Balzac, La Vielle Fille (1836)

Les gens de province possèdent au plus haut degré l’art de distiller les cancans.

People from the provinces possess at the highest degree the art of distilling gossip.

This tale of a provincial marriage is set in Alençon, a sleepy, reactionary town sitting between Normandy, Brittany, and the Loire Valley. The pursuit of the old maid in question, an ignorant, silly, but well-off heiress takes the form of a political struggle. One of the two main suitors is an impoverished and graceful old-fashioned member of the old gentry, in good favor with the Royalist party of the Bourbon restoration. The other is a brash man of low birth who made his money supplying Napoleon’s armies while in Paris (and, we are lead to belive, conning it), and seeks to become the spokesman for the Liberal cause in a heretofore conservative town, dominated by the ci-devant nobility and the Church.

Several days each week, the old maid maintains a salon in her richly appointed mansion, a salon that is a time=capsule of pre-Revolutionary manners. She is the darling of the conservatives, being the most utter example of provincialism:

car elle s’était encroûtée dans les habitudes de la province, elle n’en était jamais sortie, elle en avait les préjugés, elle en épousait les intérêts, elle l’adorait.
for she was encrusted in the habits of the province, she still had never left it, she shared its prejudices, she espoused its interests, she adored it.

The two men duel for advantage, and the liberal takes possession through a combination of great timing and a horrid embarrasment for the old maid. Upon their marriage, he basically usurps her fortunes. redecorates the hosue (the latest bad taste from Paris replaces the old-fashioned bad taste), reduces her independence, takes a mistress. and climbs to power in the prefecrure. Ub rge oisusruve side, he revives the city’s clothtarde, insituting a spinning factory and reviving the moribund economy.

Marriage as so often in Balzac is a business deal, and a deal that an unworldly and sentimental woman is certain to lose at. Such deals often end up squandering carefully built-up fortunes, on the other hand they are a major engine of economic growth, or at least shakeup. Money in Balzac is always in circulation, and the strategies of prudence and even miserliness always end up fueling a maelstrom of new spending and redistribution.

Balzac, “Facino Cane” (1836)

This short story is a Venetian fantasy, reminiscent of the history of Casanova and not unlike Balzac's own Sarrasine (1831). at least in its heightened Italian setting. The narrator hears the story of the life of blind musician, who claims to be a Venetian nobleman with an infallible nose for gold, the hero of adulterous adventures, stolen fortunes, a prison escape, and sudden blindness.

Several points of interest: the escape from an impregnable prison is a trope of Romantic fiction, Casanova's famous escape over the roof (leads) of the Venetian prison may be the immediate inspiration. But the patient digging away with a primitive tool reminds me of that pan-European Gothic blockbuster, Charles Henry Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), a book that Balzac had recently written a sequel to (Melmoth reconcié, 1835). Of course, Dumas's subsequent Comte de Monte-Cristo (1846) is the most famous of the digging-out-of-prison stories, and such prison escapes or near-escapes are a staple in Dumas (La Dame de Monsureau, La Reine Margot, and L'Homme au masque de fer.)

The unusual device here is that the hero is clued into his (dead) predecessors' nearly-completed excavations by his ability to read Arabic graffiti left by a former cell occupant, a skill the hero picked up as the scion of a merchant family in the Mediterranean.

The nameless narrator is a poor middle-class intellectual, a scientist who lives among the working classes of the Marais. blending in well enough to be able to closely observe the working classes, which he does "scientifically".

Une seule passion m'entraînait en dehors de mes habitudes studieuses ; mais n'était-ce pas encore de l'étude ? j'allais observer les mœurs du faubourg, ses habitants et leurs caractères. Aussi mal vêtu que les ouvriers, indifférent au décorum, je ne les mettais point en garde contre moi ; je pouvais me mêler à leurs groupes, les voir concluant leurs marchés, et se disputant à l'heure où ils quittent le travail. Chez moi l'observation était déjà devenue intuitivel

A single passion pulled be away from my studious habits, but wasn't it even more study? I observed the manners of the faubourg, its inhabitants and their characters. As badly dressed as the workers, indifferent to decorum, I did not put them on guard against me; I could join in their groups, see them conduct business, and argue at quitting time. In me, observation had already become intuitive.

The scientific analysis of the working classes by a sympathetic intellectual -- this is the revolution of nineteenth century literature. He tells us at one point that the story of the blind Venetian is just one among many that the has gathered. Like Balzac himself, who could blend in with al ranks of society – as portrayed by literal invisibility in La Canne de M. de Balzac (also 1836) –, the narrator acts as a kind of "nobleman in disguise" figure, another staple of romantic tale-telling.

Dumas, Les trois Mousquetaires (1844)

Les trois Mousquetaires certainly has had the biggest impact of any 19th century French novel. Teh imahe of the four friends with crossed swords, tabards, and plumed hats, is unmistakeable. The novel spawned a plethora of after-products: Dumas himself massed a hit play out of it, and ether are been a stream of musicals, novel sequels and prequels, parodies, video games, a candy bar, and especially films– over 50 films in a dozen countries all based on the novel in some way of other, including: a cartoon version with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy: a German version called Sex Adventures of the Three Musketeers; a Spanish language version called Three and a Half Musketeers (no. the half is not a dwarf version of d'Artagnan, but rather a faithful dog). I assume that many of these films are dreadful -- and the previews for a brand-new 3D version I saw last week at the theater look like an especially

Fun note: in the 1948 Gene Kelly version, Vincent Price played Richelieu and the dapper Gig Young was miscast as the dull-witted but happy strongman Porthos.

I guess I'm too old for the Three Musketeers, as much as I loved it as a teenager. Yes, the story races along and the dialog is snappy, the characters vivid if somewhat one-dimensional. And the great set-piece, the long ride of the musketeers to save the Queen's honor. as they are picked off by the Cardinal's agents is as exciting as ever. Most of all, this celebration of male camaraderie and never-say-die courage is unmatched.

But the four heroes are, if you look at them objectively, a set of roistering louts. Contemptuous of –and ready to cozen – the middle classes, brutal to their servants, exploitative to women, blankly deferential to royalty, spendthrift, quarrelsome and generally thoughtless, and especially in the case of the "more mature" Athos, unpleasant drunks. In other words, they have all the charm of rowdy fraternity jocks or football hooligans trashing a bar.

Dumas's world is everything that Balzac;s is not. Both the Paris of Louis XIII and that of Louis=Philippe are full of dangers. treachery, and intrigues, but in the 19th century Paris, you can't get out of trouble with a rapier, a fast horse, and a loyal servant. In fact, in Balzac the characters most like the musketeers are exposed as the smooth louts and parasites that they are, from de Marsay and Du Tillet to Rastignac and de Rubempré.

Balzac, L’Interdiction (1836)

The mild eccentricity of the marquis d'Espard consists of living separately from his wife; raising his two sons to be honest, hard-working, and humane; repaying reparations to a family once defrauded by his father; and indulging modestly in scholarly pursuits. All of which makes him crazy by Parisian standards.

His wife, on the other hand, has squandered the considerable money he left her with; refused to be a mother for her two adolescent sons lest her true age be made obvious to society; and had a series of lovers now including Eugène Rastignac. Her aim is to have her husband declared incompetent through a legal "interdiction" and to have his remaining fortune managed in her favor.

This novella contains some of the typical elements of a Balzac novella, elements we have seen in, for example, Le Colonel Chabert. First and most typical is a scheming, social-climbing middle-aged noblewoman. Second is a relatively innocent if old-fashioned husband who is the victim of the wife. Third, there is a raisonneur figure – here two, a doctor (Bianchon) and a judge (Popinot). These two, as the professional mediators and the witnesses/arbitrators of the ugly, secret life of Paris, can see through the illusions of apparent wealth and beauty that dazzle others.

The two raisonneurs in some ways prefigure Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes in their ability to see beneath the surface. Bianchon quickly assesses both the real age of the marquise and her hidden finical desperation.

As Bianchon tells the (willfully) less observant Rastignac:

Crois-moi, les médecins sont habitués à juger les hommes et les choses ; les plus habiles d'entre nous confessent l'âme en confessant le corps. Malgré ce joli boudoir où nous avons passé la soirée, malgré le luxe de cet hôtel, il serait possible que madame la marquise fût endettée.

Believe me, doctors are accustomed to judging people and things; the cleverest of us confess the soul by confessing the body. Despite the pretty boudoir, where we spent the evening, despite the luxury of this house, it is possible that the Marchioness is in debt.

Popinot, despite his living in a stator of personal filth and disarray (a typical Balzac theme), is even more perspicacious. He briefly interviews the principals in the case, sees through the lies of the wife, and quickly ferrets out the honesty of the husband.

Add to this the fact that Bianchon and Popinot are among the few kind characters of La Comédie humaine. Rgey both spend much of their time helping the deserving poor, Bianchon with his medical skills and Popinot as a prototypical microlender.

But unlike the usual detective tale, the discovery of tehhidden reality comes to naught, The marquise and her allies, aware of the skepticism of the judge, pull levers to have him taken off the case and put into the hands of a sympathetic judge. Justice, as so often in Balzac, favors the well-connected. And the few honest countercurrents to the sewer of Parisian society are once again thwarted. This ain't Dickens.

Balzac Le Colonel Chabert (1844)

Many of Balzac's novellas deal with the Bourbon restoration (1814-1830) and the predicament of the heroes of the Grande Armée on their return to France or (if they do not return) on their families. In La Bourse (1832). for example, the widow of a Napoleonic naval officer and her beautiful daughter live in poverty, denied the father's pension. In La Vendetta (1830),the young hero (a captain from the disbanded army), dies from starvation, along with his wife and child, for lack of a pension and the difficulty of obtaining a position. Others such as the hero of the La Duchessse de Langeais (1834) manage to resuscitate a military career after the Bourbon's come onto power.

In Le Colonel Chabert, the hero goes even further – he is a ghost come from the grave. After leading the charge that won the battle of Eylau (1807), Chabert is buried alive on the battlefield and counted among the dead heroes. After emerging and being nursed by German peasants, he combines years of illness and amnesia. By the time he walks back to France, Napoleon has been exiled, and his young, beautiful, and now rich widow has married into the newly emergent Bourbon aristocracy.

His wife, one of a battalion of ultra-wily social-climbing seductresses in Balzac , does not want this haggard specter to ruin her life. By dint of charm and wiles, she almost gets Chabert to sign away his rights, until he overhears her treachery. His reaction, instead of making trouble, id to renounce her and run off. He ends up in a home for indigent old soldiers, while his wife continues her social career.

Notes:

1. This story is a kind of Martin Guerre-like narrative, with the reservation that Chabert, whatever the initial impression, is no impostor, Curiously, the French film Le Colonel Chabert (1994) stars the inevitable Gérard Depardieu, who also played Martin Guerre in a movie. I haven't seen the movie, but plan to.

2. Derville is Balzac's honest lawyer of the Comédie humaine (he has a major role in Gobseck (1830) and witnesses the treatment of Goriot). He is the stand-in for the novelist, the raisonneur, as he observes the ugly realities of family life in Paris.

The Comédie humane is summed up – that annals of unpunished domestic crimes – in what Derville says to a young colleague, before retiring permanently from Paris:

Combien de choses n’ai-je pas apprises en exerçant ma charge ! J’ai vu mourir un père dans un grenier, sans sou ni maille, abandonné par deux filles auxquelles il avait donné quarante mille livres de rente ! J’ai vu brûler des testaments ; j’ai vu des mères dépouillant leurs enfants, des maris volant leurs femmes, des femmes tuant leurs maris en se servant de l’amour qu’elles leur inspiraient pour les rendre fous ou imbéciles, afin de vivre en paix avec un amant. J’ai vu des femmes donnant à l’enfant d’un premier lit des goûts qui devaient amener sa mort, afin d’enrichir l’enfant de l’amour. Je ne puis vous dire tout ce que j’ai vu, car j’ai vu des crimes contre lesquels la justice est impuissante. Enfin, toutes les horreurs que les romanciers croient inventer sont toujours au-dessous de la vérité.

How many things have I learned while carrying out my trade! I've seen a father die in an attic, without a penny, abandoned bytwo daughters that he had given forty thousand livres of revenue to! I've seen wills burned; I've seen mothers stripping bare their children, husbands stealing firm their wives, women killing their husbands, using the love that they inspired to make them fools or imbeciles, in order to live undisturbed with their lovers. I've seem women giving their eldest child tastes that would lead to his death, in order to enrich their love child. I can't tell you all that I have seen, for I've seen crimes against which justice is powerless. In summary, all the horrors that the novelists believe they are making up fall short of the reality.

Hugo, Les Orientales (1829)

This collection of 41 short poems is the great orientalist work of French Romanticism. While the Near East was in the air in the early 19th century, the chief influence on these poems is clearly Byron’s incredibly popular oriental poems, including The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), Don Juan (1819-26)), and Mazeppa (1819_, the later of which inspired Hugo’s own poem with the same title and subject.

The first few poems celebrate the Greek war of liberation from the Ottoman empire, including the battle of Navarino at which the French fleet along with England and Russia crushed the Ottoman navy. The connection with Byron is also strong, as Byron died in Greece supporting the revolution, helping inspire European intervention.

A few early poems are on Biblical themes. Most of the other poems are daydreams of the otherness of the East, with images of sand and palm trees, scimitars and djinns, elephants and crocodiles, pashas and sultans, from Grenada to Constantinople.

But the poetry soon turns to the deep subject of much of orientalist art – sexual daydreams of the harem. The fantasy of sexually available beauties unable to say no recurs constantly. Add to that the spice of women of different races waiting to comfort the tired warrior.

The Eastern despot’s ability to demand submission from his women stands in stark contrast to the frustrations of the nineteenth-century Parisian, of which Balzac gives us example after example. While French women are sexually available, they also maddeningly slippery and fickle. In works like Ferragus, La Duchess de Langeais, La Femme de trente ans, for example, the unsubmissiveness of women is a torment to men. In La Fille aux yeux d’or, assort of harem is created in Paris, with a bitter twist. The desire for exclusivity and control in a culture of adultery is something unobtainable in the West, thus the temptation of the harem.

The last poem of Les Orientales entitled “Novembre”, is set in the fogs and cold of a Paris late autumn. The poet confesses the fantasy as an escape from the gray Paris sky. He dreams of the “soleil d'orient”, “la beau rêve d'Asie”, “danses des bayadère”. “éléphants blancs chargés de femmes brunes”, not to mention a few tigers and camels thrown in for effect.

The Napoleonic adventure in Egypt, and the French participation of Greek revolution, along with the North African adventurism of the Second Empire show that these are not just idle fantasies with no real-world implications. But in another sense, it’s overkill to accuse these voluptuous fantasies on a chilly day of being the main motivators of a thirst for colonialism that extended far beyond the Muslim world. The mediaeval fantasies that dominate the literature of the time time, after all, did not bring back feudalism.

Verne, Cinq Semaines en ballon (1862)

I'd always thought Verne’s books were published later in the century. But he was a contemporary of Zola and Flaubert. And while an age of engineering, world conquest, and scientific breakthrough is just barely visible in Zola, in Verne it becomes the whole point in Verne.

Cinq Semaines en ballon, published in 1862, recounts a pioneering (fictional) balloon trip across Africa, from Zanzibar to Senegal. At this time, while the coasts of the Africa were being taken over by the French and English, the interior was still beyond their reach. While explorers like Livingstone, Burton, Speke, and others had managed to explore some of the interior, many other explorers died from malaria, sleeping sicknesses and other diseases or at the hands of hostile tribes. The source of the Nile was in question until confirmed by Stanley in the 1870’s. Among the other discoveries by the balloon riders in the novel is the (fictional) confirmation of Speke’s theory that Lake Victoria was the true source.

Notes:

1. This is a typical romance, a string of adventurous episodes, including breathtaking prospects, curious adventures, and near escapes from hostile man and beast. As with most romances, the incidents could be expanded or contracted or rearranged by the author, with the (somewhat blank) interior map of Africa as the only constraint, as we are pulled from jungle to grassland to desert and back again.

2. At the same time, it is full of anatomical factuality, about the specifics of ballooning (along with some innovations by our hero), about African geography and the history of its exploration. For example, a lot of prose is dedicated to the exact contents of the airship, including the precise amount of weight each person and item provide, along with the necessary ballast required.

3. What suffers is the characters – all rather one-dimensional. The trinity of balloonists is broadly drawn. There is the faithful, humorous, and agile British servant; the obtuse but trustworthy Scottish hunter/man of action; and the brilliant British leader of the expedition, whose knowledge of aeronautics, physics, geography, and ethnography gets them out of many a scrape.

4. The various natives of Africa as mostly viewed from a safe distance; they are portrayed as vicious, bloodthirsty, and/or credulous and simple. There is no real interaction with them, and a typical ugly racism of the time is rife. The sooner teh Europeans suppress these primitive natives, the book strongly implies, the better.

Zola, La Conquëte de Plasaans (1874)

After two Rougon-Macquart novels set in Paris, Zola returns us to his native Provence in La Conquëte de Plasaans, the fourth in the series। Unlike in Paris, the revolution of the modern, in industry, finance, morality, and daily life, has hardly reached Plassans (the fictionalized Aix-en-Provence).

And the clergy, which is definitely out of favor in Paris, has real political power in Provence. In La Fortune des Rougon, the Church kept a low profile, preferring to operate through proxies, at one remove. But fully pragmatic, it makes it peace with the new Bonapartist order and tries to re-establish its influence.

But in parallel with the politics is the destruction of two members of the Rougon-Macquart clan – François Mouret, a semi-retired businessman and Marthe, his cousin and wife (She’s the daughter of Pierre and Felicité Rougon, the protagonists of the first book in the series.) We see them as a relatively happy if eccentric household, along with their three children. Then they lease a few rooms to the down-at-the-heels Abbé Faujas and his mother. We see the Abbé worming his way into the comforts of the house until he becomes the master. At the same time, he rises in clerical hierarchy, supported by outside political powers, until he becomes the de facto leader of the local church.

In the meanwhile, Marthe becomes a religious fanatic, mutilating herself, neglecting her children, giving away much of the family property to the church. She dies eventually. Mouret goes gradually insane, is carted off to an asylum, and returns at night to, in a totally unexpected stroke of energy, burns down this own house with the abbé and his loathsome family.

Notes:

1. As with most Zola novels, the women hold the real power. It is the women, starting with Marthe, that the Abbé brings over to his side.

Si l’abbé avait conquis les femmes et les enfants, il restait sur un pied de simple politesse avec les pères et les maris. Les personnages graves continuaient à se méfier de lui, en le voyant rester à l’écart de tout groupe politique.

If the abbé had conquered the women and children, he remained on terms of mere politeness with the fathers and husbands. The serious characters continued to mistrust him, seeing him keeping a distance from any political group.

In the end, a Greek chorus-like group of wives of the important men in the town of all parties (Republican, Orleanist, Bonapartist, Bourbonist) overcome the reluctance of their husbands to support the abbé. The husbands, though full of self-importance are easily led by their wives.

2. Abbé Faujas is an interesting villain. His own obvious vices are pretty minor: gluttony and pride. His holiness seems pretty hollow, and he is quite unable to rein in the real, crazed piety that he sets in motion in Marthe. His unwillingness to intervene as she destroys herself and her family is one example of his deep indifference to others, his own solipsism, all cloaked under pretend meekness. He also is virtually indifferent to the depredations of his parasitic sister and brother-in-laws, who rob the Mouret household, slowly take it over, and hold wild parties. The brother-in-law is set up, due to the Abbé’s influence, at a sinecure where he has opportunity to seduce unprotected girls, and the scandal is hushed up, thanks the power of the Abbé.

3. In the end Marthe’s attraction to religion is tied in with an absolute passion for the Abbé, for whom she declared her love, he wish to be his servant. She turns against her husband and neglects her children, and bankrupts her household.

je vous aime, et vous le savez, n’est-ce pas ? …. je sentais bien que vous deviniez mon cœur. J’étais satisfaite, j’espérais que nous pourrions être heureux un jour, dans une union toute divine

I love you, and you know it, don’t you? .... I felt that you guessed my heart. I was satisfied, I was hoping we could be happy one day, in a union totally divine.

When the Abbé, disgusted and होर्रिफ़िएद, hears her avowal, he rejects her cruelly. She takes to her bed and gets progressively sicker and soon dies.

4. When Fréjus arrives in Plassans, he is poorly groomed, wearing threadbare clothes, unwashed – for all of which he is mocked in the town. As he gains power, he dresses himself in rich new clothes, takes some care of his person. Then, when he ascends to power, he lets himself go again.

Plassans, en effet, dut le prendre mal peigné. ,,,La ville fut positivement terrifiée, en voyant le maître qu’elle s’était donné grandir ainsi démesurément, avec la défroque immonde, l’odeur forte, le poil roussi d’un diable. La peur sourde des femmes affermit encore son pouvoir.

Plassans, indeed, had to take him unkempt. , The city was positively terrified when they saw that the master they had given themselves had grow so out of proportion, with his foul ragged clothes, strong smell, the reddish hair of a devil. The secret fear of women maintained his power.

I find this reversal and the contempt it expresses a surprising yet believable result of power, an indication of Zola’s mastery – of observation, of narration, and originality –that makes even this lesser work so rich.

Stendhal, Le Rouge et Le Noir (1830)

I’ve read the Red and the Black several times before, in English. What I had never realized is that it was published before any of Balzac’s great novels, which by my reckoning begin with La Peau de Chagrin (1831). The novel has a Byronic hero, yet is a satire, in the manner of Byron's own Don Juan (1824). It is also based d on a true-life scandal, set in nearby Dauphiné.

Some notes:

1. Julien, a prodigy of memorization and an autodidact, really only knows and loves three books, “son Coran” – Rousseau’s Confessions, the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, and the collection of Bulletins from Napoleon’s army. Like him, Rousseau and Napoleon are men of obscure birth, far from Paris, who become dominant figures. By contrast, the Bible, which he has memorized in what is a type of parlor trick, means nothing to him.

2. At a later point, Julien reads La Nouvelle Héloïse, the novel that Stendhal parallels and satirizes through the first half of the book Like Saint-Preux, the hero of La Nouvelle Heloïse, Julien is a tutor for a wealthy family who falls in love with a woman above his station. Like Saint-Preux, Julien flees the mountains (jura/Alps) to Paris. But it is the tone of the book that is so different. The sentimentality, the tears, that made the Rouseeau novel a best –seller in its time and is replace by a very objective, keen psychological analysis and no little humor in the Stendhal book – not a best-seller.

3. Julien imagines himself to be the hero of a work of fiction, one in which it will be discovered that, in the end, he is the bastard son of his noble patron. Or some other nobleman. No such luck.

4. Like so many striving figures of the period (most notably Rastignac), we has a vision of his conquest as he stands on the heights. Here on a mountain, as he warches a sparrow hawk circling above him.


L’œil de Julien suivait machinalement l’oiseau de proie. Ses mouvements tranquilles et puissants le frappaient, il enviait cette force, il enviait cet isolement.
C’était la destinée de Napoléon, serait-ce un jour la sienne ?


Julien's eye mechanically followed the bird of prey. Its quiet and powerful movements struck him, he envied this power, he envied this isolation. This was the fate of Napoleon, would that one day his own?

5. The second book of the novel sets a pattern for all the 19th century realistic novels about the provincial coming to conquer Paris with his charm and wit. He comes to the capital like an actor rehearsing a starring role/

Il allait enfin paraître sur le théâtre des grandes choses.
Finally he was going to appear on the great stage.

As with so many of his fellow heroes of realistic novels, early and dazzling success is followed by disaster.

Dumas, La Dame de Monsoreau (1846(

Dumas wrote La Dame de Monsoreau as a quick sequel to the very popular La Reine Margot, continuing on with the story of the last of the Valois kings and the Wars of Religion. Dumas was setting up his novel “factory” at this point, with collaborators doing some of the heavy lifting, but what is clear is a master hand at the helm, particularly in terms of structure (plotting). While the style and some of characterization flags on occasion, the power of the narrative and the suspense about what will happen next, along with the juggling of plots, are always expertly done.

The book follows the story of a score of major characters and intersects with the number of historical events (including the concluding and bloody duel of the mignons of the court and the ambush death of the valiant Bussy d’Amboise). And every step seems logical, parallelisms abound, and no string in the tangle gets lost.

Structural mastery is much-ignored virtue on writers, but it is not that common in writers of sprawling books, especially in historical romances. The temptation is to have an episodic structure, with events crammed in with litany of “and this happens and this and this.” There’s lots going on, with four separate major plot threads, but they intersect constantly and the developments in one line forward on the events in the next.

One key ambiguity is the relation of the effeminate and weak-willed Henri III and his favorites, idle and vain young minor aristocrats. In real life, Henri was designated by his enemies as either homosexual or at least bisexual (though those are modern terms – the accusations were as hermaphrodites.) In the novel, Dumas skirts the issue, though in fact in the very first chapter Henri abducts one of his favorites form his wedding night and imprisons him in the Louvre to keep him company through the lonely night. Henri is shown disdaining his beautiful wife (he will die childless) while craving the constant company of the other mignons. The implication is clear, but never explicit.

Balzac, “La Maison Nucingen” (1837)

This short novella reports an overheard conversation. The author and friends are quietly sitting in a private room at a restaurant, when the room next door fills up with four loud merry makers, easily overheard through the thin walls. The four turn out to be among the most cynical and malicious dandies in Paris, characters that all appear in other Balzac works.

They speak in a racy, allusive jargon, full of semi-private jokes and calumnies about friends and foes alike. Thanks to the reproduction of their dialogues, this is much more difficult than other Balzac works to fully comprehend.

Some notes:

1. Realistic fiction is basically about sex and money: who is sleeping (or not sleeping) with whom, and how did so-and-so get (or lose) his money. In this case, the big question is about money: how did Eugène de Rastignac, who we saw as penniless at the end of Père Goriot and is the most central character of the Comédie Humaine, become a wealthy man and a leader in French society?

2. As relevant today as in the time of Louis-Philippe, the answer is – through insider trading. The narrative details the machinations of the Baron de Nucigen, the Alsatian banker and husband of Delphine, who is Rastignac’s lover and the daughter of Goriot. Worse than with modern-day financial skullduggery, getting my brain around the actual machinery of 19th century French speculation is near impossible.

3. The narrative technique is very unusual. The four young dandies constantly tease, joke, and digress. The main thread, Rastignac’s fortune, gets lost constantly, so much so that the other characters keep expressing their frustration with Bixiou, the principal source of the secret in question, The rather simple story of Nucigen using Rastignac to pull off the sharp deal and rewarding him for his help is eclipsed by the story of the marriage of one of the big losers from the stock swindle.

4. Balzac, himself a serial failure in terms of financial schemes, is bitterly cynical about the unpunished criminality of the financial system:

prenez cinq mille francs dans mon secrétaire, vous allez au Bagne. Mais avec le piment d’un gain à faire habilement mis dans la gueule de mille boursiers, vous les forcez à prendre les rentes de je ne sais quelle république ou monarchie en faillite, émises … pour payer les intérêts de ces mêmes rentes : personne ne peut se plaindre. Voilà les vrais principes de l’âge d’or où nous vivons !

Take five thousand francs from my desk, you’ll go to jail. But if you cleverly feed a thousand investors with the spicy prospect of a big gain, you force them to take the bonds of some republic or monarchy or other in bankruptcy, issued … to pay off the interest on these very bonds: nobody can complain. These are the true principles of the golden age in which we live.

Add the word “derivatives”, and it sounds so 21st century.

Narcisssism and sexuality

In Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin, we get a frank discussion of his own sexuality from the principal male character, the poet D'Albert. While his sincerity and articulateness in his letters are admirable, the character they defray is appalling.

First, D'Albert is a convinced and over-the-top aesthete, who rejects anything less than beautifuk

C’est un véritable supplice pour moi que de voir de vilaines choses ou de vilaines personnes.

It's a real torture for me to see ugly things or ugly people.

Disappointed with his own lack of great beauty, he revela himself as a narcissist as well:

Bien des fois je me regarde, des heures entières, dans le miroir avec une fixité et une attention inimaginables, pour voir s’il n’est pas survenu quelque amélioration dans ma figure.

Many times I look at myself in the mirror. for hours at a time, with unimaginable steadiness and attnetion. to see whether there has been any improvement in my face.

And his narcissism extends to wishing not to be a handsome man, but a beautiful womanL

Quel dommage que ce soit un homme, ou quel dommage que je ne sois pas une femme !

What a pity that to be a man, or what a pity that I sam not a woman!

In making love to his mistress, he tries in vain to enter her mind and experience her experiences, to meld their sequel experiences together.

Looking around for true beauty, he finds it at its highest in a new arrival, Théodore, a woman disguises as a man:

Le seul défaut qu’il ait, c’est d’être trop beau et d’avoir des traits trop délicats pour un homme."

The only fault he has is that he is too beautiful and has feaures too delicate for a man

.
He starts to pursue Théodore, portraying himself as of the opposite gender:

Je me suis prostitué, et j’ai fait comme une vierge qui s’en irait dans un mauvais lieu espérant trouver un amant parmi ceux que la débauche y pousse.

I prostituted myself, and have acted like a virgin who goes into a bad place hoping to find a lover among those who are driven their by debauchery.

Finally he finds himself falling deeply in love with what he thinks is a man, as he writes to his friend Silvio:

J’ai découvert l’affreuse vérité… Silvio, j’aime… Oh ! non, je ne pourrai jamais te le dire… j’aime un homme !

I have dissevered the frightening truth … Si;vio, I love … Oh, no, I could never say it … I love a manna

Madempoiselle de Maupin is an amazingly bold, insightful, experimental work in the guise of an epistolary love novel.

Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835)

This intriguing novel of sexual identity is s brilliant, if imperfect work, Gautier's first novel. Mostly in epistolary form, the story is set somewhere in provincial France. The only clue to its time-period is that the main characters put on a private performance of a Shakespeare play (As You Like It) in translation (Comme il vous plaira), which sets it in the some time after François Guizot translated the play in 1821.

The name of the title character is taken from an actual remarkable woman: an 17th century female opera singer, duelist, cross-dresser, and lesbian named La Maupin. Gautier apparently first planned to write a historical novel about the singer and then simply took inspiration from her life,

On one level, the novel is a simple love triangle, a little like George Sand's Indiana (1832). The three parties are a poet, d'Albert, his widowed mistress, Rosette, and a man named Théodore, who turns out to be a women (Maupin) in men's clothing, The twist is that both Rosette and D'Albert fall passionately in love with Théodore -- a matter of great distress to D'Albert, who is tormented by the thought that he may be a homosexual.

As You Like It is cleverly worked in. Just as Orlando is in love with Rosalind, who disguises herself as man (Ganymede), Orlando finds himself strangely drawn to him/her. Ganymede offers to cure Orlando of his love by impersonating Rosalind. meanwhile Rosalind-as-man has to fight off the amatory advances of the shepherdess Phebe.

And in the performanve, these ether roles are played by D'Albert, Théodore, and Rosette.

But what in Shakespeare is portrayed as Platonic love, in Gautier is strongly carnal. D'Albert enjoys a torrid sexual relationship with Rosette, though he finds her a little shallow. Rosette makes a strongly sequel play for Théodore/Maupin. In in the end, Théodore/Maupin ends up in loses her virginity with D'Albert, to whom she reveals her true sex, and then with Rosette, though the details of their lovemaking is rather politely understated. In the end, Théodore/Maupin escapes from both of them.

Gautier, Préface de Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834)

Like Hugo's preface to the unperformed drama Cromwell. Gautier's preface to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin is a manifesto of Romanticism, one that goes even further in its self-differentiation mot from the lingering shreds pf neo-classisim (killed off finally by Hugo), but from a kind of moralistic sentimentalism. The novel itself is sensual, sarcastic. and profoundly "immoral", in the sense that casual sex is in no way punished and that there is no "moral" ending for th protagonists

The essay is most famous for its defense of "l'art pour l'art" (art for art;s sake). though he coins that phrase elsewhere. In seeing the production of beauty as the main purpose of art. rather than utility, whether moral or political.

Rien de ce qui est beau n’est indispensable à la vie. - On supprimerait les fleurs, le monde n’en souffrirait pas matériellement ; qui voudrait cependant qu’il n’y eût plus de fleurs ? Je renoncerais plutôt aux pommes de terre qu’aux roses, et je crois qu’il n’y a qu’un utilitaire au monde capable d’arracher une plate-bande de tulipes pour y planter des choux. À quoi sert la beauté des femmes ? Pourvu qu’une femme soit médicalement bien conformée, en état de faire des enfants, elle sera toujours assez bonne pour des économistes. À quoi bon la musique ? à quoi bon la peinture ? Qui aurait la folie de préférer Mozart à M. Carrel, et Michel-Ange à l’inventeur de la moutarde blanche ? Il n’y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien ; tout ce qui est utile est laid, car c’est l’expression de quelque besoin, et ceux de l’homme sont ignobles et dégoûtants, comme sa pauvre et infirme nature.

Nothing that is beautiful is essential to life. - Get rid of flowers, the world would not suffer physically, but who would want there to be no more flowers? I would give up potatoes rather than roses, and I think there is only one utilitarian in the world capable of pulling out a bed of tulips to plant cabbages. What use is the beauty of women? Provided a woman is medically well formed, capable of having children, she will always be good enough for the economists. What good is music? what good painting? Who would be crazy enough prefer Mr. Carrel*, over Moxart. and the inventor of mustard over Michelangelo? There's nothing truly beautiful that can be used for anything, and everything that is useful is ugly, because it is the expression of some need, and man;s needs are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor, weak nature.

*Presumably Armand Carrel, a contemporary historian and journalist, the dieter of yje republican newspaper Le National.

A few points:

1. Gautier clearly influenced the Parnassian movement in France and the Aesthetic ,movement in England. But I think the debate goes much deeper than those rather limited movements. Do we judge any art work because of its appeal to the senses or by its ability to provoke action, whether moral, intellectual, or political? That's a debate that has raged ever since, and the current triumph of socially motivated study of literature (post-Colonialism. gay studies, etc.) is just another front in a long-term war. Is the agenda (tides) more important then the form (structure and texture)? Can a work that now seems irrelevant, vapid, or even somewhat repellent in terms of idea still be enjoyed as art>

2. Literature, of all the arts, is subject to such moral, thematic criticism. Such discussions of music, for example, are pretty thin. Yes, attacls on the moral failings of, say, Wagner or Ravel or jazz ("degeneracy") may come in reaction to change, but it's clear we are talking about taste rather than some intrinsic ideological value that music might or might not support.

3. The "beautiful" does not mean the pretty, one has to believe. Gautier wrote several unsettling, opium-induced horror stories, and the 19th century obsession with horror. the grotesque, sexual perversity, and the lower depths of society are hardly beautiful in any normal sense. The sense of beauty evolves, so that Baudelaire and Zola for example, once considered ugly. now are as far more beautiful than self-consciously decorous literature.

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's "Madame Firmiani"

"Madame Firmiani" (1932) is a rather minor short story. It is based on two mysteries, both of which are uncovered at the end.

First, there is Madame Firmiani, a mysterious woman of uncertain martial status, but accepted into society. We see her at first only obliquely, through the opinions of over a dozen observers, a few admiring, many more spreading contradictory rumors. That long introduction is a little narrative tour-de-force, a deviation from the omniscient narrator of most of Balzac's fiction.

The hero, Oscar, is a young aristocrat who has apparently squandered his fortune and also appears to have a liaison with Mme. Firmiani. How and why he has ended up living in a garret teaching lessons is buzzed about, and it reaches his unclad benefactor, who undertakes to come to Paris to straighten things out.

In the end, the apparent scandal turns out to be quite the opposite. Oscar has been shamed into paying back the fortune that his father got through fraud, restoring the income of an impoverishing family. The mysterious Mme. Firmiani, who advised him to make good his father's crime, has been waiting until her husband's death abroad is confirmed and her inheritance clear. She arrives triumphantly to rescue Oscar from the garret and marry him.

Probably the most noticeable aspect of the story is a familiar Balzac obsession – both in life and in fiction, Namely, the affair between the richer, older married woman and the brilliant but penniless youth with aristocratic pretensions. In the story, as so frequently in Balzac's life, the financial embarrassments of the young man are cleared by the loving older woman.

The battle of the Fats and the Leans

The artist Claude Lantier, the most sympathetic character in Zola's Le Ventre de Paris, explains to Florent, the protagonist, that there is a battle being fought between the Fats (almost all the members of the community of Les Hslles) and the lean outsiders like Claude and Florent). the refusers of try feats.

Claude takes off from a description of a set of engravings (by Breugel?)

— Est-ce que vous connaissez la bataille des Gras et des Maigres ? demanda-t-il. Florent, surpris, dit que non. Alors Claude s’enthousiasma, parla de cette série d’estampes avec beaucoup d’éloges. Il cita certains épisodes : les Gras, énormes à crever, préparant la goinfrerie du soir, tandis que les Maigres, pliés par le jeûne, regardent de la rue avec la mine d’échalas envieux ; et encore les Gras, à table, les joues débordantes, chassant un Maigre qui a eu l’audace de s’introduire humblement, et qui ressemble à une quille au milieu d’un peuple de boules. Il voyait là tout le drame humain ; il finit par classer les hommes en Maigres et en Gras, en deux groupes hostiles dont l’un dévore l’autre, s’arrondit le ventre et jouit. - Pour sûr, dit-il, Caïn était un Gras et Abel un Maigre.

Are you familiar with the the battle of the Fats and the Leans? he asked. Florent, surprised, says that he didn't. Then Claude became enthusiastic, spoke about this series of engravings with high praise. He cited certain episodes: The Fats, ready to burst, sitting down for the evening pig-out, while the Leans, doubled over by fasting, watch with envy from the street with their rail-thin faces, and next the Fats, at table, with overflowing cheeks, chasing away a Lean who had the audacity to enter humbly, one who resembles a candlepin in the middle of a population of bowling balls. It takes in the whole human drama; it ends up by classifying humanity into Lean and Fat, two hostile groups, the one devouring the other, to filli its stomach and enjoy. -- For certain he says, Cain was a Fat and Abel a Lean.

All of this fits in with the action of the novel. Claude states that the Fats hate even the sight of the Leans, witness Florent's treatment by the fishmongers, who act like cats driving out a mouse. That Florent is little interested in money and even less in eating more than he needs to survive marks him out as an enemy of society.

The idealistic socialism that Florent adopts is an indictment of the conspicuous consumption the Second Empire. And it is a theme that recurs in Zola. In La Curée, there is a remarkable scene of the piggishness of the noveaux-riches, who at a ball at the Saccard house, attack the buffet with stomach-turning piggery, so that even the servants are put off. As we will seine La Conquête de Palssans, the gluttony of the priest is seen as consuming the household, eating the protagonist and his family literally out of house and home. And in La Fortune des Rougon, it is Macquart's perpetual hunger that makes him resent the food on his own children;s plates as well as the (imagined) well-supplied table of the Rougons. His egotistical cries of revolution is nothing but the resentment of the Leans against the Fats is sen as a political issue.

Appetite and indigestion in Le Ventre de Paris

The greet paradox at the heart of Zola's Le Ventre de Paris is that between the hero. F;orient, who lives in a state of disgust and the crushing superabundance of food surrounding him. Florent. who arrives in the book and in Paris, fainting from starvation, ends up being welcomed into the Cloud-Cuckoo Land of the Quénu charcuterie, where the greasy taste, feel, and smell of fat has seeped into everything. As Zola puts it, "tout un monde noyé dans la graiss" (an entire world drowning in fat.).

And in spite of being well fed by his brother and sister, Florent remains hungry throughout the novel, refusing to fit in with the plump, gourmand company that surrounds him:

Non, la faim ne l’avait plus quitté. Il fouillait ses souvenirs, ne se rappelait pas une heure de plénitude. Il était devenu sec, l’estomac rétréci, la peau collée aux os. Et il retrouvait Paris, gras, superbe, débordant de nourriture, au fond des ténèbres

No, hunger had not left him . He searched his memory, could not remember one hour of fullness. He had become dry, with a shrunken stomach, his skin stuck to the bone. And he found Paris, fat, proud, overflowing with food, to be un the depths of darkness.

When he is given a seafood inspector's job in the market, his disgust gets even stronger.:

Florent souffrit alors de cet entassement de nourriture, au milieu duquel il vivait. Les dégoûts de la charcuterie lui revinrent, plus intolérables. Il avait supporté des puanteurs aussi terribles; mais elles ne venaient pas du ventre. Son estomac étroit d'homme maigre se révoltait, en passant devant ces étalages de poissons mouillés à grande eau, qu'un coup de chaleur gâtait. Ils le nourrissaient de leurs senteurs fortes, le suffoquaient, comme s'il avait eu une indigestion d'odeurs.

Florent suffered then from this pile of food, amid which he lived. The disgusts from the charcuterie came back, more intolerable. He had endured stenches as terrible, but these did not come from the belly. His narrow, skinny man 's stomach rebelled, as he passed the wet fish stalls, drenched in water, spoiling from a bout of hot weather. They fed him their strong scents suffocated him, as if an attack of indigestion hiy him from just smelling

This attitude is met with incredulity among those whose life is the preparation and sale of food, essentially everyone in the novel and especially his brother and sister-in-law, who exude the fat of their trade. His very thinness becomes a point of disgust among the other inhabitants of the Halles and, by implication, that of Second Empire Paris.

His alientation from most of those around him and his attitude toward food eventually enters into his politics – where his disgust at the material world fits in well with his unhinged, utopian socialism.

The only person who can at all sympathize with Fkorent's indigestion is the painter Ckuade Lantier, who loves the market for its rich colors of its contents, subjects for his still-life, nut who also has little appetite.

Puis, je déjeune ici, par les yeux au moins, et cela vaut encore mieux que de ne rien prendre. Quelquefois, quand j’oublie de dîner, la veille, je me donne une indigestion, le lendemain, à regarder arriver toutes sortes de bonnes choses. Ces matins-là, j’ai encore plus de tendresses pour mes légumes… Non, tenez, ce qui est exaspérant, ce qui n’est pas juste, c’est que ces gredins de bourgeois mangent tout ça !

Then I break my fast here –– at least through the eyes, and that is been better than eating anything. Sometimes when I forget to dine the night before, I give myself indigestion the next day by watching all sorts of good things arriving. Those mornings, I have even more affection for my vegetables ... No, look, this is frustrating, what is unjustness

that these bourgeois scoundrels eat it all!"

But what Claude converts into art, Florent converts into anger and desire for a political purge of the excess.

Anatomy of the Belly

Zola's Le Ventre de Paris (1873), the third novel in the Rougon-Macquart series, is a mix of two distinct genres of prose fiction. First. there is a pretty straightforward novel, where the protagonist (Florent), escapes from imprisonment in Devil's England, gets a job through family connections in the Les Halles, and after getting caught up in a socialist conspiracy, is arrested and sent off again.

The second stream in the book is what Northrop Frye in His Anatomy of Criticism (1957) termed "anatomy". Among other things, literary anatomies take delight in cataloguing and describing the features of the world around it. If novels are aimed at describing the social world, anatomies dwell on the objects that make up the material world.

Le Ventre de Paris is an in-depth portrait of the newly upgraded central food market, literally from top (the glass and cast iron roofing) to bottom (the sub-basements),. a prose poem delighting in vivid descriptions and long lists of the goods on sale. The tour ranges from a loving look at the contents of the Quénu charcuterie to the sights and and smells of the market for fresh-and salt-water fishes. It includes in-depth visits to the vegetable sellers, the fruiterers, the florists, the cheese sellers, the butchers, the bakers, and so on.

Part of this description is painterly. We see in part through the eyes of Claude Lantier, an avant-garde (Cézanne-like) painter who will figure as the hero of his own book later in the series (L'Oeuvre). We are meant to see vividly the colors, the shimmering of the goods, even in the darkness of pre-dawn and the shimmering of gas-light.

But Zola engages all our senses: smells (both pleasing and putrid but mist notable in the so-called "Cheese Symphony"), tastes (blood sausage to carrots), textures (as the various workers get their hands in the products they make prepare and serve), and noises (the early-morning cacophony, the bustle and gossip of the workers).

For the non-native reader, the vocabulary mountain is high, and while one might be tempted to skip over the various fishes or sausages, the fact is that the poetry, and the point, is in the details. This poem – which has no logical beginning pr end, run in parallel with the more traditional narrative of Florent's modest rise and fall.

The tone is Rabelaisian, both in terms of the wide and concrete vocabulary, and the sense of connection to the real, multi-sensory word, both wondrous and nauseating -- after all, the belly is at the center of both Gargantua and Le Ventre de Paris. Zola reintroduces the Rabelaisian into French literature.