Honore de Balzac: Cousin Betty

1. PART I: THE PRODIGAL FATHER (continued)

"Ideas will not pay the tradesman's bills," remarked Lisbeth. "I was always telling him so--nothing but money. Money is only to be had for work done--things that ordinary folks like well enough to buy them. When an artist has to live and keep a family, he had far better have a design for a candlestick on his counter, or for a fender or a table, than for groups or statues. Everybody must have such things, while he may wait months for the admirer of the group--and for his money---"

"You are right, my good Lisbeth. Tell him all that; I have not the courage.--Besides, as he was saying to Stidmann, if he goes back to ornamental work and small sculpture, he must give up all hope of the Institute and grand works of art, and we should not get the three hundred thousand francs' worth of work promised at Versailles and by the City of Paris and the Ministers. That is what we are robbed of by those dreadful articles, written by rivals who want to step into our shoes."

"And that is not what you dreamed of, poor little puss!" said Lisbeth, kissing Hortense on the brow. "You expected to find a gentleman, a leader of Art, the chief of all living sculptors.--But that is poetry, you see, a dream requiring fifty thousand francs a year, and you have only two thousand four hundred--so long as I live. After my death three thousand."

A few tears rose to Hortense's eyes, and Lisbeth drank them with her eyes as a cat laps milk.

This is the story of their honeymoon--the tale will perhaps not be lost on some artists.

Intellectual work, labor in the upper regions of mental effort, is one of the grandest achievements of man. That which deserves real glory in Art--for by Art we must understand every creation of the mind--is courage above all things--a sort of courage of which the vulgar have no conception, and which has never perhaps been described till now.