Balzac's "Pierre Grassou” (1839)

This slight short story is centered on an amusing anecdote. The mediocre painter Pierre Grassou earns his bread, early in his career, by making copies of paintings by the Masters – Italian, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Later, an established portrait painter, he is brought to the private collection of his future father-in-law, an art loving bourgeois who made his fortune in manufacturing bottles. As it turns out, the whole collection, for which its owner has paid a small fortune over the years, is made up of the knock-off paintings that Grassou sold for next to nothing!

Balzac (like Zola) was at home in the contemporary art world, and this is one of several works (La Chat-qui-pelote, La Bourse, and La Vendetta, for example). It is most similar to La Chat-qui-pelote. Like that novellas it involves the marriage and courting of a daughter of the bourgeoisie by an artist. But is in almost every way its opposite.

The hero of Chat-qui-Pelote is portrayed as a handsome genius, at the forefront of his profession. By contrast, Pierre Grassou is generally considered a mediocrity, even by his fellow painters. Finally, he has some success at the Paris Salon with a mediocre, half-disguised copy of a Gerard Dow painted. That image of a condemned man getting his last haircut he has cleverly entitled “The toilette of a Chouan, condemned to death in 1891.” This painting of a Royalist hero about to be executed by the Revolution attracts the eyes of none other than Charles X and the Duke of Orléans, the latter of whom buys the painting. The implication is that the more advanced paintings of the better artists are beyond the king’s understanding. His reputation made.
Commissions follow. Grassou becomes a favorite portraitist of the bourgeoisie and his reputation only grows, as does his frugally managed nest egg.

(A further complication is that Grassou comes from Fougères in Brittany, in the center of Chouan country, and, not coincidentally, the site of Balzac 1826 novel Les Chouans, which got Balzac’s career started, and appealed to the Bourbon court.)

In any case, Grassou, unlike his brother painters (and unlike Balzac), manages his money, marries into the bottle makers’ family and a substantial dowry, and lives a life the opposite of Bohemian. His wife loves him dearly, but is rather plain in appearance. He has the good taste to appreciate his more avant-garde contemporaries, and gradually replaces the fakes in his father-in-law’s collection with their work, supporting them when they need money.

Being an artist in nineteenth century fiction means living a life of debt, mental anguish, alcohol, sex, and alternating feast or famine. The prudent Pierre Grassou is a notable exception.

Ce peintre, bon père et bon époux, ne peut cependant pas ôter de son cœur une fatale pensée : les artistes se moquent de lui, son nom est un terme de mépris dans les ateliers, les feuilletons ne s’occupent pas de ses ouvrages. Mais il travaille toujours, et il se porte à l’Académie où il entrera.
(However, this painter, a good father and a good spouse, could never remove a fatal thought from his heart: other artists make fun of him, his name is a term of scorn in the ateliers, the newspapers do not bother with his work. But he always has work, and he is on the path to the Academy, where he will be admitted.)

The de-Romanticization of Adultery: Emma Bovary and Renée Saccard

Zola’s La Curée was published in 1872, around 15 years after the notorious publication of Madame Bovary. It’s clear, in writing a novel centered on adultery, that Zola was playing off Flaubert’s work. Like Flaubert, Zola had to deal with censorship when the book started being published in a periodical.

There are some obvious differences, of course. Zola is dealing with the swank set in Paris and Flaubert with the humdrum provincial life of rural Normandy. And while Flaubert is documenting simple adultery, Zola compounds the act with quasi-incest (stepmother). After all, in the Paris of La Curée, garden-variety adultery is almost expected. Nevertheless, the stories are remarkably parallel.

The heroine of both books, Emma Bovary and Renée Saccard, were seen as scandalous in their day. Both women, restless and without responsibilities or direction in life, throw themselves into sensuality as an escape from boredom. They are in principle childless – Emma basically abandons hers, Renée loses hers to a miscarriage. At the same time as they are fooling around, as if to punish their unromantic husbands, they become fanatical consumers of luxury, far beyond what the household can afford, driving their husbands into bankruptcy (Bovary) or its brink (Saccard).

Both risk discovery by flaunting their all but public lovemaking. Their adultery should be obvious to their husbands, but one husband (Bovary) is too naïve, the other (Saccard) seems indifferent, deliberately look away for his own purposes. Both women are far more intense in their cravings than their more detached lovers. They eventually grow tired of that unrelenting neediness, in the end abandoning them.

Both novels skirt the edge of melodrama. Both heroines see their would-be tragic destiny foreshadowing in a visit to the theater. For Emma it is the crazed Lucia di Lammermoor that she projects herself onto. For Renée it is the incestuous Phèdre that she obsesses about, performed in the melodramatic style of the age.
When finally abandoned, Emma swallows arsenic. Instead of a swift and Romantic death, she suffers several days of severe and rather repulsive illness before she dies– a fate far from the pathos of the trashy novels Emma is addicted to.

For Renée, the act of self-destruction comes not at the end of the novel, but rather at the end of the first chapter. If Phèdre, who swallows poison to end her guilty life is tragic, Renée is simply bathetic. Her self-poisoning takes place in the sensual overload of the hothouse of the Saccard mansion. Feeling depressed and abandoned, she bites into the poison-milk-oozing “Tanghin de Madagascar”, and faints dead away, apparently dead. We later learn that she was quickly cured and that the dramatic gesture had no real impact. As in this case, when through the novel Renée tempts fate, fate does not seem very moved to do anything. In the end, she dies not of some jealous fury or headlong self-immolation, but rather of meningitis, a death dismissed in one sentence at the end of the book. The main interest is one who would pay off her outstanding debts. In both novels, the romantic passion is undermined by the very real question of who pays.

Money, which has no place in romantic fiction and very little in melodrama, is fatally important, far more than the sex, which would seem to be the main thene. Both ladies are lured into debt by fashion/cloth merchants, who tempt the ladies into extravagant debt that, in the end, has to be discharged by the husbands. Financial manipulators, whether on a provincial petty-bourgeois level or in the most spendthrift layer of Paris society, is the equivalent of the Furies or the Fates in these novels.

Hugo’s Bug-Jargal (1826)

Hugo’s first novel, Bug-Jargal, is striking, set in the Haitian slave evolution, It is very dismissive of both sides, The cruelty, greed, and entitlement of the white masters are not soft-pedaled; the black leaders of the slave revolt are shown as treacherous, foolish, and despotic. Both “civilization” and its opposite are portrayed as deeply evil.

Amidst all this is a strange central story of courtly honor. The white hero Leopold D'Auverney, nephew of a slaveholder, and the black hero, the one-time African prince Bug-Jargal, a rebel slave, begin as rivals for Leopold’s (very white) cousin. In the end, they mange to save each other’s lives several times each. In a sea of rascals, they both have the same sense of courtly obligation and grow to admire each other. In the end, Bug-Jargal is killed when he comes to turn himself in to the white army, under the ineffective protection of Leopold,

The description of Haiti is second-hand, though based on factual narratives. But we never get a real sense of place (no heat, no bugs, few details). The chivalric romance seems out of place with the more realistic flogging of slaves and torturing of white prisoners. The nominal heroine is offstage most of the time, survives the custody of the respectful Bug-Jargal with virtue intact, and serves more as a token of the connection of the two men rather than as a real person.

The story is a narrative framed by the familiar device of officers (here Frenchmen in the Napoleonic Wars) sitting around drinking and telling stores. Leonard’s story, some years later, at first amuses and then makes incredulous, then saddens ahis auditors.

On the whole, a pretty good start for a 24-year old youth who was still writing pretty dull verse supporting the Bourbon restoration. Bug-Jargal is presented as a powerful, intelligent noble savage –is there a positive portrait of a black man in European literature before that time?

Balzac’s La Fenne abandonée (1834)

This story of passion, pursuit, abandonment, and suicide strikes me as being very unBalzacian. This novella follows the tragic course of an aristocratic love affair and seems rather conventional stylistically. Except for a humorous and well described look at provincial society in Bayeux, the novella floats in a barely described upper-class milieu, not very deeply observed. The two main characters (Baron de Neuil and Vicomtese de Beauséant) are virtually the only people in the story, and they are immensely in love, but not very interesting in their vices, virtues, or habits.

It is telling that money is never an issue in the book. Neither of the lovers has any concern about income, and they buy and sell houses, run off to Switzerland, without any concern for cash (or for social obligations). In fact when the man finals is maneuvered by his mother into marrying a very rich heiress, it’s not at the case that he is saving the family fortune or has debts to pay off. Beyond that, the vulgar business of handling money is not even mentined in the novella.

Places are sketched briefly, interiors hardly described, even the complications of society and politics are kept at bay. It is odd to see a Balzac work with so little specificity, so little particularity. Even the earlier lives and families of the protagonists are barely sketched – though we will learn much more of the earlier history of Madame de Beauséant (the heroine) in Le Père Goriot, where she gets abandoned for the first time.

Beyond that, the story is based on the affair between a younger man (in his early twenties when the novella starts) and an older woman (in her early 30s). This is similar to other Balzac works, but even more so in regard to Balzac’s own serial liaisons with older, often aristocratic woman, many of them like Mme. De Beauséant already married. The vicomtesse is afraid she will be abandoned when she reaches an age where she is no longer so attractive, and she is, much as Balzac’s mistresses were. The irony is that it is the man, the abandoner, not the abandonee that commits suicide in eth shock ending

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 Grenadière

This 1833 novella is a surprisingly delicate work, which approaches sentimentality but never crosses the line. It's named after a simple but beautiful country house on a hill overlooking the Loire, very close to Balzac’s native Tours. A significant portion of the novella is Balzac’s careful description of that landscape in all its fertile beauty. It is said that he wrote it one night.

What he does in the opening of the work is like a cinematic zoom in to the house in question, from its wider environment to the details of the gardens, the buildings, and finally the interior of the house itself. This, in a way, is typical Balzac, to elaborately dress the scenery before having the protagonists come on stage, and when they do, letting us inspect them from head to toe as well, before they actually open their mouths. Here we have the anachronistic effect of a camera zooming in from an aerial shot, something that I can’t imagine any author doing before Balzac.

The story itself concerns the raising of two sweet brothers in a little Eden and the slow death of their mother, a mysterious beauty. The boys are the fruit of her affair with an English nobleman, but it ambiguous why they were separated or what the issue of the marriage was. In any case, they are cast adrift with little money. Nevertheless, the mother, adored by her children, takes pins to have them educated both scholastically and morally.

The end of the story is sad but not lachrymose. The woman dies in bed after admonishing the elder brother to help the more innocent younger son. The elder enters the navy as a cabin boy, the other son, through whatever money can be scraped together, is sent to a collège in Tours.

The mystery of the story – who is this woman and why is she abandoned, what is eventual fate if the boys – is only partially resolved at the end of the story. The lack of a formulaic narrative solution (for example, the husband arriving at her deathbed, the children inheriting a fortune) makes the story sound like a slice of real life. The rude cross at her simple graveyard reads “CY GIT UNE FEMME MALHEUREUSE, morte à trente-six ans,” (Here lies an unfortunate woman, dead at age 36).

The ending of the novella is cinematic also. The older son stands at the rail of the ship he is assigned to as it sails away from the coat of France.

il regardait les côtes de France qui fuyaient rapidement et s’effaçaient dans la ligne bleuâtre de l’horizon. Bientôt il se trouva seul et perdu au milieu de l’Océan, comme il l’était dans le monde et dans la vie. — Il ne faut pas pleurer, jeune homme ! il y a un Dieu pour tout le monde, lui dit un vieux matelot de sa grosse voix tout à la fois rude et bonne. L’enfant remercia cet homme par un regard plein de fierté. Puis il baissa la tête en se résignant à la vie des marins. Il était devenu père.

he watched the shores of France, which quickly fled and disappeared into the bluish line of the horizon. Soon he found himself alone and lost in the middle of the ocean, as it was in the world and in life.
- Do not cry, young man! there is a God for everyone, said an old sailor in his deep voice at once harsh and good.
The boy thanked the man with a glance full of pride. Then he lowered his head resigning himself to the life of a sailor. He had become [the[ father.

He had become the man of the family, the father he never knew. He is launched.

The horror of the dream world: Nodier’s Smarra (1821)

This novella, with the alternative title of “les Démons de la nuit”, is a nightmare-based tale of horror that has links with German Romanticism and Gothic tales. It prefigures the dream narratives of Théophile Gautier and the Decadent movement later in the century, and anticipates Freud and Jung by a century.

It is also an early vampire story. Already in 1820, Nodier co-wrote a sequel to John Polidori’s pioneering and sensationally popular story “The Vampire”, and also came out with a play with the same title. Both were big public successes, and Smarra offers an even more extreme and dark story.

The narrative itself – said to be opium-induced – has the logic of a nightmare, of a Walpurgis night. That is to say, that time and place keep shifting, endless waves of voluptuousness and bloody cruelty, and logic has no place.

The first-person narrator is Lorenzo, a young man recounts a dream to his half-sleeping mistress. He has dreamed that he is Lucius, a young man of the ancient Roman empire, who, having studied Greek philosophy in Athens, goes to visit Thessaly, famous of its magicians. On horseback and at night, he passes through a haunted forest, loses his way in the labyrinthine underbrush, and falls asleep. His dreams, if they are dreams, are full of sensuality, a synesthesia at first of luxury, then of horror.

Lucius meets his dear and deceased friend Polémon, who recounts his daytime luxury in the afterworld, surrounded by sensuous female slaves, and his nightly blood-drinking torment by monsters, led by the vampiric demon Smarra

Here’s a small sample:

les mille démons de la nuit escortent l'affreux démon … Des femmes rabougries au regard ivre; des serpents rouges et violets dont la bouche jette du feu; des lézards qui élèvent au-dessus d'un lac de boue et de sang un visage pareil à celui de l'homme; des têtes nouvellement détachées du tronc par la hache du soldat, mais qui me regarde avec des yeux vivants, et s'enfuient en sautillant sur des pieds de reptiles...

*The thousand demons of the night escort the horrid demon… Stunted women with a drunken look; red and violet serpents whose mouths spurt fire; lizards who lift a human-like face above a lake of mud and blood; heads newly detached from the body by a soldier’s axe, but who look at me with living eyes, and flee, bouncing on the feet or reptile…)

This prose-poem pits the classical rationality of Lucius/Lorenzo against the irrationality and horror of the dream world. The use of extremely vivid language, dripping with perfume and blood and devoid of rational thought makes Smarra a monument of Romantic fantasy, blurring the line between reality and dream. There’s no pretense at a moral ending; the work just exists

Henri III et sa Cour: the first Romantic drama

While Hugo’s Hernani, produced by the Comédie Française in 1830, is always accorded the bragging rights as the first successful French Romantic drama, it is in fact Dumas’s Henri III et sa cour (1829) that deserves the pride of place.

The Dumas play, performed in the same theater with some of the same cast, was a major triumph, and it’s full of some of the same elements as Hernani and later Romantic drama (period costumes, over-the-top rhetoric combined with everyday language, violent stage business, humor mixed in with grief).

But Hernani gets the acclaim thanks to three factors:

a) Hugo had proclaimed a theoretical justification for a new drama in his famous Preface to the unstaged (and unstageable Cromwelll Dumas notes in a brief foreword to his play that he has no theoretical pretentions, leaving that to others.
b) Hernani was in verse, in alexandrines yet, a direct attack on Corneille and Racine territory, while Henri III was in prose.
c) Hernani’s opening night witnessed a famous donnybrook between factions in the audience, the upholders of Classicism and Romanticism; Henri III, on the other hand, was acclaimed from the opening act on – including the enthusiasm of the soon-to-be King Louis-Philippe.

Dumas, who had a major theatrical career later eclipsed by his historical novels, was actually a pretty good playwright. Henri III is a little rough dramatically (he was just a rank beginner), but it has some very gripping moments, especially that the scene where the duke of Guise physically abuses his wife into writing the letter that will trap her lover, Saint-Mégrin. This scene, which Dumas in his memoirs tells us caused a palpable sensation. In eth audience, was a move away from the lack of direct onstage action of tragic and sentimental plays of almost two centuries of French drama. Moreover, except for the lover-hero. These are not the noble gentlemen of the heroic era – the king is a weak fool, under the thumb of his mother Catherine De’ Medici, Guise a monster, and the gentlemen of the court, vain fops.

The play is indebted to Othello, a sensation (both cheered and hooted) when English actors led by Kean visited Paris a few years earlier, showing a piece, albeit in a foreign language, that had been seen in the Rossini opera version or, worse, in the denatured adaptation of Ducis – in which, for example, the handkerchief gets replaced by a diadem. (In 1830, Vigny would produce a more literal – Romantic – translation.)

As with Othello, in Henri III a handkerchief is a key element in the jealousy of the husband, though it must be said that Guise is more an Iago than an Othello. The death of Saint=Mégrin (the lover, albeit offstage, resembles Iago’s treacherous attack on Cassio. And Guise’s confrontation with his wife resembles the strangling of Desdemona, though in the Dumas play, the heroine just faints away at the end. This happens as her husband calls out the window to the assassins who have all but killed Saint-Mégrin, throwing them the tell-tale handkerchief to strangle him:

Eh bien, serre-lui la gorge avec ce mouchoir ; la mort lui sera plus douce ; il est aux armes de la duchesse de Guise. :
(Well then, stop up his throat with this handkerchief; death will be all the sweeter for him; it bears the arms of the duchess of Guise/)

Henri III is full of gothic/Romantic trappings: locked doors, astrology, passionate love at first sight, meetings of conspirators, disguises, implacable revenge, a magic talisman. Most of these elements are rearranged and added to in Hernani.

One side issue in the play is the nature of the king’s “favorites”, the elegant young gentlemen who attend him. We know from historical accounts that these favorites, at least some of them, were lovers of the king, who was probably bisexual. And that was well known, if on the sly, by Dumas’s contemporaries. On fact, the censor objected that parents would have difficult time explaining to their innocent children what a “favorite” was. The play presents Henri and his friends as fops and dandies, but no hint of anything beyond that. In his later novel, La Reine Margot, the ambiguous sexuality of the Valois court is a little more in the open.

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.

Notes on Zola's La Curée: The emperor rides by

This novel is so full of remarkable moments that I hardly know where to start.

Napoleon III puts in a few cameo appearances. At the end of Chapter Three, when the upwardly mobile Saccards are invited to their first Imperial ball, the emperor makes a formal entrance through the lined-up ranks of the guests. The beautiful, daringly attired Renée strikes him, and he stares at her in passing, with a rare gleam in his otherwise clouded and heavy=lidded eyes. He and his entourage buzz about her. The momentary encounter, we are told, was the high note of her life (“la note aiguë de sa vie.”)

Then he turns up right near the end of the novel. He is driven in his carriage through the Bois de Boulogne, coincidentally in the midst of the daily afternoon outing of the wealthy in their deluxe coaches. René observes him unseen from her coach

Renée trouva l’empereur vieilli. Sous les grosses moustaches cirées, la bouche s’ouvrait plus mollement. Les paupières s’alourdissaient au point de couvrir à demi l’œil éteint, dont le gris jaune se brouillait davantage. Et le nez seul gardait toujours son arête sèche dans le visage vague.
(Renée found that the emperor had aged. Under his large waxed moustache, the mouth was more softly opem. His eyelids had grown heavy to the extent of half-covering his dulled eyes, whose yellow-graty had become even more blurry. Only his nose still kept the dry ridge in his indistinct face.)

While the socialites on there own landaus and berlines quietly and ironically gawk, Saccard, walking by on foot, cries out in his Provençal accent “Vive l’empereur !” The emperor turns in surprise, seems to recognize him, and salutes shim ad he rides away.



As much as Zola detested Napoleon III and as much as he satirizes the freed and stupidity of French society of the Second Empire, this passage has a surprisingly elegiac tone. The end seems in sight – for the day, for the emperor, for Renée Saccard whose point of view we are guided by, and for the triumph of the society of the Second Empire, symbolized by this daily excursion in landaus and barouches owned by the wealthy and idle through the recently refurbished Bois de Boulogne That cavalcade of conspicuous consumption frames the beginning and end of the novel.

Renée sees a kind of poetic rightness to this brief encounter near dusk.

Il lui semblait que l’empereur, en se mêlant à la file des voitures, venait d’y mettre le dernier rayon nécessaire, et de donner un sens à ce défilé triomphal.
(It seemed to her that the Emperor, in mixingc in with the row of carriages just gave the last, needed ray, and to give a meaning to this triumphal parade.)

But for Renée, the sense of triumph is bitter and painful, as her empire, her triumph has all but faded.

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.