Balzac, “Une Passion dans le désert” (1830)

“Une Passion dans le désert” (1830) is a short story where Balzac tries his hand at
Orientalism. That theme/setting, so dear to his contemporaries, had been the scene for much European literature the 18th century, from Voltaire to Montesquieu. But the Romantic take, based to some extend on the retold experiences of veterans of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, goes beyond the formulaic seraglio or pasha's palace, out into nature – in this case the Sahara desert.

The passion here is one between man (a French soldier escaped from captivity) and leopard. Fleeing the Bedouins who have taken him to an oasis, he spends the night in a cave for the night. He wakes up in terror next to the blood-flecked leopard (who has killed and fed on the horse he escaped with), but he is surprised to find that the sated cat adopts him, allowing “herself” to be petted and scratched like a pussycat.

The two warily adopt each other, the soldier torn between desire to slit the leopard’s throat, fear of a failed attempt, and fascination with the savage beauty of the feline. The cat flirts with him, reminds him of a jealous mistress, and purrs (“rourou”) as he gets nuzzled. When the soldier tries to escape at night, getting caught in quicksand, the leopard drags back by the collar to her lair.

The tension and playfulness ends when the leopard, back from a hunt, for no apparent reason half-playfully sinks his teeth into the soldier’s thigh, like a cat nipping her owner. He immediately slits the cat’s throat, and when he is at last found and rescued by fellow French troops, we is weeping over the corpse.

In this story, Balzac does not fall into speculative quasi-philosophical or sociological digressions, as he does in many early works. While these can be strong features of some stories, they often feel like filler, as Balzac scribbled on his famous all-night coffee high to meet a deadline with creditors on his heels. Here, the narrative is straightforward, and, given its nature, has very little dialog.

The “Orient” is portrayed in vivid colors. I was tempted to write that it was Delacroix’s famous paintings of lions and tigers in the desert that inspired this painterly work, but those paintings were created in the 1850s, 20 years later.

Here’s one example of the painterly description (based, of course, on no real observation – Balzac never got south of Italy in his life):

Il étudia pendant la nuit les effets de la lune sur l'océan des sables où le simoun produisait des vagues, des ondulations et de rapides changements. Il vécut avec le jour de l'Orient, il en admira les pompes merveilleuses ; et souvent, après avoir joui du terrible spectacle d'un ouragan dans cette plaine où les sables soulevés produisaient des brouillards rouges et secs, des nuées mortelles.

(During the night he studied the effects of the moon on the ocean of sand where the simoon produced waves, undulations and rapid changes. He lived with daylight of the Orient; he admired its marvelous ceremonies; and often, after having enjoyed the terrible spectacle of a hurricane in that plain where the stirred-up sands produced dry, red fogs, deadly clouds.)

It would hard to call Balzac a Romantic, but in this story he certainly writes like one. Yje fascination with the far away, with the “terrible spectacle”, and the heroic domination of nature all have the taste of High Romanticism.

La Maison du chat-qui-pelote

This early Balzac novella (1829) is already unmistakeably Balzac. The meticulous, depiction of Parisian life is there, from the industrious drapery shop to the cruelties of the decadent nobility. The painterly eye for detail, more than ever appropriate in this work where the hero is a painter whose sensational new artwork puts on canvas the same humble middle-class scene and characters that Balzac puts on paper.

Underneath all this realistic detail is a typical New Comedy plot – the beautiful daughter is watched, explicitly Argus-like by father, mother, elder sister, and amatory rival (apprentice). The young hero, Théodore de Sommervieux (a painter, but an aristocrat of sorts), falls in love from a distance, passing outside the home/shop she rarely leaves. In fact, the term cloister is used for the girl's situation and the mother is compared to a "tourière", the nun in a convent who is the other nuns' only link to the outside world. The girls unaffected, pious beauty attracts both the painter and the man.

In the course of the novella, he managed to evade the guardians, declares his love, overcomes the parents' fears objections, and marries the girl. But that is bit half the story.

But in spite of the realist texture, this is a Cinderella story (In fact, the family early in the novella celebrate a financially successful year bu the rare treat of a play, which turns out to be a performance of Cendrillion.) But most Cinderella stories end with the wedding. Here, we see the aftermath.

After a year or two of infatuation, the young heroine finds that her pious and naive upbringing make it impossible for her to mix with either the artistic or the high-society circles that her husband is a part of. Her innocence, so charming at first, makes her the laughingstock of his bohemian colleagues, eventually making her appear the more insipid in her husband's eye. "Madame de Sommervieux tenta de changer son caractère, ses mœurs et ses habitudes," (Madame de Sommervieux tried to change her character, her manners, and her habits.) But all in vain.

When she seeks consolation from her now-retired parents and her sister; they can't conceive of her life and offer her little sympathy. She is half- transformed, belonging to no class, at home nowhere. "Elle pleura des larmes de sang, et reconnut trop tard qu’il est des mésalliances d’esprits aussi bien que des mésalliances de mœurs et de rang." (She wept tears of blood, and realized too late that there are misalliances of minds/spirits as well as misalliances of manners and rank.) Isolated and unloved, she slips into death a few years later.

The leading theme of nineteenth century literature is anxiety about class. In a century where revolution –poltical, social. and financial– is constant, the issue of where any person stands is a matter.of consent obsession. La Maison du chat-qui-pelote is a Cinderella story based in realistic deal and a keen view of class differences.