Balzac, Le Médecin de campagne (1833)

This unusual Utopian novella is set in the mountains around Grenoble, where a country doctor has taken a community mired in poverty, congenital mental disease, and backwardness and changed it into a thriving and happy town. In part, it is a parable of capitalism, and for me, this the best part of the book.

The effort to upgrade the valley starts with the building of a feeder road, with the establishment of a native basket-making industry, with the improvement of farms, crops, and livestock. We see the steady arrival of blacksmiths, cart makers, masons, an inn, a brickworks, and so on. Steady. decent-paying employment, improved food, and the opportunity to do more than subsistence farming has a large impact on the mental health of community.

The story is carried forth by a series of first-person narratives -- from the doctor himself, from the military man who comes to visits hum, from a old soldier-storyteller who tells tales of crime and the Napoleonic Wars, and so on. What is unusual is that there is no love story, save fondly remembered affairs in the far past. There is a lot of didactic discussion about economy, society, and religion.

At one point, the doctor barrettes his own background -- and this story has a more typical Balzacian shape. It's s the story of a poor medical student, a kind mistress, an illegitimate child, an inheritance, and the student's typical Balzac entry into fast company.

J'eus de ces passions éphémères qui sont la honte des salons de Paris, où chacun va cherchant un amour vrai, se blase à sa poursuite, tombe dans un libertinage de bon ton

I had those ephemeral passions which are the shame of the salons of Paris, where everyone goes searching for a true love, grows blasé from his pursuit, falls back into a high-class libertinism.

He is sobered by the death of first his former mistress then her child. After other disappointments, he finds religion, goes back to practicing medicine and devotes himself to saving this backward community, as far as possible from the whirl of Paris. What little he retains of his fortune, he invests in helping the community and lives himself a Spartan life. On his death, he is reverenced as a saint.

When Balzac turns to the ins-and-out of business, he is always compelling. The political and moral philosophy is a hard slog, however.

Balzac's Les Chouans

Les Chouans (1829) is Balzac;s first real novel; it is about one of the numerous rebellions against the post-revolutionary French Republic in Brittany. The Chouans, named after the chouette (owl) whose call they use a signal, are at the same time Royalist, very Catholic, and very savage.

While the principal character, the Marquis de Montauran, an aristocrat, could the hero of a sentimental novel, his followers are ready to murder, rape, and torture with the utmost cruelty, all encouraged by priests, who see the Revolution and its troops as Satanic.

In fact, what the Chouans resemble, more than anything, are the wild Indians of the New World, to whom Balzac openly likens them:

Marche-à-terre, qui semblait posséder le don de voir dans l’obscurité, ou dont les sens continuellement en mouvement devaient avoir acquis la finesse de ceux des Sauvages, avait entrevu Corentin ; comme un chien bien dressé, peut-être l’avait-il senti.

Marche-à-terre [a Chouan guerilla], who seemed to have the gift of seeing in the dark, or whose continually active senses had to have acquired the keenness of the Savages, had glimpsed Corentin; like a well trained dog, maybe he had sniffed him out.

The novel is in part an homage to James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, published just three years before, and translated rapidly into French. As with Les Chouans, the Cooper novel is a tale from recent history of the clash of cultures, of organized government troops against daring irregulars, built around a central romance inn the Walter Scott vein between a man and woman on opposite sides.

This is a beginner's effort, and quire distant from the Balzac of La Peau de chagrin so soon to be published (1831). In its unevenness it resembles the occasionally exciting and sometimes wooden Last of the Mohicans. It is at its best in describing the details of peasant life in Brittany, where Balzac has made a tour before writing the book. His close observation of domestic life and the landscape outshines the intrigue.

Again like Scott, Mérimée, Hugo, and Cooper, like all Romantics, it gets its energy from the savagery so close-at-hand and so recent. For the French readers, this was like have Chateaubriand North American savages set down only 200 miles from Paris. Pretty soon, Balzac will discover the savages are in the back streets and the drawing rooms of Paris itself.

Balzac, Le Message (1832)

In this novella, the impecunious narrator (clearly a pretty undisguised Balzac himself), climbs onto the impériale, the top, outside seats on a couch heading into the countryside. He is joined by another young blade and they soon fall into an intimacy, after revealing that they both are romancing older, married women.

Enfin, après avoir fait nos maîtresses jeunes, charmantes, dévouées, comtesses, pleines de goût, spirituelles, fines ; après leur avoir donné de jolis pieds, une peau satinée et même doucement parfumée, nous nous avouâmes, lui, que madame une telle avait trente-huit ans, et moi, de mon côté, que j’adorais une quadragénaire.

Finally, after having made our mistresses as young, charming, dedicated, countess, tasteful, witty, fine, after giving them pretty feet, smooth skin and even gently perfumed, we confessed – he, that his Madame X was thirty-eight years old, and I, for my part, loved a forty-year old.

The bonding, based on shared tastes, is immediate.

Suddenly, as the coach nears his destination, it overturns, and as the other man leaps in impatience jumps from the impériale, he is crushed. On his deathbed, he makes the narrator promise to bring his dying message to the mistress he was planning to visit, including returning compromising letters. The narrator also brings a lock cut from the young man’s hair.

He arrives, meets the cuckolded husband, the ravishing wife. E eventually, in a dream-like conversation when she enters his bedroom at night and wakes him, he delivers his friends’ last message, along with the letter, and the lock of hair. The woman secretly managed to give a welcome sum of money to the narrator inn thanks for his deed.

The story itself simple and, for Balzac, the characters just sketched. But the autobiographical links are obvious: Balzac was forever having affair with older married women, exploiting them financially, often several at the same time, The praise of women old enough to be their mothers by young lovers is the high point of the story, and the theme that persists through his fiction (and life).

Balzac, La Bourse (1832)

This urban fairy tale is a pretty minor Balzac novella. Based as it is on a misunderstanding (she steals his purse, he thinks she’s a thief, but she only took it to embroider it). it reads more like Maupassant’s “La Parure” without the keen edge or rather like O. Henry's “Gift of the Magi”, the sentimental American version of Maupassant/

The hero, Hippolyte Schinner, is a newly fashionable painter, not unlike the hero of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, written a few years earlier. The artist, who is clearly a projection of Balzac, is a tireless late night worker, breathing life into portraits and landscapes through the reproduction of carefully observed detail.

When he visits the apartment of the heroine, the daughter, the only child of am impoverished widow, he looks on to what no painter of that time would yet portray, a kind of genteel squalor.

Aucun peintre de mœurs n’a osé nous initier, par pudeur peut-être, aux intérieurs vraiment curieux de certaines existences parisiennes, au secret de ces habitations d’où sortent de si fraîches, de si élégantes toilettes, des femmes si brillantes qui, riches au dehors, laissent voir partout chez elles les signes d’une fortune équivoque.

(No painter of manners has dared to initiate us, perhaps from shame, into the truly curious interiors of certain Parisian existence, unto the secret of these dwellings ––from which women leave so fresh, so dolled up, so brilliant on the outside –– that inside betray everywhere a precarious financial situation.)

With a painter’s eye, the artist eyes everything (cracks, stains, dust, junked), yet we are told, decently, on the sly. With every detail of decay lovingly catalogued, this is the radical innovation of Balzac – to see the grimy, shoddy world with the idea of a painter is something I can’t imagine any writer more than vaguely sketching squalor before him.

Three other notes:

• The mother is a widow of a Napoleon-era hero, and her claims for a pension were denied after the Bourbon Restoration. It’s no coincidence that after the Revolution of 1830, here and elsewhere, Balzac starts writing with real sympathy for Napoleonic officers and their widows (see Une double Famille).
• Some of the same elements here as with La Maison du chat-qui-pelote. Schinner’s pals, the other artists, lead him to mistrust the mother and daughter, as in the earlier story they make fun of and then reject the innocent, unsophisticated new bride. We don’t see here what happens after the marriage; the story ends with the proposal.
• Like so many Balzac heroes, Schinner – with his Alsatian surname –– is an outsider who is in the process of conquering Paris by dint of genius and hard work. But unlike his counterpart in chat-qui-pelote and unlike a lot of Balzac heroes, he has no pretence at nobility – he is a bastard, the son of the daughter of an Alsatian farmer, seduced by a rich man – not even, it seems, a nobleman.

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.

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 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.

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.

The moral dimension of interior decoration

In Balzac, decor is critical.

“S’il est vrai, d’après un adage, qu’on puisse juger une femme en voyant la porte de sa maison, les appartements doivent traduire son esprit avec encore plus de fidélité.” (If it is true, as the adage says, that you can judge a woman by seeing the door of her house, the rooms inside would have to translate her spirit even more faithfully.

One of the key moments of Balzac’s novella Une double Famille comes when de Granville, preoccupied by the work of a young magistrate, hands over the responsibility for decorating his new Paris house to his bride, the “premières acquisitions de ménage, source de tant de plaisirs et de souvenirs pour les jeunes femmes” (the first household purchases, source of so many pleasures and memories for young women.)

What he discovers, when finally given a tour of the new decor, is for him a horrible insight into his wife’s true character:

"Soit que madame de Granville eût accordé sa confiance à des tapissiers sans goût, soit qu’elle eût inscrit son propre caractère dans un monde de choses ordonné par elle, le jeune magistrat fut surpris de la sécheresse et de la froide solennité qui régnaient dans ses appartements : il n’y aperçut rien de gracieux, tout y était discord, rien ne récréait les yeux.

(Whether Madame de Granville had placed her confidence in upholsters without taste, or she had inscribed her own character in the world of things that she ordered, the young magistrate was surprised by the dryness and the cold solemnity that reigned on his lodgings; there was nothing gracious, all was discord, nothing pleased the eyes.)

And then comes the catalog of tasteless choices, betraying rectitude and pettiness. In the antechamber, the walls are too somber, and the very dark green velvet on the furniture makes it cheerless, rather than welcoming. As Balzac notes, the antechamber is a kind of preface to the character of the inhabitants, and the first impression is a lasting one. The main hall, in faded gold and white, was in fashion in the days of Louis XV (a hundred years before). The details of the furnishings are not only unfashionable, they are themselves a grab-bag of different styles from different periods. The retailers, having devines the character of the client, has unloaded all their unfashionable claptrap on her.

But, it is made clear, this is not just a lapse of good taste or the mistakes of a provincial, but a sign of a deep problem in character. “La dévotion porte à je ne sais quelle humilité fatigante qui n’exclut pas l’orgueil.” (Piety wears a kind of tiresome humility, which does not rule out sinful pride.)

Botched house decoration, especially when the money exists to do far better, is a mortal sin in Balzac’s eyes.

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.

Diving in

French literature of the nineteenth century grabbed me early and never let go. At 14 or 15, I stumbled upon Dumas père and devoured book after book, from the obvious (The Three Musketeers and Monte-Cristo) to the off-the-beaten track (Agénor de Mauléon and Le Chevalier de Maison-Rouge). I even owned and leafed through an abridged paperback translation of his Dictionary of Cooking, mostly for the anecdotes.

I read the plays and novels of Hugo, devoured the few plays of Rostand, and then started reading Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Huysmans, and Zola – all of them in English (which I will get to later). Each author was a revelation, and there were so many titles on the shelf!

In college, an English and drama major, I took courses in French Renaissance and 18th century literature. I wrote an undergraduate thesis about the much-maligned and obscenely prolific 19th century playwright Eugène Scribe, master of the so-called "Well-Made Play". I translated and directed one of his plays: La Cameraderie (translated as The Inner Circle).

As a graduate student, I wrote about sex, money, and objects in comedy, and devoured all kinds of plays, including those of 19th century Frenchmen like Sardou, Labiche, and Feydeau. I've had a career outside academia since I got my Ph.D., but I have continued to read a lot, and certainly have read French literature of all kinds.

Now I had a very good high school French program, and I speak the language not too terribly, I hope, and read it with ease. In high school, I plunged into Molière and Voltaire without too much difficulty, read diverse poems and plays. But in my self-satisfaction after cracking open s 19th century novel in the original was a real slap in the face.

In the first sentence of Balzac's Eugénie Grandet, two words immediately sent me to the dictionary – I know then and have remembered evert since — they were "lande" (moor) and "terne" (drab), words that a neoclassicist would choke before putting on paper. That was just a start. I spent more time buried in the dictionary than in the novella, with its loving descriptions of upholstery, grotesque characters and what they were wearing, the naming of dozens of flowers and birds, and the tools of the trade and architectural details — then I gave up I had learned the difference between knowing a language and knowing a language.

So here I am, many years later, and I have decided that now I really want to read this great corpus in the original with comprehension. It's a steep climb, I know well.

This blog will track my reading of this vast corpus of literature.The prose fiction primarily, but also the plays, poetry, and discursive writing (almost every famous author seems to have written at least one travel book or five). The project will be anchored by the two prolific giants in each half of the century of the century – Balzac and Zola, whose great novel cycles are the landmarks.

I know this is a ridiculous task. The number of titles written by Balzac number almost 100. Zola wrote over 30 long novels. Flaubert and Stendhal's works are a little more finite, true, nut then there are the others: endless works by Dumas (père) and his collaborators. Eugène Sue's giant novel cycles, scads of stories from Maupassant, hundreds of plays by Scribe and Sardou and their competitors, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, George Sand, Dumas fils, the Goncourts, Musset, Mérimée, Gautier, and on and on.

However Quixotic, that's my plan — and this blog is my report from the Front. Note also that there is a companion blog, which is dedicated to the problem of getting advanced vocabulary to stick.