La Curée and the theater

It seems like the majority of nineteenth-century French novels, at least the ones set in society, include a scene of two at the theatre (or opera). Le Père Goriot, La Dame aux Camélias, Le Rouge et le Noir, Madame Bovary, and many more. But it’s rarely the play that anyone is going to see– it's the other members of the audience, particularly the goings-on in the boxes, where the subtle play consists of what everyone is wearing, who is visiting with whom, and who is no longer talking to whom is the real show. The drama onstage hasn’t got much of a chance.

True, some male audience members (those in Nana or Les Illusions perdues) are watching what is going on onstage, but that is usually because he has or wishes to have a liaison with one of the actresses, singers, or ballerinas, not because of any innate interest in the performance or the play.

Zola’s La Curée is a big exception. There. two specific stage performances are described and reflect the changing moods of the heroine Renée, who has entered into a wild semi-incestuous affair with her stepson Maxime.

The first is Offenbach’s operetta La Belle Hélène, a big hit by that favored composer of the Second Empire. The operetta is a saucy retelling of the rape of Helen and was a giant success for the sexy (and notorious) female star, Blanche Muller (who serves as a model for Zola’s Nana). The story casts ancient myth as a Parisian adulterous adventure. Helen cuckolds the foolish Menelaus with the younger Paris, and runs away with him to Troy.


Renée is so taken with this operetta that she butchers the score on the piano, trying to imitate the raspy voice and the wiggling hips of the star (“cherchait à retrouver la voix rauque et les déhanchements de Blanche Muller.”) Maxime joins in the fun, imitating the actors. Their affair is at its height, carefree and spirited.

The second play is Racine’s Phèdre, performed by the Italian tragedienne Adelaide Ristori, the toast of Italy and France. The play is the tragic counterpart of La Belle Hélène, also a take on adultery in ancient Greece. But it cuts closer to Renée’s situation, where Phaedra’s desire for an adulterous liaison with her stepson Hippolytus, ends in both their deaths.

And the performance by the tragedienne moves her to the depths.

elle emplissait la salle d’un tel cri de passion fauve, d’un tel besoin de volupté surhumaine que la jeune femme sentait passer sur sa chair chaque frisson de son désir et de ses remords.
(She [Ristori] filled the hall with such a cry of wild passion, such a need for superhuman pleasure that the young woman felt each shiver of desire and remorse passing through her flesh.)

Not so Maxime, who mcoks Ristori ad just a big puppet, who hitched up her tunic and wags her tongue to the public just like Blanche Muller in La Belle Hélène. He sees the tragedy as a farce.

Renée sees the tragic potential of her own situation. a harbinger of the end of her affair with Maxime. As she becomes more desperate and the affair becomes more fraught, Maxime withdraws from her increasingly desperate embrace.

It is typical of Zola that the end of the novel and the end of the affair is neither tragic nor comic. Unlike Phèdre. Renée does not poison herself after a confession of guilt. (She tried – unsuccessfully – to poison herself out of sheer boredom earlier in the novel.) In fact, her husband. Saccard seems to deliberately ignore the affair even when the evidence is in front of his nose. Maxime does not perish either – he gets married to a hunchback heiress, inherits when she dies on their honeymoon, and reconciles himself with his father. Renée fades away, abandoned.

The next winter, we are told very abruptly at the end of the novel, Renée died from acute meningitis “Renée mourut d’une méningite aiguë” She dies with neither a tragic or comic denouement.

La Curée: the money plot

La Curée (The Kill, or better, Spoils of the Hunt) is the second novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, and it is, to my mind, an amazing novel. Structurally, it has two parallel plots, closely interlacing but quite distinct in style. It would not be far off to see he plots as centered around desire for money on the one hand and sexual desire on the other.

The money plot is a critique/satire of those who profiteered during the Second Empire exploiting Haussmann’s construction of the Grands Boulevards that tore up the map of Paris.

Central to that plot is the history of the second son of the Rougon family, who leaves the stagnation of the provinces and comes to Paris to pursue his fortune, like so many Frenchmen and French literary characters had before him, most notably in Balzac. But unlike Raphaël de Valentin , Eugène de Rastignac, or Lucien de Rubempré, he is no juvenile hero. He is already nearing middle age, is burdened with a wife and children when he arrives. Nor is he particularly handsome like those Balzac heroes or Julien Sorel – he is described as short, dark, and ferret-faced (chafouin), though he is pictures as having a certain “Southern” (Provençal) charm. . Nor is he an impoverished aristocrat (not even a pretender like “de” Rubempré ).

In real life, Zola, like Balzac, knew what it was to be the provincial come to Paris to make his fortune. And at this point in his life, Zola was still not a success, was still a starving artist in a cold city. Like the hero, he has come to Paris to conquer and has met discouragement and near-ruin.

But Aristide Saccard (né Rougon) is determined to conquer, even if he has to change his name so as not to embarrass his politically ascendant brother Eugène, and take a low-paying civil service job in the Paris streets department, thanks to his brother’s pull

Bitter at first, he gradually realizes is that, advance knowledge of the construction of the Paris boulevards gives an insider an opportunity to make a fortune. He learns the ropes in the department, and sets up a dummy company. He buys up properties that he learns in advance will be torn down, bribes the assessors, and gradually passes for one of the richest men in Paris. Meanwhile, his first wife conveniently dies, he marries almost at once Renée, the knocked-up daughter of an old and rich bourgeois family that is anxious to hush the scandal. In turn, Saccard gets as a dowry that serves as his stake so he can start buying up properties.

On one of the key scenes early in the book, Saccard envisions his future success. He takes his wife to a restaurant on the Buttes-Chaumont, with a window overlooking the city. Dazzled by a strange combined effect of a golden sunlight and fog, he exclaims:
Oh ! vois, dit Saccard, avec un rire d’enfant, il pleut des pièces de vingt francs dans Paris !
(Oh! Look, said Saccard, with a childish laugh, it's raining twenty franc coins in Paris.)

For Saccrd, that's as close as he ever gets to a poetic sentiment.

Looking down on the city, just like Rastignac does, at the end of Père Goriot, he see the very street grid of Paris as his toy.

j’ai bien dit, plus d’un quartier va fondre, et il restera de l’or aux doigts des gens qui chaufferont et remueront la cuve. Ce grand innocent de Paris ! vois donc comme il est immense et comme il s’endort doucement ! C’est bête, ces grandes villes ! Il ne se doute guère de l’armée de pioches qui l’attaquera un de ces beaux matins.

(I’ve said it, more than one neighborhood will be melted down, and gold will stay in the hands of those that heat up and stir the vat. Paris, this great innocent! See how immense it is and how sweetly it sleeps. How stupid, these big cities! It hardly is aware of the army of picks that will attack it one of these fine mornings.)

As often in Zola, the reality is far more difficult than the dream. We see Saccard’s machinations in some detail, managing to survive a world where the swindlers swindle the other swindlers, as well as the city. and while he gains the reputation of opulence and success, he is always just on the edge of bankruptcy.

Le Bal de Sceaux and class obsession

Le Bal de Sceaux (1829) is an early Balzac novella that has as is theme what will become the ever itchy sore of 19th century fiction in general: the class system. From Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) right up to Le Côté de Guermantes (1921), a shaken and constantly redefined old-time aristocracy constantly feels the need to hold on to its glamour, its exclusivity, in spite of the endless stream, of newly minted nobility and a more radical than ever economic redistribution. Worst of all, it’s so hard to spot the imposters from their manners.

At the heart of the story is the self-absorbed daughter of the comte de Fontaine, a once-impoverished aristocrat who has been rewarded for his loyalty to the crown (he was a leader of the Vendéan resistance) by the restored Louis XVIII. He manages to repair his fortune a little, and to get positions in the government for his sons and advantageous marriages for his daughters – for all but the youngest, Émilie.

Émilie, headstrong, beautiful, and with a devastating wit, looks around at potential husbands and dismisses them out of hand. The ones with suitable titles (peers of France) are fools or clods; the ones without title she refuses to consider. This in spite of the fact that her brothers and sisters have made happy marriages with well-off and refined children of the new bourgeoisie.

From the family summer home in the Paris countryside , This fairy-tale princess is brought by her loving siblings to the ball in the town of Sceaux. This rustic dance, which allows for wide variety of comers, is seen as a mildly adventurous diversion, and an occasion for the heroine’s witty put=downs. There she encounters her Prince Charming, a mysterious seemingly aristocratic young man whose good looks, courtly air, and ready wit recommend him to her. The problem? While his name, Maximilien Loungueville, sounds like he might be from a leading noble family, little is known about him. He teasingly resists Émilie’s inquiries, and she is ultimately convinced that he is worthy to marry her.

All that is exploded when, in company of sisters and sisters-in-law, she visits a Paris dress shop. There she is sees Maximilien clearly selling fabric to the shopkeeper, in other words acting as a bourgeois. The shocked, furious, and humiliated Émilie drops him immediately, refusing explanations.

It later turns out that Maximilien’s brother is a viscount and a peer of France; that Max had gone into business because of temporary problems with the family fortune; and that eventually he inherits his brother’s title and has his fortune restored. Emilie, meanwhile, in reaction, has married her elderly cousin, the comte de Kergaroüet – to whom she ends up acting more as nursemaid and companion than as wife, curtailed from the enjoyment of her youth.

The final scene, which reminds me of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin* (with sexes reversed), takes place in a fashionable drawing room in the Faubourg Saint Germain, as it is brought home to Emilie what she has missed:

en tournant la tête, elle avait vu entrer son ancien prétendu dans tout l’éclat de la jeunesse. La mort de son père et celle de son frère tué par l’inclémence du climat de Pétersbourg, avaient posé sur la tête de Maximilien les plumes héréditaires du chapeau de la pairie ; sa fortune égalait ses connaissances et son mérite : la veille même, sa jeune et bouillante éloquence avait éclairé l’assemblée. En ce moment, il apparaissait à la triste comtesse, libre et paré de tous les dons qu’elle avait rêvés pour son idole. Toutes les mères qui avaient des filles à marier faisaient de coquettes avances à un jeune homme doué des vertus qu’on lui supposait en admirant sa grâce

(she turned her head and saw her former lover come in, in all the freshness of youth. His father's death, and then that of his brother, killed by the severe climate of Saint-Petersburg, had placed on Maximilien's head the hereditary plumes of the French peer's hat. His fortune matched his learning and his merits; only the day before his youthful and fervid eloquence had dazzled the Assembly. At this moment he stood before the Countess, free, and graced with all the advantages she had formerly required of her ideal. Every mother with a daughter to marry made amiable advances to a man gifted with the virtues which they attributed to him, as they admired his attractive person)

Balzac, who himself had pretentions to nobility (tried to pass as de Balzac) and had affairs with aristocratic women, and eventually and famously married a Polish countess, was also from a family of drapers. He also worked hard for his livelihood. His characters are ever breaking through the defenses of polite society against parvenus, from Goriot’s daughters to Lucien de Rubempré. And the tale of Zola’s Rougon family, in three generations from provincial peasants to the toast of Parisian society followed the same path. In 1829, Balzac could hardly imagine the constant disruptions provided by both political and industrial revolution but in this bittersweet fairy-tale treatment he hits on the obsession of the age, his own obsession.

* Note that Onegin, published serially from 1826–1830 is exactly contemporary with this novella. It’s not at all probable that they influenced each other.

Tamango (1829)

“Tamango”, a short story by Prosper Mérimée is a big surprise. This narrative of a rebellion on a slave ship doesn’t preach – it simply presents a powerful, simple narrative of what happened on the ironically named L'Espérance, captained by the also ironically named Ledoux. What's striking is not the criticism of the hypocrisy, venality, and cruelty of the white slave trader, but the equally critical portrait of Tamango, the leaser of the slave rebellion.

Tamango is no noble savage. He is himself as “a famous warrior and seller of slaves”, the deliverer of other Africans to the white slave ships from his West African fortress. In the midst of a drunken negotiation with Ledoux, he starts killing slaves with a pistol and even sells one of his wives. He ends by being tricked on the ship as it is leaving and us put in chains, Ledoux thinking that such a strong powerful slave could be sold for a thousand crowns.

All the horrors of the slave ships, now familiar to us, but at that time certainly little known, are revealed: the crowded below-decks, the manacles and chains, the liberal use of the whip, the sexual exploitation and humiliation of the slaves. The slaves finally manage to steal a small file, and, lead by Tamango, plot their move. They rise as one and slaughter the much smaller white crew and have a wild celebration, only to realize that they are on a ship on the middle of the ocean with no knowledge of how to steer it anywhere, let along return home.

They drift, the sun beats down, they run out food and water, and all die but Tamango, who is about to breathe his last just as an English frigate happens across the devastated ship. Tamango is brought to Kingston where, although the plantation owners want him hung as a rebel, the Governor of Jamaica frees him, and gives him a job in a regimental band (as a cymbalist). He soon drinks himself to death.

What's amazing about this story is its lack of authorial moralizing, its matter-of-factness in the face of such horrors. What a contrast with the stories popular at the time: tales of horror, Romantic historical tales, and moral fairy tales. Even Balzac cannot keep himself from moralizing, especially in his earlier writings.

Curiosly, Tamango was made into a film in 1958 in France, starring Dorithy Dandridge and Curt Jurgens. It was filmed simultaneously with French and English, but given its interracial sex, it had a hard tiem getting shown in the US. It remains, as I’ve read, a cult classic. One strange hange – the made the French Ledoux into a Dutch captain.

Balzac, “Le Grand d’Espagne”

This story, Balzac’s second contribution to the collection Contes bruns, is a pretty typical tale of jealousy and revenge, Spanish style. In atmosphere it reminds me of Hernani, staged a few years before, in the way it turns on the inexorable search for revenge by a Spanish grandee.

But Balzac already in this slight work has a mastery of story telling and perception of detail that are striking.

The story takes place at a soirée attended by a group of French officers, many of them heading for Spain some time around 1823’s, shortly after the French invasion prop up the Spanish Bourbon monarchy (the despicable Ferdinand the VII).

The narrator, who is headed to Spain, notes an odd member of the party, a man he takes for a some minor bureaucrat, dressed in green (the narrator detests green, and black, he thinks, is called for), a man who has little steel buckles on his shoes, in pkace of the fashionable knotted ribbon, worn-out pants, a cravate poorly tied.

He turns out to be a military surgeon, who had served in Spain with Napoleon’s troops some year earlier, who tells his tale. The narrator shows his editorial hand in the recounting.

Pour vous sauver l'ennui des digressions, je me permets de traduire son histoire en style de conteur, et d'y donner cette façon didactique nécessaire aux récits qui, de la causerie familière, passent à l'état typographique.

To spare you the boredom of digressions, I am allowing myself to translate his story in the style of a raconteur, and to lend it that didactic manner necessary for tales that pass from familiar chats to the typographic state.)

In other words, Balzac is keenly aware of the levels of narration he is playing eiyj, an wants us to be aware of them, too, like the magician who can give awayteh trick and still fool us.

The surgeon’s tale involves a kidnapping and blindfolding, a delivery of a child in secret and under duress, a cloaked mysterious figure, guards drugged, a severed arm, and a near deadly stabbing.

One of his auditors derides the story as a “conte brun", a dark atle, a tale of horror. But just a tale, Then, at the party arrive the grandee and his (one-armed) wife, recent refugees from the Spanish troubles.


And it is so typical of Balzac that in painting the scene is refers to a painter:

C'était un vrai tableau de Murillo! Le mari avait, sous des orbites creusés et noircis, des yeux de feu. Sa face était desséchée, son crâne sans cheveux, et son corps d'une maigreur effroyable.

(It was truly a painting by Murillo! The husband had, beneath the hollowed and blackened orbit, eyes of fire. His dried-out face, his hairless skill, and his body, terrifyingly thin. )

Even the auditors in the story pooh-pooh its melodramatic conventionality. But Balzac is Balzac, even in a trifle.

Une Conversation entre onze heures et minuit

“Une Conversation entre onze heures et minuit” is a story from Contes Bruns, a collection of stories to which Balzac contributed two, the others being written by the now little-known Philarète Chasles (critic and historian) and Charles Rabou (journalist). It appears that the collection was originally published anonymously.

The story in question here is surprisingly experimental. It consists of an overheard conversation in an elegant drawing room filled with ladies and gentlemen. It consists of a set of “can-you-top-this” anecdotes contributed by a variety of speakers. These little stories concern such subjects as jealous husbands, war atrocities, prison escape, suicide of a pregnant woman, and tales of executions.

The model for this pattern of storytelling is the Decameron and its many offshoots, where a miscellaneous set of narrated stories )Some naughty, some tragic, some suspenseful) are strung together by the comments and reactions of a set of genteel listeners. But what Balzac does here is to have the little stories, many filled with real emotion and striking details, just peter out in a rushed conclusion, trampled over in many cases buy the eagerness of the next story teller.

This is an unusual touch. The excitement here is in the spinning of ever new tales, not in any moral reflection or carefully plotted dénouement. In this way, it resembles a realistic party conversation where endings are trampled over as the buzz of conversation marches on.

What I was reminded of was experimental 20th century narratives like Cortazàr’s Hopscotch (1963) or Calvino’s If on a Winter Niight a Traveler (1979) that play with the expectations of narrative. To be sure, “Une Conversation enttre onze heures et minuit” is hardly as problematic, but it certainly shows the young Balzac very consciously playing with the tools of his craft and the reader’s expectations.

One particular tale gets truly meta. One of the storytellers, a man, tells of how, as a young boy, he found himself unnoticed and privy to a conversations between “eight or nine” worldly women (duchesses and countesses) , discussing matters that mostly went over his head, but which fascinated him nevertheless.

J'étais resté coi en entendant ces dames raconter, sotto voce, des histoires auxquelles je ne comprenais rien; mais les rires de bon aloi qui terminaient chaque narration avaient piqué ma curiosité d'enfant.

(I remained quiet while listening to these ladies tell, sotto voce, stories of which I understood nothing; but the genuine laughter which ended each narration piqued my childish curiosity.)

When one lady, whose turn it is, tells the story of her wedding night, or rather, the way in which a she, as a very young innocent held in a convent before marriage, was told by a sympathetic nun about the realities of men and women and the wedding night. At the crucial (presumably salacious) moment of the narrative, we are denied satisfaction:

Là, le groupe féminin se rapprocha, madame de... parla à voix basse, les dames chuchotèrent et tous les yeux brillèrent comme des étoiles; mais je ne pus entendre de la réponse de la religieuse que deux mots latins, employés par la belle dame, et qui étaient, je crois: Ecce homo!...

(Then the female group gathered together, Madame de … spoke in a low voice, the ladies whispered, and all eyes sparkled like stars; but I could make nothing out of the nun’s answer except for two Latin words used by the beautiful lady, and which were, I believe “Ecce homo!’)

The narrator is toying with us, with the layers of overheard stories in a piece of fiction all about overheard stories. Like the child in the salon and like his listeners in the main story, we are eager to hear some naughty details. We are disappointed at the crisis, and the next story begins.

Balzac’s “L’illustre Gaudissart” (1834)

"L'illistre Guadissart" id a pretty slight anecdote in the tradition of the country rubes putting one over on the city slicker. The master travelling salesman Gaudissart who can sell anything to anyone, it seems, makes the mistake of wandering into the countryside around Tours, Balzac’s home town. The Tourangeaux, we are assured, are famous for their love of practical jokes and their disdain for Parisians. And Gaudissart is persuaded to sell subscriptions to a left-wing journal, to a certain landowner, who, if he can be won over, it is claimed, will be imitated by everyone else in the region. The sale almost seems too easy to the smooth-talking Gaudissart, who also agrees to take some wine off the landowner at a good price.

He is informed by his laughing innkeeper that the landowner is in fact the village lunatic. Furious, he winds up challenging the man who fooled him, all of which ends in a comical duel and reconciliation.

Just a few observations: Gaudissart represents a truly new man, whose presence in life and in fiction will expand exponentially with the advent of the railroad. The growth of the middle-class, the expansion of the products, culture, and ideas of Paris and its luxuries, and the at-least partial invasion of both modern capitalism and socialism ]into the provinces are all major engines of the century. The fast-talking salesman is the harbinger of these changes.

And Balzac describes the traveling salesman a veritable Prometheus,

Le Commis-Voyageur n'est-il pas aux idées ce que nos diligences sont aux choses et aux hommes ? il les voiture, les met en mouvement, les fait se choquer les unes aux autres ; il prend, dans le centre lumineux, sa charge de rayons et les sème à travers les populations endormies. Ce pyrophore humain est un savant ignorant, un mystificateur mystifié, un prêtre incrédule qui n'en parle que mieux de ses mystères et de ses dogmes.

(The commercial traveler! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our stagecoaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another. He takes from the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast among the drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human fire-bearer is a scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by himself, an unbelieving priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he expounds all the better for his want of faith.)

Second, critical to the story is the conflict between the natural conservatism of the countryside and the radical Saint-Simonism of Paris. Henri de Saint-Simon, even in the reactionary years of the Bourbon restoration, publish his socialistic crutique of society, most notably in Le Nouveau Christianisme (1825). By 1830, the cult of Saint-Simonism was at its height, and it is the Globe of that griup that Gaudisssart, who sees it as just another product to sell in place of stockings, more profitable for his superior salesmanship,.

Finally, outwitting the city-slickers is a also big part of Eugénie Grandet, located in the same area. Père Grandet’s a financial whiz, but play-acts deafness and obtuseness, and use steh vanity of his sophisticated adversaries to trick them. Peasant cunning figures in Zola. in Maupassant, in Stendhal, where country folk play dumber than they are, to trick the self-important.

L'Illustre Gaudissart devait rencontrer là, dans Vouvray, l'un de ces railleurs indigènes dont les moqueries ne sont offensives que par la perfection même de la moquerie, et avec lequel il eut à soutenir une cruelle lutte. A tort ou à raison, les Tourangeaux aiment beaucoup à hériter de leurs parents. Or, la doctrine de Saint-Simon y était alors particulièrement prise en haine et vilipendée ; mais comme on prend en haine, comme on vilipende en Touraine, avec un dédain et une supériorité de plaisanterie digne du pays des bons contes et des tours joués aux voisins, esprit qui s'en va de jour en jour devant ce que lord Byron a nommé le cant anglais.

(The illustrious Gaudissart was fated to encounter here in Vouvray one of those indigenous jesters whose jests are not intolerable solely because they have reached the perfection of the mocking art. Right or wrong, the Tourangians are fond of inheriting from their parents. Consequently the doctrines of Saint-Simon were especially hated and villified among them. In Touraine hatred and villification take the form of superb disdain and witty maliciousness worthy of the land of good stories and practical jokes,—a spirit which, alas! is yielding, day by day, to that other spirit which Lord Byron has characterized.)

Vigny breaks loose

As noted in the previous post, Vigny starts really feeling his oats as a poet in the late 1820’s – and we will see that Hugo does the same thing at the same time.

I won’t go much into the famous “Le Cor” (1825), the anthology piece about the battle of Roncesvalles that I still remember from reading in high school – back when 4th year high school French was founded on an anthology with samples from Baudelaire, Hugo, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and the rest. The verse is still in the format of alexandrines, but it is often broken and textured, not plodding. And the sadness – even if it for long-ago mythic heroes – seems a bit more genuine.

“La Frégate La Sérieuse” (1828) tells the tale of the captain of a French frigate, which sails the seas between France and India, then is sunk at Trafalgar. It's a vivid account of something within his readers’ living memory. The verse forms are varied, often anapestic, but a real turn away from alexandrines. The phrasing in the action of the battle is short, gripping, and full of nautical specificity.

Trois vaisseaux de haut bord — combattre une frégate !
 Est-ce l'art d'un marin ? le trait d'un amiral ? 
Un écumeur de mer, un forban, un pirate, 
N'eût pas agi si mal !

Three ships of the line – in combat with a frigate!
Is that the art if a sailor? the trait of an admiral?
A skimmer of the seas, a freebooter, a pirate,
Wouls have acted so evilly

This poem has broken free from both the proprieties of the older poetry and also from medievalism. It’s a really strong poem.

Then there’s one poem that strikes me as the masterpiece of the Poèmes antiques rt modernes: “Paris” (1831), and is it ever modern. The vision of Paris as a both the amazing hub of the world and a kind of blazing inferno on earth reminds me of Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” and looks ahead to Baudelaire prophetic take on the city.

The poem is written as a guided tour (flying?) high above the nighttime city. Looking down on Paris and taking its measure is a trope that keeps repeating itself in French ; literature through the 19th century: Eugène de Rastignac in Père Goriot, and Aristide Saccard in Zola’s La Curée come to mind.

The city is a hellish furnace, we are guided to see:

Or ou plomb, tout métal est plongé dans la braise,
 Et jeté pour refondre en l'ardente fournaise.
 Tout brûle, craque, fume et coule ; tout cela
 Se tord, s'unit, se fend, tombe là, sort de là,
 Cela siffle et murmure ou gémit ; cela crie,
 Cela chante, cela sonne, se parle et prie

Gold or lead, every metal is plunged into the embers
And thrown to be melted down in the blazing furnace,
Everything burns, crackles, smokes, and flows; all of that
Twists, unites, splits, falls here, runs out there,
It whistles or murmurs. It cries
It sings, it sounds, speaks to itself, prays.

To me, this poem is a giant step from Vigny’s earlier poems. Like the furnace, it melts away and reshapes the old – in terms of language, poetic form, intense passion, and dark, sensual, and mighty diction. It also nails the concept of Paris as the both the leader in a new age of industrial and social reformation, along with the city as a stage for suffering and inner darkness, all of which will be theme of so much post-1830 literature.

Vigny and Byron

OK. I’ll admit it. I have little taste for most French poetry. Particularly the stuff written between Racine and Baudelaire. The weight of tradition, of good taste, of bienséance, weighs down on all poets in that century and a half, and even a very talented one like Vigny have to overcome a lot to begin writing poems that strike me as enjoyable/masterful.

To me, alexandrines seem utterly empty in any but the most masterful hands (Racine). They give me the impression of a well-worn road with deep ruts. With the limits of poetic vocabulary, the rhymes are all so predictable (“cerceuil”, “deuil”, and ”linceuil”,;“ivresse” and “tendresse; “nuages” and “orages”) and the sentiments feel formulaic.

While, in general, the 18th century is a poetry train wreck through most of Europe, in Germany, poetry explodes in the 1780’s and 1790’s with Goethe, while English poetry in the 1790’s with Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake. The floodgates opened with Tieck, Novalis, Hölderlin, Eichendorff and company in Germany, and with Byron, Keats, and Shelley. French poetry lags far behind.

Take Alfred de Vigny’s Poèmes antiques et modernes, published first in 1826, but containing some later works, up to the annus mirabilis of French romanticism, 1830. Vigny is a talented poet, but he is hobbled by tradition through most of the works written before the late 1820’s.

The book, as the title implies, takes subject matter from ancient sources (Biblical and classical) as well as modern, which primarily means mediaeval. And there is a constant attempt to break out, In "Moïse" (1822) Moses is a Miltonic/Byronic ego/force of nature:m who declare st God:

J’impose mes deux mains sur le front des nuages
 Pour tarir dans leurs flancs la source des orages J’engloutis les cités sous les sables mouvants ;
 Je renverse les monts sous les ailes des vents

Forgive the awkward translation:

I set my two hands on the face of clouds
To dry up from their flanks the source of storms
I engulf cities in drifting sand
I overthrow mountains with the wings of wind.

The sentiments are the Promethean rodomontade of Romanticism, but the words and the verse fall a little flat of the ideas. Let's kook at a Biblical-era Byron poem, “The Destruction of Sennacherib”(1817) for contrast:

For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; 

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, 

And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

The anapestic tetrameter – the same basic pattern as an Alexandrine – but so full of life. This metric pattern is relatively unusual in English, and maintaining without sounding sing-songy it is a feat. (Compare, for example: “The Night Before Christmas”), For me, Byron gets energy and passion, by contrasting concrete everyday words with poetic diction. I think his poetry has bite, crunch, pace, directness, attributes that doesn’t come through in "Moïse".

Vigny, who was well aware of Byron and might well have read this well-known poem, strains after a Byronic tone, but he has to break the chains of Enlightenment verse to do it. We’ll look next at some of his more successful poems.

La Canne of M. de Balzac (1836)

La Canne de M. de Balzac is a curious little book that breaks the limits of several genres. It starts as a kind of urban picaresque novel.

The hero, a newcomer to Paris, tries in vain to get a position. The joke is that this competent, well-educated, unassuming fellow has two big handicaps: his absurdly romantic name –Tancrède Dorimont–and second (and more important), he is drop dead gorgeous, so much so that his instantly taken for a fop, a dandy, a seducer of wives, mothers, and daughters, un belliatre, un miriflor. The plot of the beginning of the novel indicates how that very handsomeness, which he thinks an advantage, is seen as a threat to each of his potential employers.

In the second half of the book, Tancrède ends up marrying an innocent country girl who has some reputation as a poet – on some level, a typical courtship romance.

But the novel is overall a fantasy store of the Arabian Nights variety, thanks to the eponymous cane of Honoré de Balzac. Our hero, frustrated after his ill-success in finding employment, goes to the Opera. There his eyes fall upon this massive (phallic, we would say) cane, “sorte de massue, des turquoises, de l’or, des ciselures merveilleuses” (a sort of club, decorated with turquoises, with gold, and with marvelous engravings). When he asks another audience member, who is the man carrying the cane and he learns it is the famous author Balzac (who was at point of his early fame, with Eugénie Grandet, La Peau de chagrin. and Père Goriot recently published.

It turns out the cane is magical, and allows the user, by switching it to the left hand, to become invisible. One thing leads to another, and Tancrède eventually is allowed to borrow the cane. He uses it to sit in on a government meeting – and make lots of money in the stock market based on inside information. He spies on a would-be mistress. He loses the cane and "hilarity ensures" when other, unknowingly, switch it to their left hands. And finally he visits, uninvited and unseen, a poetry reading by Alphonse de Lamartine and meets the girl. He follows her invisibly, making her believe she is fantasizing about an ideal, handsome lover. Finally they marry and he gives the cane back to Balzac.

All pleasant but pretty minor. The book does not really give s much of a role to the two famous, non-fictional characters, Balzac and Lamartine, but the mixture of real, living persons with fictional ones has to be something of an innovation.

The discovery of the cane leads to a consideration of Balzac’s new-fangled realism:

M. de Balzac, comme les princes populaires qui se déguisent pour visiter la cabane du pauvre et les palais du riche qu’ils veulent éprouver, M. de Balzac se cache pour observer ; il regarde, il regarde des gens qui se croient seuls, qui pensent comme jamais on ne les a vus penser ; il observe des génies qu’il surprend au saut du lit, des sentiments en robe de chambre, des vanités en bonnet de nuit, des passions en pantoufles, des fureurs en casquettes, des désespoirs en camisoles, et puis il vous met tout cela dans un livre

(M. de Balzac, like those princes of popular fable who disguise themselves in order to visit the cabins of the poor and the palaces of the rich whose lives they want to experience, M. de Balzac hides himself in order to observe; he watches; he watches people who think they are alone, who think in ways that one has never seen them think; he observes geniuses who his surprises as they leap from bed, feelings in dressing gowns, vanities in night bonnets, tantrums in night caps, and despair in negligees., and then he puts all of that in a book, for you.)

A joke of course, but a real indication of the wonder of Balzac’s acuity of understanding of a wide range of people and their private lives, a big break from both sentimental and gothic novels that precede it. Unfortunately, La Canne de M. Balzac does not even begin to approach Balzac.

By the way, the author, Mme. de Girardin (née Delphine Gay) saw some success as a romancer, dramatist, and poet, and she held a salon where, Balzac, Gautier, Hugo, and Musset were guest. She was married to a well-known journalist and politician, Émile de Girardin.

Balzac and Secret Societies

One theme that comes up repeatedly in Balzac (as it does in other XIXth century novels) is that the world is controlled by secret conspiratorial groups who have the real power, while the politicians and bankers simply have the appearance of power. In the books, I’ve read recently, there three such underground groups.

First, in Le Père Goriot, the villain Vautrin (a.k,a. Collin or Trompe-le-Mort) is revealed to be the chief agent of the Société des dix mille, the Society of 10,000, a shadowy “association de hauts voleurs, de gens qui travaillent en grand, et ne se mêlent pas d’une affaire où il n’y a pas dix mille francs à gagner.” (association of master thieves, who undertake great works, and don’t get mixed up in any affair in which there isn’t 10,000 francs to be gained.)

Vautrin, we are assured, albeit an inhabitant of a dump of a boarding house, has immense sums at his disposal. He has created his own secret police and keeps his vast connections in a state of impenetrable mystery. He uses his funds to finance all kinds of criminal activity, waging a constant war on society.

Second, the three novellas of the Histoire des Treize posits a group of thirty men, including criminals, military men, and society dandies, who work the levers of society to. Among other things, they invade a Spanish nunnery (La Duchesse de Langeais), assassinate several busybodies (Ferragus), and raid a private home (La Fille aux yeux d’or). There seems to be no obstacle in terms of money or the ability to lean on bureaucrats. Balzac hints at a far greater deeds than we see in the novellas.

Balzac’s description of the Treize hints at a society of supermen:

“Treize hommes également frappés du même sentiment, tous doués d’une assez grande énergie pour être fidèles à la même pensée, assez probes pour ne point se trahir, alors même que leurs intérêts se trouvaient opposés, assez profondément politiques pour dissimuler les liens sacrés qui les unissaient, assez forts pour se mettre au-dessus de toutes lois, assez hardis pour tout entreprendre, et assez heureux pour avoir presque toujours réussi dans leurs desseins.”
(Thirty men equally struck by the same sentiment, all endowed with enough energy to be faithful to the same idea, upright enough to in no way betray it, even when their own interests are opposed, deeply politic enough to hide the sacred bonds that united them, strong enough to put them above all laws, bold enough to ubdertake anything, and fortunate enough to almost always have succeeded in their plans.)

This reminds me of what “secret clubs” (no girlz allowed!) of my boyhppd. In real life, Balzac himself established a sort of literary free-masonry called “le Cheval Rouge”, to which a few of his friends joined including Théophile Gautier. It seems not to have gone much past being set up, like most boyish secret clubs.

Finally, in Gobseck, Balzac conjures up a cabal of moneylenders:

“

Nous sommes dans Paris une dizaine ainsi, tous rois silencieux et inconnus, les arbitres de vos destinées. La vie n’est-elle pas une machine à laquelle l’argent imprime le mouvement, L.’or est le spiritualisme de vos sociétés actuelles. Liés par le même intérêt, nous nous rassemblons à certains jours de la semaine au café Thémis, près du Pont-Neuf.
(In Paris, we are made up of around ten men, silent and unknown, the arbiters of your destinies. Isn’t life a machine that money puts in motion. Gold is the spiritualism of your current societies Bound by the same interests, we get together on certain days of the week at the café Thémis, near the Pont-Neuf.)

Note the name Themis, the Greek goddess of law and justice.

In other words, all the machinations of the Parisian economy are secretly guided by thus group of about ten, acting well out of the limelight. This groups knows all the financial secrets of each family. For Balzac, who was a constant debtor and a foolish speculator, the thought of such a cabal might be a paranoid comfort.

And the motivation? “Comme moi, tous mes confrères ont joui de tout, se sont rassasiés de tout, et sont arrivés à n’aimer le pouvoir et l’argent que pour le pouvoir et l’argent même.” (Like me, all my colleagues have enjoyed everything, have sated themselves with everything, and have ended up loving power and money for the sake of power and money themselves.) In other words, the brotherhood has, like Gobseck, left off love and family, and become monomaniac.

In some ways this is a religious society, dedicated to the spiritualism of gold, whose self-denying but powerful priests they are.

Reading and the Internet

I've been reading almost all the French books for the Balzac–Zola project on a computer screen. More specifically, using texts available primarily on Wikisource. That strikes people as odd, unpleasant, even sacrilegious. but I have my reasons.

One is that I can snip sentences with word I don't fully understand and use them on my other blog on French vocabulary here. That's both faster and far more accurate.

Second, and I'll discuss this at some later post, I use a program called Lingro, so that I can instantly click on an unfamiliar word (and there are lots of them in realist fiction) and. in many cases, get an immediate definition in English. If that doesn't work, i have bookmarks on my browser to visit several good French -English dictionaries or online French dictionaries. Otherwise, i would either stop reading entirely to seek a dictionary or pretend that I know –kind of – what a taillis or an essaim is, and push on, both unacceptable.

But the biggest bonus in being online while reading is the instant access to information through Google and/or Wikipedia, a virtual bookshelf that deepens the reading immensely without interrupting it much. For example, when a character in Paris travels from the Chausée d'Antin to Saint-Sulpice, I can see precisely where they are on the map.

But even better is access to background material for cultural references casually thrown off by the author. Hera are two examples from Père Goriot, which I am reading currently.

When Eugène, the hero, gets invited to dine at the house of his cousin, the Vicomtesse de Beauséant, he has to control his amazement at the knavish dinner laid out for the three of them.

Monsieur de Beauséant, semblable à beaucoup de gens blasés, n’avait plus guère d’autres plaisirs que ceux de la bonne chère ; il était en fait de gourmandise de l’école de Louis XVIII et du duc d’Escars.

(Monsieur de Beauséant, like many blasé people, had scarcely any pleasure other than fine dining; in respect to gourmandizing, he was of school of Louis XVIII and the duc d’Escars.)

Louis XVIII I know about a little, along with the Bourbon restoration, and am not surprised to find him a devoté of the table. But the duc d’Escars and gourmandizing? Time to Google. A little reseaching gets us to the following anecdote from an English translation of The Science of Good Living by the famous gastronome Brillat-Savarin.
here .

Louis XVIII. invented a dish called Truffes a la purée d'ortolans. The happy few who tasted this dish, as concocted by the royal hand of Louis himself, described it as the very perfection of the culinary art. The Duc d'Escars was sent for one day by his royal master, for the purpose of assisting in the preparation of a glorious dish of Truffes a la purée d'ortolans; and their joint efforts being more than usually successful, the happy friends sat down to Truffes a la purée d'ortolans for ten, the whole of which they caused to disappear between them, and then each retired to rest, triumphing in the success of their happy toils. In the middle of the night, however, the Duc d'Escars suddenly awoke, and found himself alarmingly indisposed. He rang the bells of his apartment, when his servant came in, and his physicians were sent for; but they were of no avail, for he was dying of a surfeit. In his last moments he caused some of his attendants to go and inquire whether his majesty was not suffering in a similar manner with himself, but they found him sleeping soundly and quietly. In the morning, when the king was informed of the sad catastrophe of his faithful friend and servant, he exclaimed, "Ah, I told him I had the better digestion of the two."

Perfect– that indeed is gourmandizing, and this story was still current with Balzac and must have happened only a few years before the events of the novel. It adds a richness that a footnote could never do.

A litte bit later, Delphine de Nucingen invites the hero to accompany her to her box at the opera, since she had heard he likes Italian opera so much. She writes, "Nous aurons samedi la Fodor et Pellegrini, je suis sûre alors que vous ne me refuserez pas." (Saturday we wick have la Fodor and Pellegrini, I am sure you won't urn me down.
"

Some famous singers I supposed. I know that la Pasta and la Malibran are big at the time, but these two? A little digging gets me to an online edition of Stendhal's Life of Rossini, and viola!

Of la Fodor, who was the French originator of rôles written by Donizetti and Rossini, Stendhal writes:

madame Fodor ne pouvant pas faire cette cavatine belle, elle la faisait riche. Elle accablait de roulades et d'ornements supérieurement exécutés, les inspirations du maestro, et parvenait à les faire oublier. Voilà un joli triomphe! Rossini, s'il l'avait entendue, lui aurait répété ce qu'il dit au célèbre Velluti, lors de la première représentation de l'Aureliano in Palmira (Milan 1814): Non conosco più le mie arie. Je ne reconnais plus ma musique."

(Madame Fodor, unable to make this cavatina beautiful, made it rich. She overwhelmed the inspirations of the maestro with trills and ornaments masterfully executed, and succeeded in making us forget the original. There wast a pretty triumph ! Rossini, had her heard it, would have repeated to her what he said to the famous Velluti, aftertax premiere of Aureliano in Palmyra (Milan 1814) "I no longer recognize my arias.")

Of "the excellent," Pellegrini,we learn of his beautiful bass voice singing a cavatina from La Cenerentola "d'une manière délicieuse." We also learn that he started a school for Italian singing in Paris and that one of his pupils was la Fodor.

Discoveries like these and temptations (I had to force myself not to read on, at this time, in the Stendhal), are what make the relative discomfort of reading from my wide, bright iMac screen more of a pleasure than a pain. It slows down reading, but in a way that makes the novels all the richer.

Gobseck: Usurer or Capitalist?

Gobseck (first published in 1830) is a novella that glimpses into the life of a Parisian usurer. “Papa” Gobseck, whose origin is supposedly Dutch, with hints of Jewishness, is part of a gallery of desiccated old men in Balzac’s early fiction, along with Père Grandet and Père Goriot (all G’s!). Like Grandet, Gobseck is a brilliant calculating businessman, and like him a miser, though of different stripe, a man who combines probity and greed, cynical insight and avarice. And even a little generosity.

This is one of Balzac’s earliest peeks at the seamy side of Paris, the source of the money that floats the incessant consumption. While this book was published before the idea of a Comédie humaine, Balzac later tied it in to the one of the plot lines of Père Goriot itself. The most prominent debtor caught by the usurer is the Countess de Réstaud, Goriot’s daughter, who is supporting the extravagance of her lover, Maxime de Trailles hat dandy appears in the apartment of the moneylender, presenting a letter of credit from his mistress.

Le premier billet, valeur de mille francs présentée par un jeune homme, beau fils à gilets pailletés, à lorgnon, à tilbury, cheval anglais, etc., était signé par l’une des plus jolies femmes de Paris, mariée à quelque riche propriétaire, un comte.

(The first promissory note, valued at a thousand francs, presented by a young man, handsome youth with sequined vests, with a lorgnette, a tilbury, an English horse etc, was signed by one of the prettiest women in Paris, married to some rich landowner, a count.) We later see Goriot pay off one of the notes, from the outside in this eponymous novel, from the inside in Gobseck.

The man plot of the novella involves the financial craft with which the dying count of Réstaud, in cooperation with narrator, a lawyer, and Gobseck, manages to keep his fortune out of the hands of his wife and is lover. The financial trickery, as that in Eugénie Grandet, is suitably hard to follow. But it is significant that it is money and not love that drive the plot of the novella.



What Balzac is the great master of, the innovator in, is in his hard-nosed attitude to money and its importance as the engine of Paris society. And Gobseck, who understands all of this, can philosophize about it. The narrator outlines Gobseck's credo to the Count:

Le papa Gobseck', repris-je, 'est intimement convaincu d’un principe qui domine sa conduite. Selon lui, l’argent est une marchandise que l’on peut, en toute sûreté de conscience, vendre cher ou bon marché, suivant les cas. Un capitaliste est à ses yeux un homme qui entre, par le fort denier qu’il réclame de son argent, comme associé par anticipation dans les entreprises et les spéculations lucratives. A part ses principes financiers et ses observations philosophiques sur la nature humaine qui lui permettent de se conduire en apparence comme un usurier, je suis intimement persuadé que, sorti de ses affaires, il est l’homme le plus délicat et le plus probe qu’il y ait à Paris.

“Papa Gobseck,” I began, “is intimately convinced of the truth of the principle which he takes for a rule of life. In his opinion, money is a commodity which you may sell cheap or dear, according to circumstances, with a clear conscience. A capitalist, by charging a high rate of interest, becomes in his eyes a secured partner by anticipation. Apart from the peculiar philosophical views of human nature and financial principles, which enable him to behave like a usurer, I am fully persuaded that, out of his business, he is the most loyal and upright soul in Paris.”

Gobseck is a combination of the old moneylender and the new investor, usurer and capitalist, in just the time when the lines were getting fuzzy. While his contemporaries were writing about Renaissance princes, amorous poets, and the loves of counts and marquises, Balzac started writing about one of the stark realities that dominated his life (and everyone's life), money.

V.S. Pritchett’s Balzac Biography

Published in 1974. Balzac, by the British critic and short-story writer V.S. Pritchett, became the standard English-language biography. The book is lavishly illustrated (with a score of expensive color plates) and relatively lively. It is, however, a disappointment.

Literary biographies are a strange breed. What matters with Balzac, what sets him apart, is the intense liveliness of his characters and his descriptions. After centuries of vague generalities and universalities in French literature, he leads into a world that is intensely detailed and palpable. But how he lived his life has a tangential relationship to his work. Yes, the facts of his life have bearing in the great books, but even if they didn’t. The books stand on their own.

This is particularly true of the obsessive, decades-long affair with Mme Hanska, the Polish/Ukrainian countess that Balzac eventually marries shortly before his death. This takes up an inordinate part of the biography. And one suspects it is partly because Balzac’s copious letters to Hanska survive. They are quoted at length in Pritchett’s biography, and I must say that I find them a lot less interesting than the occasional passage from Père Goriot or La Peau de Chagrin. In his fiction, Balzac is magical, in his correspondence, well, he is a letter-writer.

Mme. Hanska endless jealousy, Balzac’s obsession with her and other older ladies, the squabbling about money, his careless exploitation of others have an untidy repetitive narrative structure. It’s true that the infatuation with women higher in rank and fortune, the wastefulness, the manic midnight labors, the ambition to make it Parisian society are all elements dome the life that are translated into his novels. But the interest is the novels not in the life – people of far less talent can and did live similar vices, but they didn’t write a Comédie humaine.

It’s clear that Balzac was at turns charming and insufferable. Looked at objectively, he seems like a porky, vainglorious spendthrift and deadbeat, leaving a wake of debt and disappointment for everyone but his readers, But in the end, he could have lived the life of modest respectability and wedded fidelity without affecting the value of his work.

There are a few things that are nevertheless illuminating for the works. His family’s background as drapers meshes nicely with his obsession with cloth and clothing. His fascination collecting bric-à-brac is dramatized in books like Gobseck and La Peau de chagrin, as well in the detailed interiors of the rest of his fiction. His endless interest in money though he was himself a disastrous investor) is reflected in a way that the Romantics and the writers of social novels (Sand, Constant) would consider vulgar.

So the balance is out of whack. Pritchett quotes liberally from the early novels, but has little to say about le Cousin Pons and La Cousine Bette, and not much more about Les Illusions Perdus There’s almost nothing about his relationships with the politics or the literary movements of his time. And what an exciting time it was: the theaters were filled with riches, social classes were being redefined with astonishing speeds, riches were available and conspicuously so, the Industrial Revolution and railroads were changing life across Europe, writers (Lamartine, Hugo, Mérimée were suddenly important political figures, and the amazing sequence of ancien régime, Revolution, Empire, Restoration, and the July Monarchy made the particulars of everyone’s life ever more archeologically and sociologically interesting.

In the end, it’s the love affairs of Rastignac, the shady dealings of Vautrin, and the aspirations of Rubempré that matter, not those of their creator. Maybe no biography could reflect it, but Pritchett’s surely does not.

Dumas père, La Reine Margot (1848)

I hadn’t read any of Dumas’s novels since I was in high school, when I read them voraciously. So, how would I react to them after having read so widely in modern literature and developed (I hope) pretty sophisticated literary tastes? After all, Dumas is dismissed as a writer of silly action novels, written in factory circumstances with a team of co-writers and researchers.

Well, based on rereading La Reine Margot, I still think Dumas is terrific and look forward to rereading more. La Reine Margot is, I believe, the most perfect historical novel ever. Why?

1. It’s about an amazing piece of history, starting with the Saint Bartholomew massacre of Huguenots to the death of Charles IX and the accession of Henri III, his brother and the last of the Valois dynasty. Even more important is a duel of wits between Catherine De’ Medici, that fascinating mother of three kings, all of whom she survived, and the future Henri IB, at that point titular King of Navarre and famous for his cleverness at avoiding death. Finally, there is the beautiful and passionate Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of Charles IX and the daughter of Catherine De' Medici, and the wife of Henri de Navarre. While she pursues love elsewhere, she works with her husband to foil her mother’s attempts to have him killed.

2. It’s actually pretty historically accurate as far as U can tell. Marguerite’s lover de Mole was not a Huguenot who escapes the massacre in her bedchamber as the novel has it, bur rather himself a bigoted Catholic. On the other and, Marguerite did hide another Huguenot during the riots. There is no proof that Catherine mistakenly killed her own son by poison, but there certainly was a rumor to that effect. The chronology of the novel is handled “creatively’ at points.

3. Nevertheless, much of the novel is based on fact. Unlike most historical novels, all of the characters of any significance (except for a few servants) and there are almost dozen of them) are real historical figures. And their characters are very much in keeping with the real ones, as far as I can tell the weak-wiled and treacherous Duke of Alençon, for example, another son of Catherine, was exactly that on real life.

4. The structure of the novel is perfection. Although it involves many characters and many actions, and even though it is constrained, for the most part, by historical events, it ha san amazingly centered and coherent, with no digressions and no history lesson. All of the action takes place within Paris, and much of it within the walls of the Louvre. The fates of each of the characters are spelled out, not left hanging.

5. True, the novel has the melodramatic and Gothic trappings you’d expect: conspiracies, torture chambers, secret passages, trap doors, ambushes, disguises, poisoned books and poisoned lipstick. But it also has subtle verbal exchanges, some real comedy, and multi=dimensional characters., with dialog that is the opposite of bombast.

6. Dumas is an excellent dramatist. And he had a score of successful dramas and comedies. His first success was as in a theater, with a play about Henri III, a play as ground-breaking as Hugo's more famous Hernani. It was almost twenty years later that he published the Three Musketeers and obtained fame as a novel, his second career. As a dramatist, Dumas knows how to set up a scene, and there are dozens of exciting ones. These include the night of the massacre, nighttime love assignations, divinations, escapes, court balls, and, above all, an exciting hunt where Navarre saves the life of Charles X by killing a wild boar that was about to finish the king off. Even quiet scenes, such as Charles and Henri's visit to Charles’ mistress, where he shows off the illegitimate (and only) son, making Navarre vow to protect it.

7. The unity extends to a smoothness of style that presents the narrative with a single voice. Dumas may have written collaboratively, but there’s no doubt who is in control here.

L a Reine Margot is a treasure, It’s escapists, yes, but it’s in no way is it a less artistic creation than any of the other books I have read.

Gautier, "Une Nuit de Cléopâtre" (1838)

Yet another Orientalist fantasy, this short tale is more of an erotic prose poem than anything else. The burden is the story of a young Egyptian, a super-manly hunter of lions in the desert, who falls in love with the unapproachable Cleopatra. As she gets rowed down the Nile, bored and hot, he follows in a small reed boat. When she reaches one of her palaces, he follows, then shoots a mysterious love letter (attached to an arrow) into her quarters, one that inspires her erotic dreams. The next day, hl surprises her undressed in her outdoor bath. sort of like Actaeon and Diana, She stops her eunuchs from stabbing him, and offers to save his life for an amorous night before she has him killed.

"J’aurais le droit de te faire tuer sur-le-champ ; mais tu me dis que tu m’aimes, je te ferai tuer demain.
(I would have the right to have you killed on the spot; but you tell me that you love me, I'll have you killed tomorrow.)

Again with the killing of wild felines in the desert!

The decadent luxury of the desert is celebrated, the heated sensuality, the fascination with despotism, a sexually voracious woman – all typical of 19th century France.

The whole story is based on synesthesia.

First, the Nile is painted like Romantic landscape:

Une brume ardente et rousse fumait à l’horizon incendié.
(A burning, reddish mist smoked in the flaming horizon.)

des marnes verdâtres,des ocres roux, des tufs d’un blanc farineux.
(greenish shale, the red clay. the tufts of floury white.)

Then, the exotic costumes of the characters are detailed:

son corps, couvert de plumes imbriquées et peintes de différents émaux, enveloppait le sommet du crâne
(his body [of the bird on Cleo's hat]. covered with overlapping of variously enameled, enveloped the top of her skull.)

C’était un homme basané, fauve comme du bronze neuf, avec des luisants bleuâtres et miroitants.
(He was a swarthy man, tawny like fnew bronze, with shimmering blueish glow)

And the sounds:

Le seul bruit qu’on entendît, c’était le chuchotement et les rires étouffés des crocodiles pâmés de chaleur qui se vautraient dans les joncs du fleuve.
(The only noise that could be heard was the whispering and the strangled laughter of the crocodiles, swooning from the heat, wallowing in the reeds of the river.)

You've got to love those swooning, laughting crocs.

And the smells and sense of touch:

l’on ne respire pour parfum que l’odeur acre du naphte et du bitume qui bout dans les chaudières des embaumeurs.
The only perfume you could breathe in was the bitter odor of naphtha and of asphalt which boiled in the embalmers' cauldrons.

vastes jardins remplis de mimosas, de caroubiers, d’aloès, de citronniers, de pommiers persiques, dont la fraîcheur luxuriante faisait un délicieux contraste avec l’aridité des environs
(vast gardens filled with mimosas, carob-trees, aloes, citrus trees, peach trees, whose luxurious coolness made for a delicious contest with the aridity of the surroundings)

Gautier deserves his reputation as the father of the Decadent movement. His perfumed, overheated prose would be amplified through the century.

(Picture = Delacroix, Cléopârew et le Paysan")

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.

Le Salon jaune (La Fortune des Rougon)

While Antoine burns with jealousy for the bourgeois high life of his half-brother Pierre and sister-in-law, the Rougons themselves, once they retire from the olive oil business, find themselves hard pressed to keep up the middle-class lifestyle.

As a result, they rent an apartment at the edge of the artisan quarter, one that looks out at the houses of the rich. One especially, that of the local receveur particulier (a financial sinecure) is the obsession of Félicité Rougon, who looks longingly out her window as at that wealthy man’s house, the target of her ambitions. And in the end, that fellow is shot by friendly fire during the rebellion, and Pierre succeeds to his office and place in society.

The Rougons become the hosts of the salon of the town’s reactionaries. It’s quite a menagerie of old cranks: Legitimists, Orleanists, Bonapartists, anything but Republicans. But it is the rather threadbare yellow living room, “le salon jaune” that troubles them above all.

The “salon jaune” is a dismal haunt of petty bourgeois aspiration. Félicité has done what she could with the apartment, but with limited money there was little to do. In terms of improving it.

Le salon avait ainsi pris une étrange couleur jaune qui l’emplissait d’un jour faux et aveuglant ; le meuble, le papier, les rideaux de fenêtre étaient jaunes ; le tapis et jusqu’aux marbres du guéridon et des consoles tiraient eux-mêmes sur le jaune.”

(The living room had thus taken on a strange yellow color which filled with a false and blinding daylight; the furniture, the wallpaper, the felt curtains were yellow; the carpet, even the marble of the table and credenza tool on the yellow tint.”

This shabby room, with worn upholstery and fly-specks on the lampshade, is nevertheless the place where the fortune of the Rougons is born. And the co-conspirators and self-absorbed fools are as shabby as the surroundings. At one point, Félicité invites her physician son, Pascal, hoping to help him make connections to expand his practice.

For Pascal, the doctor and scientist, the whole human menagerie in the salon has scientific interest, in that it reveals the bestiality of human behavior.

La première fois, il fut stupéfait du degré d’imbécillité auquel un homme bien portant peut descendre. Les anciens marchands d’huile et d’amandes, le marquis et le commandant eux-mêmes lui parurent des animaux curieux qu’il n’avait pas eu jusque-là l’occasion d’étudier.

(The first time [he visited the salon], he was stupefied by the degree of imbecility to which a healthy man could descend to. The old oil merchants and almond merchants. The marquis and the commander struck him as strange animals he hadn’t until then had the chance to study.)


As the only objective observer in the novel, he brings the same curiosity to his own family.

Pascal fixait un regard pénétrant sur la folle, sur son père, sur son oncle ; l’égoïsme du savant l’emportait ; il étudiait cette mère et ces fils, avec l’attention d’un naturaliste surprenant les métamorphoses d’un insecte.

(Pascal fixed a penetrating look at the mad woman, on his father, on his uncle; the egoism of the scientist carried him away; he studied that mother and those sons, with the attention of a naturalist coming upon the metamorphoses of an insect.”

Pascal like Zola contemplates the various branches of the Rougon-Macquart, sees the same patterns, the same characteristics, the appetites pop up different variations as the same plant stock varies in different soil, sun, and water conditions.

There’s no doubt that Zola identifies with Pascal, the country doctor, who will get his own novel in the series. It is the role of the naturalist, the scientific observer that Zola aspires to, and like Pascal, he is fascinated with the behaviors of his characters. The “science” of literary naturalism is pretty bogus; Zola is great because of his art as a describer and a storyteller. Like Pascal, who risks his life treating the rebels without actually signing up with them, and who is more eager to treat the poor than make the bourgeois career his mother pushes him to, at heart a humanitarian as much as a scientist.

Antoine Macquart

I find the master touch in Zola’s Fortune des Rougon is the portrait of Antoine Macquart, the son of a poacher, and the stepbrother of the paterfamilias of the Rougon family, Pierre Rougon. Rougon has managed to take control of their mother’s fortune, while Antoine has been serving in the Napoleonic army (if serving described the far-behind-the-front shirking). Much of the novel’s story springs from the hatred and resentment of the aggrieved Antoine toward his bourgeois brother. I almost wrote that Antoine is working-class, but working is something his character does virtually none of.

Antoine is a truly unique character – a monster of bile, laziness, and narcissism. He has enough charm to marry a workhorse of a woman who is eager to work several jobs to allow him to spend his days lounging in cafés and lolling about time. He harasses the Rougons to force them to buy him off, at least in small measures. He forces his children to hand over their meager earning to support his leisure, while complaining constantly that they are eating him out of house and home.

He latches onto Republicanism as a way to vent his spleen. While his nephew Silvère is attached to Republicanism from sheer and naïve Utopianism, Antoine has dreams of a communist state where everyone works to support his luxuries. In origin, his political fervor is mostly a rhetorical stick to beat his stepbrother and his wife with, as three are among the leaders of the reactionary forces in town– it is clear that he has no real interest in politics, per se. He uses his status as a revolutionary, however, to avoid paying his café tab – the proprietor is too intimidated.

In the end, when the Revolution comes to Plassans, albeit temporary, he seizes power. He is unable, however, to get his hands on his stepbrother, who outwits and imprisons him. Finally, in return for a small sum of money, he abets Rougon is setting up his followers into an ambush, a bloodletting, establishing Rougon as the town’s savior.

All this is pretty mean, no doubt; but there’s also a humor in the character portrayal that makes Antoine the one truly fascinating character in the book. “Il lui semblait tout naturel qu’on l’entretînt, comme une fille, à vautrer ses paresses sur les banquettes d’un estaminet.” (It seemed to him only natural that he be kept, like a woman, to wallow in his laziness on the bench of a café.) While his son slaves away at his carpenter’s apprenticeship, he can look across the street to see his father “sugaring his demitasse”, with the wages of the boy.

Antoine’s greatest moment comes when he is imprisoned in the bath chamber of the Mayor’s palace. At first livid, he is seduced by the sampling of bourgeois luxury he finds in his “cell”, the soaps and the scents. “Il lorgnait le lavabo, pris d’une grande envie d’aller se laver les mains avec une certaine poudre de savon contenue dans une boîte de cristal. Macquart, comme tous les fainéants qu’une femme ou leurs enfants nourrissent, avait des goûts de coiffeur." (He examined the washstand, taken by a great desire to wash his hand with a certain soap powder contained in a crystal box. Macquart, like all ne’er-do-wells nourished by wife or children, had the tastes of a hairdresser.”) He talks revolution, but really wants to be a dandy.

Macquart who can “savoure sa fainéantise” (savors his slacking off) , is a piece of Zola’s even-handed condemnation of all political parties. His self-serving love of revolution, is contrasted with a parade of stupidity and self-seeking among the bourgeoisie, including the Rougons. In every case Except for the deluded troop and peasants and workers whose dreams are shattered by a volley from a regular army regiment, politics is a charade, a cover for self-seeking. Macquart’s narcissism is only a more transiently silly version of what is universal.