landed safely on the first floor where I was alone enough to feel I had the house to myself.

Darkness threw a cloak around me, and a silence only as loud, or as quiet, as the Oregon rain outside, now pouring its heart out to me for the third straight day with enough rainwater to enable an interested spectator to actually see lichen grow on the branches of the tree, insist that I listen to it for a few moments until I got my bearings in the strange house and could see my way forward to the kitchen. 

Once in the kitchen I could make out the uneaten shapes of pies left out on the counter after the great Thanksgiving feast--pumpkin, apple, cherry--and a great hunger desceneded upon me. Should I or shouldn't I, eat that is? To eat would be a small sin, given the eating I'd done earlier, but not to eat would be folly given my hunger. I decided on the cherry pie, just a small piece, declining the notion of apple pie with a slice of manchego cheese, plating the pie and about to carry it to the living room.

But what to drink? Water? And if water, still or sparkling? Water didn't seem right,  there was too much of it out there in the sullen dark, rain, rain, and more rain. Water wasn't special anymore, it had lost it lost its significance if not its meaning. To forego water then for fruit soda, milk, red wine, each one of them with their positive and negative qualities, each one of their proposals rejected for a small glass of American rye whiskey.

With cherry pie and whiskey I made my way into the living room, finding a chair near the fire place where I could sit and enjoy my little meal. And I did enjoy it, every bite of pie, every sip of whiskey, but the enjoyment was not long lasting and soon I was alone once again in the great dark, sleepless and forlorn, the rain outside making its way through the trees with a steady inhuman sound. 

Aha, I thought, this is a time when a book is needed, the comfort of something at least resembling a human being whose words might reach out to me. And so I opened Balzac's book of stories that was sitting on a table by the fireplace, "The Human Comedy," and began reading a story I'd begun reading months ago. And indeed Balzac's story--about a French regiment in the time of Napoleon, attacked by the Russians and left for dead on the banks of the Berezina--brought some light and warmth. 

Reading Balzac was like staring into a small domestic fire. At first it was mesmerizing, the flames warm, almost tame, but the longer I kept reading the story the higher and more fierce the fire became. Before I knew it, the fire had jumped the fireplace grates, and the whole living room was consumed by fire, I along with it.

The only thing to survive was Rodin's great figure of Balzac, a bronze, the original that was placed on the Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris. It was there in the living room this morning when I came downstairs.