Balzac's Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre

Balzac’s Shorter Fictions

‘L’art est d’exprimer beaucoup en disant peu’ (Pensées, sujets, fragments, CHH xxviii. ) ‘Entre nous, je ne suis pas profond, mais très épais’ (Balzac to Clara Maffei, Oct. , Corr. iii. )

Balzac’s Shorter Fictions Genesis and Genre

T I M FAR R AN T

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Tim Farrant  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First Published  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN ‒‒‒           Typeset in Baskerville by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd. Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by T. J. International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall

To the memory of my parents

Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to the two supervisors of the work from which this book stems: to the late Merlin Thomas for introducing me to Balzac in his uniquely inspirational way; and to Donald Adamson for his energetic and erudite supervision of the subsequent thesis. Special thanks are due to the librarians of the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford, of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and of the Maison de Balzac, Paris, for their unstinting expertise; and to the Curators of the Collection Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Institut de France, for hospitably allowing me access to Balzac’s manuscripts. The project could not have been undertaken, still less completed, without generous assistance, financial and sabbatical, from the British Academy, The Provost and Fellows of The Queen’s College, Oxford, The Master and Fellows of Balliol College, The Master and Fellows of Pembroke College, Oxford, the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Literature of the University of Oxford, and considerable patience on the part of successive editors at Oxford University Press. Versions of certain parts of Chapters  and  appear as articles in Confrontations, Équinoxe, and La Modernité avant Haussmann; I am grateful to the editors of these publications, and to Oxford University Press, for permission to take them up again here. Not least I should like to express my gratitude to many friends and colleagues for their interest and advice: in particular, to Alan Raitt for his encouragement to publish, and to Carol Clark and Colin Smethurst for reading substantial parts of the draft; but no less, to the late Vera Daniel; to Eric Southworth and many other colleagues at St Peter’s College; to Roland Chollet, André Lorant, and other members of the Groupe d’études balzaciennes and the Groupe international de recherches balzaciennes; to Frank Lamport, Richard Parish, Bruce Tolley, Simon and Oonie Lunniss, Amanda Peters, and Jeremy Morris. I am greatly obliged to Pat Lawrence for her careful correction of my Balzacian manuscript. Finally, I am immeasurably grateful to my wife, Juliet, for her unfailing understanding and support, and for keeping both book and author from the fate of Frenhofer and his toiles. T. F.

Contents     INTRODUCTION

xi 

. PHILOSOPHIES OF COMPOSITION: From Corsino to the Code des gens honnêtes, –



Narrative as Illustration: the Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme and Corsino (ii) Mimesis: ‘deux histoires’ (iii) The Code des gens honnêtes and the Limits of Prescription (iv) The Limits of Prescription

   

(i)

. FROM CODE TO PHYSIOLOGIE, –



Doxa and Dialogue: Anecdotes, Codes, and the Physiologie Prescription and Description in the Physiologie A Physiology of Literary Illusion Types of Reading in the  Physiologie

   

. THE FIRST SCÈNES DE LA VIE PRIVÉE, –



(i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

(i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

The Physiologie du mariage and the Scènes de la vie privée The Scènes de la vie privée and the conte moral Scènes, Tableaux, and Le Dernier Chouan The Composition of the Scènes de la vie privée

. NARRATIVES AND NEWSPAPERS, – (i)

El Verdugo, Les Deux Rêves, Un épisode sous la Terreur, Adieu (ii) Articles, observation de moeurs, and Pen-portraits (iii) Caricature, Satire, and the Fantastic (iv) From Newspaper to Narrative

   

    



CONTENTS

. BALZAC AND THE LITERARY REVIEWS, October –August  (i) October –August : A New Form, the Literary Review (ii) Balzac’s Stories for the Reviews: L’Élixir de longue vie, L’Enfant maudit, Une passion dans le désert, Le Réquisitionnaire (iii) Portrait and Enigma: Sarrasine (iv) Contes historiques and contes artistes: Les Proscrits and Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (v) The Fantastic, the Real, and the Frame Story

. FROM LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN TO THE CONTES DROLATIQUES, – (i) La Peau de chagrin (ii) The Romans et contes philosophiques (iii) Renaissance Models and Contemporary Reality in Balzac’s Work, – (iv) The First dixain of Contes drolatiques ()

. BALZAC, ‘ROI DE LA NOUVELLE’: From the Contes bruns to Le Curé de Tours,  (i) Art or Income? The Commercial Background, – (ii) Contes bruns: Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit and Le Grand d’Espagne; La Grande Bretèche (iii) Fiction and Truth: Le Message and Madame Firmiani (iv) From La Transaction to Le Colonel Chabert (v) La Bourse and La Femme de trente ans [ I ] (vi) Les Célibataires (F: Le Curé de Tours)

. ANOTHER DESTINY? From Louis Lambert to Le Père Goriot, September –March  Louis Lambert and Le Médecin de Campagne Two Types of Tale: La Grenadière and La Femme abandonnée Les Marana and the Break with the Revue Form and Fragmentation: From Ferragus to the Second Contes drolatiques (v) Contes drolatiques: secund dixain (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

     

    

      

     

CONTENTS

(vi) L’Illustre Gaudissart and Un drame au bord de la mer (vii) Eugénie Grandet (viii) Le Père Goriot

. BUILDING THE CATHEDRAL, – (i) Études de mœurs and Études philosophiques, Introductions (ii) Melmoth réconcilié and La Fille aux yeux d’or (iii) Balzac’s Stories for the Chronique de Paris ( La Messe de l’athée, L’Interdiction, Facino Cane, La Confidence des Ruggieri) (iv) Gambara (v) End of an Era: The Third dixain of Contes drolatiques

. RELATIVE VALUES, – A Philosophy of Composition? From César Birotteau to Une fille d’Eve (ii) César Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen (iii) La Maison Nucingen (iv) Conversation and Contingency: La Torpille (v) Une fille d’Eve

(i)

. ‘ROI DES ROMANCIERS?’ Scenes, Satires, and Serials, – (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v)

The Preface to Une fille d’Eve Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan The Potential of Impotence: Massimilla Doni The Limits of Satire: Pierre Grassou Les Français peints par eux-mêmes and Petites misères de la vie conjugale

. TOWARDS THE COMÉDIE, – (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

The Revue parisienne Z. Marcas Les Fantaisies de Claudine (F: Un Prince de la Bohème) La Fausse Maîtresse: Form and Fragmentation

   

     

     

     

    

x

CONTENTS

. ‘LA GRRRRRRANDE COMÉDIE’, – (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

Comédie humaine, Avant-propos Autre étude de femme Honorine The End of the Story? Un homme d’affaires, Gaudissart II, and Les Comédiens sans le savoir (v) Gaudissart II and Les Comédiens sans le savoir

. CONSTELLATIONS AND SUPERNOVELLAS: Nouvelle and Novel, – (i) Constellations (ii) La Muse du département (iii) Supernovellas: Le Curé de village, Pierrette, and L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine (iv) Moral Novels? Albert Savarus, Un début dans la vie, and Modeste Mignon

     

    

CONCLUSION: BALZAC’S SHORTER FICTIONS



SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY



GENERAL INDEX



INDEX OF WORKS



Note on Texts The presentation of this book adheres to generally accepted conventions, except in its italicization of the titles of Balzac’s books and articles regardless of whether they appeared as independent publications or as part of larger collections. Those of works by other authors are italicized if published independently but placed in inverted commas if part of a collective work. Works published in newspapers, such as La Caricature, are referred to by date of publication where this is the easiest means of identification, and additionally by volume and page numbers in reviews where the date of publication is frequently not stated (as in, for example, the Revue de Paris). Most of Balzac’s works appeared under several different titles and in various versions before (and in some cases, after) La Comédie humaine began to appear in . (The present Pléiade edition of the Comédie humaine, of which details are given below, is based on Balzac’s last, , revision of the first,  Furne edition; this revision is known as the Furne corrigé.) In the interests of accessibility, the generally more familiar Comédie humaine title of a given work is used wherever possible, even when referring to an earlier version. So La Maison du chat-qui-pelote appears as such, even when the first version, Gloire et malheur, is being discussed, except when the earlier title identifies an earlier version of a text, the whole of which significantly differs from its successors. This is the case, for example, of La Transaction, the  first version of Le Colonel Chabert, and of the first version of Le Curé de Tours, Les Célibataires, which title was in the  Comédie humaine applied to the part of the Scènes de la vie de province containing Pierrette, Le Curé de Tours, and La Rabouilleuse. La Femme de trente ans [I] refers to the story of ; the same title, but without this qualifying Roman numeral, refers to the eponymous novel of . An analogous system applies to Balzac’s two articles entitled Croquis. Dates of first publication are given with the first substantial discussion of a given text; as the overall organization is chronological, the context will in most cases make apparent which version of a text is being discussed. Where deemed necessary, the Comédie humaine title is indicated preceded by the cipher F or FC (i.e. Furne or Furne corrigé: see the abbreviations listed below). References to La Comédie humaine designate the ‘new’ Pléiade edition, edited by P.-G. Castex et al. (–) and reprints, supplemented, in the same series, by Œuvres diverses, ed. R. Chollet, R. Guise, and N. Mozet (, ); they take the form of volume and page numbers bracketed without identifying title, e.g. (i. ), except in the case of Œuvres diverses, where the volume number is preceded by the abbreviation OD. Where a textual variant is concerned, it is designated by a lower-case letter after the volume and page number. Thus (iv. a) refers to vol. iv, variant a to p. ; variants and notes appear at the end of each Pléiade volume. Other editions are designated as follows: F FC

La Comédie humaine (Furne, Dubochet, Hetzel, and Paulin, –). Furne corrigé: Balzac’s personal corrected copy of F , reproduced in OCI.

xii

NOTES ON TEXT

OCI CHH

Œuvres complètes illustrées, facsimile of Furne edition of –, ed. J.-A. Ducourneau (–). Œuvres complètes, Club de l’honnête homme edition (–).

In addition, the following abbreviations have been adopted: AB BF BRC CAIEF C CD Corr. ÉtM ÉtPhil. FJP LH Lov.

M P PSF

RP RDM RHLF RLC RSH S V Vol.

L’Année balzacienne (– ). Journal général de l’Imprimerie, later Bibliographie de la France (–). A. R. Pugh, Balzac’s Recurring Characters (London, ). Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises (– ). La Caricature (–). Contes drolatiques in OD i. Balzac, Correspondance, ed. R. Pierrot (–). Études de mœurs au XIXème siècle (–). Études philosophiques (–). Feuilleton des journaux politiques (). Lettres à Madame Hanska, ed. R. Pierrot (). Manuscripts and other documents at the Lovenjoul collection, Institut de France, Paris. The abbreviation is followed by a shelfmark of a letter plus – digits. La Mode (–). R. Pierrot, Honoré de Balzac (). Pensées, sujets, fragments, ed. M. Bardèche, CHH xxviii. –. The first eight folios of Balzac’s notebook (Lov. A ) are written on both recto and verso, making sixteen pages; the remainder are written on the recto only. Bardèche’s edition misleadingly numbers these pages as folios, creating a disparity after the notebook’s page , and making his numbers after his folio  consistently six higher than than of the actual notebook. So, for example, Lov. A  fo. corresponds to his fo. , CHH xxviii. . However, as this edition is otherwise the most accurate generally available, its numbering is followed here. Revue de Paris (–). Revue des deux mondes (–). Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France (– ). Revue de littérature comparée (– ). Revue des sciences humaines (– ). La Silhouette (–). S. Vachon, Les Travaux et les jours d’Honoré de Balzac (Paris, Vincennes, and Montreal, ). Le Voleur (–).

The place of publication of all works cited is Paris, unless otherwise stated. Essential references are given in the footnotes, detailed bibliographical information in the Select Bibliography.

Introduction Balzac, on paper and in person, has a reputation for being long. Here is one sleepless victim of the author: La nuit qui suivit cette soirée un peu tendue, se passa dans une chambre à deux lits, offerte aux deux visiteurs; au lieu d’écrire quelques notes, Balzac se plut à exprimer à son compagnon avec une verve et un brio intarissables, les impressions qu’il venait de recevoir; il eût fallu sténographier!; M. Loiseau répétait souvent qu’il n’avait jamais moins dormi, ni plus admiré son cher compatriote, que pendant cette conférence si spontanée et si prolongée.1

Not all Balzac’s audiences have been as delighted. The duchesse de Dino, who had been treated to him earlier that evening, found him ‘sans verve ni facilité dans la conversation. Il y est même très lourd . . . Il vise à l’extraordinaire et raconte de lui-même mille choses auxquelles je ne crois nullement’.2 ‘C’est un bavard’, declared Delacroix.3 Balzac is generally thought to be long without good reason; this study hopes to turn that notion on its head. It explores Balzac’s short stories in the light of their genesis, as individual fictional entities, in relation to others, and in the context of his work’s overall development. Short stories make up over half La Comédie humaine, in addition to the thirty published Contes drolatiques, and scores of other narratives and newspaper articles.4 Balzac’s writing career began with short fiction—the first trace of narrative in his work is an anecdote5—and ended with it, to all intents and purposes, in what are vastly expanded stories, Le Cousin Pons and La Cousine Bette. ‘Tout s’agrandit sous ma plume’:6 virtually everything in La Comédie humaine either is short fiction, or grew from it. Beyond his short stories proper, brief narrative is ubiquitous: in the anecdotes of his parodic guides to human behaviour, the Code des gens honnêtes and the Physiologie du mariage; in stories framed within others (Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit, Autre étude de femme), or in works like Le Médecin de campagne or Albert Savarus; in article-series such as Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, Petites Misères de 1 Loiseau d’Entraigues, letter to Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, May : Imprudence et bonheur, Lov. A , fo. r. The letter erroneously places the visit in ; it in fact occurred on  Nov.  ( P, ). 2 Duchesse de Dino: chronique de  à  (), ii. –: P . 3 Delacroix, Correspondance générale,  June , ii. , cited by R. Pierrot, Corr. iv. . 4 On Balzac’s unfinished work and journalism, cf. T. Takayama, Les Oeuvres romanesques avortées de Balzac (–) ( Tokyo and Paris, ); R. Chollet, Balzac journaliste () and OD i and ii, passim; and F. Schuerewegen, ‘Avortements’, in S. Vachon (ed.), Balzac: une poétique du roman (Montreal and Saint Denis, ), –. 5 6 Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme, OD i. . Cf. Ch. I. LH i. ,  Aug. .



I N T RO D U C T I O N

la vie conjugale, or Le Diable à Paris; in articles concatenated into stories (Les Comédiens sans le savoir), stories concatenated into novels (Même histoire, now La Femme de trente ans), and novels linked into the vast frescoes which are Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Such narratives are hardly brief; but Balzac’s view of brevity is very large. Untroubled by the anachronistic anglophone term ‘short story’,7 with its regrettable intimations of inferiority, and undesirable invitation to start counting words,8 he took the brevity of contes or nouvelles as read. Yet Balzac the jobbing journalist and sometime printer did calculate numbers of pages, even of typographical characters. In this respect, textual length was a practical matter, of quantity of copy and of payment. At this basic level, contes or nouvelles were units of currency—ones which, like everything he touched, were subject to inflation: David Séchard, for example, proposed as a nouvelle, eventually formed the last third of Illusions perdues.9 A working definition for Balzac’s stories at the height of his activity as conteur (–, when about half those in the Comédie humaine were written and published) might be set at two-and-a-half feuilles, or forty octavo pages,10 his limit with the Revue de Paris (Corr. ii. –), which published most of them. But, as Balzac, and the press, evolved, the boundaries shifted: his later projections of the number of typographical characters (Corr. iii. , ; iv. ) are significant less as quantitative absolutes, than as revealing reflections of the crucial junctures at which he made them. In  and , the newspaper serialized novel was just beginning to take off, and to extend beyond the five- or six-episode nouvelles which had hitherto marked the outer limit of most feuilletons.11 And it was precisely at this time that Balzac was 7 Established by Brander Matthews’s article ‘The Philosophy of the Short Story’, The London Saturday Review (  July ); Lippincott’s Magazine ( July ) (cf. F. Garcier, ‘Du nom au genre: le cas de la short story’, La Licorne, ‘Dynamique des genres’ (), esp. –; repr. in C. E. May, The New Short Story Theories (Athens, Oh.,  ), –). 8 Forster classes novels as not less than , words ( Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth, ), ; do nouvelles stop at ,?), Engstrom the nouvelle as a vaguer ‘two hundred and fifty average thirty-line pages’; whilst McCormick and Des Loges restrict themselves to – and a maximum of  pages respectively (A. G. Engstrom, ‘The Formal Short story in France and its Development before ’, Studies in Philology,  (), ; D. F. McCormick, Les Nouvelles de Balzac (), ; S. Des Loges, L’Art structural de la narration dans la nouvelle de Balzac ( Wroclaw, Warsaw, Cracow, )). Such definitions are largely irrelevant to matter apprehended not arithmetically, but formally and linguistically. 9 In , Le Siècle had exchanged Mémoires d’une jeune mariée [sic] for ‘six nouvelles inédites, dont trois d’environ soixante colonnes de quarante lignes environ chacune et les trois autres de quarante colonnes environ chacune’ (Corr. iii. –); and, on  Oct. , Balzac told Le Musée des familles that if the nouvelle David Séchard exceeded , lines, ‘je la remplacerais par une autre intitulée les Parisiens en province’ (Corr. iv. ), a title eventually employed in La Comédie humaine for l’Illustre Gaudissart and La Muse du département. 10 A feuille is a printed sheet, the equivalent of sixteen octavo pages; a feuillet, that of one printed octavo page. 11 Anticipating the length of Véronique, now part of Le Curé de village, Balzac wondered ‘si vous avez à la Presse assez de caractère pour composer toute ma nouvelle, qui sera d’une étendue de dix feuilletons’ (May , Corr. iii. ), whilst the following year its administrator, Dujarier,

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working on one such work, Une fille d’Eve (a nouvelle which stretches to thirteen instalments in Le Siècle), and that he first envisages a collection of oeuvres complètes called ‘la Comédie humaine’ (Corr. iv. ). Une fille d’Eve is a cas-limite, one of the longer works considered here in detail. But it is chosen less for its length, than as symptomatic of larger tensions between story and novel, brevity and extension, wholes and parts, macrocosm and microcosm, explored also in other texts such as La Peau de chagrin or Albert Savarus. Such tensions form some of this book’s central concerns. These are less with theoretical definition (which is ultimately subjective)12 than with exploring Balzac’s conception and practice of short fiction—both his individual stories, and shorter fiction as grille d’écriture and de lecture for his opus. Its title phrase, ‘shorter fictions’, points to these tensions, and to the aporia inherent in any study of genre: discussing genres implies that they can be absolutely distinguished, yet they are invariably mixed; conversely, to speak of mixing implies the reverse.13 It is impossible to solve this paradox; but it is the motor which drives this study forward. What matters is not the boundary-line, but the relative status of the realms concerned. Genre, fundamentally pre-reflective,14 is a question of conception—the writer’s, and the reader’s: the expression of an intention, and a set of pointers towards reception.15 Hence the linking of genesis and genre.16 My subject is not only Balzac’s ‘short stories’,17 but also other brief forms, articles, and fragments; their relationship to, and development into, even the longest novels; and ultimately, the philosophical question of brevity. And my aim differs from that of much contemporary genetic criticism calculated that ‘les  feuilletons que vous devez publier . . . formeront au moins huit nouvelles, soit environ six feuilletons pour chacune d’elles’ (Corr. iv. ). Indeed, at this time, overlength was more likely to be a problem: Nettement writes that the editor of La Gazette de France ‘a peur d’un roman en trente feuilletons’ ( May , Corr. iv. ). But, by , length has become a virtue: ‘vos quatre cent mille lettres ont enlevé la question’ wrote J.-A. David, accepting Esther ou les amours d’un vieux banquier, which actually occupied  instalments, for Le Parisien ( May , Corr. iv. ), and even articles had grown: Ce qui plaît aux parisiennes (Philosophie de la vie conjugale à Paris) was  folios,  octavo pages, paid  frs—considerably longer, and more, than Balzac’s first articles for Le Diable à Paris ( Dec. , Corr. iv. ). Cf. R. Guise, ‘Balzac et le romanfeuilleton’, AB (), esp. –; ‘Le roman-feuilleton (–): la Naissance d’un genre’, Doctorat d’État thesis, Nancy, , repr. Lille, , pt. I, chs. –. 12 See R. Godenne: ‘Il serait vain de réduire la nouvelle, ce que l’on fait trop souvent, à un type de récit unique’ (Études sur la nouvelle française (Geneva, ), ). Cf. also H. Steinhauer, ‘Towards a Definition of the Novella’, Seminar,  (), –; V. Shaw, The Short Story: A Critical Introduction (London, ), vi, ; M. L. Pratt, ‘The Short Story. The Long and the Short of It’, Poetics, : – (), –, reprinted in May, The New Short Story Theories –; A.-M. Baron (ed.), Balzac et la nouvelle, L’École des lettres,  (–), –. 13 J. Derrida, Parages (), , cit. D. Combe, Les Genres littéraires (), . 14 Combe, Les Genres littéraires,  et seq. 15 J.-M. Schaeffer, Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire? (), esp. –. 16 For an overview of Balzac’s manuscript corpus, but with a more globally synchronic approach than is taken here, see S. Vachon, ‘Les Enseignements des manuscrits d’Honoré de Balzac’, Genesis (). 17 Cf. A. W. Raitt (ed.), Balzac: Short Stories (Oxford,  and reprints).

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in being less to question the finality of the printed text, than to follow some of the steps which led to it, and to explore the role of the provisional, the fragmentary, and the virtual in the final work.18 Balzac gives only two substantive theoretical discussions of short fiction: the  Théorie du conte (which is as much an autobiographical self-examination as a theory), and his remarks in the  Lettres sur la littérature. Yet they leave his regard for the genre in no doubt. The conte, ‘la plus haute expression de la littérature’, is a traditional genre, the embodiment of authenticity and truth: Ceux qui ont conté sont rares, bien conté, on les compte, et ce sont des hommes de génie—Lucien—Pétrone—Les Fabliaux (autores incertos)—Rabelais—Verville— Boccace—L’Arioste—La Fontaine—Voltaire—Walter-Scott—Et la reine de Navarre! . . . Hamilton—Sterne—Cervantès—et Le Sage donc?19 Le Conte, cette magnifique, cette puissante forme de la pensée humaine et qui va si loin, témoin Peau d’âne, Barbe bleue, La Courtisane amoureuse, Roméo et Juliette, porte avec lui quelque secret quand il a conquis la vie refusée à tant d’œuvres.20

La Comédie humaine is scattered with vestigial references to this corpus, which the Contes drolatiques seek to emulate, and works such as Eugénie Grandet or La Vieille Fille exploit.21 For Balzac, the conte is a vital form containing the object lessons of human experience. Ceci n’est pas un conte is ‘un des grands morceaux de l’histoire du coeur humain’; Manon Lescaut, Adolphe, Werther, and René ‘donnent la clé de presque toutes les situations du coeur humain en amour’. Its weakness is a potential for triviality: ‘un livre comme Volupté a plus de chances de vie littéraire que les bijoux dont je vous parle [ Musset’s Frédéric et Bernerette] . . . Conter pour conter est l’arabesque littéraire; mais l’arabesque n’est un chef-d’œuvre que sous le pinceau de Raphaël’. Stories must have an exemplary quality, an illustrative function, present in all great examples of the genre: 18 Cf. e.g. M. Contat and D. Ferrer (eds.), Pourquoi la critique génétique (), . If the conventional historical approach thus falls into a ‘piège téléologique’ (A. Grésillon, Éléments de critique génétique (), ), at least it has some hope of being well anchored. 19 Les Cent Contes: Théorie du conte (hereafter: Théorie du conte), OD i. ; Pensées, sujets, fragments, Lov. A , fo.r, PSF fo. , CHH xxviii. , cit. OD i. ; Balzac had deleted ‘Marmontel pour mémoire’ after Scott. The list is repeated virtually verbatim, but with the addition of Aesop and ‘les Arabes inconnus des Mille et Une Nuits’ in Petites Misères de la vie conjugale, xii. . Balzac wrote an eulogious Notice sur la vie de La Fontaine in  (OD ii. –). 20 Lettres sur la littérature, le théâtre et les arts, Revue parisienne,  ( Sept. ), CHH xxviii. –; Balzac has in mind Bandello’s novella (Novelle, ii. ), rather than Shakespeare’s tragedy. Though he cites Shakespeare’s play more frequently, he has high esteem for its source: vii. . Two of these three Lettres, along with other critical texts, have been anthologized and annotated by S. Vachon: Écrits sur le roman (). 21 There are some  references to La Fontaine in La Comédie humaine,  to Marguerite de Navarre,  to Boccaccio (xii. ; , –, ); but a complete study of the role in Balzac’s work of this traditional literature of the conte remains to be made. Cf. R. Chollet, R. Guise, and N. Mozet, OD i. –; J. Gurkin, ‘Romance elements in Eugénie Grandet’, L’Esprit créateur,  (Spring ); N. Mozet, iv. .

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En terminant ces six nouvelles, on se demande comme le mathématicien: ‘Qu’est-ce que cela prouve? A-t-on voulu prouver quelque chose: Y a-t-il quelque grand et vaste symbole comme dans Adolphe, comme dans Paul et Virginie, comme dans telle page qui devient un monument au milieu des ruines d’une littérature?22

Demonstrated by Balzac’s own practice (in, for example, the  Scènes de la vie privée), this illustrative function is linked to his concern with examples, types, and systems. To be successful, Musset should have ‘élevé chacune de ces narrations à la hauteur où elles deviennent typiques’ and présenté l’un de ces sens généraux auxquels s’attachent invinciblement les coeurs . . . Ceux qui sont doués de talents rares, comme l’est M. de Musset, doivent étudier les causes de ces phénomènes de l’esprit humain, afin d’en augmenter la divine nomenclature.

For Balzac, the conte is the Urform of literature. Few today would think of Scott, Sterne, or Lesage as conteurs, or of Manon Lescaut or Adolphe (which Constant calls a ‘petit roman’) as nouvelles.23 But Balzac saw the conte, and conter, as transcendent, capable of absorbing diverse discourses and of near-infinite variety, via contes philosophiques, bruns, or drolatiques—as something, indeed, which rather resembles the Bakhtinian novel. In this, he celebrates a polyvalence which contemporaries, wearied by the craze for stories known as the folie du conte,24 implicitly acknowledged, but sought to deny. ‘Jamais siècle n’a été aussi engloutisseur que le nôtre’ noted La Charge;25 for Le Conteur, ‘le conte . . . n’est en somme que le squelette d’un roman’; for the Journal des débats the nouvelle was ‘un roman au petit pied’, an ‘improvisation de roman’.26 ‘Ah! s’il était possible de l’allonger, de l’amincir, de l’étendre à l’infini, comme une feuille d’or sous le marteau du batteur, il n’y aurait pas de contes; on les laisserait à Voltaire; il n’y aurait que des romans’, exclaimed Nisard; ‘mais le conte contemporain n’est pas une feuille d’or’.27 Yet Balzac Lettres sur la littérature, Revue parisienne ( Sept. ), CHH xxviii. , , –, –, . Constant, Adolphe, ed. J.-H. Bornecque, nd edn. (), preface, , ; Balzac calls it variously a ‘petit roman’, a ‘roman’, and a ‘nouvelle’ (ii. , iv. , ), but there are reasons for seeing it as a récit: cf. C. Du Bos, cit. Ch. (v) below. 24 The folie du conte reached its zenith in mid-, beginning to decline after , though there are still complaints about the conte’s ubiquity in . Cf. R. Guise, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton’, pt. I, ch. ; P. Berthier, La Presse littéraire et dramatique au début de la monarchie de juillet (–) (Villeneuve-d’Ascq, ), pp. –, esp. ; F. P. Bowman, ‘La Nouvelle en ’, CAIEF  () esp. –, and ‘The Splendors and Miseries of Reading beyond the Canon’, in W. Paulson, Les Genres de l’hénaurme siècle (Ann Arbor, ), –. 25 La Charge ou les folies contemporaines ( Apr. ): Guise, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton’, pt. I, ch. , –. 26 Le Conteur, recueil de contes de tous les temps et de tous les pays [], i. , ; Journal des débats ( June ): Guise, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton’, pt. I, ch. , . 27 D. Nisard, ‘D’un commencement de réaction contre la littérature facile’, RP  (Dec. ), –, at : Guise, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton’, –. The deprecation of Nisard’s final phrase relates to the moral more than the literary qualities of the conte. 22 23

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was a goldsmith: the voice of the conteur dominates in even the most fully realized novels of La Comédie humaine;28 it is through him that all else is relayed. However, the conte is not the same as the novel, even if made of similar stuff. As well as embodying archetypal wisdom,29 the various types of short fiction share an ubiquitous but under-acknowledged concern with form which determines even his longest works. ‘Quel homme eût été Balzac’, wrote Flaubert, ‘s’il eût su écrire! Mais il ne lui a manqué que cela. Un artiste, après tout, n’aurait pas tant fait, n’aurait pas eu cette ampleur.’30 Janin declared Illusions perdues to be written ‘au hasard, sans but, sans plan’; ‘un écrivain n’est pas un chiffonier, un livre ne se remplit pas comme une hotte’.31 Yet for Balzac, form is not as a mere envelope for the material, or the superficial effect of a cause, but the internal and shaping dynamic which of necessity brings together cause and effect.32 In Illusions perdues, Vernou ‘porte des articles, fera toujours des articles, et rien que des articles . . . Félicien est incapable de concevoir une oeuvre, d’en disposer les masses, d’en réunir harmonieusement les personnages dans un plan qui commence, se noue et marche vers un fait capital.’33 D’Arthez’s comments are just that: a thèse d’art. Balzac sees form as integral to conception: his concern with unity of form finds its due expression in his compositional practice. His habits of meticulous redrafting and recasting manifest a will to unity and a purposiveness engendered by his engagement with, and practice of, short fiction, and which shapes even his longest novels. Such stress on form is, then, a salient feature of short fiction, and of Balzac’s fiction tout court. Concentration, which he repeatedly advocates in the first half 28 Cf. R. Fernandez, cit. Du Bos, Ch. (v); and, on the Bakhtinian interpretation and the determinant role of the narrator, E. Bordas, Balzac, discours et détours (Toulouse, ), esp. – et seq. But Bakhtin seems to be anticipated by Blondet: ‘Notre jeune littérature procède par tableaux où se concentrent tous les genres, la comédie et le drame, les descriptions, les caractères, le dialogue sertis par les noeuds brillants d’une intrigue intéressante. Le roman, qui veut le sentiment, le style et l’image, est la création moderne la plus immense’ (Illusions perdues, v. ). 29 A notion shared by Grimm and Arnim (A. Jolles, Formes simples (), –.). Cf., inter alia, B. Bettelheim, Psychanalyse des contes de fées (), – and –; S. Loiseau, Les Pouvoirs du conte (); C. Velay-Vallantin, L’Histoire des contes (); and N. Belmont, Poétique du conte (), ch. . 30 Letter to Louis Colet,  Dec. , in Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. J. Bruneau and B. Masson (), . 31 J. Janin, ‘Un Grand homme de province à Paris’, RP  (July ), –, cit. E. Zola (‘Jules Janin et Balzac’, Le Roman expérimental, ed. A. Guedj (), , ). Zola elsewhere declares: ‘Il a pourtant, dans les Contes drolatiques, donné des pages qui sont des bijoux de ciselure; je ne sais rien de plus joliment inventé comme forme, ni de plus finement exécuté . . . D’ailleurs, il a beau s’embarquer dans des phrases fâcheuses, son style est toujours à lui. Il le pétrit, le refond, le refait entièrement à chacun de ses romans. Sans cesse il cherche une forme’ ( ‘Du Le Roman expérimental, ). 32 Cf. M. Andréoli: ‘La forme constitue le centre, l’espace privilégié de la fusion nécessaire entre la cause et l’effet’; it is a ‘manifestation sensible de l’idée’ ( Le Système balzacien ( Paris and Lille, ), ). In pointing to the dominance of the shaping narratorial dynamic, Andréoli and Bordas, from their different viewpoints, are saying similar things; cf. n.  above. 33 v. ; cf. Le Cabinet des Antiques, preface, iv. –.

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of his career,34 becomes, in the second, a demand for unity. On the model of Ceci n’est pas un conte, the conte must be ‘simple, vrai, complet’(CHH xxviii. ); Ourliac’s Suzanne, derived from Diderot’s work, uses too much extraneous material: ‘Diderot, en grand artiste, n’a pas donné les antécédents de Gardeil et de Mademoiselle Delachaux . . . Le génie de l’artiste consiste à choisir les circonstances naturelles qui deviennent les éléments du Vrai littéraire, et, s’il ne les soude pas bien, si ces métaux ne font pas une statue d’un beau ton, d’un seul jet, eh! bien, l’œuvre est manquée’ (CHH xxviii. ). Unity, together with justifying causation and drama, are the criteria which produce the ideal composition: La nature n’a pas besoin de livre, le fait est expliqué par cela seul qu’il est. Pour le faire passer de l’action vivante à l’action probable d’un livre, l’écrivain doit nous en montrer toutes les racines. (CHH xxviii. –)

Balzac’s criteria seem contradictory: on the one hand, praise for an absence of explanation in Diderot; on the other, a demand for it elsewhere. This contradiction is only partly explained by the fact that Balzac is differentiating between developments possible in novels, but not, perhaps, in stories: it is, in fact, inherent in the ambiguous generic status of the conte and the nouvelle, and innate in the emergence of the Renaissance (or Tuscan) nouvelle from the conte. Where the conte shapes the world as we would like it to be (or in such a way as to warn us that it is not thus), the nouvelle, a more modern form, starts from a real, or supposedly real, incident to exemplify a human truth.35 The world of the conte is self-contained, circular, and on occasion fantastic,36 bearing an archetypal truth, often stated in a separate moral, and, as its name suggests, echoing or replicating the oral transmission of wisdom; the nouvelle, in contrast, exemplifies the real world, stresses less narration than event, is linear, and directed towards its ending; its moral is inferred.37 The conte obeys an internal logic in which the very absence of the extraordinary might seem incredible; the nouvelle provides what is a proto-realistic exploration of the world.38 Most of the stories of the founding modern collection, The Decameron, can be seen as contes, but some are more morally problematic, and offer no unambiguous interpretation.39 The apparent ambiguity of Balzac’s comments 34 Cf. Notice sur la vie de La Fontaine, OD ii. ; Le Gars, Avertissement, viii. ; La Peau de chagrin, x. ; Les Cent Contes drolatiques, OD i. , , . 35 Jolles, Formes simples,  et seq. 36 R. Godenne, ‘A propos de quelques textes critiques du XXème siècle sur la nouvelle’, CAIEF  (), . 37 Balzac’s view seems to anticipate Flaubert’s wish that the novel should ‘faire rêver’: the ‘arabesque’ of the conte ‘fait songer, comme la fumée du cigare qu’on brûle’: CHH xxviii. . 38 Jolles, Formes simples, . 39 Cf. e.g. Decameron, . iii and . vii: J.-P. Aubrit, Le Conte et la nouvelle (), –. The ambiguity inherent in the pointe is exemplified by nouvelles  and  of the Heptaméron, which invite at least two contradictory interpretations, and found in exempla as early as Seneca: cf. P. de Lajarte, ‘La Nouvelle aux frontières du commentaire et du dialogue dans L’Heptaméron de Marguerite de

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parallels that of short fiction itself; and the conte’s idealization of its subject matter is embodied in the philosophical concerns of the Études philosophiques, conceived mostly in the earlier part of his career, whilst the nouvelle’s protorealistic concern with realia, developed in canonical psychological explorations such as La Princesse de Clèves, gives rise to the stories of the  Scènes de la vie privée, and ultimately to the Études de mœurs. If the burden of Balzac’s work thus gradually shifts from the older form of the conte to the more modern nouvelle, striking realities, dramatically presented, characterize many of the short fictions of La Comédie humaine. Balzac praises such qualities in his review of Musset: ‘L’histoire, car de telles compositions arrivent à la valeur de l’histoire, est d’un dramatique horrible, d’une épouvantable vérité, d’un sens cruel, et, par-dessus tout, amusante’ (CHH xxviii. –). A deftly exploited historical context, a focus on moments of terror, are two prominent elements identified by Bourget in Balzac’s stories,40 although they certainly do not account for all of them; and Balzac’s stress on unity anticipates Poe’s suggestively loose definition of the story as something which could be read at one sitting41 (even if Balzac could sit longer and more busily than most, breaking his chair on more than one occasion: LH i. ). Many of his stories contain a central symbol, a Heyserian falcon,42 a Tieckian turningpoint43 (often a revelation of identity—the discovery that Maximilien, a shop boy, is really an aristocrat in Le Bal de Sceaux, Chabert’s exposure of his wife’s identity in Le Colonel Chabert); or exemplify Goethe’s demand for ‘eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit’,44 Storm’s description of the Novelle as ‘die Schwester des Dramas’, or Chekhov’s comparison of it to the stage.45 There is a fundamental unity of effect in Le Colonel Chabert or Le Curé de Tours; a central symbol or imagic nexus co-ordinates, for example, La Paix du ménage, La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, or La Fille aux yeux d’or—devices carried over in the determinant symbols of longer works (La Peau de chagrin, Le Lys dans la vallée, La Navarre’, and A. Cullière, ‘De la controverse à la nouvelle. Alexandre Van den Bussche, lecteur de Sénèque’, in V. Engel and M. Guissard (eds.), La Nouvelle de langue française aux frontières des autres genres, du Moyen Age à nos jours (Ottignies, ), i.  et seq. and . 40 Études et portraits (–), iii. –. Bourget is discussing El Verdugo, Un épisode sous la Terreur, Le Réquisitionnaire, and La Grande Bretèche. 41 The Philosophy of Composition (), which even suggests that a long work cannot be unified (E. A. Poe, Selected Writings, ed. D. Galloway (Harmondsworth, ), ); cf. Twice-Told Tales, ibid. –. 42 For Heyse, the Novelle requires ‘eine starke, deutliche Silhouette . . . deren Umriss, in wenigen Worten vorgetragen, schon einen charakteristischen Eindruck marke’, finding a perfect example in the Decameron, . ix ( Jugenderinnerungen und Bekenntnisse (Berlin, ), ). 43 For Tieck, the Novelle’s ‘sonderbaren, auffallenden Wendepunkt’ distinguished it from all other kinds of tale: Schriften (Berlin, ), xi, p. lxxxvii. 44 ‘Was ist eine Novelle anders als eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit?’: J.-P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens ( Jan. ), cit. R. Paulin, The Brief Compass (Oxford, ), . 45 Storm, Novelle, ed. J. Kunz (Darmstadt, ), : Paulin, Brief Compass, ; Chekhov, letter to Pleshcheyev,  Sept. : May, New Short Story Theories, .

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Rabouilleuse). Mystery, drama, often of the most lurid kind, pervade the early stories especially—El Verdugo, Un épisode sous la Terreur, L’Auberge rouge, and La Grande Bretèche. Yet there is drama and there are dramas; cause, and causes; effect, and effects. The intense impact of El Verdugo is very different from the theatrical dialogue of a later work like La Fausse Maîtresse, or the spectacular realm of Gaudissart II. After Le Père Goriot and the middle of Balzac’s career, the systematic deployment of recurring characters represents a change in the teleology of his creation. Unity itself becomes problematic—a setting of the unity of the individual story against that of the work as a whole. The early stories of the Études philosophiques, most of them written between  and , are testbench examinations of philosophical causes, the ‘sens caché’ (x. ) behind events: Adieu, L’Élixir de longue vie, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. The real is a means of questing the absolute, more than a subject of enquiry in itself. From , with the Études de mœurs, the tables turn: the ‘effets’, ‘plus considérables que les causes’ (ibid.), become the primary study of his opus. This has two results. First, it leads to an extensiveness which takes the form of longer fictions assembled from shorter ones (Même histoire in ; from , Illusions perdues) and of a continuing production of stories (nearly all, with the significant exceptions of La Confidence des Ruggieri, Gambara, and Massimilla Doni, outside the Études philosophiques) which present the wider personnel of La Comédie humaine: La Messe de l’athée, Z. Marcas, Un prince de la Bohème, La Fausse Maîtresse. Secondly, it creates a confusion of cause and effect: L’Interdiction explores the effects of rapacity in an unhappy marriage; yet the episode it relates is also a cause of continuing rancour, evoked as late as Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (vi. , ); Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan is both an effect of the creation of its protagonists in Le Cabinet des Antiques and Illusions perdues, but also, in the new illumination it brings to them, a cause. Such circumstances make the unity of the individual story rather more questionable than it might be in the case of other contemporary writers of freestanding narratives, such as Mérimée, or Gautier. Indeed, one of Balzac’s characteristics is to diversify the forms of brevity, to subvert categories in the very act of their creation. Little given to ‘la Théorie dont la parole est toujours au futur’ (v. ), he had little time for its hierarchies: Descartes établit des divisions, des nomenclatures; j’aurais mieux aimé le voir s’occuper de choses plus intéressantes . . . rien n’est si facile que de classer les fleurs, mais celui qui cherche à deviner la cause de leurs couleurs, de leur naissance, leur principe de vie, est le véritable botaniste . . . Je ne prétends pas faire le procès de Descartes: il faut des divisions, mais il y a fagots et fagots, dirait Sganarelle. (OD i. –)

In his discussion of Musset quoted above, he slips seamlessly from ‘ces six nouvelles’ to the ex-cathedra statement ‘Conter pour conter est l’arabesque

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littéraire’. Balzac’s flexible terminology, his use without explanation of conte, nouvelle, histoire, and the like, reflects the strikingly imprecise, often deliberately aberrant usage of his age, with its challenge to Classical hierarchies of genre. ‘Les règles sont en littérature ce que sont les lois en morale: elles ne peuvent tout prévoir’.46 In this area, as in the matter of length, the desire for precision can lead to confusion,47 so I attempt no more than to follow these general pointers in my use of terms like anecdote, conte, nouvelle, and roman.48 The anecdote and conte derive from oral narrative; the anecdote, generally the shortest, is often told to illustrate another discourse; the conte is generally longer and exemplary, whilst the anecdote’s stress on event and ending 49 is shared with the nouvelle. Baudelaire’s oft-quoted remark on the pre-eminence of form in the nouvelle (‘Le roman . . . est un genre bâtard dont le domaine est vraiment sans limites . . . La nouvelle, plus resserrée, plus condensée, jouit des bénéfices éternels de la contrainte’)50 is still a useful characterization of differences between it and the novel, but its Poe-inspired emphasis on unity as a primarily aesthetic consideration (‘rien ne se perd de la totalité de l’effet’) appears somewhat anachronistic, given Balzac’s conception of unity as an altogether more substantive affair of character, event, and philosophy. Simpler, but closer to the mark, is Eikenbaum’s view of the nouvelle as ‘une forme fondamentale élémentaire’ and of the novel as ‘une forme syncrétique’; 51 but it is still rather too reductive to be applied to Balzac. Beyond such broad statements, then, there can be no absolute or universally applicable distinction between genres. To relate systematically the formal features of Balzac’s work to the generic or structural typologies of writers such as Jolles or Propp52 would be to produce a typology tied to an extraneous 46 V. Hugo, Odes et Ballades, ed. P. Albouy (), n. ( Preface); S. Nash, ‘Victor Hugo’s Odes et ballades and the Romantic Lyric’, in Paulson (ed.), Les Genres de l’hénaurme siècle, –, and Bowman, ‘La Nouvelle en ’, , . Balzac lampoons such usage in Les Litanies romantiques (OD ii. ), and acknowledges it in Illusions perdues: ‘J’ai lu L’Archer de Charles IX’ says Petit-Claud, ‘c’est plus qu’un ouvrage, c’est un livre!’(v. ). 47 A. Engstrom’s system of classification causes him to conclude that Balzac wrote only nine contes (two of which, L’Idée et le fait and Cambremer’s tale, can only by saved by wresting them from their narrative frames in L’Auberge rouge and Un drame au bord de la mer), and Nodier only one (‘The Formal Short Story’, ); Desloges’s attempt to organize Balzac’s narratives by quantity, quality, structure, type, and plot creates so many categories that her entire study becomes one of classification. R. Godenne (‘A Propos de quelques textes critiques sur la nouvelle’), produces a similarly inconclusive list. 48 This approach, whilst open to the danger of anachronism, is intended to be synchronic, seeking both to historicize generic concepts and to be accessible to present-day readers. 49 Cf. Jolles, ‘Le Cas’, Formes simples, –. 50 Baudelaire, ‘Théophile Gautier [IV]’, Curiosités esthétiques: l’art romantique, ed. H. Lemaître (, rev. ), –. 51 B. Eikenbaum, ‘Sur la théorie de la prose’ in T. Todorov and R. Jakobson (eds.), Théorie de la littérature (), . 52 V. Propp, Morphologie du conte (). J. Gurkin, ‘Romance elements in Eugénie Grandet’, suggests the potential of such readings.

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hierarchy, rather than to the internal imperatives of Balzac’s work, to that evolving relationship between genesis and genre which is the study of ‘le véritable botaniste’. More seriously, it would overlook the central fact that such contradictions result from attempts to isolate as absolutes generic features which operate contextually and synergically, which ask to be seen in conjunction with each other53—a particularly grave error in relation to Balzac, whose work is both a cathedral of categories, yet also their carnival,54 and in which genesis and evolution are indissociable from genre.55 The bafflement of a Godenne at such diversity (‘La nouvelle française, c’est tout à la fois une histoire de quelques pages . . . une histoire aux dimensions plus importantes . . . un récit sérieux, grave, dramatique, et un récit plaisant, comique, un récit de caractère oral ou non, une histoire vraie, une histoire fantastique’)56, is merely a failure to recognize a critical vice as a creative virtue.57 Balzac’s ambition is to ‘représenter toutes les formes littéraires’ (xi. ; cf. vii. ); I include as many kinds of shorter fiction as possible, to acknowledge the mobility of Balzac’s novels and stories, written at a time when notions of genre were notably in flux. Newspaper articles like La Dernière Revue de Napoléon could be expanded into a story and concatenated with others to become what, faute de mieux, we must call a novel, Même histoire; the story Les Deux Musiciens turned into Le Cousin Pons. The interanimation of Balzac’s creation, of genesis and genre, makes it as pertinent to say what Balzac’s fictions do, as what they are. Apart from the conte philosophique Corsino (), and the tête de roman or proto-nouvelle Une heure de ma vie (–), the few Balzac short fictions written prior to  form brief illustrative anecdotes or exempla in longer works (such as the Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme, the Code des gens honnêtes, or the Physiologie du mariage), embodying a fundamentally exemplary, demonstrative, even didactic role which his fiction was never entirely to abandon. But the  publishing crisis made bringing out longer works difficult, and was soon to lead to the folie du conte. Between  and , Balzac wrote about half the total number of stories in La Comédie Cf. Schaeffer, Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire?, –. Cf. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, –, –. For a robust appraisal of the readings of Balzac ‘contre Balzac’ instituted by L. Dällenbach, ‘La Comédie humaine et l’opération de lecture’, ‘Du Fragment au cosmos’, and ‘Le Tout en morceaux’, Poétique ( and ), and marked notably by N. Mozet, Balzac au pluriel (),  et seq., and F. Schuerewegen, Balzac contre Balzac (Paris and Toronto, ), see M. Andréoli, Lectures et mythes (), . 55 Schaeffer’s scepticism about the application of evolutionary models to questions of genre (Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire?, –, –) is doubtless justified—texts, unlike biological species, do not reproduce themselves. But Balzac explicitly invites an evolutionary approach (Avant-propos, i. ), and his texts are, to a degree, self-generating, determined by a creative imperative shared with other genres (cf. e.g. Chs.  and  below on the shared origins of the Physiologie du mariage and the Scènes de la vie privée, or Ch.  on Eugénie Grandet and L’Illustre Gaudissart). Balzac’s work is a matter of competition and progression between different genres (pace S. Vachon, ‘Balzac nouvellier’ in Baron (ed.), Balzac et la nouvelle, ). 56 R. Godenne, Études sur la nouvelle française (Geneva, ), . 57 Cf. Schaeffer, Qu’est-ce qu’un genre littéraire?, . 53 54

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humaine, nearly all of which were kept in print and ultimately included in it. Thereafter, the conte, especially the Renaissance conte, genuine or reproduction, fundamentally or vestigially oral in nature, continued to have for him the totemic status and proselytizing function as the vessel of authenticity and repository of archetypal national wisdom which is embodied in the uncompleted project for ten dixains of Contes drolatiques, begun in , effectively abandoned six years later, but still being discussed at the end of his career. Most of the other contes in La Comédie humaine are included within framed narratives (La Grande Bretèche, Le Médecin de campagne), often fragmented or problematized (L’Auberge rouge, La Grande Bretèche), but none is explicitly called a tale: Balzac’s frame stories or first-person narratives, free-standing or extracted from novels, were invariably entitled histoires (Histoire du Capitaine Beauvoir, Histoire de Napoléon racontée dans une grange, Histoire d’une clarinette, Histoire intellectuelle de Louis Lambert), connoting both objectivity and authentic first-person or first-hand experience. It is extraordinary to note that a storyteller as prolific as Balzac rarely published in isolation stories labelled simply conte (coming closest to doing so in contes fantastiques such as Zéro, Tout, and Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu). The term conte was reserved for cycles of stories (Contes bruns, Contes artistes, Romans et contes philosophiques) denoting some thematic and human community of experience, and often characterized by other features, unity of action, imagery, and symbolism, developed in Balzac’s nouvelles and novels. If the conte forms the first broad category of Balzac’s fictions, the nouvelle might be a second, emerging in  from the condensing of the historical novel and its conflation with other genres—the conte moral, visual art, and satirical dialogue scènes.58 The first series of Scènes de la vie privée embody the story as exemplary, socially engaged form, ‘composé en haine des sots livres [i.e. contes moraux] que des esprits mesquins ont présentés aux femmes jusqu’à ce jour’(Préface, I. ).59 But Balzac’s nouvelles are always more complex than Eikenbaum’s ‘forme fondamentale élémentaire’: these scènes adopt a belt-andbraces approach, having both the explicit didacticism of the conte, expressed in an appended moral, and the inwardness of the nouvelle, embodied in the action. They tell by recounting and warning of danger, in the way of the conte moral (‘marquer d’une branche de saule les passages dangereux de la vie’), yet also tell by showing ‘le tableau vrai des moeurs que les familles ensevelissent aujourd’hui dans l’ombre’ (i. ). In , Les Célibataires, now Le Curé de Tours, develops Balzac’s use of the nouvelle in a penetrating psychological exploration 58 I omit the stories of uncertain authorship Le Pacte () and Le Droit d’aînesse. Cf. Ch. (iii) and Mozet, Balzac au pluriel, –. 59 Balzac was still targeting the genre as late as , in La Femme auteur, written partly as an attack on writers such as Albertine Necker and Sophie Ulliac de Trémadeure, whose L’Éducation progressive and Le Petit Bossu et la famille du sabotier had in  and  won the Montyon Prize for virtue which Le Médecin de campagne was denied: M. Regard, xii. –.

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of the experience of the individual. From it, via notably La Femme abandonnée and Louis Lambert, would emerge Balzac’s first major novels. The distinction between conte and nouvelle thus becomes largely redundant, other than as an extraneous category used in private communications with publishers, but (with the signal exception of the Contes drolatiques) hardly in public labelling of his work. For the whole drive of Balzac’s enterprise is to transcend the conventional generic boundaries which limit narrative fiction to women and children, or, as Stendhal put it more disparagingly, ‘femmes de chambre’,60 to make the ‘ouvrages improprement appelés Romans’ with which Balzac’s Scènes are associated (I ) bear the weight of philosophy and history. From early on, in his project for an Histoire de la France pittoresque, a cycle of novels running from the Middle Ages to the present, via Le Dernier Chouan, he aimed to subsume narrative, histoire, within History—the ambition still voiced in the  Avant-propos to La Comédie humaine (i. ). Balzac’s scènes, a genre brought to prominence by the Scènes de la vie privée in , and the principal generic denominator of his creation, are much more than simply longer, or more objective, contes. Whilst contes narrate archetypal events, Balzac’s scènes are primarily concerned with the characters’ emotions and experience; by its veracity and exemplary validity in the context of contemporary society. Even the stories which do rely on the sensational place it in an emotional, usually family, context: La Vendetta, Adieu, El Verdugo, L’Élixir de longue vie, Le Réquisitionnaire, La Grande Bretèche. It is this increasing understanding of, and weight given to, characters’ feelings which enables Balzac to develop La Transaction from a Gothic tale of burial alive into the quest for emotional wholeness which is Le Colonel Chabert, or to move from the merely sympathetic treatment of the protagonists of La Femme abandonnée and La Grenadière to the full-blown empathetic development of the protagonists’ subjectivity in texts like Eugénie Grandet or La Duchesse de Langeais, to an identification with the characters which is the prerogative of the novel, to the engagement of substantive individuals with each other. Balzac’s generic boundaries are indeterminate, but suggestive. If he prefers the implicit objectivity of scène or étude to the fictional (and, for other writers, often negative) connotations of conte, nouvelle, or roman, story and novel are held in tension, as are fiction and reality in La Comédie humaine. These tensions, together with Balzac’s consistently genetic, evolutionary presentation of his work in the Introductions to the Études de mœurs and the Études philosophiques, and above all in the Avant-propos, invite us to eschew the sometimes arcane typologies of previous studies,61 and to approach his stories and novels as symbiotically as they grew. This is why, seeking to work with the material, I have chosen a broadly diachronic approach, covering every completed self-contained ‘Projet d’un article sur Le Rouge et le noir’, in Le Rouge et le noir, ed. P.-G.Castex (), . Notably Des Loges, L’Art structural de la narration dans la nouvelle de Balzac, and McCormick, Les Nouvelles de Balzac, and M.-C. Amblard, L’Œuvre fantastique de Balzac (). 60 61

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story in La Comédie humaine, some unfinished works, and touching on pivotal novels such as Le Dernier Chouan and La Peau de chagrin. This means as much looking at the way genres interact within individual texts, as sketching their contemporary background; for this interaction is the name of the game.62 Florence Goyet has distinguished late nineteeth-century nouvelles from novels on the basis of monology: the first are monologic, the latter are not. This argument may hold for other writers, but probably not for Balzac.63 Balzac’s writing begins with a dialectical ambition, in his Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme; but it almost immediately becomes dialogic, in his various ‘asides’ and ‘voices off ’ (like the remark on Descartes quoted above), and in the very first anecdote in the Discours (OD i. ), explored in Chapter I; Balzac entertains diverse viewpoints, and in his fictions tends to transcend the narratorial distance which Goyet (and implicitly others, like Du Bos and Fernandez)64 find characteristic of the récit or the nouvelle. Balzac’s shorter fiction emerges from this proto-dialogic hesitation, in this Discours and the Physiologie, and carries it throughout his career; 65 it is an inevitable effect of his plurivocal œuvre. Yet his later absolutist conception of a transcendent unity in his work and in the world, of a whole composed of parts, ‘un et varié’ (Massimilla Doni, x. ), knowable in its totality solely by God (or the author), visible only partially, as fragments, to fallen creatures (or readers) via the illusory relativism of human viewpoints, ultimately makes his dialogism as problematic as his synthesis is virtual.66 This ‘novelistic’, ‘dialogic’ quality is perhaps implied by A. J. George’s unappetizing description of Balzac’s stories as ‘dehydrated’ novels;67 but in terms of 62 S. Swahn, Balzac et le merveilleux (Lund, ), takes a step in this direction, in the light of the fairy-tale. 63 F. Goyet, La Nouvelle, – (), esp. chs.  and . Goyet’s view contrasts with A. Vial’s conception of the nouvelle as a hybrid of conte and novel (Guy de Maupassant et l’art du roman (), –); cf. also Bakhtin’s ambivalence on this matter in relation to Balzac: Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, c.), . 64 Cf. Ch. (v) n.  below. 65 Bahktin’s account of the parodic-travestying literature of ancient Rome as ‘unstable, compositionally still unshaped, lacking a firm or definite generic skeleton . . . something like an immense novel, multi-generic, multi-styled, mercilessly critical, soberly mocking, reflecting in all its fullness the heteroglossia and multiple voices of a given culture, people and epoch’, along with the importance of the mosaic, seems like a description of Balzac’s enterprise avant la lettre, as characterized in Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du temps présent and the preface to Une fille d’Eve. (M. Bakhtin, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. M. Holquist (London, ), –, ; cf. below, Chs.  and (iii).) 66 Cf. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, ch. , esp.  et seq. The debate about the unity or diversity of Balzac’s work, and the associated question of the relation between monology and pluralism, constitute two of the main currents in contemporary Balzac criticism. Cf. particularly Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, and A. Vanoncini, Figures de la modernité (), esp. –, –, , , –; views crystallized in their articles ‘La Représentation de l’utopie dans Le Médecin de campagne, and ‘Le Médecin de campagne: idéologie et narration’, AB ( and ), and to some extent synthesized in Andréoli’s Lectures et mythes: see esp. –. 67 A. J. George, Short Fiction in France, – (Syracuse, NY, ), ; echoed by A.-M. Baron’s view of them as ‘modèles réduits de l’ensemble’ (Balzac et la nouvelle, ).

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chronological development, the truth is rather the reverse. There is little evidence that the techniques of Balzac’s novels had much bearing on his short narrative before , when the failure of Le Dernier Chouan, the first novel he published under his own name, produced a cure d’amaigrissement which resulted in his first breakthrough as a story-writer, his first series of stories, the  Scènes de la vie privée.68 La Peau de chagrin, his first success as a novelist, is a development of the story, as are his canonical nouvelles Le Colonel Chabert and Le Curé de Tours, and the first great novels of his maturity, Eugénie Grandet and Le Père Goriot, created by a ‘lateral’ expansion, via subplots and description, of the fundamentally ‘linear’ diachronic narrative of the story. Eugénie Grandet and Le Père Goriot exemplify a major aspect of this symbiosis, emerging in tandem with the stories L’Illustre Gaudissart and Un drame au bord de la mer, like Madame Firmiani and Le Colonel Chabert before them, or, subsequently, César Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen, Une fille d’Eve and Béatrix, and La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons. From the purely illustrative function of the philosophical exemplum in the Discours, Balzac’s early fiction evolves via attempts at short fiction, Corsino and Une heure de ma vie, towards a more mimetically credible treatment of freestanding reality in his early novels. But this is only brought into focus in the combination of doxa and exemplary narrative in the  Code des gens honnêtes. Chapter  shows how this treatment develops through the anecdotes of the second,  version of the Physiologie du mariage, an elaboration and undermining of the prescriptive discourse of the first version of . This undermining of the exemplary was to be at the centre of Balzac’s work: Chapters – cover the high noon of his career as a writer of short stories, during the – crisis in novel-publishing and the subsequent folie du conte. Chapter  shows how, in the Scènes de la vie privée, Balzac moves from a narratorially centred historical account via other genres, the conte moral, the contemporary satirical scène, and the historical novel, to a more rounded and more ‘embodied’ treatment of reality. In this period, Balzac’s fiction develops via his early journalism—in his development of narrative from pen-portraits in, for example, Gobseck and Étude de femme, and in small-readership magazines and satirical sheets (Chapter ). Stories like Sarrasine or Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, which have since become canonical, owe much to the publishing environment in which they emerged, and in which I have attempted to resituate them (Chapter ). Seen in this context, they, along with others, such as the Contes drolatiques or Maître Cornélius, can resume their ideological purpose as would-be renewers of the Renaissance, or Hoffmannesque contes artistes promoting the artist as an absolute romantic, and by implication, absolute anti-bourgeois. La Peau de chagrin’s synthesis of these 68 This is why I give only very brief consideration to the romans de jeunesse, on which cf. M. Bardèche, Balzac romancier (), and P. Barbéris, Aux sources de Balzac () and Balzac et le mal du siècle (), and A. Lorant (ed.), Premiers Romans ().

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genres is a major advance, the creation of an identity of microcosm and macrocosm, part and whole, which was to underpin Balzac’s aesthetic, but one whose potential was not fully to be achieved until later (Chapter ); for the time being, oral narrative and the frame story embody a threatened social cohesiveness of which the Études de mœurs, and ultimately La Comédie humaine, were to be the analogue. Via the myriad contemporary species of the conte—conte brun, conte drolatique, conte artiste, conte fantastique—Balzac, dubbed ‘roi de la nouvelle’ in January , moves to more considered psychological treatment of its subjects in Le Colonel Chabert and Le Curé de Tours (Chapter ). If these mark the pinnacle of his first period as a storyteller, they also introduce the hesitant self-examinings of the first-person narratives of , Louis Lambert and Le Médecin de campagne, and the more thoroughgoing psychological investigations of La Grenadière, La Femme abandonnée, Eugénie Grandet, and La Duchesse de Langeais, explored in Chapter . With Le Père Goriot, Balzac completes an evolution from predicative to psychological,69 from objective to empathetic narration, from conte to novel. The story, of course, is not that simple. Evolution is too facile a model to account for the complexity of genre in Balzac’s fiction. As well as being diachronic, it is also, perhaps even more, synchronic, and it is from , the year of Le Père Goriot, that this becomes most pointedly apparent. The systematic reappearance of characters initiated by this novel renders redundant the cycle of stories hitherto at the centre of Balzac’s creation, the Contes drolatiques, where recurring characters originated,70 the consequence of the creation of the Études de mœurs au XIXème siècle and the Études philosophiques ( and ), successors to the first Scènes de la vie privée and Romans et contes philosophiques ( and ). If the core of these new series is initially formed by earlier fictions, mainly stories, they are soon joined by others, affected by their dichotomous, paradoxical relationship to narratives elsewhere in the creation. Whilst Balzac’s novels continue to expand short fictions, building narrative around a single major protagonist (La Vieille Fille, César Birotteau), single-protagonist stories, explored in Chapter , La Messe de l’athée, Facino Cane, are characterized by a kind of ‘tangentiality’, a ‘centrelessness’ which makes clear their dependence on tales or events elsewhere. It is a decentredness which will become more common as Balzac develops the system of recurring characters, in stories like La Maison Nucingen (Chapter ), Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, which recount secrets de polichinelle (Chapter ), Z. Marcas, which alludes to a political doctrine never revealed, or Un prince de la Bohème or La Fausse Maîtresse (Chapter ), which are about love affairs which never really occur. Driven by Balzac’s burgeoning treatment of the contemporary, it is a development which spells Cf. T. Todorov, ‘La Grammaire du récit’, in Poétique de la prose (), –, at  et seq. Argow, pirate-protagonist of Le Vicaire des Ardennes () had reappeared in Annette et le criminel (), but Balzac did not develop the device at that stage. 69 70

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the effective end of the Contes drolatiques, whose  third dixain has little of the abandon of its two predecessors. In this synchronic symbiosis, Balzac’s  preface to Une fille d’Eve (Chapter ) marks, after Le Père Goriot, an important second stage. Its emphasis on his creation as a mosaic implies the interrelationship of its parts—characters and narratives—to each other, and the often disordered and anachronistic way in which this may emerge. We may encounter the middle or the end of a story before its beginning, or the established Rastignac before meeting the student. This is partly a response to circumstance: Balzac’s frenzied and simultaneous composition of different fictions, the uncertainties of book and newspaper publications, and the pressure of writing for the ill-fated enterprises he engaged in, in order to escape them: his inordinate contributions to his newspapers (the Chronique de Paris) and single-handed writing of the Revue parisienne () gave rise to short fictions like La Messe de l’athée and Z. Marcas. But there are also aesthetic reasons for the development. As Balzac’s creation grew, his short fictions in particular assume unprecedented complexity (Un prince de la Bohème). The  Avant-propos (Chapter ) confirms the tendencies announced in , mixing perspectives and generic frames, at once handing narratorial control to an embodied creation and voicing the author’s own views more powerfully than anywhere else. As the Comédie humaine emerges, the independence of its fictional world becomes ever more apparent: Balzac’s most important new short fictions are told by recurring characters (Honorine, Autre étude de femme), a factor which, in Un homme d’affaires, creates a complexity verging on incomprehensibility. Yet the whole project of publishing a Comédie humaine, rather than just Œuvres complètes, emerges from short fiction, via the publisher Hetzel and a series of articles, Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux; and the fragmentation implied by the mosaic evoked in Une fille d’Eve’s preface is created both by the disordered appearance of the Comédie in instalments, and by the intermittent publication of Balzac’s articles and pen-portraits in newspapers and collective works such as Le Diable à Paris. His last stories, Un homme d’affaires and Les Comédiens sans le savoir, are largely concatenations of such articles, embodying in their form the modern metropolitan fragmentation they describe. Their piecemeal, alternatory techniques are reflected in the quickfire sequences of contemporary serial novels, La Cousine Bette and Splendeurs et misères. But older forms of Balzac’s fiction also re-emerge and are reinvented towards the end of his career. The early s see a series of ‘supernovellas’, Un début dans la vie, La Muse du département, Modeste Mignon, developed from short stories, under the influence of his sister Laure and Madame Hanska, and with an implicit moral aim (chapter ). It is this augmented nouvelle form to which Balzac turns in his final diptych, Les Parents pauvres (La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons), which combine the cogency of short fiction with the linearity, fragmentation, and eclecticism of the serialized novel. ‘Tout est bilatéral dans le

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domaine de la pensée’ declares Illusions perdues (v. ); ‘Tout est double, même la vertu’, the preface to Les Parents pauvres (vii. ). Balzac’s genres are oxymorons,71 holding contrary elements in tension. The subjective is implicit in the objective, the fantastic in the real, the literal in the literary—and vice versa; the particular in the general, unity in variety, the part in the whole; immensity, import, in the exiguous; brevity, the story, in the novel. Read with focus, Balzac’s fictions, even the longest, may seem shorter than we thought.

71 Cf. J.-L. Diaz, ‘Balzac-oxymore: logiques balzaciennes de la contradiction’, RSH  (July–Sept. ).



Philosophies of Composition From Corsino to the Code des gens honnêtes, – (i) Narrative as Illustration: the Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme and Corsino The beginning and end of Balzac’s work is a quest for general truths. La Comédie humaine opens with an ambitious Avant-propos; it was to end with the Études analytiques, and an Essai sur les forces humaines. The first aim of his creation is to interpret the world; its means of doing so, description, and classification. Narrative is subservient to this purpose; fiction, philosophy’s parent pauvre. Nowhere is this truer than at the start of his career. His earliest surviving work, the notes for a Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme (),1 were intended for a philosophical treatise—with drama, and poetry, one of the three respectably elevated genres at a time when the novel, not to mention the nouvelle, was beneath the dignity of authors with pretensions. Yet this treatise never really gets under way. The notes form an exploration—a series of questions, answers, and speculations. There is no doubt that an argument, or at least a viewpoint, was intended: assertions of the soul’s immortality are rebutted by the quibbling lawyer’s clerk Balzac would soon no longer be.2 But it is as if the author were not quite able to espouse one perspective and reject the other, however

1 Lov. A , formerly known as Notes philosophiques: OD i. –. The title ‘ Immortalité’ appears in Balzac’s hand (OD i. ); internal evidence, and similarities to Corsino suggest that the Discours was not abandoned until the following year. Cf. P , and below, n. . 2 Balzac quibbles particularly with Malebranche, Descartes, and Spinoza, on whom his notes have survived, along with those on D’Holbach, which belong to a slightly later period (OD i. – and n.). Locke, clearly central, is cited with a precision indicating a first-hand acquaintance absent from Balzac’s mentions of some other thinkers, encountered through the Encyclopédie or Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (OD i. –); many of his lists of philosophers may be merely good intentions. Cf. M. Kanes, ‘Balzac et la psycholinguistique’, AB (), esp. , , –, and Balzac’s Comedy of Words (Princeton ), ch. I, esp. –; H. Gauthier, ‘Les Essais philosophiques du jeune Balzac’, AB (), and A. Voussaris, ‘Du Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme de Balzac’, AB (), adopt a more synthetic approach to the Discours. On Balzac’s subsequent development of such ideas, cf. H. Gauthier, L’Image de l’homme intérieur chez Balzac (Geneva, ), esp. – and pt. I, ch..

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ardently he might believe the first.3 Dialogue out of monologue: 4 a pattern was already set. It is in this unordered mass that a first trace of narrative appears: Toutes les choses humaines ont autant de côtés qu’il y a de personnes qui les considèrent. Deux cavaliers arrivent chacun d’un côté opposé au milieu d’une route, ils trouvent une statue, l’un s’écrie qu’elle est noire, l’autre qu’elle est blanche, ils se battent, et après s’être battus, ils voient qu’elle est blanche d’un côté et noire de l’autre. Voilà l’opinion.5

With its illustrative aim, its ambivalence and antithesis authorially appropriated, this slim exemplum is portentous. It shows the potential and the limits of the treatise, which could accommodate contradiction and ambiguity, but only in a sequential and thus potentially unbounded manner. It was a lawsuit the most ardent advocate could not win. In contrast, the story—and this is a little story—could turn paradox to paradigm, ground questions in the world and make them into pictures, give coherence, shape, and form to thought. Corsino, Balzac’s first free-standing fiction,6 written concurrently with, or soon after, the Discours, is a potted version of the treatise, but gives ambivalence more say. The pyrrhonism of the Discours, ‘le tombeau des religions’, anticipates Corsino’s ‘pyrrhonisme absolu’,7 but his desire to ‘savourer son existence’ casts doubt on the first’s eulogy of epicureanism;8 the hero’s rejection of 3 The difficulty arose partly because the opposing views were those of Balzac’s parents: G. Robb, Balzac (London, ), . 4 Some, however, see dialogue as the overarching genre from which all others come: cf. P. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.-L. Nancy, ‘Genre’, Glyph,  (),  et seq. 5 OD i. . This exemplar resembles one used by Diderot in his Addition to the Lettre sur les aveugles, and is mentioned in La Vieille Fille (iv. ; cf. OD i. ,  n. ), where Balzac attributes it to Addison. But there is no such passage in the Spectator essays. 6 Corsino’s chronology is uncertain. R. Chollet and R. Guise suggest the beginning of , or even , on the basis of Balzac’s famous letter written to his sister around  Aug. , ‘J’ai l’espoir de devenir riche à coups de romans’ (OD i. –, Corr. i. ). But it seems unlikely that even the novice Balzac of  could have imagined that Corsino could make him rich: he did not persist with it for long enough, and the first volume of the novel he was already correcting in June is surely either the letter-novel Sténie (OD i. ), or more probably L’Héritière de Birague, which eventually appeared in January . ( There are few corrections on Corsino’s MS, which never went into proof.) Other factors, such as the text’s uncertain spelling, and its closeness to the assertions of the Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme, point to a date even earlier than . Corsino is almost certainly the accompaniment to, or missing link between, the drama Le Corsaire, abandoned in Sept.  (Corr. i. , OD i. –), and Sténie, begun around the same time (OD i. ). Byron’s Corsair first appeared in French in  (OD i. –); his version, Balzac’s, and Corsino itself all include arrival on an island or a shipwreck. Balzac’s gradual incorporation of the philosophy of the Discours and of Corsino into Sténie, on which he may still have been working at the beginning of , corresponds to the abandonment of these earlier texts, placing Corsino in the autumn of , and making it, more credibly than Sténie, the ‘petit roman dans le genre antique’—as easily pastoral as epistolary—which Balzac was ‘croquignolant’, in respite from his philosophical or dramatic ‘travaux’, on  Sept. of that year (Corr. i. , OD i. ). 7 Discours, OD i. ; Corsino, OD i. . 8 Discours, OD i. –; Corsino, OD i. .

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

‘l’immortalité de notre âme’ leads not to the virtue it anticipates, but simply to ‘un affreux égoïsme’ (OD i. , ), whilst the heroine’s father’s religion is not inherently unreasonable, but freed from ‘des absurdités dont l’homme l’a entourée’ (OD i. ). Corsino is undeniably limited, its views mouthed by characters identifed chiefly by belief. Balzac had still to absorb Scott:9 with the exception of the hero himself, we learn little of their appearance or background. If more developed than the exemplar in the Discours, it is basically an illustrative anecdote enclosed by narratorial commentary. Like Candide or L’Ingénu, it is a conte philosophique which puts ideas to the test. But it none the less introduces something central to Balzac’s fiction: the notion of oxymoronic reversal. The shipwreck confronts the hero with his moral opposite, Nehoro,10 and tries Corsino’s philosophy by facing him with death. Its protagonists are reflections of the author, mirroring the antitheses of his philosophy and personality, esprit and matière. Nehoro, an idealist, is an anagrammatical Honoré, whilst Corsino, a sceptic (echoing Byron’s Corsair, first published in French in )11 is a physical self-portrait: Corsino [avait une belle figure deleted], sans avoir la beauté féminine dont se parent certains [hommes deleted] androgènes, était parfaitement homme, son visage mâle et fier en imposait, et ses regards étaient terribles, ses formes nerveuses quoiqu’il fût petit.12

Balzac raises the spectre of androgyny, but at once dispels it: the very device of contemporary or later fictions (Falthurne, Sarrasine, La Fille aux yeux d’or, or 9 A.-J.-B. Defauconpret’s translation of Scott’s Oeuvres complètes did not appear until , but Corsino’s Scottish setting suggests that Balzac may have encountered Scott earlier; Guy Mannering had appeared anonymously in , along with articles in the press, and in  had come the first translation (of Rob-Roy, by Defauconpret) under Scott’s name (E. Preston Dargan, ‘Scott and the French Romantics’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,  (), ; M. Iknayan, The Idea of the Novel in France (Geneva, ), ; cf. D. Haggis, ‘The Popularity of Scott’s Novels in France and Balzac’s Illusions perdues’, Journal of European Studies, : / (Mar. ), , and K. Massmann, Die Rezeption der historischen Romane Sir Walter Scotts in Frankreich (–) (Heidelberg, ), ). But there is otherwise nothing Scottian about Corsino, apart from the ‘Sc’ in ‘Scorsil’, one version of his name. Its linking of Italy and Scotland derives from Staël’s Corinne (OD i.  n. ; cf. Preston Dargan, ‘Scott and the French Romantics’,  n. ); the rest is quite Byronic. 10 OD i. –. 11 Oeuvres de Lord Byron, trans. anon. [A. Pichot and E. de Salle] (–), i: E. Estève, Byron et le romantisme français (), . In Les Employés, Poiret buys this translation, ‘a laquelle il ne comprit rien du tout’ (vii. ). 12 Lov. A , fos. r–v. OD i. . One might well expect to read ‘androgyne’ in this passage, yet MS seems to read ‘androgène’ (Lov. A , fo. v), thereby concording with the Discours sur l’immortalité de notre âme: ‘Leibniz croît que l’âme est contenue dans la semence et se transmets et il s’appuie sur les observations microscopiques de Leuwenhoeck’ (OD i. ; cf. ). Elsewhere J. Ducourneau notes: ‘Il s’agit probablement d’un néologisme de Balzac. L’androgénie désigne une suite de descendants de mâle en mâle et concerne l’homme dans sa reproduction’ (OCI xxiv. ). But ‘androgène’ does not appear in any other context until  (Le Grand Robert de la langue Française (), i. ). The ‘androgyne’ reading is supported by the sense of Balzac’s manuscript corrections (Lov. A , fos. r–v; cf. OD i. ). The very self-consciousness of androgyny’s exclusion suggests its implicit centrality.

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Illusions perdues).13 It anticipates Louis Lambert in its account of frustrated philosophy, in the hero’s ambiguous sexuality, in his relationship to a friend who is more a reflection, in its centrally narcissistic self-portraits. Corsino’s androgyny suggests a split but potentially cohesive personality, one ruled by ‘effroyable égoïsme’, yet redeemable by the goodness of Nehoro, sir Lothurn, and his daughter; the text parallels its hero’s ambiguous gender, containing elements of treatise, conte, and novel. Its fundamentally oppositional structures, opposing Corsino to Nehoro, and to sir Lothurn and his daughter, form the basis of subsequent stories and of novels: there are many other pairs of friends, or of fathers and daughters, in later fictions—Derville and Godeschal in Le Colonel Chabert, the contrasting brothers of La Rabouilleuse or La Cousine Bette, the father–daughter pairs of Falthurne, Clotilde, Wann-Chlore, Le Bal de Sceaux, La Vendetta, Eugénie Grandet, and Le Père Goriot. The near-contemporary novel Sténie relies on a similar opposition between the lover Del Ryès, and a confidant, Van Ehrs, made patent by its epistolary form.14 Balzac was to use the technique of dichotomous reversal at other salient junctures in his career—in creating La Transaction, the first version of Le Colonel Chabert, as a mirror of Madame Firmiani, or Massimilla Doni as a pendant to Gambara. But his seminal essay in reversal is undoubtedly Clotilde de Lusignan,15 his ‘remake’ of Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe’s interest in historical conflict, in the past as a reflection on the present, in Normans versus Saxons, would be translated into bourgeois and aristocrats, just as, in Scott’s own country, into English and Scots, Hanoverians and Stuarts. Its Shakespearian confrontation of opposing characters and factions—Rebecca versus Rowena, Bois-Guilbert versus Ivanhoe, Jew versus Gentile—would reinforce the dichotomies of philosophy. Scott’s Robin Hood embodies and transcends these oppositions, as would later Balzac’s Argow or his Vautrin—in the latter case at least, the characteranalogue of the authorial narrator. Ivanhoe’s varying, contrastive, often alternating focus of attention would find its way to many of Balzac’s fictions, as would its explanatory flashback structures.16 And many smaller details would reappear in later fictions: the interview between rivals for one man, Rebecca and Rowena, as the confrontation of Augustine and Mme de Carigliano in La 13 On the question of Balzac’s psychosexuality, cf. P. Citron, Dans Balzac (), and A.-M. Baron, Le Fils prodige: l’inconscient de ‘La Comédie humaine’ (). 14 Cf. M. Bardèche, Balzac (), –; in the most substantial recent treatment of the novel, R. Chollet and R. Guise suggest that the difficulty of presenting philosophical arguments in letters was responsible for its abandonment: OD i. . 15 Clotilde de Lusignan ou le Beau Juif, manuscrit trouvé dans les archives de Provence et publié par Lord R’hoone (),  o vols. Cf. D. R. Haggis, ‘Clotilde de Lusignan, Ivanhoe, and the Development of Scott’s Influence on Balzac’, French Studies (Apr. ). The very closeness of Balzac’s plagiarism probably explains why Ivanhoe is never mentioned in his letters in this period, unlike Kenilworth and Rob Roy. 16 Ivanhoe, ed. A. N. Wilson (Harmondsworth, ), , , , , etc; cf. Ch. (iv) below on La Maison du chat-qui-pelote.

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

Maison du chat-qui-pelote;17 Rebecca’s trial for sorcery, in Le Succube; the resurrection of Athelstane, buried in battle, as the resurrection of Chabert, buried at Eylau.18 Beauséant, the templar’s cry, becomes the name of one of Balzac’s harshest women; Le Lys dans la vallée owes its title, probably not directly to the Bible, but to its recurrent mention in Scott’s novel;19 whilst the beautiful Jewish girl Rebecca, in the Esther of Splendeurs et misères, has the most vibrant afterlife of any of Scott’s female characters in Balzac’s fiction, doubtless because she has a mind of her own.20 Yet Ivanhoe is seminal not only in a thematic, but also a generic sense. (Scott’s collection of stories, The Chronicles of the Canongate, which might a priori be thought influential on Balzac’s short fiction, was not published until , and is only mentioned once in La Comédie humaine.)21 Balzac’s first attempts at emulation of Scott’s novel, the unfinished fictions Agathise and Falthurne, written in , prior to Clotilde, and presented as the Oeuvres de l’Abbé Savonati, copy Ivanhoe’s surface as much as its substance.22 Agathise imitates its historical setting and situation but also the fairy-tale: the mysterious, beautiful heroine is as much a fairy-tale princess, capable of assuming ‘mille formes’, protected by an ‘écharpe protectrice’ (OD i. ), as she is Balzac’s answer to Rowena, Le Borgino at least as much an ogre as a fusion of Friar Tuck and Front-de-Boeuf. Ivanhoe opens with history, and closes ‘To point a moral, or adorn a ’;23 Agathise adapts Scott’s tension of chronicle and myth to more personal ends, exploring the most intimate issues, the secret sides of private life. In Falthurne, the androgynous heroine is a fictional containment of opposites (possibly Corsino’s Maria and sir Lothurn) within one whole (OD i. , ): the young Honoré, rejected by his mother, adoring of his father, compensating, projecting the female on to the male and vice versa, as in Corsino, in the figure of sir Lothurn, and later in Eugénie Grandet or Le Père Goriot, he substitutes the father for the mother. The heroine of L’Héritière de Birague 24 may be female, but she Ivanhoe, ch. , –; La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, i. –. Ivanhoe, ch. ,  et seq., Le Colonel Chabert, iii.  et seq.; but with the interesting, yet typically Balzacian reversal that, where Athelstane renounces his intended spouse, Rowena, the whole plot of Le Colonel Chabert turns on Chabert’s attempts to lay claim to his. The end of Scott’s novel forms the beginning of Balzac’s story. 19 Song of Solomon : ; Psalms : ; Ivanhoe, , . 20 As her resistance to Bois-Guilbert (ch. ) shows. ‘Obligé de se conformer aux idées d’un pays essentiellement hypocrite, Walter Scott a été faux . . . dans la peinture de la femme . . . La femme protestante n’a pas d’idéal’ (Avant-propos, i. ). But Rebecca, of course, is not a Protestant. 21 Le Cousin Pons, vii. : ‘Schmucke, semblable à cette mère des Chroniques de la Canongate qui, pour jouir de son fils vingt-quatre heures de plus, le fait fusiller, était capable de sacrifier Pons au plaisir de le voir dîner tous les jours avec lui.’ The reference is to The Highland Widow; perhaps a subliminal inspiration for Le Réquisitionnaire. The benefactor theme surfaces occasionally elsewhere: cf. Ch. (iii). 22 Parallels explored further in Falthurne, ed. P.-G. Castex (), and R. Guise, ‘Le Problème de Falthurne’, AB (). 23 Ivanhoe, . 24 L’Héritière de Birague . . . (),  o vols. 17 18

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bears Honoré’s initials; and the empty, cavernous spaces in this novel, of caves in Falthurne (OD i. ), of the tomb which opens Clotilde de Lusignan—dug by her nurse, the mother-substitute, standard Gothic novel devices— point again to the obsession with the maternal: ‘les trois mères des trois ministres sont la cause des malheurs qui vont fondre sur Casin-Grandes’.25 It is no accident that Clotilde reverses Ivanhoe’s polarities, making the male protagonist, Nepthaly Jaffa, the knight and the outsider, pursue the aristocratic Clotilde: an echo, as La Dernière Fée ou la nouvelle lampe merveilleuse 26 was later an exorcism, of the maternal,27 the fictional analogue of Balzac’s love for Madame de Berny, almost twenty-two years his senior. His other novels of this period, Le Vicaire des Ardennes, Annette et le criminel, and Wann-Chlore, all deal with forbidden desires: incest, bigamy, the ménage à trois.28 The romans de jeunesse are so in the deepest sense: their personal nature explains why Balzac was later so anxious to disown them (i. ), and why his narrative stance is so jocular and ironic: the unavowably intimate is distanced, and the personal dédoublé into the struggle of two competing selves. It is with his own double, Bongarus, that Agathise’s narrator, Savonati, enters into dialogue, mocking the very chronicle model Balzac had just chosen, as if unwilling to take responsibility for his narrative.29 A dialogue is, then, present in Balzac’s writings from the start—in the hesitations of the Discours, in the dualistic oppositions of Corsino, in the flippancies of romans gais like Jean-Louis; 30 it is implicit in the gender ambiguities of his androgynes, and in the structural reversals which drive his fictions. There is, in thematic terms, little, apart from length, to distinguish Balzac’s earliest stories from his novels: the early novels, all published in the duodecimo format standard at the time, pioneer the subject matter and methods of later stories. Falthurne, Annette et le criminel, and Wann-Chlore exploit father–daughter pairs as would La Vendetta or Le Bal de Sceaux (but also Eugénie Grandet and Le Père Goriot); Agathise and La Dernière Fée have lengthy historical expositions, anticipating La Maison du chat-qui-pelote or Le Bal de Sceaux. La Dernière Fée contains probably the most numerous foreshadowings of individual tales.31 Husbands, as in the 25 Clotilde de Lusignan, i. –; ii. ; cf. –. Balzac’s emphasis. Cf. Balzac, Premiers romans, ed. A. Lorant (), i.  et seq. 26 La Dernière Fée ou la nouvelle lampe merveilleuse (),  o vols., augmented to  later the same year. 27 Cf. Premiers romans, ed. Lorant,  et seq. 28 Le Vicaire des Ardennes (),  o vols.; Annette et le criminel (),  o vols.; Wann-Chlore (),  o vols. On these novels, see Premiers romans, ed. Lorant, ii. 29 Cf. OD i. , , , , , and Clotilde de Lusignan, i. , ii. –, iii. , etc. 30 Jean-Louis ou la Fille trouvée, par A. de Viellerglé et Lord R’Hoone, auteurs de ‘L’Héritière de Birague’ (Hubert, ),  o vols. A. de Viellerglé is the pseudonym of A. Lepoitevin de L’Égreville, also known as Lepoitevin Saint-Alme, with whom Balzac may have collaborated on other works such as L’Anonyme ou Ni père ni mère () or Le Corrupteur (). See B. Tolley, ‘Balzac et les romans de Viellerglé’, AB (); Premiers romans, ed. Lorant, i. –. 31 For a more complete (but different) interpretation, cf. A.-M. Baron, ‘Romans de jeunesse, genèse du roman: La Dernière Fée, roman originel’, AB ().

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Physiologie or Le Colonel Chabert, are like monkeys; its heroine, Mme de Sommerset, is Balzac’s first real woman, dreaming only of being loved for herself; 32 a tobacconist’s sign anticipates the altogether more emblematic item in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote.33 But La Dernière Fée’s satire has a Voltairian note, which is in turn indebted to the Oriental fairy-tale.34 Balzac’s explanation of the fantastic through the real (La Dernière Fée is just that, none other than Mme de Sommerset herself )35 anticipates his later way in Sarrasine, L’Auberge rouge, or Melmoth réconcilié, whilst motifs from Le Centenaire reappear both in Melmoth, L’Élixir de longue vie, and La Peau de chagrin.36 Even length seems often fortuitous: the Discours and Corsino are all brief, it would appear, because abandoned; Sténie, longer, because inconclusive; whilst Clotilde de Lusignan’s extent is determined by the model being followed, and that of subsequent novels by publishers’ contracts. A nouvelle exploring the Melmoth theme, Le Pacte, was added to Le Tartare ou le retour de l’exilé mainly, it seems, as a way of filling space.37 Yet length (or brevity) can still illuminate genre and literary purpose. Irresoluble dichotomies cause the Discours and Sténie to peter out; but Corsino, although unfinished, ends with a moral (OD i. ). A prescriptive purpose and clear narrative thrust, first fully realized in the  Scènes de la vie privée, drive Balzac’s stories with a dynamism absent from his most ambitious projected novels, La Bataille 38 and Les Paysans 39: La Bataille was, unlike most of Balzac’s work, never conceived as a story, whilst with the abandonment in favour of étude de mœurs of Le Grand Propriétaire, the propagandistic nouvelle which Les Paysans supplanted,40 went a loss of narrative purpose. The fundamentally xi. , iii. –; La Dernière Fée, ii. , . La Dernière Fée, i. ; cf. La Maison du chat-pui-pelote, i. –. 34 Both Balzac’s novel and, for example, Zadig contain satirical assemblies, respectively of genies and of magi: La Dernière Fée, –, and Zadig in Romans et contes, ed. R. Pomeau (), ; there are also echoes of Marmontel. But the ultimate source lies in collections such as the Arabian nights and Le Cabinet des fées: Premiers romans, ed. Lorant, ii. –. 35 La Dernière Fée, ii. . 36 Le Centenaire ou les Deux Béringheld . . . (),  o vols. Cf. S. Swahn, Balzac et le merveilleux (Lund, ), ch. , esp.  et seq. 37 A. H. Armstrong, ‘Is Balzac the Author of ‘Le Pacte’?, French Studies Bulletin,  (Autumn ), –; the uncertainty over Balzac’s authorship excludes Le Pacte from consideration here. 38 First mentioned as early as , and still being envisaged two decades later. Cf. R. Chollet, xii. ; T. Takayama, Les Œuvres romanesques avortées de Balzac (–) (Tokyo and Paris, ), –, , –, etc. 39 First conceived ; abandoned by Balzac , and completed by his widow after his death. Cf. T. Bodin, ix. –; C. Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, La Genèse d’un roman de Balzac, ‘Les Paysans’ (); and, on the interpretation of the novel, M. Andréoli, Lectures et mythes (). It is no accident that both La Bataille and Les Paysans are, in their military and agrarian themes, linked to another experiment with form, Le Médecin de campagne. See Ch.  below. 40 Cf. M. Fargeaud, ‘La Naissance d’un sujet: Le Grand Propriétaire’, AB (). N. Mozet (Balzac au pluriel (),  et seq.) suggests links between Les Paysans and an earlier, anonymous, unfinished nouvelle, Le Droit d’aînesse: esquisses du XIXème siècle (Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle (Mar. ); repr. AB (), –), which itself takes up Balzac’s pseudonymous Du Droit d’aînesse of  (repr. OD ii. –). 32 33

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descriptive character of these novels, governed by the depiction of realities external to the text, rather than by formal and aesthetic unity, was not in itself enough to shape and sustain narrative.41 The Discours and Sténie on the one hand, and Corsino on the other, represent two determinant models in Balzac’s fiction: description, and prescription. They shape Balzac’s two remaining uses of brief narrative pre-, Une heure de ma vie and the Code des gens honnêtes.

(ii) Mimesis: ‘deux histoires’ The short unfinished story Une heure de ma vie (–)42 is the culmination in Balzac’s early work of his line of enquiry about the relationship between writing and the external world. ‘C’est en vain que l’on me demanderait si je voudrais en écrivant le fait qui donne lieu à cette histoire, broder des circonstances à ma guise et faire arriver des voleurs dans la forêt voisine’ had declared the deleted final paragraph of Corsino, ‘car un coup de la cloche de la maison de sir Lothurn, aurait fait arriver tout le village, et malheur à ceux qui voudrai[en]t troubler la paix du hameau’.43 There is an evident debt to Diderot: on the one hand, the narrator is a trickster, who can ‘broder des circonstances à sa guise’; on the other, a reporter, bound by the obligations of reality and the importunate tolling of sir Lothurn’s bell. He is already both chronicler and creator, secretary and observer.44 41 Les Paysans warns early on: ‘Ne vous attendez pas à de la passion, le vrai ne sera que trop dramatique’ (ix. ); but its publication in La Presse (– Dec. ) was abandoned in response to protests from bored readers: see Andréoli, Lectures et mythes,  et seq. The sheer projected immensity of La Bataille,of which only ten words were ever written (xii. ) probably prevented it from getting off the ground (see F. Schuerewegen, ‘Avortements’ in S. Vachon (ed.), Balzac: une poétique du roman (Montreal and Saint-Denis, ),  and n. ); whilst the ‘democratization’ of portraits in Les Paysans, in which even minor characters are described seemingly regardless of dramatic relevance, makes it hard to perceive as a whole. Cf. S. Swahn, Le Pourquoi du récit (Uppsala, ), esp. ch. . 42 Cf. R. Chollet, ‘Une heure de ma vie, ou Lord R’Hoone à la découverte de Balzac’, AB (), and OD i. –. Une heure de ma vie is a by-product of the novel L’Héritière de Birague (). 43 OD i. ,  n. . 44 Cf. Diderot, Jacques le fataliste et son maître, in Œuvres de Denis Diderot, ed. J.-A. Naigeon (An VI–), xi. –. A. Prioult detects Diderot’s influence in Balzac’s early writings, especially Sténie (Balzac avant ‘La Comédie humaine’ (), , ); Barbéris finds them as early as Falthurne (Balzac et le mal du siècle (), i. ); but Balzac’s first mention of Diderot occurs in a note to M. Frémeau, bookseller at Rheims, of  Dec.  (Corr. i. ) requesting ‘ Diderot complet’ and ‘ Diderot (Brou?) complet,  vol.’. S. J. Gendzier suggests that this can only be the Brière edition of Œuvres de Denis Diderot (: ‘Balzac’s Changing Attitudes Towards Diderot’, French Studies,  (), ). But Balzac could well have read Diderot in the Naigeon editions of An VI or An VIII (–). These passages suggest that Balzac read Diderot at least five years earlier than generally thought. Une heure de ma vie also invites speculative parallels with Nodier’s similarly autobiographical and serendipitous Moi-même (; unpublished during Nodier’s lifetime): D. Sangsue, Le Récit excentrique (), ch. .

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

The tension between these roles, between the subjective and the objective, and an awareness of recounting as a business of the choice and elimination of events, is Une heure de ma vie’s central concern. Lord R’hoone’s (=Honoré’s) simple account of his life is constantly waylaid, and soon overshadowed, by speculations on history, the soul, and the nature of narrative; like some hypertrophied Schlegelian moi symbolique,45 the narrator’s subjectivity threatens to subsume the narrative and its central thread, a chance erotic encounter in the Palais-Royal. If certain features of Une heure, like its title, and ‘L’Horloge’, the subtitle of chapter , recall Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, its subject matter, tone, and dimensions make it just as much Balzac’s Sentimental Journey.46 Une heure (like Corsino, a fictional presentation of the Lockian sensualism of the Discours), makes selection a business of perception.47 When Balarouth places his hand on the arm of a boy who has insulted him, saying ‘c’est mal ce que vous dites là’, the narrator’s interpretation of his gesture is immediately qualified: Voilà ce que je crus y voir; mais nous avons tous des organes, des fibres, du sang, des humeurs, des nerfs, des sens différents, et par conséquent des sensations, des idées et des âmes différentes. Les choses humaines ont autant de faces que de gens qui les envisagent, et l’altière marchande n’aperçut dans le propos de Balarouth qu’une insulte pour le garçon. (OD i. )

This looks back to the anecdote of the Discours, yet also forward a decade, to Madame Firmiani: Il y avait enfin autant de madames Firmiani que de classes dans la société, que de sectes dans le catholicisme. Effrayante pensée! nous sommes tous comme des planches lithographiques dont une infinité de copies se tire par la médisance. (ii. )

The later passage makes sensualism a literary principle: 48 the ambiguity and relativity of perception create a virtual image of the protagonist from the converging viewpoints of several observers (cf. ii.  et seq.). The centrality of perspective colours a second significant feature of Une heure de ma vie, its redefinition of history: Ce qu’on nomme commmunément histoire est le tableau de tout ce qu’ont fait les grands troupeaux d’hommes que l’on nomme nations . . . Mais il est une autre sorte de 45 Cf. F. Schlegel, Nachricht von den poetischen Werken des Johannes Boccaccio—Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, ed. H. Eichner (Munich, Padeborn, and Vienna, ), ii. , cited by A. Fonyi, ‘Nouvelle, subjectivité, structure’, RLC, : – (Jan.–June ), . 46 On the wider influence of Sterne in the period, cf. Sangsue, Le Récit excentrique, passim, esp. ch. . 47 Cf. Chollet, ‘Une heure de ma vie’, . 48 It is thus hardly true to speak of ‘une “philosophie” ad hoc dont la seule justification est précisément de permettre la réalisation d’un désir littéraire’ (L. Dällenbach, ‘Du fragment au cosmos’, Poétique,  (), ). The whole drive of Balzac’s work is an emergence of the literary from philosophy and, in La Comédie humaine, a redemption of the literary by philosophy.

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gens qui pensent que ce genre d’histoire n’est que la peinture sèche des faits et gestes d’hommes qui n’ont aucun rapport avec les temps présents; qu’il existe une espèce d’histoire qui sert à dévoiler l’intus de l’homme et les motifs qui le portèrent à ces actions . . . Cette histoire secrète du Genre humain, cet inventaire de tous ses sentiments m’a toujours paru plus difficile que tout le reste des genres littéraires.49

Here is virtually a manifesto for La Comédie humaine, a striking prefiguration of the ‘deux Histoires’ Herrera outlines in Illusions perdues: ‘l’Histoire officielle, menteuse qu’on enseigne, l’Histoire ad usum delphini; puis l’Histoire secrète, où sont les véritables causes des événements, une Histoire honteuse’ (v. ).50 Two sides of the same coin: in their common stress on the determinant role of viewpoint, and the relativity of perception, the theory of multiple histories is central to any individual narrative formulation of events, and to the diversity of perspectives implied by the manifold narratives and recurring characters of La Comédie humaine. As Balzac would later aver, ‘Il n’y a rien qui soit d’un seul bloc dans ce monde, tout y est mosaïque. Vous ne pouvez raconter chronologiquement que l’histoire du temps passé, système inapplicable à un présent qui marche.’51 A third significant feature of Une heure de ma vie, its focus on detail, combines the relativity and multiplicity of viewpoint in the narrator’s exploration and interpretation of hitherto-neglected trivia: Cette action naïve de porter la main à mon gousset comparée avec les idées que la jeune fille m’avait fait naître, sera sans doute comprise par les étudiants en droit, en médecine, et par la gent libertine des clercs de procureurs et de notaires qui voudraient bien que le dimanche leurs poches fussent toujours matérialistes.52

This ostensibly Sternian detail links desire and money in a now familiarly Balzacian, but, in , quite novel way: the account is abstract, yet also, undeniably, physical, attesting the author’s interest in what constitutes a situation’s uniqueness and yet general truth. The encounter with Sterne has produced an important new element in his world-view, a sense of the inexhaustible, serendipitous fascination of daily life. Its combination of history and philosophy theorizes the banal, extrapolating from the particular a relationship to the general which lies at the heart of Balzac’s narrative, and of La Comédie humaine. Une heure de ma vie’s narrator, like his narrative, foreshadows La Fille aux yeux d’or’s. But a more fundamental breakthrough comes with the awareness that every situation contains not just ‘deux côtés’, as in the anecdote in the Discours, but ‘deux histoires’—an insight enabling Balzac to organize fictions not merely around antithetical ideas, but around differing perceptions of the OD i. –. Cf. Balzac’s similar comment, ‘le vrai dans toute sa pureté, une horrible histoire’, in the preface to Le Cabinet des Antiques (iv. ). 51 Une fille d’Eve, preface (), ii. . Cf. Ch. (i) below. 52 OD i. . 49 50

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

world; to see them empathetically, through the human. , the year of Une heure de ma vie, but also of Clotilde, that novel of relativity, the year of his first great love, for Mme de Berny, was also the year of converging recognitions, the bringing of life into philosophy and fiction.53 Balzac’s early narratives, from Corsino via Agathise to Une heure, move from philosophy, to composition, and back again: from narrative exemplifying philosophy (Corsino), to narrative exploring in metanarrative the diegetic implications of philosophy, from the relationship between history and story (Agathise), to narrative fully encompassing and embodying and suggesting the philosophical, abstract, implications of the particular (Une heure de ma vie). The theoretical basis of his later work was in place, along with something of its practice. Yet there was little, structurally and formally, to link the two: in particular, no overview of society, no characteristic authorial voice, no organizing authorial discourse to interpret, classify, and generalize its perceptions; and no disciplined model of fictional form. The main dynamic of the youthful novels was expansion: the volumes had to be packed with as much incident as possible, a tendency only encouraged by Balzac’s models (not only Scott’s dramatic narratives and the serendipitous structures of Sterne and Diderot, but also the adventure novels of Cooper, and the Gothic of Lewis and Radcliffe). Although the narratives of – foreshadow much in his later writings, not until the first Scènes de la vie privée of  were these to be reduced to forms which could shape his later fiction. It took another experimental work, the Code des gens honnêtes, to fuse the general and the particular, the philosophies of composition explored so far.

(iii) The Code des gens honnêtes and the Limits of Prescription The Code des gens honnêtes, ou l’art de ne pas être dupe des fripons,54 published in March , four months after Balzac’s failure to find a publisher for the last of his youthful novels, Wann-Chlore, is a semi-parodic guide to social mores— the first of his works to make society its main subject, and an almost certain money-spinner. As part of the tradition of popular descriptive and prescriptive guides to social behaviour which arose in the first two decades of the nineteenth century,

53 A missive such as Balzac’s draft of Mar. , where he puts himself in Mme de Berny’s shoes in order to woo her, shows just how much his novelist’s skills were exercised by love: Corr. i. –. 54 BF ( Mar. ). A second edition appeared in July ( BF ( July )); a third, expanded edition was published in  under the title Code pénal des honnêtes gens, under the name of Horace Raisson, with whom Balzac may have collaborated (BF ( Feb. )). OD ii. reproduces the  version, in which Balzac had the largest hand. Cf. OD ii. –.



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Balzac’s Code was one of many writings, Arts, and Physiologies,55 which responded to society’s increased mobility by attempting to fix it, multiplying categories to cover every situation:56 Pour beaucoup de gens, le coeur humain est un pays perdu; ils ne connaissent pas les hommes, leurs sentiments, leurs manières; ils n’ont pas étudié cette diversité de langage que parlent les yeux, la démarche, le geste. Que ce livre leur serve de carte; et, comme les Anglais, qui ne se hasardent pas dans Paris sans Pocket-book, que les honnêtes gens consultent ce guide, assurés d’y trouver les avis bienveillants d’un ami expérimenté. (OD ii. )

The Code provides a semiotic education57 of the kind Rubempré will receive from Mme de Bargeton, Lousteau, or Vautrin. Its title-page is a hierarchical typology of crime, ‘un dictionnaire que nous apporte Balzac’,58 recommending ‘une grande connaissance du système de Lavater’, whose technique of deduction from appearance, later to become so familiar,59 is here, for the first time, central. More significant still is the Code’s title. Balzac’s play on the Code Napoléon (the parodic usage appears to be his invention) points to a global view of society and a new focus on social relations which, if present in the scenes and portraits of various social types in earlier writers like Mercier and Jouy,60 is not coordinated in any analytical (still less philosophical) way. The hierarchy and classification inherent in its form and subject, criminality, and in its emphasis on society’s disruptive and irregular elements, embodies Une heure de ma vie’s project for a secret history. 55 e.g. J.-G.Ymbert, L’Art de faire des dettes et de promener ses créanciers (, ); L’Art d’obtenir des places, ou la clef des ministères, ouvrage dédié aux gens sans emploi et aux solliciteurs de toutes les classes (, republished ). See A. Prioult, ‘Les Codes littéraires et Balzac’, AB (), and R. Sieburth, ‘Une idéologie du lisible: le phénomène des Physiologies’, Romantisme, :  (), –. 56 Cf. W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: un poète lyrique à l’apogée du capitalisme (), ch. ,  et seq.; and, on the wider phenomenon of the Physiologie, Sieburth, ‘Une idéologie du lisible’; R. Amossy, ‘Types ou stéréotypes: les “Physiologies” et la littérature industrielle’, Romantisme, :  (); and N. Preiss, Les ‘Physiologies’ en France au XIXème siècle: étude historique, littéraire et stylistique (Mont-de-Marsan, ). 57 R. Terdiman, ‘Structures of Initiation: On Semiotic Education and Its Contradictions in Balzac’, Yale French Studies (), esp.  et seq. 58 L. Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses à Paris pendant la première moitié du XIXème siècle (), . 59 Cf. C. Rivers, Face Value (Madison, ). 60 L.-S. Mercier’s Tableau de Paris (Hamburg and Neuchatel, ), considers a dazzling range of subject matter—‘Les Filles publiques’, ‘Les Capitalistes’, ‘Les Faux cheveux’—with the sobriety of a chronicler. The focus of V.-J-É. de Jouy’s L’Hermite de la Chaussée d’Antin, ou observations sur les moeurs et les usages parisiens au commencement du XIXème siècle (–), is more sharply satirical (see e.g. ‘Un bourgeois du Marais’, ibid. i. , or ‘Journal d’une dame à la Mode’, ibid. ii. ), anticipating Balzac in contemporary details such as the list of his dandy’s clothes and tailors (i. –). Cf. Prioult, Balzac avant ‘La Comédie humaine’,  and , and Barbéris, Balzac et le mal du siècle, i. , .

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

This stress on society’s structure is joined by confident generalization. One of the Code’s major contributions is the prescriptive utterance, maxim, or aphorism, which makes statements which seem both generally valid, yet also challenge our credulity. It is as if Balzac were doubting authority from its very heart. ‘En général, tout ce qui porte le nom d’économique est une invention coûteuse ou impraticable’ (OD ii. ), says the Code; later examples are more extreme. It is hard, perhaps, to accept the assertion that Lancashire is a ‘pays où les femmes meurent d’amour’ (ix. ) other than as the obverse of uncertainty: ‘Je ne croyais pas qu’on pût aimer sous un ciel aussi gris’.61 But although the validity of such statements is questionable, they are vital in creating the soidisant authoritativeness of Balzac’s text, the shadow of doubt which sets truth in relief, its organizing discourse from this point onwards. The Code’s prefatory statement, ‘La vie peut être considérée comme un combat perpétuel entre les riches et les pauvres’ (OD ii. ), and subtitle, L’Art de ne pas être dupe des fripons, anticipate Madame de Beauséant’s description of society as ‘une réunion de dupes et de fripons’ (iii. ). Without the Code she could not have claimed ‘je sais tout’; it strikes the keynote of La Comédie humaine. Balzac’s Code uses these prescriptions in ways soon to be ubiquitous: demonstratively (‘Paris est rempli de ces honnêtes gens qui font leurs affaires en gérant celles d’autrui’, OD ii. ) and interrogatively: Avez-vous vu sur les murs de Paris ces petits carrés de papier blanc entourés de noir qui se trouvent placardés on ne sait comment? . . . Qu’on se figure une allée obscure, un escalier dont les marches sont si chargées de terre durcie, qu’en se retirant, on ferait un terrassement de six pieds de hauteur sur trois de largeur. (OD ii. ; cf. –)

These familiarizations of the unfamiliar, ways of referring to the world beyond the text, of inducing the reader to participate with real or imagined experiences, common enough in earlier fiction, are ubiquitous in Balzac’s work—in La Dernière Fée, for example, in Madame Firmiani, or the opening of Le Père Goriot: Avoir rendu un être au bonheur, est une jouissance qui vient d’un sixième sens que tout le monde n’a pas: or ceux qui l’ont, comprendront parfaitement ce que ressentait Abel, et ceux qui ne l’ont pas ne le comprendraient jamais, y eût-il vingt pages d’impression pour le leur expliquer.62 Si vous n’avez pas déjà enseveli quelque bonne tante infirme ou sans fortune, vous ne comprendrez point ces pages (II –). Sera-t-elle comprise au-delà de Paris? Le doute est permis. (iii. )

Taken literally, such statements would drastically limit potential readership, but they must, of course, be understood chiefly figuratively: their power is hardly restricted to Parisians or to those who have recently lost an aunt. What 61 PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. . Cf. C. Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis (Cambridge, ),  et seq. 62 La Dernière Fée, ii. p. .

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is important in the Code is their systematic application to the contemporary. They appropriate the unfamiliar aspects of urban life and absorb them into the reader’s subjective sphere,63 creating an ‘effet de sens’ as Madame Aubain’s barometer creates an ‘effet de réel’,64 exploiting the reader’s own experience to suggest that what the text recounts is real.

(iv) The Limits of Prescription Yet despite this formidable battery of techniques, the Code betrays doubts about the feasibility of its enterprise. Its tone is poised between the serious and the parodic, as if containment through categorization were not quite possible, and prescription’s potential limited: Dans l’impossibilité toutefois de deviner toutes les subtiles combinaisons des voleurs, nous avons tenté de réunir dans ce livre les aphorismes, les exemples, les anecdotes qui peuvent servir à éclairer la probité innocente sur les ruses de la probité déchue. (OD ii. –)

The Code’s response, and crucial innovation, is the systematic use of anecdotes to supplement the limits of prescription, and thereby establish one of the paradigmatic structures of Balzac’s works. The  Physiologie du mariage, and the  Scènes de la vie privée, grow out of the anecdote-aphorism combination, which develops into the alliance of generalization validated by narration and vice versa characteristic of Balzac’s later fictions.65 Journal pen-portraits,66 stories, novels like La Cousine Bette, even Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, are indebted to Balzac’s gens honnêtes, the latter’s treatment of urban criminality depending on narrative fragmented by portraits, anecdotes, and assertions—a more radically disrupted form, where ostensible authority struggles with ‘toutes les subtiles combinaisons des voleurs’(OD ii. ).67 Le Cousin Pons’s account of Poulain’s career reproduces this pattern in microcosm. The narrator’s initial assertions (‘Une vie commune et sans hasards finit par agir sur l’esprit le plus aventureux. Un homme se façonne à son sort, il On Balzac’s wider use of such metalepses, cf. J. Rousset, Le Lecteur intime (), –. Cf. G. Falconer, ‘Le Rôle poétique de la doxa balzacienne’, in R. Le Huenen and P. Perron, Le Roman de Balzac (Montreal, ), ; R. Barthes, ‘L’Effet de réel’, in G. Genette and T. Todorov, Littérature et réalité (); and M. Riffaterre, ‘L’Illusion référentielle’, ibid. –, esp. . 65 E. Bordas, Balzac, discours et détours (Toulouse, ), sees authorial doxa as developing from narrative. If often true of detail additions to later work (cf. e.g. Ch. (vi) below on Le Curé de Tours), it is clear that the story of the development of Balzac’s technique is marked by the emergence of narrative from authorial discourse. See esp. Chs. , , (i), and (i). 66 See Ch. (ii) below. 67 César Birotteau, conversely, had drawn directly on the Code de commerce, although one of its elements first appears in Balzac’s Code (César Birotteau, ed. P. Laubriet (), pp. lxvi–lxxi, cxxxii, and ciii–cvi). 63 64

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accepte la vulgarité de sa vie’) are followed by the story of Poulain’s situation (‘Aussi le docteur Poulain . . .’); later, the tale of his near emigration is accompanied by another general observation: ‘Quitter la France est, pour un Français, une situation funèbre’ (vii. ). A kind of descriptive apostrophe asks us to imagine Poulain’s jealousy of Bianchon: Jugez de quel fiel il se nourrissait? Mettez dans un parchemin jaune les yeux ardents de Tartuffe et l’aigreur d’Alceste; puis, figurez-vous la démarche, l’attitude, les regards de cet homme, qui, se trouvant tout aussi bon médecin que l’illustre Bianchon, se sentait maintenu dans une sphère obscure par une main de fer. (vii. )

So this is how Balzac’s hyperreality is created: the fictional but unremarkable and entirely ‘vraisemblable’ character of Poulain is described with our assistance. We feel, as our own imagination is engaged, that what is described must have some basis in reality; but our experience is hijacked for a totally hyperbolic end.68 ‘Poulain se sentait maintenu dans une sphère obscure par une main de fer’: a phrase which could come from any of the more lurid passages of the young Balzac’s romans noirs; yet its excessiveness is legitimized by an appeal to the reader’s extra-textual reality, first encountered in the Sternian passages of the early fictions, but not systematically exploited until the Code des gens honnêtes. Balzac’s subsequent works are hybrids, born of disorder out of law: the Gothic novel’s melodramatic action validated by the author’s commentary as vehicle for the reader’s own experience, the model first extensively exploited in the Code. The Code des gens honnêtes set the course for Balzac’s fiction, for narrative of value as much in itself, as a prescriptive illustration of the typical—possibilities fully explored in the  Physiologie du mariage. The Physiologie du mariage and the Scènes de la vie privée engage with and seek to change reality, the former with its mass of exhortations, the latter with its marking of ‘les passages dangereux de la vie’ (i. ). That this course should have been set in shorter fiction, and, in particular, in the Code, is accidental, but deeply logical. For as Corsino and Une heure de ma vie show, fiction was not Balzac’s first, but second, impulse, auxiliary to abstract enquiry, an impulse continued in his Code, where authorial generalization and commentary outweigh narrative in the order of two to one. Despite the novel’s predominance in Balzac’s opus between  and , it was in shorter narrative that many of his most urgent concerns were explored, in illustrative, experimental stories like Corsino and Une heure, unshackled by the novel’s commercial constraints, in narrative which could be purposive, directed towards an end, yet not obliged to finish or amuse. These Diderotian, Sternian liberties, appealing to the reader but contained within the organizing authorial discourse of his Code, made a structure for tensioning the specific and the general, his doxa and its stories—for two key axes of his world. 68 Cf. Bordas, Balzac, discours et détours,  et seq., for a thoroughgoing technical analysis of the device.



From Code to Physiologie, – (i) Doxa and Dialogue: Anecdotes, Codes, and the Physiologie The Code des gens honnêtes co-ordinates doxa and narrative, description and prescription, but keeps them, for the most part, formally discrete. Yet between the first () and the second () versions of the Physiologie du mariage (a code, but one which, as its title indicates, takes its subject from the inside), Balzac published anthologies and collections of anecdotes, and probably participated in other codes. Such activities would allow him to combine prescription with narrative, doxa, and illustration, in the diachronic account of marriage which is the much more wilfully eclectic  Physiologie du mariage, ou méditations de philosophie éclectique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal, publiées par un jeune célibataire.1 Balzac’s first Physiologie had probably been conceived and written between  and , the year it was printed, but not published.2 If its title and chapter-headings echo Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût,3 a study of gastronomic manners which could have been concocted specially for Balzac, the resemblance is superficial—he had probably finished his manuscript before Brillat’s work appeared.4 Both are courses of instruction: Balzac’s, like his Code, approaches its subject statistically, before proceeding to a linear, documentary exploration, a chronology of the likely evolution of a marriage. It matches the logic of a treatise to the diachrony of narrative. The second Physiologie builds on this. Its numerous leavening 5 anecdotes are used much more liberally than in the Physiologie du goût. Where Brillat, fearing interruption, sends them to the end,6 Balzac, for almost the reverse reason, distributes them throughout: ‘La matière était si grave qu’il a constamment essayé de l’anecdoter (xi. ). He ascribes the idea of including anecdotes to Brillat; but Physiologie du mariage, BF ( Dec. ), dated . Cf. Physiologie du mariage préoriginale (), ed. M. Bardèche (), –, and R. Guise, xi. . A hitherto unnoticed resemblance between the anecdote in the Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme, and the virtually identical passage in the Physiologie (OD i.  and xi. ) suggests that Balzac may indeed have worked on the text as early as . 3 J.-A. Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante, ouvrage théorique, historique, et à l’ordre du jour, dédié aux gastronomes parisiens, par un professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés littéraires et savantes (). 4 Cf. Physiologie, ed. Bardèche, –, and Guise, xi. . 5 Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du goût, i. ; cf. xi. –. 6 Ibid., ii. . 1 2

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impulses for their systematic incorporation also came from his business as a compiler and printer of albums, memoirs, and anthologies between  and .7 The Album historique et anecdotique,8 the Choix d’anecdotes,9 the Mémoires anecdotiques sur l’intérieur du Palais,10 the Petit Dictionnaire critique et anecdotique des enseignes de Paris,11 and the Nouvelle Anthologie12 kept him in constant contact with these forms, turning his attention towards short narrative, providing him with a store of snippets, histories, and stories to be recycled in the Physiologie and later works:13 on the one hand, gatherings of trivia, shop-signs, the ‘Bon fabricant’, ‘A la clef du bonheur’, which, duly overdetermined and symbolized, will form the signifying core of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote14 or La Peau de chagrin;15 on the other, the petite histoire of great men—the Œuvres choisies de Napoléon, Raisson’s Histoire de Napoléon et de la grande armée, and the Mémoires de Sanson.16 Their period atmosphere17 was to be exploited in the  Scènes de la vie privée—La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, Le Bal de Sceaux, La Paix du ménage, and La Vendetta. Such activities established or renewed the author’s contact with a group of liberal writers including Latouche, Lepoitevin de l’Égreville, and indeed 7 Cf. B. Tolley: ‘Balzac anecdotier: de l’Album historique et anecdotique () à La Comédie humaine’, AB (). 8 Album historique et anecdotique (). 9 Choix d’anecdotes, de contes, d’historiettes, d’épigrammes et de bons mots, tant en prose qu’en vers. Published in sixteen instalments from  Mar. to  July ; cited by Tolley, ‘Balzac anecdotier’, , who attributes this text to Balzac, along with other anthologies by Castel, whose work it was formerly thought to be (B. Tolley, ‘Un ouvrage inconnu de Balzac’, AB (),  n. ). 10 L.-F.-J. de Bausset, Mémoires anecdotiques sur l’intérieur du Palais, published by the Baudouin brothers (BF ( June )), discovered and attributed to Balzac by B. Tolley (‘Un ouvrage inconnu de Balzac’). 11 Petit Dictionnaire critique et anecdotique des enseignes de Paris, par un batteur de pavé. BF ( Oct. ) (J.-A. Ducourneau and R. Pierrot, ‘Calendrier de la vie de Balzac, années –’, AB (), ). 12 L. Castel, Nouvelle Anthologie, ou choix de chansons anciennes et modernes (), printed and, according to B. Tolley, compiled by Balzac (B. Tolley, ‘Les Œuvres diverses de Balzac’, AB (), ). 13 Tolley, ‘Les Œuvres diverses’, and ‘Balzac anecdotier’, –. Several of these anecdotes display the interest in recent history which will form the staple of Balzac’s later writing, with items on Napoleon—the material of La Vendetta and of La Femme de trente ans and Une ténébreuse affaire; on prominent figures of the Empire (soon to reappear in Le Bal de Sceaux), of recent literature (Beaumarchais, who appears in Les Deux Rêves), and of the Peninsular War (Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit, El Verdugo). Some of these anecdotes not only form the basis of longer narratives but actually reappear as anecdotes in later novels: Tolley cites the story of Ernst Johann Biron, Duke of Courland, in Illusions perdues. 14 Petit Dictionnaire critique et anecdotique des enseignes de Paris, ; cf. i. –. 15 Petit Dictionnaire, ; the signs of gaming-houses are described on –, with the warning ‘Passons-y rapidement, et gardons-nous de suivre ceux que nous voyons descendre’. Cf. x. –. 16 Balzac may perhaps have contributed to the Oeuvres and the Histoire (; , dated ); he certainly wrote the introduction to the Mémoires, now the story Un épisode sous la Terreur: Tolley, ‘Les Œuvres diverses’, , –; cf. OD ii.  et seq. 17 See, e.g., Raisson, Histoire de Napoléon, .

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Raisson. Between  and  there appeared a series of popular parodic prescriptive works attributed to the latter, but modelled on Balzac’s Code,18 and with many of its features: prescriptions, maxims, buttonholing of the reader, and an alleged concern to instruct and enlighten about the contemporary world. Balzac almost certainly contributed to a number of these Codes. The ‘ouvrage auquel il ne met pas son nom’ mentioned in April 19 was probably one of the later Codes, probably the Code conjugal;20 another was perhaps the Code du littérateur,21 whose subject matter and numerous anecdotes distributed throughout the text—as in the Physiologie, but in no other Code—seem to indicate Balzac’s hand.22 Along with his activities as anecdotier and printer, and Le Dernier Chouan, the first novel he was to publish under his own name, by which he was successively occupied until mid-March ,23 they doubtless brought him back to the Physiologie. The Code conjugal, for example, the one to which it is thematically closest, parodically undermines doxa in a way central to Balzac’s treatise: Les amis de la maison sont de trois types . . . Le petit cousin est de l’âge de la mariée; ils ont été élevés ensemble. Dans leurs jeux enfantins, ils étaient toujours d’un parfait accord. Ils se tutoyaient; mais depuis que l’un est sorti du collège et l’autre du couvent, le vous cérémonieux leur a été recommandé; ils font tout ce qu’ils peuvent pour ne pas l’oublier.24

Particular and general, exception and rule, are held in tension: ‘les amis de la maison’ are individuals, but they play a recognizable social role, and are here reduced to a type. The reader’s banality is parroted, indeed sold, straight back to him, disguised as insight and instruction—revealing to posterity the lost details of nineteenth-century mores, yet, to contemporaries, at once transparent 18 Code gourmand, manuel complet de gastronomie (n.d.), BF ( July ); Code civil, manuel complet de la politesse du ton, BF ( Apr. ); Code de la toilette, manuel complet d’élégance et d’hygiène (n.d.), BF ( Sept. ); Code de la conversation, manuel complet du langage élégant et poli (n.d.), BF ( Dec. ); Code conjugal, contenant les lois, règles applications et exemples de l’art de se bien marier . . . (n.d.), BF ( May ); Code du littérateur et du journaliste par un entrepreneur littéraire, BF ( June ); Code galant, ou l’art de conter fleurette . . . BF ( July ); Code de la Chasse, manuel complet du chasseur, suivi du Code de la pêche, par M. de C . . . y (n.d.), BF ( Sept. ); Code des boudoirs, moyens adroits de faire des conquêtes, de devenir bientôt heureux en amour et d’acquérir un certain aplomb auprès des femmes, par un jurisconsulte de Cythère, ouvrage indispensable aux novices (n.d.), BF (Oct. ). 19 Corr. i. . 20 Cf. OD ii. . Prioult’s suggestion (Balzac avant ‘La Comédie humaine’ (), –) that it is the Code galant, on the basis of its resemblance to Balzac’s Physiologie, and its publication on  July , seems less likely, given the closer resemblance of the Code de la toilette (pace R. Pierrot, Corr. i.  n. ). 21 Corr. i. , BF ( June ). 22 On the question of attribution cf. Tolley, ‘Les Œuvres diverses’; R. Chollet, OD ii. –. 23 On  Mar.  Balzac promised Pommereul Le Dernier Chouan ‘dans cinq ou six jours’. It was published a few days before its appearance in BF on  Mar.  (Corr. i. ). Cf. ch.  below. 24 H.-N. Raisson, Code conjugal (), . The  edition is not at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

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and opaque, the recognizable presented as alien and baffling. ‘Ouvrez les yeux, tournez sur vous-mêmes, soyez francs’ wrote Le Figaro, ‘ses originaux sont partout, et peut-être dans votre miroir.’25 This is the Physiologie’s double-bluff for husbands, and the voice of Balzac’s later assertive narrators.26

(ii) Prescription and Description in the Physiologie Balzac’s  Physiologie is, then, Janus-faced, looking backwards to the Codes, and forwards to the Scènes de la vie privée the following year. On the one hand, its many prescriptions, maxims, and aphorisms, numbered paragraphs, and Rabelaisian lists, attest the experience of the Codes; on the other, the number of anecdotes makes the narrative more prominent, but the text more disparate. The Minotaur, Balzac’s ambiguously hornèd emblem of adultery,27 which opens and dominates the  version, in  arrives (as in marriages) casually, about a quarter of the way in (xi. –). As a result, the mythic beast loses its determinant significance, but becomes a more constant companion—a subtler way, perhaps, of initiating hapless husbands into what is presented as the full horror of matrimony. This, the second Physiologie, though presented diachronically, as the likely story of a marriage, shifts emphasis from the whole to its individual parts. It is very much less a treatise, and much more a cycle of stories. Stories, or rather extensive anecdotes, are the most significant feature of the  Physiologie. Balzac uses the present or future tense prescriptively, and predictively, in the by now familiar way: Votre jeune femme ne prendra jamais, comme nous l’avons dit ailleurs, un amant sans faire de sérieuses réflexions. Au moment où la Lune de Miel décroît, vous avez plutôt développé chez elle le sentiment du plaisir que vous ne l’avez satisfait. (xi. )

The anecdote merely merges authorial prescription into narrative, a development inspired by the influence of Brillat-Savarin. Indeed, much of the nonanecdotal material in the Codes and the Physiologie hovers between narration and prescription, and many of the scenes added in  emerge from the prescriptive mode which characterizes the version of : ‘Imaginez une jeune femme, voluptueusement couchée sur un divan . . .’; ‘Figurez-vous la  Jan. , cited xi. . Cf. C. Nesci, La Femme mode d’emploi (Lexington, Ky., ),  et seq., and Ch.  below, on the relation between doxa and narrative in the  Scènes de la vie privée. But the univocal narrator has a long afterlife: cf. amongst recent studies, E. Bordas, ‘L’Écriture de l’Héritière de Birague’, AB (),  n. . 27 R. Guise notes that Balzac’s comparison of the Minotaur, to whom fifty virgins were sacrificed each year, to the lover rather than the husband is an ‘allégorie discutable’ (xi.  n. ). But might not the confusion be deliberate, suggesting that both husband and lover were at risk, and discussion be precisely the point? 25 26

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charmante Mme de T*** . . . commençant par dire d’un air fin: “Mais je ne vous ai jamais vu si aimable! . . .”’ (xi. , ). Such scenes are increasingly predominant towards the end of the Physiologie of . Like the Codes, they apostrophize the reader, enabling him to read his own experience into the text, to become one of its main actors. Yet only the most desperate thespian would actively seek the dubious privilege of appearing in, say, the migraine or pâté de Strasbourg anecdotes (xi. –, –)—which relate age-old uxorial and physiological excuses for not making love, and tell-tale traces of infidelity. Whilst narratives of this sort reinforce prescriptive assertions, and return the reader to them, they also throw him back on to his own resources, offering amusement or admonition, depending on whether he imagines they apply to others, or to himself. And if that reader happens instead to be an unhappily married wife, such narratives could actually offer advice on how to commit adultery, or rather, on how to do so without being discovered (a possibility this anecdote’s address to ‘vous . . ., madame’, explicitly envisages, despite, or, by counter-suggestion, because of, Balzac’s warning that ‘les femmes n’entrent pas ici’). This is the very ambivalence the Physiologie invites, the dissent alongside, at the core of, its doxa. Such contradictions have marked the Physiologie’s reception from the start.28 Thus does prescription create the essence of subversion; the will to control, the very cradle of dissent. But the  Physiologie also uses first- and third-person narratives more conventionally, to describe single, completed sequences of events,29 implying that the world can be classified, interpreted, and controlled, promising to prepare us for every possibility. Yet the subversive readings they invite turn many into exceptions to their own rules, narratives both fixing a single, emblematic set of circumstances in stone, and revealing how flawed such tablets of wisdom are— as much an admission of fallibility as ‘l’impossibilité de deviner toutes les subtiles combinaisons des voleurs’ (OD ii. ) in the Code des gens honnêtes. The functions of prescription and description are ostensibly, and often actually, antithetical. The Codes’ prescriptive paragraphs merely comment on hypothetical situations; the anecdotes or scenes present themselves as reality, a ‘chose vue’. In the Physiologie, however, the presence of these two conflicting yet 28 Cf. Balzac’s letter to Mme de Castries,  Oct. , Corr. i. –, and C. Mounoud-Anglés, Balzac et ses lectrices (), –. 29 e.g. the first comte de Nocé anecdote, relating how his charm saved his wife from adultery (xi. –), the whole of Meditation XVI ‘La Charte conjugale’ (xi. –); the second comte de Nocé anecdote, illustrating the prédestiné, impervious to the needs of his spouse (xi. –); the Beyle anecdote, and that in ‘De la correspondance’, a pendant to the essay on ‘La Police conjugale’, accompanied in the same essay by one indicating that women are interested exclusively in money (xi. , –, –); the tale of the coquette in ‘Principes de stratégie’ and the intercalated nouvelle ‘Point de lendemain’ (xi. –); ‘Des amies de pension’ (xi. –), and ‘Des alliés de l’amant’ (xi. –); the story of the ape and violin (xi. –), and the story of Mme de T*** (xi. –).

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complementary modes of writing and of reading reflects a tension of purpose between prescription and narration—a tension central to La Comédie humaine. Balzac fuses these conflicting modes by skilful transitions between the narrative and didactic elements of the text, framing each anecdote by paragraphs announcing its purpose and concluding that it has been achieved. So the comte de Nocé anecdote is presented by the phrase ‘toute la question réside dans un parallèle perpétuel et involontaire que votre femme établit entre vous et son amant’ (xi. ), and ends with the advice ‘si vous venez à bout de remporter, comme monsieur de Nocé, une si grande victoire, n’oubliez pas de mettre singulièrement en pratique le système des moxas’ (xi. —useless advice, in fact, since the sentence continues: ‘et ne vous imaginez pas que l’on puisse recommencer impunément de semblables tours de force’!). Similarly, Balzac introduces the Café Tortoni anecdote, which illustrates various kinds of ‘compensation’ (xi. ), and follows it with another snippet showing ‘compensation’ of a different kind; the first one serves as a transition, helping to develop the argument. Most of the Physiologie’s anecdotes stand in this auxiliary position, reproducing, reflecting, though not necessarily reinforcing, the subject matter of the surrounding text. And, at a deeper level, the Physiologie is united by the ultimate purpose of both anecdote and prescription, of returning the reader to reflection, and to the world. Prescriptive anecdotes seek this by apostrophe, inviting us to conspire in literary creation, albeit guided by the author’s heavy hand: ‘Quand j’écris et parle de moi au singulier’, Balzac warns, ‘cela suppose une confabulation avec le lecteur; il peut examiner, discuter, douter, et même rire; mais, quand je m’arme du redoutable , je professe, il faut se soumettre’ (xi. ). But this very dogmatism is a pose: every statement is potentially subverted, simply by virtue of being made; and Balzac’s prescriptions fall explicitly short of presenting an exhaustive account of foreseeable situations: ‘laissons à chacun le soin d’augmenter le nombre des exceptions suivant sa propre expérience’ (xi. ). The Code’s ‘impossibilité de deviner toutes les subtiles combinaisons des voleurs’ has become a downright refusal, providing the starting-point for the reader’s own rueful reflections on reality: A ces traits, vous pouvez maintenant en ajouter d’autres. Nous tâcherons dans ce livre de toujours peindre à fresque et de vous laisser le soin des miniatures. Selon les caractères, ces indices, cachés sous les accidents de la vie, varient à l’infini. Tel découvrira un symptôme dans la manière de mettre un châle, lorsque tel autre aura besoin de recevoir une chiquenaude sur son âne pour deviner l’indifférence de sa compagne. (Des premiers symptômes, xi. )

This is enough to chill the spine of many a husband. If these are ‘premiers symptômes’, then what are the next? The very ploy of refusing any exhaustive account, and then providing an already alarmingly long list, raises the spectre of a hypertrophy of interpretation, of men driven by paranoia to find symptoms

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in everything they see. We could find in these examples foreshadowings of later stories, where the reader is left to solve enigmas whose key is not entirely in his hand: Le Réquisitionnaire, L’Auberge rouge, La Grande Bretèche; Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, whose heroine is of such uncertain virtue, and which ends with the teasing question: ‘Est-ce un dénouement? Oui, pour les gens d’esprit: non, pour ceux qui veulent tout savoir’ (vi. ). There are several points in this Physiologie when, as later in Madame Firmiani (ii. –), Balzac does not quite hand over the key: Pour apprécier l’exclamation du vieillard, il faudrait avoir écouté les horreurs que le capitaine avait racontées. (xi. ) Parlez-moi donc, beau ténébreux! . . . dit-elle en se plaçant devant lui, dans le négligé le plus séduisant. Mais vous n’aurez jamais une idée de toutes les sorcelleries de la marquise, il faudrait l’avoir connue. (xi. )

But there are many more when he gives us too many keys, indicates too many potential paths through the labyrinth of marriage to the Minotaur-husband-reader, and not enough threads to follow. This, perhaps, is the true import of Balzac’s (in some ways, slightly sadistic) justification of his refusal to list every conjugal predicament, ‘car, avant tout, le but d’un livre est de faire penser’ (xi. ). ‘Lire, c’est créer peut-être à deux’ (xi. ): interpretation is never entirely in our hand, yet we have too many constructive possibilities with which to play. It is on this paradoxical relation between assertion and subversion that this second Physiologie relies, and which it will both exploit and undermine in its theories of literary illusion, in the roles it asks the reader to assume.

(iii) A Physiology of Literary Illusion Balzac’s active reader, heir of Sterne and Diderot, is expected to read his own real or imagined experience into the text. For Balzac, art is essentially selfcontained: poetry, music, and painting, ‘les trois arts qui nous aident à chercher peut-être infructueusement la vérité par analogie’,30 cannot give the thing itself, instead relying for their effect on our response. ‘L’homme se trouve seul avec son imagination’ (xi. ) in ‘une conspiration contre le vrai’:31 30 On the sources of such ideas in Swedenborg and—later—Hoffmann, cf. M. Eigeldinger, La Philosophie de l’art chez Balzac (Geneva, ), ch. ; P. Laubriet, L’Intelligence de l’art chez Balzac: d’une esthétique balzacienne (), pt. II ch.  esp.  et seq.; but Diderot’s ubiquity in the Physiologie makes it difficult not to suspect his influence here. For some wider considerations of correspondance in Balzac’s work, cf. M. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien (Paris and Lille, ),  et seq.; E. Bordas, ‘Balzac: écriture et peinture’, and B. Vouilloux, ‘La peinture dans l’écriture’ in J.-P. Boyer, and E. Boyer-Peigné (eds.), Balzac et la peinture ( Tours, ), –. 31 Cf. M. Kanes, Balzac’s Comedy of Words (Princeton, ), –; and Andréoli, Le Système balzacien,  et seq. The Physiologie is the first implementation of this aesthetic.

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

Cette fascination provient moins du désir que chaque auteur a de se montrer parfait en affectant des idées délicates et recherchées, que d’un indéfinissable travail de notre intelligence. Il est dans la destinée de l’homme d’épurer tout ce qu’il emporte dans le trésor de sa pensée . . . L’âme du lecteur aide à cette conspiration contre le vrai, soit par le silence profond dont il jouit ou par le feu de la conception, soit par la pureté avec laquelle les images se réfléchissent dans son entendement. Qui n’a pas, en lisant les Confessions de Jean-Jacques, vu Mme de Warens plus jolie qu’elle n’était? On dirait que notre âme caresse des formes qu’elle aurait jadis entrevues sous de plus beaux cieux; elle n’accepte les créations d’une autre âme que comme des ailes pour s’élancer dans l’espace. (xi. )32

The text triggers the reader’s imagination, intensifying real experience— Stendhal’s violin, perhaps, but with a significant drive towards idealization.33 None the less, the  Physiologie consistently prefers practice to theory, narrative to prescription. Its assertions (‘Un exemple vivant rafraîchira ces arides et sèches dissertations. N’est-ce pas quitter le livre pour opérer sur le terrain?’; ‘les événements de la vie sont toujours plus féconds que l’imagination humaine’: xi. , ), and, towards the end, more numerous and extensive anecdotes, attest the increasing importance of mimesis, and, in the emergence of completely self-contained narratives, the influence of the Scènes de la vie privée, then in the process of being composed. Whilst the anecdote appended to the ‘Essai sur la police’ is introduced simply as an illustration of the text (xi. ), and begins, like many others, lightheartedly, the rapid tonal change between the opening and the miser’s subsequent poisoning by his wife and her lover reveals the impact of his contemporary narrative short fiction and of the juxtapositional techniques which the Scènes de la vie privée were just beginning to adopt.34 The leisurely exposition is succeeded by a turbulent denouement which brazenly manipulates our emotions: Ils étaient réunis pour la première fois, mais sur le banc des criminels, et séparés par un gendarme. Ils furent condamnés à l’unanimité par des jurés en pleurs. Personne, parmi ceux qui eurent le courage barbare de les voir conduire à l’échafaud, ne peut aujourd’hui parler d’eux sans frissonner. La religion leur avait arraché le repentir du crime, mais non l’abjuration de leur amour. L’échafaud fut leur lit nuptial, et ils s’y couchèrent ensemble dans la longue nuit de la mort. (xi. )

In its confrontation of opposites, this anecdote parallels La Vendetta;35 in technique, it is almost a free-standing narrative. Its events speak for themselves, persuading emotionally, through the story’s figurative power. A similar image occurs in a passage on artistic illusion in La Bourse (ii. ). Stendhal’s violin is ‘l’âme du lecteur’: Oeuvres intimes, ed. V. del Litto (–), ii. ; cf. R. Pearson, Stendhal’s Violin: A Novelist and his Reader (Oxford, ). For Balzac, the ideal is the expression of an inherent reality: Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, ; cf.  and  et seq., and P. Nykrog, La Pensée de Balzac (Copenhagen, ), , . 34 Cf. Ch. . 35 The Physiologie du mariage was published on  Dec. ; La Vendetta is dated Jan.  in F (i. ), but its ending was not completed until mid-March (R. Chollet, Balzac journaliste (), –). La Vendetta is, with La Paix du ménage, the closest of the Scènes de la vie privée in conception to the Physiologie du mariage. 32 33

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Of the Physiologie’s many other developed narratives, those in Meditation V, ‘Des Prédestinés’, or XXVIII, ‘Des Compensations’, corroborate its theory, whilst a second series, the tripartite anecdote of the ‘Charte conjugale’, has only a short two-paragraph authorial introduction (xi. ); the original authorial epilogue in the  version becomes a fictionalized dialogue (xi. –). Meditation X, ‘Traité de politique maritale’, evolves along similar lines, the narratorial discourse of  becoming a dialogue in  (xi. –). The abstractions of the treatise are transformed into a scene: a pattern of modification developed in the  Scènes de la vie privée. But by far the most significant is the anecdote in Meditation XVI, Charte conjugale. In the  version it is mostly occupied by the vicomte’s proud account of his measures to control his wife’s infidelities (xi. –); yet the whole edifice is exploded when he discovers an alien hair on his divan. His system, and the author’s admiration, instantly collapses, letting real life overtake the more limited potentialities of fiction: ‘L’aventure détruisit de fond en comble trois de mes plus importantes méditations, et l’infaillibilité catholique de mon livre était attaquée dans son essence’ (xi. ). Even this anecdote’s second ending, which apparently resolves the vicomte’s doubts about his wife, is undermined when he rushes off at the mere sight of ‘un de ses amis qui lui semblait avoir l’intention d’aller saluer la vicomtesse’. As the narrator remarks, ‘Que pourrions-nous ajouter qui ne serait une fastidieuse paraphrase des enseignements enfermés dans cette conversation? Tout y est germe ou fruit’ (xi. ). ‘Germe’, doubtless, in the vicomte’s incessant uncertainty and the impossibility of preparing for every eventuality, ‘fruit’ in the lesson of its final pun: ‘Néanmoins, vous le voyez, ô maris, votre bonheur tient à un cheveu.’ This second stab of the Physiologie’s double-edged knife is already a typical Balzac ending, an epilogue foreshortening the narrative time-scale, bringing it closer to our present whilst providing a more detached comment on what has gone before. The penultimate Meditation’s dialogue (xi. –) does this in much the same way as the one between Granville and Bianchon at the end of Une double famille (ii. –). Many other stories will leave events to speak apparently for themselves, whilst delivering a moral through an image or a pun. In Le Grand d’Espagne, a frame story of ,36 the time-scale of the ending is foreshortened as the countess, who has been maimed by her brutal husband, appears in the world of the frame to announce that she lost her arm ‘dans la guerre de l’indépendance’.37 The ending of Le Bal de Sceaux, a short final scene set two years after Émilie’s mariage de raison, puns on the ‘roi de coeur’—the king of hearts in her game of cards, as well as the lover she has lost (i. –); La Maison du chat-qui-pelote ends with a moral in metaphoric terms (i. –). It is in the Physiologie that short fiction goes beyond being a means to a didactic end to become an end which itself embodies meaning. 36

Cf. Ch. (ii) below.

37

Le Grand d’Espagne in Contes bruns (Marseilles, ), .

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(iv) Types of Reading in the  Physiologie The more numerous and extensive anecdotes of the second Physiologie reinforce the dichotomy between the overall structure of , with its blow-by-blow treatment of the progressive stages of marriage, and the individual anecdotes which stand in contrast to this linear dynamic. This second Physiologie is a hybrid, carrying the tensions between description and prescription, narrative and commentary, to their logical extreme, foreshadowing important dichotomies in Balzac’s later writing: between generalizing authorial commentary and the specificities of characters and events; between contingency and aphoristic absolutes; between their aspiration to universal truth, and their inevitable inadequacies. Doxa and classification control these forces in La Comédie humaine. But, in the Physiologie, it is the increased importance of mimesis which saves its prescriptive elements from dissolution. This potential fragmentation is countered by the appearance, in , of patterns of symbolism throughout the text. Most persistent of these is the Minotaur, whose more discreet appearances as a leitmotif in  suggest a greater concern with textual unity.38 The ‘perruque’, another significant recurring image, initially of conjugal neglect, subsequently moves to an entirely metonymic level (xi. –), before being explained by the Minotaur. The second Physiologie is unified by a whole series of metonymic in-jokes: ‘minotaure’, ‘minotaurisé’, ‘moxa’, ‘perruque’, ‘prédestiné’, ‘souricière’, ‘force de la crécelle’ (‘nagpower’), which create a private language between author and reader. And it is paralleled by a dominant, governmental, image. This central metaphor of the Codes, derived from the Code civil, in turn from more recent statistical enterprises,39 is reproduced at every level of the text, in the chapters entitled ‘Statistique conjugale’, ‘Traité de politique maritale’, ‘De la Douane’, ‘Charte conjugale’, ‘Des révolutions conjugales’, ‘Essai sur la police’, and in many images elsewhere: Un mari, comme un gouvernement, ne doit jamais avouer une faute (‘Des premiers symptômes’).40 Un pouvoir stationnaire est un pouvoir nul. (xi. )

Yet government does not necessarily carry weight: and, as with all the prescriptive, supposedly authoritative statements in the work, it is as much subject to subversion as to assertion. Whilst the unifying imagery and symbols of the 38 The Minotaur symbol was particularly emphasized by a contemporary review of the Physiologie du mariage which appeared in La Pandore on  Dec. . M. Tilby suggests that the reviewer (assuming that he was not Balzac himself) might have been acquainted with the genesis of the Physiologie (‘La Pandore et la Physiologie du mariage’, AB ()). But it is equally likely that the reviewer had simply been impressed by the symbol’s central role. 39 In particular F.-P.-C. Dupin’s Forces productives et commerciales de la France (): cf. P. Barbéris, ‘Balzac, Dupin et les statistiques’, AB (). 40 Physiologie du mariage préoriginale (), .

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second Physiologie bespeak Balzac’s view of literature as an essentially metonymic art (xi. ), enabling the reader to read his or her imaginative response into the text, that response is unpredictable and diverse, as much destructive as supportive of the doxa. But it is in the development of anecdotes that this increasing independence of meaning is most evident. Balzac’s criterion of ‘la vérité par analogie’ applies to his whole system of mimesis. The second Physiologie is strikingly mimetic, both in its individual anecdotes, and throughout the text—most notably in the recurrence of characters from one narrative to another. M. de Nocé first appears in the ‘moxa conjugal’ anecdote (xi. –), Meditation XIII ‘Des Moyens personnels’, and later recounts, in ‘Théorie du lit’, an anecdote demonstrating the drawbacks of twin beds (xi. –); Mme de T*** first appears in the intercalated nouvelle ‘Point de lendemain’ (xi. –),41 reappears in the dialogue which ends Meditation XXIX, ‘De la paix conjugale’ (xi. –), and is also used as an example in Meditation XXVIII, ‘Des compensations’ (xi. ). These recurrences give Balzac’s fictional characters the same reality as those who appear in other, allegedly more factual, anecdotes;42 both types spill over into the surrounding authorial commentary, in an increasing use of mimesis for didactic ends. M. de Nocé’s reappearance gives substance to his anecdote—having already provided his own moxa, he is fit to advise the reader. Balzac was to invest other narrators, like Bianchon and Derville, with greater authority through their reappearances throughout La Comédie humaine. The repeated appearance of Mme de T*** adds a new aspect to her character which, when combined with our previous experience of her in ‘Point de lendemain’, creates a more multidimensional portrait than could have been created at one sitting. As the only developed character in the Physiologie du mariage, she has her own history and chronology, reappearing in the dialogue concluding Meditation XXIX, ‘De la paix conjugale’, whose emotional impact, the shock of her reappearance, ruined by passion and age, reinforces its moral lesson as an ‘image vivante de ma Méditation’ (xi. ). Balzac was to use the device a few months later, at the end of Une double famille,43 where Granville reappears, exhausted by marriage and adulterous passion, in an epilogue set some time after the main action. Both works end in dialogues (Bianchon/Granville in Une double famille and narrator/comte de T*** in the Physiologie), but present a similar, and unambiguous, moral about relationships: Borrowed, somewhat indirectly, from Denon: xi. –. Although Nocé’s status is ambiguous: while never certainly identified as real, he bears the famous name of one of Louis XV’s companions in debauchery. Did Balzac choose it in order to pun on noce? 43 Une double famille, formerly La Femme vertueuse, the last of the first series of Scènes de la vie privée to be composed, is dated Feb.–Mar.  in the Béchet edition (ii. b). 41 42

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—L’amour n’existe pas, reprit le vieillard en me regardant. Ce n’est même pas un sentiment, c’est une nécessité malheureuse qui tient le milieu entre les besoins du corps et ceux de l’âme. (Physiologie du mariage, xi. ) Je déteste tout ce qui peut ressembler à un sentiment. Depuis neuf ans donc, je ne m’étonne plus que les vieillards se plaisent tant à cultiver des fleurs, à planter des arbres; les événements de la vie leur ont appris à ne plus croire aux affections humaines; et en peu de jours je suis devenu vieillard. (Une double famille, ii. )

In both cases, mimesis embodies the message: Granville is ‘un homme dont les cheveux entièrement blanchis et la physionomie semblait annoncer qu’il était plutôt vieilli par les chagrins que par les années’ (ii. ). The irony of Nocé’s question ‘—Je ne vois pas, Monsieur, ce que vous pourrez dire contre un mariage comme le nôtre?’ (xi. ) makes its point more subtly than could authorial statement. The ‘exemple vivant’ both refreshes and ensures the impact of the ‘arides et sèches dissertations’. The  Physiologie embodies a central conflict between prescription and description, narrative and commentary, using each simultaneously to underpin and undermine the other. Balzac’s theory and practice of mimesis transcends the limitations of prescription, drawing on the reader’s own experience, and on kinds of reading beyond the discursive and analytic: it is in the Physiologie that creative, intellectually purposive short narrative begins to dominate. Characters reappear, and, with events, assume their own reality; and in reappearing, they begin to share that reality with the reader. The Physiologie’s combination of prescription and narrative acknowledges the limits of doxa, marking the emergence of serious free-standing short narrative in Balzac’s first collection of short fictions, the  Scènes de la vie privée. Its indictment of ‘l’hypocrisie qui nous gagne et nous empêche de rire comme riaient nos pères’ (xi. )—the political correctness of his age— is actually an attack on the duplicity which stands in contrast to the burgeoning, Rabelaisian pluralism44 of its Introduction, on the wish to see things antithetically, dualistically, in terms of black and white, husband and wife, instead of as relationship and engagement. Hypocrisy is a refusal of laughter, of irony, of Baudelaire’s sentiment double; of our fallen state, of the carnal fallibility and plural nature which makes us wholly human. We neglect Balzac’s laughter at our peril: it is this interanimation of opposites and contraries (husband/wife, prescription/ mimesis, reader/text) which is the whole being of Balzac’s text. Against, or, along with, Rabelais’s ‘oui, et non’, he sets (reworking his very first anecdote in the Discours) his ‘Tout est vrai et tout est faux, car il semble vraiment que les choses humaines aient autant de facettes qu’il y a d’esprits qui les considèrent’ (xi. ), and with it, a diversity which is his theory of marriage—of life, as well as literature: ‘l’on ne reçoit qu’en raison de ce que l’on donne’; ‘savoir offrir les girandoles pour se les faire rendre, est un principe qui s’applique aux moindres 44

Cf. Nesci, La Femme mode d’emploi.

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détails de la vie’ (xi. , ). Meaning is generated by contradiction, by the text’s constantly conflicting views of marriage, by the paradox within doxa which ends the work: ‘Si je me marie, je dois succomber à quelque diablerie inconnue; mais j’offrirai, dans ce cas, soyez-en certaine, un ménage modèle à l’admiration de mes contemporains’ (xi. ). ‘L’amour se passe presque toujours en conversations’ (xi. ). It is conjugal failure to engage which the Scènes de la vie privée emblematically address.

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The First Scènes de la vie privée, – The  Scènes de la vie privée, Balzac’s first collection of stories,1 emerge from the failure of Le Dernier Chouan, his first novel signed with his own name, the previous year,2 and from the Codes and the Physiologie to which he returned as a result. But its six narratives owe perhaps more to the Physiologie than to his novel, and we shall look first at the latter’s role in the genesis of the Scènes, before returning to Le Dernier Chouan.

(i) The Physiologie du mariage and the Scènes de la vie privée The brevity and frivolity of the earliest scène, La Paix du ménage (written July ), itself derived from an anecdote in Dufresny’s Amusements sérieux et comiques,3 suggests that it had initially been intended for inclusion in either the Physiologie or one of the Codes, perhaps the Code conjugal. ‘Cette scène est la plus faible de toutes et se ressent de la petitesse du cadre primitivement adopté’ remarks Davin in the  Introduction aux ‘Études de mœurs au XIXème siècle’ (i. ). But even if Balzac had progressed considerably since earlier illustrative, didactic narratives (in the Discours, Corsino, and the Codes), he had moved into an impasse. On the one hand stories, even short ones, could no longer be simply auxiliary to a treatise, as the Physiologie had shown: La Paix du ménage 1 Scènes de la vie privée, st edn.,  vols., BF ( Apr. ). Vol. i contains: La Vendetta, Les Dangers de l’inconduite [now Gobseck], Le Bal de Sceaux; vol. ii: Gloire et malheur [now La Maison du chat-quipelote], La Femme vertueuse [now Une double famille] and La Paix du ménage. The collection, augmented successively in , –, , and , now contains  works and stands at the head of La Comédie humaine. For clarity of reference, the Comédie humaine titles will be used in the discussion which follows. 2 Le Dernier Chouan ou la Bretagne en ,  vols., BF ( Mar. ) (but probably published some days earlier). Le Dernier Chouan, now Les Chouans, is the earliest of Balzac’s texts in La Comédie humaine. 3 Amusements sérieux et comiques d’un Siamois à Paris, rd edn. (Amsterdam, ); but variants of the story appear at least as early as Boccaccio (Decameron, . ix): cf. P.-G. Castex, Nouvelles et contes de Balzac (Scènes de la vie privée) (), –, and J. Baudry, ‘Notes concernant les deux premiers tomes de la nouvelle édition de La Comédie humaine dans la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, AB (), .

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emerged from it, probably from frustration at the limits of prescription. On the other, in critical and financial terms, Le Dernier Chouan had got nowhere.4 There was no third hand: the anecdote, too limited in scope for extensive narrative developments or commentary, was hardly a solution. Balzac moved, for the time being, in a circle, returning in earnest, in September , to the Physiologie,5 which offered a compromise between novel and anecdote and, in combining brief narrative and extensive commentary, a structure of almost infinite flexibility: a form whose popularity was proven, and whose subject virtually guaranteed success. But it, too, was only a provisional solution, its burgeoning narratives hinting at fictional impulses which had somehow to be satisfied. The Scènes were begun in answer to these problems, and to economic conditions which made novel-publication difficult.6 Accepted for publication on  October , they were written at night as the Physiologie was being finished.7 La Paix du ménage, La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, and Le Bal de Sceaux were composed in the second half of , the rest in January to March . A pendant to the Physiologie, they embody its prescriptiveness, but react to its narrative restrictions. Dialogue, description, and storytelling, the mimetic elements of Le Dernier Chouan, are combined with narratorial commentary and a framing preface and postface explaining their didactic intent. The scènes solved Balzac’s problems, aesthetic and commercial, at a stroke. Not only did they meld narrative and doxa in a way which his writing had sought since the beginning of his career: they sat squarely in the dominant and most saleable shortfictional genre of the time, the conte moral.

(ii) The Scènes de la vie privée and the conte moral The Scènes de la vie privée develop the Physiologie’s exploration of marriage, but from an opposing, feminine, perspective, and for a predominantly female readership.8 The ‘morals’ of the Scènes de la vie privée go far back, to La Fontaine at least,9 but they are most immediately a subversion of the contemporary conte moral aimed at women and children: L’auteur n’a jamais compris quels bénéfices d’éducation une mère pouvait retirer à retarder d’un an ou deux, tout au plus, l’éducation de sa fille, et à la laisser s’éclairer lentement à la lueur des orages auxquels elle la livre presque toujours sans défense. P ; G. Robb, Balzac: A Biography (London: ), –. 6 See Ch. (i) and nn. –. 7 Corr. i. –. Cf. xi. –, and Corr. i. . 8 Extracts from Les Dangers de l’inconduite were published in a progressive women’s journal of the period, La Mode, along with several of Balzac’s later stories. See Ch. . 9 La Maison du chat-qui-pelote has been seen as a subversion of Griselidis, and Le Bal de Sceaux of La Fontaine’s Le Héron—La Fille (Fables . iv): La Comédie humaine, ed. P. Citron (), i.  and La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, ed. P.-G. Castex (), –, cit. S. Swahn, Balzac et le merveilleux (Lund, ), –; cf.  et seq. 4 5

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Cet ouvrage a donc été composé en haine des sots livres que des esprits mesquins ont présentés aux femmes jusqu’à ce jour.10

The emotional impetus came from the experiences of women in his own circle—his sister Laurence, but also his mother, and his lover Mme de Berny, all unhappily married in youth to husbands they did not choose. And if the term scènes implies a universal objectivity, a presentation of women’s typical experiences, the stories’ first titles (Les Dangers de l’inconduite (now Gobseck), Le Dernier Bienfait d’un père, La Femme vertueuse (early titles of Une double famille), La Paix du ménage, Gloire et malheur (now La Maison du chat-qui-pelote)) show how deliberately this female, conte-moral readership was sought. All could have graced works by Montolieu, Genlis, or Bouilly,11 the kind of fiction La Femme auteur calls ‘cette littérature à la Genlis, qui veut ramener le goût du public vers les tartines beurrées de morale sans sel’ (xii. )—the category, indeed, in which Le Globe placed Balzac’s Scènes.12 Their preface mimics moral circumspection so successfully that Le Sylphe observed: ‘M. Bouilly, annonçant la publication de nouveaux Contes à ma fille, n’emploierait pas une formule moins ambitieuse’.13 This was perhaps perforce a Pyrrhic victory: to reach its readership, Balzac had to adopt the genre under attack. Each tale is cautionary, marking ‘d’une branche de saule les passages dangereux de la vie’ (i. ). Yet they are hardly ‘tartines sans sel’. Where contes moraux deliver inflexibly unambiguous messages, the scènes offer no easy judgements. They tell truths about human behaviour, but hide none of its complexities; they raise problems, but leave solutions open; they use the conte moral’s form and discourse to subvert its message. Sommervieux, in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, stands in a similar relation to his wife Augustine as Lucidor to Hermelinde in Genlis’s ‘L’Ambitieux’, where Hermelinde (like Augustine, or Angélique in Une double famille), has the contemoral heroine’s virtuous innocence.14 Augustine’s brave visit to her husband’s mistress, the duchesse de Carigliano, as their marriage is collapsing, looks like feminine virtue in adversity. But Angélique’s priggish piety is presented as a form of monstrous selfishness, ‘l’égoïsme divinisé, le moi par-delà le tombeau’, the antithesis of Christian love, which soon destroys her marriage (ii. ). In each case Balzac believably presents complexities the conte moral ignores. Augustine’s ignorance, a virtue in the conte moral, is for Balzac the cause of her downfall: La légèreté de l’esprit et les grâces de la conversation sont un don de la nature ou le fruit d’une éducation commencée au berceau . . . Ses idées religieuses et ses préjugés i. . Marmontel takes a similar starting-point: Contes moraux (London, ), i. –. Cf. e.g. Exaltation et piété: quatre nouvelles par Madame de Montolieu (); S.-F. de Genlis, Six Nouvelles morales et religieuses (n.d. []); J.-N. Bouilly, Les Adieux du vieux conteur (n.d.). 12  June : P. Barbéris, ‘L’Accueil de la critique aux premières grandes œuvres de Balzac’, AB (), . 13 Le Sylphe, Journal des Salons ( Apr. ). 14 S.-F. de Genlis, ‘L’Ambitieux’, Six Nouvelles, . 10 11

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d’enfance s’opposèrent à la complète émancipation de son intelligence . . . La fidélité d’Augustine déplut même à cet infidèle mari, qui semblait l’engager à commettre des fautes en taxant sa vertu d’insensibilité. (i. –)

Sommervieux’s sin, adultery, may be more credible than that of Genlis’s Lucidor (which is doing good for reasons of vanity, not virtue).15 Yet Sommervieux is no more stigmatized than is his wife exalted. For the issues are altogether larger than the characters. The fault lies as much outside as in them, in their ignorance of themselves, and of their potential incompatibility; in the education, or lack of it, which has made them so. Balzac may use the language, and even the ideology, of the conte moral—both Émilie’s and Ginevra’s upbringing is ‘funeste’ because they have been given choice without experience (i. , )—but his target is bigger than the conte moral’s, or the private life of his title. Stressing how much individuals are bound up with history and society, Balzac’s scènes seek to modify not just their behaviour, but social mores, and society itself—its arranged marriages, its wilful oppression of women, the system which keeps Mme Crochard, or Natalie, at their samplers (ii. ; viii. ), rather than reading the stories which could enlighten them. Here, too, Balzac is even-handed: Granville, in Une double famille, is as much the victim of an arranged marriage as is Émilie in Le Bal de Sceaux, yet each is equally responsible for his or her unhappiness, Émilie in rejecting Maximilien on grounds of class, Granville because ‘nous sommes, tôt ou tard, punis de n’avoir pas obéi aux lois sociales’ (ii. —but not ‘religieuses’: the whole point of Balzac’s morality is to be more responsive than bigoted religion to reality). Balzac’s stories are in dialogue with the reader, by revealing the impossibility of dialogue between characters; the tales blame neither party, but show how marriages founder on an inability to engage. It is for this reason that we observe, rather than empathize with, the protagonists: their situations are presented objectively, as questions, rather than answers; problems, rather than solutions. Balzac’s collection is a cycle of exempla, diversely illustrating the same fundamental points, showing situations, more than telling the reader what to do. This is evident in their use of contrivance, a central device of the conte moral, where extraordinary coincidences reward the good, punish the bad, and turn strangers into families.16 As much is true of La Vendetta, the first and most excessive of the scènes, whose chapter-titles (‘La Désobéissance’, ‘Le Mariage’, ‘Le Châtiment’) make the ostensible message clear, as does its melodramatic ending. Crying ‘Morte! Nos deux familles devaient s’exterminer l’une par l’autre, car voilà tout ce qui reste d’elle’, Luigi casts the locks of his dead wife’s hair at the feet of his implacably hostile in-laws, before himself expiring (i. –). S.-F. de Genlis, ‘L’Ambitieux’, Six Nouvelles, . Cf. e.g. Mme de Genlis’ ‘L’Ambitieux’ (Six Nouvelles,  et seq.), or Monotolieu’s ‘La Veille de Noël ou la conversion’ (Exaltation et piété, ). 15 16

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The end of Mme de Genlis’s ‘La Peste de Marseille’ does something similar, when Zénaïde’s sister reappears after Zénaïde herself has succumbed to the plague brought by the oriental dress vanity had driven her to acquire. ‘Fallaitil donc de telles catastrophes pour me faire connaître les horribles conséquences qui peuvent résulter d’une vanité puérile?’,17 asks Zénaïde; one might ask as much of La Vendetta. Yet Balzac uses contrivance to very different effect. Where the conte moral leaves no interpretative doubt, good and evil are part of a divine order which Balzac’s Scènes reject. His characters’ misfortunes result almost entirely from disobedience to social (rather than holy) laws, the ‘chagrins que le monde sème autour de ceux qui ne suivent point ses usages’ (i. ). Any equation between father and daughter and good and evil in La Vendetta is superficial: its disaster results from the collision of two equally intransigent forces, of his possessive love against hers, rather than of a right against a wrong. Del Piombo’s prediction that ‘les enfants qui n’honorent pas leurs parents meurent promptement’ (i. ), though actually realized, is hard to take as the story’s simple moral. Indeed, it is perhaps because Ginevra has obeyed the biblical injunction too faithfully that disaster occurs: in a striking parody of the conte moral advice scene, she rebuffs her father with: ‘Raison de plus pour me marier promptement et être heureuse!’. If Del Piombo embodies patriarchal morality, his daughter represents a more rational moral standpoint which neither father, narrator, nor reader can easily disregard: ‘cette puissance de raisonnement achevait de troubler Piombo’(i. ). The whole force of such oppositions is to question opposition. Bartoloméo’s rigidly clannish, nationalistic ethos is set in doubt from the outset, when his willingness to regard Napoleon as ‘un Corse’ depends on whether the Emperor is willing to please him. The historical context further illuminates the dangers of such ideas. The story is set precisely in July , at the turningpoint between Empire and Restoration; Servin, Ginevra’s painting-master, is married ‘par inclinaison’, just as Lucien Bonaparte, with whom La Vendetta opens, twice married against his family’s wishes. Other political, national, and linguistic boundaries are confused, revealing their fundamental falseness: Luigi is also Louis, as Bonaparte was neither Corsican, nor French, but both. Ginevra and Luigi’s love, like Romeo and Juliet’s (i. ), illuminates and transcends such confines. ‘De toutes les tyrannies, la plus odieuse est celle qui ôte perpétuellement à l’âme le mérite de ses actions et de ses pensées: on abdique sans avoir régné’, declares Une double famille (ii. ). Balzac uses the conte moral’s rigidity to suggest flexibility, fractured absolutes to instil relative truths. This is evident if we examine the apparent contrivance of other scènes. Longueville, former shopboy, reappears at the end of Le Bal de Sceaux, enriched by a sudden inheritance which points to the potential happiness 17

S.-F. de Genlis, ‘La Peste de Marseille’, Six Nouvelles, –.

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Émilie’s aristocratic snobbishness had rejected. Sommervieux’s destruction of his wife’s portrait at the end of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, the concluding reappearance of Hippolyte’s purse18 (purloined, but as a token of love), of the lost diamond in La Paix du ménage, all have a similar force.19 The reappearance of the same motif or symbol in changed circumstances reinforces textual cohesion, placing diegetic and moral emphasis on the ending.20 In the conte moral, the device is circular: Lucidor and Calyste are as virtuous or as happy at the ends of ‘L’Ambitieux’ or ‘Monomanie’ as at their openings; the city returns to health at the conclusion of ‘La Peste de Marseille’. The initial state of events is restored, reinforcing the morality of a just universe, yet which exists only in the story itelf. The conte moral, whose purpose is to direct behaviour in the world outside, stays locked in its own devices. Each of Balzac’s tales, however, carries an ambiguity inviting dialogue.21 That Émilie’s realization comes only when Longueville is proved safely aristocratic (and rich) validates the very status-markers it appears to undermine, as does the dubious symbolism of Hippolyte’s bourse. The diamond ring of La Paix du ménage, the fate of Augustine’s portrait, question the relationship between financial and emotional value, reminding us, via Mme Guillaume’s wellintentioned but unhelpful ‘consolation’ of her daughter (‘il y a sur le boulevard un homme qui fait des portraits charmants pour cinquante écus’, i. ) that, as the duchesse de Carigliano says, ‘le bonheur conjugal a été de tout temps une spéculation, une affaire qui demande une attention particulière’ (i. ). The common language of love and money plays poetically on the inherently alloyed currency of human relations, showing marriage’s pitfalls, yet being guarded on how to avoid them. Balzac, then, turns the conte moral against itself, using contrivance to question what might have happened had chance not been so helpful, and closure to open new narrative and interpretive possibilities. The neatness of Angélique’s chance discovery of her husband’s adultery, of the appearance of Mme de Soulange’s ring in the hand of Martial, the man about to seduce her, counter-suggest uncomfortable speculations on the messiness of life. Had Mme de Soulanges in fact committed adultery, the tale’s circularity would have been broken, and a new narrative development ensued. It was the structure Balzac would use at the end of the first Illusions perdues;22 and it is the dialogic possibility hinted at in the story’s La Bourse, Scènes de la vie privée, nd edn., vol. iii, BF ( May ). They appear as pointes, epiphanic moments, when the effect of the tale becomes clear: cf. F. Goyet, La Nouvelle, – (), –, esp. –. 20 Cf. B. Eikenbaum, ‘Sur la théorie de la prose’, in Théorie de la littérature, ed. T. Todorov (), . 21 A dialogue Balzac’s women readers energetically engaged, not always along the lines his text apparently envisaged: see C. Mounoud-Anglés, Balzac et ses lectrices (), esp. –, –, something corroborated by the range of modern responses to the morality of the Scènes: Swahn, Balzac et le merveilleux,  et seq. 22 In its  version: cf. Ch. (iv) below. 18 19

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 epilogue, where the other lovers, Montcornet and Vaudremont, are burnt to death in the fire at the ball celebrating Napoleon’s marriage—a history, and symbol, of passion out of control.23 And the circularity of the conte moral, whose most explicit precepts occur at its beginning and its end,24 is echoed in the overall and individual structure of these Scènes de la vie privée: in their framing preface and postface, and in the closing words of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, spoken by ‘un ami de cette timide créature’: Les humbles et modestes fleurs, écloses dans les vallées, meurent peut-être, se dit-il, quand elles sont transplantées trop près des cieux, aux régions où se forment les orages, où le soleil est brûlant. (i. )

At the end of Le Bal de Sceaux, the bishop comments: ‘ma belle dame, vous avez écarté le roi de coeur, j’ai gagné’ (i. ). Balzac, unlike Genlis, refrains from commenting on his characters: images reinforce, and make more suggestive, the final statement, leaving the reader to link its elements, to use experience to discover a truth.

(iii) Scènes, Tableaux, and Le Dernier Chouan If Balzac’s collection is written to subvert the conte moral, yet for its readership, its title invokes another genre, the scène historique.25 Rare before the late s, treating distant, often Renaissance, history,26 dialogue scènes were briefly popular in  and , their subject matter (and numbers) expanding to cover exotica, études de mœurs, recent history,27 and political satire.28 By  the vogue 23 It is thus more than a question of having to dispose of Mme de Vaudremont because Montcornet had already been married to Virginie de Troisville, pace A.-M. Meininger, ii. a. F’s renaming of La Femme vertueuse as Une double famille hints at a similar even-handedness, implicitly moving responsibility solely from Angélique to all members of the family. 24 Cf. J.-N. Bouilly, ‘Monomanie’, Les Adieux du vieux conteur, –; S.-F. de Genlis, ‘La Peste de Marseille’, Six Nouvelles, ; I. de Montolieu, ‘Philosophie et religion’, Exaltation et piété, . 25 Cf. J. Marsan, ‘Le Théâtre historique et le romantisme, –’, RHLF (); C. Duchet, ‘La Saint-Barthélemy: de la “scène historique” au drame historique’, RHLF (); I. Meehan, ‘Théâtre et histoire à la veille de la révolution de juillet’, in W. Paulson (ed.), Les Genres de l’hénaurme siècle (Ann Arbor, ); and A. Vanoncini, Figures de la modernité (), – et seq. 26 e.g. L. Vitet’s anonymous Les Barricades, scènes historiques, mai  () and Les États de Blois, ou la mort de MM. de Guise, scènes historiques, décembre  (). Balzac was later to be inspired by A. Germeau’s La Réforme en  ou le Tumulte d’Amboise, scènes historiques, in the Contes drolatiques and Sur Catherine de Médicis. Cf. R. Chollet, ‘Le Second Dixain des Contes drolatiques’, AB (),  n. . 27 e.g. Scènes de mer—naufrage du Gaston de Bordeaux, La Pandore ( Jan. ), Quelques scènes d’un ministère, ibid. ( Feb. ), Scènes militaires—Ratisbonne, le général Pujol, ibid. (– Feb. ), Scènes entre M. de Polignac, Charles X et le Dey d’Alger (les premiers jours d’août, ), and ‘Scènes turques’, ibid. ( and  Feb. ); Scènes épisodiques de la vie de Napoléon, BF ( Mar. ); anon., Scènes de jour et de nuit au Palais Royal, ou tableau par soirée des délices et des périls de ce séjour enchanté, BF ( Aug. ). 28 e.g. the tantalizingly entitled Scènes contemporaines sur l’administration des ponts et chaussées, La Pandore ( Apr. ).

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had passed, with only one scène appearing in the Bibliographie de la France (against five in , nine in , and many more in journals); but it is one of the most enduring, the second edition of Monnier’s Scènes populaires. Monnier’s scènes symbolize the genre’s shift from remote to recent past, from description to political satire: Sand’s ‘Une conspiration en ’ ( or earlier), the scène on which Musset drew for Lorenzaccio, would inspire the use of history for social criticism in a new and subtler way.29 History was a tool for the trial of the contemporary.30 Scènes, like codes, apprehend a society in transition: two of Balzac’s code-producers, Romieu and Loève-Veimars, brought out Scènes contemporaines laissées par feue Madame la vicomtesse de Chamilly,31 the first scènes to combine the contemporary and the historical with satire:32 Aux Scènes historiques se joignent des Scènes contemporaines dont le but est, je crois, de corriger ce que nos moeurs ont de ridicule ou de dangereux . . . Ici . . . nous ne voyons retracer que des événements puérils, ou des actes de la vie privée.33

It was Balzac who, less than two months later, printed the first edition of Mérimée’s Scènes féodales: La Jacquerie,34 whose treatment of peasant revolt is an implicit comment on the present35 and an inspiration for Le Dernier Chouan.36 Mérimée’s Scènes, like the Scènes contemporaines, contain a more intimate element: Isabelle’s boredom is a discreet comment on the condition of women.37 Together they were probably the main inspiration for Balzac’s Tableaux d’une vie privée, a collection of dialogues very much in the style of his contemporaries. Written on  May ,38 a month after the Scènes contemporaines appeared, a month before the publication of La Jacquerie, Balzac’s Tableaux reflect both. Set in the recent past (Alençon, –), they lampoon high- and low-life 29 Cf. P. Dimoff, La Genèse de ‘Lorenzaccio’ (), pp. xxii–xxxiii and –; and Musset, Théâtre complet, ed. S. Jeune (), –. 30 Cf. C. Duchet, ‘Théâtre, histoire et politique sous la Restoration’, and B. Masson, ‘L’Approche des problèmes politiques dans Lorenzaccio’, in L. Girard (ed.), Romantisme et politique (), –, –, esp. . 31 Scènes contemporaines laissées par feue Madame la vicomtesse de Chamilly, by F.-A. Loève-Veimars and A. Romieu, BF ( Apr. ), with a nd edition later the same year. 32 The scenes appear to have initiated a number of similar works dealing with contemporary or recent history. Cf. C.-R.-E. de Maurice, Rome, Londres et Paris, scènes contemporaines, BF ( Dec. ). 33 Review of the nd edn. of Scènes contemporaines laissées par feue Mme la vicomtesse de Chamilly, L’Universel ( Mar. ); my emphasis. 34 La Jacquerie, scènes féodales, suivies de la famille de Carvajal, par l’auteur du Théâtre de Clara Gazul, BF ( June ). 35 See A. W. Raitt, Prosper Mérimée (London, ), –, which makes clear the link between La Jacquerie and Mérimée’s historical novel Chronique du règne de Charles IX. 36 Cf. Mérimée, La Jacquerie, preface. Many contemporary reviews of Le Dernier Chouan accused Balzac of plagiarizing Mérimée, although with reference to Les Espagnols au Danemark rather than to La Jacquerie. Cf. P. Barbéris, ‘L’Accueil de la critique aux premières grandes œuvres de Balzac (–)’, AB (), , , , . 37 38 Mérimée, La Jacquerie, sc. VIII, p. . Lov. A , fo. r.

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characters, attesting the interest in historical and social processes manifest in Le Dernier Chouan, mirroring Mérimée’s concern with local colour. Balzac’s protagonists, Nathalie and Fanchette, echo Mérimée’s, but they are much more the beginnings of a feminist rejoinder to the Physiologie. Balzac’s first return to writing after his failure as a printer is hesitant. He toyed with scènes instead of tableaux, and intellectuelle as well as privée, in the title;39 he is unclear about whether this ‘fantaisie d’auteur’ is to be read, performed, or both, writing equally of ‘auditeurs’ and ‘pages’ in the kind of captatio benevolentiae as tâtonnement found in many of his openings, even Le Père Goriot.40 Here the hesitations are real: Balzac is both continuing the kind of hack writing adopted after his  abandonment of the novel, and, in a way, going back to drama; had the Tableaux d’une vie privée succeeded, he might well have been a dramatist, as well as, or instead of, a writer of stories. But hesitation is also inherent in the genre, suspended between drama and narrative. Balzac’s Tableaux are scènes in the contemporary popular sense, whilst sketching the background in the way of the historical novel;41 but, unlike Clotilde de Lusignan or Ivanhoe, they are concerned less with the colourful recreation of its externals in individual psychology. Natalie’s frustration results directly from the mould into which society forces her; her environment, like, later, those of La Maison, La Vendetta, or Une double famille, is a direct expression of her psyche: ‘Que tout est rétréci autour de moi! . . . Tiens, Fanchette, mon tambour borne mes pensées et les retient à je ne sais quoi d’ignoble. . . . Tout cela est à mon image’ (viii. ). ‘La maison de Saumur, maison sans soleil, sans chaleur, sans cesse ombragée, mélancolique, est l’image de sa vie’ (Eugénie Grandet, iii. ). Yet if these are Scènes de la vie privée, they are also a little too intellectuelles: like a contemoral heroine, Nathalie seems overly self-aware;42 one might ask, with Fanchette, ‘Où prenez-vous tout ça, Mademoiselle?’ (viii. ). Needless to say, she got it from the author: from the storyteller’s inability to let facts speak for themselves. The dialogue has a narrator’s, not the characters’, tone, its speeches often too long to be credible; unsupplemented by narratorial commentary, it does not fully express his ideas. Balzac was to confront similar problems with the transmission of essentially authorial perceptions via characters such as Lambert, Genestas, and Vautrin.43 40 Lov. A , fo. r. Lov. A , fo. r. The Tableaux are contemporary with Balzac’s project for a cycle of historical novels, including Le Roi des merciers and Le Capitaine des bouttefeux, a short fragment of which appears on the back of the manuscript of Le Bal de Sceaux (Lov. A , fo. v). Cf. R. Guise, ‘Balzac et le roman historique’, RHLF (), and OD ii. –. The notion of a cycle of fictions was to occupy Balzac from this point onwards: it next appears in the Avertissement du gars, where Balzac first uses an image which will later become familiar: ‘Cet ouvrage n’est, en quelque sorte, qu’une des pierres de l’édifice que l’auteur essayera d’élever, s’il ne s’est pas trompé sur sa vocation’ (viii. ), and attains its ultimate developments in the Contes drolatiques and, of course, in La Comédie humaine itself. 42 43 Cf. e.g. Genlis, Six Nouvelles, –; –; p. iv. See Ch. (i) and (viii) below. 39 41

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Such difficulties doubtless explain why Balzac abandoned the Tableaux in favour of forms where authorial commentary was more dominant. Most significant of these is the earliest precursor of Le Dernier Chouan, the preface to Le Gars (Aug. ),44 which is at least as much about the authorial (and autobiographical) persona, Victor Morillon, as about the novel it was supposed to precede. But the author’s total presence was no more a solution than was his absence. It was Le Dernier Chouan itself, an ‘ouvrage historique’, which gave scope for the authorial commentary which had proved so discordant in Nathalie’s speeches—but also for the visual description, dramatic dialogued scenes, and detailed psychological exploration which no other single form could accommodate.45 Yet this very liberty was in turn to prove counterproductive. Lengthy descriptions and authorial commentaries sometimes seem intrusive, and almost bring the action to a halt.46 Contemporaries seized on these problems. Latouche47 warned him, before the novel was even finished: ‘Je crains les rebourrages. Les boudins qu’on n’a piqués crèvent.’48 If Le Dernier Chouan did not burst, critics did their best to deflate it, attacking confused exposition, over-complex plot and structure, excessive description49—and length: ‘reduit de la moitié, il amuserait d’un bout à l’autre.’50 The Physiologie seems to accept and absorb these criticisms, its ‘rebourrages’ (the anecdotes and dialogues) occurring within the treatise’s more flexible structure. But so, too, do the Scènes de la vie privée. For all that they contain scenes, descriptions, authorial commentary, and dialogue, the very elements reviewers criticized, they effectively comply with the exhortation to write more briefly.51 Not only are Balzac’s Scènes shorter: they are also very much denser. Whilst the entangled plot and the four duodecimo volumes of Le Dernier Chouan 44 viii. –; more properly a forerunner, than a fragment (pace M. Regard, Les Chouans (), pp. iii–iv), since it constitutes part of Balzac’s dialectical creative process. Cf. Vanoncini, Figures de la moidernité, – et seq. 45 C. Bernard explores the relationship between such elements in Les Chouans, the final version of the novel: Le Chouan romanesque (), – and –. 46 See particularly the opening passages, interrupted first by detailed accounts of characters’ costumes (viii. –), then of Fougères (viii. –); the subsequent action is similarly punctuated (viii. a and c; viii. – and var.). 47 Latouche provided literary advice and used his patronage to facilitate the publication of Le Dernier Chouan, thus providing artificial support for a work in an already outmoded genre. See Latouche to Balzac, Nov. , Corr. i, letters nos. , , , and ; L. Frappier-Mazur, Les Chouans, ‘Histoire du texte’, viii.  et seq.; F. Ségu, Un maître de Balzac méconnu: H. de Latouche (),  et seq. 48  Jan. , Corr. i. . 49 Cf. Barbéris, ‘L’Accueil de la Critique’, and e.g. Le Trilby ( July ). Impatience with description bespeaks a fundamental shift in contemporary conceptions of historical narrative, whether in the novel, history, or drama, and a questioning of the recountability of the past in unified form: Vanoncini, Figures de la modernité, passim, esp. –, –. 50 L’Universel ( May ). 51 Latouche to Balzac, Dec. , Corr. i. – and  Jan. , Corr. i. –.

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cover but one week, a protracted treatment of a brief fictional time-span which L’Universel declared to be typical of the novel,52 the Scènes follow an opposing tendency identified by L’Universel in drama, covering extended time-spans in limited confines. Only La Paix du ménage takes place within an evening; the other stories all condense whole marriages into a few score pages, using the resulting compressions and contrasts between differing stages in life to show the results of their first causes, to make meaning out of form. Yet neither the historical novel nor the anecdotes-within-treatise of the Physiologie were in themselves ways of writing stories. Only through strenuous drafting and recasting could they be adapted and condensed, in narratives four times shorter than any Balzac had published hitherto.

(iv) The Composition of the Scènes de la vie privée Balzac’s first solution was to write in dialogue: the initial draft of La Paix du ménage opens anecdotally, with a conversation between the colonel and Martial.53 At this point (July ), he was still thinking in terms of the popular scène—something also indicated by the next part of the text, an historical account of Restoration society (ii. ). But where scènes typically rely on dialogue, Balzac gives his account to an authorial narrator. This structure had two drawbacks. On the one hand, the narrator’s absence in the dialogues meant that description had to be placed in the mouths of characters, producing the stilted effects of the Tableaux d’une vie privée; 54 on the other, his total presence in the subsequent historical narrative interrupted the action, creating the awkwardness of some of the articulatory passages of Le Dernier Chouan. This structure is inverted in the second draft and later versions, where the historical account precedes and explains the dialogue (ii. –)—a return to the forms of Balzac’s writing from the Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme onwards: narratorial commentary preceding illustrative exemplum. However, this second version unifies these separate elements through imagery linking history to the protagonists, the ‘coeurs . . . nomades comme les régiments’, the ‘passion effrénée pour tout ce qui brillait’ (ii. –). Diamonds and fireworks express the fugacity of liaisons, the contrast between appearance and reality; military and maritime imagery, of battles and of conquest, connects the characters’ mercurial emotions to their epoch, metaphors of fortification and defence with the diplomatic stratagems which are the stuff of Martial’s career and of the story. Such cohesive imagery is, in one way, a continuation of the leitmotifs of the Physiologie. Yet here its force is both linear and circular: the narrative ends when the ring resumes its initial meaning in a changed context. La Paix du ménage 52 54

L’Universel ( May ). Cf. La Paix du ménage, ii. –.

53

Lov. A , fos. , , , v, ii.  et seq.

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achieves an imagic density hitherto unrivalled in, but henceforth characteristic of, Balzac’s shorter fictions. La Paix du ménage all but reverses the relation between fictional and real time in Le Dernier Chouan. Where the novel spreads a week over four volumes, the story takes place in an evening, and takes no more than an evening to read. It is a shining example of the coincidence of forme and fond, and of the prominence of forme in the story.55 But Balzac the historian still had to find ways of compressing longer time-spans into shorter texts. His next three stories all touch the opposite extreme, opening with authorial commentary to the exclusion of dialogue. The early drafts of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, Le Bal de Sceaux, and La Vendetta are historical exordia, reflecting both Scott and the codes, where illustrative anecdotes follow general propositions.56 That there are no less than three substantial draft openings of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote indicates the magnitude of the problem, and the importance of finding a satisfactory solution. The problem is also, perhaps, the fundamental thematic problem in Balzac’s world, encountered from the Discours, Corsino, and the Code des gens honnêtes: how convincingly to link the general and the particular, the abstract and the concrete? The first draft opening of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote is a thousand-word threnody on the rise of the bourgeoisie, a lament on the few remaining ‘débris de l’ancien monde’, and a study of the situation of women in Restoration society (i. –). The position and function of this passage resemble those of the second and subsequent versions of La Paix du ménage, which set the story in its period and state its premiss at the opening. If style and language closely echo the Physiologie, they are historically contextualized, the focus through an anonymous ‘flâneur’ being merely a pretext for an overview of society at the time at which it is set (i. ). Le Bal de Sceaux opens similarly, with a ,-word history of the Restoration (i. –), but with the crucial difference that its introduction explains the career of the protagonist Émilie’s father, M. de Fontaine. And Balzac’s initial drafts for La Vendetta show that he considered adding an historical exordium on the Bourbons (i. ) with similar passages at the beginning of the second section (i. –), where Del Piombo’s past is more successfully related to its Napoleonic context. But these versions suffer from certain drawbacks. If the link between history and the individual is apparent, its diegetic and causal relation to the action can seem obscure—another example of the difficulties encountered in Le Dernier 55 M. Riffaterre gives a metonymic and metaphoric reading of the story’s moral based on the emblematic significance of flames and candles (La Production du texte (), –). But still more fundamental to this meaning is the return of the ring to its owner, present in archetypal examples such as Decameron, . ix, or Heptaméron, xiii. Cf. Baudry, ‘Notes concernant . . . La Comédie humaine’. 56 i. –; i. – (where Restoration history is more immediately linked to the character of M. de Fontaine); and i. , i. – respectively. The pattern was to be repeated in El Verdugo.

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Chouan,57 and of the kind of cumbersome articulation used to overcome them. This is particularly true of the first opening of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, where the story’s purpose is not mentioned until the last sentence of the introduction (i. ). And extensive focus through the authorial narrator soon becomes monotonous. In the first draft opening of Le Bal de Sceaux, everything, even the most trivial dialogue, is reported by the narrator, tiring the reader—and the writer: ‘Cette masse d’observation qui coûte tant de mots à la plume n’exigea pas deux regards d’Émilie’ (i. ). In both cases, Balzac’s solution is to transform the introduction into a scene. He removes the barriers of narratorial reportage, creating a more immediate causal link between the opening and what follows. In the second draft opening of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, the discursive historical account largely disappears, to be replaced by a description of Augustine’s father’s shop as seen by a passer-by, along with the first mention of the sign of the Cat and Racket which, in draft three, will be centrally symbolic of the characters’ social relations (i. –; cf. ). Augustine will be shuttled between her lover Sommervieux and her parents, between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, like the ball between the sign’s cat and its ‘gentilhomme en habit brodé’. Observer and sign are both essential to the story,58 as is another new element in version two, the account of Guillaume’s routine and his relations with his apprentices (i. ). The third version amplifies this considerably, and makes three more important changes. First, the opening, ‘en ’ (i. –), becomes a fairy-tale-like ‘naguère’, whilst Guillaume’s house is now described ‘par une matinée pluvieuse du mois de mars’ (i. ). Secondly, Balzac brings on his male lead. The anonymous ‘flâneur’ of version one (i. ), ‘passant’ in version two (i. ), has become Sommervieux (i. ), through whose eyes the house is now seen. Thirdly, the description comes to life as the apprentices’ faces appear at the window and Guillaume opens the shutters (i. –). It has become the opening of a drama, the beginning of a scene. Balzac’s solutions in other stories are less radical. The drafts of La Vendetta turn successively on history and the Bourbons, on Servin’s studio, on Bartholoméo’s past, and his relations with his daughter (i. –). These first, second, and fifth59 versions are all passages of authorial discourse, with a hint of dialogue only in the last. The final version adopts the same solution as La Maison du chat-qui-pelote and Une double famille (ii. –): a focusing in time and place, followed by the arrival of an as yet unidentified protagonist (i. ). The descriptions of Servin’s studio and the Bourbons are moved further on in the text (i. –), and the short two-page introduction leads directly to a Cf. L. Frappier-Mazur, viii.  et seq. Cf. M. Andréoli, ‘Une nouvelle de Balzac: La Maison du chat-qui-pelote—ébauche d’une lecture totale’, AB (), –; M. Amar, ‘Autour de La Maison du chat-qui-pelote’, AB (), ; and J. Frøhlich, Pictogrammes (Oslo, ), –. 59 The third and fourth versions consist only of incomplete first sentences (i. ). 57 58

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scene (i. –). In the opening of Le Bal de Sceaux, the discursive exposition is actually extended,60 making Émilie’s historical and family background an important structural component. The first editions of all these stories combine time, place, action, and description: the elements of a scene, of vision, and of drama. Balzac expanded his initially continuous drafts to create dialogue scenes which grow out of narratorial commentary, as ‘le germe ou le fruit des faits’, in a way he was later to identify in Scott, who used dialogue to ‘achever ses portraits’.61 The openings of Le Bal de Sceaux and La Vendetta, together with Ginevra’s antithetical combat with her father (i. ), and the earlier discussion between the lawyers and Bartholoméo (i. –) all evolved into dialogue between manuscript and first publication. And Balzac develops his scenes with properly theatrical notation, veritable stage directions, frequently expanded at successive stages of writing.62 In Le Bal de Sceaux, in the second version of Émilie’s discussion with her father about marriage, authorial commentaries are transformed into direct presentation of their gestures (i. – and –). Something similar happens to Roguin’s scene in La Vendetta. Where the first version relies largely on reported speech (i. a), the second significantly expands dialogue to reproduce the lawyer’s unctuous tones (i.  et seq.). His speech helps us to visualize: Roguin’s halting Bridoison-like delivery conveys character and situation in properly theatrical moments. Balzac combines commentary and dialogue, creating intensely visual and dramatic effects. Both owe much to his acquaintance with artists, and to his journalism and ongoing dramatic ambitions at the time the Scènes were being composed.63 Balzac’s close acquaintance with visual art dates from the 60 It presumably occupied the missing first folio of the manuscript (Lov. A ). The deleted first version begins on fo. v: i. –. 61 Balzac, Lettres sur la littérature, la science et les arts,  July , CHH xxviii. . Hugo had earlier said much the same: ‘les descriptions suppléeraient aux décorations et aux costumes, où les personnages pourraient se peindre par eux-memes, et représenter, par leurs chocs divers et multipliés, toutes les formes de l’idée unique de l’ouvrage’: Victor Hugo, ‘Sur Walter Scott. A propos de Quentin Durward’, La Muse française, in Littérature et philosophie mêlées, ed. A. R. W. James (), ii. . 62 M. Kanes traces Balzac’s interest in gesture to the works of Destutt de Tracy and Lavater: Balzac’s Comedy of Words (Princeton, ), –. Balzac may also have been influenced by Diderot’s ‘Scènes muettes’ in his Entretiens sur le fils naturel. Extensive description of characters’ gestures first appears in Le Dernier Chouan, where dialogue is sometimes overburdened by description of characters’ movements; the narrator seems so anxious to make his characters live that the resultant effect is paradoxically rather puppet-like (cf. e.g. viii. , –, , ). The absence of such detailed notation from the first drafts of the Scènes de la vie privée perhaps indicates an intention to avoid such rebourrages. 63 See R. Guise, ‘Un grand homme du roman à la scène ou les illusions reparaissantes de Balzac’, AB (),  et seq.; D. Milatchitch, Le Théâtre de H. de Balzac () and Le Théâtre inédit de H. de Balzac (), – and –; P. Descaves, Balzac dramatiste (), –. Cf. L. E. Dickinson, Theatre in Balzac’s ‘La Comédie humaine’ (Amsterdam and Atlanta ), ch. , and Ch.  below.

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Physiologie’s success in late , when he became a regular visitor to the salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, meeting painters such as Gros, Gérard, the Vernets,64 Ingres, Delacroix, Pradier and David d’Angers.65 Devéria had produced vignettes for Balzac’s publication of La Fontaine in ; Balzac had known Monnier since , and met Gavarni in ;66 from October of the previous year, work on La Caricature and La Silhouette had brought him into regular contact with the worlds of visual and literary creation. Most frequently, Balzac uses visual art as a kind of objective correlative, an analogue which most fully expresses the situation in hand. Sommervieux embodies the school of David (i. ), in an opening description which also evokes ‘ce jour jaune qui donne tant de grâce aux tableaux de l’école hollandaise’ (i. –);67 his lover Augustine becomes a Raphael Madonna. Gobseck’s portrait seems inspired by Dow, Metzu, and Rembrandt,68 yet he is explicitly related to Lethière’s Brutus condamnant ses fils à mort.69 More approximately, but more suggestively, the startling chiaroscuro of the descriptions of Servin’s studio (i. –), the contrasts in Ginevra’s very face (i. ), express La Vendetta’s highly charged emotional conflicts. Indeed, art is thematized in La Vendetta, as Ginevra turns her painting-class from a finishingschool for young ladies into a hiding-place for her exiled lover, reactivating the radical power of art. But it is nowhere more central than in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, where the artist Sommervieux sees, and loves Augustine, not as a woman, but as a Raphael Madonna made flesh, an oxymoronic ‘tableau naturel’ (i. , ),70 and falls out of love when marriage reveals his bourgeois wife’s limitations.The artist-bourgeois conflict appears in puns on the painterly theme, and in cruel mises en abyme: her other suitor’s, Lebas’s, confusion of art and house-decoration (i. ), her mother’s attempt to console her with the street-artist ‘qui fait des portraits charmants pour cinquante écus’ (i. ). L.-J. Arrigon, Les Débuts littéraires d’Honoré de Balzac (), . Cf. D. Adamson, ‘Balzac and the Visual Arts’, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, , . Despite the recent flurry of publications on this area (notably F. Pitt-Rivers, Balzac et l’art (), J.-P. Boyer and E. Boyer-Peigné (eds.), Balzac et la peinture (Tours, ); J. Meyer-Petit (ed.), L’Artiste selon Balzac ()), this regrettably unpublished thesis is still the only systematic comprehensive study of Balzac’s artistic tastes and associations. 66 A.-M. Meininger, ‘Balzac et Henry Monnier’, AB (), ; Adamson, ‘Balzac and the Visual Arts’, . 67 E. Bordas gives a meticulous technical account of this passage, B. Vouilloux attempts a typology of methods: Boyer and Boyer-Peigné (eds.), Balzac et la peinture, ,  et seq. 68 Adamson, ‘Balzac and the Visual Arts’, –, –. Amongst possible visual references are Dow’s Goldweigher (The Louvre), Rembrandt’s portrait of his father (The Hague, Mauritshaus; both reproduced in Pitt-Rivers, Balzac et l’art, –). The references to Rembrandt in Gobseck are modifications of the Béchet (ii. a) and Furne (ii. a) edns. 69 Lethière’s painting was displayed in the salon of  and housed in the Luxembourg in  (Adamson, ‘Balzac and the Visual Arts’, ). 70 Balzac may have seen many of Raphael’s greatest works as early as , including the Belle Jardinière, the Madonna della Sedia, and the Madonna di Foligno in the Luxembourg (Adamson, ‘Balzac and the Visual Arts’, ). 64 65

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Balzac, then, builds on the illustrative use of the visual Hugo had identified in Scott, making description narrative, using pictures to tell stories or create enigmas demanding attention and solution. In the openings of early texts (La Paix du ménage, Le Bal de Sceaux), this often takes the form of narratorial explanation of the past—of Guillaume and his family in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote (i. –), a technique used also in the introduction to Une double famille, which foreshadows the division of the action into ‘deux actions distinctes’ (ii. ) emphasized by the expressive contrast between Granville’s mistress’s abode and his home (ii. , ), between frugality and meanness. By explicitly juxtaposing a number of temporally and spatially distant scenes and inviting the reader to connect them, Une double famille marks a significant technical advance (cf. ii. , , , , , , and ). In La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, the opening explanation of recent history is displaced, becoming the second narrative segment, linked to the protagonists to provide a full causal explanation of the action. Le Bal de Sceaux, in contrast, leaves these causes as the first narrative segment (the account of the comte de Fontaine’s past), but embellishes them with telling details, reworking reported speech into a scene, making the opening much more immediately and dramatically expressive. La Paix du ménage contains a similar flashback (i. ). It is Gobseck, the last of these  scènes, which has the most narrative layers: those of the authorial narrator, of the lawyer’s (now Derville’s) framed narration, which contains the flashback history of Mme de Grandlieu, and creates an enigma through Derville’s question, ‘S’il [Ernest] était riche’; and finally, Gobseck’s framed account of his encounters with the countess and Fanny Malvaut (ii. – et seq.). Such complexities reflect the involvedness of the action, where Derville’s narrative both explains Ernest’s fortune (itself complicated by the rivalry between his parents, and the involvement of Derville, Trailles, and his sister’s granddaughter Sara van Gobseck),71 and enables simultaneous presentation of, and commentary on, the horrors and perils of marriage—very much more an ‘opération sur le terrain’ (xi. ) than any of these other Scènes, since Camille is actually hearing directly about the man she wants to marry. The resultant narrative is both dia- and synchronic, opening out from the portrait of Gobseck to an adversarial battle over fortune which is closer than anything else in this first series to the oppositional structures of later novels (themselves first envisaged as stories) such as La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons. Complex temporal structures of this sort involve explanatory narratorial commentaries. In Une double famille, Granville’s adultery seems initially like a mere adventure, but part two reveals the marital unhappiness which leads to 71 Both added in the  reworking of the story as Le Papa Gobseck, the Trailles character appearing previously as an anonymous viscount: cf. BRC –. As Pugh notes (BRC ), all the main characters are present in , making the story the earliest we might describe as ‘germinal’—something true not only of its recurring characters, but also of its scope and structure.

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the final catastrophe (ii.  et seq.). Part two is incomprehensible without part one, and both direct attention towards the denouement, set place fourteen (in F, eighteen) years after the opening (ii. , b, ). Balzac’s articulation is laborious: Pour comprendre le secret d’intérêt caché dans les cinq tableaux qui précèdent, il faut que l’imagination les oublie un moment, pour se prêter au récit d’événements bien antérieurs mais dont le dernier vient se mêler à la mort de Mme Crochard. Là les deux tableaux n’en forment plus qu’un et le narrateur sera facilement absous d’avoir présenté une double histoire puisqu’elle existait véritablement en deux actions distinctes dans la nature. (ii. c)72

Form embodies content; but Balzac, having discovered the directness of the scène, cannot relinquish the storyteller’s control. The flashback is governed by explanation (as the explictly titled ‘Conclusion’ of the final tableau in this first edition suggests: ii. b), but the moralizing epilogue, like La Maison’s, is a subsequent addition (ii. b). The addition of a whole new scene seals the characters’ fate; yet the convergence of narrative elements reveals only how lives are irreparably fractured. Granville contemplates the house in the Rue de Gaillon just as, as a young lover, he beheld a different house in the Rue du Tourniquet-Saint-Jean (ii. , ), his pursuit of passion making him, paradoxically, as dead to feeling as his unfeeling wife. Such juxtapositions are more revealing than commentary and more economical than narrative. Balzac supplants a continuous historical account with a storyteller’s suggestiveness. This is particularly so in Une double famille, where the narrator’s introduction underlines the parallels between two scenes (ii. ), and subsequently stresses ‘l’anniversaire de ce  mai’ (ii. , ). In Gobseck, the miser’s two visits, to Mme de Restaud, and to Fanny Malvaut, are contrasted by Gobseck himself: ‘j’opposais sa vie pure et solitaire à celle de cette comtesse qui a déjà un pied dans le vice!’ (ii. –, a). It is a technique increasingly apparent in these later scènes. Gobseck is built around pairs of scenes contrasting the countess and Fanny (ii. –, –, –), our first encounter with the roué Trailles, and his meeting with Gobseck (ii. –), his fear reflecting the countess’s (ii. , ). Ernest’s pair of interviews with his father and his mother mirror and prepare the scene between the count and his wife (ii. –); the disorder of Trailles’s banquet parallels the chaos of the count’s death (ii. , ), the destructions of the countess (ii. ), and the decay in Gobseck’s room (ii. ). Balzac was to use similarly paired scenes in another text dealing with a battle between spouses, La Transaction, now Le Colonel Chabert.73 Juxtaposition creates more compact structures in dramatically contrasting scenes, forcing the work of reconstruction and interpretation on the reader. The narrator’s explanatory commentary is considerably reduced (Gobseck contains 72

Cf. La Paix du ménage, i. .

73

See Ch.  below.

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only one example, ii. ), and the narrative’s suggestive potential correspondingly increased. Such stories exploit a novelistic concern with process, give a detailed account of a situation’s diverse causes, yet present them with the story’s emphasis on conclusion,74 a technique analogous to the tension between ‘linear’ and ‘vertical’ reading in the Physiologie.75 The opening enigmas of all these stories encourage us to reach the end as fast as possible; yet the various scenes, explanations, and peripeteies at once advance and thwart this aim. This tension was noted by Le Sylphe, which criticized un peu de bavardage dans l’exposition de ses drames, puis des longueurs dans certaines scènes peu liées avec la fable principale. Ces défauts sont apparens [sic], surtout à cause du cadre étroit où sont renfermés les esquisses de M. Balzac; mais à part cette sorte de lenteur à arriver au fait, son ouvrage a droit aux éloges de tout critique impartial.76

Perhaps Le Sylphe was right; but the ‘bavardage’ is only the causal involvedness which consistently drove Balzac to explain stories with other stories, and which would in due course give rise to the recurring characters and burgeoning narratives of La Comédie humaine.77 Gobseck perhaps best exemplifies this tension between stasis and forward movement, narrative desire and consummation. Derville must tell his story in order to explain Ernest’s situation. The narrative moves from Mme de Grandlieu’s view that Ernest has ‘une mère qui mangerait des millions’ (ii. ), to the lawyer’s closing revelation that his fortune will soon allow him to marry Camille (ii. ). Her need to discover the truth about Ernest seems to more than justify Derville’s sometimes digressive explanations (ii. –). Yet her motivation is less simple than it appears. Her interest is aroused by Derville’s hint at Ernest’s wealth—which makes her blush (ii. ). In Gobseck, money becomes a metaphor for desire: ‘L’or représente toutes les forces humaines . . . l’or contient tout en germe, et donne tout en réalité’ (ii. ; ii. b). Gobseck is an ‘homme-billet’ (ii. ), valid everywhere. His status as a universal currency is represented by his sexual ambiguity, a characteristic shared with Trailles. ‘Je me suis quelquefois demandé à quel sexe il appartenait’ says the lawyer of Gobseck, describing Trailles as an ‘espèce amphibie qui tient autant de l’homme que de la femme’ (ii. , ). For Gobseck, as for Vautrin and Corsino, androgyny connotes omniscience and omnipotence, a ubiquitous correspondence between money and desire. Fanny and the countess are implicitly equated to the two bills of credit that they sign (ii. ); the countess substitutes money for feeling in her attentions to her dying husband (ii. ), telling Ernest 74 Cf. B. Eikenbaum: ‘Tout dans la nouvelle comme dans l’anecdote tend vers sa conclusion’, ‘Sur la théorie de la prose’, . 75 ‘Linear’ reading concentrates on reading for the ending, ‘vertical’ reading on the individual incident or process: M. Issacharoff, L’Espace et la nouvelle (), –. 76 Le Sylphe, Journal des Salons ( Apr. ). 77 See below, Ch. , on the lateral expansions of the  versions of Le Colonel Chabert and Le Curé de Tours.

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that ‘de méchantes gens ont cherché à me séparer de ton père, dans le but de satisfaire leur avidité’ (ii. ).78 Money, itself a correspondence, a means of equating the material with the ideal, physical with spiritual desire, forms the unifying structural, thematic, and imagic networks of Gobseck, as it would of Sarrasine, Le Colonel Chabert, La Bourse, and La Fille aux yeux d’or. In Gobseck, the coincidence between narrative and symbolic structures is particularly precise, the true purpose of Derville’s ostensible money-narrative being the arousal and satisfaction of Camille’s, and the reader’s, desire. ‘C’était bien mal écrit, ces premiers ouvrages des Ires Scènes de la vie privée’ Balzac repined after they had appeared at the head of La Comédie humaine.79 Yet if the Scènes de la vie privée bear the traces of their arduous conception, it is because they mark a decisive stage in Balzac’s work. Without the cure d’amaigrissement after Le Dernier Chouan, he almost certainly could not have developed their condensed techniques, still less built on them, as he did from , to create the structures of later novels (see Chapter  below). Although his first collection of stories undoubtedly owes much to Scott, and to the reduction and compression which followed Le Dernier Chouan’s ‘rebourrages’, the Physiologie, the popular scène, and the conte moral were equally important. Balzac’s efforts to fuse these genres together are recognized, if implicitly, in a scathing contemporary review: Sous ce titre de Scènes de la vie privée, M. Balzac vient de publier deux volumes in-o que, dans le bon temps, du temps où l’on appelait un chat, un chat et quelque chose par son nom, l’on aurait intitulé Nouvelles ou quelque chose approchant . . . et ça se donne pour un portrait ou un caractère . . . ou bien encore pour une esquisse de moeurs, à moins qu’on n’ait rencontré un autre titre qui, sous une apparence de bonhomie, cache encore plus d’ambition: Scènes de la vie privée.80

On one level, Balzac’s title is an obfuscation, designed to avoid the unwelcome connotations of nouvelle; on another, it points to the collection’s generic richness: historical, political, satirical, visual, dramatic. From the most prescriptive discourse, from the codes and the conte moral, Balzac makes tales open to dichotomous readings, reversing the moralities to which they initially seem to appeal, using chance, contrivance and circularity to challenge received ideas. They are a difficult coming-to-birth of narrative which is free-standing but not unbound, of a would-be objective reality expressive of authorial ideas. Balzac’s Scènes both show and tell, using ‘le tableau vrai de moeurs que les familles ensevelissent aujourd’hui dans l’ombre’ to ‘marquer d’une branche de saule les passages dangereux de la vie’ (i. ). 78 This symbolic structure escaped the critic of L’Universel, who wrote: ‘Quelle misérable affectation, quelle ridicule recherche dans ce style maniéré . . . quelle incohérence d’idées et de figures, et dès lors combien peu d’analogie dans le style. Que de mots, que de pensées qui hurlent de se voir accouplés. Qu’est-ce qu’une figure à la fois lunaire, d’argent, dédorée et coulée en bronze? . . . Quel galimathias bon Dieu!’ L’Universel ( May ). 79  Oct. , LH i. . 80 L’Universel ( May ).

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Narratives and Newspapers, – , the year Balzac began the Scènes de la vie privée, was also the year when it was just becoming possible to publish short fiction in the press.1 For all the importance of that first cycle of stories, Balzac’s fiction owes much to his numerous contemporary articles and narratives in four newspapers in particular: La Mode, La Silhouette, La Caricature, and Le Voleur.2 Writing for the press was to mark a vital new stage in his fiction—to develop his handling of brief articles, of pen-portraits, satire, and the fantastic, within the confines of house style; and, in some of his most dramatic narratives, El Verdugo, Adieu, and Le Réquisitionnaire, to face him with the fitting of fiction to the demands of the press. It would open new horizons, but impose new constraints.

(i) El Verdugo, Les Deux Rêves, Un épisode sous la Terreur, Adieu Of the journals in which Balzac published, La Mode most converged with his aims. This new magazine, aimed at an intellectually ambitious female élite, minced no words in its crusade against the repressive education of women. ‘Le mal est plus urgent que jamais’, warned the first issue, ‘la littérature empire chaque jour; chaque jour les femmes perdent quelque chose de leur dernier crédit sur les arts qui charment la vie’.3 Balzac’s first story for La Mode, El 1 Balzac’s correspondence for the year shows his waning faith in the lucrativeness of book publication: Corr. i. , , ; V  n. . 2 The main journals to which Balzac gave fictional articles; his contributions to Le Voleur, which reproduced pieces already published elsewhere, and his mainly non-fictional work in Le Temps and Le Feuilleton des journaux politiques are not considered here. Balzac published eight articles in La Silhouette in , seven in La Mode, and twenty-two in La Caricature in –, most with narrative elements, together with numerous reviews and chronicles of less immediate interest for his fiction in Le Voleur, Le Feuilleton des journaux politiques, and Le Temps. Cf. OD ii. –, and R. Chollet, Balzac journaliste (), passim. These papers emerged in the context of the spread of political opposition in the Parisian and the provincial press after the fall of Villèle. The Martignac law of  had abolished the requirement of preliminary authorization; newspapers could now be founded with only two guarantors and the deposit of caution money. This law, together with the expression of dissent in large-circulation newspapers such as Le Constitutionnel, La Gazette de France, and Le Journal des débats, favoured the emergence of a more sharply satirical petite presse. See I. Collins, The Government and the Newspaper Press in France, – (Oxford, ), –. 3 M (Oct. ), .

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Verdugo,4 explores love across class, national, and patriarchal5 boundaries: quelling an insurrection, Victor, a military commander, is saved by, and falls for, Clara, daughter of the marquis de Léganès. As a punishment, the whole family is condemned to death, save the sibling willing to execute the others (in the event, Clara’s brother, Juanito). As the axe is about to fall, Victor pledges to free Clara if he will marry her; but she disdainfully refuses, and dies, leaving Juanito, having massacred his family, to the living death of remorse. Like La Vendetta, El Verdugo focuses on limits—on the formal as the expression of the fundamental. This, one of the briefest of Balzac’s fictions, is also one of the relatively few which, in its concentrated, dramatic action and close matching of form and content, might qualify as a ‘short story’. Its notation exactly replicates its situation’s stark alternatives. Its Spaniards are intensely Spanish: Clara, ‘une véritable Espagnole’ with ‘le teint espagnol, les yeux espagnols’, her father ‘le vieillard le plus entiché de sa grandesse qui fût en Espagne’ with ‘une tête couverte de cheveux blancs qui semblait échappée d’un tableau de Murillo’ (x. , ), are examples of hypotyposis characteristic of short fiction, and which makes its situation readily readable, and recognizable, in a newspaper.6 Its conflicting camps are starkly juxtaposed: the initial calm contrasts with the clamour of the ball, its candles with the flames of insurrection, the avenging soldiers’ dinner with the dance of two days earlier (x. –). And, in what is one of the bloodiest of Balzac’s tales, with at least one death on almost every page and, on one,  (x. ), a decapitatory symbolism conveys the action: ‘Je vous apporte ma tête’ (x. ), Victor declares to his general, having failed to stifle the uprising; he sadly contemplates the ballroom ‘où, la surveille, il avait vu tournoyer, emportées par la valse, les têtes des deux jeunes filles et des trois jeunes gens’ (x. ); the marquis asks to be beheaded, rather than hanged (x. ), his son answers him with ‘une inclinaison de tête’ (x. ). When his family is to be executed, ‘les têtes de ces bourgeois touchaient presque les pieds de ces martyrs’ (x. ), and after Clara has 4 M ( Jan. ); probably written in Oct.  as a by-product of the Mémoires de Sanson. This work, commissioned by Mame as a commercial venture in return for publishing the Scènes de la vie privée (S.-J. Bérard, viii. ) was, ironically, remaindered, whilst the Scènes de la vie privée were a success. Cf. N. Felkay, ‘Les Quatre Faillites de Louis Mame’, AB (), . El Verdugo’s Spanish theme was probably suggested by the duchesse d’Abrantès, with whom Balzac was staying in Oct. , although the story derives ultimately from Flemish sources (P. Citron, x. –), the executioner theme is more likely to have been suggested by Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, or by Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul, or L’Ane mort et la femme guillotinée, the latter reviewed by Balzac in Le Voleur on  Feb. , and both classed in the École du désenchantement in the eleventh Lettre sur Paris (Vol. ( Jan. ), OD ii. –). 5 See R. Chollet, ‘Trophée de têtes chez Balzac’, AB (); A.-M. Baron, Le Fils prodigue (),  et seq.; and O. N. Heathcote, ‘Balzac romancier de la violence’ in S. Vachon (ed.), Balzac: une poetique du roman (Montreal and Saint-Denis),  et seq. 6 El Verdugo forms, with other Balzac texts, notably Les Marana and Le Grand d’Espagne, part of a wider contemporary vogue. Cf. P. Berthier, ‘La Présence de l’Espagne dans la presse française des années ’, AB (,) ,  et seq.

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refused Victor’s offer of grace, ‘Sa tête roula aux pieds de Victor’ (x. )—a symbol of physical degradation as moral elevation. El Verdugo brings narrative to the newspaper (all Balzac’s previous articles had been brief extracts from longer works), as if cramming one of the Scènes de la vie privée into an article.7 Its anecdotal confines force everything into a pointe, into a story which is as much a picture as a tale. But it also brings the newspaper to narrative, exploiting pictures’ propensity to make an impact at one sitting, a formal unity sought also by Balzac’s pen-portraits and visual transpositions.8 Les Deux Rêves, in contrast, Balzac’s next story in La Mode,9 has only the loosest formal organization, a first-person narrative framing stories of two dreams. The combination allows virtually any content to be included; yet frame and form are, in more than one sense, the meaning of the tale. For Les Deux Rêves, written in , stems from Balzac’s project for an Histoire de la France pittoresque,10 a cycle of historical novels ranging from the most distant times to the present, and, like its contemporary in La Mode, Un épisode sous la Terreur, presents events as but part of a larger continuum. The opening reflects the ending, the narrator’s curiosity about two guests at Mme de Saint-James’s salon, a surgeon and a barrister, amply deprecated as ugly and vulgar, being echoed by the final revelation that they are Marat and Robespierre; and the two dreams, the barrister’s, that he has seen Catherine de Medici, and the surgeon’s, that he has seen a crowd of ‘animalcules’ emerging from a patient’s leg, correspond to the dichotomy of esprit and matière, and to the visible and invisible world.11 The dream allows Catherine de Medici, perhaps the archetype of La Mode’s strong woman, an unbridled defence of her actions which is formal in both content and implications, presenting events as part of a larger canvas, the individual, and the individual event, in the light of history. The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre was simply ‘un malheur’ or, in the ‘duel’ between old and new beliefs, only ‘une blessure’ (xi. , –). By allowing his character to speak, Balzac attempts to change our view of Catherine de Medici, and to set the present in the context of the past—of the Calvin who initiated ‘un esprit d’investigation qui devait amener les peuples à vouloir tout examiner’ (xi. ); but also, as narrator, as later in Z. Marcas, to warn of the dangers of revolution. The newspaper story is a way of speaking directly to the readership about potential 7 Although this is unlikely, as El Verdugo was written four months before publication. R. Pierrot speculates, however, that the proofs mentioned by Girardin, founder of La Mode, in a letter to Balzac of Jan.  are those of El Verdugo (Corr. i.  n. ). Cf. Chollet, Balzac journaliste, . 8 See sect. (ii) below. 9  May . Les Deux Rêves is now the last part of Sur Catherine de Médicis (–). 10 On this project see R. Guise, ‘Balzac et le roman historiques’, RHLF (),  et seq. and R. Chollet et al., OD ii.  et seq.; and on Les Deux Rêves, N. Cazauran, Catherine de Médicis et son temps dans ‘La Comédie humaine’ (), pt. I, ch. , and xi. –. 11 xi. –; –; a passage which seems to echo Le Rêve de d’Alembert, and anticipates La Peau de chagrin. Cf. Ch.  below and xi.  n. .

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instability: ‘C’est un levain qui fermentera’.12 Les Deux Rêves is now, like Catherine herself, just part of the wider canvas of Sur Catherine de Médicis, of history, and the newspaper, but uses this most ephemeral of forms to present politics, and personality, to posterity. Un épisode sous la Terreur,13 like El Verdugo, relates a salient event in a highly conflictual situation, and is built around a dialectical reversal of boundaries: the stranger who follows a fugitive, aristocratic nun at the opening of the story turns out to be not a revolutionary spy, but an ostensible royalist sympathizer, in quest of a covert expiatory mass for Louis XVI. Only when he returns a year later, in the second part of the story, in quest of a second anniversary mass, are ideological and social boundaries revealed not to be as simple: his gift of a precious relic to the celebrant of the mass, the abbé de Marolles, turns out to be the handkerchief with which the king wiped his brow at his execution. All is revealed on the last page of the tale when, in a parallel to the street-scene of the opening, Marolles sees the mysterious donor on a tumbrel bearing Robespierre’s collaborators to the guillotine, and collapses at the realization that the stranger was none other than Sanson, chief executioner and regicide, in quest of expiation. Un épisode sous la Terreur is, like many other Balzac stories, an exploration of paradox. The repeatedly stressed cold, silence, and solitude of the opening, symbolic of the absence of social warmth and of the royalists’ social exclusion, gives way to imagery expressing the contradictions of clandestine spirituality (‘Tout était immense, mais petit; pauvre mais noble; profane et saint tout à la fois’, viii. ), a paradox which lies at the semiotic centre of the tale. The story itself is the defamiliarizing of a cliché—the name of the period of Robespierre’s domination as the Terror—and an exploration, in petto, of what it really meant for individuals who lived under it, evident in the ‘crainte’, ‘terreur’, ‘soupçons’, and ‘frayeur’ which run throughout, or in the protagonists’ fearful exchange of glances at an unknown knock on the door (viii. , , , ). But its title also designates the reality beneath the surface—the covert protection afforded to clerics by Mucius Scaevola, ostensible revolutionary, but covert royalist sympathizer, and Sanson’s secret contrition. Un épisode sous la Terreur, like La Messe de l’Athée later, deals with the ambiguous realities behind appearance, the secret history, the blurring of boundaries which society takes as read. 12 xi. ; Cf. Z. Marcas: ‘Je ne crois pas que dans dix ans la forme actuelle subsiste . . . La jeunesse éclatera comme la chaudière d’une machine à vapeur’ (viii. ). 13 Written as the introduction to the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution française, par Sanson, exécuteur des arrêts criminels pendant la Révolution; first published in Le Cabinet de lecture on  Jan. and  Feb. , ahead of the Mémoires themselves, which appeared in two separate volumes on  Feb. and  May  (OD ii. –), and in which the exact extent of Balzac’s collaboration is uncertain. In the Mémoires, the story formed a preamble illustrating Sanson’s character, and ended differently, with an epilogue situated in a salon, in which the abbé de Marolles, discussing the Revolution, is interrupted by a young man who takes him to Sanson’s family and presents him with his memoirs (viii. –). The present ending was added for the story’s publication as Une messe en  in Le Royal Keepsake in .

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El Verdugo, Les Deux Rêves, and Un épisode sous la Terreur emerge from living memory, from the contemporary historical context,14 and form part of a category so endemic to newspapers that it might easily escape notice: the fait divers. Balzac’s experience in compiling collections of anecdotes had introduced him to the raw material of history, the trivial facts of private existence. If the Scènes de la vie privée present the typical, these stories narrate the extraordinary events of political and military life. El Verdugo explores the outrages committed by aristocratic privilege in quest of inheritance and illicit, incestuous love;15 Adieu,16 what would now be called post-traumatic stress—Philippe de Sucy’s doomed attempt to restore the sanity of his lover, Stéphanie de Vandières, lost when her husband was gruesomely decapitated at the crossing of the Berezina in , by recreating the landscape and circumstances in which he died. Along with Une passion dans le désert 17 and Le Réquisitionnaire,18 these stories all examine aberrant mental states: in Les Deux Rêves, hallucination, in Le Réquisitionnaire, transmission of thought, in Une passion and Adieu, the mind’s capacity for delusion. Yet all begin, and are told, as casually as they might be encountered in the journal. There is nothing particularly surprising about this in Étude de femme,19 the story of a dandy, later Rastignac’s, dalliance with a countess, now Mme de Listomère; in the circumstances, its bantering tone might be expected. Even in Les Deux Rêves, the frame-story form means that ready familiarity does not really shock: the orginal version begins, after a short preamble, anecdotally (xi. ), presenting a salon-world shared by a reader who is more a member of a club: ‘Le succès que ces fragments ont obtenu dans le monde et dans les salons nous a permis de croire qu’on accueillerait avec plaisir un article dont la gravité contraste peut-être avec l’esprit de ce recueil.’20 But in Étude de femme, Balzac strikingly transfers parallels and boundaries of the kind used in El Verdugo and Le Réquisitionnaire to a more flippant context. Rastignac writes two letters the morning after dancing with Mme de Listomère; there are two scenes juxtaposing the two (ii. –, –), and the story ultimately turns on two paradoxes: first, Rastignac’s somewhat careless misdirection of a missive to Mme de Listomère when he is supposedly writing to his mistress; secondly, that, through a rather Stendhalian cristallisation, Mme de Listomère, as unintended recipient, should fall in love with him unawares, even though the letter was not 14 Although only the rubrics of Les Deux Rêves make its political significance explicit: ‘Ce morceau est l’un des plus importants que contiendra un livre auquel M. de Balzac travaille depuis longtemps, et qui a pour titre Scènes de la vie politique’: M  ( May ), . Balzac’s political line was adroit: cf. Chollet, Balzac journaliste, –. 15 16 Cf. P. Citron, x. –. M  ( May and  June ), – and –. 17 RP  ( Dec. ), –. Cf. Ch.  below. 18 RP  ( Feb. ), –. Cf. Ch.  below. 19 Actually written for the Revue de Paris, but very much more in character with the brief anecdotes Balzac wrote for newspapers like La Mode. 20 M  (),  n. .

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meant for her. Rastignac writes unwittingly, driven by desire; Mme de Listomère falls in love unconsciously, driven by her mind. Étude de femme is a fittingly lighthearted exploration of the dichotomous relationship between esprit and matière probingly treated in La Peau de chagrin. It is more astonishing, though, to encounter Étude de femme’s urbanity in the gruesome battlefield context of Adieu. Here, as later in Une passion dans le désert, the supposed community of newspaper text and readership reinforces fiction’s pretension to be fact. The text is the last link in a chain beginning with the framed narrator’s experience of the event (in Adieu, M. de Fanjal’s, Stéphanie’s protector’s, observation of the battle of the Beresina, in Une passion, the soldier’s narrative of his encounter with a panther) and ending with the reader. The story is part of our world, and we are left to make sense of it. Adieu may end with ‘la dernière scène d’un drame qui avait commencé en ’, but it occurred ‘il y a quelques jours’ (x. a; ), just as, in Étude de femme, the marquise’s encounter with the dandy took place ‘il y a un mois environ’. ‘Depuis seize jours, elle ne va plus dans le monde’:21 the sudden shift into the present shocks the reader into reflecting on the story, into considering it part of her world. Adieu’s revelation of Sucy’s ‘désordres cachés’ following Stéphanie’s madness and death questions the nature of identity and reality, referring us to the real world—what, and whenever, that may be. Yet, apart from Étude de femme, these stories depict worlds doubtless rather alien to their readers, who are blandished by consistent (and sometimes comic) attempts to render them accessible. The panther of Une passion is compared to ‘un gros chien, paisible possesseur d’une niche somptueuse à la porte d’un hôtel’ (viii. —this in a country about to read Les Orientales), whilst in Adieu, Stéphanie virtually wears her ball-gown to the battle: Était-ce la dernière de vivandières? était-ce cette charmante femme, la gloire d’un amant, la reine des bals, l’adorable sylphide aux formes éblouissantes de grâce, de fraîcheur? Hélas! l’oeil même de son ami le plus dévoué n’apercevait plus rien . . .22

Accessibility is more important than authenticity: La Mode’s reader would probably not have been disappointed by this impromptu fashion-parade. The intimate topicality linking narrator, text, and audience helps explain the frequency of frame stories (amongst others, Adieu, Sarrasine, Une passion dans le désert, and L’Auberge rouge) amongst Balzac’s early journalistic fictions: the shared status of narrator and readership as narratees, the trivial or human-interest character of the narratives was specially suited to newspaper publication. Later, M  (), , corresponding to ii. . M  (), ; x. a, b, c. In addition, the opening scene clashes with the story’s overall tone; the interjection ‘Allons, député du centre, en avant!’ and the narrator’s explanation that ‘le chasseur était un gros homme court dont le ventre proéminent accusait un embonpoint véritablement ministériel’ (x. ) refer to a contemporary joke, the designation of the ‘députés du centre’ as ‘députés du ventre’. Later, Balzac refers to knowledge which only a contemporary could have had: the hot summer of  (x. ), although the story is set in . 21 22

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in , such traits were to be exploited at greater length in the more spacious environment of the literary reviews (see Chapter  below). But Balzac’s first newspaper fictions are very compact. El Verdugo, Les Deux Rêves, and Un épisode sous la Terreur are amongst the shortest of his tales;23 in his later career, only when driven to write single-narrative episodes for journals (La Messe de l’athée, Z. Marcas) would he write as briefly again. This brevity impacts on subject matter: these stories deal with concentrated, dramatic, single events; they are textbook examples of short stories. Les Deux Rêves is told in an evening, recalling Poe’s stipulation that tales should be readable in one sitting; all meet his requirement of unity of impression. Un épisode revolves around three versions of the same enigma of identity (the spy’s, the old woman’s, and the executioner’s); El Verdugo relates the bloody events of a single day. It is tempting, indeed, to suspect the influence of L’Enlèvement de la redoute in its Napoloeonic subject matter, its violence, dynamism, and imagic unity;24 conversely, Les Deux Rêves seems to anticipate La Vision de Charles XI. El Verdugo’s events come in hot succession: the tranquil opening scene is soon overtaken by the sudden attack: ‘Une heure après, un régiment entier . . . [était] en route. La distance qui séparait la ville de Menda du quartier général fut franchie avec une rapidité merveilleuse’ (x. ). Only at the end, as in L’Enlèvement, does narrative slow to examine the character’s emotions. Such limits, however, were simply too narrow for Balzac’s aims. The Napoleonic (but feminine) subject matter of Adieu, its dialogued, dynamic, diachronic opening episode, its frame-story form—all indicate some effort to meet the needs of the journal. Yet that episode alone is longer than El Verdugo, and, at some , words, Adieu is overall nearly four times its length. The ultimate source of the tripartite division into tableaux is probably La Vendetta,25 rather than any desire to oblige La Mode, whilst the epilogue probably owes as much to Gloire et malheur or La Femme vertueuse; the denouement seems to reprise Viellerglé’s L’Anonyme, on which Balzac may have worked.26 But in the journal, the Scènes’ technique of juxtaposition becomes the very subject of the story: Adieu turns on parallels and convergences of time and place. It is a reminder of her husband’s death at the crossing of the Berezina which precipitates Stéphanie’s final crisis: the landscape, the louring weather of the opening, 23 El Verdugo is some ,, Les Deux Rêves just over ,, and Un épisode sous la Terreur approximately , words long. 24 Mérimée’s story was first published in the Revue française in Sept. , a month before Balzac wrote El Verdugo (x. ); but, at some , words, L’Enlèvement de la redoute is less than half as long. 25 Adieu was first published, and perhaps written, in three parts: I ‘Les Bons-hommes’,  May  (x. –); II, ‘Le Passage de la Bérésina’, and III, ‘La Guérison’ on  June (x. –, –). Like Adieu, La Vendetta, though never serialized, was originally divided into (indeed written in) three sections ‘L’Atelier’, ‘La Désobéissance’, ‘Le Mariage’, and an epilogue, ‘Le Châtiment’: i. . 26 : P. Barbéris, Aux sources de Balzac (), ; M. Bardèche, Balzac (), –.

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symbolize her oppressed condition as ‘la Belle au Bois Dormant’ in a ‘palais’ inhabited by a ‘vision’ belonging more to the dead than the living (x. ). Philippe’s remark ‘Ici, tout est harmonie, et le désordre y est en quelque sorte organisé’ (x. ) foreshadows his reconstruction of the battle, an attempt to organize the disorder of the landscape and of her psyche. The dead metaphors of scene and tableau here revive, but to such shocking effect for Stéphanie, who discovers her true state, that they kill her: Philippe’s theatrical reconstruction of ‘un tableau si large de leurs anciennes misères’ is a ‘représentation tragique’ with actors who ‘répétèrent leurs rôles avec assez d’intelligence’ (x. a; cf. x. , , –). Balzac’s self-referential rhetoric bespeaks the story’s central subject, the effect of ‘les sympathies qui méconnaissent les lois de l’espace’ (Le Réquisitionnaire, x. ); but Adieu shows how parallels are never exact. The first woman Sucy and D’Albon encounter at the opening is not Stéphanie, but the equally weak-minded Geneviève, and the narrative plays on queasily mixed metaphors of cuisine, horses, women, and ‘rivière’ (both diamond necklace and river proper, ball and battle: x. ) which almost, but (unlike those in El Verdugo) do not quite, make a system: Geneviève appears to belong to ‘une des tribus de peaux-rouges célébrées par Cooper’ (x. ); the ripples in the water ‘ressemblaient à des pierreries’ (x. ); the horse the soldiers cook is carved ‘avec avant d’adresse qu’auraient pu faire des garçons bouchers de Paris (x. ); gold, diamonds, and silverware are scattered across the battlefield (x. ). ‘Nous sommes flambés’ declares the major (x. ). Semiotic disorder lies at the heart of the story: recreating the battle takes Stéphanie back to her husband’s death as she bade him adieu, but only to show that she cannot progress beyond that moment. Recognition does not merely stun her (unlike Marolles in Un épisode)—it kills her; and the burden of having done so in his attempt to bring her back to life soon kills Sucy, haunted, like Juanito in El Verdugo, by the tyranny of an idea. Adieu is, paradoxically, about an inability to bid farewell. Adieu, written as the Scènes de la vie privée were being completed, imports their techniques into the journal, but only by breaking its rules: apart from the shorter Le Charlatan,27 it is the first of Balzac’s stories to be interrupted by ‘La suite au prochain numéro’. If its subdivisions correspond to its episodes in La Mode, they also foreshadow the problems encountered in the Revue de Paris later the same year, where the complexity and resultant length of Balzac’s fictions would entail their fragmentation into episodes, perhaps in turn encouraging him to write more causally and explicatively, and hence at greater length. Adieu, unique in length and complexity among Balzac’s early journalistic narratives, marks the end of his first concerted burst of story-writing (Oct. – June ), centred on the first Scènes de la vie privée; he would publish no stories of comparable significance until November  and Sarrasine. But articles 27

S  ( May ), –. See sect. (iv) below.

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composed concurrently continued his apprenticeship in brevity, and of subject matter which would later be central to his work.

(ii) Articles, observation de moeurs and Pen-portraits Balzac’s journal stories, El Verdugo, Les Deux Rêves, and Un épisode demonstrate his ability to write dramatically and briefly, their unity of impression recalling the concentrated impact of visual art. These skills were further developed in his short descriptive works in journals in  and . Articles such as Moeurs aquatiques accompanied lithographs; others, anonymous pieces in La Silhouette like ‘Les Fashionables’28 or ‘Les Moustaches’,29 were more developed inferences of character from appearance, exploiting a widespread preoccupation with interpretating the visual. ‘Les Premières Loges et le paradis’,30 accompanied by a lithograph, is an interpretation of the appearance and behaviour of different types of theatregoer: nobody watches the performance, the writer concludes, because all are watching each other.31 ‘Fatigués d’être acteurs, nous nous sommes faits regardeurs, concluded Philarète Chasles, Balzac’s future collaborator on the Contes bruns.32 It was a preoccupation evident in the very titles of La Silhouette, La Caricature, and La Mode, in their rubrics Croquis, Esquisses, Albums, in their lithographs and caricatures. La Silhouette’s founders are symptomatic of a new fusion of literature and visual art,33 as was La Caricature morale, politique et littéraire, established by Charles Philipon, a pupil of Gros.34 Various passages, often visual or descriptive, of the Scènes de la vie privée were published as articles,35 and, in many cases, we shall probably never know 29 S  ( Sept. ), –. 30 S  ( May ), –. S  ( Jan. ), –. A striking demonstration of the evolution of observation de moeurs is provided by comparison with an earlier example, Jouy’s ‘Le Balcon de l’Opéra’ (Jouy, L’Hermite de la Chaussée d’Antin ( July ), iv. –), which consists of a series of pen-portraits of real individuals, and makes no attempt to provide interpretation of characteristic details of dress or manners for the reader, contemporary or subsequent, who is unfamiliar with the subject. Jouy’s exploration of the contemporary world, whilst descriptive and interpretive, is superficial and unsystematic. 32 P. Chasles, ‘Statistique littéraire et intellectuelle de la France pendant l’année ’, RP (Oct. ), ; cf. Ch. (ii) below. 33 Charles-Victor-Hilaire Ratier and Sylvestre-Nicolas Durier were both printer–lithographers, whilst Benjamin-Louis Bellet is described in the act of incorporation ( Oct. ) as an homme de lettres: Chollet, Balzac journaliste,  n. . The first issue of La Silhouette appeared on  Dec. . 34 A prospectus for La Caricature appeared on  Oct.  and the first number on  Nov. of the same year. La Caricature grew out of the ashes of La Silhouette, in the collapse of which Philipon was implicated. Cf. Chollet, Balzac journaliste, –, and D. Kerr, Caricature and French Political Culture, – (Oxford, ). 35 e.g. the following extracts from Gloire et malheur (La Maison du chat-qui-pelote): ‘Augustine était arrivé au dernier degré du malheur’ to ‘nous ne pouvons être jugés que par nos pairs’, i. –), S,  April ; La Vendetta: ‘M.Servin, l’un de nos artistes les plus distingués’ to ‘un groupe d’anges assis sur un nuage dans le ciel’, (i. –), published under the title ‘L’Atelier’, S ( Apr. ); and La Femme vertueuse (Une double famille): ‘Il existe des maisons nouvellement bâties’ 28 31

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whether the article preceded the story, or is actually an extract from a text already written.36 Whatever the truth of the matter, the very doubt attests the convergence of Balzac’s interests with the journals’—something evident not only in the striking economy and unity of his stories, but also in the development of subject matter, notably satirical pen-portraits explicitly tailored to their readership. L’Épicier, for example, builds on the pseudo-scientific objectivity of the Codes, describing the subject as a species, in his social context.37 But Balzac puts his grocer in a human zoo: Est-ce parce que l’épicier a toujours un pantalon brun-rouge, des bas bleus, de larges souliers, une casquette de fausse loutre garnie d’un galon d’argent noirci . . . que vous maudissez un épicier? . . . qui oserait ici-bas se comparer à l’épicier et surtout à l’épicier parisien, modèle éternel des épiciers européens, américains, asiatiques et africains?.38

The parody of Buffon is never far away39—but neither is the zoological classification of the human which describes Mlle Michonneau as a ‘vieille chauve-souris’,40 or César Birotteau as a ‘gymnote éléctrique’.41 Such techniques, reversed to describe animals as humans, would ultimately give birth to La Comédie humaine; 42 and in , Balzac turns the hyperbolic techniques of the Codes to specifically anti-bourgeois ends: Être sublime, être incompréhensible, source de douceur et de vie, de lumière et de plaisir, modèle de résignation! O épicier, tu es tout cela, et ce qui est le comble de tes perfections, tu es tout cela sans t’en douter!43

Balzac’s grocer, ‘lien commun de tous nos besoins’,44 is elsewhere, more extravagantly, in almost blasphemous parody of Cousin,45 a ‘triplicité to ‘l’angle noir de la rue lui avait dérobé cette vision’, ii. –, under the title ‘La Grisette parvenue’, Vol. ( Apr. ). The whole Introduction to the Mémoires de Sanson (Un épisode sous la Terreur) was published together with its beginning in Le Cabinet de lecture ( Jan.– Feb. ). 36 e.g. Une vue de Touraine (S ( Feb. ), later forming part of Le Rendez-vous corresponding to the passage of La Femme de trente ans from ‘En quittant le dôme vert’ to ‘le printemps dans toute sa splendeur’: ii. –); and L’Usurier, the passage of Les Dangers de l’inconduite (Gobseck) corresponding broadly to ii. –, from ‘Saisirez-vous’ to ‘L’ARGENT’ was published as ‘Moeurs parisiennes: L’Usurier’ in La Mode ( Mar. ), –. Both these texts probably predate their partial newspaper publication. Cf. P. Citron, ii. d, and Chollet, Balzac journaliste, . 37 38 OD ii. –. OD ii. –. 39 Cf. W. Jung., Theorie und Praxis des Typischen bei Honoré de Balzac (Tübingen, ), ; Bardèche, Balzac, – (on the Physiologie du mariage); – (on ‘Espèce sociale’ and ‘Territoire’); – (on ‘comparaison entre l’Humanité et l’Animalité’). 40 41 Le Père Goriot, iii. . César Birotteau, vi. . 42 Cf. Ch. (i) on Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux. 43 OD ii. . L’Épicier seems to derive from a similar encomium in Raisson’s Code gourmand: ‘Politique, littérature, sciences, arts, la truffe embrasse tout. Elle donne de l’esprit au sot, de l’éloquence au lourdaud, de la persuasion au fat; elle décide de la paix et de la guerre; dans les déjeuners académiques, dans les dîners ministériels, dans les soupers séducteurs, elle brille et triomphe également. Combien d’heureux candidats n’ont-ils pas dû leur faveur, leur fortune et leur gloire à la truffe!’ (–). 44 OD ii. . 45 OD ii. .

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phénoménale’.46 In related works, like Gobseck, or L’Illustre Gaudissart (), the opening portrait gives rise to the subsequent narrative (iv. –, esp. –); there, the story comes out of the portrait just as, in other early Scènes, the picture had come out of the story (see Chapter  above). These, the devices of the Codes, are also those of caricature in writing, owing much to Balzac’s contact with caricaturist-journalists47 such as Philipon, Ratier, Monnier, Gavarni, and Grandville. The interdependence of text and illustration48 embodied the common verbal and visual culture, creating word (or picture) play between the two.49 The ‘députés du centre’, known in newspaper articles as ‘députés du ventre’, appeared as ‘ventru’ in pictorial caricature, a joke reflected in Le Bal de Sceaux, Adieu (i. , x. ), and Daumier’s Le Ventre législatif.50 Philipon’s transformation of Louis-Philippe into a pear was later reflected in a range of visual and verbal puns on poire,51 a vogue Le Père Goriot echoed in the name of the police-informer Poiret. Balzac’s hyperbolic satire combines caricature with the fantastic—a generic combination which would become familiar before the end of the year.

(iii) Caricature, Satire, and the Fantastic Articles like L’Épicier are serious in their frivolity: the very choice of a grocer as subject matter signals a change in social relations,52 its undesirability registered by double-edged treatment of the kind found also in later pieces like Le Rentier.53 The most telling comparisons are also the most burlesque: OD ii. . Cf. A. G. Paradissis, ‘Balzac’s Relationships with the Caricaturists and Popular Dramatic Satirists of the July Monarchy’, Australian Journal for French Studies, :  (Jan.–Apr. ). A. Devéria had been commissioned to produce vignettes for Balzac’s Vie de La Fontaine as early as  (D. Adamson, ‘Balzac and the Visual Arts’, D.Phil thesis, Oxford, , ), and had met Monnier at the home of Hyacinthe de Latouche in the summer of  (A.-M. Meininger, ‘Balzac et Henry Monnier’ AB (), ). Chollet suggests that Balzac may have encountered Ratier in  (Balzac journaliste,  n. ). 48 e.g. ‘Songe drolatique’, S ( Nov. ), with an accompanying caricature by Monnier; ‘Les Fashionables’, an anonymous article and illustration, S ( Jan. ); É. Déaddé’s ‘Pour les pauvres, s’il vous plait’, S ( Feb. ); lithograph by V. Adam and V. Ratier, showing a collection at a society ball; or Balzac’s Mœurs aquatiques, S ( May ), with accompanying lithograph by Grandville and Ratier. 49 A similar view of the similarity between caricature and punning is implicit in a remark by E. H. Gombrich and E. Kris: ‘in so far as a caricature is a graphic joke, it no more requires a painter’s gift than a skilled punner must be a poet’ (Caricature (Harmondsworth, ), ). 50 L’Association mensuelle (Jan. ). 51 Daumier, Les Poires, Le Charivari ( Jan. ); cf. Benjamin’s caricature ‘La France traîne son boulet’, La Caricature ( Dec. ) (the ball is pear-shaped, and bears the monarch’s features); ‘Les Quatre Poires croquées par Ch. Philipon’, La Caricature ( Jan. ) (an advertisment for the offending cartoon); ‘Tête-à-tête entre de deux jeunes époux entre la poire et le fromage’, Le Charivari ( Mar. ) (anonymous lithograph). On  Feb. , Le Charivari had published the judgment against Philipon according to the letter of the law—but in the shape of a pear. 52 53 P. Barbéris, Balzac et le mal du siècle (), ii. . Cf. Ch. (v) below. 46 47

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Je préfère la protection d’un épicier à celle d’un roi . . . ‘Nous tenons tout’ vous disentils avec un juste orgueil. Alors, quand vous lirez en lettres d’or: Un tel, épicier du roi, demandez-vous, avec terreur, qui est le plus souverain, ou du roi de l’épicier, ou de l’épicier du roi.54

‘La puissance argent nous mène à la plus triste des aristocraties, celle du coffrefort’,55 declared Balzac as early as February . But it is after the July Revolution that his articles become most searingly satirical, earlier observation de mœurs56 shifting to subjects of immediately political interest,57 with a series of particularly destructive articles in La Caricature. Le Ministre, Une vue du grand monde, and Croquis [I],58 Zéro, conte fantastique,59 L’Opium,60 La Convention des morts,61 Le Garçon de bureau,62 and Les Litanies romantiques 63 are the spawningground for less ephemeral texts like L’Élixir de longue vie, Sarrasine, and La Peau de chagrin. Des caricatures64 is representative of the often vicious visual symbolism of contemporary political cartoons, with its ‘vieux trône’ and ‘vieil autel usés, vermoulus, rapetassés, cassés, s’appuyant l’un à l’autre, et se faisant réciproquement tomber . . .’65 So, too, is the anonymous accompaniment to H. Gérard-Fontallard’s lithograph of Charles X as an antiquary: Le vieil homme, éteignoir en tête, gibecière au flanc, collet de jésuite au dos, guêtres aux jambes, croix au col, s’asseyait dans un large fauteuil. Sur un prie-dieu était un microscope; le vieil homme y ajustait son oeil et le règne commençait. Le royaume, c’était une table chargée d’une foule de marionnettes imperceptibles, accoutrées de la plus singulière façon. Nos ancêtres devaient être ainsi vêtus. Bref, on eût dit des antiquailles’.66

Such examples must inevitably have left their mark on Balzac:67 ‘Michael journaliste’, for example, seems to foreshadow Balzac’s Comédie du diable in its OD ii. –. Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du temps présent, M ( Feb. ), OD ii. . 56 Des mots à la mode, M :  ( May ), –; De la mode en littérature, M :  ( May ), –; Étude de moeurs par les gants, S  ( Jan. ), –. 57 e.g. Traité de la vie élégante, M  ( Oct. ), ;  ( Nov. ), ; La Comédie du diable, M  ( Nov. ), –. 58 C, Prospectus (October ). Croquis [I] was formerly entitled Un Entr’acte by Lovenjoul to distinguish it from Croquis [II] in C ( Nov. ). Cf. OD ii. –, –. 59 S  ( Oct. ), –. 60 C ( Nov. ). 61 C ( Nov. ). 62 C ( Nov. ). 63 C ( Dec. ); cf. Des salons littéraires et des mots élogieux, M :  ( Nov. ), –, of which Balzac’s authorship is uncertain: OD ii. . 64 C ( Dec. ); formerly attributed to Balzac: Chollet, Balzac journaliste,  and n. . 65 C ( Dec. ). 66 ‘Le Vieil Homme ou l’Antiquaire et ses antiquailles’, S  ( Oct. ), –. The candlesnuffer was a standard attribute of royalists in contemporary liberal caricature. 67 Did they, rather than ch.  of Scott’s The Antiquary, suggest the antiquarian’s shop in La Peau de chagrin, which Balzac was currently composing? Scott’s novel, first published in France in  (BF ( Sept. )), was popular throughout the decade, with two new editions in , three in , one in , and three in . 54 55

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vision of contemporaries in hell, ‘les génies inspirateurs de Châteaubriant [sic], de Lamartine et de Hugo’, together with those ‘dont l’aspect burlesque suffisait pour exciter le rire. Ceux-ci, pour la plupart, siégaient à l’extrême droite de l’assemblée’.68 And Janin uses comparable techniques anticlerically in La Maison suspecte, conte fantastique,69 the story of a Jesuit who, in a striking premonition of the July days, has a nightmare about being attacked by the mob: Les hommes étouffaient un rire affreux, les femmes glissaient à lui comme des ombres . . . elles se frappaient la poitrine en riant aux éclats, elles faisaient le signe de croix avec une dérision coupable; elles outrageaient le ciel et la terre: le rêve était affreux pour le pauvre écclesiastique; il sanglottait dans son sommeil: Grâce! oh Dieu! grâce! qu’ai-je fait? Chasse loin de moi cette horrible vision!

Balzac had made similar youthful experiments in La Dernière Fée, and in L’Église,70 the later development of Zéro, conte fantastique, fantastic vision would be directed towards a more positive presentation of the Church. Indeed, as both authors’ subtitles indicate, the fantastic is almost synonymous with visual satire at this time.71 Complaintes satiriques sur les mœurs du temps présent,72 one of his earliest newspaper articles, builds on caricature, using strikingly pictorial allegory. Its opening simile, an arresting presentation of France as ‘une belle vieille femme in articulo mortis’, anticipates the picture of the Church as a prostitute at the beginning of Zéro (x. –), whilst Croquis [I] (the first of two articles by Balzac which bear this title) compresses one of the Scène de la vie privée’s juxtapositions into a couple of pages: a murder at the opening, committed during an interval at the theatre, and a second scene, nineteen years later, where the murderer, now rich and successful, is fêted by society: ‘Pourquoi la bonne société reculerait-elle devant un meurtrier?’, asks the narrator, anticipating the theme of L’Auberge rouge. Similar devices recur throughout this series of articles.73 68 Le Sylphe ( June ). Cf. La Comédie du diable, M  ( Nov. ), –, discussed in Ch. (ii) below. 69 Vol. ( June ). Balzac’s brief friendship with Janin reached its height at the beginning of , and is something perhaps reflected in the style of Étude de femme (q.v.). Cf. xii.  n. , and H. Godin, ‘Jules Janin et Balzac’, in D. G. Charlton, J. Gaudon, and A. R. Pugh (eds.), Balzac and the Nineteenth Century: Studies in French Literature presented to H. J. Hunt (Leicester, ), –, esp. –. 70 Romans et contes philosophiques (); now combined with Jésus-Christ en Flandre. Cf. Ch. (ii). 71 Cf. Nodier, ‘Du Fantastique en littérature’, RP  ( Nov. ), : ‘quand les religions elles-mêmes ébranlées jusque dans leurs fondements ne parlent plus à l’imagination . . . il faut bien que cette faculté de produire le merveilleux dont la nature l’a douée s’exerce sur un genre de création plus vulgaire, et mieux appropriée aux besoins d’une intelligence matérialisée.’ 72 M ( Feb. ), OD ii. –. 73 Cf. also the eulogy of caricature in Des artistes (S  ( Feb. ), –; OD ii. ), Gavarni (M  ( ct. ), –, OD ii. –), the interpretations of Des Caricatures (C ( Dec. ); CHH xxvi. ) and the fantastic vision and abundant metaphor of Croquis[II] (C ( Nov. ); OD ii. –), a fragment of the unfinished story Les Deux Amis reworked to suit the newspaper’s pictorial style: OD ii. –.

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Malady and death pervade Complaintes satiriques, foreshadowing the queasy mixture in L’Élixir de longue vie and Sarrasine. The malaise symbolizes a national decline,74 attributed to the depletion of Gallic spirit by an invasion of foreign, particularly British, influences.75 In its comprehensive picture of social fragmentation, Complaintes satiriques looks forward to La Peau de chagrin and L’Auberge rouge. Here, as there, the root cause is money’s emergence as an omnipotent force replacing the old oligarchy,76 causing a deterioration in moral and aesthetic values77 visible in the disorder of Restaud’s bedroom (ii. ) or of the antiquary’s shop in La Peau de chagrin: ‘Aussi vivons-nous comme au milieu des débris d’un tremblement de terre.’78 Balzac’s antidote is laughter, via the creation of a new national literature, inspired by Rabelais and other French Renaissance conteurs: il y a cent mille fois plus de talent dans un conte à rire que dans toutes les méditations, les odes et les trilogies cadavéreuses avec lesquelles on prétend régaler nos esprits . . . La théorie du laid, du grotesque et de l’horrible, le méthodisme de nos prophètes à froid . . . doivent nécessairement nous conduire à l’hypocrisie anglaise . . . à chercher l’originalité dans le silence.79

The satirical Rabelais was to be ubiquitous, in the Lettres sur Paris, in the ‘gastrologie’ of Nouvelle Théorie du déjeuner,80 in Le Dôme des Invalides,81 in the gigantism of Fragment d’une nouvelle satyre ménippée,82 and even more expansively in La Peau de chagrin. Complaintes satiriques exemplifies Balzac’s satire from La Physiologie onwards,83 embodying two major poles of Balzac’s work, fantastic satire and Rabelaisian gaiety, in the period up to the first dixain of the Contes drolatiques.

(iv) From Newspaper to Narrative Balzac’s journalistic experience enlarged his range, but stultified his fiction. Journal articles were too restricted for any but the briefest narrative, and many of his pen-portraits bear witness to a storytelling vocation they could only frustrate. Le Charlatan,84 published less than a month after the Scènes de la vie privée, attempts to work their techniques into a article, opening, like La Maison du chatqui-pelote, with topographical description through the now-familiar speculative rhetorical questioning,85 presenting the protagonist through a smoke-filled room.86 Prosaic reality serves an ironic ideal: it is precisely the smoke which stops objects from being seen properly, for ‘jamais romancier n’inventa de 74 78 81 82 83 85

75 76 77 OD ii. , . OD ii. –. OD ii. . OD ii. –. 79 OD ii. . 80 M  ( May ), –. OD ii. . Annales romantiques (), –. C ( Nov. ), CHH xxvi. –. Cf. Chollet, Balzac journaliste, –. 84 S  ( May ), –. Cf. M. Ménard, Balzac et le comique (), esp. chs. –. 86 OD ii. . OD ii. –.

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spectacle plus romanesque’. The future romancier uses simile—visual caricature—as burlesque: Devant le foyer, une petite femme, jaune comme un cierge, ronde comme une tonne, battait des oeufs dans une poêle et criait à tue-tête après sa fille qui tardait à lui apporter du beurre.87

And familiar techniques, scene, tableau, portrait, are centrally complemented by dialogue. The characters’ exclamations prompt brief descriptions when they enter; Balzac’s predominantly pictorial techniques suggest both caricature and higher art. His card-players are ‘digne[s] de ces farauds d’estaminet si bien rendus par Bellangé dans ses caricatures’, whilst others form a tableau: Ce groupe attentif, dont toutes les têtes stupides étaient rangées en demi-cercle, avait quelque chose de biblique. Ces créatures presque sauvages ressemblaient aux bergers hébreux agenouillés devant la crèche.88

Le Charlatan, little more than an anecdote, is the first of Balzac’s fictions to adopt a segmented structure suited to episodic publication, and the first by any author to carry the often ominous promise: ‘la suite au prochain numéro’.89 With Adieu, it paved the way for texts like Sarrasine or Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, the stories published in literary reviews over the next two years, and ultimately, for a whole new genre, the roman-feuilleton. As early as the autumn of , Balzac sought to exploit the journal’s fragmentation to promote book publication, via his project for a Société d’abonnement général.90 But, in a pattern which was to become characteristic, Le Charlatan’s sequel never appeared. Serialization, unusual in La Mode, was almost impossible in La Silhouette. The very form of Le Charlatan, combining, but segmenting, portrait, narrative, and dialogue, reveals Balzac’s difficulties in writing even brief narrative for journals in this period. With the exception of Adieu, his subsequent contributions to La Mode and La Silhouette are fictional but non-narrative études de mœurs. The sophisticated, juxtapository techniques of the Scènes de la vie privée were of limited usefulness in a newspaper. As early as May , Balzac had reached an impasse. La Caricature, the other journal for which he wrote, offered, on the face of it, little hope of escape. Founded with the same writers, artists, and financial backing as La Silhouette,91 it sought a similar market by similar means, via a concoction of sketches, portraits, and anecdotes supplemented by the indispensable OD ii. . OD ii. –. Referring to Ostade and Teniers, R. Chollet points out the Dutch and Flemish inspiration of this scene (Balzac journaliste, –). 89 The more urgent promise ‘la suite à demain’ first appeared in ‘Le Déjeuner d’un bandit: nouvelle corse’, L’Opinion ( Dec. ): R. Guise, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton (–)’, Doctorat d’État thesis, Nancy, , pt. II, p. . 90 Cf. Ch. , p.  and n. . 91 Cf. Chollet, Balzac journaliste, –, , . 87 88

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lithographs. La Colique 92 is about a prank played by an artist on unsuspecting clerics, whilst L’Opium 93 is an account of hallucination. But the visual also predominates in works attempting to reproduce verbally the effect of landscape illustration. La Mort de ma tante,94 Croquis[II],95 La Dernière Revue de Napoleon,96 and La Reconnaissance du gamin,97 like the openings of La Colique or La Mort de ma tante, solicit our visual imagination, whilst other articles, like Une vue du grand monde and Croquis[I] 98 pursue the portrait’s interpretation of external detail.99 Here, too, Balzac struggles to bring narrative to the paper. Le Charlatan’s innovative combination of portrait and story continues in Zéro100 and in La Reconnaissance du gamin,101 where a two-paragraph portrait is followed by a short tale before ending with a moral.102 Towards the end of , the narrative element begins to dominate, revealing the influence of Balzac’s writing elsewhere, particularly in the Revue de Paris. Most of the fictional articles in this period, like La Colique, are narrative, even those with titles which might earlier have suggested portraits, such as Le Garçon de bureau.103 Balzac develops the techniques of compression still further: ‘rebourrage’ is reduced, dialogue circumvents the authorial exposition. As a result, the portrait changes from being an individual example of a type to a component, usually expository, part of narrative. In La Caricature, Balzac expands newspaper fiction to make structures which later form the model for short stories like Sarrasine and Les Proscrits. Balzac’s contribution to La Caricature was vital to the development of his fictional techniques. The house constraints of La Silhouette effectively prohibited narrative not through lack of space (Des artistes104 is extensive and is also a series), but because the journal’s pictorial ethos did not allow it; the same would have been true of La Caricature. But Balzac’s status as sole contributor between October and December  allowed him to break the house rules— or rather, to work around them. In Les Litanies romantiques105 he ingeniously extends the anecdote by incorporating one of the journal’s rubrics, Croquis, into his text.106 He would do much the same as single-handed writer of his Revue parisienne (see Chapter  below). Editing La Caricature enabled Balzac to introduce the techniques of longer prose fiction to brief articles at a time when a publishing crisis precluded their use in book form. Balzac’s journal articles in  and  were centrally instrumental in his development, leading him to adapt techniques to the journals in which his articles appeared, creating the sense of community with the 92 94 96 98 99 100 102 104 105

93 C ( Nov. ), OD ii. –. OD ii. –. 95 C ( Dec. ), OD ii. –. C ( Nov. ), OD ii. –. 97 C ( Nov. ), OD ii. –. C ( Nov. ), ii. –. C, Prospectus (Oct. ), OD ii. –. Subsequently most noticeable in the openings of Sarrasine and Les Proscrits. 101 C ( Nov. ), OD ii. –. S  ( Oct. ), –. 103 C ( Nov. ), CHH xxvi. –. OD ii. . S  ( Feb. and  Mar. ), –, –;  ( Apr. ), –. 106 OD ii. –, esp.  n. . C ( Dec. ), OD ii. –.

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reader found in the numerous frame stories of the literary reviews; lithographs fostered the pictorial and caricatural qualities of his writing, and its socially critical cast. But if journals taught him to be brief, his aims could not be wholly achieved within their limited confines. From September  he turned to a different medium, the literary review.

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Balzac and the Literary Reviews, October –August  Over a third of Balzac’s stories were written between October  and the end of . This remarkable flowering began with his stories published in literary reviews, principally the Revue de Paris, and was to lead to some of his most audacious and ambitious fictions: La Peau de chagrin and Les Cent Contes drolatiques, Le Colonel Chabert, and Le Curé de Tours; and ultimately, to Eugénie Grandet and Le Père Goriot, the first novels of his maturity. But none could have been created without the literary reviews, or Balzac’s major contributions to them in the year from October : L’Élixir de longue vie, Sarrasine, Une passion dans le désert, Le Réquisitionnaire, L’Enfant maudit, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, and L’Auberge rouge.

(i) October –August : A New Form, the Literary Review Balzac’s activity was driven by hard commercial fact. By , publishing was in crisis. The increase in literacy, and the spread of cabinets de lecture (readingrooms where books were hired, but not bought)1 had led to a thirst for fiction which French writers alone could not quench; the market was flooded with foreign, usually Anglo-Saxon, novels by writers like Scott, Cooper, Lewis, Radcliffe, and lesser contemporaries.2 But the dominance of these cabinets, and the expensiveness of books, meant that few of these readers were purchasers; whilst, in publishing, the ready availability of credit, which had proliferated since , had brought overproduction and bankruptcy to many practictioners.3 ‘La République des lettres n’a manqué comme l’industrie, ni de produits, ni de producteurs . . . l’emploi des machines a fait passer les besoins réels de la consommation et déprécier les objets fabriqués: elle a souffert, on ne peut le 1 Cf. F. Parent-Lardeur, Lire à Paris au temps de Balzac, les cabinets de lecture à Paris, – (). 2 Stendhal noted: ‘Sir Walter Scott a eu environ deux cents imitateurs en France; tous les ouvrages de ces auteurs ont été lus, quelques-uns même ont eu plusieurs éditions et sont parvenus à se faire lire à Paris’ (Projet d’un article sur ‘Le Rouge et le noir’ in Le Rouge et le noir, ed. P.-G. Castex (), ). Cf. A. Vanoncini, Figures de la modernité (),  et seq. 3 See N. Felkay, Balzac et ses éditeurs (), pt. I, esp. ch .

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nier.4 In the s, the production of fiction had risen relentlessly, then levelled out in :  new novels were registered in the Bibliographie de la France in , but in  numbers fell by more than a third to , and in  to , the lowest figure since  5—a direct consequence of the press restrictions which had triggered the July Revolution. In its aftermath, many publishers would go bankrupt.6 The absence of those willing or able to risk book production left a gap in the market which was rapidly filled by the new literary reviews. Their necessary brevity made short fiction transiently the dominant prose narrative form during the worsening crisis of , and the slight upturn of , when it became a veritable obsession, the folie du conte. Thereafter began its decline. Publishing was to half recover in , and to suffer a new crisis four years later; whilst the establishment of newspaper serialization in , with Balzac’s La Vieille Fille, gave shorter fiction a longer lease of life, many feuilletons in fact being long nouvelles of five or six episodes until the early s.7 But, in , such developments lay far ahead. At its foundation the previous April, the Revue de Paris, the first of the reviews for which Balzac wrote, was a completely original publishing venture. Its originality lay in two innovations: the deliberate absence of political line, and an exclusive devotion to literature. Under the last of its three literary rubrics, ‘littérature ancienne’, ‘littérature étrangère’, and ‘littérature moderne’, it frequently published complete new stories, drama, and poetry, and was the first periodical systematically to serialize fiction—an innovation which, with the absence of visible political colour, was to pave the way for the roman-feuilleton. The Revue’s formula resulted almost entirely from the crisis, which had kept aspiring authors from publishing their work, and an eager public from reading it. Véron, its first director, was anxious to distance his creation from newspapers and other journals: ‘ce n’est point un journal, mais un livre que nous publions’.8 Many other features made it more book-like: its appearance monthly, rather than weekly, or every few days; its 4 C.-L. Lesur, ‘Note pour servir à l’histoire des Sciences, des belles lettres et des arts en ’, Annuaire Historique Universel (), . Cf. R. Guise, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton (–)’, Doctorat d’État thesis, Nancy, , pt. II, p. . 5 M. Iknayan, The Idea of the Novel in France, – (Geneva, ), . Cf. also D. Bellos, ‘La Conjoncture de la production’, in R. Chartier, H. Martin, and J.-P. Vivet (eds.), Histoire de l’édition française (), iii. –, esp. ; and J.-Y. Mollier, L’Imprimerie et la librairie en France dans les années – in J. Meyer-Petit (ed.), Balzac imprimeur et défenseur du livre (), esp.  et seq. 6 See Felkay, Balzac et ses éditeurs,  et seq. Balzac’s De l’état actuel de la librairie (Feuilleton des journaux politiques ( Mar. )) describes some of these circumstances and suggests solutions developed from autumn  in his project for reforming the book trade via a Sociéte d’abonnement général: OD ii. –; R. Chollet, Balzac journaliste (),  et seq., –; ‘Un épisode inconnu de l’histoire de la librairie’, RSH (); ‘Balzac et sa “Grande affaire de librairie”: l’acte de société de ’, AB (); and OD ii. –. 7 Cf. R. Guise, ‘Balzac et le roman-feuilleton’, AB (), –, and ‘Le Roman-feuilleton’, pt. I, chs. –; pt. II, ch. I. 8 RP (), p. v.

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octavo format, which Balzac had sought in vain for Le Dernier Chouan,9 but gained for the Physiologie;10 and, most importantly, its printing of articles with the author’s name—a crucial innovation—and without the constraints of house style or explicit political line. The Revue de Paris was, indeed, a book in all but name—the ideal place for a budding Balzac. Between October  and December , it published the majority of his stories. The Revue des deux mondes, founded in June  and relaunched in January ,11 was, like Véron’s review, apolitical, and intended for a cultivated readership. It concentrated on narrative, together with ethnographical, social, and scientific articles. A literary emphasis was strongly implied: ‘Nous nous attacherons principalement . . . à donner des morceaux littéraires qui soient la peinture animée des usages, des coutumes, des préjugés nationaux’12— another thinly disguised promise of fiction, one which made the Revue des deux mondes almost as ideal a ground for publication as the Revue de Paris. Together with L’Artiste, these two reviews published most of Balzac’s stories prior to .13 They gave immediate and frequent exposure to a sizeable captive readership without the anonymity or pseudonymity of La Mode, La Silhouette, and La Caricature, or the need to obey their stylistic, political, or—above all— spatial constraints. They also paid in advance.14 Over this period, they published an increasing amount of original short prose fiction.15 Balzac’s contributions were effectively the pursuit of novel-writing by other means, articles intended to produce an immediate return whilst longer, more ambitious projects like La Peau de chagrin and Monographie de la vertu were being prepared.16 Yet his stories for the reviews are more than merely incidental. They form the major part of his output in this period, and a significant slice of La Comédie humaine.17 Cf. letter from Latouche to Balzac,  Jan. , Corr. i. – and n. . Until Balzac’s success the octavo volume was reserved for elevated genres. Stendhal noted: ‘Le roman pour les femmes de chambre est en général imprimé sous format in- et chez M. Pigoreau’, but in order to ensure success ‘il est indispensable que le livre soit imprimé sous format in-octavo’ (Projet d’un article, ). 11 12 Cf. Chollet, Balzac journaliste,  et seq. RDM, Prospectus (Jan. ). 13 In L’Artiste, which appeared weekly from  Feb. , Balzac also published Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu ( July and  Aug. ), episodes – of Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit (Contes bruns;  Dec. ), and La Transaction ( and  Feb.  and  Mar. ), and in keepsakes during  Le Refus (Le Saphir), Le Départ (L’Émeraude), and Le Dôme des Invalides (Annales romantiques). 14 The Revue de Paris paid  frs. for  pages per month, whilst the contract for La Peau de chagrin offered only , frs. for two volumes. Cf. La Peau de chagrin, ed P. Barbéris (), . 15 Cf. Guise, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton’, pt. I, ch. . 16 La Peau de chagrin, sold to Gosselin and Canel on  Jan. , with delivery promised ‘le  février au plus tard’, was not published until the following August, whilst Monographie de la vertu bought by Boulland and Canel on  Mar. , was never written: Corr. i. – and –. 17 The importance Balzac attached to them is demonstrated by his vehement disagreement with Pichot over Maître Cornélius (q.v.) and by his absorption in L’Auberge rouge: ‘Je suis à cheval sur un crime et je mange, je me couche dans L’Auberge rouge’ (letter to Rabou,  May , Corr. i. ); apart from Sarrasine, most form the core of the Études philosophiques and the second, , series of Scènes de la vie privée. 9

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(ii) Balzac’s Stories for the Reviews: L’Élixir de longue vie, L’Enfant maudit, Une passion dans le désert, Le Réquisitionnaire Writing for the reviews gave Balzac freedom for the exploration of personal and psychological concerns which had simply not been possible in journal articles or in the Scènes de la vie privée. The curious and the fantastic form the core of Balzac’s short fiction in –: parricide and reincarnation in L’Élixir de longue vie, a sculptor’s love for a castrato in Sarrasine, a soldier’s affair with a panther in Une passion dans le désert, transmission of thought in Le Réquisitionnaire; in Le Chefd’œuvre inconnu, an artist’s infatuation with his painting. Apparent sources of such stories are often not hard to find: Hoffmann’s Elixire des Teufels for L’Élixir,18 the Pygmalion legend and the Mémoires de Casanova for Sarrasine,19 the topicality of the exotic in Une passion. And all appeal to the vogue for the fantastic fired by Hoffmann’s works from , when Balzac probably first read them.20 Yet profound impulses elevate these narratives from the realm of literary fashion to the absolute. They are perhaps nowhere more fundamental than in L’Élixir de longue vie.21 The story of Bartholoméo Belvidéro’s attempt to escape death by charging his son Juan to embalm him with the elixir is Hoffmannesque at least in theme, if not in origin,22 exploiting Gothic clichés (an Italian Renaissance setting and an ending recalling Lewis’s The Monk), and numerous presentations of Don Juan. But Balzac builds his story around the relationship between past and present, subjective and objective, which had already governed his approach to history in Adieu.23 In relating how Juan 18 According to A.-M. Baron and R. Guise (Le Fils prodigue (), ; x. –), but this is most unlikely (T. W. Lewis,‘The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on Balzac’, Ph.D. diss., London, , –; P. Whyte, ‘Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu de Balzac: esthétique et image’, in M.-A. Hutton (ed.), Text(e)/Image (Durham, ), –, at ). Likelier origins are Ignaz Denner (Lewis, ‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’, or La Vieillesse de Don Juan, the play on which Balzac planned to collaborate in – (R. Guise, OCI xxi. –); but sceptics may well prefer to find it (and the germ of César Birotteau’s huile comagène) in the prospectus for ‘Pilules antiglaireuses de longue vie’, the very first item printed by Balzac’s presses in  (R. Tranchida, ‘Inventaire des impressions balzaciennes’, AB (), ). 19 Cf. H. David, ‘Balzac italianisant: autour de Sarrasine’, RLC (), –; P. Citron, ‘Note sur Sarrasine’, AB () –. Lewis makes a convincing case for locating ultimate sources in Hoffmann tales such as L’Église des Jésuites and La Cour d’Artus: ‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’, –. 20 Lewis, ‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’,  et seq. Cf. P.-G. Castex, ‘Walter Scott contre Hoffmann: les épisodes d’une rivalité littéraire en France’, Mélanges d’histoire littéraire offerts à Daniel Mornet (), –. 21 RP ( Oct. ). 22 Pace R. Guise, ‘Balzac lecteur des Élixirs du diable’, AB (); cf. P. Brunel, ‘Variations balzaciennes sur Don Juan’, AB (), –. Balzac’s story may in fact be indebted to Steele: E. Teichmann, ‘Une source inconnue de L’Élixir de longue vie de Balzac’, RLC  (), –, and B. Tolley, ‘The Source of Balzac’s L’Élixir de longue vie’, RLC  (), –. 23 And in petto in Croquis [I] and La Mort de ma tante (C ( Dec. ), OD ii. –).

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thwarts Bartholoméo by failing to carry out his bidding, and how the elixir enables Juan himself fleetingly to escape death by concealing from his own son Philippe the elixir’s true purpose, the story juxtaposes the three generations in three main scenes. The life–death antithesis is constantly stressed: Juan carouses whilst his father lies dying, the deathbed forming ‘un contraste si heurté avec la scène que don Juan venait d’abandonner, qu’il ne put s’empêcher de tressaillir’ (xi. ). Bartholoméo dies on a winter’s night, Juan on a summer’s evening (xi. , ); there are echoes of Hoffmann (as F acknowledges, xi. ),24 in this tale of miracles wrought through diabolic power. L’Élixir de longue vie is about the struggle for omnipotence. At its centre, after the death of don Juan’s father, lay two paragraphs of pointed authorial intervention, remodelled in F as the preface, juxtaposing Juan’s search for absolute knowledge with his arrival at utter cynicism (xi. b): ‘Il prit l’âme et la matière, les jeta dans un creuset, n’y trouva rien, et dès lors il devint  !’ (xi. ). Juan, descendant of Corsino, is an avatar of Faust, Manfred, and Melmoth, and his discovery enables him, when his own moment to call upon the elixir comes, to present it as holy oil for safeguarding the soul rather than an elixir for restoring the body (xi. ). From this central struggle for personal power, from the son’s victory over, and effective murder of, his father, and from an obsession with longevity of his own father, who had died but the year before, Balzac builds out: to the individual’s relation to the world; to the mind’s transcendent potential; to the quest for the absolute which defines both the antiquary and Raphaël (in La Peau de chagrin); and to political power, to the collective delusions underpinning religion and state—to the father as head of the family, and to God as ruler of the world. In the story’s final pages, Juan’s brief discussion with pope Julius II, his heartless manipulation of his son, and the mass misapprehension of his partial resurrection as a divine, not diabolic, miracle, turn the story into a tragico-grotesque morality tale (xi. –). The final scene, where Juan’s disembodied head rails at the congregation, eventually attacking the officiant, exemplifies Balzac’s romantisme frénétique at its most extravagant, and his most mordant anticlerical satires: ‘Allez à tous les diables, bêtes brutes que vous êtes! . . . êtes-vous stupide avec votre Dieu-vieillard!’ (xi. ). Despite later changes of political tack, Balzac, significantly, never moderated this ending,25 suggesting that the three generations of Belvidéros are emblematic of larger conflicts—of the three generations of France’s monarchs, ancien régime, Restoration, and roi bourgeois, of the eternal struggle between the generations, of the constant combat of life and death. Freud declares, discussing the psychology of love:26 Cf. P.-G. Castex, Le Conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (), . It was, in fact, reinforced (the clause last quoted was added in the  Werdet edition), in contrast to La Peau de chagrin, whose political excesses are considerably toned down. 26 A.-M. Baron gives an illuminating Freudian analysis of this story: Le Fils prodige, –. The following comments use Freud more as a guide to the text’s structural characteristics. 24 25

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When a child hears that he owes his life to his parents, or that his mother gave him life, his feelings of tenderness unite with impulses which strive at power and independence . . . It is as though the boy’s defiance were to make him say: ‘I want nothing from my father; I will give him back all I cost him.’ He then forms the fantasy of rescuing his father from danger and saving his life; in this way he puts his account square with him. This phantasy is commonly enough displaced on to the emperor, king, or some other great man; after being thus distorted it becomes admissible to consciousness, and may even be made use of by creative writers.27

We hear almost nothing of Juan’s mother, except that, like Balzac’s, she married when young an already elderly man, Juan’s father Bartholoméo, and that she was called Juana (xi. )—evidence enough, were any needed, that this mother ‘gave him life’, that the parents considered the child as an extension of their egos. But we do hear rather more about the only other women in the story—the seven courtesans present at the opening orgy, whose presence can be related to Freud’s contention that the way boys cope with the discovery that his parents engage in sexual activity is by telling himself ‘that the difference betwen his mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing’, her lover exhibiting the features of the boy’s own ‘personality, grown up and so raised to a level with his father’.28 In L’Élixir de longue vie, Balzac transfers his own fantasies about his mother (who was all the more inaccessible because actually unfaithful) on to the prostitutes, emblematic of absolute availability yet remoteness, their sexual availability for Juan, like the mother’s for the child in the Oedipus complex, being dependent on the father’s death (xi. ).29 And his simultaneous adoration and abomination of his father are projected on to the twin figures of Bartholoméo and of Juan; to Freud’s fantasy of being ‘raised to a level with his father’, of refusing to rescue, or rescuing, his own father, with a final, horrific vision of what happens when he does, Juan’s final apotheosis as at once devil and God corresponding to a dichotomy in the father detected also by Freud.30 Balzac’s story is a brief, intense projection of his own psychological conflicts of , one which would be magnified in the conjunction of prostitution and omnipotence, together 27 Cf. S. Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’ (Contributions to the Psychology of Love I), in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, ed. J. Strachey and A. A. Richards (London, ), –; Freud’s emphasis. 28 Ibid. –. 29 There are similarly ‘virginal’ prostitutes in La Peau de chagrin (‘vierges factices’ or ‘d’hier’, x. , b), indicating the oxymoronic yoking of purity and pornocracy in the mother complex. 30 ‘ God and the Devil were originally identical—were a single figure which was later split into two figures with opposite attributes . . . The contradictions in the original nature of God are, however, a reflection of the ambivalence which governs the relation of the individual to his personal father. If the benevolent and righteous God is a substitute for the father, it is not to be wondered at that his hostile attitude to his father . . . should have come to expression in the creation of Satan. Thus the father, it seems, is the individual prototype both of God and the Devil’ (S. Freud, ‘A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’, Art and Literature, ed. J. Strachey and A. Dickson (London, ), –).

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with the compensating maternal figure of the femme-ange Pauline (doubtless Balzac’s first love, Mme de Berny),31 in La Peau de chagrin the following year. L’Enfant maudit 32 is the other of Balzac’s contemporary stories which makes a profoundly personal exploration of psychological conflict; but (as often in Balzac, and in psychoanalytic case studies),33 its terms are reversed. If L’Enfant, like L’Élixir, has a brutish father, Hérouville, as male protagonist, it focuses equally on a mother, the delicate Jeanne de Saint-Savin, compelled to marry Hérouville in return for the release of her Huguenot lover Chaverny. It is she who opens the narrative and, in her death, draws it to a close (x. ); in the interim, Étienne, supposedly Chaverny’s bastard, but in fact legitimate by Hérouville, and Maximilien, her second legitimate son, form the two contrasting panels of the central diptych. The contrast between Étienne and his brother is at the centre of L’Enfant maudit, falling exactly half-way through (Balzac later heightened it: x. , , , ), corresponding to deeper contrasts of the masculine and the feminine, sensitivity and brutality, love and marriage. Both Étienne and his mother Jeanne compensate for their unhappiness, each providing for the other the love which Hérouville denies, Jeanne making of her son ‘un simulacre d’amant’, Étienne listening to his mother with ‘une admiration passionnée qu’elle n’avait jamais vue que dans les yeux de Chaverny’.34 The unresolved past turns into neurosis, into a failure to separate sex roles into lover and parent, or rather, the desire to fuse them. (Sarrasine, the story of a man’s love for Zambinella, a castrato, a ‘woman’ with a penis but who, sexually, can give nothing; and Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, Frenhofer’s quest to find life in art via love for his painting, La Belle Noiseuse, suggest similar predicaments.) The result is art: Étienne’s sensitivity and privileged perception is rivalled only by Louis Lambert and Séraphîtus/Séraphîta. Through poetry and music he attains a supra-linguistic unity which transcends the mother–son, subject– object boundary: ‘Étienne se créa le plus mystique des langages pour pouvoir s’entretenir avec sa mère. Il étudia les ressources de sa voix . . . et venait chanter d’une voix mélancolique sous les fenêtres de sa mère’ (x. ). It is his singing, 31 Balzac would later write to Mme Hanska: ‘quand je sombrais une première fois, c’était en , je n’avais que  ans, et j’avais un ange à mes côtés’:  Oct. , LH i. . 32 L’Enfant maudit, RDM rd ser., :  (c. Apr.  (dated Jan.–Feb. )), –; x. –. Balzac began to draft a novel of this title as early as , and in  published La Perle brisée, a brief sequel to the  story; the two were combined to appear in novel form in . Cf. F. Germain, ‘L’Enfant maudit: esquisse d’une préhistoire’, AB (); L’Enfant maudit (); and x. –. 33 Cf. Freud, ‘Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis’: ‘an idea that has a contradictory—an ambivalent—content becomes divided into two sharply contrasted opposites.’ Sarrasine reverses Casanova’s story of his liaison with an opera singer en travesti who turns out to be a beautiful woman: Casanova gave Balzac the Lanty name and the couleuvre incident (cf. vi. ). Balzac’s ‘compositions nées jumelles’, from César Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen to Le Cousin Pons and La Cousine Bette, will exemplify the process. 34 x. , : additions on proof for the  Études philosophiques.

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too, which eventually causes his father to relent (x. ), which brings him back to primal unity in his embrace of his father with the words ‘O ma mère pardonne’ (X ). And, in narrative terms, neurosis is reflected in a circularity and stasis which characterizes the whole text. L’Enfant maudit opens with Jeanne d’Hérouville and, as the first part of the reworked Études philosophiques version of , closes with the heavily marked parallel of her death (‘Même tempête, mêmes angoisses, même peur d’éveiller le géant sans pitié’, x. ); it is structured by the births of Étienne and Maximilien—one easy, one torturous, both symbolic. The meaning, and much of the expression, of L’Enfant maudit is ultimately metaphorical. The fundamental significance of his quest for solace in the sea after his mother’s death is conveyed, in the Études philosophiques, by an all-telling play on mère: ‘il sentit bientôt le besoin d’aimer, d’avoir une autre mère . . . A force de chercher un autre lui-même auquel il pût confier ses pensées . . . il finit par sympathiser avec l’Océan. La mer devint pour lui un être animé, pensant’ (x. –), analogue of the maternal milk which would protect him ‘tant qu’elle le nourrirait’.35 His retreat to a hollow (an eminently safe and female space) brings the tale full circle, to the birth which forms its opening. The scene is the sense of L’Enfant maudit. Forme and fond coincide: it is entirely significant that Balzac’s – amplification of the story introduces no extra characters or plot development (unlike comparable amplifications of Le Colonel Chabert or Le Curé de Tours),36 but magnifies its poetic truth in line with his contemporary work on Louis Lambert and Séraphîta, and its own fundamental character. It is only by taking such metaphorical and formal qualities seriously that we can come near the heart of some of Balzac’s more baffling stories. In Une passion dans le désert,37 the framed anecdote’s meaning is only revealed by its relation to the frame.38 The opening conversation between the narrator and his lady companion on the one hand, and the soldier’s framed anecdote on the other, are but two sides of the same coin. His tale insistently parallels woman and animal, presenting the encounter with the panther as a transcendent sexual experience.39 Desert and sky represent absolutes of excess and threat (viii. ), the cave in which the soldier takes refuge a contrastingly protective, female, space; but the panther’s roar ‘comme les derniers ronflements des orgues dans une église’ (viii. ), links this epiphanic immensity and depth 35 x. ; stressed also in her happiness ‘lorsqu’elle sentait Étienne se gorgeant de son lait’ (x. ), and the ‘voie lactée’ of Petrarch and Dante which mother and son travel together (x. –). 36 See Ch.  below. 37 RP  ( Dec. ), –. 38 For a discussion of the récit-contrat as a strategy in connection with Balzac’s work, see e.g. C. Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis (Cambridge, ), ch. . 39 Notations echoed in La Femme de trente ans [I], ‘les gestes de la tête et les torsions du cou, si variées, si expressives chez une femme’ (ii. ) and the more explicitly serpentine and animalistic comparisons in La Fille aux yeux d’or; the panther, Mignonne’s, eyes, ‘deux lueurs faibles et jaunes’, anticipate Paquita’s (viii.  n. ). Cf. also L.-F. Hoffmann, ‘Mignonne et Paquita’, AB (), and P. Citron, ‘Le rêve asiatique de Balzac’, AB ().

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with a terror of woman as of the absolute. The tale turns on the tension between aggression and engulfment: the soldier’s fear of being devoured versus his desire to stab and kill. Analogy, literature’s way to ‘chercher peut-être infructueusement la vérité’ (xi. ), lies at the heart of Une passion: ‘Dans le désert . . . il y a tout, et il n’y a rien . . .’, explains the soldier (viii. ); and one could say as much of this story.40 Balzac published the brief narrative Zéro as a pendant to Tout in La Silhouette in October , a month before Une passion; and ‘all’ or ‘nothing’ form the central polarities of Le Réquisitionnaire, the story of Mme de Dey’s anxious wait for the arrival of a conscript she expects to be her son. At the climactic moment ‘[elle] vit son fils’, but the man she embraces turns out to be a stranger. ‘Elle flottait entre la crainte d’avoir perdu son fils et l’espoir de de voir reparaître’, and she dies ‘A l’heure précise où . . . son fils était fusillé dans le Morbihan’ (x. –). Balzac uses the story to speculate on ‘les sympathies qui méconnaissent les lois de l’espace’ (ibid.), but it is more significant as the first of his fictions to focus specifically on provincial life since Le Vicaire des Ardennes (), exploiting a coming vogue for tales of the provinces notably represented by his friend Samuel-Henry Berthoud.41 Yet it uses detail in a way redolent of Parisian observation de mœurs, and which was to become quite as characteristic of the future Scènes de la vie de province. The exposition is focused through local curiosity (x. ); Mme de Dey’s reclusion, her ordering of a hare for dinner, create an initial enigma as intriguing as those opening Madame Firmiani and La Femme abandonnée, or, later, Eugénie Grandet and La Vieille Fille. And Le Réquisitionnaire foreshadows another of Balzac’s provincial texts, Le Curé de Tours, in the transferred erotic interest of its story. It is effectively a love-affair between mother and son. The closure of Mme de Dey’s salon excites ribaldry: the magistrate speculates ‘elle a sans doute donné asile à son amant’ (x. ); her revelation of her motive comes as a confession of love (‘C’était la seule fois que, dans cette petite ville, son âme généreuse eût sympathisé avec celle d’un autre’, x. f.), and her son is awaited as anxiously as a lover. Her disappointment, in consequence, is as atrocious as a betrayal, an anguish foreshadowing the various kinds of loneliness suffered by Mme Willemsens (in La Grenadière), Mme de Beauséant (in La Femme abandonnée), and Eugénie Grandet. Le Réquisitionnaire is one of several stories (Les Deux Rêves, El Verdugo, Adieu) using the Scènes de la vie privée’s techniques to explore philosophical themes; less than seven months 40 Cf. P. Brooks, Body Work (Cambridge, Mass., and London, ), –, on sexual and narrative mutilation in the tale; and P. Laforgue, L’Éros romantique: représentations de l’amour en  (), ch. , on its dichotomies of presence and absence. 41 Cf. M. Fargeaud, ‘Dans le sillage des grands romantiques: S.-H. Berthoud’, AB (), esp. –, and N. Mozet, La Ville de province dans l’œuvre de Balzac: l’espace romanesque: fantasmes et idéologie (), ch. I, esp. –; Balzac au pluriel (), –. Cf. B. Guyon, ‘Balzac “invente” les Scènes de la vie de province’, Mercure de France (July ), –, and A.-M. Meininger, ‘Histoire des Scènes de la vie de province’, AB (),  et seq.

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later, it would appear with these and several others in the Romans et contes philosophiques,42 forerunner of the Études philosophiques series in which it now appears. But beyond this, Le Réquisitionnaire also shows how the questioning of boundaries in dramatic journal stories such as El Verdugo or Un épisode sous la Terreur is extending in Balzac’s burgeoning creation, in stories of women and private life, of Parisian social observation, in provinces far removed. It is a mobility of conception and of category which would in due course sideline the descriptive, sociological part of his world (Théorie de la démarche, Traité des excitants modernes),43 to form the kaleidoscopic basis of his opus.

(iii) Portrait and Enigma: Sarrasine44 In the interim, Balzac had hardly abandoned pen-portraits in La Caricature, producing a clutch of pot-boiling variants, some of which, along with more earnest pieces, would be incorporated into what would eventually become the composite novel La Femme de trente ans.45 Yet it was not a pen-portrait, but a painting, Girodet’s Endymion, which formed the emblematic source of Sarrasine, together with the more recent memory of Latouche’s novel Fragoletta ou Naples et Paris en .46 Fragoletta, against a vast historical background, tells the story of the siblings Marius and Eugénie d’Hauteville’s love for Fragoletta, the androgynous Camille/Philippe Adriani.47 To produce Sarrasine, Balzac essentially does to Latouche’s narrative what he had done to Le Dernier Chouan in BF ( Sept. ). Cf. V – and n. , and pace R. Fortassier, ‘Les Études analytiques: du rejet à une pleine reconnaissance’, AB (). 44 RP  (– Nov. ), – and –. Sarrasine has been the subject of probably more complete critical readings than any other Balzac story, notably R. Barthes, S/Z (); P. Citron, ‘Interprétation de Sarrasine’, AB (); R. Chambers, Story and Situation (Minneapolis, ), –; M.Serres, L’Hermaphrodite: Sarrasine sculpteur (); C. Paglia’s dizzying interpretation in the light of (mainly) Western culture (Sexual Personae (Harmondsworth, ), –); T. Crow’s illumination of the historical background (Emulation (New Haven and London, ), –); P. Laforgue’s exploration in the context of contemporary mentalité (L’Éros romantique, ch. ); and C. Brémond and T. Pavel, De Barthes à Balzac (). The following discussion explores Sarrasine in terms of its internal structures and of Balzac’s contemporary work. 45 Notably La Dernière Revue de Napoléon and Une vue de Touraine, combined in  with the article La Femme de trente ans [I] to make Même histoire, forerunner of the  novel La Femme de trente ans. For a succinct account of this complex genesis, cf. ii. –; cf. also S. Vachon, ‘La “Même histoire” d’Une Femme de trente ans’, in Balzac: ‘La Femme de trente ans’ ‘Une vivante énigme’, ed. J.-L. Diaz (), –. 46 Balzac expressed a desire to see Girodet’s painting in  (Corr. i. –), a decade before Fragoletta was published; the canvas was exhibited at the Salons of  and , and displayed at the Luxembourg in : D. Adamson, ‘Balzac and the Visual Arts’, D.Phil thesis, Oxford, , . But Balzac also drew on writers as diverse as Diderot and Casanova: J. Seznec, ‘Diderot et Sarrasine’, Diderot Studies (); David, ‘Balzac italianisant: autour de Sarrasine’. 47 On the significance of the androgyne in the novel, see P. Laforgue, L’Éros romantique, ch. , esp. –. 42 43

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order to create the Scènes de la vie privée. Discarding Fragoletta’s political context,48 and displacing the narrative to Rome and Paris in  and , Balzac concentrates on the account of mistaken desire for an androgynous object, making it—reminded of Girodet by his recently published Oeuvres posthumes 49— the story of an artist’s love. Sarrasine is a Pygmalion narrative,50 a tale of selfdeluding desire willing a statue’s perfection to life: sculpture, chiefly emblematic in Fragoletta, where Polyclitus’ depiction of an hermaphrodite mainly foreshadows the later action,51 is central in Balzac’s story. Of his several contemporary works combining pen-portraits and narrative, journal and book techniques, none does so more spectacularly than this. Headed ‘Une passion d’artiste’ in the Revue de Paris (vi. c), the framed story of Sarrasine’s unwitting love for a castrato forms a second chapter subordinate to, and developing from, the first, ‘Les Deux Portraits’ (vi. b), nearly its equal in length. Yet this opening contains not two portraits, but six. First come four presenting each member of the mysterious Lanty family (VI –)— except the last, who remains intriguingly anonymous. Even the lengthy sentence which introduces him delays mentioning its object until the last possible moment: ‘Les observateurs, ces gens qui tiennent à savoir dans quel magasin vous achetez vos candélabres . . . avaient remarqué, de loin en loin, au milieu des fêtes, des concerts, des bals, des raouts donnés par la comtesse, l’apparition d’un personnage étrange’ (vi. –). The next statement, ‘C’était un homme’, misleads us, minimizing any chance of identifying La Zambinella, the ‘woman’ in the framed narration, with the comte de Lanty, the old man in the frame, until his identity is revealed at the end. And the fifth portrait is delayed for four pages by speculation on the old man’s identity (vi. –), focused, as in La Paix du ménage and, later, Madame Firmiani, through the questioning of numerous characters, whose various explanations fuel our curiosity—but also puzzlement, since the portrait contains a number of important, but confusing, clues to his ambiguous gender: ‘la délicatesse de ses membres’, and ‘Un jabot de dentelle d’Angleterre assez roux, dont la richesse eût été enviée par une reine’ (vi. ). His face, potentially the most revealing feature, is last to be described, but its ‘peinture très bien exécutée’ and ‘perruque 48 It is on this aspect, and in particular on the impenetrability of Latouche’s narrative, that Balzac’s June  review of Fragoletta focuses (Mercure de France, : –: OD ii. –). Was he already contemplating Sarrasine, with a view to covering his tracks? 49 Girodet’s Oeuvres posthumes appeared in  (Crow, Emulation, ); the artist makes his only personal appearance in La Comédie humaine advising Sommervieux in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, written the same year. 50 It was on a painting of Pygmalion and Galatea that Girodet worked bootlessly for six years, inspiring, according to Crow, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (Emulation, –, ; Frenhofer works for ten). On the links between that story and the legend, cf. G. Didi-Hubermann, La Peinture incarnée (),  et seq. 51 Cf. Fragoletta, pref. M. Nemer (), –; cf. ibid., pp. v–vii, and Laforgue, L’Éros romantique,  et seq.

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blonde dont les boucles innombrables trahissaient une prétention extraordinaire’ are further markers of an effeminacy the narrator describes as ‘assez énergiquement annoncée’. Perhaps most subtle is the description of the old man as ‘cette espèce d’idole japonaise’, which effects an ingenious, and crucial, change of gender from masculine to feminine between this line and the next: ‘Silencieuse, immobile autant qu’une statue, elle exhalait l’odeur musquée des vieilles robes que les héritiers d’une duchesse exhument de ses tiroirs pendant un inventaire (vi. ).52 The portrait’s shifting gender microcosmically reverses the story’s revelation of a ‘woman’ as a man, hinting, via ‘les héritiers d’une duchesse’ at another central problem—how the Lantys acquired their wealth. But this description of protagonist as artefact also ironically foreshadows the central role of art and artist in the tale. Zambinella is ‘immobile autant qu’une statue’, his clothes framing his face (‘Le cadre était digne du portrait’), appearing as ‘une création artificielle’ (vi. ). In a clever mise-en-abyme, this fifth verbal portrait is juxtaposed to the sixth, Vien’s painting of Adonis (vi. ), allegedly the model for Girodet’s Endymion: only at the end is the Adonis (and thus, supposedly, Endymion) revealed to have been based on Sarrasine’s sculpture of Zambinella (vi.  and n. ).53 Several features, however, link the picture with information about Zambinella in the core story. The narrator’s companion’s (F: Mme de Rochefide’s) comment, ‘il est trop beau pour un homme’ echoes the sexual ambiguity of the narrator’s description; whilst her question ‘Un être si parfait existe-t-il?’ turns out to be more than rhetorical: Il admirait en ce moment la beauté idéale de laquelle il avait jusqu’alors cherché ça et là les perfections dans la nature, en demandant à un modèle, souvent ignoble, les rondeurs d’une jambe accomplie; à tel autre, les contours de sein . . . C’était plus qu’une femme, c’était un chef-d’œuvre! (vi. –)

Zambinella is literally ‘made up’ of parts gathered ‘çà et là’. Sarrasine, like Sommervieux in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, sees his lover as an artwork; but Zambinella, unlike Augustine, actually is one.54 Frame portrait and framed story are further linked by theatrical notation, which acts as a cipher for what one might call Zambinella’s ‘illusiveness’. The old man first appears ‘sorti de dessous terre, poussé par quelque mécanisme de théâtre’, and it is on stage that Sarrasine first sees her (vi. –). But her confession that ‘Le théâtre sur lequel vous m’avez vue’ is ‘toute ma vie, je n’en ai 52 Thus gender confusion comes earlier than Barthes suggested: ‘Je puis être un ami dévoué pour vous’ (S/Z, , ). 53 In versions prior to F the painter was Girodet, and both the Adonis and the Endymion were attributed to him (vi. b, d). Balzac’s modification does more than ‘defend the fragile [sic] fictional world . . . against an over-dependence on the factual’ (Crow, Emulation, ): it adds an extra layer between art and reality, reinforcing the story’s central theme. 54 Sarrasine’s infatuation mirrors Nathaniel’s with the mechanical doll Olympia in Der Sandmann, with which Lewis identifies several parallels: ‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’,  et seq.

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pas d’autre’ hints at a femininity no deeper than the décor, inviting a paradoxically literal interpretation beyond the figurative reading made by Sarrasine— and the reader: ‘Dans quelques heures vous ne me verrez plus des mêmes yeux, la femme que vous aimez sera morte’ (vi. ). The cogency of frame and framed story gives clues to the eventual outcome; it invites a reading involving rereading, an ‘alternatively gendered’ understanding of the whole. Yet there is a deeper unity in Sarrasine. Narcissism and androgyny connote the artist’s transcendent creative understanding, something implicit in figures such as Corsino, Lambert, Rubempré, and Steinbock. Zambinella’s union of masculine and feminine represents the highest forms of creation, an absolute irresistibly attractive to the artist Sarrasine: as both male and female, Zambinella reflects the androgyne’s mythological perfection. Her sexual ambiguity gives her a theoretically absolute power, an ability to transcend gender boundaries, to manipulate the ciphers of femininity—a kind of superhuman detachment enabling her to dupe, and pull the strings of, lesser beings. Sarrasine’s artistic integrity leads him into loving her, in a quest for supernatural perfection which overlooks the merely human. For the superhuman is also the inhuman: Zambinella’s perfection, if ideal in the abstract, is monstrous in reality, ‘une chose sans nom dans le langage humain’.55 It is impossible for Zambinella to have any normal sexual being, not merely in physical terms, but because her status as an artistic creation removes her from the sphere of everyday reality.56 As the theatrical imagery makes clear, this is a fatal illusion, its menace and incompatibility with life most clearly apparent when Sarrasine makes a sexual advance: at this move towards literal consummation, the artistic illusion crumbles, and her feminine ‘reality’ is revealed to be non-existent. Perfect in itself, the artistic creation is also self-contained, locked within the plenitude yet ultimate sterility of the androgyne. 55 Cf. M. Éliade, Méphistophélès et l’androgyne (), , –. In ancient societies hermaphrodite children were regarded as a curse of the gods and put to death (Éliade, cit. L. FrappierMazur, ‘Balzac et l’androgyne’, AB (), ; A. Busst,‘The Image of the Androgyne in the Nineteenth Century’ in I. Fletcher (ed.), Romantic Mythologies (London, ), ; cf. –), and all Balzac’s androgynous characters, with the exception of Séraphîtus/Séraphîta, are represented as being in some way deficient (Valentin, Marsay, Rubempré, Steinbock). See also M. Labouret, ‘Méphistophélès et l’androgyne’, AB (). Narcissism is closely related to the themes of creation and androgyny in Balzac’s work. Balzac doubles like Rubempré or Vautrin are also homo- or bisexual, and correspond to Freud’s account of the origins of homosexuality in the narcissistic stage of individual development. (‘Libido Theory and Narcissism’, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. J. Strachey and A. Richards (Harmondsworth, ), –; ‘On Narcissism’, ‘On Metapsychology, ed. A. Richards (Harmondsworth, ), , , ). In this reading, such creators, striving to combine the qualities of both sexes, turn their energies on themselves (or selfsubstitutes); their superhuman characteristics invite comparison both with the narrator and with God’s creation of man in his own image. 56 R. Barthes makes a similar observation with slightly different emphasis, noting that Zambinella’s inaccessibility derives from her lack of conformity to accepted categories (S/Z, ). But this can hardly be the most practical of her problems.

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Sarrasine sounds some of Balzac’s deepest concerns. Apart from L’Auberge rouge, it is the only story of this period which remains a first-person narrative in the Furne Comédie humaine; yet, unlike all the others, we are never told who tells it. Logically it can be attributed only to the authorial narrator: Sarrasine has been killed, Zambinella will have kept silence—as will her cardinal-protector. But beyond vague mention that the tale is ‘assez connue en Italie’, there is no hint of how the narrator heard it: he simply seems to know. This contradiction in narrative logic points to the deep convergence between Sarrasine’s story and that of his creator, and to the text’s explosive core.57 With the exception of Louis Lambert, Sarrasine is closer to Balzac than any other character. He embodies the artist’s narcissistic infatuation with the artwork; he faces his central struggle between vouloir and pouvoir. For if vouloir represents desire and pouvoir consummation, then vouloir and pouvoir are antitheses analogous to art and life.58 And the story’s opening contrast between life and warmth and cold and death announces this major theme as plainly as at the beginning of L’Élixir de longue vie, the narrator’s ‘macédoine morale’ (vi. ) reflecting the mixture of male and female in Zambinella.59 Like the protagonists of L’Élixir, Sarrasine attempts the impossible: to incorporate life/pouvoir (sexual love) into art (Zambinella). For all that Zambinella is human, ‘she’ is primarily an artistic creation, no more capable of returning love than Pygmalion’s statue or Frenhofer’s Belle Noiseuse. Frenhofer, indeed, will commit no less an error; and, as for Balzac’s other early chercheurs de l’Absolu in this period, Bartholoméo and Juan Belvidéro, and Raphaël de Valentin, Sarrasine’s attempt to transgress a natural law leads only to perdition. The choice between life and death, between nature and artifice, is the crux of Sarrasine. In the end, the only two pictures which matter are ‘la sombre et silencieuse image de la mort’ and ‘les décentes bacchanales de la vie’. For the narrator’s oxymoronic predicament, ‘sur la frontière de ces deux tableaux si disparates’ (vi. ), and the life–death opposition at the opening, are ‘mille fois répétés de diverses manières’: by the cold accompanying the aged Zambinella’s appearance (vi. ); by the repeated contrasting of his deathly figure with young, attractive women, representing both the heterosexual alternative (vi. , ), and an equally absolute transcendence, but in life: ‘le type de cette poésie secrète, lien commun de tous les arts, et qui fuit toujours ceux qui la cherchent’ (vi. ). Sarrasine presents a choice between heterosexuality and death. Zambinella appears accompanied by ever less-obscurely threatening images, culminating in ‘deux os mis en croix sur une tombe’ (vi. ). The alternatives reflect Sarrasine’s character (‘Tour à tour agissant ou passif, sans aptitude ou trop intelligent’ (vi. ), becoming more overt in the framed story itself, echoing 57 59

Citron, ‘Interprétation de Sarrasine’. Cf. Serres, L’Hermaphrodite, –.

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La Peau de chagrin, x. ; cf. Ch. (i) below.

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the narrator at the opening: when Zambinella sings, ‘L’artiste eut froid; puis, il sentit un foyer qui pétilla soudain dans les profondeurs de son être intime . . . “Etre aimé d’elle, ou mourir”, tel fut l’arrêt que l’artiste porta sur lui-même.60 Sarrasine’s ‘dépression morale’, his ‘espèce de frénésie’ and ‘tristesse morale’ (vi. –) all point to the uneasy nature of his passion; but her ‘fatale beauté’, his ‘sourde rage’, the fact that ‘Il ne pouvait que regarder cette femme extraordinaire avec des yeux enflammés qui brûlaient’ (vi. ), make him as surely doomed as any Don Juan.61 Sarrasine’s dreadful doubt at discovering that Zambinella is not a woman is a more absolute version of Mme de Dey’s encounter with the uncanny: his incredulous ‘Et c’est une illusion!’ (vi. ) as he contemplates first his statue, then its model, is his ransom for his delusions of transcendence, for the presumption that ‘il n’existait pas de distance entre lui et la Zambinella, il la possédait’ (vi. ), for the hubristic belief that it is impossible to ‘tromper l’oeil d’un artiste’ (vi. ). The ghastly outcome: ‘“Monstre! toi qui ne peux donner la vie à rien, tu m’as dépeuplé la terre de toutes les femmes . . . Plus d’amour! je suis mort à tout plaisir, à toutes les émotions humaines”’, is echoed by the narrator’s listener’s reaction: ‘“Vous m’avez dégoûtée de la vie et des passions pour longtemps. Au monstre près, tous les sentiments humains ne se dénouent-ils pas ainsi, par d’atroces déceptions?”’ (vi. , ). The story of Sarrasine, with its ‘passages dangereux pour le narrateur’ (vi. ), effectively forecloses his hopes of heterosexual love as well. Sarrasine’s binary structures embody its meaning as a conte moral about the dangers of excess—for Balzac, about the deceptions of artistic self-absorption; and for Sarrasine, about the alternatives of sexual conformity and death.62

(iv) Contes historiques and contes artistes: Les Proscrits and Le Chefd’œuvre inconnu Sarrasine marks the zenith of Balzac’s technique of portrait as enigma; subsequent texts use it in a way which is more routine. Hérouville is stereotypically evil at the beginning of L’Enfant maudit; Les Proscrits, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, and Maître Cornélius, which all turn in some way around questions of identity (respectively, of a visitor, of Frenhofer, of a thief) all use initially mysterious portraits to 60 The carefully crafted resemblances between frame and story, along with the close parallels between frame and story in other contemporary narratives such as L’Auberge rouge and L’Élixir de longue vie, seem to corroborate P. Citron’s view that frame and frame-story in Sarrasine were composed of one piece (vi. ). 61 Lewis finds a parallel in Hoffmann’s story of that name: ‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’,  n. . 62 It thus pushes Balzac’s real-life confusions of sexual identity to their limit: see G. Robb, Balzac: A Biography (London, ), –. On the morality of Sarrasine, cf. Laforgue, L’Éros romantique, –.

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give forward impetus to material from which it might otherwise be largely absent. This potentially puzzling regression can be explained by other contemporary generic models. Les Proscrits, subtitled Esquisse historique in the Revue de Paris, is set in , in the shadow of Notre-Dame, and, as would Maître Cornélius, exploits the popularity of Hugo’s novel, published but six weeks earlier.63 Both Balzac’s stories, indeed, could be called Esquisses historiques, crammings of the historical novel into the pint pot of the story,64 whilst the publishing crisis blew itself out; Maître Cornélius has elements of Hoffmannesque hallucination to boot.65 The plot of Les Proscrits turns on little more than its protagonists’ identity, just as, later, Maître Cornélius is, on the face of it, about little more than the temporary loss of Louis XI’s gold. Yet both are peculiarly Balzacian expressions of insecurities about artistic and regal, historical and national identity, explored both in Hugo’s novel and in other contemporary texts, mediated by generic experiment which is far more developed in Notre-Dame de Paris than in these stories.66 Six months before Les Proscrits, Balzac’s friend Berthoud had published his story of Tasso’s imprisonment, ‘Le Fou—Conte historique’.67 Balzac may in part have been inspired by Berthoud’s tale, which treats the isolation of madness and genius in an Italian Renaissance setting, seen through the eyes of French travellers, and turns around the identity of the protagonist and his visitors, who only at the end are revealed to be La Boétie and Montaigne—features closely paralleled by Les Proscrits. But, whilst undoubtedly more accomplished than other contes artistes, it is the work of a writer under other pressures, notably to complete La Peau de chagrin.68 Les Proscrits’s reduction of narrative interest to little more than a portrait, the story’s very slightness, reveal the problems of conformity to this generic model. Balzac fills its centre, discouragingly, with a lecture, followed by a seminar with Sigier, the lecturer, Godefroid, and the other mysterious exile, on the subject of

63 Les Proscrits, RP  ( May ), –; Notre-Dame de Paris had been published on  Mar. Balzac’s rubbishing of Hugo’s novel, in a letter to Mérimée of  Mar.  (Notre-Dame de Paris, ed. J. Seebacher (), ) looks like sour grapes. 64 Laure Surville states, indeed, that Balzac wrote Maître Cornélius to correct the view of Louis XI in Quentin Durward: Balzac, sa vie et ses œuvres (), , cit. G. D. Morris, ‘Balzac’s Treatment of History in Maître Cornélius’, Philological Quarterly, :  (), . 65 Attributed variously to Ritter Gluck or Mademoiselle de Scudéry: Lewis, ‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’,  n. ,  et seq.,  et seq. 66 Mérimée, in a letter to Stendhal of  Mar. , had identified Hugo’s novel with ‘le genre salop’ (Notre-Dame de Paris, ed. Seebacher,  et seq.). 67 S  ( Nov. ), –. ‘Le Fou’ was republished in Berthoud’s Contes misanthropiques (BF ( July )). 68 Balzac was more occupied by La Peau de chagrin and his candidacy as deputy. Cf. letters to de Pommereul of  Apr.  (Corr. i. –) and from Rabou, director of the Revue de Paris, at the end of Apr.  (Corr. i. –). In the latter, Rabou pleads: ‘au nom du Ciel envoyez votre copie en vous serrant le plus possible et que j’aie mon affaire jeudi soir au plus tard’.

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transcending the spirit-matter duality (xi. –);69 it leads Godefroid to attempt suicide, in order to try and reach heaven early (xi. –). Only then are they allowed to return to Florence and is the third man revealed to be Dante. Les Proscrits may seem lightweight, turning on identity as narrative puzzle rather than, as in Sarrasine, psychosexual problem; but it opens the way for later texts. Godefroid’s suicide, like Sarrasine’s love, attempts to reach transcendence through solipsism, as do, later, Valentin or Séraphîtus/Séraphîta—the obverse of Porbus’s demand that ‘les peintres ne doivent méditer que les brosses à la main’ (Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu, x. ): ‘Ta poésie, à toi, ne sort pas de ton coeur! Tes vives, tes ardentes pensées . . . marchent et grandissent dans ton âme. Va, ne livre pas tes pensées au vulgaire!’ (xi. ). Dante, ‘le majestueux vieillard’, suggests an evolution in Balzac’s attitude to the father-figure, to the point where, in the shape of Frenhofer, he can assume a creative as well as destructive role.70 And the core of undisguised philosophical exposition anticipates Frenhofer’s central discourse in Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Perhaps its very unwieldiness led Balzac to rely on dialogue in that story, whose philosophical discussion only reached its present density and dimensions in the revisions of . Balzac, then, turns the conte historique from a pretext for portraying famous historical figures into a philosophical treatise, as he was to do in  with Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu.71 But in  he lacked the artistic knowledge to achieve this, and the first version of that story corresponds much more closely with a related genre which could be dubbed the conte artiste. If its appearance in the reviews coincided with the translation of Hoffmann,72 the genre, like Balzac’s esquisse historique, stood half-way between fiction and fact, embroidering narrative around a famous artist or writer, almost invariably of the past and frequently of the Renaissance,73 and with comparably slim narrative interest: more than one 69 The doctrines Balzac attributes to Sigier (more properly Siger, although the identity of Balzac’s protagonist is problematic) are hardly orthodox, and owe more to Swedenborg than to any fourteenth-century theologian: R. Guise, xi.  et seq. 70 In the Gosselin editions of the Romans et contes philosophiques and the Contes philosophiques (–), Les Proscrits is sandwiched between L’Élixir de longue vie and Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. 71 First published in L’Artiste ( July and  Aug. ; republ. c. Sept. , Romans et contes philosophiques, nd edn.). The main philosophical developments are x. a, added in this edn., and x. a, added in the  Étphil. The  modifications are the most significant: cf. P. Laubriet, Un catéchisme esthétique: Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu de Balzac (), –. 72 F.-A. Loève-Veimars’s translations of Hoffmann appeared in the literary reviews from  onwards and in book form –. L’Artiste published ‘Kressler’  ((Feb. ), –; signed Hoffmann, but in fact by Janin: cf. A. R. W. James, ‘L’Artiste de  à ’, MA thesis, Manchester, , ), ‘La Leçon de violon’ ( (Apr. ), –), and articles on Hoffmann by Loève-Veimars and Himly (. ; . , ). M. Bardèche suggests that Balzac may have known Hoffmann’s tales some years before they were published in France (Balzac (),  n. ), a suggestion corroborated by Lewis, ‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’,  et seq. It was under the title Contes artistes that Balzac planned to republish Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, Gambara, Massimilla Doni, and Le Secret des Ruggieri in : Corr. iv. . 73 Although cf. Aloysius Bock, ‘Les Deux notes, conte fantastique’ (L’Artiste,  (Apr. ), –), a hallucinatory description of one of Paganini’s concerts no doubt inspired by Rat Krespel

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writer slips into simple adulation, or resorts to recounting love affairs. É.-J. Delécluze’s treatment of the platonic love between ‘Vittoria Colonna et Michel-Ange’,74 for example, seems to anticipate Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu was the last of Balzac’s works to be labelled conte fantastique at its first publication. But in its depiction of famous artists, in the concentration of its narrative interest on Poussin’s love-affair with Gillette, and in the absence of the philosophical speculations on the nature of art added in the  edition, the first version of Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu is typical of the conte artiste, and of L’Artiste itself, which from its foundation in February , explored artists’ désenchantement75 with bourgeois philistinism in a number of texts presenting the artist as pariah. But the way the story opens, with a young painter’s, Poussin’s, first visit to Porbus, a great master, clearly reflects Balzac’s own position: genius on the threshold of greatness, composer of his own then unknown masterpiece, La Peau de chagrin. Yet the Balzac figure is also dédoublé into Frenhofer, the nightmarish embodiment of what Balzac might become: a vieillard at once genius and idiot, an echo of the God/devil father at the end of L’Élixir de longue vie. Frenhofer, at the story’s end, is both transcendent, and a nothing. Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu uses the portrait as enigma far less stiltedly than Sarrasine or Les Proscrits. Whilst the story revolves around portraits en abyme (Porbus’s Marie Égyptienne, Mabuse’s Adam in part one, Frenhofer’s Belle Noiseuse in part two), and the revelation of Frenhofer’s identity is deferred (x. ), portraits of real people are far from being the whole reason for the tale: painting, the economy of art, has become an object of inspection in itself (although this aspect is not fully developed until the  revision, when Frenhofer becomes the undisputed protagonist, rather than the historical figures Porbus and Poussin).76 There is little of the cumbersome local colour of Les Proscrits,77 and the dialogue between the artists emerges far more vigorously and spontaneously. For they have an absolutely fundamental motivation—the link between desire and creation, mirrored in the story’s structure, its two chapters contrasting the real Gillette and Frenhofer’s fictional Catherine Lescault, Frenhofer as hero and Frenhofer as fool. The apparently extraneous love-plot is central to the meaning.78 It is no accident that the first two pictures we encounter are of Mary of Egypt, a and Die Fermate, and Castil-Blaze, Cherubini, RP  (July ), – and –—like Janin’s Benvenuto Cellini (ibid., –), a hagiography more than a tale. 74 L’Artiste,  ( Mar. ), –; cf. also M. Droz-Desnoyes, ‘Benvenuto Cellini’, in Infortunes Conjugales ou trois maris (). P. Whyte suggests other possible sources: ‘Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu de Balzac’, –. 75 For a full study of the theme, cf. P. Bénichou, L’École du désenchantement (). 76 The  reworking thus distances the story from other contes artistes. Cf. A. Goetz, ‘Frenhofer et les maîtres d’autrefois’, AB (), . 77 Although Balzac, in , saw fit to remove some of what there was: cf. e.g. x. a. 78 Pace T. Kashiwagi, ‘Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, conte d’amour ou conte de peinture?’, Équinoxe (Spring ).

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prostitute turned saint, and of Adam, the first man woman tempted. For the role of women in this story is polarized into prostitute and wife, as determined by their men: it is Poussin who will decide if his lover Gillette can pose for Frenhofer; Frenhofer refuses to let his friends see La Belle Noiseuse, treating it as his spouse; and Poussin must decide whether to renounce life for art. He contemplates rejecting his mistress Gillette in favour of painting, perceived by her, correctly, as her rival. Poussin’s dilemma reflects Frenhofer’s, and Sarrasine’s. Unlike his predecessor, Poussin recognizes his dilemma, and survives: Frenhofer’s tragedy is that he does not. He tries instead, like Sarrasine, Bartholoméo, and Juan, to incorporate life into its opposite—here, art.79 Frenhofer falls in love with his painting, La Belle Noiseuse, as with a real woman: ‘Je suis plus amant encore que je ne suis peintre’ (x. ),80 just as Sarrasine falls in love with Zambinella. The artefact becomes the object of desire, but desire itself is never fully sublimated into creation, remaining painfully suspended between desire for a real woman (which Frenhofer, in his delirium, imagines his Belle Noiseuse to be) and the creation of a painting. This is perhaps why Frenhofer’s canvas is mostly incomplete: he places the greatest emphasis on the supposed reality of La Belle Noiseuse, and not on her status as an artwork; like Sarrasine, on his own subjective imaginings, rather than on any objective creation. He is, like Godefroid before him, and Gambara after, a supreme, but solipsistic creator, doomed to failure. The final scene’s hesitation, when Porbus and Poussin, inspecting his painting, can see nothing, and Frenhofer can see everything—life itself, a real woman, La Belle Noiseuse—is the crux of the whole text, the mass of strokes on his canvas embodying a huge, chaotic expenditure of energy. Frenhofer, like a lover with his mistress, becomes too involved in his artwork, incapable of creating, or judging, its objective merits.81 Tellingly, the only part which is completed represents ‘un pied délicieux, un pied vivant!’ (x. ),82 symbolizing Frenhofer’s misdirected desire, linking the story’s erotic and artistic topoi.83 It 79 M. Kanes suggests that Balzac’s artists’ error is to suppose that their ‘creation and real reality can be judged according to the same criteria’, thus admitting ‘a Turgotian system of naive realism’ (Balzac’s Comedy of Words (Princeton, ), ). 80 Something echoed by Poussin, ‘plus amant qu’artiste’ (x. ) or Porbus’s words: ‘Les fruits de l’amour passent vite, ceux de l’art sont immortels’ (x. ). 81 Lewis suggests that Hoffmann’s La Cour d’Artus and La Leçon de violon (which had been published in L’Artiste a few weeks before Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu) were influential in shaping the latter’s linking of hallucination and artistic creation: ‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’, –. 82 R. Guise observes (x.  n. ) that this foot may have been suggested by Diderot’s Essais sur la peinture (Œuvres esthétiques, ed. P. Vernière (), ). 83 Cf. Freud, ‘The Sexual Aberrations’, – and ‘Fetishism’, in On Sexuality, – and , . Balzac often uses foot imagery to symbolize sexual fulfilment—or its absence. The narrator of Sarrasine tells Mme de Rochefide his tale ‘presque à ses pieds’ (vi. ); de Maillet finds ‘ung bon chaussepied de mariaige’ in Le Frère d’armes (OD i. ; cf. , , and ); and Birotteau’s happiness is defined by the state of his feet (cf. Ch. (vi) below). For G. Didi-Hubermann, the foot is emblematic of the impossibility of painting itself (Le Peinture incarnée,  et seq.).

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is appropriate, in this tale of the disconnection of desire and realization, that the narrative should be based on a displaced love-plot. Frenhofer’s libido, sublimated into the creation and love of an imaginary woman, reflects Poussin’s dilemma between art and life, and Valentin’s, between vouloir and pouvoir.84

(v) The Fantastic, the Real, and the Frame Story Balzac’s technique of portrait as enigma comes close to self-parody in the murder mystery L’Auberge rouge,85 which turns on the solution to questions common to frame and framed story: Who is the restive guest at table (the banker Mauricey, now Taillefer)?86 Who killed the merchant Walhenfer, in the framed story told by Hermann? And are they one and the same? But there is no portrait in Hermann’s tale to help us; as in Sarrasine, the key portraits (of narrator, a guest, and friends) are all in the frame (xi. –), and the story becomes a game of linking frame and framed narration, of making sense of each with information from the other. The name of Magnan’s, the alleged murderer’s, companion is not revealed as Frédéric—Taillefer’s Christian name—till late on (xi. ); and we are never actually told how, or by whom, the murder was committed.87 Yet this identity is hardly a secret. The constant interplay between story and frame gives enough evidence to secure a conviction. Taillefer’s illness recurs in autumn, the season of the crime (xi. , ); he shares his first name with Magnan’s companion (his second, if sinister enough, would not stand as evidence in a court of law); and his nervous water-gulping at key moments in Hermann’s narration (as when the victim’s severed head is being gorily described: xi. ) is enough to connote a would-be washing-away of blood. The portrait has really been absorbed into this action; and, on this evidence alone, the narrator challenges him at the end of the story, provoking the crisis which leads to his death. Hermann’s narrative poses a second question, itself answered by a game: should the narrator marry Taillefer’s daughter, despite the bloody origin of her wealth? The answer, nine to eight in favour, given by a vote of the listeners, is hardly an endorsement of democracy, or of the rising order, since all nine are ‘jeunes gens de mon âge’ (xi. ). It makes, in fact, a mockery of any single, simple, moral. 84 M. Kanes sees Frenhofer’s dilemma in different terms, between pensée and idée (Balzac’s Comedy of Words, –). A similar duality informs Les Proscrits, which anticipates La Peau de chagrin in the contrast between the contemplative Godefroid and the expressive Sigier: P. Nykrog, La Pensée de Balzac (Copenhagen, ), –. 85 RP  ( and  Aug. ), – and –. 86 Mauricey became Taillefer in the Werdet edition of Étphil (). 87 D. Kelly, ‘Balzac’s L’Auberge rouge: On Reading an Ambiguous Text’, Symposium,  (), –.

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But the real issue of L’Auberge rouge is that of Magnan’s innocence. He goes to the scaffold because the evidence appears to convict him, and because he has sinned in thought and, virtually, in deed (by coveting Walhenfer’s wealth and planning his murder, though we cannot be certain that he committed it). The story questions whether evidence is ever reliable or society’s judgement responsible; and more than this, it asks: What constitutes the crime? The deed, or the mere thought? In so doing, it raises the more fundamental question, shared with Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu and Sarrasine, of the subjectivity of perception, of its ultimate location in the eye and mind of the perceiver. Magnan’s desire to take responsibility for the crime derives from his doubt over whether he committed it, or merely dreamt it. The conundrum, topical from Hoffmann88 and from Nodier’s speculations,89 treated more lightly in Maître Cornélius, is underlined by the story’s subdivisions, ‘’É   ’ and ‘  ’.90 And Balzac, quite unusually, does not foreground the inn itself, thus downplaying an essential ingredient of the detective story—description of the scene of the crime—and shifting the centre of interest to the relation between story and frame, stressing the frame more than the story. The narrative of L’Auberge rouge effectively moves Hermann’s opening tale to the narrator’s closing conundrum; it makes him not just a storyteller whose concerns are safely contained, but a believable protagonist who is part of the real contemporary world. L’Auberge rouge marks an important stage on the journey from narrative as illustration to narrative as experience, to the framed story important less in itself than for its real-life import, something being developed simultaneously in La Peau de chagrin.91 The portrait en abyme of Sarrasine, the portrait en creux of L’Auberge rouge, are the culmination of a satirical, parodic fantastic first manifest in the Voltairian genies of La Dernière Fée, and more recently in Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du temps présent: a contribution to the vogue for the fantastic, but also a protest against it. ‘Le rire est un besoin en France, et le public demande à sortir des catacombes où le mènent, de cadavre en cadavre, peintres, poètes et prosateurs’.92 But the points of greatest conformity to the genre are those which most effectively subvert it. When the macabre is stressed ad absurdum, the 88 Magnan’s crime is committed in the hypnagogic state associated with heightened inspiration in Der goldene Topf, Die Genesung, and Lebensansichten des Kater Murrs. P. Whyte identifies the last two as sources for L’Auberge rouge: ‘A Study of Themes in the “Conte fantastique” in NineteenthCentury France (–), with Special Reference to Foreign Influences’ (Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, , –): Lewis, ‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’, . 89 ‘De quelques phénomènes du sommeil’, RP  (Feb. ), –; T. James, Dreams, Creativity and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford, ), –. 90 It is unusual for Balzac to retain them: apart from L’Auberge rouge, in F, only Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu does so, doubtless also for thematic reasons. 91 L’Auberge rouge was begun by May , but the end was not written until around  August, after La Peau de chagrin had been published. 92 OD ii. .

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resultant tension is destroyed by some small, but incongruous, event: Juan, pondering whether to revive his father in L’Élixir, is given pause by a squawking wooden cockerel on a clock, recalling Christ’s denial by St Peter, and also by protracted silent communication with his father’s animated eye—‘un clignotement d’une étonnante ironie’ (xi. ). The symbolic, life-and-death contrasts opening Sarrasine are built up to be demolished, a ‘macédoine morale, moitié plaisante, moitié funèbre’ explained by the fact that ‘Ma jambe était en effet glacée par un de ces vents coulis qui vous gèlent une moitié du corps tandis que l’autre éprouve la chaleur moite des salons’ (vi. ). The humour may be lumpen, but that is precisely the point. The fantastic captures the imagination before being deflated to reveal a fundamentally political message. Rumours about Zambinella are ascribed to ‘l’exagération naturelle aux gens de la haute société’: having run through the gamut of vampires and ghouls, dismissed as ‘railleries parisiennes’, the narrator tells us that ‘L’Étranger était simplement un vieillard (vi. ; cf. ). Perhaps the most sardonic treatment comes in L’Auberge rouge, requested as ‘une histoire allemande qui nous fasse bien peur’ (xi. ),93 told by a German called Hermann, ‘comme presque tous les Allemands mis en scène par les auteurs’ (xi. ).94 But this story exactly reverses the fantastic’s usual status as a brutal intrusion into real life, its allusions to Hoffmann, like those in Sarrasine (vi. ), lulling us into a false generic security which real-life horrors will disrupt. This is nowhere truer than in L’Élixir de longue vie, which leads readers on with hopes of a conte historique,95 before making its contemporary relevance plain in the abrupt narratorial incursion which is now reworked as the preface: Croyez-vous que je me sois joué de vous?—Non. Ce récit n’est pas une plaisanterie? ne le prenez pas pour une oeuvre de déception dans laquelle un auteur fait de l’atroce pour le plaisir des jeunes filles . . . Essayez de deviner la conduite que tiendraient, en des conjectures à peu près semblables, les honnêtes gens qui, au dix-neuvième siècle, prennent de l’argent à rentes viagères, sur la foi d’un catarrhe, ou ceux qui louent une maison à une vieille femme pour le reste de ses jours? . . . Je cuide qu’ils ne ressusciteraient pas leurs rentiers! (xi. b)

If the fantastic connoted the historical, it was also highly topical: L’Auberge rouge seems indebted to Un entracte,96 published a few days after L’Élixir, and long ascribed to Balzac: Stanislas de B . . . murders Joseph Cottin and acquires his inheritance despite his well-attested guilt. ‘Que de successions s’ouvrent ainsi, par le fer ou par le poison! . . .’97 In the second scene, set nineteen years 93 Perhaps its putative sources L’Enchaînement des choses or Le Spectre fiancé: L. Wanuffel, ‘Présence de Hoffmann dans les œuvres de Balzac (–)’, AB (), . 94 This is indeed a cliché: F. P. Bowman, ‘La Nouvelle en ’, CAIEF (), –, and A.-M. Meininger, xi.  n. ; cf. Le Cousin Pons, vii. . 95 Cf. R. Guise, xi. b. 96 C, Prospectus (Oct. ); CHH xxvi. –; signed Henri B. 97 CHH xxvi. .

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later, characters speculate on the identity of the murderer, who, like Taillefer, is redeemed merely by his wealth. Money, indeed, is identity: ‘tuer la fortune d’un homme, c’est quelquefois pis que de le tuer lui-même’ (vi. ), and to discover it is to discover the source of wealth. Though Un entracte contains no real enigma, its central question: ‘Pourquoi la bonne société reculerait-elle devant un meurtrier?’98 converges with the theme’s exploration in Sarrasine and L’Auberge rouge. This evolution in subject matter is answered by an evolution of technique, reflecting Balzac’s increasing awareness of his audience. Adieu, Une passion dans le désert, Sarrasine, and L’Auberge rouge relate the remote to the contemporary; money enters the metaphor of L’Élixir de longue vie: Pour les négociants, le monde est un ballot ou une masse de billets en circulation; pour la plupart des jeunes gens, c’est une femme: pour quelques femmes, c’est un homme; pour certains esprits, c’est un salon, une coterie, un quartier, une ville; pour don Juan, l’univers était lui. (xi. )

In contrast to the conscious archaising of a Jacob,99 Balzac’s metaphor incorporates the familiar into the distant, immediacy into the alien; Zambinella is introduced as s/he might actually be encountered (vi. ). Technique and theme reflect his changing reader—liberal and bohemian in the journals, more bourgeois and more moneyed in the reviews. For the latter had more material power: he was more likely to have purchased the publication he was reading, more likely, perhaps, to purchase Balzac’s works later on. He had, in a sense, already become a customer. This new status is acknowledged by his greater importance within the text. Descriptions of, or implicit reference to, the familiar, in, for example, the salon scene in Sarrasine, elicit his active participation; the central interrogation of L’Élixir is evidence enough of Balzac’s long-held didactic aims. In L’Auberge rouge, the questions are far from merely rhetorical, making the narrative less an unalterable account beyond the narratee’s control than a performance arranged for our benefit. L’Auberge rouge does not so much tell a story, as help us reconstruct it. Its recasting of pen-portrait and frame story throws readers back on themselves and puts morality up for grabs. The reader’s increased importance perhaps explains the striking ubiquity, in Balzac’s work in this period, of frame stories, perhaps the archetypally reassuring narrative form. All Balzac’s frame stories have salon audiences whose CHH xxvi. . Louis-Paul-Benoît-Philippe Lacroix (–), known as Le Bibliophile Jacob, soi-disant antiquary and author of Les Deux Fous, at once praised and panned in two reviews ascribed to Balzacwhich appeared simultaneously on  May  (cf. R. Chollet, OD ii. –). But it was Lacroix’s novel, written in modern French but with dialogue in pastiche, edulcorated sixteenthcentury idiom, which gave the impetus for Balzac’s more creative archaism in the Contes drolatiques; and it was Lacroix who revised the old French of the  edition of Balzac’s collection, illustrated by Gustave Doré. 98 99

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members recognizably resemble the reviews’ readers, who respond, ask questions, and supposedly influence their course. Through them Sarrasine and L’Auberge rouge are focused, identifying the reader with the fictional audience, encouraging him to identify and engage with the framed story, equal to them in his status as narratee. Balzac’s fictions for the reviews exploit this supposed community of text and reader, audience and narrator.100 Sarrasine’s opening creates a powerful sense of intimacy (vi. –),101 whilst L’Auberge rouge stresses the listeners’ after-dinner receptiveness to narrative: Nous aimons alors à rester dans je ne sais quel calme, espèce de juste milieu entre la rêverie du penseur et la satisfaction des animaux ruminants, qu’il faudrait appeler la mélancolie matérielle de la gastronomie . . . Pendant cette benoîte pause, la voix d’un conteur semble toujours délicieuse à nos sens engourdis, elle en favorise le bonheur négatif. (xi. –).

The Revue de Paris’s reader could doubtless have identified with the fictional audience, been more ready to accept the narrative which follows. Yet these audiences are not only passively receptive: both stories result from their demands. In Sarrasine, it is the narrator’s companion who is intrigued by Zambinella (vi. ), as the soldier-narrator of Une passion dans le désert is by the panther (viii. ); if Taillefer’s daughter wants to be entertained (xi. ), her desire is amply answered. Narrative, indeed, is generally part of an exchange—sexual, in Sarrasine, Une passion, and in L’Auberge rouge, where Taillefer’s daughter and her fortune are the object of a transaction which turns out to be more than anyone bargained for; in others, more straightforwardly didactic. The framed narrative in Gobseck is prompted by Derville’s overhearing of Mme de Grandlieu’s advice to her daughter (ii. –); in Le Conseil (),102 the narrator’s story is a cautionary tale specially suited to his audience. ‘—Je ne sais pas s’il y a parmi vous beaucoup d’amants’, he says, ‘mais je suis bien certain de ne jamais dire mon aventure à des personnes plus dignes de l’entendre . . .’ (ii. ). The framed story is a mode of, almost a surrogate for, exchange between society and narrative; L’Élixir de longue vie, Sarrasine, and L’Auberge rouge border on being ‘contes à thèse’ exploring the problem of wealth. But whilst the first two stories resort either to narratorial commentary or to direct address to the reader, the frame story allows members of the fictional audience to engage. 100 Such community had already been suggested in the intimacy and immediacy of the opening of Gobseck: ‘La soirée finissait toujours assez tard chez Madame la vicomtesse de Grandlieu. Pendant une nuit de l’hiver dernier, il se trouvait encore à une heure du matin dans son salon deux personnes étrangères à sa famille’ (ii. ). The departure of the nondescript ‘jeune homme’ before the beginning of the story emphasizes that this is a narration for the happy few. 101 As do those of other narrations such as Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit and later works such as Un prince de la bohème (vii. ) and Autre étude de femme (iii. –). 102 Le Conseil framed Le Message and La Grande Bretèche in the nd edn. of the Scènes de la vie privée. Cf. Ch.  nn.  and .

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The frame is at least as important as the narrative it surrounds, particularly in L’Auberge rouge, where, reversing archetypal narrative forms,103 the story is almost a pretext for its frame. In its final discussion on the morality of marrying Taillefer’s daughter, the characters are a microcosm of contemporary society: ‘toutes les opinons sociales, toutes les vertus pratiques’ (x. ). Yet they reach no conclusion. Just as there is no explicit answer to the question ‘Who killed Walhenfer?’, so there is no answer to the narrator’s dilemma. L’Auberge rouge, with its echo of Cain and Abel, in its stress on thought as well as deed, is an almost biblical story, with archetypal import. The narrator’s quest for knowledge leads to his moral destruction; where wealth is concerned, it is better not to ask. ‘Où en serions-nous tous s’il fallait rechercher l’origine des fortunes!’ (xi. ). It is not by accident that the lawyer’s question is rhetorical, for in L’Auberge rouge, the conte moral becomes the conte à problème. Religion, the traditional source of moral guidance, is helpless (xi. ); the frame story no longer answers questions, only asks them. It is we who are left to speculate on the difficulty of purity, as Balzac’s narrative moves from merely representing the world, to inviting reflection on it. Writing for the reviews launched Balzac as a storyteller. They gave him the space the journals lacked, and an audience with which to engage; they let him fuse the genres of the contemporary (conte artiste, fantastique, historique) with his own profoundest concerns. But if the reviews saw Balzac tackling topical issues via innovatively subversive techniques, the experience they gave him was only fully to be exploited in book form and at greater length, in La Peau de chagrin and the Les Cent Contes drolatiques.

103 Exemplified by such frame narratives as The Canterbury Tales, the Decameron, and the Heptameron.

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From La Peau de chagrin to the Contes drolatiques, – (i) La Peau de chagrin Conte oriental 1 and conte fantastique, La Peau de chagrin is a summation of Balzac’s work to date. It grows out of journal articles: Les Litanies romantiques, where it is first mentioned as ‘mon célèbre conte fantastique’2 in December , and Le Dernier Napoléon, which is both a typical newspaper portrait-narrative and an early version of the opening. Such elements overlap with the conte moral (the story of a young man’s choice between vice and virtue) and the fairy-tale,3 under a new subtitle, roman philosophique. Yet the ‘ouvrage’ for which Balzac contracted with Gosselin and Canel on  January , and which appeared on  August, formed two octavo volumes, each of – folios—about twice as long as his longest stories so far.4 Genesis can only partly explain genre: if the tale was still a tale in December ,5 in Balzac’s mind it had clearly become 1 Pensées, sujets, fragments (), quoted in ‘Histoire du texte’, x. ; echoed by Chasles’s designation ‘conte arabe’ in the Introduction aux Romans et contes philosophiques (x. ). F. Baldensperger identifies a source in the th tale of the Arabian Nights in L’Appel de la fiction orientale chez Honoré de Balzac (Oxford, ), —something recalled by the banquet scene, ‘féerie digne d’un conte oriental’ (x. ). 2 Les Litanies romantiques, La Caricature ( Dec. ); OD ii. . Balzac’s extensive prepublication publicity had already begun in the salons. T. W. Lewis (‘The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman on Balzac’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, , ch. ) gives an in-depth account of the indebtedness to Hoffmann implied by the label fantastique. 3 Cf. P. Nykrog, ‘Peau de chagrin—peau d’âne’, AB (). 4 Corr. i. . The two volumes of the first edn. are of  and  pp.: x. – and –. The most striking feature of the first edn. of La Peau de chagrin (which is approximately the same length as FC) are its spacious typography, bantering dialogues, and Rabelaisian lists, all gradually attenuated in Balzac’s persistent correction of its seven successors; the chief differences between this edition and later ones are the description of the lac du Bourget, introduced in , and the presence of a closing Rabelaisian Moralité (x.  n. i). Cf. G. Falconer, ‘Le Travail de style dans les révisions de La Peau de chagrin’, AB (). The 1st edn. is available as La Peau de chagrin, ed. P. Barbéris (). 5 Pace R. Chollet, who regards Le Dernier Napoléon as indubitably a tête de roman in the same manner, one assumes, as later openings published in papers such as that of Le Cabinet des Antiques (Chronique de Paris ( Mar. )). But this is to make Balzac a novelist avant la lettre. Unlike these later openings, Le Dernier Napoléon is virtually a self-contained narrative, the convergence, in its final phrase (‘son regard plongea jusqu’au fond de la Seine’, OD ii. ) of the figurative and the

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much longer (yet not a roman, just an ‘ouvrage’) by the time he signed the contract; and the time spent on the first part (x. –), which took from February until May,6 suggests the difficulty he had developing what, even in the final version, is still effectively the massively augmented frame of a frame-story, into something with the embodied action of a novel. La Peau de chagrin builds on L’Élixir de longue vie, Sarrasine, and L’Auberge rouge, exploring the real (society’s hypocrisies, the sources of its wealth) via the fantastic, or making the apparently supernatural rationally explicable. The hero Raphaël’s Faustian vision in the antiquary’s shop is ‘un phénomène d’optique enfanté par la fatigue’(x. ), the skin itself a ‘prétendu talisman’ whose shrinking may be attributed to purely material causes.7 And the narrative multiplies familiar oppositions. Like Sarrasine, it is constructed around contrasting portraits: of the antiquary and ‘le portrait de Jésus-Christ peint par Raphaël’ (x. ); of Euphrasie and Aquilina (x. –); of Foedora, ‘femme sans âme’ versus Pauline, ‘femme-ange’. Balzac’s Raphaël makes a pair of visits to each (x. , , ); at the two banquets, he is first hero, then Banquo at the feast (x. ). La Peau de chagrin is based on a profound, but patent, dualism.8 Like L’Élixir and Sarrasine, it opposes light and dark (x. , –), silence and noise (x. , )—contrasts which represent the deeper dichotomies of life and death (x. –), age and youth (x. , ), virtue and vice (x. ; x. ; x. ), and extend to the almost stichomythic dialogue of the banquet (x. –). Like the androgynous Zambinella, the divinely demonic Juan, or Frenhofer, holy fool, the antiquary subsumes contraries: both Eternal Father, and Mephisto (x. ). Foedora, too, sublimates dualities in her androgynously aesthetic perfection, but, like Zambinella, is detached from the physical world; whilst Raphaël, the third element in the equation, mirrors both the antiquary and Foedora, but can rival neither. The novel reads like a fairy-tale whose hero, like Sarrasine, is confronted with the choice between the ‘malédiction paternelle’ (vi. ), represented in Sarrasine by the aged Zambinella, and in La Peau by the antiquary or the old men at the gambling-table, and the ‘femme castatrice’ in the shape of the coldly beautiful Foedora. In La Peau de chagrin, according to P. Vernois, concrete completing the narrative and making its outcome clear. That that outcome differs from La Peau de chagrin’s is, in the context of Le Dernier Napoléon, irrelevant. 6 Falconer, ‘Le Travail de style’, p.  n. . 7 According to S.-H. Berthoud, in Balzac’s early plans for the novel, Raphaël ‘professait un matérialisme absolu’ but ‘finissait par se laisser mystifier par la grossière duperie d’un vieux créancier’ (M. Fargeaud, ‘Dans le sillage des grands romantiques: S.-H. Berthoud’, AB (), ). M. Hayward carries this view further, arguing that the skin itself is an oriental mirror of crystal or of metal: ‘Supercherie et hallucination: La Peau de chagrin’, RLC, (Oct.–Dec. ). It is true that Balzac’s puns on ‘chagrin’ (x. , , ) suggest that it is above all a ‘peau symbolique’ (x. ; cf. x. , ). Cf. L. Rudich: ‘Une interprétation de La Peau de chagrin’, AB (), and F. Gaillard, ‘L’Effet Peau de chagrin’ in R. Le Huenen and P. Perron (eds.), Le Roman de Balzac (Montreal, ). 8 Cf. S. Haig, ‘Dualistic Patterns in La Peau de chagrin’, Nineteenth Century French Studies, :  (Sept. ).

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‘l’apparition régulière des vieillards annonce toujours une présence ou un arrêt du destin’.9 In Sarrasine, of course, old man and castatrix are one and the same (with the significant proviso that Zambinella is less castrator than castrated); yet its moral purpose is none the less clear. But interpretation of La Peau de chagrin’s outcome is far less certain: does Raphaël die as a punishment for infringing the malédiction, as a result of a demonic pact, or from sexual exhaustion? It is impossible to say.10 No one cause is the cause: the story’s pointe proliferates into a multitude of pointes. Two features in particular distinguish La Peau de chagrin from previous stories. First is the placing of the dilemma at the opening. Sarrasine does not even realize that he has a dilemma until too late; but Raphaël’s is explicitly presented as such virtually from the start: the alternatives of life and death in his near suicide, and the equally stark choice in the antiquary’s shop: ‘Vouloir nous brûle et Pouvoir nous détruit; mais  laisse notre faible organisation dans un perpétuel état de calme’ (x. ). Second is the subjective focus through the protagonist. Where earlier first-person narrators are distanced from their stories (notably the authorial narrator in Sarrasine, with its ‘passages dangereux pour le narrateur’, vi. ), Raphaël tells what is explicitly his own story in the central part of La Peau de chagrin. This, together with other features (the fact that, from the gaming-den onwards, we discover Raphaël for ourselves, as a convincing flesh-and-blood person, rather than indirectly via a characterized narrator; that we spend so long with him as to become oblivious of his story’s retrospective nature) means that Raphaël is subjectivized; he has become the locus of a personal dilemma as true and as real as the one Le Père Goriot’s reader will recognize ‘dans son coeur, peut-être’ (iii. ), of an emotional and moral progress which we experience, as much as of an outcome we are merely anxious to discover. In this it stands in contrast to Sarrasine, or L’Élixir, or any of Balzac’s other early stories apart from La Peau de chagrin’s close contemporary L’Auberge rouge. We travel for the journey, as much as to arrive. We identify with him, we accompany him through his ordeal, rather than observing it from the outside, as an oddity (as we may well have done with Adieu, Sarrasine, Une passion, or even L’Auberge rouge). His dilemma, unlike Sarrasine’s, is decidedly universal: between dissipation and consolidation, between the spiritual and the material. ‘Que chacun choisisse entre le matérialisme et le spiritualisme!’ (x. ). At every level, the text says: Choose!—not just to Raphaël, but to the reader. But if Raphaël is more substantial than any of his predecessors, this is not merely because of La Peau de chagrin’s textual length. His presence results from his relevance to us, to the central problems of ‘égoïsme’, ‘personnalité’, and ‘individualité’ which Chasles’s introduction outlines: 9 ‘Dynamique de l’invention dans La Peau de chagrin’, in Le Réel et le texte (), , cit. S. Swahn, Balzac et le merveilleux (Lund, ), . 10 Cf. the multiple interpretations cited by Swahn: Balzac et le merveilleux, –.

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Voyez Raphaël? Comme le sentiment de sa conservation étouffe en lui toute autre idée! . . . Soumis à ce talisman terrible, il vit et meurt dans une convulsion d’égoïsme. N’est-ce pas la vie toute pure? C’est cette personnalité qui ronge le coeur et dévore les entrailles de la société où nous sommes. A mesure qu’elle augmente, les individualités s’isolent; plus de liens, plus de vie commune. La personnalité règne; c’est son triomphe et sa fureur que La Peau de chagrin a reproduits. (x. )

Raphaël’s account is so personal because it is so general: it is also our account, and a still strikingly modern view of society at large. This also explains why the preface distances the author so explicitly from the text: the biographical Balzac has involved himself with it even more closely than in Sarrasine. Raphaël in  is Balzac in  or , on the verge of suicide;11 one way of seeing La Peau de chagrin is as a therapeutic exercise written to avoid it. Another way, more pertinent to the aesthetic issue here at stake, is as Balzac’s first complete achievement of a detachment essential to literary creation. Essential in the manner of Paradoxe sur le comédien (which had just been published, in ),12 because the more one feels, the less one can express; expression, and hence detachment, being thus central to the successful artwork: ‘il ne s’agit pas seulement de voir, il faut encore se souvenir et empreindre ses impressions dans un certain choix de mots’ (x. –); and because La Peau de chagrin’s criterion of success is the removal of the creator from the creation: Raphael Sanzio’s picture of Christ is a work of genius because ‘on oubliait le peintre’ (x. ). The withdrawal of the author, the individuation and substantiveness of the single protagonist, the fact that he has a voice of his own, all make La Peau de chagrin a radically different kind of writing: in one sense, a roman personnel, based around a thinly disguised authorial moi. In absolute terms this is hardly a great innovation; but, in Balzac’s work, it marks a fundamental change of nature— or at least of ambition—and an important prise de conscience: a change from ‘anecdotal’ fiction, from the narrative as exemplum, illustrating something external to, and fundamentally different from, itself, to narrative as microcosm, embodying in miniature and continuous with the macrocosm, the world.13 11 E. Arago, Mémoires inédites, cit. L.-J. Arrigon, Les Débuts littéraires d’Honoré de Balzac (), –, and G. Robb, Balzac: A Biography (London, ), . L. Surville, Balzac, sa vie et ses oeuvres d’après sa correspondance (), . 12 P. Whyte, ‘Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu de Balzac: esthetique et image’, in M.-A. Hutton (ed.), Text(e)/Image (Durham, ),  n. . 13 The notion of the world’s monistic unity, and hence of the continuum between microcosm and macrocosm, is Leibnizian, as is the image of the ‘miroir concentrique’, used by Chasles in his Introduction (x.  and n. ). It appears as early as Sténie (‘Leibniz a raison en disant qu’une âme est le miroir concentrique de l’univers’: OD i. ), and, in Apr. , Balzac writes to Mme de Berny (with a somewhat different purpose): ‘Leibniz prétend que toute la masse idéale est coordonnée dans la nature et que cette chaîne commence au plus insensible jusqu’au plus sensible; il dit que les marbres, par cela même qu’ils naissent et croissent, ont des idées, mais extraordinairement confuses. Je serai marbre, passif dans la vie’ (Corr. i. ). Balzac mentions Leibniz

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This is evident in the use to which Balzac puts familiar devices. Thus, each of La Peau de chagrin’s portraits is an individual, yet is also a type—‘le jeu incarné’ (x. ); each could start a story (as in Sarrasine or Les Proscrits); yet each is contained within the overall account of Raphaël’s history. His central framed flashback focuses past, present, and future, suggesting a multitude of narrative possibilities, its essentially diachronic narration containing further digressions—on Raphaël’s father (x. ), on women (x. ), or on Pauline (x. ). If the diversity of centres of narrative interest threatens the story with fragmentation, the conte-like structure, a linear narrative organized around the protagonist, devoid of subplots or conflicts between opposing factions, prevents this. Raphaël’s framed narration, far from being ‘an extremely weak device which almost spoils the whole tale’,14 is central to Balzac’s purpose: it is fitting that, in a work where expression is a central concern, the protagonist should be a narrator. It is the writer who most embodies this essentially monistic conception. ‘Obligé’, like the Balzac-double Victor Morillon before him, and before him, Victor Hugo, ‘de porter en lui quelque miroir concentrique où, suivant sa fantaisie, l’univers vient se réfléchir’),15 he transcends the parameters of space and time which limit literature,16 able to ‘résumer le passé, railler le présent’ (x. ). It is a catch-all role not dissimilar to Stendhal’s contemporary characterization of ‘le roman’ as ‘un miroir qui se promène le long d’une route’,17 but one more philosophically ambitious, and more pluralist. Balzac’s miroir concentrique, if Leibnizian in character, represents a unity of thought and a chain of being encompassing both the mystical and the material which would eventually form the foundation of the Avant-propos’s vaunted unité de composition.18 In the Avant-propos, this notion is associated with the naturalist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire; but in La Peau de chagrin, it is his great rival Cuvier who represents a transcendence assumed not only by the writer, but by the reader, as the point of convergence between his own experience and the text. The now-familiar buttonholing questions have an altogether more cosmic ambition: ‘Vous êtes-vous jamais lancé dans l’immensité du temps et de l’espace en lisant les œuvres géologiques de Cuvier?’ (x. ; cf. e.g.  and ).19 The founder of only four times elsewhere in La Comédie humaine, and never again in his letters; but, on possible parallels between the two, cf. M. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien (Paris and Lille, ), passim. 14 M. Kanes, ‘The Mythic Structure of La Peau de chagrin’, Studi francesi (Jan.–Apr. ), . 15 x. ; Le Gars, preface, viii.  and n. ; V. Hugo, Cromwell, ed. A. Ubersfeld (), preface, . Cf. M. Iknayan, The Concave Mirror (Saratoga, ), –. 16 Cf. M. J. Tilby, ‘Balzac and the Writers of the école du désenchantment’, Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge, , –. 17 Le Rouge et le noir, ed. P.-G. Castex (), . 18 Le Gars, preface, viii. ; Romans et contes philosophiques, Introduction, x. ; Avant-propos, i. – and n. . Cf. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, . 19 Balzac’s admiration for Cuvier, moderated by a later enthusiasm for Saint-Hilaire, is evident in many parts of La Comédie humaine, most prominently in the Avant-propos. Cf. M. Fargeaud, ‘Balzac et les messieurs du Muséum’, RHLF  (),  et seq.; Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, ch. , esp. – and –; and below, Ch.  n. .

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comparative anatomy, of the part which leads to the whole, is invoked as a model for encompassing and subsuming the central dichotomies between individual and type, precept and example, which had preoccupied Balzac since the beginning of his career;20 and the invocation encapsulates the newly monistic character and purpose of the work. ‘Tout est devenu bouffon!’ declares La Peau de chagrin’s preface (x. ); the narrative itself is nothing less than an attempt to create a kind of pluralist writing which subsumes existing genres, ‘épopée, satire, roman, conte, histoire, drame, folie aux mille couleurs’ (Introduction aux Romans et contes philosophiques, x. ).21 All are focused through the all-encompassing conteur: Qu’est-ce que le talent du conteur, sinon tout le talent? Il renferme en lui la déduction logique dans sa rigueur, le drame avec sa mobilité, l’essence même du génie lyrique avec son extase intérieure. Le narrateur est tout. Il est historien; il a son théâtre; sa dialectique profonde qui meut ses personnages; sa palette de peintre et sa loupe d’observateur. Non seulement il peut réunir les talents spéciaux que je viens d’indiquer, mais, pour exceller dans son art, il le doit . . . La narration est toute l’épopée; elle est toute l’histoire; elle enveloppe le drame et le sous-entend. Le conte est la littérature primitive. . . . Le premier conteur fut un Dieu. (x. –)

It is a pluralism associated also with the Contes drolatiques, there, as in this preface and introduction, derived principally from Rabelais, who symbolizes this renewal of a kind of Urliteratur (Préface, x. ; Introduction, x.  et seq.) which encompasses exhausted contemporary genres in order to take in life in the round, and to attack the real problems of society and being which exisiting genres have failed to address. These are the tasks La Peau de chagrin assumes: Des critiques n’ont pas vu que La Peau de chagrin est l’expression de la vie humaine, abstraction faite des individualités sociales; la vie avec ses ondulations bizarres, avec sa course vagabonde et son allure serpentine, avec son égoïsme toujours présent sous mille métamorphoses. La même signification se trouve cachée sous les plus légers incidents de cette fiction. . . . N’est-ce pas la vie toute pure? . . . Dans ce livre, il y a encore toute une époque. (x. )

If such omnivorous ambitions seem at odds with calling La Peau de chagrin a conte, there is much that is exuberantly conte-like about the first edition—its burgeoning narrative, its bantering dialogue, its seemingly endless Rabelaisian lists.22 But the fundamental explanation is that the conte, in the early s, is the subject of a concerted attempt to create a transcendent genre which would encompass the whole of reality; a truly Gallic national literature to set against English hypocrisies and Gothic ghouls, and which would perform the socially critical and mimetic function which would later belong to the novel. In , 20 21 22

Cf. F. Davin, Étphil, Introduction, x. . Cf. A. Vanoncini, Figures de la modernité (), ch. . Cf. La Peau de chagrin, ed. Barbéris, and Falconer, ‘Le Travail de style’, , –.

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the term roman was scarcely respectable: for Le Rouge et le noir, Stendhal shunned it,23 and it is doubtless only the epithet ‘philosophique’ which makes ‘roman’ acceptable for La Peau de chagrin.24 As late as , Balzac was writing to Mme Hanska: ‘il y a encore des gens qui s’obstinent à voir un roman dans La Peau de chagrin, mais chaque jour aussi les gens sérieux et les appréciateurs de cette composition gagnent du terrain.’25 It is his drive to legitimize the conte, and to make it all-encompassing, which explains the proliferation of generic labels and of contes ‘de toutes les couleurs’ in the middle s, and which accounts for the eagerness of Balzac and his spokesmen to attach his first successful novel to a genre which was seen as emblematic of the revival of contemporary France.

(ii) The Romans et contes philosophiques The title of the Romans et contes philosophiques 26 points to a central paradox: by today’s standards, the collection contains at most one roman, La Peau de chagrin itself.27 Yet that novel, through the very fantastic subject matter and garrulous narrative which might lead many to call it a conte, makes a bold claim to explore the real world. The preface’s concern to ‘inventer le vrai, par analogie’ (x. ) is more than a reworking of the earlier meditation, in the Physiologie du mariage, on ‘l’art littéraire, l’un des arts qui ont pour but de reproduire la vérité par analogie’ (xi. ). It is concerned not merely with synaesthetic analogies between the arts, but with a synechdochic sampling of real life. The analogy is 23 Cf. his projected article on the novel, reproduced in Le Rouge et le noir, ed. Castex, and Vanoncini, Figures de la modernité, . 24 Cf. P. Barbéris, ‘L’Accueil de la critique aux premières grandes œuvres de Balzac (–)’, AB (), –. 25  Jan. , LH i. –. The neutrality of the generic term (‘composition’) is striking. 26 BF ( Sept. ); republished as Contes philosophiques in  and Études philosophiques in ; cf. glossary. This section deals principally with those stories from the Romans et contes philosophiques not already covered: La Comédie du diable, Jésus-Christ en Flandre, L’Église, and with Maître Cornélius, published three months after the collection on  and  Dec. 27 The inadequacy of the roman element in La Peau de chagrin’s subtitle was implicitly acknowledged by Balzac’s comment to Montalembert that ‘Tout y est mythe et figure’, as by his later remark to Mme Hanska that ‘il y a encore des gens qui s’obstinent à voir un roman dans La Peau de chagrin’ ( Aug. , Corr. i. ;  Jan. , LH i. –). And ‘le titre Romans et contes philosophiques braquait son adjectif contre l’appellation “fantastique” à la mode; le conte “drolatique” semble narguer à son tour le conte “philosophique” (R. Chollet, OD i. ), which was mocked by some contemporaries (cf. R. Guise, ‘Balzac et la presse de son temps’, AB (), –). Yet the plural ‘romans’ in that collection’s title also points to the intention of writing other longer works (such as the Histoire de la succession du marquis de Carabas, sold to Gosselin in the contract for the Romans et contes (Corr. i. ) and mentioned in his letter to Montalembert and in the Introduction, x. , but never written) whilst hedging its bets by exploiting the popularity of the conte. It may also be an attempt to promote the novel above the Hugolian drama, panned in Balzac’s reviews of Hernani (FJP ( Mar. and  Apr. ), OD ii. –).

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between the work and life itself, and in foregrounding it in his preface, Balzac is claiming for literary reality the right to be taken as (if not more) seriously than a literal reality whose truthfulness he often doubts. This impulse is also present in Le Père Goriot’s famous ‘All is true, il est si véritable, que chacun peut en reconnaître les éléments chez soi, dans son coeur, peut-être’,28 in Stendhal’s conflicting claims of veracity and falsehood at either end of Le Rouge et le noir,29 and in Hugo’s status, in Notre-Dame de Paris, as the inventor of his ‘très-véridique histoire’.30 And, in Balzac’s case, it is an analogy created by the reader’s empathetic identification with the text. Words, even pictures, cannot give the thing itself (‘qui dit art, dit mensonge’, x. ); but consciousness, being continuous with experience, and one point of the spiritual-material, vouloir–pouvoir–savoir continuum, can come very close to it. The antiquary, able to ‘faire comparaître en soi l’univers’, transforms ‘chagrins, amours, ambitions, revers, tristesse’ into ‘romans que je lirais par une vision intérieure (x. , ). The Protean author, ‘bossu à Orléans, blond à Bordeaux, fluet à Brest’(x. ; cf. ), redeems his polyvalent selves by distancing himself from, and projecting himself into, his creation; and the reader, faced with a text whose very diversity threatens its fragmentation, is saved by circularities and parallels which make it cogent—by both the transcendent, empathetic consciousness of the novel, and the circularity of the conte: the ‘petit vieillard’ of the Palais-Royal foreshadows the antiquary; the ‘Oui—non’ of a gambler, Raphaël’s destiny (x. ; cf. x. ); these ‘professeurs émérites de vie et d’infamie’, the scientists he later consults. Raphaël’s tale is enclosed within the temporal structure of the Scènes de la vie privée: a leisurely (if menacing) opening which accelerates towards the end, before decelerating with an epilogue and a ‘moralité’. Only Raphaël himself, too absorbed in the world to step back from it, fails to achieve such transcendent plenitude. ‘Le oui et non humain’ (x. ) becomes a torture, not a liberation. La Peau de chagrin, then, offers a model of topicality, of diversity, of chaotic, potentially threatening, heterogeneity encompassed within cogency (of consciousness, of the conte), embodied more crudely but more visibly in lesser texts in the Romans et contes philosophiques. La Comédie du diable,31 a bipartite satirical fantasy whose first part is by Soulié, and whose second is by Balzac, exemplifies this clearly. Part one lampoons literature, mainly the drame romantique; part two, politics, which Balzac presents as theatre (OD ii. ); the Comédie is the comedy of reality— like La Comédie humaine itself.32 Generic disorder reflects 28 iii. . All is true is itself a quotation of the epigraph to Chasles’s article on Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (RP ( Aug. ); iii.  n. ). 29 The novel’s epigraph reads: ‘La vérité, l’âpre vérité’, yet the author’s final footnote tells us that he has set it in Besançon, ‘où il n’est jamais allé’. 30 Notre-Dame de Paris, ed. J. Seebacher (), . 31 La Comédie du diable, Romans et contes philosophiques, BF  ( Sept. ). 32 The idea of life as a comedy played for the devil was later to be exploited in Le Diable à Paris, the collective publication by Hetzel, publisher of La Comédie humaine: cf. Ch.  below.

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broader contemporary confusions: the devil’s question, ‘Quel genre jouera-t-on sur mon théâtre?’ is answered by ‘un mouvement inouï’ of authors ‘s’arrachant à belles dents des pages de roman, des pointes, des couplets, des sujets, des vers bien frappés, des pensées libérales et des allusions’ (OD ii. ; cf. –), an image of fragmentation answered by other contemporary texts—the ‘rien de complet’, the ‘débris de cinquante siècles’ of La Peau de chagrin (x. , ), the ‘débris d’un tremblement de terre’ of Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du temps présent (OD ii. )—but which La Peau de chagrin transcends. La Comédie du diable relies on a much simpler paradox—that the ‘représentation éternelle’ of history and politics is not, as Satan thinks, flattery, but ‘la vérité’ (OD ii. ); but the paradox is that of mimetic art itself. The topicality of La Comédie du diable, along with its dual authorship, doubtless explains why it was omitted from the Études philosophiques in  and thereafter. But this topicality also indicates the earnestness of Balzac’s use of the fantastic—something shared by his remaining contes fantastiques of : Jésus-Christ en Flandre, L’Église, and Maître Cornélius.33 Jésus-Christ en Flandre and L’Église both share origins contemporary with La Peau de chagrin. The source of L’Église, an amalgamation of Zéro and La Danse des pierres, lies in the satirical anticlericalism of ,34 but Balzac mitigates Zéro’s caricatural symbolism in line with his turning towards Catholicism and the sympathetically critical ideas of Montalembert and Lamennais.35 This doubtless explains why there was no journal pre-publication of Jésus-Christ en Flandre—neither manuscript nor proofs have survived—but Balzac’s depiction of a lascivious bishop and his concubine suggests that it may be contemporaneous with L’Archevêque and La Belle Impéria, the first of the Contes drolatiques,36 whilst its Flemish setting almost certainly owes something to Balzac’s electoral ambitions at Cambrai, and to his contact with Samuel-Henry Berthoud, whose Chroniques et traditions surnaturelles de la Flandre had put Flanders on the literary map.37 On  August Jésus-Christ en Flandre was still unwritten, but a 33 Jésus-Christ en Flandre immediately precedes L’Église in vol. iii of the Romans et contes philosophiques, BF ( Sept. ); Maître Cornélius appeared in the Revue de Paris on  and  Dec. Balzac also published Le Dôme des Invalides (BF ( Dec. ), Annales romantiques ()), a brief hallucination inspired by Chasles, similar in tenor to L’Église, the last of a number in similar vein. Cf. OD ii. –. 34 Cf. J. Pommier, L’Église (), pp. viii–xxvi; P.-G. Castex, Nouvelles et contes de Balzac (), –. 35 x. –; cf. x. –, and P. Bertault, Balzac et la religion (), – et seq. 36 L’Archevêque appeared in La Caricature on  Nov. ; a first version of La Belle Impéria was refused by Véron on  Feb. , four days after the sacking of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois (Corr. i. ). The fact that Balzac dates the Furne edition of Jésus-Christ en Flandre Feb.  points to the common origin of these works. 37 Pace A. Vandegans (who finds a source for the shipwreck of Jésus-Christ en Flandre in Erasmus and dismisses Berthoud’s influence altogether), and, in his wake, M. Pinel. Cf. A. Vandegans, ‘Jésus-Christ en Flandre, Érasme et Ghelderode’, AB (), –, M. Pinel, ‘Significations spirituelles de la mer dans La Comédie humaine’, AB (), –; also Castex, Nouvelles et contes de Balzac, . The work was perhaps inspired by the confluence of these sources. Balzac’s correspondence with Berthoud attests the warmth of their relations during : cf. Corr. i, letters ,

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month later it was in print, in the third volume of the Romans et contes philosophiques. Balzac was vaunting its merits to Mme de Castries on  October, and by the nineteenth, Berthoud had received his copy.38 In its initial enigmatic portrait of Christ, Jésus-Christ en Flandre recalls Sarrasine and Les Proscrits: the only clue to Christ’s identity is that he is allowed to board the boat ‘pour l’amour de Dieu’ (x. ; Balzac’s emphasis). But the story also returns to Balzac’s beginnings, making Christ a Byronic hero, a ‘pirate impuni’, a ‘voleur’ (x. , ), in a shipwreck recalling Corsino (x. ; cf. OD i. ). But this is a shipwreck of civilization, a central theme of La Peau de chagrin.39 For the themes of Corsino were in Balzac’s mind at this time.40 Like this story and La Peau de chagrin, Jésus-Christ en Flandre is constructed around a dualistic opposition between materialism and idealism, implicit in the contrast between the worldly bishop (x. –) and the true spirituality of the poor and of Christ. Balzac’s description of the storm, with its ‘contrastes puissants’ (x. ) reflects this; but its synaesthesia none the less suggests the impossibility of representation in either oils or language (ibid.). There is ambiguity in this fantastic: though the narrator’s hallucinatory vision of the church leaves him ‘sur la limite des illusions et de la réalité’, in reality it results from ‘les pièges de l’optique’ (x. ). The story, like La Peau de chagrin, turns on the continuum of reality and the imagination, and suggests that they are but one—something also implicit in the impossibility of deciding whether Magnan really managed to ‘changer ses fictions en réalités’ (xi. ) and commit the murder in L’Auberge rouge. It is the theme of Balzac’s next conte fantastique, Maître Cornélius,41 which reverses the plot of L’Auberge rouge to tell the story of Cornélius, Louis XI’s superintendent of finance, who, imagining others to be stealing from him, turns out in fact to be robbing himself in his sleep. Maître Cornélius deals with a theme popular at the time,42 and at first looks like yet another portrait-enigma story in the manner of Sarrasine, Les Proscrits, , , , , of which the first two relate to Balzac’s parliamentary ambitions, and B. Guyon, La Pensée politique et sociale de Balzac, nd edn. (), –. 38 Gosselin to Balzac,  Aug. , Corr. i. ; Balzac to Mme de Castries,  Oct. , Corr. i. –; Berthoud to Balzac,  Oct. , Corr. i. –. 39 The water imagery in this novel appears to symbolize surfeit and disorder, e.g.: ‘océan des littératures’ (x. ); ‘Cet océan de meubles, d’inventions, de modes, d’œuvres, lui composait un poème sans fin’ (x. ; cf. x. –, ). Cf. also the imagery of ruin and fragmentation in La Comédie du diable and Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du temps présent just discussed. 40 Evinced by Émile’s advocacy of ‘l’exclamation de Pyrrhon restant entre le bien et le mal’ (La Peau de chagrin, x. ). This, the only mention of the philosopher in La Comédie humaine, recalls Corsino’s ‘pyrrhonisme absolu’(OD i. ). 41 RP ( and  Dec. ). 42 Nodier’s article ‘De quelques phénomènes du sommeil’ cites ‘le monomane qui rentrait en s’endormant, dans les réalités de sa vie matérielle’: RP  (Feb. ), , whilst S.-H. Berthoud’s tale ‘L’Insomnie’ had appeared in his Contes misanthropiques: BF ( July ). Balzac must have known these works, which may in part have inspired Maître Cornélius. Cf. N. Froger-Silva, ‘Maître Cornélius ou les dangers du dogme’, AB (),  n. , and, on the general currency of the theme, T. James, Dreams, Creativity and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford, ).

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L’Auberge rouge, and Jésus-Christ en Flandre. Its historical setting acts as a pretext for a portrait of Louis XI, and as a simultaneous exploitation of Quentin Durward and of the vogues for the fifteenth century and for Hoffmann; 43 its stress not on the supernatural, but on bizarre mental states as the source of the fantastic, is no doubt particularly indebted to that author.44 Based, like Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, on the triangle of protagonist, apprentice and lover, Maître Cornélius falls into two rather awkwardly related parts. D’Estouteville’s link with Cornélius seems tenuous (as the narratorial commentary acknowledges, xi. ); he is scarcely mentioned after his arrest. But this apparent disunity reflects the work’s thematic structure.45 The apprentice, D’Estouteville, is, like Poussin, the fulcrum on which the plot turns. He too must decide whether to direct his desire to his master or to his mistress. Yet Cornélius is not an artist but a bourgeois: the noble d’Estouteville’s allegiance, unlike Poussin’s, is merely feigned. Whilst Poussin is faced with a more attractive choice in art, D’Estouteville, compelled to decide between love and money, chooses the fulfilment of the former. Like the miser, he can either sublimate energy in potential as apprentice to Cornélius (whose ‘passion cachait sans doute de profondes jouissances’: xi. ), or expend it in pouvoir. Although Cornélius is a miser, he has none of the spiritual insight of a Gobseck; indeed, the oppressive sterility of his existence foreshadows Grandet’s. Cornélius’s conservation of vouloir is as pernicious as the celibates’ in Le Curé de Tours (with which it shares its setting); his misdirected energy is, no doubt, his chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Lacking, along with Raphaël and Frenhofer, the detachment necessary for adequate expression, in the absence of an outlet his energies, like the latter’s, become ever more solipsistic: ‘l’assimilation de ce métal [gold] avec sa substance avait été de plus en plus intime’ (xi. ). His thieves have no more real existence than does ‘La Belle Noiseuse’; he is ‘tout à la fois le voleur et le volé’ (xi. ). Denying himself the fulfilments of pouvoir, his suicide, like 43 The aspects of the work most frequently emphasized. Cf. M. Fargeaud, Balzac et ‘La Recherche de l’Absolu’ (), –; P. Barbéris, Balzac et le mal du siècle (), ii. –. Maître Cornélius, in the character of its protagonist, in its theme of stealing from oneself, in its relationship between a monarch and a bourgeois, appears to owe much to Hoffmann’s Das Fräulein von Scudéry, first published in an anonymous adaptation by Balzac’s associate Henri de Latouche in  under the title Olivier Brusson—the first French version of any of Hoffmann’s works. Lewis speculates that Balzac may have authored an anonymous review of Latouche’s work in the Feuilleton littéraire on  June  (‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’, ). If Olivier Brusson was thus responsible for introducing Balzac to Hoffmann, this may explain why Balzac returned to the theme when under pressure in late . It is tempting to find an ultimate source in La Fontaine (Le Savetier et le financier, Fables, . ii). 44 A trait of Hoffmann’s work recognized early on by J.-J. Ampère: Le Globe, :  ( Aug. ), –, cit. Lewis, ‘Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman’, –. 45 G. Moyal argues that the apparent dislocation between the love plot and the detective mystery in Maître Cornélius is in fact a coincidence, the one being a self-reflexive parallel of the other: ‘Position de l’énigme et la lecture de Maître Cornélius’, in R. Le Huenen and P. Perron (eds.), Le Roman de Balzac (Montreal, ), .

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Frenhofer’s, is a psychological implosion caused by the turning of vouloir upon itself. Maître Cornélius is, with L’Auberge rouge, the most violent of Balzac’s fantastic narratives. Despite his resemblance to Frenhofer and his comically Hoffmannesque qualities, Cornélius is one of Balzac’s most sinister and least sympathetic characters. His misdirection of vouloir, like Taillefer’s, leads to deaths; his adulation of money creates physical and emotional barriers, separating him from the king by a ‘barrière élevée par la défiance et par l’argent’ (xi. ). But for Balzac, as we have seen, desire is a unitary force, whose alienation is a perversion. The opening in Saint-Gatien reflects his belief that the spiritual and material worlds converge: Le concert de sentiments par lequel toutes les âmes s’élancent au ciel produit alors un explicable phénomène de spiritualité . . . Puissance toute électrique, la prière arrache ainsi notre nature à elle-même. Cette involontaire union de toutes les volontés, également prosternées à terre, également élevées aux cieux, contient sans doute le secret des magiques influences que possèdent le chant des prêtres et les mélodies de l’orgue, les parfums et les pompes de l’autel, les voix de la foule et ses contemplations silencieuses. Aussi ne devons-nous pas être étonnés de voir au Moyen Age tant d’amours commencées à l’église après de longues extases . . . Le sentiment religieux avait alors certainement quelques affinités avec l’amour, il en était ou le principe ou la fin. L’amour était une religion, il avait encore son beau fanatisme, ses superstitions naïves, ses dévouements sublimes qui sympathisaient avec ceux du christianisme. Les moeurs de l’époque expliquent assez bien d’ailleurs l’alliance de la religion et de l’amour’. (xi. ) 46

Religious feeling is as much a sensual as a spiritual phenomenon; Christianity and the Church are in harmony with the body, rather than at odds with it, phenomena explained by ‘les moeurs de l’époque’, the Renaissance. Such themes are reflected in the Contes drolatiques, which had been gestating since at least February .

(iii) Renaissance Models and Contemporary Reality in Balzac’s Work, – To modern readers, the most striking aspect of Les Cent Contes drolatiques 47 is their archaism; but it is almost true to say that for Balzac and his contemporaries their main feature was their modernity. Balzac would not have shared the archaeological approach of many modern commentators.48 Although he had 46 Cf. the similar equation of religion and sexuality in L’Élixir de longue vie: ‘la débauche et la religion s’accouplaient alors si bien, que la religion était une débauche et la débauche une religion! . . . C’était bien une image de la vie!’ (xi. ). 47 Les Cent Contes drolatiques. Premier dixain, BF ( Apr. ). 48 A feature which has been explored almost to excess: cf. OD i, pp. xxxiii–xxxv. See also P. Toldo, ‘Rabelais et Honoré de Balzac’, Revue des études rabelaisiennes  (), esp. –; L. Spitzer, ‘Die Wortbildung als stilistisches Mittel exemplifiziert an Rabelais. Nebst einem Anhang über die Wortbildung bei Balzac in seinen Contes drolatiques’, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für

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a established interest in Renaissance literature, particularly in Rabelais,49 and admired the principal architects of its revival, Lacroix and Nodier,50 he was concerned to exploit the period’s topical connotations, associated in literature with Romanticism, and, by reactionaries, with decadence: Rien ne conviendrait mieux à la France-Polignac qu’un peuple dont la littérature et les arts rétrograderaient ainsi vers les quatorzième et quinzième siècles; tout se lie dans l’esprit humain. Faussez le goût, le raisonnement disparaîtra bientôt. Adoptez les monstruosités littéraires, vous comprendrez mieux les monstruosités politiques.51

Such was the context in which the Contes drolatiques first appeared. Théorie du conte,52 Balzac’s own reflection on his cycle, makes clear the extent to which the tales are an emanation and embodiment of Balzac conteur, an expression of his personal (and political) views, ‘un nombre incommensurable d’exemplaires de ma propre personne, tous pressés les uns contre les autres à l’instar des harengs au fond d’une tonne’ (OD i. ). The two Balzacs who actually speak are the dandy, ‘l’homme à cervelle creuse, celui de tous les moi-même qui a le plus de succès’, and ‘l’homme aux conceptions, l’homme qui ne dort plus, l’homme dont le regard va loin, l’homme affaissé sous le poids de la pensée’ (OD i. , )—two faces of Balzac’s career, Janus-like, at the turn of . ‘Écoute, la face incomplète sous laquelle le monde te voit a dit vrai!’ says this Balzac, ‘Soient donnés un mari, sa femme et un amant, déduisez cent contes dont aucun ne ressemble à l’autre. / De même que le cuisinier fait cent plats avec la substance essentiellement culiniforme nommé l’œuf ’ (OD i. ). But this ‘homme aux conceptions’ is sent packing: for the dandy has already demonstrated that Balzac cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs—or even chickens: romanischen Philologie,  (), esp. ; R. Massant, ‘A propos des Contes drolatiques: réalités et fictions dans La Belle Impéria’, Revue des sciences humaines (); M. Lecuyer, Balzac et Rabelais (), –; F. Bar, ‘Archaïsme et originalité dans les Contes drolatiques de Balzac’, AB (); E. Valentin, ‘Le Frère d’armes, examen de l’archaïsme d’un conte drolatique’, AB (), –; W.-D. Lange, ‘Poetik des Pastiche zu Balzac’s Contes drolatiques’, Honoré de Balzac (Munich, ), –. 49 R. Massant, ‘Balzac disciple de Rabelais et maître des Contes drolatiques’, in Balzac et la Touraine (Tours, ); Lecuyer, Balzac et Rabelais, –; Tilby, ‘Balzac and the Writers of the école du désenchantment’, ; M. Ménard, Balzac et le comique (), –. 50 On the influence of the Renaissance, and especially Rabelais, during this period, cf. L. Sainéan, L’Influence et la réputation de Rabelais (),  et seq., at ; J. Boulenger, Rabelais à travers les âges (), ; Lecuyer, Balzac et Rabelais, , –, , ; C. Pichois, Philarète Chasles et la vie littéraire au temps du romantisme (), i. –, –; Tilby, ‘Balzac and the Writers of the école du désenchantment’, – and, on the role of Lacroix and Nodier, –. 51 ‘Parallèle entre le romantisme et le ministère actuel’, La Pandore ( Dec. ). La Gazette de France made a similar attack on Rabelais, of whom ‘l’obscénité et le cynisme révoltaient Voltaire lui-même’ ( Aug. , cited by Ménard, Balzac et le comique, ). A different view was presented by Villemain in his lectures on medieval literature: ‘la liberté du XIXème siècle n’est rien auprès de la licence des muses féodales’ (La Gazette littéraire,  Feb. ). 52 Lov. A ; probably written in late  or early  as an introduction to the Contes drolatiques: OD i. –.

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Mon cher, ne fais plus de contes; le conte est fourbu, rendu, couronné, a le sabot fendu, les flancs rentrés comme ceux de ton cheval. Si tu veux te rendre original, prends le conte, casse-lui les reins comme on brise la carcasse d’un poulet découpé . . . Sans cela, tu n’es qu’un contier, un homme spécial. Ou il faut montrer que le conte est la plus haute expression de la littérature, que ce titre est un mot vide de sens, et qu’en toute espèce d’oeuvre il n’existe que des détails et une exécution plus ou moins habile. Tâche d’arriver à cette déduction, et tu auras soufflé sur une foule de capucins de cartes qui sont en route pour envahir la voie du conte et la gâter. (OD i. , )

The text strikingly anticipates both the trans-, even hyper-generic nature of Balzac’s later work ( literary works have merit only in their details and execution, regardless of genre),53 and also how aware Balzac was that his work had to develop from short fiction. The full formal implications of this development would begin to become apparent the following year, in the compositional difficulties, and novelties, attendant upon Madame Firmiani and La Transaction—the canvas, like Les Célibataires, for the later, more novelistic extensions of these works as La Comtesse à deux maris (F: Le Colonel Chabert) and Le Curé de Tours (see Chapter  below). But a challenge to accepted genres, and a critique of a hackneyed approach, had already been made in Les Deux Amis, a tale which remained unfinished, perhaps because it was a carnivalesque outlet for the completed stories which became the main line of Balzac’s creation.54 Its attack on ‘toutes les niaiseries dans lesquelles s’entortillent les romanciers . . . les cabrioles que les auteurs font subir à leurs créatures . . . ces promenades au clair de lune, ces rêveries suaves . . . les bêtises que l’envie d’être vrai, naïf, tendre ou simple souffle aux écrivains’ was later echoed by a comparable list of clichés in Honorine (xii. –; ii. g). Like Jésus-Christ en Flandre and La Peau de chagrin, the Contes drolatiques have their origins in Balzac’s satirical writings of the autumn of . The first Conte drolatique, La Belle Impéria, was a development of the anticlerical article L’Archêveque.55 Les Joyeulsetez du Roys Loys le Unziesme (CD . v) derives from a similar contemporary article, La Colique.56 These works were topical, liberal, and political. The dangerous content of La Belle Impéria—a risqué tale of a 53 Balzac’s phrase, ‘en toute espèce d’œuvre il n’existe que des détails et une exécution plus ou moins habile’ recalls the similar emphasis on detail in the afterword to the first Scènes de la vie privée (i. ), his organic view of genesis the Avant-propos’s later statement: ‘Le créateur ne s’est servi que d’un seul et même patron pour tous les êtres organisés. L’animal est un principe qui prend sa forme extérieure, ou, pour parler plus exactement, les différences de sa forme, dans les milieux où il est appelé à se développer. Les Espèces Zoologiques résultent de ces différences’ (i. ). 54 On this excentrique vein in Balzac’s creation, cf. J.-L. Diaz, ‘Portrait de Balzac en “conteur phosphorique”’, and F. Schuerewegen, ‘Avortements (sur les ébauches rattachées à La Comédie humaine’), in S. Vachon (ed.), Balzac: une poétique du roman (Montreal and Saint Denis, ),  et seq. and –, esp. –. Schuerewegen even suggests that the interruption which closes Les Deux Amis is ‘en quelque sorte motivée’ ()—a parallel with the end of Le Dernier Napoléon, the first published version of La Peau de chagrin’s opening. 55 C ( Nov. ). 56 C ( Nov. ).

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courtesan and her clerics—led Véron to refuse it: ‘Le lendemain du pillage des églises, des descentes de croix etc., etc., il serait de trop mauvais goût d’accuser à nouveau les prêtres qui n’ont rien moins à craindre que d’être jetés à l’eau . . . 57 It finally appeared, much modified, in the Revue de Paris on  June ; the remainder of the first dixain was written between September and the following March, and published on  April .58 It was during the composition of these Contes that Balzac turned towards legitimism, employing history in covert reference to contemporary events. His allegiance to throne and altar is evident in Maître Cornélius, which presents Louis XI as an ideal of kingship Louis-Philippe implicitly could not match,59 and warily alludes to contemporary unrest. Dwellings are fortified ‘contre une populace furieuse’ (xi. ; cf. xi. ), monuments destroyed (xi. );60 and there is perhaps a nostalgic ring in the narrator’s observation that ‘le peuple n’était pas encore souverain’ (xi. ). But it was not until Balzac’s overt espousal of legitimism early in  that history was turned to a partisan purpose.61 Le Départ,62 a brief story about the exile of Charles X, uses emotive imagery to convey an allegorical message, presenting the king as a symbol of stability (‘hors de cet esquif sont les tempêtes’) and the opposition as ‘marchands d’orviétan politique’ (OD ii. , ). Charles X represents historical continuity: ‘un vieillard à cheveux blancs, enveloppé dans une idée, fidèle à une idée’(OD ii. ). In Le Refus,63 the words of Cardinal de Bourbon as he refuses the crown—‘Vous avez un roi, c’est mon neveu’—contrast implicitly with Louis-Philippe’s action in similar circumstances.64 Balzac consistently contrasts the present with its Renaissance precedent. In La Peau de chagrin, Raphaël’s orgy is a pale reflection of Gargantua’s feast,

 Feb. , Corr. i. . On the genesis of the Contes drolatiques, see R. Chollet, OCI xx, pp. iv–xl, and, on the first dixain, OD ii. – and –. 59 xi. ; cf. Guyon, Pensée politique, –. 60 This reference is ambiguous. On  May  Balzac had written to Barthélemy expressing sympathy for both Napoleon and the Bourbons (Corr. i. –; Guyon, Pensée politique, –). Yet less than a year later he was to publish Sur la destruction projetée du monument au duc de Berry (Le Rénovateur ( Mar. )). Balzac’s references to such destructions in Maître Cornélius may be viewed in the light of his regret at the disappearance of the ancient city of Paris. Cf. La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, i. –. 61 Cf. Guyon, Pensée politique,  et seq.; Barbéris, Balzac et le mal du siècle, ii. –. 62 Le Départ, L’Émeraude. Morceaux choisis de littérature moderne, BF ( Jan. ); OD ii. –. 63 Le Refus. Scène de l’histoire de France, Le Saphir. Morceaux inédits de littérature moderne, BF ( May ); OD ii. –. 64 OD ii. . The manuscript was more explicit: ‘L’Histoire est, dit-on, la leçon des Rois, mais de nos jours, les rois ont trop d’affaires sur les bras pour trouver le temps de lire, et le temps n’est plus où l’on préférait sauver l’honneur de sa couronne à la couronne même’ (Le Départ, Lov. A , fo. r). This passage does not appear in L’Émeraude, for which it was no doubt considered too provocative, but its implicit significance remained. 57 58

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showing only ‘tout l’abîme qui sépare le dix-neuvième siècle du seizième’ (x. ). La Peau de chagrin echoes the negative purpose of Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du temps présent,65 advocating rejection of the ‘vandalisme actuel’ represented by foreign literary influences and ‘la combustion des bibliothèques, et un nouveau Moyen Age’ (x. ). Balzac is here as provocatively and topically anticlerical as the first version of La Belle Impéria: the archbishop’s library and palace had been burnt after the sacking of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois on  February , perhaps the very day before this preface was composed.66 But for Balzac the Middle Ages also signify a joyous, Gallic, Rabelaisian tradition.67 The nineteenth century, taxed with being ‘un peu trop collet monté’ in Maître Cornélius (x. ), is implicitly present in the drolatiques, whose archaism is perceived in the context of the present, ‘une dragme de joyeulsetez par ce tems où l’ennuy tumbe comme une pluie fine qui mouille’ (OD i. ). The Contes drolatiques are the jovial counterpart of La Peau de chagrin. Balzac’s aim extends beyond the narrowly political to a more ambitious cultural undertaking: the thoroughgoing renewal of the French national character, via the conte. The nexus of Balzac’s enterprise is Touraine, ‘la patrie du conte en France’ (xi. ), home of the archetypal Gallic narrative form, associated with integrity of national character and of literature: ‘il y cent mille fois plus de talent dans un conte à rire que dans toutes les méditations, les odes et les trilogies cadavéreuses dont on prétend régaler nos esprits.’68 Both conte and conteur have an ancient and oracular purpose (x. –) which Balzac was to attribute to Rabelais in Le Prosne du ioyeulx curé de Meudon (CD II, viii), where his illustrious compatriot offers advice to Henri II—a thinly diguised allegory of his own position in relation to the July Monarchy.69 Through the Contes drolatiques, Balzac sought in literature the political and social role which eluded him in life.70 It was in its very archaism that the cycle was most topical and, in the widest sense, political.

Cf. Ménard, Balzac et le comique, , –, –, . Gosselin’s deadline for La Peau de chagrin was  Feb. . Cf. Corr. i. . 67 In his Lettre à Hippolyte Castille, Balzac describes Rabelais as ‘Le plus grand génie du Moyen Age, le seul que nous puissions opposer à Dante’ (CHH xxviii. ). 68 Complaintes satiriques, OD ii. . 69 Cf. M. Lastinger, ‘Du légitimisme drolatique: Le Prosne du ioyeulx curé de Meudon’, AB (), –, esp. –. 70 It is interesting to compare the preface of Le Cabinet des Antiques: ‘A toutes les époques, les narrateurs ont été les secrétaires de leurs contemporains: il n’est pas un conte de Louis XI ou de Charles le Téméraire (Les Cent nouvelles nouvelles) . . . pas un fabliau des vieux romanciers, qui n’ait pour base un fait contemporain’ (iv. ). In  Balzac still sought to achieve a political aim by literary means; by  he was resigned to a passive role. The socially committed yet detached narrator of the Contes drolatiques is a forerunner of the amanuensis of La Comédie humaine, following a trajectory from pouvoir to savoir. 65 66

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(iv) The First dixain of Contes drolatiques () The Contes drolatiques escape to a Golden Age where consummation follows immediately upon desire. No sooner does the silk-dyer of L’Apostrophe (CD I, x) spot the laundry-maid, than she becomes his wife;71 the vicar of Azay-leRideau meets a girl, and makes love with her;72 Impéria falls helplessly and happily in love with Philipe de Mala.73 This world is the reverse of Balzac’s usually meticulous causation—of the corrosive analysis identified by Balzac’s mouthpiece, Chasles, as Balzac was signing the contract for his contes: L’analyse ronge la société en l’expliquant: plus le monde vieillit, plus la narration est une oeuvre pénible. Rendez-moi compte de cet incident: Apportez-moi le comment de cet acte et le pourquoi de ce caractère? Disséquez ce cadavre et sachez me plaire! Soyez commentateur et amuseur!74

More importantly, the drolatiques aim to counter a duplicitous vice, ‘la pruderie, l’hypocrisie de nos moeurs’ (x. ). The pessimistic dualities of La Peau de chagrin, L’Auberge rouge, and Maître Cornélius are here resolved into an optimistic unity. The readiness with which physical urges are satisfied in the Contes drolatiques is the positive embodiment of the continuity between esprit and matière, pensée and idée implied, but never attained, in the Romans et contes philosophiques. Their emotional alienation plays no part here: characters achieve the state of union with nature which eludes Raphaël during his stay in the Auvergne. The Contes drolatiques are, in more ways than one, the obverse of La Peau de chagrin, the counter-demonstration of the repeated assertion that ‘l’homme qui pense est un animal dépravé ’ (x. ; ). Balzac’s imagery reflects our status as part of the natural continuum. Many images compare humans and animals;75 the diverse goals of ‘énergie vitale’ are viewed as implicitly equivalent parts of the natural order.76 Food, sex, and scatology are frequently related,77 as are sex and property (a Rabelaisian revisiting 72 73 OD i. –. OD i. –. OD i. –. Introduction aux ‘Romans et contes philosophiques’, xi. , BF ( Sept. ); Balzac signed the contract for the first dixain on  Aug.: Corr. i. –. 75 e.g. ‘Bruyn devisoyt d’enfans, discours qu’il fuyoit comme les chatz fuyent l’eaue’ (Le Péché vesniel, OD i. ); ‘Le paouvre mary ploura comme ung cerf aux aboys’ (La Mye du roy, OD i. ); ‘Le bon vieulx seigneur . . . flairoyt la fille et se deshanchoyt le col comme un singe en voulant attraper des noix grollières’ (La Pucelle de Thilhouze, OD i. ). 76 e.g. ‘Dieu avoyt faict les puccelaiges pour estre prins comme les perdreaux pour estre embrochez et rostis’(Le Péché vesniel, OD i. ); ‘bescher, arrouzer, cultiver, labourer le iardin natturel de Vénus’ (L’Héritier du dyable, OD i. ). 77 e.g. Mme de Valesnes ‘laissoyt ieusner son bon mary des douceurs et sucreries stipulées en tous contracts de mariaige’ (La Pucelle de Thilhouze, OD i. ); ‘je feroys cuire l’un de ses tettins et le croquerois, mesme sans saulce’ (L’Apostrophe, OD i. ). Blanche stares at her husband so fixedly that ‘le mary resta sot comme une fille qui laisse échapper quelque note d’en bas devant une nombreuse compaignie’ (La Connestable, OD i. ). 71 74

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of L’Auberge rouge, where marrying Victorine is a way of getting rich),78 or sex and religion, here not so much anticlerical as merely comic.79 The sexual exploits of Balzac’s clerics are merely part of a natural order, a light-hearted demonstration of the continuity between spiritual and sensual emotion more grimly expressed in Maître Cornélius. The drolatiques’ imagery and language embody their monism, forming a positive pendant to the problem of expression ‘par analogie’ which had beset La Peau de chagrin and the Physiologie du mariage: Nous ne pouvons donc plus parler la langue rude et grossière de nos ancêtres. L’âge dans lequel on fabrique des tissus si fins, si brillants, des meubles si élégants, des porcelaines si riches, devrait être l’âge des périphrases et des circonlocutions. (xi. )

Much comedy results from the expression itself, and, frequently, from the very disparity between the idea and its ‘comparaison matérielle’ (x. ) which causes Raphaël such anguish. Many of the most amusing locutions are actually circumlocutions, similes, or euphemisms: ‘il n’y ha si vilain pot qui ne renconstre son couvercle’;80 ‘lire dans ce bréviaire de guallanterie’; 81 ‘il ne confessa plus que les femmes de hault lignaige’.82 Yet the cycle’s language is none the less ‘la chose même’. When Blanche fixes her page with ‘la plus pute de toutes les oeillades’,83 the expression shocks at least as much as the action; in Les Joyseulsetez du Roy Loys le Unziesme, Balzac’s listing of metaphors, as well as being a mock-Rabelaisian tic, suggests the narrator’s frustration at their inability to convey meaning, as they are flung out with the violence of missiles directed at the mind: Et, lors ils se cotonnèrent le moule de leurs pourpoincts. Qu’est-ce cela? C’est se carreler l’estomac, faire la chymie naturelle, compluser les platz, fester ses trippes . . . mais plus filosophiquement, c’est faire du bran avecque ses dents. Ores, comprenez-vous? De combien est-il besoing de mots pour vous desfoncer l’entendement?84

The language of the drolatiques aspires to none of the representational transparency admired in Raphael’s painting of Christ (x. ), or which inspires Balzac’s explanation of ‘torçonnier’ in Maître Cornélius (xi. –). The nineteenth-century reader is confronted with an intentionally opaque and plastic medium, a barrage of archaism protecting Balzac’s purpose, the proverbial 78 e.g. ‘plantter insolemment son estendart au cueur des appartenances légitimes dudict seigneur comte’ (La Connestable, OD i. ); ‘Dieu ha voulu punir le sieur de Valesnes d’avoir essayé d’achepter une danrée faicte pour estre donnée’ (La Pucelle de Thilhouze, OD i. ). 79 ‘Blanche gaignoyt ung appestist de nonne et de preslat; c’est-à-dire, voulant procréer, aiguizant ses forces, et ne briddant guères sa faim’ (Le Péché vesniel, OD i. ); ‘tous deux prindrent un gros à compte sur les joyes du paradis’ (Le Curé d’Azay-le-rideau, OD i. ). 80 81 La Pucelle de Thilhouze, OD i. . Le Péché vesniel, OD i. . 82 83 L’Héritier du dyable, OD i. . Le Péché vesniel, OD i. . 84 OD i. . Cf. also Balzac’s definition of the ‘malandrin’, which is expressed by a series of paraphrases: Le Curé d’Azay-le-Rideau, OD i. .

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ring of its phrases bolstering its cohesive otherness, his aim of suggesting an escape from contemporary France to a less hypocritical past. Balzac’s narrative techniques reflect his fundamental monism. In comparison to contemporary stories which were eventually to be included in La Comédie humaine, tales like La Belle Impéria, La Mye du roy, L’Héritier du dyable, Les Joyeulsetez du Roy Loys le Unziesme, La Connestable, and Le Curé d’Azay-le-Rideau are strikingly uncomplicated. The prevailing simplicity of character and situation, and their corollary, the direct link between desire and consummation, render Scottian digressions and flashbacks virtually redundant. Few stories are situated more precisely than ‘en ce temps’ or ‘alors’. In consequence, we are placed not at a calculable distance from the action—as is the case in, say, Maître Cornélius or Le Colonel Chabert, where the perception of events as history is important—but within the same time-span, in a virtual Golden Age whose settings, like those of the Decameron and Heptameron, are suggested rather than described. In stories like Le Péché vesniel, Les Joyeulsetez du Roy Loys le Unziesme, and L’Apostrophe,85 the circumscription of the action in Touraine creates a self-contained world reinforced by the collection’s cyclical form, and its creator’s aim of recounting one hundred different tales around a single theme: ‘un mari, sa femme et un amant’ (Théorie du conte, OD i. ). Characters and settings extensively recur. Cornélius is mentioned in Les Joyeulsetez; the belle buandière and the abbey of Turpenay were to have been joined, in another story, La Nonne d’Égypte, by the converted gypsy of Le Péché vesniel; along with the courtesan of the latter, she subsequently reappears in Le Succube.86 Whilst the reappearance of characters was not to become widespread until the third dixain of Contes drolatiques, it is in the first that Balzac’s fictional world becomes self-generating and self-contained. Yet it is, none the less, not hermetic. If the cycle refers implicitly to contemporary reality, its greatest achievement is the creation of a reality of its own. Unlike the Scènes de la vie privée, Adieu, or Maître Cornélius, these contes contain virtually no explicit reference to real or contemporary conditions or events, only to other parts of Balzac’s creation.87 Le Péché vesniel and La Connestable are comic reworkings of L’Enfant maudit; La Godegrand, in Les Joyeulsetez, foreshadows many Balzacian old maids, whilst L’Héritier du dyable is a humorous handling of inheritance. As work on the first dixain progressed, Balzac reverted increasingly to techniques characteristic of works outside the cycle. L’Héritier du dyable, Le Curé d’Azay-le-Rideau, and Les Joyeulsetez du Roy Loys le Unziesme feature brief penportraits,88 and the latter, ellipsis.89 La Pucelle de Thilhouze and La Connestable 90 OD i. –. CD . ix. Cf. R. Chollet, OCI xx.  pp. xxxiv–xxxvi and Ch. (v) below. 87 Exceptions are scarce: the reference to the sacking of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois in La Belle Impéria, already mentioned, to nineteenth-century Tours in L’Apostrophe: N. Mozet, ‘Ma mère la ville: Tours en Balzacie’, Corps écrit  (), cit. P.-G. Castex, OD i, p. xv. 88 OD i. –, –, –, respectively. 89 OD i. –. 90 OD i. ,  respectively. 85 86

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use Balzac’s narrator’s well-tested devices, such as explanatory flashbacks;91 authorial maxims and interjections are as common in these stories as elsewhere.92 In Le Péché vesniel, for example, the exposition forms a retrospective account of Bruyn’s history; like Maître Cornélius and La Transaction, the tale progresses through five chapters, each explaining the event announced in its title. Its length, more than twice that of any other in this dixain, enables action evolving over an extended period of time, using the now familiar technique of scenes at salient moments interspersed with passages of authorial narration. In the whole of the Contes drolatiques, only Le Succube (CD . ix) is longer, and there, Balzac uses the space to give a diversity of perspectives which was coming to characterize his creation by the time of its appearance in . The presence of Balzac’s conventional techniques as early as the first dixain, whose raison d’être was to be unconventional, suggests that the aim of creating an entirely discrete fictional world in the Contes drolatiques could probably never have been fully realized. But it is far from being a defeat, foreshadowing the emergence of cycles like the Études de moeurs, and, ultimately, La Comédie humaine. The drolatiques’ recurring characters are the first to be given a life of their own, untied to a particular narrative, or narrator. Echoes of the first dixain are to be found outside it, in Maître Cornélius, contemporary with Les Joyeulsetez, in Balzac’s characterization of the lovers’ desire to ‘se donner le plus audacieux de tous les baisers’ (xi. ), in the description of the courtesan of Jésus-Christ en Flandre as ‘une Galloise’ (x. ; cf. OD i. , , ), and in the reappearance of the name Mortsauf, in Le Lys dans la vallée. The year from  and  was decisive in Balzac’s career. In La Peau de chagrin, Balzac uses a conte to create a novel, developing a monistic conception of energy and creation already foreshadowed in Sarrasine and Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu; and, together with the other stories of Romans et contes philosophiques, develops the fantastic as an analogue of, and tool for, exploring the real. Though he probably did not conceive of ‘le désordre et le ravage portés par l’intelligence dans l’homme’ as the ‘idée primitive’ of this collection until it was actually brought together (x.  and n. ), it was this impulse to group parts into a whole, rather than (as in the case of the  Scènes de la vie privée) to publish an already completed cycle, which was ultimately to be reproduced and developed in La Comédie humaine. Yet these very developments were also to lead Balzac to abandon the conte as his major mode of expression. In La Peau de chagrin, his treatment of a surfeit of desire created a frame story literally bursting at the seams; Maître Cornélius compresses the techniques of a Scottian novel into a fraction of novel length, demonstrating, in opposition to the Contes drolatiques, a monistic conception uncontainable in a single story or cycle. As Davin later

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‘Vecy l’ordre de battaille’, OD i. ; ‘Pour estre brief . . .’, OD i. . e.g. L’Apostrophe, OD i. –.

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remarked: ‘l’auteur a dû souvent éprouver mille peines à rétrécir ses compositions dans le cadre qui leur était assigné pour l’harmonie de l’ensemble.’93 Such peines were already being felt in .

93

Introduction aux Études philosophiques, x. .



Balzac, ‘Roi de la Nouvelle’ From the Contes bruns to Le Curé de Tours,  (i) Art or Income? The Commercial Background, – ‘Roi de la nouvelle’: Sophie Gay’s sobriquet (Corr. i. ) accurately describes Balzac’s reputation at the begining of . In the previous year, he had published no less than ten new contes and nouvelles in the literary reviews, as well as La Peau de chagrin, Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit, Le Grand d’Espagne, and many of the first dixain of Contes drolatiques;1 in  were to come a further eight stories in the reviews, four collections of his own, together with contributions to three collaborative volumes.2 Such high-profile activity placed him in a position of strength. As early as mid he felt able to write to Gosselin, who was about to publish La Peau de chagrin: Je ne prendrai plus jamais d’époque pour donner un livre, et désormais mon éditeur devra subir une puissance dont je suis la première victime. Permis à lui de ne voir que du papier noirci, dans ce que je fais, je ne l’en blâme pas; mais moi j’y vois autre chose . . . Je me contenterai des journaux qui m’offrent en ce moment plus d’argent que je n’en espérais . . . et quand je ferai un livre, je n’en aurai pas d’irritations à éprouver, et mes ouvrages seront offerts non pas tant à l’argent qu’aux bons offices.3

This was a scheme for publishing stories in reviews to subsidize more ambitious undertakings; but it did not go quite to plan. The first such project, Histoire de la Succession du marquis de Carabas, was sold to Gosselin barely a month later (Corr. i. ),4 but never finished; and Balzac was not able to compose 1 Les Deux Rencontres, Le Réquisitionnaire, Le Doigt de Dieu, Les Proscrits, La Belle Impéria, L’Auberge rouge, and Maître Cornélius (RP ); L’Enfant maudit and Le Rendez-vous (RDM ); Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (L’Artiste), plus L’Église and Jésus-Christ en Flandre (Romans et contes philosophiques), and Le Dôme des Invalides (Annales romantiques, ). 2 Madame Firmiani, La Femme de trente ans [I], La Femme abandonnée, La Grenadière, Voyage de Paris à Java, and pt. I of Les Marana (RP ); Le Message (RDM ); La Transaction (L’Artiste) plus the nd edn. of the Scènes de la vie privée, the first dixain of Contes drolatiques, Contes philosophiques, and Nouveaux contes philosophiques. Balzac also contributed Le Départ to L’Émeraude, Le Refus to Le Saphir, and La Vie d’une femme to Le Rénovateur. 3 Balzac to Gosselin, c. July , Corr. i. . 4 Contract between Balzac and Gosselin of  Aug. ; see also T. Takayama, Les Œuvres romanesques avortées de Balzac (–) ( Tokyo and Paris, ), –.

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Louis Lambert, the only one to be written, until the summer of ; meanwhile, he became seriously engaged in his stories, with consequent implications for deadlines and for length. L’Auberge rouge appeared nearly three months late; La Peau de chagrin, nearly six.5 Maître Cornélius was delivered to the Revue de Paris two months overdue, and considerably overlength: unbeknown to the author, its director, Pichot, cut it, and suffered Balzac’s wrath; but the issue containing the second instalment still has  pages instead of the usual , even after Pichot’s illicit pruning.6 By early , Balzac’s production of short fiction was swamping a market already saturated at the height of ‘la folie du conte’. In February he published in three reviews in one week,7 eliciting what looks like Pichot’s revenge: A ce prix-là le nom de Chateaubriand ou de Charles Nodier en prose, celui de Lamartine en vers perdraient beaucoup de leur éclat pour nous . . . . Connu par les libraires comme vous l’êtes, pourquoi ne vous suffirait-il pas de vous partager entre eux et nous?8

The dispute had prophetic implications. It is the first of the collisions between the aesthetic and the commercial which were to dog the rest of Balzac’s career: between the length, temporal and textual, produced by his drive to treat subjects seriously, and in detail, and the constraint of publishers page limits and deadlines.9 Maître Cornélius was not alone. Balzac’s narratives now demanded more extensive developments than the reviews could allow. La Transaction (the first version of Le Colonel Chabert, which it finally became in  via a significantly rewritten intermediate version, La Comtesse à deux maris, of ) spread from the third to the sixth issue of L’Artiste,10 the theatrical rubric being omitted in the fourth number to accommodate its second and third chapters. Les Célibataires, now Le Curé de Tours, was published two months later—but in book form.11 And it was in book form, in the Contes bruns, that Cf. Corr. i.  and  respectively. Corr. i. – and ; RP  ( Dec. ), –; cf. R. Guise, xi. –. Balzac was only placated by the publication of his story the following Oct. in book form, in the Nouveaux Contes philosophiques. 7 Le Message was published in the Revue des deux mondes on  Feb. . The first chapter of La Transaction appeared in L’Artiste on  Feb. , and on the same day Madame Firmiani appeared in the Revue de Paris. 8 Pichot to Balzac,  Mar. , Corr. i. . 9 In the case of the Revue de Paris, it began a period of increasingly difficult relations which was to culminate, in , in a lawsuit against the journal for the unauthorized advance publication of proofs of Le Lys dans la vallée in the St. Petersburg Revue étrangère, and ultimately, in Balzac’s vengeful unmasking of the press in the second part of Illusions perdues, Un grand homme de province à Paris. Cf. H.-J. Godin, ‘Jules Janin et Balzac’, in D. G. Chartlton, J. Gaudon, and A. R. Pugh (eds.), Balzac and the Nineteenth Century: Studies in French Literature Presented to H. J. Hunt (Leicester, ), –, at –. 10 L’Artiste (,  Feb. ), –, –;  (,  Mar. ), –, –. The promise of ‘La fin au prochain numéro’ was made twice before it was kept. 11 Scènes de la vie privée, nd edn., published  May . 5 6

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

Balzac was temporarily able to turn the collision between the commercial and the aesthetic to his advantage.

(ii) Contes bruns: Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit and Le Grand d’Espagne; La Grande Bretèche Balzac had initially sought to dominate the Contes bruns (‘Dark tales’),12 a collaborative volume of ten stories to which he gave two frame narratives, Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit (which itself contains twelve anecdotes) and Le Grand d’Espagne. The ubiquity of frame stories and of collections of contes between  and  was an index of commercial viability, the genre offering a convenient means of publishing narratives with no more relation to each other than their presence between the same covers. The very titles of collective works containing stories on a bewildering variety of themes—Le Salmigondis, Contes de toutes les couleurs, Les Cent-et-une Nouvelles nouvelles des Cent-et-un13—point to their motley contents. The Contes bruns were one of the first commercial ventures of this kind. On one level, Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit was a convenient format for publishing anecdotes from Balzac’s notebook Pensées, sujets, fragments,14 for reworking in more lurid and lucrative form themes already treated elsewhere. In some respects, it is a potboiler. Tales of gullible nuns and consolable widows echo the contemporary Contes drolatiques; Napoleon, heroic embodiment of his people, recalls Raisson’s Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande Armée; the Spaniards of Le Grand d’Espagne and La Grande Bretèche (originally intended for the Contes bruns, but not included in the collection, and published soon after, with Le Message, in Le Conseil )15 conform to contemporary stereotypes—passionate,

12 H. de Balzac, P. Chasles, C. Rabou, Contes bruns. Par une tête à l’envers, BF ( Feb. ). Cf. Rabou to Balzac,  or  Jan. , Corr. i. –. 13 Le Salmigondis, Contes de toutes les couleurs (–), Les Cent-et-Une Nouvelles nouvelles des Cent-etUn (). The prefaces of these works stress their heterogeneity: Le Salmigondis, ix. ; Les Centet-Une Nouvelles nouvelles des Cent-et-un, . Cf. also R. Guise, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton (–)’, Doctorat d’État thesis, Nancy, , pt. I, ch. ,  et seq. 14 Balzac’s notebook Pensées, sujets, fragments contains sketches of the ‘capitaine Bianchi’, ‘général Rusca’, and ‘bol de punch’ anecdotes (CHH xxviii. , , ). 15 Le Conseil is a frame story containing Le Message and La Grande Bretèche published in the third volume of the second edition of the Scènes de la vie privée, BF ( Apr. ); the framing passages, subsequently abandoned, are reproduced in ii. –. La Grande Bretèche was probably written in  (A. W. Raitt, ‘Notes sur la genèse de La Grande Bretèche’, AB (), –). It has a chequered history. Republished as La Grande Bretèche ou les trois vengeances in vol. iii of the  Scènes de la vie de province with two stories from Une conversation, and again under the same title in , it appears as a free-standing narrative in vol. iv of F, between Béatrix and Modeste Mignon; FC appends it to Autre étude de femme: iii. –. See Ch. (ii), and, on Le Message, Ch. (iii) below.

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jealous, cruel, faithful, and honourable to the point of death.16 In Le Grand d’Espagne and La Grande Bretèche, Balzac parodies the roman noir;17 according to a contemporary reviewer, the story of Le Grand d’Espagne was ‘connu comme la borne des rues’.18 Yet this was a potboiler well seasoned for contemporary tastes. Unlike, say, Le Salmigondis, the Contes bruns have a unifying sombreness of tone: the stories treat adultery, and/or brutish or insensitive husbands; Bianchi’s, Beauvoir’s, Rusca’s, the soldier’s widow’s tale,19 the story of the captain and Clarisse,20 like El Verdugo and Adieu, depict the destructive effects of war, especially on relationships. These are perhaps the Soirées de Médan of their era, pitched at the Napoleonic generation—one peculiarly aware of the cohesive value of the conte, of popular oral narrative, as a unifying response to social upheaval. This awareness had risen with the rediscovery of Renaissance literature, of the social importance of ‘contes qui s’ouvrent dans les longues soirées d’hiver pour charmer le seigneur de quelque château ou le bourgeois de Paris’.21 ‘Les innombrables et brillants conteurs de l’Italie apparurent à la suite des maladies contagieuses et des guerres civiles’ noted Les Cent-et-Une Nouvelles nouvelles des Cent-et-un.22 The opening of Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit is an encomium of the social virtues of storytelling, of ‘cette profusion de pensées, de formules, de contes, de documents historiques . . . le phénomène oral qui, bien étudié, bien manié, fait la puissance d l’acteur et du conteur’.23 Balzac’s Conversation, for all its, or perhaps rather, because of, its popularity, is, with the drolatiques, part of his project of revivifying French literature through a return to the Renaissance:24 16 Cf. V. L. Leathers, L’Espagne et les Espagnols dans l’œuvre d’Honoré de Balzac (), esp. ch. ; L.-F. Hoffmann, Romantique Espagne: l’image de l’Espagne en France entre  et  (), esp.  et seq.; and P. Berthier, ‘La Présence de l’Espagne dans la presse française des années : autour de Balzac’, AB (). 17 Contes bruns, ed. M. Milner (Marseilles, ), , and iii. ,  respectively, where the narrator reads ‘un roman à la Radcliffe’ and abandons himself to ‘une curiosité romanesque’; a wry tone recalling, say, Hoffmann’s Das öde Haus. As the folie du conte blew itself out, La Grande Bretèche was itself to be pastiched in Janin’s ‘La Cent Millième et une et dernière nouvelle nouvelle’, RP  (Sept.–Oct. ), –, and its sequel, a frame story entitled Le Cercueil. Cf. H. Godin, ‘Jules Janin et Balzac’, in Charlton et al. (eds.), Balzac and the Nineteenth Century, – and –. 18 Le Figaro ( Feb. ), cit. R. Pierrot, AB (), . 19 Contes bruns, ed. Milner, . 20 Ibid. –. 21 F. Villemain, Tableau de la littérature française au moyen âge, reported in La Gazette littéraire ( Dec. ). 22 Les Cent-et-Une Nouvelles nouvelles des Cent-et-un, . Such attitudes were also related to the contemporary context: ‘Le dégoût de la politique fait renaître le goût de la littérature’ (Le Conteur (), ). 23 Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit, in H. de Balzac, Ph. Chasles, and Ch. Rabou, Contes bruns, ed. M. Milner (Marseilles, ), –. Balzac’s emphasis on the serpentine aspects of narration echoes the arabesque of the La Peau de chagrin. 24 Ibid. . L’Artiste had earlier attributed the loss of oral narration to a decline in national character: ‘Sur les contes de veillées’,  ( Dec. ), –. But this may well be advance publicity for the Contes bruns: the issues of  and  Dec. contained Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit and Chasles’s ‘L’Œil sans paupière’.

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Aujourd’hui vous voulez rire, et vous nous interdisez toutes les sources de la gaieté franche qui faisait les délices de nos ancêtres. Otez les tromperies de femmes, les ruses de moines, les aventures un peu brenneuses de Verville et de Rabelais, où sera le rire? . . . Le jour où nous avons donné de la chasteté au langage, les moeurs avaient perdu la leur.25

The frame story was perfectly adapted to this end. Told from the horse’s mouth, its tales link directly to reality, guaranteeing authenticity.26 ‘Je ne parle que de ce que j’ai vu’,27 says the doctor-narrator of Une conversation. It is a statement we may take all too lightly, but he counts Stendhal and Nodier in his audience—who, of course, like most contemporaries, had lived through the Napoleonic era. Balzac reanimates the problematic relation between framed narrative, frame, and the real world, exciting the audience’s reactions to a framed story in Une conversation, turning the framed narratives Le Message and La Grande Bretèche into illocutions in Le Conseil, where these stories are told in order to change the relations between the characters in the frame. M. de Vilaines, ‘[qui] haïssait cordialement Ernest de la Plaine’ (ii. ), tells two cautionary tales to Mme d’Esther, successfully turning her against his rival in order to win her himself—and even getting her to thank him for his trouble. The key event of La Grande Bretèche, one of Balzac’s most celebrated and frequently anthologized tales, the walling into a chamber of Mme de Merret’s Spanish lover Férédia by her husband after she has sworn by the Cross that there is no one there, may well originate in the Heptaméron, or in other, more immediate sources.28 But other elements of the story seem indebted to Hoffmann: to the opening to Das öde Haus,29 and perhaps more to Das Majorat.30 Both Hoffmann’s and Balzac’s stories open with a cursed and ruined house; both deal with an adultery theme, Hoffmann’s more tangentially than Balzac’s, in the incipient affair between the narrator Théodore and Séraphine. But both are concerned with hatred and division, and, above all, with the Une conversation, . Cf. ibid. , , and Le Grand d’Espagne and La Grande Bretèche, which both contain frame narrations presented as transcriptions: Contes bruns, ed. Milner, ; La Grande Bretèche, iii. . 27 Une conversation, . 28 R. Lebègue, ‘De Marguerite de Navarre à Honoré de Balzac’, Comptes rendus des séances de l’académie des inscriptions et belles lettres (July–Oct. ); N. Célestin, ‘La Grande Bretèche: tradition orale, souvenirs livresques, cadre tourangeau’, AB (). Férédia’s name virtually reproduces that of Hérédia, one of Balzac’s mother’s lovers: P –; G. Robb, Balzac: A Biography (London, ), . 29 First published on  Oct.  as La Maison déserte in E. T. A. Hoffmann, Contes nocturnes, trans. F.-A. Loève-Veimars,  vols. (), xiii (sic: the Contes nocturnes are in fact the continuation of E. T. A. Hoffmann, Contes fantastiques, trans. F.-A. Loève-Veimars,  vols. (–). See E. Teichmann, La Fortune d’Hoffmann en France (Geneva and Paris, ), , . The cracked walls, holed roof and windows, and missing doorbell of La Maison déserte are all replicated in more detail by Balzac (iii. –). 30 First published in vol. i of Loève-Veimars’s translation of Hoffmann’s Contes fantastiques in Nov. : Teichmann, La Fortune d’Hoffman, . 25 26

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blocked-up door. Mentioned early in Hoffmann’s tale, its mystery is not explained until the end. Whilst the motive for that mystery—there it is money, not love—differs in nature from that of Balzac’s story (Wolfgang’s majordomo, Daniel, has pushed him through the door to his death, so that his brother Hubert may inherit the estate), the blocked-up door forms the enigma in both stories, and, in both Das Majorat and La Grande Bretèche, it is via a servant that the truth is revealed. Above all, it is perhaps the multiple layering of narration which Balzac derives from Hoffmann: Théodore’s great-uncle tells the story of the rival brothers, the majorat and the majordomo, in a central framed section which occupies about one-third of the tale, and the parallelism is increased by the fact that the same names are borne by successive generations of the noble family. La Grande Bretèche complexifies these layers, or rather fragments them, by making its narrative a mosaic of different viewpoints the reader, in the steps of the narrator (in , in Le Conseil, M. de Vilaines; from , Bianchon)31 must piece back together—a mosaic perhaps influenced by the jigsaw Balzac had assembled in Une conversation.32 La Grande Bretèche is much more explicitly a detective story than Das Majorat, narrated in four main stages: the enigma triggered by the ruinous house; the notary Regnault’s relation of his visit to Mme de Merret on her deathbed and the provisos of her will; the landlady, Mme Lepas’s, account of her Spanish lodger; and the end of the story, culled from Mme de Merret’s servant Rosalie, in Merret’s discovery of his wife’s infidelity and the bricking-up of the wall. Balzac’s story is, characteristically, much more closely, but also architecturally, worked. The sundial at the opening, with its legend,  , points to the outcome, as does the clammy grasp of the cold ‘comme la main du commandeur sur le cou de don Juan (iii. –). The narrative is both linear and spatial. Rosalie is ‘la case qui se trouve au milieu d’un damier’; her tale stands halfway between Regnault’s and Mme Lepas’s ‘aussi exactement que les moyens termes d’une proposition mathématique’; Rosalie is ‘la case qui se trouve au milieu d’un damier’ (iii. , ). The ‘appétissante’ Rosalie parallels the beautiful Mme de Merret in the framed story, just as the narrator (who is attracted to Rosalie) parallels her lover, de Férédia. Hermeneutic and sexual desire coincide: the house, like Hoffmann’s at the beginning of Das öde Haus, triggers the narrator’s ‘roman à la Radcliffe’; Rosalie herself becomes ‘le dernier chapitre d’un roman’ (iii., , 31 In the  publication La Grande Bretèche ou les trois vengenances, the story is joined by Histoire du chevalier de Beauvoir and Le Grand d’Espagne, told by Gravier and Lousteau respectively. La Grande Bretèche, along with these two characters, would next appear in the first book publication of La Muse du département (Les Mystères de province, BF ( July [in fact, end Oct.] )), again told by Bianchon (iv. , a), before its subsequent reappearance between Béatrix and Modeste Mignon (F ), and (as was Balzac’s intention in FC) at the end of Autre étude de femme. Cf. N. Mozet, iii. –, and Ch. (ii) below. 32 For a rigorously narratological analysis, cf. M.-L. Ryan, ‘Narration, génération, transformation’: La Grande Bretèche de Balzac’, L’Esprit créateur (Spring ).

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). In everything, the fiction parallels the reality, as, in its successive publications during Balzac’s lifetime, the story would reflect its various frames. (With the exception of F, it is only in modern anthologies that the tale has appeared on its own.) It is in its scenic, its dramatic, and visual elements, that the text is most balzacian. As well as the magnificent opening description, the details of Regnault’s tics, of Mme Lepas’s or Rosalie’s speech, fully bring the work to life. The final scene, in particular, is a grimly gripping tableau of marital conflict, in which the two spouses vie to have the chamber bricked up or unblocked as they wish. Comparison with Hoffmann reveals how deft Balzac is. Where Das Majorat, via the great-uncle, narrates Wolfgang being pushed into the abyss, Balzac merely gives briefly the half-glimpsed face of the prisoner, and we never know certainly that he and the prisoner accommodated by Mme Lepas are one and the same. The story’s strength is in its suggestiveness, in the way it implies that reality is a matter of words as much as deeds. This is most tellingly evident at the moment of Merret’s surprise return to his wife, when he makes her swear on the crucifix that the chamber is empty. At this point, no one, neither the reader nor the fictional Merret, can definitely know whether it is or not: what makes the situation so very powerful is the fact that all depends on her word, which either way makes her sublime—whether she is innocent, and the mere victim of her husband’s hostility, or guilty, in which case she falls prey to his cruelty but, though adulterous, is dignified by her love. The close of the story, too, turns on words, as, in their stiff-lipped refusal publicly to acknowledge that anything is amiss, the spouses keep to the letter of their conjugal obligation, and Merret forces his wife to adhere to her oath that there is no one behind the wall. La Grande Bretèche pits words against deeds, and fiction against life. But it is Le Grand d’Espagne which manipulates the levels of fiction and life most strikingly. The framed story is repeatedly interrupted—during the surgeon’s account of his adventure to his comrades;33 when he reveals his identity as the protagonist of the framed story, transforming it from a third- to a firstperson narration;34 and finally, when one of its characters, the one-armed countess, appears in the salon where the tale has been told. Ostensibly distinct and distant layers of narration are suddenly collapsed, bringing events right up to the reader in a rapid succession of dramatic occurrences at the end—the camarista’s death,35 the protagonist’s attempted murder,36 the countess’s surprise appearance.37 The collapsing narrative levels are perfectly mirrored in the double entendre of the final exchange: —Madame, demandai-je à la comtesse vers la fin de la soirée, par quel événement avez-vous donc perdu le bras? 33 34

Le Grand d’Espagne, in Balzac, Chasles, and Rabou, Contes bruns, ed. Milner, . 35 Ibid. . 36 Ibid. . 37 Ibid. . Ibid. .

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—Dans la guerre de l’indépendance … dit-elle.38

Independence is both political, and personal, a matter of freedom from conjugal oppression. The pun fuses the figurative and the concrete, the literal and the literary, the macrocosm and the microcosm, in much the same way as the doctor-narrator of Une conversation, who combines the authenticity and credibility of a first-person narrator with the near-omniscience of an author—the very combination Balzac was to draw on when, a decade later, he named this narrator Bianchon and gave him many of the stories of Une conversation recast in Autre étude de femme.39 ‘Je ne puis être que vrai’ says the doctor of Une conversation,40 pointing to the story’s ultimate concern, the relationship between art and truth: N’est-ce pas un problème intéressant à résoudre pour l’art en lui-même, que de savoir si la nature, textuellement copiée, est belle en elle-même? Nous avons tous été fortement émus, un lecteur le sera-t-il? . . . Nous allons voir le Marguerite de Scheffer; et nous ne faisons pas attention à des créatures qui fourmillent dans les rues de Paris, bien autrement poétiques, belles de misère, belles d’expression, sublimes créations, mais en guénilles . . . Aujourd’hui nous hésitons entre l’idéalisation et la traduction littérale des faits, des hommes, des événemens [sic.]. Choisissez . . . . Voici une aventure où l’art essaie de jouer le naturel.41

This was precisely the question explored by Balzac’s first stories for the reviews in .

(iii) Fiction and truth: Le Message and Madame Firmiani On  August  Balzac had signed a contract for a second edition of Scènes de la vie privée, which was to appear in April .42 Together with Le Rendezvous,43 Le Message 44 and Madame Firmiani 45 return to the personal and Le Grand d’Espagne, in Balzac, Chasles, and Rabou, Contes bruns, ed. Milner, . Cf. below, Ch. (ii) below. The doctor of Une conversation is the prototype of Bianchon, the most ubiquitous character-narrator of La Comédie humaine, first developed in La Messe de l’Athée in . 40 Une conversation, in Balzac, Chasles, and Rabou, Contes bruns, ed. Milner, . 41 Ibid. . A similar concern had already been placed in Guillaume’s mouth in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote: ‘Est-ce donc bien amusant de voir en peinture ce qu’on rencontre tous les jours dans notre rue?’ (i. ). 42 Corr. i. –; Scènes de la vie privée, BF ( May ). 43 RDM ( and  Sept. ). Le Rendez-vous had been written in  and was probably intended for inclusion in the first Scènes de la vie privée. Extracts from the work appeared in C (La Dernière Revue de Napoléon and Croquis [II] ( Nov. )) and S (Une Vue de Touraine ( Feb. )). 44 RDM  ( Feb. ), –— the last of Balzac’s works to appear in this review. Le Message was written probably by the end of , and certainly by  Jan. , as Canel had seen the manuscript by that date (Balzac to Rabou,  Jan. , Corr. i. ). 45 RP  ( Feb. ), –. It seems likely that Madame Firmiani was composed towards the end of Jan. or the beginning of Feb. . Pichot had requested the work on  and  Jan.  (Corr. i.  n.  and  n. ). 38 39

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emotional themes of the first Scènes, themes which had been largely eclipsed by Balzac’s preoccupation with the fantastic in . In Le Message, a dying lover charges the first-person narrator with carrying a message to Mme de Montpersan, his married mistress. The emotive subject matter is underpinned by an emotiveness of technique. The opening assertion of authenticity, ‘J’ai toujours eu le désir de raconter une histoire simple et vraie, au récit de laquelle un jeune homme et sa maîtresse fussent saisis de frayeur, se réfugiassent au coeur l’un de l’autre comme deux enfants qui se serrent en rencontrant un serpent dans un bois’, is answered by another, at the end: ‘Quelles délices d’avoir pu raconter cette aventure à une femme qui, peureuse, vous a serré, vous a dit: “Oh! cher, ne meurs pas, toi!”’ (ii. , ). Yet there is no fictional audience in Le Message: it is effectively a frame story without a frame.46 The appeal is made directly, to the reader—a request to use our own experience to empathize with the characters, rather than judge them from without—to use ‘la beauté en guenilles’ we have actually seen rather than Scheffer, ‘la traduction littérale’ rather than ‘l’idéalisation’. Truth does not in itself guarantee literary effect (ii. h); but selection can—and it is selection which Le Message deploys. Each paragraph advances relentlessly towards the conclusion, the first-person narrator’s restricted viewpoint limiting details to those immediately pertinent, and consciously omitting digressions (ii. ). His very idiosyncrasies guarantee authenticity: his description of M. de Montpersan settles on an incongruous detail, his shoes, foregrounded, says the narrator, ‘parce qu’ils me frappèrent plus vivement encore que son habit noir fané’ (ii. ; cf. ). There are echoes of the desire of Balzac’s first alter ego, the abbé Savonati, to include ‘ce que beaucoup d’historiens oublient’.47 The narrator consciously rearranges reality, presenting grotesque juxtaposition as literal transcription. Madame Firmiani, published four days after Le Message, begins with an even more earnest appeal to our empathy: Beaucoup de récits, riches de situations ou rendus dramatiques par les innombrables jets du hasard, emportent avec eux leurs propres artifices et peuvent être racontés artistement ou simplement par toutes les lèvres . . . mais il est quelques aventures de la vie humaine auxquelles les accents du coeur seuls rendent la vie . . . Si vous pensez par hasard aux personnes chères que vous avez perdues; si vous êtes seul, s’il est nuit ou si 46 Le Message appeared as a free-standing narrative in RDM, and in its remaining publications during Balzac’s lifetime, apart from its framing with La Grande Bretèche in Le Conseil. In Le Conseil, Balzac made a number of minor additions to Le Message, most of which simply signal the narratee’s presence (usually by the addition of the word ‘vous’, e.g. ii. e and k), reinforcing the link between narrator and audience. 47 Agathise, OD i. . Balzac’s observations also recall Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne, where the ‘conteur historique’ is ‘un menteur plat et froid’, and realistic detail is recommended in order to ensure the credibility of the narrative: ‘Il parsèmera son récit de petites circonstances si liées à la chose . . . et toutefois si difficiles à imaginer, que vous serez forcé de vous dire en vous même: ma foi, cela est vrai: on n’invente pas ces choses-là’: Œuvres de Denis Diderot (), xii. .

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le jour tombe, poursuivez la lecture de cette histoire; autrement, vous jetteriez le livre, ici. (ii. –)

In drawing such a sharp distinction between narrative standing on narrative merits alone, and one which needs to be felt to be appreciated, Balzac calls for a reading more dependent on identifying with the characters—a more ‘novelistic’ kind of reading, perhaps. The elegiac tone is immediately subverted, the mysterious protagonist presented from a variety of sometimes flippant viewpoints (ii. –); her husband, potentially a figure as tragic as Chabert, is consistently occulted as ‘le problématique Firmiani’ (ii. ). But the subversion is that of La Peau de chagrin or Une conversation, rather than, say, that which opens Sarrasine or L’Élixir de longue vie: a subversion which encompasses a heterogeneous variety of realities, rather than dialectical opposites (light/dark, heat/cold, life/death, real/fantastic). In such tonal variations, with all that they imply about complete treatment of reality, there is a novel in embryo. Stories like Le Message, Madame Firmiani, and La Transaction seem to be strung between the Renaissance nouvelle, with its emphasis on narrative and physical action, and its modern namesake, with its greater stress on feeling. Such generic ambiguity, combined with a demand for identification with, as well as appraisal of, the protagonist, portends later, more all-encompassing developments. Both writer and reader, then, draw on their own subjective experience to create the story. But this dependence on subjectivity, on interpreting one’s own feelings to make sense of another’s, is the subject of these stories, which both turn on obliqueness and relativity of perspective. In Le Message, the narrator’s decision first to announce the lover’s death not to Mme de Montpersan, but to her husband (who thinks him merely an associate) sets him on a consistently tangential course of action. He seems initially to leave the husband to tell his wife, before subsequently telling her himself (ii. –); she reciprocates by giving him, via her husband, a package ostensibly for a third party, which is in fact a discreet token of thanks. The truth about Mme Firmiani is sought even more obliquely—through the opening’s various social types, through Octave, her lover’s uncle, and is only revealed when Octave reads him her letter urging him to pay his bad debts (ii. –). But the revelation that they have secretly married, and the sentimental ending (‘Vous n’êtes jamais coupable de vos fautes’, says the uncle, ‘elles viennent toujours de nous’ (ii. ) may not entirely dispel doubts about Mme Firmiani, who conducts an illicit affair whilst her husband was thought, but not known, to be dead. Balzac exploits a similar relativity of perspective in La Transaction.

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(iv) From La Transaction to Le Colonel Chabert La Transaction 48 (F: Le Colonel Chabert) is the mirror-image of Madame Firmiani— a similar tale, but told from the husband’s viewpoint. Both Firmiani and Chabert are soldiers, missing, presumed dead. But whilst Firmiani’s story is summarized, Chabert’s burial alive at Eylau and arduous return to France to find his wife bigamously remarried forms the central subject of La Transaction. The end of Madame Firmiani, the getting of a second spouse, is the beginning of La Transaction; but whilst we sympathize with Mme Firmiani’s refusal to compromise her values or Octave’s, Rose Ferraud, a former prostitute, merely resells herself in marriage. Firmiani is a comic Chabert, characterized chiefly by his absence, but Chabert is, in the strictest sense, pathetic. Where confirmation of Firmiani’s death triggers the denouement, the revocation of Chabert’s is the catalyst for drama. La Transaction turns on the question of identity. Chabert’s social position, like Mme Firmiani’s, depends on others’ recognition of his identity. His ‘Suis-je vivant ou suis-je mort?’ is susceptible of infinite interpretation by his wife’s lawyers: when she refuses to acknowledge him, he effectively returns to oblivion. If Chabert embodies absolute integrity, defined only by his own standards and blind to those of the world, his wife is a chameleon, fickle and mercurial, assuming the allegiance, wealth, and identity of the partner of the moment: her role as Mme Ferraud is already her third. Chabert’s return threatens to destroy her new identity, to reveal her former roles as Mme Chabert and Rose Chapotel.49 The similarities between Mme Firmiani and La Transaction remind us of Balzac’s aim of writing one hundred tales on the triangle of ‘un mari, sa femme et un amant’ (Les Cent Contes drolatiques: théorie du conte (OD i. )). But La Transaction pursues Madame Firmiani’s development from the comic, objectifying humour of the Contes drolatiques towards a more subjective, empathetic identification with the protagonist, towards a deepening reflectiveness continued in La Bourse and Les Célibataires (F: Le Curé de Tours). This is paralleled by Balzac’s techniques: these stories are comprehensible only from a number of different viewpoints because the legitimacy of various individuals’ subjective perceptions is their very subject. If there are vestiges of reassuring objectivity in the rather pat happy endings of Madame Firmiani and La Bourse, the realities of La 48 The first chapter of La Transaction was published in L’Artiste on  Feb. , the same day as the appearance of Madame Firmiani in RP. Subsequent instalments of La Transaction appeared in L’Artiste on  Feb. and  and  Mar. . La Transaction was significantly recast as La Comtesse à deux maris in  (EtM, vol. ), and renamed Le Colonel Chabert in F (). 49 Cf. E. B. Sivert: [Mme Ferraud] ‘is a kind of non-character with a closer affinity to the être de lettres of the new novel than to any traditional notion of character as a cohesive, recognisable individual’: ‘Who’s who: non-characters in Le Colonel Chabert’, French Forum ().

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Transaction and Les Célibataires have ‘autant de côtés qu’il y a de personnes qui les considèrent’,50 subjective perceptions, capable of creating or destroying identity. This theme is mis en abyme in La Transaction, whose opening is a Scène d’étude in the fullest sense of the term: the clerks’ speculations, their drafting of Louis XVIII’s edict restituting property to the émigrés, the Rembrandtian portrait of Chabert (iii. ), are the pieces from which the narratee—Derville, Godeschal,51 or the reader—will reconstruct Chabert’s identity. But if La Transaction continues the series of stories told by privileged frame narrators (Sarrasine, L’Auberge rouge, La Grande Bretèche, and Le Grand d’Espagne), it also continues the gradual reconception of the frame. On the one hand, only at the end is it revealed that Chabert’s story has been relayed via Godeschal, and ultimately Derville (iii. a), whose reactions, like those of the ‘jeune homme et sa maîtresse’ of Le Message (ii. ) anticipate ours: we, too, may be so moved that we forget our business. On the other, most of the action takes place in the world of the frame: Chabert’s story is literally an object of exchange for which Derville pays by lending him money,52 and which Chabert hopes will allow him to recover the fortune his wife has purloined. ‘Vous ne risquerez pas de mettre au jeu des pièces d’or contre du billon.’53 The lawyer, possessed of superior insight into society, is, with the usurer and the doctor, one of ‘les trois grands pretres de la vérité’ (iii. b). It is between Les Dangers de l’inconduite and La Transaction that three of Balzac’s most significant narrators emerge. La Transaction is none the less very different from its final version, Le Colonel Chabert. Some major passages were not yet written; others were later greatly transformed. The manuscript version54 is much more melodramatic than its successors. When Mme Ferraud absconds to Paris, the stunned Chabert ‘drops out’—a more dramatic decline than in F, and which curtails the story strikingly (iii. a; Balzac uses similarly rapid endings in later novels). It is effective as narrative, but perhaps not entirely satisfying as psychology, and it is with psychology that Balzac is increasingly concerned.55 We have got to know Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme, OD i. . Godeschal’s name was not added until , along with those of Crottat, Grados, Grandlieu, Navarreins, and Roguin. 52 If La Transaction is a Barthesian récit-contrat (S/Z (), –), Brooks finds the concept of contract ‘too simple’, modifying it into ‘something more active, dynamic, shifting and transformatory’—as Balzac’s first title implies (P. Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Oxford, ),  et seq.). 53 Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit, in Balzac, Chasles, and Rabou, Contes bruns, ed. Milner, . 54 Lov. A . Only the end of the manuscript has survived. Cf. iii. –. 55 A similar tension between narrative and psychology, between two different kinds of nouvelle, may be detected in Dezesperance d’amour (CD II. x) and La Duchesse de Langeais. In the conte drolatique, the lover’s disfigurement is narratively effective, yet distanced by our generic expectations of the Renaissance nouvelle (action, and often, violence); in the modern nouvelle, more concerned with subjectivity and credible psychology, a similarly violent action (the branding of the duchess with 50 51

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Chabert, and want to know more of his reaction. In the first published version, in L’Artiste, Chabert confronts his wife with her treachery and rejects her before disappearing, a more psychologically credible, and dramatically pertinent, solution. In the manuscript, the brief moment when Chabert and his wife discuss whether they can compromise is merely a romantic sunset reunion (iii. a); but in L’Artiste, her question: ‘Comment dirai-je en parlant de Ferraud?’ adds a more believable moment of diffidence. Into this scene L’Artiste also introduces her children by her remarriage, as altogether more palpable obstacles to any reunion with Chabert. ‘Trois jours se passèrent pendant lesquels le Colonel et sa femme firent combat de générosité’ reads the manuscript (iii. c); but no time-span is mentioned in L’Artiste, making the conflict more concentrated and direct. Both versions rely heavily on the semiotic devices of earlier stories. The physical environment and temporal juxtapositions are particularly expressive. Louis XVIII’s edict foreshadows the revocation of Chabert’s status (iii. ); his burial at Eylau, his metaphorical burial by society. Derville’s visit to Mme Ferraud follows hot on his visit to Chabert’s friend Vergniaud, sharpening a contrast underlined by the chapter-heading ‘Les Deux Visites’ (iii. a–c; a). La Transaction is as lurid as any Gothic novel.56 Derville warns Mme Ferraud: ‘Nous aurions plus d’un moyen de vous arracher de précieuses confidences … Vos enfants … adultérins … votre caractère … attaqué! …’ (iii. a); Chabert demands that ‘tous ses droits d’époux soient reconnus’ (iii. e)—something more in keeping with the Physiologie’s prédestinés than with the hero Balzac later makes him. Dramatic rhetoric reinforces this intensity, sharpened by the doubt about Chabert’s real identity. Derville suspects that he may merely be ‘le plus habile comédien de notre époque’ (iii. ; cf. ); the Berlin notary’s letter brings ‘le dénouement de la comédie’ (iii. ). But if Chabert’s wife is the better performer, able to ‘jeter tant d’éloquence dans un mot’, creating ‘une image d’elle-même à laquelle elle ne ressemble plus (iii. ), they both re-enact a past with no existence beyond their appearances together or his imagination; as Derville says, he is ‘tout un poème, ou, comme disent les romantiques, tout un drame’(iii. ).57 La Transaction is one of Balzac’s most cohesive stories. Like Sarrasine, it answers a question of identity posed at the opening; its ever shorter scenes accelerate towards a crisis before a meditative epilogue, in the pattern already an iron) at once shocks and challenges the bounds of moral acceptability more, yet carries a deeper psychological significance as the marker of desire. Cf. P. Brooks, Body Work (Cambridge, Mass., and London ), –. 56 Cf. R. C. Dale, ‘Le Colonel Chabert: Between Gothicism and Naturalism’, L’Esprit créateur (), . 57 An  addition, suggesting a certain distance from the dramatic rhetoric of , already ironized in La Peau de chagrin’s preface.

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familiar from the Scènes de la vie privée. The cohesion derives largely from economy: there are few secondary characters or scenes,58 most of which were added when the story was reworked as La Comtesse à deux maris in , and the crudely melodramatic quality of some of the notation intensifies its impact— Chabert’s demand for his conjugal rights, already mentioned (iii. e), or his reaction to Mme Ferraud’s change of temper (‘une goutte d’eau froide introduite dans une chaudière pleine de vapeur’, iii. a), both removed in . Other first versions, such as the description of Mme Ferraud’s apartment (iii. c), or the account of Ferraud’s past, if sketchier, are more suggestive. But all contribute to a greater concentration of event than in the final version, the absence of secondary characters driving attention forwards, placing emphasis squarely on the conclusion—on outcome, more than process. In , in the Études de mœurs au XIXème siècle, Balzac expanded La Transaction into La Comtesse à deux maris, which is essentially the text of Le Colonel Chabert in La Comédie humaine.59 Davin calls it an ‘étude’, ‘une histoire irréprochable’, and a ‘drame’ (x. ), labels indicating a move towards more realistic presentation in a still fundamentally dramatic tale. Derville’s meeting with Mme Ferraud is developed not with histrionic amplification, but with additional factual information—the legal complications of Chabert’s case (iii. ; cf. a). The brief summary of Ferraud’s past, which in L’Artiste had been concealed between Derville’s melodramatically contrasting ‘deux visites’, is expanded to a three-page flashback (iii. a, –), and moved to the prominent position near the beginning occupied by similar passages in Le Bal de Sceaux and the first version of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote (iii. –; cf. i. –). Derville can now adduce Ferraud as a complicating factor in his discussions with his wife, and Balzac can leave the scene free from authorial intervention (iii. ). The storyteller is stepping back from the story. These modifications also multiply the centres of narrative interest, expanding other scenes, notably Chabert’s meeting with Vergniaud and the description of his house (iii. e–a, b), the discussion of Chabert’s will, and the conflict between his absolute integrity, and the relative values of modern justice (iii. c–a). These additions act centrifugally in terms of structure, directing attention beyond this story to wider concerns elsewhere, and centripetally in terms of theme. All are oriented around the protagonist, illuminating him variously, making his problem altogether weightier. 58 Vergniaud’s abode and the account of Ferraud’s past (iii. –) are present only in embryo (iii. a); Derville’s first visit (iii. – and a), his long interview with Chabert (iii. – and a), his dialogue with Mme Ferraud (iii. –, and a), and Chabert’s discovery of her deceit (iii. –), which in the original version took the more melodramatic form of her unannounced departure (iii. a), are all much shorter. 59 It is in F that the text becomes Le Colonel Chabert (iii. ). The remodelling of La Transaction, envisaged as early as Sept. , had been delayed by a dispute with Ricourt, founder of L’Artiste, and Fournier, publisher of Le Salmigondis, which had reproduced La Transaction without Balzac’s permission (Corr. ii. , , –).

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This is most evident in the expansion of the opening scene, with its additions to the character of the lawyer’s clerk (iii. –), and to the clerks’ dialogue (iii. b, a, c, c, a, –a). The  extension of Ferraud’s history (iii. –) is also structurally centrifugal, linking him to wider historical events, reinforcing the protagonists’ status as types, allegorical representatives of the replacement of the Empire by the Restoration. More importantly, it fragments the forward movement of  (iii. a), suggesting that Balzac was now less interested in formal dramatic contrasts (a sometimes facile effect, already amply exploited) than in the more substantive matter of the relations between the individual and society.60 La Comtesse à deux maris sketches in the broader canvas of the future Comédie humaine, and does so principally through mimesis. With the single exception of Derville’s final speech (iii. ), at no point is the narrative interrupted with extensive narratorial generalizations of the kind which characterize (and perhaps disfigure) Les Célibataires (see section (vi)). The accounts of Vergniaud’s lodging (iii. a),61 and of the complexities of Chabert’s will, act as guarantees of authenticity, as does the very gratuitousness of Vergniaud himself.62 But this  version also reinforces the coincidence of the figurative and the literal already familiar from earlier stories. Chabert has fought a war; but fighting his wife is tougher, allowing ‘ni paix ni trêve’, a far more ruinous ‘guerre odieuse’. His head wound almost obliterates his identity through amnesia; but it is society’s collective amnesia which completes the task. Such convergences unite the later text: the psychological and emotional world is at least, if not more, immediate than the physical: Chabert is undermined by ‘une de ces maladies pour lesquelles la médecine n’a pas de nom . . . affection qu’il faut nommer le spleen du malheur’ (iii. ). Paradoxically, Balzac finds a name for this sickness of the spirit, a ‘mal invisible, mais réel’, and draws it from the realm of the material. Chabert’s discovery of his wife’s scheming is ‘comme une goutte de quelque poison subtil qui détermina chez le vieux soldat le retour de ses douleurs et physiques et morales’ (iii. ); his wife’s mental anguish, a ‘monstre moral inconnu’, is diagnosed as ‘le cancer qui dévorait Madame Ferraud’ (iii. ). La Comtesse à deux maris realizes La Peau de chagrin’s project of inventing ‘le vrai, par analogie’ (x. ), creating, from the basis of a short story, a free-standing, psychologically credible fictional world, largely independent of the author, which 60 It must be noted, however, that many of the modifications of  are contractions. Chabert’s demand ‘que tous ses droits d’époux soient reconnus’ is removed to make the conflict, and his entry, more dramatic (iii. e). Similarly, the exclusion of the metaphor increases the impact of Mme Ferraud’s change of temper (iii. a). Cf. also iii. a; a; b; c. Balzac, probably aware of the dangers of structural fragmentation, seems anxious to preserve intensity of impact. 61 As P. Citron demonstrates (‘De la “Scène de village” au Médecin de campagne’, RHLF  ()) this scene was composed at the same time as the highly pictorial articles of La Silhouette. Indeed, it seems almost an exercise in description for its own sake. 62 Cf. R. Barthes, ‘L’Effet de réel’, Communications,  (), –.

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has as much substance as the real. In so doing, it subtly shifts from a Renaissance to a modern nouvelle, from short narrative relating action, to narrative inviting reflection, developments which are apparent in other shorter fictions written between  and  (notably Ferragus, Eugénie Grandet, and La Duchesse de Langeais: see Chapter  below). But if La Comtesse à deux maris uses short-story devices to unify the nouvelle, and if its modifications have the self-referentiality of the story (the added narrative complications are the very embodiment of the complexity of Chabert’s case), they also bring the nouvelle closer to a novel. The diversified centres of narrative interest shift emphasis from the outcome of Chabert’s story, towards its process. Whilst it retains a story-like focus on a single character at a moment of crisis, the initial triangular situation is both reinforced and diversified by the addition of protagonists divided into two opposing camps—the structure Balzac would use in later works like Eugénie Grandet and La Vieille Fille. These expansions show a widening of thematic impact, where individual characters act as representatives of more general historical movements, which the text of  had been too brief to encompass in detail. In , Balzac returns to the Scottian theme of historical change, first explored in Les Chouans, and destined to reach its ultimate development in La Cousine Bette: 63 La Transaction, a seminal Balzac story, is also a model for his novels.

(v) La Bourse and La Femme de trente ans [ I ] La Bourse and La Femme de trente ans [I], with Les Célibataires, the last of Balzac’s stories written prior to the  second series of Scènes de la vie privée, revisit the themes of earlier stories, but rework them with the delicacy and allusiveness which was coming to characterize Balzac’s fiction. La Bourse, written rapidly for the second Scènes de la vie privée,64 draws on a popular motif.65 Its situation and highly pictorial description reflect La Maison du chat-qui-pelote (like Sommervieux, Schinner, its painter-protagonist, sees his lover through art, i. –, c, ), but it resembles Le Bal de Sceaux still more closely: there is a suggestion of impropriety about Adélaïde as there is about Longueville, yet whilst both Émilie (in Le Bal) and Schinner fall in love but harbour doubts about their lovers, only Schinner has faith in Adélaïde and is rewarded. La Bourse, like La Transaction, links the quests for identity and emotional completion. The status of Adélaïde and her mother is queried (by a concierge), just 63 Cf. D. R. Haggis, ‘Fiction and Historical Change in La Cousine Bette and the Lesson of Walter Scott’, Forum for Modern Language Studies (). 64 Probably during the first two weeks of Apr. , before Balzac’s departure for Saché and Mme de Berny; La Bourse is mentioned only twice in his letters, in Jan.  and Nov. : Corr. iv. , , and . 65 Cf. J. Borel, Personnages et destins balzaciens (), –.

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as numerous social types question Mme Firmiani’s. The lovers, with their mothers, form two incomplete pairs (i. , ); yet neither has a father, and both lack the paternal, masculine elements symbolically represented by the portrait and the purse. Schinner’s repainting of Adélaïde’s father’s portrait replaces the masculine element, and involves him emotionally in her life (i. ); her theft and return of the bourse plays on the sexual and the pecuniary.66 Only at the end, in a closing game of cards, does Schinner become Adélaïde’s partner just before she returns the purse, dispelling his doubts about her honesty and allowing him to propose (i. ), and his mother to suggest that ‘nous sommes en famille ce soir’. The referential and the symbolic pointedly converge. La Femme de trente ans [I]67 reverses Étude de femme, recounting an almost accidental affair, but from the woman’s perspective, and in more substantial terms. In the wake of the other brief stories which in  were to be linked into Même histoire (an ensemble itself entitled La Femme de trente ans in F),68 it introduces the type of the femme de trente ans for which Balzac was soon to be famous,69 and, in its protagonists Charles and Julie, creates a convincing interiority absent from Étude de femme. The designation of the ineffable, ‘cet ensemble de petites choses qui font une femme laide ou jolie, attrayante ou désagréable, ne peuvent être qu’indiqués’ (ii. ), as in La Transaction, invites our imaginative understanding, and points to the rather static, reflective narratives of the remainder of the year—Les Célibataires, La Femme abandonnée, and La Grenadière. Balzac was staying with Mme de Berny and doubtless drew on his own feelings: in its stress on emotion and empathy, in its move from anecdote and action to process and emotion, La Femme de trente ans [I] fleshes out Étude de femme, and looks forward to Eugénie Grandet. Where the earlier stories of this series recount enormities (piratical abduction, maritime combustion) which we cannot take seriously because we do not care about their characters, La Femme de trente ans [I] reverses the relationship between event and moment. Incidents may be slight, but their import can be immense: precisely the paradox exploited in Les Célibataires. Cf. S. Weber, Unwrapping Balzac (Toronto, ), –. La Femme de trente ans [I] (RP ( Apr. )) is a story which now forms the third part of the eponymous novel of . This discussion concerns the  tale. 68 Même histoire (): Le Rendez-vous, Souffrances inconnues, La Femme de trente ans [I], Le Doigt de Dieu, Les Deux Rencontres, and L’Expiation: Études de mœurs au XIXème siècle, iii and iv, BF ( Sept. ); La Femme de trente ans (): F iii, BF ( Nov. ), in which edn. some of the stories are retitled (Le Rendez-vous, Premières fautes; La Femme de trente ans [I], A trente ans; L’Expiation, La Vieillesse d’une mère coupable), and their heroines renamed with the aim of creating a single character, Julie d’Aiglemont. This synthetic aim was of long standing (see CHH xxviii. ); but in , the work was still ‘ce mélodrame indigne de moi’(LH i. .) Cf. ii. –; BRC –, , and –; and S. Vachon, ‘La “Même histoire” d’une femme de trente ans’, in J.-L. Diaz (ed.), Balzac: ‘La Femme de trente ans’, ‘Une vivante énigme’ (), –. 69 Cf. J. Janin, ‘La Cent Millième et Une et dernière nouvelle nouvelle’, RP  (Sept.–Oct. ), , quoted by H. Godin, ‘Jules Janin et Balzac’, in Charlton et al. (eds.), Balzac and the Nineteenth Century, –. 66 67

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(vi) Les Célibataires (F: Le Curé de Tours) If Les Célibataires70 is closer in manuscript to its final text than is La Transaction to Le Colonel Chabert,71 its opening gave Balzac more difficulty than almost any other. There are sixteen different versions; bar one, all imply the presence of the ubiquitous observateur, and all begin by describing the cathedral cloister and Mlle Gamard’s house.72 The problem was one of viewpoint. It took Balzac eight attempts to shake off the passer-by (here ‘étranger’),73 and two the ‘antiquaire’74 of La Maison du chat-qui-pelote or Maître Cornélius, before finally seeing through the eyes of the abbé Birotteau, who, as the ‘principal personnage de cette histoire’ (iv. ), is very far from being as detached. It is Birotteau’s viewpoint which makes the story. If the persistent ‘antiquaire’ briefly reappears in the description of Gamard’s house (iv. ), this is relegated to second place: it is its psychological significance which matters. Chapeloud’s approbatory remark that Mlle Gamard has ‘sans cesse un oeil dans ma chambre’ (iv. ) is altogether more sinister for Birotteau, who lives ‘sous l’empire d’une haine dont l’oeil était toujours ouvert sur lui’ (iv. ; cf. ). As his enemy Troubert’s influence increases, so, in Birotteau’s mind, does his size (iv. ). The surroundings repeat earlier claims to ‘la vérité historique’ (iv. f.), but form a symbolic psychological map. The protagonists’ triangular relationship is represented by their placing at breakfast, by Gamard and Troubert’s surveillance of Birotteau in the garden, by his exile to SaintSymphorien, a parish literally and figuratively opposed to the cathedral (iv. , , a). Birotteau’s enemies make the house a domestic Panopticon. This repression is joined by displacement embodied in the very agent of repression75—in Mlle Gamard’s warming of Birotteau’s slippers, in the canonry he covets, along with Chapeloud’s rooms and his bed. A symbolic 70 Les Célibataires was written to fill the third volume of the nd edn of the Scènes de la vie privée in late Apr. and early May . Apart from La Bourse, it is the only previously unpublished work in the volume. 71 Lov. A . The only important additions are the subtexts in the stichomythic duel between Mlle Gamard and Troubert (iv. –) and the work’s final paragraph (iv. –), added in the Béchet edn of the Études de moeurs au XIXème siècle (). 72 Lov. A , fos. v–v; A , fos. –v. The exception is A , fo. v, which opens with an aphorism about ‘certains êtres qui consomment sans produire’ which is probably the impetus for the story (as the accepted hypothesis that dossier A , Le Prêtre catholique, is a sketch for Les Célibataires, would suggest). Cf. iv. – and xii. –. On a different scale, Balzac was to make no fewer than twenty-five false starts on the last part of Splendeurs et misères, La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin (LH ii. –). 73 Lov. A , fos. , , , ; A , fos. , , , and v; or ‘voyageur’ (fo. v). 74 Lov. A , fo. v, A , fo. v. 75 L.-F. Hoffmann, ‘Éros en filgrane: Le Curé de Tours’, AB (); cf. S. Freud, ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva’, in Art and Literature, ed. J. Strachey and A. Dickson (Harmondsworth, ), –.

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pattern of envelopment and enclosure first surfaces in the strangely detailed account of Birotteau’s view of his shoes: Or, entre toutes les petites misères de la vie humaine, celle pour laquelle le bon prêtre éprouvait le plus d’aversion était le subit arrosement de ses souliers à larges agrafes d’argent et l’immersion de leurs semelles. En effet, malgré les chaussons de flanelle dans lesquels il empaquetait en tout temps ses pieds avec le soin que les ecclésiastiques prennent d’eux-mêmes, il y gagnait toujours un peu d’humidité; puis, le lendemain, la goutte lui donnait infailliblement quelques preuves de sa constance. (iv. )76

Birotteau’s desire for emotional and sexual security is perverted into other sensual, ultimately womb-like, satisfactions: the Mother Church and its building,77 the cosy canonry (iv. ),78 Chapeloud’s appartment: ‘il ne voyait rien au-delà’ (iv. ). When Troubert finally obtains it, Birotteau imagines him ‘assis dans le beau fauteuil gothique de Chapeloud, couchant sans doute dans le lit’.79 Indeed, Birotteau is not alone: ‘Voilà vivre!’ says Chapeloud, ‘N’avoir rien à chercher, pas même ses pantoufles!’ (iv. ). Their absence is the first sign of Birotteau’s exclusion (‘Il s’agissait évidemment de la perte entière de son bonheur, dans l’oubli de ses pantoufles’, iv. ), and when he is finally ostracized, things literally unravel: ‘il comparait sa vie à un bas dont une seule maille échappée faisait déchirer toute la trame’(iv. ). The images echo the opening, marking the end of Birotteau’s ‘affair’ with Mlle Gamard and her apartment. It is odd that so many readers have been introduced to Balzac by this story. ‘Tout cela à propos d’un procès entre deux chanoines et d’un bonhomme désolé, parce qu’il ne trouve plus ses pantoufles’;80 yet Birotteau’s distorted perspective is the very meaning of the work. One suspects that Taine’s doubts centre less on this perspective per se, than on the disparity between the triviality of the events and the magnitude of their consequences as amplified by the narrator. Though such distortion may be convincing as Birotteau’s view, it is less so when used to bridge what, seen from an external perspective, is a gap between event and import—which is what Balzac attempts to do, in a profusion of hyperbolic commentaries. Troubert is Sixtus V (iv. ); Mlle Gamard’s cronies are endowed with ‘une sagacité digne du conseil des Dix’ (iv. ); Mlle Villenoix is a ‘sénat femelle’, the whole conflict becomes ‘le combat du peuple et du sénat romain dans une taupinière’. Balzac caricatures his protagonists as

76 The symbolic value of foot and shoe, emblematic of genitalia, is well attested. Cf. S. Freud, ‘The Sexual Aberrations’, in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, ed. J. Strachey and A. A. Richards (London, ),  n. . 77 C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, ed. B. M. Hinkle (no pl., ), –. 78 Balzac gradually attenuates this innuendo. The MS runs: ‘il avait les pieds chaussés d’un canonicat, caressait sa chimère’ (iv. a, Lov. A , pièce iii.; cf. iii. c). 79 L.-F. Hoffmann lists other examples of the work’s erotic language: ‘Éros en filigrane’, –. 80 H. Taine, Nouveaux essais de critique et d’histoire (), .

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animals and vegetables (iv. –);81 he extrapolates from domestic events to the past, and society at large, in the manner of the Codes or Physiologie. And he buffets the reader with an unprecedented amount of doxa, with narratorial commentary more prominent and extravagant than in any earlier fiction. Les Célibataires contains over one hundred separate authorial generalizations, many explanatory,82 almost all asserting the story’s universal import and attempting to construct a general rule. Most prominent are the three long passages on the type of the old maid, two on Mlle Gamard (iv. –), the third, much shorter, on Mlle de Villenoix (iv. ), which were joined, in the  edition of the Études de moeurs, by the passage on history and society which concludes the story (iv. –). These are remarkable concatenations of aphoristic matter. The first constitutes one long paragraph containing sixteen pieces of doxa, eight of them consecutive. The second is an even more impressive agglommeration of thirty-two consecutive maxims; the third, on Mlle de Villenoix, if considerably less extensive, is none the less uninterrupted.83 Yet this battery of techniques arguably fails to widen the story’s import. Whilst La Transaction achieves this through unobtrusive mimetic means, in Les Célibataires, the necessary causal link between characters and wider historical developments does not exist. Balzac seeks to create it by stressing the narrator’s role as dramatist and historian, here presented as the reason for the predominance of doxa: Les événements qui constituent en quelque sorte l’avant-scène de ce drame de bas étage, mais où les sentiments dont le coeur humain est agité se retrouvent tout aussi violents que s’ils étaient excités par de grands intérêts, exigeaient cette longue introduction, et il eût été diffcile à un historien exact d’en reserrer les minutieux développements. (iv. a, b, c; cf.  and )

But such interventions merely dislocate the dynamic structure of ever shorter scenes accelerating towards catastrophe: sixteen pages of the opening scene are occupied with exposition, and nine of the second; action in the present in this first part of the text is virtually excluded.84 This caricatural inspiration is made explicit in the Béchet edn: iv. –. ‘Pour comprendre la souffrance . . .’ (iv. ); ‘Il est nécessaire, pour l’intelligence . . .’ (iv. ), etc. 83 I: iv. , from ‘défauts qu’elle partageait avec toutes les vieilles filles’ to ‘tout faire plier autour d’elles’ (iv. ). II: iv. –iv. , l. , ‘Ce monde’. III: iv. , from ‘dans la citta dolente des vieilles filles’ to ‘leurs traits flétris’. 84 Overall, little happens in Les Célibataires. Most of it takes place within a month, with an epilogue set five months later; the whole story is easily circumscribed within a year (iv. ). The first scene (iv. –) occupies almost one-third of the length, yet covers only one evening and the following morning. The second (iv. –) takes another sixth, yet covers only breakfast and dinner; between them, the two scenes account for nearly half the work’s length. Although the third scene (iv. –) takes place eight days later and contains equally important information (the revelation of the plot against Birotteau), at ten pages long it is only slightly shorter than the second. More happens in scene four (iv. –)—the loss of the room, Birotteau’s expulsion from Tours—but it is only half the length. At its end we are two-thirds of the way through the text and only one-third through the action, prior to the cathartic series of short scenes leading to Birotteau’s final downfall. 81 82

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Such problems are partly explained by the story’s organization around an idea—the unproductivity of the celibate—rather than narrative or a mimetic purpose. This is attested by the manuscript openings, all entitled La Vieille fille, indicating preoccupation with an idea more than with its particular embodiment; one begins with a Code-like generalization.85 Here, too, Balzac is concerned to present individuals as types, designating Mlle Gamard as ‘cette figure typique du genre vieille fille’ (iv. ). Les Célibataires seems to face both ways at once—turning back towards the prescription of the Codes, where narrative plays second fiddle; and looking forward, to the Comédie humaine’s systematic stress upon the typical, its monistic linking of the particular and the general. But the general begins to squeeze out the particular: the very predominance of narratorial generalizations excludes possible narrative and mimetic developments. With more space, Balzac might have developed Les Célibataires along the lines of La Comtesse à deux maris (F: Le Colonel Chabert)— something hinted at in the widening repercussions of the Birotteau affair, the involvement of M. de Bourbonne, his brother, and of larger political concerns (iv. –), doubtless inspired by his journeys between Paris and the provinces in the months before the story’s composition. But the obsession with causation leaves little room for narrating the events themselves.86 Les Célibataires even refers to developments precluded by its form. The portrait of Mme de Listomère, itself added in the first publication, is reduced to a cipher (iv.  b, c, d, e); earlier, the narrator summarizes what might otherwise have been a scene: ‘Si les bornes étroites dans lesquelles se renferme cette histoire avaient permis de rapporter une seule de ces conversations . . . elle eût offert une peinture achevée de la vie béotienne des provinciaux’ (iv. –). Such ellipses mark a crisis in short fiction as Balzac’s chief mode of expression. Les Célibataires attempts to circumvent its spatial constraints by narrating a single event, and by extensive authorial commentary. But this was neither a long-term solution, nor one suitable for all subjects. Balzac would no doubt have liked to include a scene demonstrating ‘la vie béotienne des provinciaux’, or a more complete portrait of Mme de Listomère, as two significant later alterations suggest: the verbal duel between Mme de Listomère and Troubert, which simultaneously increases both authorial intervention and mimetic function (iv. –), and the story’s prophetic final paragraph. The germ of this paragraph, already present in the first edition, is expanded in the  edition of the Études de moeurs into one of Balzac’s most phantasmagorically baroque passages of hyperbole (iv. –). It is a passage which is far from being an improvement on the original; indeed, in some ways, this reversion to the aphoristic grandiloquence of the Lov. A , fo. v, iv. . For a divergent interpretation, cf. N. Mozet, ‘Le Curé de Tours, un espace oedipien?’, in D. Maleuvre and C. Nesci (eds.), L’Oeuvre d’identité (Montreal, ), –. 85 86

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Codes is more of a regression. The very amplitude of authorial generalization does not seem justified by the subject matter, even given Birotteau’s distorsions. The difficulties appear to result from inflating a short-story subject to something approaching the dimensions of a novel, yet without its structures; and the end is merely the most vivid illustration that Balzac’s way of dealing with the problem is the storyteller’s way, using a narratorial megaphone, rather than the novelist’s way of letting characters speak for themselves. Though earlier stories had dealt with subjects of great import—whole destinies in Adieu, La Vendetta, La Maison du chat-qui-pelote—their restricted confines ensured that significant detail was not submerged. In Les Célibataires, we have the reverse: in a bigger space, this detail is amplified to make it register on a larger scale. As the mirrorings of plot and recurrence of characters in the stories of – demonstrate, this scale was perhaps already that of the future Comédie humaine. But brevity is a virtue in a story; the first version of this ending, devoid of its successor’s hyperbole, firmly stresses the end of the action, achieving maximum impact with minimum means (iv. ). It completes the circle started at the opening; the contrast between Birotteau, ‘squelette’, and his former ‘embonpoint’ (iv. ) puts in a nutshell the cruelty of his demise; the threesentence final paragraph broadens its repercussions to the relations between the individual and society, suggesting social and political criticism which is only implicit, but which, like the abyss between Birotteau and Troubert which precedes it, is the more effective for being so. Such suggestiveness is an advantage in the story, which lacks the space for extensive developments, and so draws on the reader’s imagination in order to complete the vistas which it implies;87 its networks of symbolism, imagery, and parallels make it complete and self-contained. Yet, by , these solipsistic characteristics were increasingly at odds with Balzac’s evolving aims. The recurrence of characters and situations in the stories of this period demonstrated that he was in search of a form which could be joined with other narratives to link the specific and the general. In Les Célibataires, this relation was only established at the cost of painfully explicit narratorial commentary, with infelicitous results. On the one hand, the story’s resonance is lost, or over-explicated; on the other, the narratorial concern to link trivial events and wider import fragments the nouvelle’s structure. Form and purpose seem patently at odds. Les Célibataires brings full circle the first half of Balzac’s career. Its organization around one idea, viewed in terms of the specific and the general, seems to revisit the devices of the Codes—as does a contemporary prescriptive work such as Théorie de la démarche.88 It is a return with regrettable consequences for this one story; La Peau de chagrin and L’Auberge rouge had established the relation As Balzac indicates in Madame Firmiani (ii. –) and La Bourse (i. –). Théorie de la démarche, L’Europe littéraire (, ,  Aug. and  Sept. ). Traité de la vie élégante (M (, , ,  Oct. and  Nov. ), reworked in  and  but not published until ) and Traité des excitants modernes () are in similar vein. 87 88

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between the specific and the general by more successful mimetic means. Yet if Les Célibataires is less than perfect, it looks far forward to Balzac’s future creation. Its triangular structure of three protagonists supported by secondary characters divided into two factions anticipates Eugénie Grandet, La Vieille Fille, Le Cousin Pons, and La Cousine Bette; the expansion of fictional form to the point where narrative structure becomes content’s parent pauvre characterizes later panoramic works like Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Its tension between the individual and the general, present from Balzac’s beginnings, is one of his creation’s central thematic and structural principles. The short story’s limited dimensions and inherent tendency towards self-referentiality arguably render it unsuitable for treating wider concerns: the recurrence of themes and plot structures in the stories of early  shows Balzac straining against the form. As Jameson has remarked: Each section of the Comédie humaine, each individual story or novel, remains relatively faithful to an individual experience, whilst the overall system aims at transcending solipsism, transcending the limits of the individual experience, in a way which still keeps faith with it.89

Les Célibataires embodies this creative tension. Later stories, such as La Maison Nucingen, La Messe de l’athée, and Z. Marcas reconcile the self-containedness of the individual fiction with its intended wider import, using recurring characters as a shorthand for the larger repercussions of the individual case. In  this technique was but in embryo. Les Célibataires foreshadows the eclipse of the short story as Balzac’s main form of expression; but the smaller body would cast its shadow on the larger one for a very considerable time.

89 F. Jameson, ‘La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (), .



Another Destiny? From Louis Lambert to Le Père Goriot, September –January  Quant à ne faire que des contes, quoi que ce soit à mon avis, autre hérésie peut-être, l’expression la plus rare de la littérature, je ne veux pas être exclusivement un contier. Autre est ma destinée. La preuve me regarde. Je ne connais que trop la paucité de mon public, et je ne sais si j’en dois être triste ou fier. Tout cela m’est indifférent. Il y a, comme j’ai eu l’honneur de vous le dire, beaucoup d’amour pour l’art, dans mes travaux. Vous êtes le juge de l’utilité dont je puis être à la Revue, et moi juge de la valeur de mon temps. (Corr. ii. )

Thus Balzac to Pichot, director of the Revue de Paris, on  December . On  September he had agreed to supply it with forty pages per month ‘en caractère dit philosophie’1 for  francs per month for the next year (Corr. ii. ); but since March, and La Transaction, he had largely abandoned the reviews,2 during the autumn playing book publishers off against each other with a view to larger projects.3 ‘Ma fortune devient considérable’, he declared in November, ‘Mes libraires m’assurent , fr. cette année, outre mes journaux’ (Corr. ii. ). The book market had begun to recover, and Balzac had used a summer away from Paris and journalism to work on more ambitious projects like Louis Lambert and, probably, Le Médecin de campagne.4 Yet that ‘mule entêtée’, the public, still wanted contes (Corr. ii. ): the form was to prove less 1 About  words per page, the approximate equivalent of  point: H. Fournier, Traité de la typographie (), –. 2 Apart from La Femme de trente ans [I] (RP ( Apr. )), and, in May, possibly, reviews of Monnier’s Récréations and Sand’s Indiana in La Caricature, until La Femme abandonnée in September, Balzac’s only such contributions were La Vie d’une femme and Essai sur la situation du parti royaliste, to the legitimist review Le Rénovateur ( May,  May and  June respectively). He cut himself off from Buloz, Director of the Revue des deux mondes, following Planche’s scathing dismissal of the Contes drolatiques (RDM ( Apr. )): Corr. ii.  and n. , –, . 3 Notably promising himself successively to Mame and Gosselin (Corr. ii. , , ); cf. V  n. , and N. Felkay, Balzac et ses éditeurs, – (), – and –. 4 Corr. ii. , , and R. Fortassier, ix. –; although he probably did not begin Le Médecin in earnest until December: P. Citron, ‘De la ‘Scène de village’ au Médecin de campagne, RHLF  (), esp.  et seq.; V  and n. .

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easy to supersede than Balzac had perhaps supposed. If La Transaction and Les Célibataires had provided blueprints for larger fictions, they also highlighted some central tensions—between single, and wider, actions; between the narrator and his world. It was to be less a question of abandoning the conte than of developing it. It is during this autumn that Balzac begins to organize his works into a system, through cycles of Contes bruns, Causeries du soir, Études de femme, and in particular, at the end of , the Études de mœurs;5 but it was not until the following October that his contract with Mme Béchet for this series (Corr. ii. ) would give ballast to the airy schemes with which he had gulled other publishers hitherto,6 and lay the foundation of the future Comédie humaine. Finding forms adequate to his purpose was to prove more testing than catching publishers. As yet, the destiny was but a desire.

(i) Louis Lambert and Le Médecin de Campagne No text demonstrates this more pertinently than Notice biographique sur Louis Lambert, the first version of Louis Lambert.7 Conceived as ‘un grand et bel ouvrage’ to complete volume iv of the Romans et contes philosophiques,8 the Notice biographique returns to semi-autobiographical narrative of the kind pioneered in Corsino, with a story auxiliary to the philosophical aim, and a protagonist who is a Balzac double split in two, here as first-person narrator and Lambert. The Notice biographique reverses the narrator-character relationship of La Peau de chagrin. There, the narrator is superior to the character (Valentin, another Balzac double); here the reverse is the case. Balzac starts from the frame story, with a 5 V  n. ,  n. , and . It is in the autumn  plan that the title Études de mœurs au XIXème siècle first appears, together with the division into Scènes de la vie privée, Scènes de la vie du monde, Scènes de salon, and Scènes de village, the whole to be introduced by Sand, as was later Balzac’s intention for the Comédie humaine (cf. Ch. ); the Conversations entre onze heures et minuit, originally at the centre, are struck out. The final order (vie privée, de province, parisienne) appears in the ‘Plan définitif’ of  (CHH xxviii. , ). Concurrently, Balzac was developing the Romans et contes philosophiques into what would become the Études philosophiques, for which a contract was signed with Werdet on  July . Cf. V  and nn. –; Felkay, Balzac et ses éditeurs, –. 6 V  n. . Had they been completed, these phantom masterpieces would have been substantial:  folios ( octavo pages) each for Monographie de la vertu and Histoire de la succession du marquis de Carabas, and a similar length for Les Trois Cardinaux (Corr. i. , , )—not forgetting the epic novel La Bataille, mentioned some forty times in Balzac’s correspondence in this period, but never written: xii. –. 7 There are three main versions of Louis Lambert: Notice biographique sur Louis Lambert (with Maître Cornélius, Madame Firmiani, and L’Auberge rouge in the Nouveaux Contes philosophiques, BF ( Oct. )); Histoire intellectuelle de Louis Lambert ( Jan. ); and the version of the Études philosophiques (, BF ( Sept. )); subsequent editions contain no significant variants. Cf. M. Lichtlé, xi. –. 8 The Nouveaux Contes philosophiques took the place of this volume, which never appeared, and the Notice biographique that of a nouvelle on Bernard de Palissy. The Palissy theme and title (Souffrances de l’inventeur) were subsequently developed in Illusions perdues. Cf. J. Pommier, ‘La Genèse du premier Louis Lambert’, RHLF  (), ; Corr. ii.  and n. .

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reflection on mimesis recalling those in Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit and Le Message: ‘En racontant cette histoire dans une forme inusitée, je la dépouillerai peut-être de l’intérêt dont elle pourrait se revêtir, si je me servais des ressources que l’art prête aux romanciers. Je sais de quelle froideur un récit est frappée par l’emploi du je et du moi; mais . . . ici, le moi, explique seul la vérité des faits.’9 But the moi is being used rather differently from in Le Message, more in the manner of La Peau de chagrin; except that, although a first-person narrator recounts Louis Lambert, it is not he, but the character, Lambert, who is the transcendent miroir concentrique, or, as the  version would term it, ‘spécialiste’ (xi. ).10 Lambert is an attempt to contain novelistic pluralism within one individual (xi. , , , etc.), to turn the miroir concentrique into a character capable of embracing and transcending the totality of experience. The paradoxical result is a protagonist who is almost totally solipsistic, yet for access to whose mind we depend on the first-person narrator. Lambert is a peculiarly anti-narrative character, and the text’s apparent amorphousness embodies the paradox of its subject, ‘jeune monument en ruines’, the closeness of his genius to madness. The work emerges ‘au milieu de mes contes comme la plus fabuleuse de toutes les vérités, ou la plus vraie des fables’;11 as something perturbingly similiar yet different, which will provoke both ‘troubles profonds’ in ‘l’âme des lecteurs’ and the thoughts of ‘esprits germaniques curieux d’examiner logiquement jusqu’à quel point le génie peut ressembler à la folie et vice versa’. Yet if Balzac’s alliance of ‘vérité’ and ‘fable’ seems to anticipate Baudelaire’s conjugation of observation and vision,12 for the moment the Notice biographique remained too close to the ‘fable’. The coincidence of forme and fond is, if not anti-expressive, then anti-effective: Balzac feels Lambert too inwardly to bring him to us. ‘Le narrateur’ is still ‘tout’ (x. ), and the character is tied too closely to him to have a convincing existence of his own. Balzac solves the problem by giving Lambert a mistress: Pauline de Villenoix, one of the first recurring characters, taken over in  from Les Célibataires,13 is developed in  and  to become an intradiegetic counterweight to Lambert,14 an Lov. A , fo. , xi. ; cf. Ch. (ii) above. On Balzac’s use of this term, cf. S.-J. Bérard, ‘Une énigme balzacienne: la spécialité’, AB (), esp. –; J.-L. Tritter, Le Langage philosophique dans les œuvres de Balzac (), ; M. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien (), –. 11 Lov. A , fo. r, xi. e. 12 ‘Théophile Gautier [IV]’ in Curiosités esthétiques: l’Art romantique, ed. H. Lemaître (), . This MS ending of Louis Lambert recalls the objective/subjective dichotomy in Théorie du conte (OD i. –), and the tone of the first version is that of spoken language. During its composition Balzac was rumoured to have gone mad. Cf. J. Pommier, ‘Deux Moments dans la genèse de Louis Lambert’, AB (), , . 13 BRC –. 14 Principally through the denouement, expanded successively in  (xi. b) and  to give the narrative a properly bipartite structure, the first relating Lambert’s love for the narrator (xi. –), the second Lambert’s love for Pauline (xi. –). 9

10

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opposite pole of attraction within the fiction which could give it some life of its own. By the time he wrote Le Père Goriot, he could elaborate the quasihomosexual relation between character and narrator to create in Vautrin a Balzac-double, vested with authorial wisdom, who is also a convincing fictional character-narrator. Balzac’s genius in the  Louis Lambert is to make its intellectual structure narrative, Lambert’s return to Swedenborgian theory reflecting its espousal at the beginning— something which in itself may owe much to Le Père Goriot, whose first part concerns Rastignac’s relations with Goriot, the second with his daughters. But despite (or perhaps because of) Balzac’s reworkings, the  Histoire intellectuelle de Louis Lambert remained just that: a narrative whose thread is dropped to generalize on Lambert’s development or his thought, ‘le plus triste de tous les avortons’ (LH i. ). Le Médecin de campagne uses similar methods, and suffers from similar problems. Envisaged as Balzac’s most ambitious work to date, it would broadcast a social gospel and win the Montyon prize for virtue (Corr. ii. )—all in a single volume the size of a prayerbook.15 But successive interruptions and Balzac’s massive revisions16 made it, according to La Quotidienne, ‘une espèce de portefeuille où l’auteur a jeté toutes ses idées’.17 Its organization around Genestas and Benassis, fictional narrators who are also the author’s doubles and spokesmen—a reversal of Louis Lambert and a reworking of La Peau de chagrin—seeks to exploit the very pluralistic characteristics associated with the conte, employing the oral as a mode of social cohesion envisaged by Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit, and by Causeries du soir, which Balzac was preparing simultaneously. Le Médecin de campagne emerges from, and still is largely, a cycle of contes, within the overall framework of Benassis’s tour of his domains.18 Some of its major stories, notably Goguelat’s tale (ix. –), exploit and broaden the social impact of narrative (ix. ; cf. )—both in

15  o pages. ‘J’ai pris l’Évangile et le Catéchisme pour modèles’, wrote Balzac to Mame, ‘deux livres d’excellent débit’ (Corr. ii. ). Le Médecin as first published forms two octavo vols. of  and  pages (BF ( Sept. )). 16 Le Médecin de campagne is, with Louis Lambert, the first instance of Balzac’s henceforth frequent habit of major compositional revision. Probably drafted in September, begun in earnest in December, Balzac could not concentrate on Le Médecin until Apr. and May ; in June his publisher Mame successfully sued him. Balzac, in one of his more dramatic compositional acts, attempted to sabotage production by destroying the formes; but Le Médecin de campagne nonetheless appeared on  Sept. Cf. B. Guyon, La Création littéraire chez Balzac: la genèse du Médecin de campagne, nd edn. (); R. Fortassier, ix. –, and N. Felkay, Balzac et ses éditeurs, –. 17 La Quotidienne ( Sept. ), cit. R. Fortassier, xi. . 18 Une Scène de village was originally to be inserted in Causeries du soir (Corr. ii. ); the doctor’s Confession was written as a self-contained story, sharing a common source (Balzac’s amorous disappointment with Mme de Castries) with the Conte drolatique Dezesperance d’amour (CD . x) and La Duchesse de Langeais. See R. Chollet, ‘De Dezesperance d’amour à La Duchesse de Langeais’, AB (), –.

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ANOTHER DESTINY?

fiction and in reality, as the author had intended:19 published separately, without his consent, it would be a success through much of his career.20 These are the beginnings of Balzac’s attempts at reaching a wider readership, subsequently pursued via the publication of Eugénie Grandet in L’Europe littéraire the following September, and in  with the pioneering serialization of La Vieille Fille in Girardin’s La Presse.21 But Goguelat’s tale was, via its republications, the only part of Le Médecin which actually realized the function of the oral as tool of political or popular enlightenment also envisaged, albeit differently, in the Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg or the Paroles d’un croyant 22—perhaps, in the case of Le Médecin, because it squeezed an epic, the history of a nation, into a conte. Le Médecin presents both a society, and the programme for its renovation, through narrative; but this is precisely what makes it so wordy.23 The very flexibility which resulted from the insertion of oral narratives, and from Balzac’s overworking of the text (Corr. ii. ) demonstrated that cogent and unified novels could not be created from cycles of stories24 (as did the attempt, in , to concatenate a string of articles into the ‘novel’ Même histoire ),25 and that a more contained and disciplined form must be found elsewhere. It was to derive not from oral narrative, nor from the egoistical divagations of Voyage de 19 Balzac promised the support of the ‘Journal des Connaissances utiles de mon ami Girardin, lequel tire à   abonnés’ (Corr. ii. ), and wanted two editions, one on vellum paper at  frs. per volume, and a cheaper version at  fr. , aimed at a large provincial market (letter to Mame,  Oct. , Corr. ii. ). 20 These publications derived from the text’s first legitimate appearance as La Veillée: histoire de Napoléon contée dans une grange par un vieux soldat in L’Europe littéraire,  June . But Balzac was soon complaining about illicit reproductions (‘, exempl[aires] de vendus’ of ‘ce gigantesque morceau . . . que  journaux ont reproduit’ (LH i.  and n. ; cf. Corr. ii.  and n. ). The text was still being published in : V , . 21 Cf. R. Chollet, ‘Balzac et sa “Grande Affaire de librairie”’, AB (); P. Kinder, ‘Un directeur de journal, ses auteurs et ses lecteurs en ’, AB (), and ‘Balzac et La Presse’, Ph.D. thesis, Liverpool, , ch. . Cf. Ch. (iii) below. 22 J. de Maistre’s Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg () is explicitly constructed around eleven conversations between a St Petersburg senator, a young French émigré, and Maistre himself, whilst Lamennais’s Paroles d’un croyant () take the form of quasi-biblical prophecy. Both, like Le Médecin, explore the relationship between the religious and the social, Maistre affirming the role of God’s Providence in history, Lamennais that of true faith against secular and religious authority. Balzac did not appreciate Paroles d’un croyant, published seven months after Le Médecin de campagne on  Apr.  (LH i.  and n.; see also A. Lorant, ix. –). Cf. P. Bertault, Balzac et la religion (), pt. V, chs.  and . M. Fargeaud suggests that E. Richer’s ‘La Soirée de Stockholm’ (), also written on a conversational model, may have inspired Les Martyrs ignorés (xii. –). 23 Cf. F. Pacqueteau,‘Idéologies et formes dans Le Médecin de campagne’, AB (), , –. 24 On the ideological implications of this statement, cf. A. Vanoncini, ‘La Représentation de l’utopie dans Le Médecin de campagne, AB (), and M. Andréoli, Le Médecin de campagne: idéologie et narration’, AB (). 25 ÉtM  ( Sept. ). The whole ensemble was republished in vol. iv of the Scènes de la vie privée in , and under its final title, La Femme de trente ans, in F iii, BF ( Nov. ); cf. Ch. (v) below and n. .

ANOTHER DESTINY?



Paris à Java;26 for it had already been prefigured by Balzac’s first two stories for the Revue de Paris in Autumn .

(ii) Two Types of Tale: La Grenadière and La Femme abandonnée La Grenadière and La Femme abandonnée were written within days of each other;27 but they represent two contrasting models in Balzac’s fiction. Like Le Message and Madame Firmiani the previous spring, both are enigma stories about mysterious ladies of dubious mores, dealing delicately with fine nuances of emotion. ‘Voir, n’est-ce pas avoir?’ asks La Grenadière (ii. ): its visual model is cogent because based on the scène, more than the conte: on unity, stasis, and containment, which let description tell much of the story, rather than on oral narrative’s potentially boundless word-spinning. La Grenadière’s secret lies in its symbolism, in letting things speak for themselves. The landscape, too good to be true at the opening, disappears by the end in decay—like Mme Willemsen herself (ii. ). The maternal element frames it, as rivers at the beginning, and oceans at the end. A liminal place, betwixt land and water, on the banks of the Loire, it embodies the story’s subject, the passage from one generation to the next, Louis’s arrival at masculine independence, as a surrogate father for his brother—as the closing sentence declares: ‘Il était devenu père.’ La Grenadière is deeply personal. Conceived in June at Saché, home of Balzac’s mother’s lover, and finished in Nemours, with the maternal Mme de Berny, for whom his love was beginning to wane,28 it alludes to his affair with Mme de Castries, via Mme Willemsen’s landscape picture of Switzerland (ii. ).29 Form and theme coincide in what is a less lurid reprise of La Grande Bretèche, presenting a house which conceals a past. A scène more visual than dramatic, its intrigue lies in the puzzle’s missing piece, in the question of Lady Brandon’s lover, which Balzac left permanently unanswered:30 as in L’Auberge rouge and La RP  ( Nov. ), –. La Femme abandonnée, RP ( and  Sept. ); La Grenadière ( Oct. ). The latter was probably written first, but both may have been in part inspired by the same real-life figure: M. Fargeaud, ‘Sur la route des Chouans et de La Femme abandonnée’, AB (), esp. –. 28 Cf. H. Gauthier, ‘Le Projet du recueil Études de femmes’, AB (), , cit. A.-M. Meininger, ii. . Balzac had stayed at La Grenadière with Mme de Berny in ; fo.  of his album bears a sketch plan of the dwelling: R. Guise, ‘Les Mystères de Pensées, sujets, fragments’, AB (), –. Mme de Berny is also reflected in La Femme abandonnée: Fargeaud, ‘Sur la route des Chouvans’, . 29 Balzac’s flirtation with Mme de Castries in fact took place in Aix-les-Bains, after La Grenadière was completed; he had not visited the country until he went with her in October. Switzerland, as in La Femme abandonnée, is a cipher of romantic happiness; the landscape in La Grenadière seems like a tangential, geographically displaced anticipation of the relationship. Robb gives a lively account, and of other ways in which fiction preceded fact: Balzac: A Biography (London, ), –; cf. also J. Noiray, ‘La Suisse de Balzac’, AB (),  et seq. 30 A remark in Le Père Goriot appears to identify the lover as Francessini, but Balzac later deleted the passage, leaving his identity, and the precise story of their affair, a mystery: BRC , –. 26 27

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ANOTHER DESTINY?

Grande Bretèche, Balzac leaves gaps to fill, but here leaves them more overtly. Yet if stasis and description are suited to the elegy, they are on their own too limited for more extensive development. La Femme abandonnée combines them with more dynamic elements, in a model to be developed in Balzac’s novels. Almost twice as long as La Grenadière, it uses the extra space to develop the enigma-narrative, presenting Mme de Beauséant at length, from Gaston’s viewpoint, before he begins to know her properly, making her mysteriousness as palpable to us as it is to him. It is much freer with narrative pace: Neuil’s musings on Claire’s beauty last a page, but come to him ‘avec la rapidité de l’éclair’; the lovers’ nineyear affair is summed up in a sentence, but the narrator dilates on ‘la corniche d’un boudoir’ (ii. , –). Such distensions develop Les Célibataires’ doxa to allow room for the subjective, for readerly identification, for the telling moments of reflection which would soon characterize novelistic loci classici, such as Charles’s arrival, or Eugénie’s illicit offer of sugar to her cousin (Eugénie Grandet, iii. , –). If comparably awkward moments in Balzac’s stories are less resonant, it is because they have less against which to resonate: but the larger dimensions of La Femme abandonnée, as later of Eugénie Grandet, allow more substantial characters and narrative developments, and the storyteller’s closing doxa, whilst it still tells us what to feel, makes it clear that we are to rely on the reader’s response.31 Women will guess the reasons of Claire’s heart; the ending’s ramifications must be ‘abandonnés au caprice de chaque esprit’; those who have observed or experienced ‘l’union parfaite de deux êtres’ will have no difficulty understanding Gaston’s suicide (ii. ). Similarly directive instructions for empathy are a feature of later stories dealing with emotion, such as Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan or Massimilla Doni, particularly of their endings.32 In most of its narrative developments La Femme abandonnée shows no such economy. Using the sequential portraits of social types seen in Madame Firmiani (another model further expanded in Eugénie Grandet, La Vieille fille, and the Bargeton salon in Illusions perdues), it creates a substantial dramatic, tragic structure.33 Written rapidly,34 it is strongly end-directed, moving from multiple oppositions (Paris/provinces, marriage/ separation, madness/reason, Gaston/Claire) to a love-triangle. Dualistic 31 As Balzac noted in his album at this time: ‘La profondeur vient de l’intelligence du lecteur et non de la pensée exprimée, un livre est moins un effet qu’une cause’; PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. . 32 Cf. Ch. (iii) below. 33 Act I: Exposition: Gaston’s arrival in Bayeux. Act II: Complication: the lovers’ meeting. Act III: Turning-point: their Swiss Idyll. Act IV: Hubris: their return to France on Gaston’s inheritance. Act V: Catharsis: his marriage to another woman and suicide. No such divisions appear, however, on the manuscript, and when Balzac did tardily consider theatrical adaptation, it was in two acts:  Apr. , LH ii. , cit. M. Fargeaud, ii. –. 34 M. Ambrière-Fargeaud, ii. , , , . Balzac drew on the duchesse d’Abrantès for the plot of La Femme abandonnée: A.-M. Meininger, ‘La Femme abandonnée, L’Auberge rouge et la duchesse d’Abrantès’, AB (), esp. –.

ANOTHER DESTINY?

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patterns—realistic analogues of Sarrasine’s—are themselves doubled, to create something closer to La Peau de chagrin, a more extensive series of mirrorings. Claire contrasts with the salon, the local view with Neuil’s imaginings; Champignelle’s visit (ii. ) parallels Gaston’s, itself subdivided into two, like his declarations of love (ii. –, –, –, –). This more extensive architecture, with its repetition of certain scenes, takes the stasis implicit in essentially ‘spatial’, symmetrical oppositions and uses it to create a more dynamic effect, whereby parallels mark progress; but it also mitigates the story’s finality. Consummation is deferred, making fate itself shorthand for a ‘foule de motifs impossibles à dire’ (ii. ). The narrative becomes a matter of process as much as result.

(iii) Les Marana and the Break with the Revue In La Femme abandonnée, the ‘mari-femme-amant’ triangle of Théorie du conte (OD i. ) is made more untidily like life: near the end, the over-perfect parallel demises of Claire’s father and her brother remind us that her husband is still alive, opening the door to Gaston’s marriage of convenience and, potentially, to a further narrative development which their twin suicide attempts cut short. The conclusion, if narratorially amplified, is dealt with swiftly (ii. –). But Les Marana doubles this triangular structure, adding to Montefiore’s and Diard’s rivalry for Juana’s hand in part one (headed  and  in RP) a second, symmetrical triangle,     (x. –): as the narrator explains, the ‘dénouement’ is in fact the ‘véritable histoire’ (RP x. b). Stories, in other words, are growing out of stories—a phenomenon analogous to those of Le Médecin de campagne and Même histoire; but there is almost a second novel in part two, where we discover Juana’s two unequally loved children and Diard’s suspicions about her favouritism. And they are used not simply for further narrative developments, but to lament the impossibility of extending the poetic narrative of La Grenadière, to solicit the reader’s emotions, and to make explicit the painful necessity of narrative selection. Juana’s marital sufferings are ‘une histoire impossible à retracer dans toute sa vérité’, demanding ‘des observations si minutieuses que, pour les gens avides d’émotions dramatiques, elle deviendrait insipide’ (x. ). Amongst the ‘milliers de scènes jouées au fond des âmes’, ‘il est difficile de trouver un exemple. Cependant il est une scène qui servit plus particulièrement à marquer le moment où, dans cette vie à deux, la mésintelligence commença. Peut-être servira-t-elle à expliquer le dénouement de cette histoire’ (x. ). The technique is still storytelling, and explanatory, but it is striving towards a more comprehensive treatment of emotion. Such developments did not please Pichot, who needed dramatic contes, of not more than two-and-a-half feuilles,  pages per month, according to



ANOTHER DESTINY?

contract, delivered regularly, and for whom Balzac’s lengthy reflections presented considerable difficulties (Corr. ii. –, ). Balzac’s aims were almost exactly opposed. He was in pursuit of profundity: for him, as for lesser contemporaries, the conte, the trifling thing which Pichot saw, and which he was coming to see himself, was no longer a permanent home, but a temporary (and somewhat cramped) refuge for the giant of the future.35 Les Marana provoked the reflections with which this chapter began and, in March , Balzac’s rupture with the Revue de Paris (Corr. ii.  n. )—but not before he had supplied Ferragus at more than double the planned length, in irregular instalments, and charged the Revue for the privilege.36 Pichot’s riposte was to print an article on St Honoré, patron saint of bakers. Balzac did not return to the Revue until the following May, after Brindeau had taken over as director (Corr. ii.  n. ; –).

(iv) Form and Fragmentation: From Ferragus to the Second Contes drolatiques Balzac’s Revue de Paris stories of – represent two determinant models for his fictions. The first can be called cohesive; the second, linear. On the one hand is the essentially static narrative of La Grenadière, constructed around a central symbol; on the other, the more dynamic narrative of La Femme abandonnée; and in both is a desire to treat emotion seriously, and at length. Length, the Revue’s essential problem with Les Marana and Ferragus, was to recur with Ne touchez pas la hache (F: La Duchesse de Langeais) and Eugénie Grandet, whose openings first both appeared in the reviews to which Balzac turned post-Pichot, but which were only published in toto in book form.37 Yet length is only the working-out of deeper generic problems. Ferragus, like Les Marana, doubles the story’s triangular and dualistic structure, the two parts 35 In Apr.  he declares: ‘la nécessité fait d’un savant et d’un homme politique un conteur’; May finds him deprecating the genre he had once revered (‘le déluge de contes dont nous sommes inondés’ and regretting that Deschamps, in Les Deux Frères, had not written ‘plus de détails, non pas un conte, mais une histoire, un livre’ (Corr. ii. , ). If it is clear that Balzac is referring to contemporary contes rather than the admired models of the past, it is equally the case that his own collections of stories in book form were not selling (on  June, Gosselin tells him that he still has ‘ Peau de chagrin’, ‘ Contes philosophiques’, and ‘ Nouveaux contes [philosophiques]’ on his hands (Corr. ii. ), and that his major projects (Les Trois Cardinaux, Le Privilège, La Bataille) are all historical novels which would never be written: T. Takayama, Les Œuvres romanesques avortées de Balzac (–) (Tokyo and Paris, ), –. 36 Corr. ii.  and n. ; . The Revue de Paris appeared each Sunday, containing  pages; Ferragus occupies something approaching a third of the March issue ( pages against the  contractually agreed—Mar.  had five Sundays), but Pichot was obliged to publish a -page supplement to accommodate the end of Ferragus in Apr. 37 At this time, Balzac also wrote the opening of Le Cabinet des Antiques, first entitled Les Rivalités en province, before realizing that it would not fit into the planned volume of the Études de moeurs and substituting L’Illustre Gaudissart.

ANOTHER DESTINY?

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reflecting each other, the characters forming a diptych.38 Les Marana presents two symmetrical triangles with Juana at their common apex, the first with Montefiore as her chief suitor and Diard as his rival, the second reversing this situation; Ferragus similarly presents a female protagonist, Clémence Desmarets, at the apex of two triangles, whose other points are her lover Auguste de Maulincour and her husband Jules Desmarets in part one, and her husband and her hitherto unseen convict father Ferragus in part two. Balzac’s opening reflections on Paris-monstre, which appear en filigrane throughout the tale, start the story off from, and base it around, an image as determinant, if not as overdetermined, as those of La Maison-du-chat-qui-pelote or La Grenadière (something difficult to sustain in a work as long as Ferragus).39 And within this combination of the two models of La Grenadière and La Femme abandonnée, Balzac expands the serious exploration of emotion, via the subjectivity and inwardness of his characters, the ‘digressions’—in fact less digressions than long passages, mainly of psychological or sociological explanation, which are ‘en quelque sorte le sujet principal pour l’auteur’ (v. ).40 This was a dangerous move for the storyteller; but it was to be the novelist’s big break. It stretches the story’s unity to its limits.41 Though still bounded by parallels which bring it full circle (Maulincour’s encounter with Clémence in the street at the opening is answered by Desmarets’s sighting of Ferragus at the end, v. –, ), the narrator’s intervening and expansive reflections, and the action’s complications, with its glances both at Marsay’s affair with Ida, her mother’s relation to Ferragus, and Maulincour’s duel with Ronquerolles, submerge a fundamentally clear and cogent structure. The various coincidences and coups de théâtre—Maulincour’s discovery of Ferragus’s letter, his two brushes with death before he is poisoned through his hair—can indeed appear tiré par les cheveux, at least until their raison d’être—Ferragus’s desire to protect Clémence, his daughter—is revealed. But unity is less decisive in the novel than in the story. The determinant image of the one is merely the motif of the other. The unfaithful lover’s refusal, and brutalization, the point de mire of Dezesperance d’amour as of La Fille aux yeux d’or, is buried in the midst of Ne touchez pas la hache (though still the motto-title of the first versions), and is merely alluded to in Ferragus: ‘je voudrais être hâchée vivante 39 Ibid. . A. W. Raitt, ‘L’Art de la narration dans Ferragus’, AB (), –. Cf. e.g. passages of commentary on love (v. –); on rain in Paris (v. –); on feminine mendacity (v. –); on conjugal intimacy (v. –) etc.—treatments of inwardness supplemented by the numerous letters (particularly those of Ida and Clémence, or her dialogue with her father (v. – and –). Though most of these are expanded in RP, almost all are substantially present in MS. As Balzac’s comment implies, one narrative’s digression is another’s main plot. Cf. E. Bordas, ‘Pratiques balzaciennes de la digression’, AB () [I],  et seq. 41 Cf. E. Bordas: ‘La Composition balzacienne dans Ferragus et La Fille aux yeux d’or: de la négligence à l’ambivalence’, Orbis Litterarum,  (), . 38 40

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pour toi’.42 What has often been taxed as melodrama is in fact an attempt to outdo Hoffmann, to create a new genre combining the fantastic and the real,43 presaged by a whole variety of texts running from Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit, Le Message, and the manuscript of Louis Lambert, developing a ‘fantastique de Paris’ which recurs throughout the text;44 a genre which appealed peculiarly to the sensibility of contemporaries who, ignorant of Flaubert and Maupassant, were perhaps less demanding in formal or causal terms than subsequent readers, and who, like present-day viewers of ‘soaps’, wanted thrills, and characters they could relate to, adulate, or hate. Balzac was amply satisfying these needs,45 creating, as a by-product, and apparently by accident (given Pichot’s aversion for spreading stories over several issues), an avidity for the next instalment which newspaper serialization was soon more formally—and regularly—to satisfy. The expansions of Ferragus, the author’s dilations on various subjects, thus accentuated the progressive decentring of focuses of narrative interest in Balzac’s world—the idea that subjects always suggest other subjects elsewhere, the process already behind the proliferations of doxa in Les Célibataires.

(v) Contes drolatiques: secund dixain This process of dispersal and proliferation of centres of interest lies at the heart of the project to ‘excogiter cent contes drolatiques’ (OD i. ); yet it also explains its demise. The impulse behind Dezesperance d’amour, Balzac’s disappointed affair 42 OD i. –; v. –; –; ; cf. Chollet, ‘De Dezesperance d’amour’, p. . There are other comparable instances in the Histoire des Treize cycle. In Ferragus, the Paris-monstre motif reaches one, but not the conclusion, when the poisoned Maulincour reaches ‘l’état dans lequel sont les monstres conservés au Muséum’ (v. ). Clémence lifts up her husband with ‘une force nerveuse bien supérieure à celle d’un homme’, just as Paquita raises Marsay ‘vigoureusement en l’air comme pour le contempler’ in La Fille aux yeux d’or (v. , ); whilst the desert appears merely as an image in La Fille aux yeux d’or, but as a more developed episode in La Duchesse de Langeais (v. , –). Balzac would develop the technique in César Birotteau, whose ch.  became La Haute Banque, a title initially intended for the whole of La Maison Nucingen (vi. d), and in La Cousine Bette, of which ch.  in the first publication in Le Constitutionnel is entitled: ‘              É,  É   ’: vii. c. Cf. also Ch. (iii) below. 43 Cf. Raitt, ‘L’Art de la narration’, –. ‘Le fantastique est si vieux’, Charles de Bernard had written to Balzac, apropos Louis Lambert, two months before Ferragus (Corr. ii. ); although the genre had begun to decline in popularity the previous year (iv.  n. ). As early as Sept. , Balzac had written: ‘Il n’y a rien de fantastique. Nous n’imaginons que ce qui est, sera, ou a été’ (PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. ). See also C. Massol-Bedouin, ‘L’Énigme de Ferragus: du roman noir au roman réaliste, AB (), –. 44 So the pedestrian is ‘fantastiquement collé sur le mur’ (v. ); Paris ‘s’éprend de mille fantaisies’ (v. ), or is ‘ce fantasque Paris’ (v. ). 45 As his correspondents’ comments demonstrate: Corr. ii. , , , , , , , etc. These comments about the anachronistic nature of critical response also hold, all other things being equal, for many contemporaries’ admiration of Louis Lambert and Le Médecin de campagne, despite the negative reactions quoted above: cf. e.g. Corr. ii. , , .

ANOTHER DESTINY?

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with Mme de Castries, also drove Le Médecin de campagne’s confession and La Duchesse de Langeais itself, as well as the other stories of the Histoire des Treize; its very violence explains its fecundity. In the face of such proliferation, he could no longer, indeed no longer needed to, maintain generic integrity; the drolatiques’ singularity was coming into conflict with the diversity of the wider opus. This is apparent in the dixain itself. Begun, after its predecessor, in a flush of enthusiasm,46 it lacks the latter’s cost-free picture of love. If the Prosne du ioyeulx curé de Meudon is a joyous La Fontainian debunking of secular and clerical authority (complete with suitably comico-erotic euphemisms: OD i. , –, , ), in the second dixain overall there is a progressive darkening of tone. Nearly all the tales present cruelty and manipulation—innocently enough in Les Trois Clercqs de Sainct-Nicolas (where dupery anticipates L’Illustre Gaudissart later in the year); more menacingly in Le Jeusne de François premier (where the king is forced alternately to abstain and to indulge) and La Faulse Courtizane; most horribly in the last tales, Le Succube and Dezesperance d’amour. Frustration is the heart of this dixain as delight is that of the first. The cycle is full of emptiness, of things not being what they seem. The faulse courtizane turns out to be the punter’s wife; the ideal husband, hopeless in bed (Le Dangier d’estre trop coquebin); the succubus not a witch, but a woman. Such disappointments bespeak a larger failing of the project. The drolatiques begin to develop the complexity of other contemporary narratives: tales like Le Dangier d’estre trop coquebin and Le Succube were drafted and redrafted like contemporary, and therefore much more complex, narratives, such as Notice biographique sur Louis Lambert, Ferragus, Ne touchez pas la hache, and Le Médecin de campagne; others sprout similar digressions. The cycle begins to suffer the fragmenting effect of interrupted genesis already noted in Ferragus and Ne touchez pas la hache, together with other factors which were particularly to affect it: the first dixain’s hostile reception (which had only made Balzac more determined to press on), and the incipient waning of the folie du conte.47 The Renaissance was getting old; simplicity, difficult to simulate—‘ung grief labeur’, especially given the mutinousness of the muse (OD i. , –). Merriness had become a question of duty, not desire. This arduousness of composition derives from complexity. The first dixain’s direct link between desire and consummation has become confused; getting one’s mate, a matter of hatching plans (Comment fust basti le chasteau d’Azay, La Faulse Courtizanne, La Chière nuictée d’amour, Les Trois Clercqs de Sainct-Nicolas). And the second dixain interweaves personal and political interests more closely than 46 Most of the stories were written in the autumn of , the remainder between December and June: R. Chollet, ‘Le Second Dixain des Contes drolatiques’, AB () and OD i. –. 47 Datable from Nisard’s emblematic remark, ‘Le conte, c’est quelque chose qui n’a pas la force d’être un roman’ (‘D’un commencement de réaction contre la littérature facile’, RP  (Dec. ), –, at –: R. Guise, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton (–)’, Doctorat d’État thesis, Nancy, , pt. I, ch. , pp. –. Balzac’s letters of the following spring register his fading enthusiasm for the genre: Corr. ii. , .

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the first. La Chière nuictée d’amour is set in the context of the wars of religion; Jacques de Beaune’s amorous exploits bring him a title, and an estate (OD I ); the death of the duc d’Orléans, killed by d’Hocquetonville in revenge for Orléans’s adultery with his wife, leads to the battles between Armagnacs and Burgundians (OD i. –). Now Balzac’s lovers both make their beds, and lie on them: their actions never come cost free. In Les Trois Clercqs, it is the conte itself which is costly: the innkeeper so forgets himself in storytelling that the clercs escape without paying their bill. Even Zulma, the nymphomaniac of Le Succube, can make love without conceiving only because she is possessed by the devil (OD i. , ). Le Succube, more than any other tale, embodies the whole collection’s decline. Unlike the other stories, it presents a patchwork of testimonies from a variety of witnesses, all, save two, determined to condemn the protagonist to death. This overtly polyvocal form comprehensively undermines any simple moral, even the limp conclusion (OD i. ), replacing it with a pluralism evident in the mosaic of testimonies and the systematic presentation of her defence in reported speech (OD i. –). Her accuser’s words are only as good as her own. Only belatedly did Balzac change her defence from direct to reported speech, or add the final, moderate, moral, thereby distancing himself from her view, the narrator’s, and that of the public at large. Such features strike to the heart of Le Succube, making her demonic status result from prejudice, not reason: ‘Le conte de sa course dans l’ecclize aydoit le menu populaire à croire que ce feut le dyable, et aulcuns disoyent que elle avoyt vollé par les aers’ (OD i. ). Zulma, vassal of desire, has never ‘suivi en son amour aultre cours que celui de sa natture’ (OD i. ),48 and is no more susceptible to amendment than life itself. Le Succube, in the wake of Madame Firmiani, indicates the impossibility of concluding, the inherent relativity of any world-view.49 Its mosaic of opinions demonstrates once again the diversity presaged in the eulogy of Rabelais which ends the previous tale, Le Prosne du ioyeulx curé de Meudon, ‘glorifiant tes ouvraiges d’esterne mémoire, tant cheriz de ceulx qui ayment les œuvres concentriques où l’univers moral est clouz et où se renconstrent pressées comme sardines fresches en leurs buyssars, toutes les idées philosophicques quelconques, les sciences, artz, esloquences, oultre les momeries theatrales’ (OD i. ).50 48 Cf. Cornille’s posthumous deposition: ‘bien que cette ioyeulze galloise eust rompeu le ban de son moustier, elle estoyt innocente de toute diablerie . . . nul desmon aultre que celuy de l’amour ne estoyt en ceste fille’ (OD i. ). 49 Cf. Ch. (iii) above. It is telling that this dixain’s two last tales, Dezesperance d’amour and Le Succube, allude respectively to Mme de Castries and to Zulma Carraud, the two women most influential upon Balzac at this time. 50 The image of the artwork as ‘œuvre concentrique’ figures, as R. Chollet points out (OD i.  n. ), elsewhere in the collection: in L’Apostrophe (OD i. ), in the prologue of the third dixain: (OD i. ), and is paralleled in the description of the writer as a ‘miroir concentrique’ in the preface to La Peau de chagrin and in the ‘glaces de Venise’ of Berthe la repentie; cf. Chs. (i) above and (v) below. Such images reflect those of Balzac’s creation as a series of circles moving around a common centre.

ANOTHER DESTINY?

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Yet here, in contrast to La Peau de chagrin (x. ), it is not the narrator, or, as in Louis Lambert, the character, but the ‘œuvres’ which are ‘concentriques’: a tribute to the heterogeneous quality of the drolatiques, and a sign of their decline. Their polyvalence was being assumed by other burgeoning works;51 their ‘concentricity’, their specificity marked them as ‘un monument littéraire bâti pour quelques connaisseurs’ (LH i. ,  Aug. ). Henceforward, their impulse for proliferation and repetition would become the determinant impulse of his world. The publication of the second dixain in July  marks the end of the story as Balzac’s principal means of expression. Though he would continue to plan stories throughout the remainder of his career, they would in future generally play second fiddle to the novel, and be fitted in as larger schemes allowed.

(vi) L’Illustre Gaudissart and Un drame au bord de la mer This is the case with Balzac’s last two completed stories prior to Le Père Goriot, L’Illustre Gaudissart, and Un drame au bord de la mer. They were written in gaps during the composition of Eugénie Grandet and Le Père Goriot respectively; somewhat as, more than a decade later, La Cousine Bette would emerge in the midst of Le Cousin Pons.52 The signing of the contract for the Études de mœurs on  October  gave Balzac the stability to concentrate on longer projects, to create a ‘monument’—not the drolatiques, but the future Comédie humaine.53 But it also gave him an incentive to keep to word limits, and to think carefully when overrunning them: L’Illustre Gaudissart was written to fill the first instalment of the Études de moeurs,54 in place of the beginning of Le Cabinet des Antiques, Un drame to complete the first of the Études philosophiques, but also to bring to fruition Balzac’s 51 Notably via the Études de moeurs, the Romans et contes philosophiques, and the Scènes de la vie de province. The Études de moeurs, with their division into Scènes de la vie privée, de la vie de province, de la vie parisienne, and de la vie de campagne, were rejected by Gosselin in Sept. , but accepted by Mme Béchet in October (Corr. ii. –, –, ). The Romans et contes philosophiques were agreed with Gosselin in place of the novel Le Marquis de Carabas; certain of them were to give rise to major projects of Balzac’s mid-career: Les Souffrances de l’inventeur to Illusions perdues and César Birotteau, Le Prêtre catholique to Séraphîta. Cf. Corr. ii. ,  and n.; S.-J. Bérard, La Genèse d’un roman de Balzac: ‘Illusions perdues’ (), i. – et seq.; Takayama, Les Œuvres romanesques, –; V  n. ,  and nn. –. On  July , Balzac was to sign the contract with Werdet for the publication of the Études philosophiques (Corr. ii. –), whose  volumes would appear between the following December and . Cf. B. Guyon, ‘Balzac “invente” les ‘Scènes de la vie de province’, Mercure de France (July ); and A.-M. Meininger, ‘Histoire des Scènes de la vie de province’, AB (). 52 Cf. A.-M. Meininger, vii. , –; D. Adamson, The Genesis of ‘Le Cousin Pons’ (Oxford, ), chs.  and ; A. Lorant, Les Parents pauvres d’Honoré de Balzac: La Cousine Bette (Geneva, ), i. –. 53 Cf. V  et seq. 54 ÉtM  (), vols v and vi, vols i and ii of the Scènes de la vie de province, pub. c. Dec. , BF ( Feb. ). L’Illustre Gaudissart is preceded by Eugénie Grandet, Le Message, Les Célibataires (F: Le Curé de Tours), La Femme abandonnée, and La Grenadière.

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long-held plan for a pendant to El Verdugo and Le Réquisitionnaire which, with La Peau de chagrin, Adieu, and L’Élixir de longue vie, it accompanies in this volume.55 Both L’Illustre Gaudissart and Un drame deal with subjects closely related to the ‘parent’ novels, yet in a way which illuminates generic difference. They reverse them, and concentrate on a single action—a pattern which the related novels develop, and which would be most strikingly employed a few years later, in César Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen.56 L’Illustre Gaudissart is the ‘Grandet’ part of Eugénie Grandet, rewritten as a conte drolatique. There, the Parisian Charles dupes the provincials; here, the provincials dupe Gaudissart; Grandet is tyrannical and wily, Margaritis is henpecked and deranged; Grandet’s fortune is real, Margaritis’s is imaginary. Grandet represents property, Gaudissart, finance; Grandet the old, Gaudissart, the new. Un drame au bord de la mer is a provincial mirroring of Le Père Goriot:57 a father’s murder of his son, listed after the story of sibling rivalry, El Verdugo, in the July  contract for the Études philosophiques (Corr. ii. ), which place it after L’Élixir de longue vie; it recalls both Mateo Falcone and contemporary works by Davin.58 L’Illustre Gaudissart and Un drame au bord de la mer are constructed around dominant images with a consistency and intensity which necessarily could not be attained in the lengthier related novels. L’Illustre Gaudissart is about wordspinning, the travelling salesman Gaudissart’s stock-in-trade. His job is to extract ‘par des opérations purement intellectuelles, l’or enfoui dans les cachettes de province’; ‘c’était en travaillant à l’extérieur de la tête qu’il en avait compris l’intérieur, il avait l’habitude de coiffer les gens, de se jeter à leur tête’ (iv. , ; cf. , ). The hypothetical forms the core of Gaudissart’s business, insurance, and of the story, which reaches a climax when Gaudissart’s attempt to sell that most virtual of commodities to Margaritis is worsted by the latter’s success in selling him imaginary wine. Their dialogue de sourds is composed largely of non sequiturs and traffickings between the figurative and the literal. ‘Mais je vais plus loin . . .’ says Gaudissart in full flow—Margaritis thinks he is leaving; yet on occasion he sweeps the salesman off course with a syllogistic flood: ‘ Mon vin est capiteux, capiteux s’accorde avec le capital en étymologie; or, vous parlez capitaux . . . hein? caput, tête! tête de Vouvray, tout cela se tient . . .’59 55 Étphil,  (), vols. i–v, pub. c. Dec. , BF ( Jan. ). Cf. M. Le Yaouanc, ‘Introduction à Un drame au bord de la mer’, AB (), . 56 It also occurs later, with Illusions perdues and Une fille d’Eve: cf. below, Chs.  and , and P. Citron, ‘Aux sources d’Une fille d’Eve’, AB (). 57 Balzac initially mentions Le Père Goriot on  Sept.  (Corr. ii. ), and wrote most of it in October and November. It was first published in RP ( and  Dec.  and  Jan. ). Un drame au bord de la mer was probably written in the few days prior to  Nov. : x , . 58 Le Yaouanc, ‘Introduction à Un drame au bord de la mer’,  et seq. 59 iv. , ; cf. – passim, and S. Felman, La Folie et la chose littéraire (), : ‘Gaudissart ignore à quel point il est lui-même déterminé par la parole . . . le texte balzacien est là pour nous apprendre . . . qu’on ne domine pas le langage’. Vautrin’s word-play, conversely, is subversive, but deliberate (iii. , , etc.).

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The virtualization of commerce is the story’s central subject, mirrored by Gaudissart’s progress from millinery, via finance, to insurance. ‘Il ne s’agit plus là d’économiser le temps’, he tells Margaritis, ‘mais de lui donner un prix, de le chiffrer, d’en représenter pécuniairement les produits que vous présumez en obtenir dans cette espace intellectuel . . . Ah! ceci est un progrès, un mouvement vers un meilleur ordre des choses, mouvment dû à l’activité de notre époque, essentiellement progressive’ (iv. ; cf. n.  and ). The parody of Orleanist discourse is evident enough.60 Yet L’Illustre Gaudissart is also a selfparody, its protagonist a Balzac double (‘Calembours, gros rire, figure monacale, teint de cordelier, enveloppe rabelaisienne’, iv. ) whose very Protean diversity threatens dissipation: ‘Il ne voit rien à fond. Des hommes et des lieux, il en apprend les noms; des choses, il en apprécie les surfaces . . . Il s’intéresse à tout, et rien ne l’intéresse’ (iv. –).61 Gaudissart is an actor (iv. , , ), like the polymathic author of La Peau de chagrin (x. ), endowed with the ‘eloquence d’un robinet d’eau chaude que l’on tourne à volonté’ (iv. ). His newspaper-driven productivity is the analogue of Balzac’s journalism,62 and of Balzac the conteur, moving, like Gaudissart, from the fantastique to the pittoresque (iv.  and n. ). In a way, L’Illustre Gaudissart is (like, indeed, the Scènes de la vie de province )63 a voyage pittoresque, but also, in its vulgar eroticism, in its theme of duperie, in its celebration of Touraine, a dissolution of the drolatique into what was to be the mainstream Comédie humaine. L’Illustre Gaudissart centres on financial and linguistic circulation, Un drame, on place and stasis. Its opening description embodies its immensity: the narrator, later revealed to be Louis Lambert,64 contemplates the ocean as, at the end of Le Père Goriot, Rastignac surveys Paris (x. –). Its atmosphere of silent, intuitive communication, the stress on the sea as analogue of spiritual enormity (‘Nager dans les airs après avoir nagé dans la mer! ah! qui n’aurait nagé dans l’avenir?’: x. ) hints at, but does not prepare us for, what is to come. Cambremer’s silent remorse, his ‘coup d’oeil, semblable à la flamme d’un 60 Something present also in Gaudissart’s republicanism (he is a former carbonaro), in Balzac’s jibes at Le Temps, and in Saint-Simonian clichés: ‘masses intelligentes et progressives’ (iv. ; Balzac’s italics). Cf. also iv.  and n. ,  and n. ; B. Guyon, ‘Balzac, héraut du capitalisme naissant’, Europe, – (Jan.–Feb. ),  et seq.; and B. Tolley, ‘Balzac et les saint-simoniens’, AB (), –. 61 F. Schuerewegen (Balzac contre Balzac (Paris and Toronto, ), ), after Felman (La Folie, ), sees Gaudissart as an example of Bakhtinian ‘décentrage’; but some may feel that his parallel between Margaritis and the narrator () goes too far. 62 The paper Gaudissart is seeking to sell is the Journal des enfants; the previous year Balzac had envisaged collaboration with Girardin’s Journal des connaissances utiles (Corr. ii. ). Cf. Guyon, ‘Balzac, héraut du capitalisme naissant’, –; P. Kinder, ‘Balzac et La Presse’, i. –. 63 Balzac’s project for the Scènes de la vie de province may be indebted to the regional tales of his friend Samuel-Henry Berthoud. See Fargeaud, ‘Sur la route des Chouans et de La Femme abandonnée’, –, esp. –; Guyon, ‘Balzac “invente” les Scènes de la vie de province’, –; S.-J. Bérard, La Genèse d’un roman de Balzac, . 64 The story’s first readers could not have identified him as such: BRC –.

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canon’ is the pendant to the flamme or fièvre (x. , x. ) with which Lambert relates it, as well as a parallel to his madness. But if Un drame au bord de la mer reverses its parent novel, it does so rather more subtly than L’Illustre Gaudissart. Cambremer may seem to be an infernal father compared to the apparently ideal Goriot; yet he is arguably as paradoxical, if more extreme. Where Goriot loses his daughters’ affections through his own excessive affection, Cambremer adores his son, yet actually kills him, and spends his days with Perrotte, his goddaughter, a substitute child. These stories point to significant symbioses with the novel. Like Les Marana or Ferragus, they develop and double the anecdote, L’Illustre Gaudissart relating Gaudissart’s affair with Jenny before not one, but two encounters with those who dupe him, Un drame relating Lambert’s encounter with the fisherman before the fisherman tells Cambremer’s tale. Its two parts stand in parallel. The opening ‘cuve de granit’ mirrors the ‘quartier de granit’ from which Cambremer contemplates both the ocean and his crime; his paradoxical nature, ‘grandement religieuse’ and ‘horriblement repentante’ (x. ) echoes the fisherman’s ‘noblesse de . . . dévouement qui s’ignorait lui-même; la force de cette faiblesse’ (x. ). The antitheses are almost Hugolian, like the emblematic casting of Cambremer as l’Homme au voeu: ‘Pourquoi cet homme dans le granit? Pourquoi ce granit dans cet homme? Où était l’homme, où était le granit?’ (x. ). Like some Hugo avant la lettre, he has become part of the landscape.65 But although it is vivid, there is nothing schematic in Un drame. If it works up the high colours of El Verdugo and L’Élixir de longue vie (which immediately precede it in the  Études philosophiques), it carries more emphasis on the intuitive and the empathetic. The choice of Lambert as its narrator, with his Christ-like compassion for the poor, doubtless bore on the choice of subject matter; it may even have been the immediate impetus for the tale.66 Un drame au bord de la mer, written symbiotically with Le Père Goriot, initiates the use of recurring characters as narrators (this is the first story to be told by one,)67 with significant implications for the story as a form. It brings a widening of scope, with considerable detail of the characters’ relations (about the fisherman, or Cambremer’s brother and niece); yet its core is the simple explanation of an enigmatic protagonist—a pattern to be repeated once the use of recurring characters was under way, in Balzac’s stories for the Chronique de Paris (see Chapter  below). In its stress on the intuitive and empathetic, on 65 Balzac’s tale (if not Hugo’s famous pose in exile) may have a literary inspiration in Jouy’s L’Hermite de la Bretagne (Le Yaouanc, ‘Introduction à Un drame au bord de la mer’, –). 66 See BRC . 67 Un drame au bord de la mer takes the form of a letter written by Lambert to his uncle. The narrator of Gobseck only became Derville in the Béchet edition, just as La Grande Bretèche only became Bianchon’s narrative in FC. Cf. A. Pugh, ‘Personnages reparaissants avant Le Père Goriot’, AB (), –.

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character and psychology in Cambremer and Lambert himself, Un drame au bord de la mer reflects the rising importance of character and psychology as the main focus of Balzac’s narrative.

(vii) Eugénie Grandet Psychology, particularly feminine psychology, had been at the heart of Balzac’s writing since the Physiologie. Along with Les Marana and Ferragus, Ne touchez pas la hache and Même histoire constitute ever more substantial explorations of the being Balzac, under the increasing influence of Swedenborg, calls ‘une création transitoire entre l’homme et l’ange’ (iii. –).68 But neither of these works has the unity of Eugénie Grandet; and both yoke subtlety of insight to a sometimes crudely melodramatic plot.69 With Eugénie Grandet, Balzac set out to write something different, ‘dans le genre des Célibataires’, but ‘qui sera mieux’ (LH i. ). His Préambule signals the change of tack: au moment où l’on donne aux œuvres les plus éphemères le nom glorieux de conte, qui ne doit appartenir qu’aux créations les plus vivaces de l’art, il lui sera sans doute pardonné de descendre aux mesquines proportions de l’histoire, l’histoire vulgaire, le récit pur et simple de ce qui se voit tous les jours en province. (iii. )

This is a manifesto for literary realism, which links technique directly to subject, the ‘intérêt presque muet, qui gît moins dans l’action que dans la pensée’ of provincial life, contrasted to the ‘drame tout fait’ demanded by Paris (iii. 68 Ideas fully developed in Séraphîta, begun in Nov. , during the composition of Eugénie Grandet. See H. Gauthier, xi. – and P. Nykrog, La Pensée de Balzac (Copenhagen, ), –, –. 69 The genesis of Ne touchez pas la hache, like, to a greater degree, that of Même histoire, was piecemeal. Set aside in Apr.  after L’Écho de la jeune France published the first instalment before Balzac had had time to revise it (Corr. ii. – and n.), more serious authorial reflections, most developed during reworking for its first complete publication (EtM ( Apr. )), are imposed on a melodramatic plot. These fall into two main categories: doxa on the aristocracy (e.g. v. a and b, b–a, a), and a larger group concerning emotion—music as an objective correlative near the opening; and doxa on love, or developments of Antoinette’s interiority towards the end (e.g. v. c, c,  passim—rewritings made for L’Écho de la jeune France; v. a, b, a, e, b). These are important modifications: for, in increasing the character’s subjectivity, or appealing to the reader’s empathy, they endow what started as a story with the more experiential qualities of a novel—something reinforced by Balzac’s early MS decision to introduce an explanatory flashback rather than continue with melodramatic action (v. c). But they sit rather oddly with the more dramatic elements (which Balzac, in these modifications, on occasion none the less expands: v. a), and scarcely hide an exemplary quality characteristic of the conte (cf. Nykrog, La Pensée de Balzac, –; G. Thouvenin, ‘La Composition de La Duchesse de Langeais, RHLF  (), –). Eugénie Grandet’s composition was less seriously interrupted (only the first instalment appeared in L’Europe littéraire ( Sept. )), occuring in the stabler publishing context of the Études de mœurs, where the whole novel first appeared c. Dec. .

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–). The insistently visual imagery stresses the importance of objectivity and of the typical, of the representativeness of the work at hand. Balzac is, he implies, inventing ‘une forme, un genre, une action’ which will combine a sensitivity to the un-, or scarcely, spoken, to the delicate nuances of provincial life, with the objectivity of ‘le plus humble des copistes’ (iii. ). It is an invitation to read La Grenadière or Les Célibataires, but at length; a kicking-away of the storyteller’s crutches, but (in the preface, epilogue, and extensive narratorial commentaries) a clambering on to the stilts of the secrétaire. Like most manifestos, this one is not entirely honoured. The change of direction is less radical than Balzac implies. Drawing, for the figures of cousin Charles and the self-denying Eugénie on the early novels Annette et le criminel and Wann-Chlore, Eugénie Grandet reworks the romance in a modern context;70 it begins, like La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, with the protagonist’s house as text—even down to nails as undecipherable hieroglyphs (iii. ; cf. i. ). Grandet’s portrait follows, copying Gobseck’s;71 the exposition, building on La Transaction and Les Célibataires, introduces the two factions which will battle around Eugénie, returning fleetingly to her father’s fortress-house before the Cruchotins and Grassinistes prepare to engage battle in the opening scene (iii. , –g). It is ‘tout veiné des couleurs du conte de fée’.72 But if Eugénie Grandet succeeds where some of Balzac’s other fictions fail, it is by adapting the techniques of his stories. Charles’s arrival, in the midst of what is prepared as a scene about inheritance, heightens the intensity, and changes our (and the characters’) perspective on Eugénie’s prospective marriage.73 It provides the germ of a whole second story, a Scène de la vie privée about Eugénie’s experiences in love. That this should illuminate the first is not in itself an innovation: the interweaving of the love and art themes in Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu is similar. The innovation comes in making Charles, Eugénie, and ultimately everyone else, dependent on Grandet financially, and on each other emotionally. In consequence, scenes like Charles’s first breakfast, his sale of his trinkets 70 Cf. J. Gurkin, ‘Romance elements in Eugénie Grandet’, L’Esprit créateur (Spring ); J. Gale, ‘Sleeping Beauty as an Ironic Model for Eugénie Grandet’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies (Fall–Winter ). 71 ‘Cet homme . . . se taisait au passage d’une voiture, afin de ne pas forcer sa voix. A l’imitation de Fontenelle, il économisait le mouvement vital’ (Gobseck, ii. ), whilst Grandet ‘ne faisait jamais de bruit et semblait économiser tout, même le mouvemement’ (iii. ). 72 J. Guichardet, ‘Du bon usage de l’effacement des genres’, in S. Vachon (ed.), Balzac: une poétique du roman (Montreal and Saint-Denis, ), . 73 This approximates to the end of the only episode of Eugénie Grandet in L’Europe littéraire, which broke with Balzac on  Oct. The interruption did not in itself turn Eugénie Grandet into a novel, for the second episode, Le Cousin de Paris (iii. g–a), had already been written. But the roman interrupted Eugénie Grandet, Balzac’s twelve-day absence visiting Mme Hanska perhaps making Lefèvre, director of L’Europe littéraire, lose patience. Writing went better after its withdrawal (LH i. , , ). Mme Béchet’s Études de mœurs formed a timely solution to the problem of accommodating the complexity attendant upon a narrative telling more than one story at more than one level.

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to Grandet, or Eugénie’s gift of her nest egg (iii. , , –) go beyond the triangular situations of La Transaction and Les Célibataires. Their import is doubled: both love and money depend on them. The expository portraits of earlier tales are multiplied, raising further possible outcomes (Eugénie could marry Adolphe, or Charles, Adolphe’s mother), and launching numerous subsidiary centres of interest—Cruchotins, Grassinistes, Madame Grandet, Nanon—interleaved with the main triangle, reappearing where relevant to the three protagonists, allowing Eugénie Grandet to sustain interest for much longer than could a story dealing solely with Eugénie’s love or Grandet’s avarice. The final resolution is more an intertwining than a denouement, a more complex interweaving of the similar threads in L’Auberge rouge or Maître Cornélius. It is the central section which presents the narrative stasis announced by the preamble (iii. –).74 To mitigate it, Balzac relegated Grandet’s speculations until after Charles’s departure, thus shifting the perspective and developing the causal relation between events.75 The long period thereafter is filled by the discovery of Eugénie’s loan, Mme Grandet’s death, and, finally, Grandet’s own, and by lengthy passages of authorial commentary which markedly slow the pace. But they are much more effective than comparable passages in Les Célibataires: the preamble has warned us what to expect, and they relay Eugénie’s feelings and reflections, which are very much the novel’s subject (iii. , , –). More than this, they mimic the dragging period of Charles’s absence, allow us to feel something of Eugénie’s experience, striving towards the embodied, free-standing reality the preamble has set out. They are central in every sense, rather than (as in Les Célibataires) ‘tacked on’. None of these elements would be as effective without Eugénie Grandet’s story-like cogency—the network of parallels and anticipations which hold it together. Grandet’s machinations with Cruchot and Des Grassins reflect each other (iii. , ); after the lovers have confided their treasures ‘ils s’endormirent dans le même rêve’—a contrast with their earlier, very different, bedtime thoughts (iii. , ). Each soirée echoes the first, of Charles’s arrival, none more than the last, which culminates with Eugénie’s proposal to Bonfons; but the various coups de théâtre—Charles’s letter, his marriage to Mlle d’Aubrion— have been long prepared by the reminder that ‘Depuis sept ans, sa passion avait tout envahi’ (iii. –). Form and content coincide, as so often in Balzac’s stories, nowhere more than in the novel’s symbols. Card-playing, emblem of destiny in Le Bal de Sceaux and La Bourse, accompanies Charles’s first appearance, and the final scene Cf. J. Winkler-Boulenger, ‘La Durée romanesque dans Eugénie Grandet’, AB (), esp. . Eugénie Grandet, iii. . In MS it apppears after Grandet’s return from Angers (iii. ), forming one extensive passage with the account of Eugénie’s love—an effect of the storyteller’s continuous authorial narration, whose growing complexity paradoxically retards forward narrative movement: iii. b, e, a. Balzac was to effect analogous reorderings elsewhere: cf. Ch. (iii) below. 74 75

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when Eugénie’s marriage is decided: ‘les parties finissaient, les joueurs quittaient leurs tables, se payaient et discutaient les derniers coups de whist’; Eugénie, ‘parti perdant’, pays handsomely for her loss (iii. , ). Grandet’s house, compared to a gaol, literally becomes one when he actually imprisons her (iii. , ). The dominant image is the cloister. Balzac had used it before: Mme Guillaume, in La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, is ‘la soeur tourière’ (i. ). What distinguishes Eugénie Grandet is its subtlety. Where Antoinette de Langeais literally retreats to a convent,76 Eugénie becomes a secular nun, whose husband has to forswear conjugal rights as a condition of marriage (iii. –); the rather clichéd dramatic action of the one becomes a hypothesis in the mouth of the other. The literalness of the duchesse de Langeais’s retreat derives from her text’s predominantly Gothic premiss, and from the active dynamic of the Scènes de la vie parisienne; Eugénie Grandet, in contrast, blends nuances more delicately. The preamble’s ‘fils de la vierge’ reflect the ‘cheveux de Vénus’ she sees on Charles’s first morning in Saumur and the epilogue’s Rosa mundi (iii. , , ), connoting the two sides of her destiny, virginity or love; the moralités which, Balzac warns, are contained within this ‘tradition champêtre’ are left for the reader to discover; the symbol becomes a motif. The contes which so obtrude in Le Médecin de campagne are subsumed in the narrator’s discourse, in the ‘bons contes’ of the copieux, the ‘nouvelle du retour et de la sotte trahison de Charles’ which races round the town (iii. , ). Fiction embodies reality, and the moral lesson, rather than merely illustrating it; the microcosm contains the macrocosm, ‘le récit pur et simple de ce qui se voit tous les jours en province’, the whole history of France (iii. , ). On the foundations of the story Balzac builds his first mature novel, and the independent yet profoundly purposeful reality of the future Comédie humaine.

(viii) Le Père Goriot Le Père Goriot77 uses short-fictional models to yet more radical effect. What began as a single-protagonist sujet d’article (i.e. story: ‘Un brave homme—pension bourgeoise— fr. de rente—S’étant dépouillé pour ses filles qui toutes

76 At the time of Eugénie Grandet, Balzac had already drafted the ending of Ne touchez pas la hache; he had himself visited the Grande Chartreuse on  Sept. , during his adventure with Mme de Castries (Robb, Balzac, ). Departures to cloisters feature in L’Abbesse de Castro, La Chartreuse de Parme, in Albert Savarus (under the artistically dubious influence of Mme Hanska) and at the end of part one of Béatrix, on the part of Félicité des Touches (although this last instance has more to do with the monastic inclinations of George Sand, on whom Félicité is modelled: cf. J. Pommier, George Sand et le rêve monastique (), ch. I). 77 RP ( and  Dec. ,  Jan. and  Feb. ).

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deux ont . fr. de rente, mourant comme un chien’)78 had become, on its completion, Balzac’s seminal novel.79 That status derives from its use of recurring characters; and they in turn are closely connected to its genesis. Early on, the pension bourgeoise, second element in the plan, was moved to the beginning, introducing the protagonists rapidly, and making an important statement of intent: their meeting, says Balzac, ‘offrait en petit les éléments d’une société complète’ (iii. ). This is the microcosm of Eugénie Grandet; but it announces the macrocosm of reality, and of Balzac’s widening, in particular Parisian, world. Le Père Goriot’s characters present a miniature society within the novel; they will go on to form one, in the multiple narratives of La Comédie humaine.80 Le Père Goriot, unlike Le Médecin de campagne, implies that not the single novel, but the whole œuvre, will be a cycle of stories. Society, more than any individual, is the subject: Le Père Goriot has more than a story’s scope. On the seventeenth sheet of the manuscript, Balzac decided to make Mme de Beauséant, from La Femme abandonnée, recur.81 Le Père Goriot may start like a story, but its portentous tone is that of writing, not of speaking (‘Vous qui tenez ce livre d’une main blanche’, iii. ), and its frame is never closed. The use of third-, rather than first-person narrative is central: it makes Rastignac, potentially merely another of Balzac’s framed storytellers, a character external to the authorial narrator, yet with interiority and a mind of his

78 PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. ; the novel is first referred to on  Sept.  (Corr. ii. ) and was completed on  Jan. . S. Vachon is rightly circumspect in stating that it is impossible to decide whether subject or character came first (‘L’Écrivain au travail’, in J. Meyer-Petit, L’Artiste selon Balzac: entre la toise du savant et le vertige du fou (), –) But the evidence of PSF suggests that subjects generally come first, find their character(s) (as is the case, for example, with Les Souffrances de l’inventeur: v. ), before Balzac works out their consequences in the process of reactive composition. A character’s name primarily designates an idea, as much as do titles like La Femme abandonnée or La Recherche de l’Absolu. Balzac’s first mention of Le Père Goriot to Mme Hanska is of ‘un sentiment si grand que rien ne l’épuise’, and only subsequently of ‘un homme qui est père comme un saint’ (LH i. ; cf. Le Père Goriot, ed. P.-G. Castex (), pp. iv et seq.); Birotteau is killed by ‘l’idée probité’ (x. ; cf. César Birotteau, ed. P. Laubriet (), p. ). Even Lov. A , fo. A, sketched when Le Père Goriot was almost completed, lists roles rather than named characters (iii. ). It is this conceptual and compositional process which explains the proliferation of plots, events, persons, descriptions, and details from a given source. Balzac’s writing moves from cause to effect, from precept to example, and—as here—from story to novel. See Ch. (i) below. 79 It was an instant success. The first edition ( Mar. ) sold out before publication and was followed by a second in ÉtM  ( May ). 80 Many of Le Père Goriot’s characters had already appeared in earlier stories; others were to be made to do so by renaming: BRC –. 81 Lov. A : the change occurs in the sentence which runs: ‘Il [Rastignac] avait été, par quelques relations de famille, quoiqu’éloignées, pressenti chez [une des femmes deleted] Madame la Vicomtesse de Beauséant, l’une des femmes [la plus deleted] à la mode, et dont la maison passait pour [l’une deleted] la plus agréable du faubourg Saint-Germain]’; iii. h regrettably omits the vital moment. See also P. Barbéris, Le Père Goriot de Balzac: écriture, structures, significations (),  et seq.

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own.82 Overdetermined imagery, of the kind found in, say, Sarrasine, disappears, Balzac reviving instead the dead metaphors of the city—‘Paris est un véritable océan’, the omnipresent boue 83—which are joined by the emblematic pension itself. The opening confuses generic signals, playing on several registers at once: the sordid ‘vallée de plâtras incessamment près de tomber et de ruisseaux noirs de boue’ becomes the almost biblical ‘vallée remplie de souffrances réelles, de joies souvent fausses’, before declaring that ‘All is true’.84 Yet this statement, itself a quotation, in turn multiplies messages,85 taking the literary to the heart of the literal, asking us to take fiction as seriously as the real. Generation is the principle of Le Père Goriot. Balzac multiplies the ploys of Madame Firmiani and Eugénie Grandet, presenting protagonists in pairs to hint at narrative outcomes (Michonneau/Poiret, Victorine/Rastignac, Vautrin/Vauquer), but in such numbers that we cannot say until some way into the narrative who the main actors will be. Identities and roles are persistently problematic (Goriot’s introduction, like Charles’s in Eugénie Grandet, creates another putative pairing with Mme Vauquer), none more so than those of Goriot, repeatedly presented as a criminal (iii. , , ), or Vautrin, who initially appears to be the reverse. The picture is constantly on the move. Dynamism drives every aspect of the novel. If it adopts Eugénie Grandet’s triangular, tripartite structure, interweaving Goriot’s, Vautrin’s, and Rastignac’s stories, using Rastignac, like Eugénie, as the link between the three,86 the central section, taken up with Rastignac’s quest to discover the truth about his society, has none of the quiescence of Charles’s absence. Goriot’s story, though sidelined during Vautrin’s association with Rastignac, unlike Eugénie’s, never disappears completely, and, by his death, frames the novel at its close. And whilst Eugénie Grandet explores her feelings through prominent authorial narration towards its end, Le Père Goriot is more scenic and direct, and in Rastignac has a protagonist through whom we see. It is a step further in the creation of a 82 Cf. Barbéris, Le Père Goriot de Balzac, –. Le Père Goriot both initiates the systematic use of recurring characters, and of such characters as storytellers in, for example, La Maison Nucingen or Autre étude de femme. But these character-narrators differ from their pre-Goriot predecessors in being fleshed out by their roles in other fictions, and their appearances in novels are made more substantial by their ability to speak in their own right in the stories they narrate. 83 Cf. also P. Citron, La Poésie de Paris de Rousseau à Baudelaire (), ii. –. 84 Cf. V. Brombert, The Hidden Reader (Cambridge, Mass., and London, ), –. 85 Le Père Goriot, iii. –. ‘All is true’ appeared as an epigraph in the first, Revue de Paris, publication, and on the title-page in editions prior to Charpentier (); it is the epigraph under which this journal printed Chasles’s article on Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in Paris on  Aug. —immediatedly before L’Auberge rouge (iii.  n. ). Cf. Stendhal’s epigraph to Le Rouge et le noir (‘La vérité, l’âpre vérité’), S. Petrey, Realism and Revolution (Ithaca, NY, ), –. 86 Balzac subdivided the recopied manuscript along approximately these lines prior to publication in the Revue de Paris: Lov. A  feuillet A (MS, fo. ), iii. . Prior to the  Charpentier edition, Eugénie Grandet was likewise divided into Physionomies bourgeoises, Le Cousin de Paris, and Les Amours de province. Pugh traces triangular structures back further, to La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, and notes the multiplication of secondary plots: ‘Le Père Goriot et l’unité de La Comédie humaine’, in Vachon (ed.), Balzac: une poétique du roman, –, esp. –.

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free-standing reality, in the liberation of the novel from its narrator; but it is made by placing a narrator in the fictional world of the text. Vautrin is the authorial narrator’s double, with his characteristics and percipience (‘Vous êtes donc prophète’ asks Mme Vauquer; Vautrin replies: ‘Je suis tout’ (iii. ));87 yet his criminal status makes him more ambiguous, prevents him from being merely Balzac’s mouthpiece. The preface, almost propagandistic in its purpose, is necessary because its morality is far from simple. Vautrin, dubious as he is, illuminates society’s vices; Goriot, a Christ de la paternité, is crucified on his ideal. The movement of Le Père Goriot is maintained right up to the end which, like part one of Les Marana, is more like a beginning. So far from being sealed off with an epilogue, it opens out in Rastignac’s famous challenge, breaking the circular model of many earlier Balzac fictions,88 looking out on to the Comédie humaine. ‘Vous écraserez vos rivaux . . . par la puissance de l’intérêt bien plus que par les détails.’ Pichot’s December  declaration (Corr. ii. ) seems strangely premonitory of his author’s, in the preface to Le Père Goriot: ‘L’ouvrage auquel travaille l’auteur doit un jour se recommander beaucoup plus sans doute par son étendue, que par la valeur des détails’ (Corr. ii. ; iii. ). The period between the two sees a movement from brevity (the ‘détails’ which would be ‘le mérite des ouvrages improprement appelés Romans’)89 to length, both in single works and in the total extent of his œuvre. But length is a means, not an end, the by-product of his questing for profundity. In the autumn of , Balzac’s work could have gone several ways: he might have remained solely a conteur for longer, had he published a second volume of Conversations entre onze heures et minuit or Causeries du soir, or had the Revue been more accommodating; Louis Lambert, Le Médecin de campagne, and the Contes drolatiques are various forms of evidence of his attachment to the genre. But it was only the cogent narrative structures from La Grenadière, La Femme abandonnée, and Les Marana, combined with the stable publishing background of the Études de moeurs, which enabled the development of Eugénie Grandet and Le Père Goriot, the first great novels of his maturity. They were accompanied by the drolatiques’ simultaneous decline. After , stories were subservient to longer novels; in , Le Père Goriot’s systematic development of recurring characters was the major precondition for centring future stories on them in the next years of his career. Henceforward stories were to play a chiefly secondary role in his creation—something implicit in the introductions to its two main sections, the Études de moeurs and the Études philosophiques. 87 Cf. Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes: ‘Je suis l’auteur, tu seras le drame’ (vi. ), and E. Bordas, Balzac, discours et détours (Toulouse, ), –. 88 Near the end of Ferragus is a similar (and more extensive) scene at Père-Lachaise (v. –), but Balzac spoils it by burying it beneath an epilogue. 89 Scènes de la vie privée, postface, i. .



Building the Cathedral, – Je crois qu’en  les trois parties de cette œuvre gigantesque seront, sinon parachevées, du moins superposées et qu’on pourra juger de la masse. Les Études de mœurs représenteront tous les effets sociaux . . . l’histoire sociale faite dans toutes ses parties, voilà la base . . . après les effets viendront les causes. Dans les Ét[udes] philosophiques, je dirai pourquoi les sentiments, sur quoi la vie . . . Aussi, dans les Études de mœurs sont les individualités typisées; dans les Études philosoph[iques] sont les types individualisés. . . . Puis . . . viendront les Études analytiques dont fait partie la Physiologie du mariage, car après les effets et les causes doivent se rechercher les principes. Les mœurs sont le spectacle, les causes sont les coulisses et les machines. Les principes, c’est l’auteur . . . Ainsi, l’homme la société, l’humanité, seront décrites, jugées, analysées sans répétitions, et dans une œuvre qui sera comme les Mille et une Nuits de l’Occident. . . . Et, sur les bases de ce palais, moi, enfant et rieur, j’aurai tracé l’immense arabesque des Cent Contes drolatiques.1

Le Père Goriot is the cornerstone of this comprehensive œuvre, whose virtue will lie in its dimensions more than its details (iii. ). The period between  and the beginning of  lays the foundations of long and major works: the first parts of Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes; Le Secret des Ruggieri (F: La Confidence des Ruggieri), which became the central section of Sur Catherine de Médicis; Le Lys dans la vallée and La Vieille Fille. And it sees the demise of the Contes drolatiques, with the publication of the third and last completed dixain in December —which the passage just quoted reduces to an immense graffito, scarcely a year after they themselves were the monument (LH i. ). Their cyclical principles, as Balzac’s reference to the Arabian Nights suggests, were to be absorbed into his creation as a whole (cf. i. ). The first stories of this period, Melmoth réconcilié and La Fille aux yeux d’or, both published in , are unfinished business from the folie du conte; whilst in , Balzac’s purchase of, and considerable contribution to, the Chronique de Paris create what look like gap-fillers, a series of brief ‘monographies’ which flesh out recurring or secondary characters: La Messe de l’athée, Facino Cane, L’Interdiction. Only La Confidence des Ruggieri () and Gambara () return to the more substantive and philosophical concerns which, from Balzac’s earliest career, lay at the heart of his stories. 1

LH i. –,  Oct. .

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(i) Études de mœurs and Études philosophiques, Introductions The foundations of the edifice are the contracts for the Études de moeurs and the Études philosophiques, signed respectively with Mme Béchet in October , and with Werdet in July the following year.2 In the Introductions to these series, signed Davin but ghosted by Balzac, the author steps back from his opus, seeking to give it a more objective, independent status. They stress the notional order and unity of an œuvre still far from complete (x. ),3 a cathedral of detail, with stones, columns, and sculptures; a fresco, a gallery with endless lines of portraits—an enterprise of gigantic grandeur, and infinitesimal beauties. Yet if such hyperbole sought Balzac’s transformation from hyperactive conteur to Great Creator,4 short fiction could hardly be discarded. It was the building block of a larger whole: Quelques critiques n’ayant pas l’échelle de proportion . . . ont critiqué le peu d’étendue des sujets, les appellant ici des contes, là des nouvelles, et presque partout les amoindrissant. Mais n’en est-il pas de ces prétendues petites choses exactement comme des pierres carrées, des chapiteaux épars . . . qui, vus au chantier . . . semblent insignifiants et petits, et que l’architecte, dans son dessin, a destinés à orner quelque riche entablement, à faire des voussures, à courir le long des grandes croisées en ogive de sa cathédrale . . .? Certes, l’auteur aurait pu donner les proportions du roman ordinaire à chaque détail . . . Mais les existences de cinq bénédictins, mises bout à bout, auraient-elles suffi seulement à exécuter ces six parties des Études de mœurs? Et d’ailleurs, dans cette riche galerie de tableaux . . . ne compte-t-on pas des cadres d’une assez remarquable dimension, tels que ceux d’Eugénie Grandet, du Médecin de campagne, et celui des Chouans . . .? (x. –) 5

Brevity stands to length as the part does to the whole: each is a component of, and contrast to, the other. Set against these dichotomies is an allegedly diachronic sequence in his creation, running from adolescence in the Scènes de la vie privée to old age in the Scènes de la vie parisienne.6 But the link between the series and their generic or thematic identity becomes ever vaguer and more abstract, as Balzac/Davin struggles to reconcile the contradictions between the generalizations inherent in any absolute, and the particularities of individual 2 On Balzac’s relations with these publishers, see N. Felkay, Balzac et ses éditeurs, – (), pt. II, chs.  and . 3 As was later the case with the Comédie humaine itself (see Ch. (i)), many of the instalments of the Études philosophiques were published late or out of order, and the introductions themselves did not appear until some time after the work they were supposed to introduce. At this stage, the monument was still a muddle. 4 Reflected, variously, in Chasles’s  Introduction aux ‘Romans et contes philosophiques’ (x. –), and in  tales such as La Messe de l’athée or Facino Cane. 5 Le Père Goriot was always published separately until integrated into F in . 6 The disparity between the opening stress on system and subsequent emphasis on the individual may in part result from joint authorship. Most of the references to the as yet unwritten Scènes de la vie politique, militaire, and de campagne are Balzac’s. Cf. Introduction aux ‘Études philosophiques’, x. –, and Introduction aux ‘Études de mœurs’, i. –; A.-M. Meininger, i.  n. .

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narratives, which turn out to be quite irreducible to the categories into which the Introductions would place them. What the Introductions demonstrate, it seems quite unwittingly, is the increasing plurality yet homogeneity of Balzac’s fiction, whose mimetic reality so completely embodies its ideas that their quintessence can no longer be readily abstracted. This is perhaps why Balzac’s definition of the Études de moeurs as ‘individualités typisées’ and of the Études philosophiques as ‘types individualisés’ is already rather circular: each category is contained within the other. And it doubtless explains why he wrote no Études philosophiques after .7 The age of the exemplum was past; his business was mimesis. But mimesis is not naïvely transcriptive. The ‘miroir concentrique’ of La Peau de chagrin and the Contes drolatiques is superseded by a speculum mundi, reflecting, even seeing to the heart of, the whole of reality (x. ; OD i. ; x.  n. ).8 And it is joined by two yet more determinant images, the mosaic, and the kaleidoscope.9 The writer arranges details ‘avec cet art et cette patience admirables des vieux faiseurs de mosaïques’.10 The ‘œuvre kaléidoscopique’ will be infinitely varied,11 its evolving symmetries objectively viewed yet also subjectively manipulated by narrator and reader, in accordance with the order of their encounters with its fictions. They are the virtual interface between the event and its reception; and their endlessly mobile grilles d’écriture and de lecture correspond to the nature of reality itself, an incommensurable whole composed of a multiplicity of parts—both massive, objective fact, and a mass of kaleidoscopically subjective perceptions.12 The Introductions multiply genres in an attempt to encompass or exorcise genre.13 If their breadth of coverage, striving towards a total history of the nation, almost classes them as epic, the genre is alluded to (‘chants’ i. , ), yet never named. Extraneous classifications are too reductive for an all-encompassing totality14 which reformulates the real to create types All had been started by , even Sur Catherine de Médicis, which was not completed until . S.-J. Bérard elucidates the meaning of species and its cognates in relation to Leibniz and to the biblical sense of direct apprehension (‘Une énigme balzacienne: la spécialité’, AB (), ; cf. xi. ). 9 The latter originated in  (Les Voisins, C ( Nov. )). Cf. P. Citron, La Poésie de Paris dans la littérature française de Rousseau à Baudelaire (), vol. ii. –. 10 x.  and i. ; further developed in the preface of Une fille d’Eve (), where reality itself is the mosaic: II . 11 i. ; cf. Les Héritiers Boirouge, an early version of La Rabouilleuse: xii.  and n. . 12 Mentioned in these introductions, in the preface to Une fille d’Eve, and in Madame Firmiani. Cf. e.g. Ch. I above, on Une heure de ma vie, and J. Gleize, Le Double Miroir: le livre dans les livres de Stendhal à Proust (),  et seq. 13 The avoidance of conventional generic terminology is striking: the work is an œuvre or science (x. , , , –), its creator auteur (x. , , , etc.), écrivain, ouvrier, or poète (x. , , ). 14 Cf. also Victor Hugo, whose prefaces to his Odes et ballades reflect several of the themes of the Introductions: generic brassage as a way of renewing genre; the cathedral as an image of a natural order quite apart from the imposed regularity of classical genre; and truth as the ultimate literary guarantee and effective abolition of genre. V. Hugo, Odes et ballades, ed. P. Albouy (),  preface, ;  preface, ; ibid. ;  preface, . 7 8

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transcending the merely literary, as Balzac would later ‘faire concurrence à l’État-Civil’ (i. ). For Balzac,15 as for Hugo, it is the cathedral (Gothic, naturally) which represents this creation of a natural and organic whole from many parts; and Balzac presents genre genetically, as a matter not of the epic, but of expanding short forms far beyond their usual bounds: Aussi nul mot n’avait-il encore reçu une extension plus vaste que celui de romans ou celui de nouvelles, sous lequel on a mêlé, rapetissé ses nombreuses compositions. Mais qu’on ne s’y trompe pas! A travers toutes les fondations qui se croisent ça et là dans un désordre apparent, les yeux intelligents sauront comme nous reconnaître cette grande histoire de l’homme et de la société que nous prépare M. de Balzac. (i. )

Genesis is a rite of passage; genre is inadequate, and to some degree irrelevant. The creation here outlined is trans- and hypergeneric, subsuming all other genres: ‘aux Études de mœurs la richesse du roman, le luxe des descriptions, les découpures bizarres, la passion à plein coeur, les fleurs à pleins mains, les phases sociales, les maisons de toutes nos villes, tous les styles et tous les genres’ (x. ). Henceforward Balzac’s stated primary motive will be to reflect life, the forms of his fictions subordinate to this aim; but the ostensible objectivity of the observer on the way to becoming a secretary (a term here used but once) is paralleled by the narrator’s subjectivity, by his penetrating vision of an apparently mundane world.

(ii) Melmoth réconcilié and La Fille aux yeux d’or Both Melmoth réconcilié and La Fille aux yeux d’or were conceived some time before, but published after, the Introductions, whose tensions may be related in different ways to both. Melmoth takes little more than its title and demonic pact theme from Maturin’s novel;16 it is more a revisiting of La Peau de chagrin, and of other related contemporary tales about money and desire (Maître Cornélius, L’Auberge rouge) initially intended for the second volume of Conversations entre onze heures et minuit (),17 and subsequently as one of a more diverse series of stories leading from Le Grand d’Espagne to Une passion dans le sérail, a forerunner of La Fille aux yeux d’or.18 But Melmoth, Balzac’s final conte fantastique, was not written and published until after this story, to fill the collective volume Le Livre des conteurs,19 itself a last gasp of the folie du conte. First envisaged as Le Dernier i. ; cf. i. , , x.  and iv. . Balzac had already amply exploited Melmoth the Wanderer: M. Le Yaouanc, ‘Melmoth et les romans du jeune Balzac’, in D. G. Charlton, J. Gaudon, and A. R. Pugh, Balzac and the Nineteenth Century (Leicester ), –. 17 18 PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. . PSF, fos. , , CHH xxviii. ,  respectively. 19 BF ( June ); subsequently republished in vol. XXII of the Werdet Études philosophiques: BF ( Sept. ). 15 16

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bienfait de Melmoth, it explores the paternal theme of Le Dernier Bienfait d’un père,20 but reworks it as a further reversal (after Un drame au bord de la mer) of Le Père Goriot: Melmoth/Castanier are Goriot’s infernal analogues, not dispossessed of, but possessed by, money, imparting not love, but lust, to the following generation, furiously endowed with Vautrin’s staring gaze. La Fille aux yeux d’or also originates in  (and perhaps ultimately in Mme d’Aulnoy’s La Belle aux cheveux d’or),21 but shares Sarrasine’s androgynous theme.22 Announced as the third Histoire des Treize at the end of Ferragus in April  (v.  n. ), like Ne touchez pas la hache, it was written and published piecemeal, in  and .23 It takes the Parisian exotic of the Treize to a climax. Like earlier stories, Melmoth réconcilié and La Fille aux yeux d’or are based on oppositions; yet they create them to subvert them.24 Castanier is a ‘caractère mixte’ with ‘sentiments contraires’ (x. ; cf. ), a lack of integrity which contrasts with his mistress Aquilina’s love of union, conjugal and absolute, and makes him prey to Melmoth’s advances (x. , ). If the story begins with generalizations about bank cashiers before introducing Castanier as a particular example of the type, La Fille aux yeux d’or opens with a much more extensive series of categorizations of Parisian classes which—like the categories of the Introductions themselves—becomes so multifarious as to be self-defeating. The opening dualities (nature and artifice, appearance and reality, public and private, male and female) are subsequently brought into question. Marsay has an old man’s experience in the body of a youth, Paquita is ‘vierge’, but ‘certes pas innocente’ (v. ); both are distinguished less by their differences than by their similarity in uniting, but not resolving, difference.25 Marsay is puissant, yet effeminate; Paquita voluptuous, but vigorous (v. ); both are feline, yet feral (v. ). The bloody conclusion shows these oppositions also to be homologies, uniting similarity and difference: Paquita’s symmetrically named lovers Mar-say and Mar-iquita are revealed to be half-brother and half-sister (v. ). This dichotomy points to their narcissism, an ambiguous and aporetic 20 First title of Une double famille (); Le Dernier Bienfait de Melmoth was first noted in  or : PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. . 21 S. Swahn, Balzac et le merveilleux (Lund, ), ; a more immediate source may be H. de la Ferrière’s nouvelle Paquita (L’Artiste ( July )): cf. J. Drent, ‘Balzac et le nom de Paquita Valdès’ AB (), and P. Berthier, ‘La Présence de l’Espagne dans la presse française des années ’, AB (,) –. 22 La Fille aux yeux d’or’s prologue incorporates Le Petit Mercier (C ( Dec. ), v. d–e; cf. OD ii. – and n. Sarrasine appeared in the Revue de Paris in Nov. . 23 ‘Prologue’ (v. –; originally ch. I) ÉtM (Apr. ); remainder,  (May ). The respective parts were drafted rapidly prior to publication. 24 Cf. R. Amossy and E. Rosen, ‘Melmoth réconcilié ou la parodie du conte fantastique’, AB (), esp.  et seq. 25 Marsay is male, blond, English; Paquita female, dark, Spanish. But these differences are rapidly confused by the ambiguities both embody, the changing colour of Paquita’ hair—first dark, then ash blonde, and Marsay’s combination of European intelligence and Asiatic despotism (v. ).

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dualism, an attraction to another who is both, and neither, the other (n)or the self. This combination of similarity and difference is reflected in these stories’ symbolic and imagic networks.26 The sexual short circuit which ends La Fille aux yeux d’or is the culmination of a string of circular images which link its disparate parts. Paris, with its ‘enceinte de boue, ceinture de la plus impudique des Vénus’ (v. ), anticipates Paquita’s ‘boudoir en fer à cheval’ (v. ) and Mariquita’s final circling around her victim before the kill (v. ). Persistent imagery of twisting and turning—Paquita ‘se retourna . . . pour revoir Henri’ (v. –; cf.), her neck’s ‘torsion magnifique’ (v. ; cf. )27— connotes perversion and the circular outcome. Imagery of counting (actual, and figurative) runs through Melmoth. It promises the ‘bilan exact du Talent et de la Vertu, dans leurs rapports avec le Gouvernement et la Société’ (x. –); Castanier, seeking credit, ‘résolut d’escompter la confiance que lui méritait sa probité réel’ (x. ) and plunges into ‘le trésor des voluptés humaines’ (x. ). Literal and symbolic seemingly coincide in a series of determinant terms: credit; credence; ‘croyance’; faith. The ‘mot d’ordre’ of Castanier’s safe foreshadows the ‘logogriphe’ which Castanier’s satanic knowledge can solve (x. , ). Yet the effect of unity is disintegration. The ‘mot d’ordre’ reveals disorder. Financial ‘credit’ demonstrates that its cognate, religious faith, is of an entirely different nature; the ‘bilan’ cannot measure talent or virtue, because they are unquantifiable; the morality of a society where the statement ‘Tout était en ordre’ can follow references to routine adultery is questionable (x. ). ‘En quelque sorte, l’écrivain ne fait que lire le langage’:28 this Balzac does by untying literal and figurative in their very convergence, by laying bare fundamentally conflicting rhetorics and moralities. Both stories end with puns which destabilize referentiality, La Fille aux yeux d’or with Marsay’s shockingly flippant remark that Paquita ‘est morte . . . de la poitrine’, which plays figuratively on the sexuality which is her downfall; Melmoth réconcilié with a series of wordplays on mercury (which kills the notary’s clerk who is the final holder of the pact) and the devil, used to gull a curious demonologist (x. ). Such instances implicitly question morality by querying the very linguistic boundaries and perceptual bases on which it rests. Castanier’s crime comes not of a ‘tentation’, but of an ‘hallucination’, induced, like Marsay’s, by sexual obsession, and is ‘un de ces faits qui soulèvent tant de questions que, pour le discuter, le moraliste aurait demandé la division’ (x. ). Conventional limits, like the gender limits 26 Partially analysed, but with reference only to the introduction, in C. Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford, ), –. Cf. also J. Frøhlich’s reading of Paquita’s boudoir in the wider context of Histoire des Treize: Pictogrammes (Oslo, ), –. 27 These remarks on the imagery of La Fille aux yeux d’or supplement N. Mozet’s on its structures: Balzac au pluriel (), –. 28 T. Todorov, ‘La Grammaire du récit’, in Poétique de la prose (), .

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of La Fille aux yeux d’or, seem not to apply: the courtesan Aquilina desires nothing more than legitimate wedlock, but society, ‘profondément illogique’, reproves her whilst excusing the misdemeanours of married women (x. , ; cf. ). Neither story ends with a conventional, finite moral; for both are about the paradoxical nature of limits.29 Their protagonists seek the infinite by material means, yet are confronted only by finality. The clerk exhausts the pact in a two-week orgy with his mistress; Marsay and Paquita transcend gender boundaries, but the attempt results in her death. The challenging of moral and phenomenological boundaries brings a challenging of textual ones, too. The Melmoth story is, by definition, conceived around and framed by the twin notions of finality and continuity, of limits and their transcendence:30 at the opening ‘Melmoth avait déjà dépassé sa victime’ (x. ); at the end Crottat, the new victim, is outstripped by his own desire. In the course of genesis, the notion of narrative and moral finality implicit in Le Dernier Bienfait de Melmoth is supplanted by continuity and relativity: Castanier’s final repentance and conversion comes in the middle of the text as finally written, rather than at the end (as the  project for La Fin de Melmoth might suggest: Corr. ii. ), denying any moral lesson other than the title’s. And the supernatural cause implicit at the end of the version of Le Livre des conteurs (x.  n. ) is undermined by the punning epilogue of the Werdet edition. Melmoth réconcilié is inherently subservient to other imperatives—to Mathurin’s original novel (in Le Livre des conteurs, Balzac’s note states that his story is almost unintelligible without it, x. ), to the illustrative and auxiliary function which was its impetus, and to the inherent finality yet transmissibility of the pact. But the subservience of La Fille aux yeux d’or is different, deriving from the narrative continuum of Histoire des Treize (where it was announced in April : v.  n. ), rather than from the initially ideological imperative of Melmoth réconcilié. La Fille aux yeux d’or was originally to have been a framed story told by Ronquerolles (v. c); by transferring it to a ‘confident involontaire’ (v. ; an anonymous eavesdropper?) it is allowed to stand on its own. It presents a reality embodied in recurring characters, rather than one illustrative of an idea. Both stories represent shorter fiction’s changing nature and function in Balzac’s opus, where subservience to an idea is doubled by the increasingly independent reality of recurring characters. Crottat’s evacuation of the pact also evacuates the moral implicit in its persistence, and is a farewell to the conte moral which gives the story a carnivalesque, human end; La Fille aux yeux d’or’s 29

Cf. C. Perry, ‘La Fille aux yeux d’or et la quête paradoxale de l’infini’, AB (). On the same page as Balzac’s  or  plan for Le Dernier Bienfait de Melmoth are those of ‘La Fin du monde annoncée pour une époque fixe, ce qui s’en suit’ and La Succession, which anticipates Melmoth’s theatrical setting and, like another adjacent plan, reflects the theme of transmission (of fortune, of life) Balzac actually explored in L’Élixir de longue vie: PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. ; cf. P. Citron, ‘De la “Scène de village” au Médecin de campagne’, RHLF  (), –. This second project is called La Transaction, but bears no relation to the  story. 30

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dismissive final words attest an ongoing reality which, unlike that of, say, Adieu, is not that of the reader, but of Marsay and Manerville, of Balzac’s fictional world. In terms of genesis and of the reader’s itinerary, both point to other narratives elsewhere: the end of Melmoth to L’Incube,31 La Fille aux yeux d’or via Manerville to Le Contrat de mariage.32 Both Melmoth and La Fille aux yeux d’or show the unrealizability of the Quest for the Absolute—in narrative, moral, or any other human terms. In Balzac’s fictions the truth is often paradoxical and increasingly circumscribed, however much characters might yearn for transcendence; and the centre of interest is always potentially displaced—as his stories for the Chronique de Paris reveal.

(iii) Balzac’s stories for the Chronique de Paris (La Messe de l’athée, L’Interdiction, Facino Cane, La Confidence des Ruggieri)33 The determinant event of Balzac’s career in  was his purchase, the previous Christmas Eve, of a ‒ share in the Chronique de Paris, whose acquisition was intended to satisfy his soaring social and political ambitions, and to liberate him from the Phoenix-like contracts and deadlines, and from the counterfeiting of which Le Lys dans la vallée had been the major victim.34 It gave him an impressive editorial team, including Planche, Bernard, Gautier, and Karr, together with sole editorial responsibility, and a hitherto unparalleled freedom to voice his views in scores of critical and political articles. Over the next year it published nearly all his new work except Le Lys and La Vieille Fille.35 Balzac’s contributions to the Chronique are diverse. But all were written rapidly, and their most striking feature is their closeness to his immediate experience. The protagonists of three stories are Balzac doubles. Popinot, in L’Interdiction, is a solitary ‘grand homme’. In La Messe de l’athée, the atheist 31 L’Incube, one of the tales of the uncompleted fourth dixain, shares its theme with, and could even have been suggested by, Crottat’s fate in Melmoth. Its date of composition remains uncertain: OD i. –. 32 La Fleur des pois (now Le Contrat de mariage) emerges from La Fille aux yeux d’or, developing from a portrait of Manerville as a type. Cf. BRC ; H. Gauthier, iii.  et seq.; and P. Laforgue’s suggestive analysis of the two (L’Éros romantique (), ch. ). 33 Balzac also published in the Chronique de Paris the beginning of Le Cabinet des Antiques ( Mar. ; the remainder in Le Constitutionnel,  Sept.– Oct. , and in reworked book form in Mar. ); and the fragmentary texts Ecce Homo ( June ) and La Perle brisée ( and  Oct. ), neither of which appears as a free-standing narrative in La Comédie humaine. (Ecce Homo was incorporated into Les Martyrs ignorés and La Perle brisée into L’Enfant maudit, both in July  (V , , ). Space precludes consideration of these texts here; La Torpille is examined as an example of a tête de roman in Ch. (iv) below. 34 Cf. Historique du procès auquel a donné lieu Le Lys dans la vallée, Chronique de Paris ( June ), repr. ix. –; R. Pierrot, Honoré de Balzac (), –, and P. Kinder, ‘Balzac et La Presse’, Ph.D. thesis, Liverpool, , i. –. 35 Robb gives a lively evocation of the enterprise: Balzac: A Biography (London, ), –.

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Desplein’s foundation of a mass in gratitude for services rendered by Bourgeat, whose simple faith he longs to share, reflects Balzac’s own ambiguous and seemingly contradictory (ostensibly Catholic and Legitimist, in fact syncretic) beliefs.36 Desplein, like Balzac, is a Protean, all-embracing Creator, possessed of ‘cette universalité de connaissances qui fait d’un homme le verbe ou la figure d’un siècle’ (iii. –). Yet his publicly affirmed atheism is set in doubt by a hesitation between scepticism and belief, expressed by his covert devotions. As in La Fille aux yeux d’or and Melmoth, actions undermine the overt ideology; they bespeak the author’s controlling but phantom presence in an increasingly independent and self-sufficient world. And in Facino Cane, authorial dédoublement involves both narrator and protagonist—the narrator reflects the -year-old Balzac in the rue Lesdiguières,37 Cane himself, the maturing writer of the Études philosophiques.38 Cane’s blindness is the antithesis of the narrator’s empathy: where his vision is ‘le rêve d’un homme éveillé’, Cane’s is that of ‘un homme endormi’, but he is none the less able to detect a sighted person on his approach, just as the narrator can detect Cane’s singularity at first sight (vi. ). Imagination transcends reality: Dante-like, endowed with immense creative power (vi. ), an analogue of the narrator artist/prince, he descends at will into the hearts and minds of his people,39 both ‘principe de Varese’, yet also ‘Le Père Canet’, ‘Canard’ (vi. ),40 his story viewed as bogus (vi. ). Cane’s ambiguous status makes this tutor-mentor story, like La Messe de l’athée, one of the expressions of insecurity which surface during transitional phases in Balzac’s life. The fictions written or begun around —Le Père Goriot, Illusions perdues, La Messe de l’athée, Facino Cane, Gambara, the new editions of Gobseck and Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu,41 César Birotteau—all tell tales of pupils and mentors and of ambition overreached.42 36 For M. Andréoli, Desplein is the analogue of a Balzacian magisme positing the unity of matter and spirit, a continuum which fuses materialism with the views of thinkers such as Buffon, Bonnet, and Swedenborg: (Le Système balzacien (), –, and ch.  passim). 37 Balzac lived in the rue Lesdiguières from Aug.  to Jan. . Cf. V –; Robb, Balzac, –. 38 Where Facino Cane appeared in ; it was moved to the Scènes de la vie parisienne in F. 39 Cf. vi. –. M.-F. Jamin (‘Quelques emprunts possibles de Balzac à Hoffmann’, AB (), ) suggests that Loève-Veimars’s translation of Hoffmann was the source of Cane’s insights. But the narrator’s gift has a Quinceyan quality (A. Lorant, vi. –), and is a kind of Baudelairian prostitution avant la lettre. Cf. R. D. E. Burton, ‘The Unseen Seer, or Proteus in the city: Aspects of a Nineteenth-Century Parisian Myth’, French Studies, :  (Jan. ), –. 40 Details account for narrative drive (‘Ces détails n’étaient pas de nature à éteindre ma curiosité’ (vi. ), the narrator skipping over ‘aventures dignes de Gil Blas’ (vi. ), especially in the raccourci at the end, where he dies as the result of ‘un catarrhe’ (vi. –). 41 Le Papa Gobseck, EtM  ( Nov. ); Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, Etphil BF ( July ). On the latter edn., cf. P. Laubriet, Un cathéchisme esthétique (),  and –; A. Goetz (ed.), Le Chefd’œuvre inconnu et autres nouvelles (), –; and P. Whyte, ‘Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu de Balzac’, in M.-A. Hutton (ed.), Text(e)/Image (Durham, ), esp. –. 42 J.-D. Ebguy relates this to the impossibility of the realist enterprise: ‘Balzac voyant dans Facino Cane’, AB (),  et seq.

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These stories, written quickly, are very close to Balzac’s own experience: La Messe de l’athée and Facino Cane were dashed off in a single night,43 and are amongst La Comédie humaine’s briefest stories. La Messe de l’athée is a more than usually immediate reflection of fact. Bourgeat differs only by two vowels from Balzac’s protector and creditor Borget; the fictional Desplein echoes the surgeon Dupuytren closely; Bianchon is modelled on his associate Mardochée Marx.44 They are presented almost as real people, suggesting, in the frenzied newspaper publication of the Chronique, a confusion of fiction and reality of the kind already encountered in Balzac’s articles of ,45 here further heightened by the fact that a fictional narrator, Bianchon, tells the story. Such characters’ closeness to real-life models points to a second striking feature of their stories, their status as ‘serial monographies’, short tales focusing on single protagonists, who fill in the background of his Études. (The phenomenon was to be repeated during his  ownership of the Revue parisienne, in Z. Marcas and Pierre Grassou: see Chapter  below.) Balzac had begun to see his creations as actual people,46 and his elaboration of these fictions suggests as much the encounter with a real social group as the creation of a fictional one. Bianchon was the starting-point for La Messe de l’athée (his name is the very first word on the manuscript, iii. a) and the related narratives of this period, such as Facino Cane, are precisely that—less frame stories, than reported conversations between acquaintances. This is particularly the case with L’Interdiction, which more than earlier stories depends on recurring characters, several (notably Mme d’Espard and Judge Popinot) invented for this story, but destined for prominence in subsequent fictions.47 L’Interdiction is in one sense a rerun of Gobseck (which Balzac had just revised),48 another story of an aristocratic wife’s attempt to ruin her husband, in this case by alleging that he is embezzling funds by dispensing them to the family of his supposed mistress Mme Jeanrenaud and seeking to obtain an 43 LH i. ,  Oct. ; La Messe had appeared in the Chronique on  Jan.; Facino Cane, on  Mar., L’Interdiction between the two ( Jan., , , ,  Feb.) after a similarly hasty composition (G. Sagnes, iii. ). The first fifty feuillets of Illusions perdues were written in three days (LH i. ); its completion was an altogether longer story: cf. S.-J. Bérard, La Genèse d’un roman de Balzac (), pt. II, esp. chs.  and . 44 Cf. iii.  n. , and J. Borel, ‘Un modèle de Horace Bianchon’, RSH (Oct.–Dec. ),  et seq.; Personnages et destins balzaciens (), –; Médecine et psychiatrie balzaciennes (), –. 45 Cf. Ch. (i) above. 46 L. Surville, Balzac, sa vie et ses œuvres d’après sa correspondance (,) –. 47 A total of  appear. Le Contrat de mariage (EtM  (c. Nov. ) has  (counting the Société des dix-mille as one!), more than Le Père Goriot, but is three-quarters as long again as L’Interdiction: BRC –, . 48 Le Papa Gobseck, ÉtM  ( Nov. ). The modifications take particular account of Le Père Goriot, integrating the story into Balzac’s widening social world, and creating the heiress to Gobseck’s fortune, ‘La Torpille’, thus preparing the eponymous  narrative, now the first part of Splendeurs et misères. Cf. B. Lalande, ‘Les États successifs d’une nouvelle de Balzac: Gobseck’, RHLF  (), –;  (), ; BRC –.

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order (the interdiction of the title) to prevent him. But here it comes within a veritable Chinese box of considerations—on women, Popinot, the magistrature, his career, his bereavement; and similar accounts of Mme d’Espard, Mme Jeanrenaud; and of M. d’Espard,49 until our final encounter with him—‘lateral’ expansions reflecting the forensic pursuit of the truth, yet which compromise the forward narrative dynamic. Its major centres of interest are displaced: Rastignac is ultimately interested in Mme d’Espard, and her story, for reasons of ambition; to satisfy him, Bianchon arranges for the marquise and Popinot to meet; Espard’s reason for funding the Jeanrenauds, in order to right an ancestral wrong, turns out to be legitimate but causally remote; and the story ends doubly inconclusively, with no indication of whether Rastignac seduces Mme d’Espard, or of whether she wins her case. At the end Popinot has to pass it on (like Melmoth’s pact) to a younger judge (Camusot, in F). The result is a certain ‘centrelessness’, a consequence of the gap-filling nature of the narrative, of the multiplying use of recurring characters and centres of interest elsewhere. L’Interdiction’s outcome was not finally reported until innumerable fictions and seven years later, in the first part of Splendeurs et misères. Its ending may be ‘profoundly satisfying’ in the context of Balzac’s whole opus;50 but the individual story is frustratingly incomplete. It is a crossroads, but not a centre. Incompleteness marks all these stories: they are chronicles of paradox and imperfection. Desplein is a kind of Christ of atheism, devoted to a belief he does not share; the magnanimous Popinot infringes legal protocol; Cane is a flawed Dante, resembling the poet’s mask, but not the man (vi. ), his allegedly empathetic intuitive gift as a spécialiste the sign of egotistical obsession with gold—a monomanically destructive creator of the kind Balzac would soon explore in the reworked Chef-d’œuvre inconnu and in Gambara. Cane may, like the narrator, ‘franchir les lois du temps et de l’espace’ by means of the imagination, thinking himself young ‘quand on voit de l’or devant soi’ (vi. ), but he is prevented from actually going to Venice by his renascent material obsession. His death from ‘un catarrhe’ is a fittingly physiological obstacle to the ethereal ideal his playing might have led us to suppose.51 Facino Cane’s concern with egotism and expansion, expression and concentration, reflects the paradox at the heart of Balzac’s stories of . All stand in relation to the increasing elaboration of his opus, in which complex subjects are either diverted to longer works (it was in this year that Illusions perdues was 49 iii –, –, –, –, passim, most incorporating smaller additions in MS or the Chronique (e.g.: doxa on women (iii. a and a); on Popinot’s dress (d and e), his method (d), his clients (b), his expression (a), his abode (a and a); Bianchon’s observations on magnetism (d), on the origins of the rivalry between Mmes Jeanrenaud and d’Espard (b and c); on the latter’s allegations (b), regimen (c); her salon (c), Rastignac’s cultivation of her (c)) additions supplemented, chiefly towards the end of the story, by others made for the first book publication (e.g. a, b, a, a, b; Étphil.  and , BF ( Sept. )). 50 51 BRC . Cf. M. Le Yaouanc, Nosographie de l’humanité balzacienne (),  et seq.

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begun) or, if in shorter examples like L’Interdiction, create the impression of ‘centrelessness’, of dispersal of interest just explored. Conversely a short, highly unified work like Facino Cane 52 has no repercussions beyond its own bounds: though he is mentioned in Massimilla Doni (x. , ), neither Cane, nor any of its other characters, ever reappears in the Comédie humaine; and the introduction and story are ostensibly unrelated, even though contained in the same narrative: ‘rien de ce monde n’a trait à mon histoire’ (vi. ). L’Interdiction and Facino Cane exemplify the paradoxical relationship between the particular and the general in Balzac’s contemporary work. In narrative (if not absolute philosophical)53 terms, the unity of the part is at the expense of that of the whole, and vice versa. These tensions reach a climax in Le Secret des Ruggieri, the last and most ambitious of Balzac’s stories for the Chronique. It was as rapidly improvised as the others (the royal lovers and the Ruggieris came from Balzac’s unfinished drama Marie Touchet, begun in January ); but what in the manuscript was a story about the relationship between a royal protagonist and his alchemist advisers, like Maître Cornélius or Les Joyeulsetez du roy Loys le unziesme,54 became, via Balzac’s myriad revisions for the Chronique de Paris, a much more extensive (and extensively contextualized) narrative. The inital core of the whole story,55 the encounters between Charles IX and his mistress, Marie Touchet, and the Ruggieris, becomes chapter ; the former exposition partly reappears in a new first chapter introducing the Court, Catherine’s relationship with her astrologer, and the juxtaposed portraits of Catherine and Charles IX, together with his incipient plot against her and her response.56 To this extent, these changes do no more than Balzac’s other explanatory openings; they enmesh the narrative in its causal, social context more closely than the first, slight story about secrets.57 But Le Secret assumes larger contextual knowledge even than L’Interdiction (which is difficult to understand without 52 At some , words, Facino Cane is one of the shortest free-standing stories of the Comédie humaine: for a penetrating analysis of Facino Cane’s alchemical theme, cf. T. Kashiwagi, ‘La Poétique balzacienne dans Facino Cane’, AB () [II]. 53 Cf. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, ,  et seq. 54 On Marie Touchet, cf. xi.  n.  and R. Guise, ‘Un grand homme du roman à la scène’, AB (), –. Maître Cornélius had recently reappeared in Etphil. (BF ( Sept. )), and Catherine de Medici figures in the second dixain, in La Chière Nuictée d’amour and Le Prosne du ioyeulx curé de Meudon. 55 As the manuscript attests: cf. N. Cazauran, xi. ; cf. –. The MS version broadly corresponds to xi. c and xi. –a, although the end of the MS is lost. Overall, the MS is much shorter than the version of the Chronique de Paris and almost exclusively narrative: cf. e.g. xi. a, c, d, etc. The story was initially written in a single night (LH i. ), a brevity also suggested by a letter to Werdet anticipating that Le Secret will be a short novella in vol.  of Étphil.; in fact, Les Deux Rêves took its place (Corr. iii.  and n. ). 56 xi. a and, very approximately, xi. –, with major variants at xi. a. 57 The  Souverain edition, which combines the text with Les Lecamus (now Le Martyr calviniste) and Les Deux Rêves to create Catherine de Médicis expliquée (F: Sur Catherine de Médicis) substantially modifies the text again, dividing it into five chapters and reworking the opening: xi.  et seq.

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acquaintance with Le Père Goriot), in this case, of its Renaissance setting. It engages in none of the ‘spoonfeeding’ of Chronique du règne de Charles IX or NotreDame de Paris; but its duality of perspective has a political topicality consonant with the legitimist aims of the Chronique. Narratorial strictures on kingship or the perniciousness of Protestantism, like those of more politically explicit texts like Le Refus, are written with an eye to the contemporary 58—a proliferation of intermeshings and of viewpoints which bears on genre. Balzac’s reworkings move from telling to showing, the play of glances in court capturing its paranoia (xi. –), the extensive tableau-like opening, stressing the visual more than the verbal (an echo perhaps of Marie Touchet), in tune with the vividly contrasting portraits of the protagonists, and the dramatic oppositions between the queen mother, the queen, her son, and her twin obsessions with ‘domination et astrologie’ (xi. – et seq.). Where the manuscript motivated Charles’s interest in the alchemists with nothing more than curiosity, the first published text places an altogether novelistic stress on process, leading us, via its three parts divided into four successive episodes, to a truth the Ruggieris obligingly provide (xi. –).59 As a result, the circular structure of the original conte has been expanded, even exploded: the queen’s obsession with clairvoyance, represented at the opening by the sorceress, symbolised by a spinning-wheel connoting Fortune and the Fates, is paralleled at the end by the brothers’ revelation of the future (xi. –, –). ‘Fin contre fin’: as the last chapter’s title implies, the ends eventually meet, though the whole may be diverse. The end of Le Secret embodies its tensions. It ties up narrative threads in a potentially novelistic account of the protagonists and their descendants over the next century and a half; but also suddenly produces the ‘vieillard de qui viennent ces renseignements’ (xi. , ), linking the tale to the ancient tradition of orality as authenticity,60 reminding us of its status as auxiliary, an explanation of an extrinsic truth— here, the truth of history. These tensions were not fully to be worked out until , in the sequel to Le Secret which Balzac was already planning (which in fact turned out to be a prequel, Les Lecamus, the sequel eventually being provided by Les Deux Rêves when Les Lecamus and Le Secret (now La Confidence) des Ruggieri were united, with an Introduction, as Sur Catherine de Médicis in ). 58 Cf. e.g. Charles IX’s declaration ‘il est temps que la royauté se relève’ (xi. ), or Laurent’s revolutionary predictions: ‘Le protestantisme qui vous dévore sera dévoré à son tour par ses conséquences matérielles . . . L’Europe en est aujourd’hui à la Religion, demain elle attaquera la Royauté. . . . Quand la religion et la royauté seront abattues, le peuple en viendra aux grands, après les grands il s’en prendra aux riches’ (xi. ). Cf. Ch. (iii) above. 59 In the first publication in the Chronique de Paris these parts and episodes were: Une Nuit de Charles IX ( and  Dec. ); Marie Touchet ( Dec. ); Fin contre fin ( Jan. ), xi. ––– (V ). 60 An orality which has slipped, as a vestigial remembrance of Balzac’s  Conversations, into the first line of the story: ‘Entre onze heures et minuit, vers la fin du mois d’octobre ’.

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Balzac’s stories for the Chronique map his work’s evolution from a cycle of stories determined primarily by their subject matter to a collection of narratives led by characters. As his world becomes more self sufficient, the ‘individualités typisées’ (of the Études de mœurs) and ‘types individualisées’ (of the Études philosophiques) become conflated: it is significant that all Balzac’s fictions for the Chronique were initially classed in the Études philosophiques, but only Le Secret des Ruggieri remains there in F. The mimetic impulse was coming to dominate the predicative.61 Recurring characters may sometimes be used a little mechanically, Balzac citing Desplein when he needs to name a surgeon;62 yet he has to remind himself that Bianchon is a type (rather than just a person), adding on the manuscript that he is ‘Un médecin à qui la science doit une belle théorie physiologique’ (iii.  n. a; my emphasis), and in the next story the characters appear already to have become a law unto themselves. L’Interdiction tests the limits of integrity, both narrative and moral. Balzac is using short (as longer) narratives in the manner of a cycle, to corroborate and support each other, to lend depth and perspective to his world : La Messe de l’athée recalls Derville’s story in Gobseck, and is a variant on the mentor-ward relationship which figures in Balzac’s work from Le Corrupteur 63 onwards, recurring notably in Le Père Goriot and Illusions perdues. L’Interdiction draws on and amplifies the character group of Le Père Goriot, Facino Cane the artist stories Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu and Gambara. But he is also using short forms for linear narratives, for publishing beginnings, ends, or sections of longer works, with the expectation of future completion elsewhere.64 The Chronique’s part-publication of Le Cabinet des Antiques in March  can be seen as a failed attempt at extended narrative serialization in a newspaper,65 something achieved in October by La Vieille Fille.66 62 Cf. Todorov, Poétique de la prose,  et seq. Cf. BRC . A. de Viellerglé, Le Corrupteur (),  vols.; only the first is thought to be by Balzac: V . 64 To Le Secret des Ruggieri may be added La Perle brisée, the conclusion of the  Enfant maudit, and Ecce homo, subsequently incorporated into Les Martyrs ignorés (Etphil.  ( July )), but not finally included in La Comédie humaine. 65 The opening of Le Cabinet des Antiques had been written in , and intended for the Revue de Paris in  ( Nov. ,  July : LH i. , ); the first publication (Chronique,  Mar. ), may well have been abandoned on account of its close resemblance to the Verninac de Saint-Maur affair (cf. A.-M. Meininger AB (), –, cit. N. Mozet, iv. ). Thereafter it is envisaged as a sequel to La Vieille Fille ( Feb. , LH i. ), as Un grand homme de province à Paris was to Illusions perdues (the  first part of the eponymous novel: see n. ), and repeatedly mentioned in connection with Un grand homme both in  and whilst being recast as a novel in its own right in – (Corr. iii. –; , , –); both share a tripartite province-Parisprovince structure. It is interesting to note that its  first book publication ( Mar. ) was in tandem with Gambara (as that of Une fille d’Eve with Massimilla Doni: BF ( Aug. )), and that, in a story-like development in that edition, Balzac makes Blondet the ‘reporter’ of the action, no doubt still deemed too close to the real-life Verninac affair. 66 La Vieille Fille, La Presse ( Oct.– Nov. ). See La Vieille Fille, ed. P.-G. Castex (); P. Kinder, ‘Un directeur de journal, ses auteurs et ses lecteurs en , AB (); N. Mozet, iv. –, and ‘Pour une histoire des pratiques d’écriture: peut-on comparer les manuscrits de Balzac et de George Sand?’, in D. Bevan and P. M. Wetherill (eds.), Sur la génétique textuelle 61 63

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Yet the major example of such fragmentation is in book form. Illusions perdues (; now the first part of the novel),67 is constructed cogently, almost like a comedy, around two pairs of couples: Eve and David; Lucien and Mme de Bargeton. But the symmetry is disrupted, and the tone becomes altogether more ominous, when the second couple leaves for Paris and splits up at its end.68 Its next part, published three years later, is but the ‘introduction’ of a larger construction: ‘ici chaque roman n’est qu’un chapitre du grand roman de la société’ (v. ). Balzac is building his cathedral, but not without the foundations, scaffolding, false starts, collapses, and disasters which can attend constructions of this sort. The Chronique had folded in July ;69 on the first of that month, Girardin and his rival Dutacq simultaneously launched La Presse and Le Siècle, the first of a new, cheaper type of newspaper which would transform both fiction and the press, and create the roman-feuilleton.70 Over the coming years such papers would publish much of Balzac’s fiction;71 but many (Amsterdam and Atlanta, ), esp.  et seq., and Balzac au pluriel, –; and S. Vachon, ‘L’Écrivain au travail’, in J. Meyer-Petit (ed.), L’Artiste selon Balzac (), –. 67 Illusions perdues, approximating to what is now pt. I of the eponymous novel, was first mentioned in , but only written in  and first published in ÉtM  (BF ( Feb. ): cf. v. , v. –, and nn. a, e); pt. II, Un grand homme de province à Paris, appeared in June  (Souverain,  vols.); only pt. III, Les Souffrances de l’inventeur, was serialized (in L’État and its successor, Le Parisien-L’État (– June,  July– Aug. )), before book publication in two volumes by Dumont (BF ( Mar. )). See R. Chollet, v. –. 68 The genesis of Illusions perdues is of course very much more complex than any summary could suggest. Balzac’s piecemeal production of the  publication, drafting and correcting proofs of its later episodes even as the beginning was being printed (see v. –) creates an effect not merely of fragmentation, but of refraction, reflected within the narrative by the parallelism both of the two couples and of their wider relations. The elder Séchard opposes David’s marrying a girl from L’Houmeau as aristocratic Angoulême objects to Lucien’s liaison with Anaïs. The echoes are infinitesimal, Séchard’s ‘Voilà le fruit de l’éducation’ answering Angoulême society’s reaction to Mme de Bargeton’s reception of Lucien, ‘Voilà le fruit des doctrines libérales’, even though no less than thirteen sets of proofs separate the two (v. a and f). Cf. Bérard, La Genèse d’un roman de Balzac, passim, and Illusions perdues [], le manuscrit de la collection Lovenjoul, p.p. Suzanne Jean Bérard (). 69 Balzac’s participation only ceased with Le Secret des Ruggieri in Jan. . Cf. Bérard, La Genèse d’un roman de Balzac, pt. II, pp. –. 70 Cf. C. Bellanger, J. Godeschot, P. Guiral, and F. Terrou (eds.), Histoire générale de la presse française (), ii. –, –; R. Guise, ‘Le Roman-feuilleton (–)’, Doctorat d’État thesis, Nancy, , pt. I, chs. –, pt. II passim; L. Queffélec, Le Roman-feuilleton français au XIXème siècle (), –. 71 Notably La Vieille Fille, La Femme supérieure (Les Employés), Le Curé de village, Une princesse parisienne (Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan), Les Deux Frères and Un ménage de garçon en province (pts. I and II of La Rabouilleuse), Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, Les Paysans, Petites misères de la vie conjugale and La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin in La Presse; Une fille d’Eve, Béatrix ou les amours forcés, Pierrette, La Fausse Maîtresse and Albert Savarus in Le Siècle; and Les Rivalités en province (Le Cabinet des Antiques), La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons in Le Constitutionnel. Other significant serialized publications include Une ténébreuse affaire in Le Commerce, Ursule Mirouët in Le Messager, Le Danger des mystifications (Un début dans la vie) in La Législature; and David Séchard ou les souffrances d’un inventeur and Esther ou les amours d’un vieux banquier, final and first parts of Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes in L’État and Le Parisien respectively. See Kinder, ‘Balzac et La Presse’, and P. Berthier, La Presse littéraire et dramatique au début de la monarchie de juillet (–) (Villeneuve-d’Ascq, ); and S. Vachon, ‘Balzac en feuilletons et en livres’, in A. Vaillant (ed.), Mesure(s) du livre (), and ‘L’Oeuvre au comptoir’, AB ().

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stories would still appear in more conventional reviews, beginning with Gambara, published in the Revue et gazette musicale.

(iv) Gambara Gambara 72 looks like a return to the past. The journal director Schlesinger’s commissioning for his Revue et Gazette musicale of a story centred on Meyerbeer’s Robert-le-Diable, the opera whose publication had made the fortune which had enabled the establishment of Schlesinger’s Gazette, was to see Balzac writing a conte artiste in a journal’s house style for the first time since the  Chef-d’œuvre inconnu. Gambara’s genesis confirms this impression. Its salient feature, Schlesinger’s rejection of a second version (which subsequently became Massimilla Doni), based on a tenor called Gambara, rather than on a musician of the same name and on Meyerbeer’s opera, seems to attest the journal’s control over the story’s subject matter, and the story’s subservience to an idea.73 But Gambara’s creation by subdivision, its development of complexity from duality, is consonant also with the evolution of Balzac’s wider opus. The opening’s contrast between the ‘homme complexe’ Andrea with his ‘théories d’artiste, de penseur, de poète, . . . souvent en contradiction avec ses goûts’ (x. –) and the apparently simple narrative thread strikes its keynote. However, his pursuit of Marianna, in an opening which echoes La Maison du chat-quipelote, Une double famille, or Ferragus, leads to dualities further subdivided along the lines of La Femme abandonnée. Marianna’s gaze, ‘à la fois tendre et farouche’ (x. ), reflects Andrea’s dualities and Gambara himself, who in turn parallels Giardini; they are ‘deux abstractions’, one material, one spiritual, Parisian Italian exiles anticipating the French/Italian musical comparison which forms the story’s core. Gambara’s first-person life-story (which might have made a 72 Revue et Gazette musicale (,  July and , ,  Aug. ); first published in book form with Le Cabinet des Antiques in Mar. . 73 On the context of Schlesinger’s Revue, and the pervasive influence of Hoffmann, see K. Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge, ), –. Gambara’s Hoffmannesque subject matter may initially have been Schlesinger’s suggestion (cf. R. Guise, x. , ), mediated by his secretary Belloy’s rereading of several of Hoffmann’s tales, notably L’Archet du Baron de B.; H. Egmont’s translation of Hoffmann’s complete works had appeared in , published, with the exception of vol. i, by Béthune and Plon, who were also responsible for producing the Chronique de Paris (T. W. Lewis, ‘The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman on Balzac’, Ph.D. thesis, London, , –). Belloy was responsible for the protagonist and initial outline of Gambara, and for reconstructing the middle of the story when Balzac’s work was destroyed in a fire (T. Bodin, ‘Balzac et la musique’, in J. Meyer-Petit (ed.), L’Artiste selon Balzac, –, esp. –). But Balzac largely rewrote Belloy’s draft, scrapping, for example, his phenomenological observations on music in favour of more extensive and penetrating ones of his own: x. b, d, c. On the complex genesis of Balzac’s two stories, cf. Bodin, ‘Balzac et la musique’, –; Gambara, ed. M. Regard (), and Massimilla Doni, ed. M. Milner (). The following discussion concentrates on the text in F.

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whole story in the Chronique de Paris)74 is doubled by an extensive account of his art, itself split into discussions of the relative merits of his Mahomet and Meyerbeer’s Robert-le-Diable; they in turn parallel his relationship with Marianna (she will abandon her genius husband as Mohammed abandons his wife), into Andrea’s critique and Gambara’s defence of Robert-le-Diable (x. –). Gambara is a hall of mirrors, its epilogue a microcosm of all that precedes: Girardini’s decline reflects Gambara’s, and Marianna’s. Her loss of Andrea to a dancer ironically echoes her husband’s horror of ballet in opera (x. ) and the opening clue of ‘sa dignité [qui] sentait un peu le théâtre’ (x. ). Yet the final circular enclosure of these oppositions is perhaps a little too neat. The gathering of ‘ces infortunes si diverses’ at the end is a rather rapid writing-off of what has come before, an expedient for containing a more fragmented whole. Marianna has lost Andrea, Girardini finishes selling scraps, Gambara performing bits of his opera. Ragged ends stretch out to other works: alchemy and somnambulism to Le Secret des Ruggieri or Maître Cornélius, Giardini’s intoxication of Gambara to Philippe’s ploy with Stéphanie in Adieu; the frittering of Gambara’s genius to Frenhofer’s in Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu,75 Massimilla’s closing appearance (her surname is Cane on proof, x. b), to Massimilla Doni, Gambara’s pendant and successor in the Comédie humaine; scraps themselves, to the rags of the paper-making process described in Illusions perdues (v. –). Gambara is a microcosm of Balzac’s contemporary creation; its origin as a subdivision of what became Massimilla Doni indicates its amoebic and proteiform potential. Andrea’s preference for melody over harmony (x. ) reflects the dangers of drowning a narrative in description, or in its own developments.76 Robert-le-diable, according to Andrea, neglects the whole for the part (x. –); it is merely a concatenation of plagiarized fragments because—as with Balzac, perhaps—‘il est arrivé ce qui arrive à tous les faiseurs de centons, l’abus des bonnes choses’(x. ). Equilibrium is indispensable to all successful art. Don Giovanni ‘est encore la seule œuvre musicale où l’harmonie et la mélodie soient en proportions exactes . . . Que d’art! quelle liaison de toutes les parties, quelle puissance de construction!’ (x. , ). 74 x. –. Gambara’s closeness to texts in the Chronique is evinced by its references to somnabulism (x. ) and alchemy, as well as by the inital casting of Massimilla Doni, who appears at the end, as Massimilla Cane (x. b). 75 The significantly reworked fourth edition of Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu had been published just three weeks before Gambara on  July . 76 The melody versus harmony debate was as much a topos of contemporary musical discussion as the line versus colour debate in art: J.-M. Bailbé, Le Roman et la musique en France sous la Monarchie de Juillet (), –; cf. J.-P. Barricelli, Balzac and Music (New York, ), pt. I, ch. , and K. Ley, Die Oper im Roman (Heidelberg, ), – and, on the debate in Gambara,  et seq. These dyads were further paralleled by narration and description: Ley, ibid. –.

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Yet the story simultaneously demonstrates the aesthetic limitations of such duality. Gambara can explain his art only through analogy, in comparisons which pass close to, but can never touch, its heart. Beethoven’s Fifth may suggest ‘toute une nature tour à tour éclairée par d’éblouissantes gerbes de lumières . . . égayée par des chants divins’, the patterns of powder on his drums ‘les différentes natures des sons’ (x. , ); but these are only traces in the sand, not the sound or sensation itself. His discursive explanation can never attain the monistic nature of art, the sensory character on which it relies for its creation and reception: Le son est la lumière, sous une autre forme: l’une et l’autre procèdent par des vibrations qui aboutissent à l’homme et qu’il transforme en pensées dans ses centres nerveux. La musique, de même que la peinture, emploie des corps qui ont la faculté de dégager telle ou telle propriété de la substance-mère, pour en composer des tableaux. En musique, les instruments font l’office des couleurs qu’emploie le peintre . . . la musique est un art tissu dans les entrailles mêmes de la Nature. (x. )

Monism is what makes artistic expression possible, and the potential reconciliation of the dualities of melody and harmony, Italy and Germany, and, ultimately, science and art.77 But the artist’s (and the writer’s) dilemma is that though the world, and music, is monistic, the discourse which describes it is not. Like the Physiologie, with its classification of music with poetry and painting as one of ‘les trois arts qui nous aident à chercher peut-être infructueusement la vérité par analogie’ (xi. ), Gambara shows not so much artistic analogy’s ability, as its inability, to ‘realize’. Its synaesthesia is only a relative success: not a totalizing transcendence of boundaries between the arts, or the arts and the senses, but at most a setting of them in parallel, a relative categorization which makes clear the gaps between. In place of analogy’s dualities, Gambara proposes an empathetic understanding derived from the listener’s own experience.78 Music, the most material of the arts, reaches furthest into the soul (x. ), its dependence on physical sensation79 enabling it to work within us: Vous ne voyez que ce que la peinture vous montre, vous n’entendez que ce que le poète vous dit, la musique va bien au-delà: ne forme-t-elle pas votre pensée, ne réveille-t-elle 77 Cf. La Peau de chagrin or Louis Lambert, where the ‘substance éthérée’ is fundamental: ‘Ici-bas, tout est le produit d’une  ÉÉÉ, base commune de plusieurs phénomènes connus sous les noms impropres d’Éléctricité, Chaleur, Lumière, Fluide galvanique, magnétique, etc. L’universalité des transmutations de cette Substance constitue ce qu’on appelle vulgairement la Matière’ (xi. ), cit. M. Eigeldinger, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, Gambara, Massimilla Doni (), . Cf. also Andréoli, Le Système balzacien ch. , esp. –. 78 Andréoli explores the distinction between perfect and imperfect analogies, and the role of doubt in knowledge: Le Système balzacien, –, . 79 Cf. J. Martineau, ‘La Physiologie musicale balzacienne’, AB (),  et seq.; A. Panchout, ‘Gambara et le Panharmonicon’, in Meyer-Petit et al. (eds.), L’Artiste selon Balzac, –; at  and n. .

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pas les souvenirs engourdis? . . . La musique seule a la puissance de nous faire rentrer en nous-mêmes; tandis que les autres arts nous donnent des plaisirs définis. (x. –)

Music is an art of infinite suggestion, the empathy it creates more reliable than analogy in conveying experience. Emotional identification can transcend the boundaries between self and other, bridging the polarities of esprit and matière, or esprit and cœur. Given man’s fundamentally material nature, it is no accident that Gambara is at his most creative when drunk, or that Balzac parallels him with a chef and a lover. Yet empathy’s very materiality, like the lovers’ sensual infinite in La Fille aux yeux d’or, can equally cause it to be finite. Its restriction to the individual creates both a potential plenitude of experience and also an imprisonment of expression within solipsism. For, ‘quand la musique passe de la sensation à l’idée, elle ne peut avoir que des gens de génie pour auditeurs, car eux seuls ont la puissance de la développer’ (x. ).80 This is the cause both of Gambara’s spiritual success and of his physical downfall. The paradox is most pointed in his Panharmonicon, the instrument intended to transcend all others and totally to express the world, yet which confirms nothing more than his (and its) own extreme singularity, his ontological and phenomenological isolation.81 Like Frenhofer’s painting of La Belle Noiseuse, this would-be absolute of poesis fails to express, not everything, but anything. The failure is perhaps as much of reception as of creation, the result of the listeners’, as much as of the artist’s, lack of generic conformity: what to Gambara is sublime harmony is hideous dissonance to others, whilst mediocre music is more successful: ‘si l’opéra plaît tant, c’est que la musique est de tout le monde’(x. ). There is an incipient Beylisme in this story, as Balzac’s passage on La Pasta’s poetic power suggests (x. –).82 It is doubtless altogether fitting that the Panharmonicon is not a Gesamtkunstwerk, but a Gesamtinstrument: Balzac’s violin? However, the divisions between subject and receiver, expression and its object, sign and signifier are ultimately absolutes, indisputable phenomenological facts. If, for the musician, ‘la musique existe indépendamment de l’exécution’, for the 80 Balzac was later to remark to Liszt: ‘L’éloquence, mon cher Franz, est, comme vous l’avez dit, autant dans ceux qui écoutent que dans l’orateur’ ( Nov. , Corr. iv. ). 81 The Panharmonicon had a source in reality, but (pace A. Panchout) it is doubtful that Gambara’s version transcends contemporary debates to unite melody and harmony, sensation and idea (‘Gambara et la Panharmonicon’, ). 82 Cf. Barricelli, Balzac and Music, –. Balzac’s most celebrated contact with Stendhal came at the time of La Chartreuse de Parme (see Études sur M. Beyle, Revue parisienne ( Sept. ), CHH xxviii. –). But he had known him since at least , and had no doubt encountered him during Stendhal’s Parisian sojourns thereafter; Balzac first visited Italy in , going to Turin in July and Aug., returning for a more extended stay between Feb. and May , during the composition of Gambara (P –). Cf. R. Guise, ‘Balzac et l’Italie’, AB (), esp.  et seq.; and A.M. Meininger, ‘Balzac et Stendhal en : une rencontre peu connue’, AB (), –. The Stendhalian intertext is more pronounced in Massimilla Doni: see Ley, Die Oper im Roman,  et seq., and Ch. (iii) below.

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layman, ‘Mozart, Haydn et Beethoven sans orchestre, sont peu de chose’ (x. ). Gambara’s opera is both a transcendent work of genius and only good for wrapping groceries, such is the gulf between the artist and his audience. Gambara shows both the mimetic power of empathy, yet also its inherent élitism; an extralinguistic achievement ultimately doomed, through the limits of commerce and of genre, to solipsism. Balzac was less willing than Stendhal to wait decades for his readers: Gambara and Giardini mirror his creative hopes and fears. Gambara represents the paradoxes of Balzac’s contemporary output, his move towards the creation of psychologically rounded characters, yet his dependence on the illustrative, exemplary narrative of the story to achieve it. Its protagonist, ‘un pauvre compositeur, qui voudrait passer de la romance à l’opéra et ne peut’ (x. ), reflects his creator’s struggle to develop stories towards a more comprehensive form of expression in La Vieille Fille or Illusions perdues. Gambara’s dualities express the quest for, and death of, the absolute, a recognition of the inevitability of dualistic expression in a monistic world.83 It is a return to the initial premiss of Balzac’s creation (in the Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme) and to what was to be its ultimate conclusion, the Études analytiques. Gambara’s outer limits—its title and final lines—encapsulate its paradoxical self-abnegation: Gam/barre/a embraces both the creator’s musically Protean range (‘toute la gamme’), its simultaneous existence and non-existence as sign: ‘barre’ suggests both the musical measure and its deletion. ‘L’eau est un corps brûlé’: the story’s enigmatic closing words encapsulate these paradoxes of alchemy and of art: the theoretical possibility of the absolute (‘Toute vie implique une combustion’: the lesson of La Recherche de l’absolu), and its particular unattainability, Gambara’s tears. Gambara ends in Stendhalian suspension, with a conclusion for the Happy Few, but which suggests the dominance of money and of commerce over art. Balzac’s last major series of stories points to a similarly poignant paradox.

(v) End of an Era: The Third dixain of Contes drolatiques Gambara, through all its compositional vicissitudes, retained its integrity; but the third dixain of drolatiques was compromised from the start. ‘Vous pourrez, je crois, sans rougir, vous permettre le me dixain’, Balzac told Mme Hanska as he was beginning to write it, ‘il sera presque chaste’ (LH i. ,  Aug. ). From his earliest jottings, Balzac married off Impéria, its courtesan heroine, for the very chevaulchiees which are its raison d’être: an altogether emblematic contradiction of its terms. The four fraught years preceding the dixain’s eventual publication on  December  certainly played their part in its demise, its composition constantly interrupted—by false starts, failures of inspiration, 83

Cf. Ley, Die Oper im Roman, –; – et seq.

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even fire.84 In the process, the first dixain’s gaulois ideal of desire no sooner conceived than satisfied had been contaminated by the intrusion of enduringly contemporary realities. Money, administration, a coldly bureaucratic abbot, all threaten the protagonists’ happiness in Perseuerance d’amour, where Anseau, like Rastignac or Manerville, worries whether he has the means to buy into a noble line;85 ‘la belle fille de Portillon’ values her virginity at , écus. Tales like this, or D’ung iusticiard qui ne se remembroit des choses can be seen at once as traditional mockery of lawyers, and acknowledgements of, and revenges on, the modern world; stories of biters bit. The dixain is suspended between the Renaissance and Balzac’s own time, in an ironic awareness of contemporary reality. The chilly reception of the secund dixain had confirmed the lesson of the first: Balzac was writing not for some project of national renewal, but for a Happy Few.86 The third dixain reverses the relationship between authenticity and irony, to irony’s advantage. Whilst some tales retain a strikingly anecdotal simplicity (Comment la belle fille de Portillon quinaulda son iuge, Dires incongreus de trois pelerins, and Naïfueté), in others a simple story is struggling to get out. ‘Las!’ cries the narrator in Perseuerance d’amour, ‘ces preparatoires discours sont digressions oisives et fastidieulx commentaires, desquels les mecreans obligent ung homme d’entortiller ung conte, comme ung enfant dedans ses langes, alors qu’il debvroyt courir tout nud . . . Ie vais tout dire sans ambages’(OD i. ). This remains more an aspiration than a fact; complexity results not from ‘mecreans’, but from the application of Balzac’s mainstream narrative techniques. Numerous reversals follow the idyllic opening of Perseuerance d’amour: the abbot’s intransigence, and subsequent lenience, is itself threatened before 84 Fire destroyed eleven feuilles of this dixain (and  volumes of its predecessors) on the night of  Dec.  (Corr. ii. , LH i. ). On the evidence of parallels with other contemporary works, composition of this dixain appears to have taken place in two main bursts in – and after the fire, in –. Empathy (Berthe la repentie, OD i. –) or misogyny (Comment la belle fille de Portillon quinaulda son iuge, Sur le moyne Amador) recall Ne touchez pas la hache or La Femme de trente ans (OD i. ), and cross-dressing figures in both Berthe and La Fille aux yeux d’or. A passage in La Belle Impéria mariée parallels images in L’Interdiction (OD i. ; iii. ), whilst a mention of physiology points to La Messe de l’athée (OD i. ; iii. ).The Venetian theme of Facino Cane echoes Cy est desmontré que la fortune est touiours femelle, and musical analogies for orgasm in the third dixain point to both Ne touchez pas la hache and Gambara (OD i. ; cf. also , , , ). Cf. R. Chollet, OD i. –). 85 OD i. –; cf. L’Interdiction, iii. . 86 Stendhal successfully creates a virtual reality, suspended between the Renaissance and the modern in L’Abbesse de Castro () and its development, La Chartreuse de Parme () at the very time Balzac abandons it. Part of the explanation lies perhaps in Stendhal’s subversion and fusion of existing conventions to create a new aesthetic; part in the prudish influence of Mme Hanska; part also in the waning popularity of the Renaissance, and consequent ghettoization of the drolatiques as ‘un monument littéraire bâti pour quelques connaisseurs’ (LH i. ,  Aug. ). With the third dixain, the drolatique is channelled into other aspects of Balzac’s mainstream creation: the conjugal peripeteia of La Vieille Fille, the grotesque adventures of Nucingen and Esther, the innocent dupery of La Fausse Maîtresse.

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finally winning through; brother Amador ‘confesses’ the countess, her servant, her sister, and her niece (OD i. –).87 As a sequel to La Belle Impéria, La Belle Impéria mariée delivers its narrative almost in reverse: first the meeting and happy marriage of L’Isle-Adam and Impéria, then her suicide, resulting in his subsequent return to his first mistress. The conte becomes ‘entortillé’ by novelistic complications; causation has caught up with the idyll. In La Belle Impéria mariée, Berthe la repentie, and Sur le moyne Amador, subplots parallel the protagonists. The servant La Falotte’s pregnancy mirrors her mistress’s misadventures, leading to Berthe’s downfall when La Falotte betrays her confidence; in Sur le moyne Amador, Perotte’s adultery with the count parallels the monk’s in sleeping with his wife (OD i. –; ). Whilst the distinctively oral nature of the drolatiques proliferates in direct addresses to the reader, it does so more cumbersomely than authentic Renaissance contes, which introduce information with much less ado. The third dixain is striking by the multiplicity and extent of its reworkings and additions, which are both more numerous and more extensive than those of the previous two.88 Almost every aspect of the collection points to its compromise by the contemporary. The narrator’s aim of creating ‘ung françoys pour luy seul, oultre les mots bizarres . . . phrazes d’oultre mer et jargons hespagniols advenuz par le faict des estrangiers’ (OD i. ) now appears almost totally solipsistic. In the context of the waning vogue for Rabelais and the Renaissance, Balzac’s French really is ‘pour luy seul’: a national language privatized. Or rather, a language both private and public, written with a duality of vision, with an eye on both domains at once. This tension is reflected in the prologue, which invokes both a universal Eve, and, implicitly, Éveline Hanska, and in the first tale, Perseuerance d’amour, whose title is a veritable motto for Balzac’s protracted long-distance affair with her. 87 This parallels a mainstream work like L’Interdiction, where Rastignac’s desire to have Mme d’Espard as a lover reflects her husband’s supposed affair with Mme Jeanrenaud. In that case, sacred love supplants the profane. 88 Alterations or additions of more than a couple of words in the first dixain are few (e.g. OD i. a); the most important and extensive are closing morals (a, a), a tendency increased in the second (e.g. a, a, f,  and n. , a); only the last two of the latter’s tales, Le Succube and Dezesperance d’amour, go beyond this in more substantial novelistic developments, e.g. a–a. But additions to the third dixain include a number of narratorial digressions (e.g. on Eva, on Pichot, on the etymology of coquedouille, on the maistre mire or historical context (e–a d, a, c, d), which amplify dialogue or create a more spontaneous effect (a, f, a, d, a, etc.). Other emendations develop characters (Bastarnay’s, or Montsoreau’s, via his endearments for his wife, a, c), or, most interestingly, extend their interiority— via e.g. reflections on Berthe’s difficulties in marriage, on good households, or on her communion with her son (a, a, f), or amorous exchanges with Sylvie/Jehan (b, e; cf. b and c, a). Cf. also the Belle fille de Portillon’s enthusiasm for her paramour (b), dialogue expansions (e, c, d, a, b, a), or narratorial additions such as narration of Imperia’s flight from Rome, amplification of her enamouredness, or of her despair at her failing sexual powers (OD i. a, d–a, a). Such modifications all increase the impression of people who really exist, rather than characters who are just narrated, and bring the stories closer to the novel.

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Begun after the lovers’ momentous meeting in February  (OD i. ), this story of a goldsmith abandoning his position to marry a cowgirl phantasmically reverses the real-life lovers’ relative social status. But subliminally, it also relates a return to a prelapsarian idyll, with Balzac as the solitary Anseau, transfiguring ‘ses pensers d’amour en ioyaulx drolastiques, qui playsoyent moult à ses achepteurs, lesquels ignoroyent combien il y avoyt de femmes et d’enfans perdeus dans les pieces d’orpheurerie du bon homme’ (OD i. ). In a further compromise of innocence and experience, pastoral and Paris, the tourangeau idyll of earlier dixains is transported to the capital, where Anseau’s lover Tiennette symbolizes both the city of Saint Genevieve (whom she resembles) and earthy stability: ‘vecy ung bien longtemps que nous y vivons de père en fille’ (OD i. , ). Tiennette bears a considerable symbolic weight. As a ‘fille de corps’ (bondswoman) with whom marriage will automatically enslave her husband, she encompasses spirit and matter, sex and spirit; yet she is also, via the sky, ‘pers’ (the colour of the Madonna’s robe), ‘sans nuées’; virginal, sublimely maternal, yet also erotic, fecundly burning ‘comme une forge’ (OD i. ). Love and money are reconciled when Anseau declares ‘ie vous cuide le cueur plein de seures richesses’; love and art, when he makes her a statue of the Madonna (OD i. , ). Perseuerance d’amour depicts a primal idyll, both public and private, incorporating Arcadia into Paris, and love into art.89 The dichotomies of Perseuerance echo others in this dixain: appearance and reality, saying and doing, the part and the whole. Its licentiousness is set in the context of hypocrisy, that most dualistic of depravities. Ladies ‘ayment l’humide’, and ensure that they hear the abbot’s corrupting tale before they reject it, ‘vu que pour iuger, besoin est de ouir les choses’(Sur le moyne Amador, OD i. –). Priggishness leads to ignorance (OD i. ): D’ung iusticiard or Comment la belle fille turn on the revelation of a normally concealed sexuality, such as the married Impéria’s beauties, the greatest of which the public cannot see (OD i. ; cf. ). Hypocrisy makes the third dixain a scapegoat for the erotic elements in Balzac’s mainstream work;90 it exports responsibility for the unmentionable. Telling may still be a prelude to doing (celebrating sex should tempt us to indulge, OD i. ); but it has become its substitute, the 89 The personal element is present in many other aspects of this dixain. The concern with money in Perseuerance d’amour reflects Balzac’s own, whilst the violence of Anseau’s reaction to the prohibition of his marriage corresponds to the author’s own attitude to his rejection by Mme de Castries, as, in Ne touchez pas la hache, do Montriveau’s attempts to master Antoinette de Langeais, whose first name echoes Tiennette’s. The third dixain, like La Duchesse de Langeais or La Messe de l’athée, generally bears witness to Balzac’s ‘Great Man’ complex: Anseau consoles himself by saying that even if he does become a bondsman, he will keep his intellectual superiority; Amador’s volubility reflects that of his creator (OD i. , ). If Balzac was able, as he claimed to Madame Hanska, to write D’ung paoure qui avoit nom le Vieulx-par-chemins in a single night, it is perhaps because he saw aspects of himself (industry, phantasmatic realization of a rampant sexuality) in its papery protagonist. 90 Notably La Vieille Fille, Le Lys dans la vallée, and the emergent Torpille.

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phantasmatic realization of the inadmissible faire: ‘Mieulx vaut estre coulx par le conte d’ung liure, que coulx par l’hystoire d’ung gentil homme’ (OD i. ). Where the first two dixains gaily leap the gap between desire and consummation, the last falls into an abyss. Tales are cautionary, books, moral prophylactics;91 desire leads ultimately to Amador’s Augustinian austerity, or Impéria’s regret. Integrity, wholeness, is thus impossible, a matter merely of appearance. While some tales bridge, or paper over, the gap between desire and realization (D’ung paoure qui avoit nom le Vieulx-par-chemins), the symbolic cohesion of others points only to the fissures of hypocrisy (Perseuerance d’amour, Sur le moyne Amador). In Perseuerance money and love imagically cohere, but are actually in conflict; the omnipresent and evidently erotic moistness of Amador bespeaks a generalized desire which hypocrisy never generally admits. Even the judge in Comment la belle fille . . . feigns naïvety only to try and get his way. The impossibility of integrity points to formal dichotomies in the dixain as a whole, hamstrung between unity and diversity, self-containedness and dispersal. The prologue’s ‘Treuvez proufficts pareils aux aultres cayers noircis typographiquement (OD i. ) suggests that these ‘proufficts’ both are, and are not, to be found. It is a measured denial of the drolatique ideal, half-asking the reader to ignore its specificities (uniqueness, naïvety, archaism, orality), yet also to acknowledge irony. Its effect depends on a heightened generic awareness (of reading, or pretending to listen to, a tale, of expecting it to be droll and have a moral) which is the opposite of the naïvety they parade. The third dixain is a generic paradox, neither ancient, nor modern, but neither, and both, at once. It uses art to make love (to the tutelary figure of Madame Hanska), love to discuss art (as in Gambara), and, implicitly, the conte to talk about the novel: Le propre du véritable amour est une certaine concordance qui faict que tant plus l’ung donne, tant pluz l’aultre reçoipt, et réciproquement, comme dans certains caz de la mathématique où les choses se multiplient par elles-mesmes à l’infini. Cettuy problesme n’est expliquable aux gens de petite science que par ce que ils voyent ez glaces de Venise où s’aperçoivent des milliers de figures produites par une mesme. (Berthe la repentie, OD i. –)

The ‘glaces de Venise’, the ‘milliers de figures’ rework the ‘nombre incommensurable d’exemplaires de ma propre personne’ from which the ‘commission’ for Théorie du conte’s ‘cent contes dont aucun ne ressemble à l’autre’ comes (OD i. –), and the miroir or ouvrage concentrique which is the generative image of La Peau de chagrin and the secund dixain respectively (x. ; OD i. ). The image is richly suggestive. It applies to the mutual sympathy of love, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts; and, via the image of the mirror, to Balzac’s work, to La Peau de chagrin’s continuity between microcosm and macrocosm (see 91

R. Chollet, OD i.  n. .

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Chapter  above), and to the diversification of his work—in recurring characters, and in the multiplication of narratives. Within the dixain itself, this diversity is evident in several ways. The choice of concluding morals or anti-morals 92 given in many tales suggests that morals are not the unambiguous narrative facts or lessons implicit in the tale’s subservience to an axiom, but subjective entities which can only be alluded to and conveyed only by a reinforcing familiarity and repetition of examples, and critical comparison between them. Repetition within variation is the founding principle of Théorie du conte: ‘Soient donnés ung mari, sa femme et un amant, déduisez cent contes dont aucun ne ressemble à l’autre’ (OD i. ); it is embodied in the cyclical recurrence of the Contes drolatiques, which, like the real collections of the Renaissance, are striking by the repetitive nature of their subject matter. Yet repetition is arguably also a characteristic of the empathetic identification with the action felt by readers of novels. For these ‘caz de la mathématique où les choses se multiplient par elles-mesmes à l’infini’, these ‘milliers de figures produites par une mesme’ in Berthe la repentie suggest a parallel with the experience of the readers of novels, obliged, like lovers, to find their own desire mirrored and multiplied in an object external to themselves, their experience reflected in the text: ‘Chacun trouvera la vérité chez soi, dans son cœur, peut-être’ (iii. ). This generic and perceptual tension is indicative of the evolution both of the drolatiques and of Balzac’s wider world. The aporetic image of Berthe la repentie 93 falls halfway, in chronology and in character, between the ‘miroir concentrique’ of La Peau de chagrin () and the mosaïque of the preface to Une fille d’Eve (). It implies neither concentration, nor fragmentation, nor yet linear expansion, but a completeness, a unified infinity which can be supposed but not actually apprehended. The femme–mari–amant triangle of Théorie du conte is being supplanted by an altogether more complex topography. The third dixain’s two longest tales attain novelistic depth and intensity of characterization through the very devices of familiarity and repetition. Berthe and Impéria acquire a quasi-mythic status as symbols of women’s suffering at the hands of men, or of universal Eros, largely as a result of greater textual space and temporal duration, of the cumulative effect of passages such as the portrait of the hateful Bastarnay, of Berthe’s suggestively erotic music lesson with Jehan, or the celebration of Impéria’s allure. These devices are employed not merely to accumulate events (‘Rien ne trahit plus l’impuissance d’un auteur comme 92 Several tales offer a choice of moral conclusions: at its end, Cy est desmontré que la fortune est touiours femelle no less than three; Comment la belle fille de Portillon quinaulda son iuge closes with an antimoral, that justice itself may be violated, and La Belle Impéria mariée with what is almost a nonmoral, that one needs to know vice to know virtue. And ladies in Sur le moyne Amador ‘ayment l’humide’, and wish to have the abbot’s corrupting tale ‘vu que pour iuger, besoin est de ouir les choses’ (OD i. –); priggishness leads to ignorance (OD i. ). 93 Written Christmas Eve –Jan. ; finally completed in June : OD i. –.

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l’entassement des faits’ as Balzac was to write a few years later), but for their combination in a ‘constellation brillante’.94 The dixain’s longest tales are successful not because they digress, but because they intertwine events to reveal their connectedness: Berthe is undone by her servant’s betrayal, Impéria in penitence and ultimately in punishment for her past. Length is thus not the purpose of digression,95 but the product of complexity. ‘Tout s’agrandit sous ma plume’ Balzac was to write whilst composing La Cousine Bette, ‘ou tout s’étale, ce qui n’est pas la même chose.’96 Even infinite length, however, could not accommodate infinite complexity, for, like those cases ‘où les choses se multiplient par elles-mesmes à l’infini’, the limitless number of potential narratives always vies with the potentially limitless number of perceived realities they might narrate. Any single tale can tell only a small part of the truth, can be only the most schematic reduction of the infinite totality of fact. The development of subplots in the third dixain’s longer tales implicitly recognizes this constraint, but is arguably profoundly at odds with the genre of its contes. For if contes are generally brief because auxiliary to an axiom, whether explicit or implied, Balzac’s longer tales break this rule, both in this dixain and elsewhere. Their principal narrative is subservient not to an axiom, but parallels another narrative fact contained within the same tale or collection or elsewhere: La Falotte’s corruptness, or Impéria’s youth, misspent in La Belle Impéria, the very first story of the whole. The upshot is an ostensibly exhaustive factual completeness in a dixain striking for its numerous cross-references to, and recyclings of, other tales. In Berthe la repentie, the sire de Bastarnay is looking for a wife, like Anseau in Perseuerance, or the father of L’Enfant maudit (reworked in  and ); the idea that ‘l’amour se fait par les yeux’ recurs here too (Les Bons Propous des relligieuses de Poissy, CD . iii, OD i. ). Jean de Saché, Berthe’s lover, is the cousin of the duc de Montmorency, whose family features in La Belle Impéria mariée, where one of the daughters is L’Isle-Adam’s mistress, whilst Comment la belle fille de Portillon quinaulda son iuge sends us back to L’Apostrophe (OD i. ). Many of the dixain’s numerous digressions strive to provide a totalizing account: ‘Pour estre vray de tout poinct, besoing est de dire qu’à ceste saigesse ayda moult le petit gars’ (OD i. ); ‘Cy est urgent de faire sçavoir que elle avoyt eu . . . ung pretieulx guerdon’ (OD i. ; cf. , , etc.). Features such as these, together with portraits and micro-narrations about secondary characters like La Falotte (OD i. ) all betoken the quest for a totalizing history, a complete veracity akin to that of Balzac’s mainstream creation. In this context, some of the drolatiques appear unduly constrained by Lettres sur la littérature, Revue parisienne ( July ), CHH xxviii. , ; cf. . With the exception of the struggle to expand Massimilla Doni to the stipulated length, in Balzac’s work it scarcely ever is. Cf. his scathing remarks on the prolixity of the rienologue, Monographie de la presse parisienne, CHH xxviii. –, and Ch. (iii) below. 96 LH i. ,  Aug. . 94 95

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brevity. If Comment la belle fille, Dires incongreus, and Naïfeuté are happily restricted to the anecdote, others, such as Sur le moyne Amador and Cy est desmontré que la fortune est touiours femelle, complicate events. The drolatiques are increasingly selfdefined, in line with the growing objectivity and self-sufficiency of Balzac’s world. They have ceased to be pastiches, subservient to Renaissance models, and have become ‘de véritables créations’,97 truthful, independent realities in their own right. Yet this development is also one of the reasons for their demise. Their raison d’être was their specificity; once it was lost, so were they. Another is the parallel emergence, from October , of the Études de mœurs, which progressively took the drolatiques’ place as Balzac’s major fictional cycle after the publication of the secund dixain in July. But the major causes of their decline were generic and formal. A single self-contained narrative or collection was no longer large enough to be complete. In parallel with the recurring narratives and characters of the Études, the third dixain sees the appearance of a certain depth of perspective, a virtual and more rounded apprehension gained by seeing tales in the light of others, which gives readers a basis for critical comparison and apprehension of his world. The third dixain symbolizes the failing of a unified ethos, both in this cycle, and in Balzac’s work as a whole. Short fiction had been given a further lease of life by the Chronique de Paris, and by the protracted genesis of Gambara, Massimilla Doni, and the third dixain, producing stories of two main types: brief anecdotal narratives (La Messe de l’athée, Facino Cane), and rather overworked stories like Gambara and the more ambitious tales of the third dixain, straining to be something bigger. All, however, demonstrated the conte’s inadequacy as an independent narrative unit. This problem Balzac solved by demoting it to the anecdotal functions of filling in the secondary (but nevertheless significant) episodes of La Comédie humaine. Melmoth réconcilié, La Fille aux yeux d’or, or L’Interdiction illustrate the dichotomy of conte and nouvelle, part and whole, implicit in the Introductions to the Études de mœurs and Études philosophiques. But in the coming years Balzac’s output becomes more homogeneous: the geneses of different fictions more closely interwoven, and the standard unit of production a hypertrophied nouvelle from which few works (Z. Marcas, Pierre Grassou), not even La Torpille, depart. This brevity of conception and execution was crucial. For without it, Balzac’s work would have been neither written, nor read.

97

R. Chollet and N. Mozet, OD i. .

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Relative Values, – It is tempting to draw a line between the appearance of the third dixain of Contes drolatiques of  December , and César Birotteau, published a fortnight later.1 On the one hand, the last of Balzac the youthful conteur; on the other, the major works of the novelist. What could be more different than the Contes drolatiques, a folie de jeunesse, and Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau, parfumeur, chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, adjoint au maire du ème arrondissement de la ville de Paris, etc. Nouvelle scène de la vie parisienne, an archetype of the realist novel, not a story, but History, artfully combining sublime and grotesque, emblematically eclectic in its yoking together of grandeur and trivia, of Montesquieu and the mayor of the second arrondissement? In the years between now and , Balzac was to complete all three parts of Illusions perdues, the first two parts of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Le Curé de village, and the first part of Béatrix, and La Rabouilleuse; to shed the more fantastical elements of his youth and turn into the literary realist of La Comédie humaine. Or so, at least, a conventional account might run. Yet its taxonomic anxiety would tell rather less than half the story, omitting the nine briefer but no less central stories of La Comédie humaine which were published between  and ,2 quite apart from other tales and articles.3 More seriously, it would ignore central continuities. Virtually all these texts were first conceived, and, in the case of La Torpille, first published, as short fiction. This, the nucleus of what is now part one of Splendeurs et misères, was originally briefer than La Maison Nucingen, as were, in their initial conception or realization, many of Balzac’s longest novels.4 And virtually all spring from a common source in the early s, at the height of Balzac’s story-writing career, reformulating for the present common themes of creation, invention, and commerce.

1 Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau . . ., published c. Dec.  but dated , BF ( Jan. ). 2 La Maison Nucingen, La Torpille, Une fille d’Eve, Massimilla Doni, Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, Un prince de la Bohème, Pierre Grassou, Z. Marcas, La Fausse Maîtresse. 3 Notably Petites misères de la vie conjugale, the Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, and Balzac’s contributions to Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, joined in  by those to Le Diable à Paris. 4 e.g. Béatrix, in its first incarnation as Les Amours forcés, Le Cousin Pons, or La Cousine Bette.

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(i) A Philosophy of Composition? From César Birotteau to Une fille d’Eve So much were antecedents felt to bear upon Balzac’s literary progeny that Le Figaro published a Sternian account, by Balzac’s friend Ourliac, of ‘Les Malheurs et aventures de César Birotteau avant sa naissance’. Like many jests, it had its grain of truth.5 César Birotteau sprang, along with La Maison Nucingen, Une fille d’Eve, and La Torpille, from common plans sketched many years before. A Birotteau character appears in projects for the Romans et contes (later Études) philosophiques;6 finance figures both in a projected play, Le Républicain (where an ‘honnête homme’, a Birotteau avant la lettre, is faced not by a banker, but by a Castanieresque cashier and a spy),7 and in Une fille de Paris, eventually to be reworked in La Torpille’s  development, Esther ou les amours d’un vieux banquier: Sujet d’Une fille de Paris. L’homme de la Bourse, sa passion, a fait toutes les horreurs de la terre pour garder sa place dans la maison de jeu . . . il a rencontré une pauvre fille qui l’aime, dont il est épris, il est l’homme du XIXe siècle, homme de progrès sans préjugés, il vit avec cette fille, il lui fait ,fr. de sa prostitution, les lui donne et meurt.8

‘Fondre le tout’ notes Balzac of Le Républicain;9 but in many cases, genesis was less a matter of fusion than of fission, of making several stories from one nucleus. Une fille de Paris is effectively La Maison Nucingen and La Torpille at once: Nucingen is a speculator, Esther a courtesan, but Balzac attenuates and individuates the characters of both. The businessman-protagonists of César Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen may look like moral opposites, but derive from an earlier common stock—a conte philosophique, like Gambara’s or Frenhofer’s, orientated around the portrait of its protagonist as a type or the victim of an idea.10 Such fissiparous genesis, common to La Recherche de l’absolu, Illusions perdues, La Vieille Fille, and, to some extent, César Birotteau, is exemplified also by 5 Le Figaro ( Dec. ); also included in the first edition (Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau (Boulé, c. Dec. , dated )  o vols.). On César Birotteau’s extensive antenatal history, from  Étude philosophique to symbiotic genesis with La Maison Nucingen and La Femme supérieure (Les Employés) in –, cf. César Birotteau, ed. P. Laubriet (), pp. xiii–li, and A. R. Pugh, ‘The Genesis of César Birotteau’, French Studies (Jan. ). 6 e.g. PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. –. 7 PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. . 8 PSF, fo.  (), CHH xxviii. ; Esther ou les amours d’un vieux banquier, Le Parisien ( May– July ). As A. R. Pugh notes, ‘it is probable that the title La Torpille . . . referred to a story represented now by parts one and two of Splendeurs, rather than just to the fragment published in ’ (BRC ); he and Takayama place Une fille de Paris in  (Les Œuvres romanesques avortées de Balzac (–) (Tokyo and Paris, ), –). On the conception of the subject, cf. J. Pommier, L’Invention et l’écriture dans ‘La Torpille’ d’Honoré de Balzac (Geneva, ), – et seq. 9 Le Républicain, CHH xxviii. . 10 In Birotteau’s case, ‘l’idée probité’: F. Davin, Introduction aux ‘Études philosophiques’, x. . Cf. R. Guise, vi. –.

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Gambara and Massimilla Doni.11 The import and final form of César Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen are considerably removed from these early sketches, but their transposition of visionary heroes to commercial contexts points to a common philosophical core.12 Like Balzac’s earliest writings, many of these works start literary life as a maxim, a sentence expressing their essential subject, from which narrative will grow. In the plan of Une fille de Paris, moral impetus and storyline are firm; in a note for César Birotteau, the hold on both is shakier: C’est une chose impossible peut-être que de savoir quand la finesse devient de l’improbité et la probité bêtise.—Tu fais quelque chose, tu n’arriveras à rien. Il n’y a que ceux qui ne font rien qui arrivent. Ils sont à l’affût de tout et passent leur vie à la chasse aux places, aux affaires . . . Un visage aigu, des yeux verts de mer, nez pointu.13

A tentative and noncommittal maxim moves via a pessimistic affirmation (a Marsay’s or a Lousteau’s?) to the beginnings of a portrait. This is at once the author’s personal repository of wisdom for future use, a kind of moral memorandum, as well as a storyline waiting to happen—generically inert, but potentially polyvalent. Such sketches are mostly very brief, and, with a few exceptions like Le Républicain, undefined in terms of genre, other than ‘transparently’, as scènes or études. Yet their aphoristic brevity and hermetic selfcontainedness is embryonically short fictional, and short fiction moulds their final form.

(ii) César Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen The preface to César Birotteau announces its shared genesis with La Maison Nucingen: Ces deux histoires sont nées jumelles. Qui lit César Birotteau devra donc lire La Maison Nucingen, s’il veut connaître l’ouvrage entier. Toute œuvre comique est nécessairement bilatérale. L’écrivain, ce grand rapporteur de procès, doit mettre les adversaires face à face. (vi. )14

César Birotteau is, formally, two short stories placed end to end: Birotteau’s rise and fall, followed by his recovery and Popinot’s ascent. Perhaps Balzac 11 See Takayama, Les Œuvres romanesques, –; S. J. Bérard, La Genèse d’un roman de Balzac (), ii. –; M. Fargeaud, x. –; César Birotteau, ed. Laubriet, pp. xxiii–xxviii, and Pugh, ‘The Genesis of César Birotteau’. Cf. Ch. (iv) above. 12 For examples of the process from the end of Balzac’s career, cf. F. Schuerewegen, ‘Avortements’, in S. Vachon (ed.), Balzac: une poétique du roman (Montreal and Saint-Denis, ), –. 13 PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. . 14 The genesis of the two works was closely linked: R. J. B. Clark, ‘Vers une édition critique de la Maison Nucingen: genèse et épreuves’, in D. G. Charlton, J. Gaudon, and A. R. Pugh, Balzac and the Nineteenth Century (Leicester, ),  et seq.

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even envisaged the initial tale ending as the novel now does, with Birotteau’s death, but in an epilogue, as in Une double famille or Le Contrat de mariage. His contract, however, compelled him, despite a desperate shortage of copy, to stretch his conte to the size of a novel.15 César’s rise, and his fictional portrait, was deferred until well into the narrative by the introduction of successive expository portraits of other characters (as in La Vieille Fille), Pillerault, du Tillet, and Popinot, enabling it to begin with his wife’s premonition of the bankruptcy which will end part one: a novel’s scope within a story’s cogency. Part two adopts a similar solution. César’s decline, conceivable as narratorial summary, was unsustainable as the sole narrative interest of a whole extra volume: if Birotteau alone does not quite solve ‘le difficile problème littéraire qui consiste à rendre intéressant un personnage vertueux’ (Avant-propos, i. ), then Anselme Popinot16 does. In a story, his sudden appearance to rescue Birotteau might have been an all-too-crude deus ex machina. But motivated by his desire to marry Césarine, and extended over a series of scenes in the second part of the novel, its very duration convincingly suggests the complexity and arduousness of this recovery, and the illusion of wider social vistas. The conte plays a central role in César Birotteau,17 in terms of both its overall cohesion and of its intercalated tales. Its various portraits and potted histories are stories within the novel: instead of being a story in a cycle, César Birotteau became a cycle within his story. Fundamental symmetries contain it: Constance’s dream presages César’s downfall, du Tillet’s return reverses his expulsion, César’s second grand ball reflects his first. César Birotteau successfully contains the diverse characters and narratives which, in the absence of such a structure, disunify Le Médecin de campagne,18 but its  recurring characters are strongly suggestive of unfinished business continuing beyond its bounds. La Maison Nucingen, in contrast, makes the narrative role of gossip and social interaction more immediately apparent.

15 Contract with Delloye and Lecou,  Nov. , Corr. iii. –, subsequently taken over by Boulé. Between Aug. and Dec. Balzac rushed to fill the two octavo volumes stipulated by the contract, and almost succeeded: in the first publication the two feuilles he failed to cover were occupied by Ourliac’s article. See R. Guise, vi. –. Of composition, Balzac later wrote: ‘C’est des hasards littéraires. J’ai eu César Birotteau six ans commencé sur mon bureau. L’énormité du prix (vingt mille francs) me l’a fait finir, et en dix-sept jours, par je ne sais quel miracle’ ( Dec. , Corr. iv. ). He was barely exaggerating. 16 Already present in Balzac’s drafts for the novel in ; given an uncle, Jean-Jules, the judge of L’Interdiction, in : BRC , . 17 S. Swahn (Balzac et le merveilleux (Lund, ), ) suggests that the novel follows the structure of the oriental tale Abou Hassan, whose protagonist becomes caliph for a day—the subject of Boieldieu’s opera Le Calife de Bagdad (), mentioned in Le Père Goriot (iii.  and n. ). 18 It was in autumn , immediately after Le Médecin de campagne that César Birotteau was first sketched: vi. –; Takayama, Les Œuvres romanesques, .

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(iii) La Maison Nucingen César Birotteau is a conte stretched to a novel; La Maison Nucingen turns an article into a conte. Originating in a piece published in La Caricature in October , Une vue du grand monde,19 it is under this title that La Maison Nucingen appears over the next five years, in plans for the Études philosophiques, but also for the Scènes de la vie privée and the Scènes de la vie parisienne.20 Such catholicity is the essence of its genesis. Une vue du grand monde presents both a ‘banquier d’absolutisme’ (OD ii. ) and an abandoned lover, ‘béauté mélancolique . . . suave fille d’Ossian, à la coiffure aérienne’ (OD ii. ), anticipating the Malvina of the final tale. But the project does not coalesce around Nucingen until , when Le Père Goriot suggested as its sequel La Faillite de Nucingen, focused on the relations between Nucingen, Delphine, and Rastignac.21 The following year, in L’Interdiction, Rastignac announces: ‘J’ai été roué, mon cher, dans l’affaire de monsieur de Nucingen, je te raconterai cette histoire-là’ (iii. ). The story, now called La Haute Banque, was offered first to Le Figaro,22 then to La Presse, where it was initially welcomed by the editor, Girardin, still weathering the scandal (and raking in the subscriptions) caused by the scabrous subject matter of La Vieille Fille,23 in replacement of the potentially equally dubious La Torpille.24 But what was now La Famille Nucingen failing to make the crucial deadline for renewal of subscriptions, La Femme supérieure (Les Employés) became Balzac’s next fiction in La Presse.25 Yet any relief Girardin may have felt was ill founded, for La Maison Nucingen, when Balzac finally composed it concurrently with César Birotteau between October and December , featured a shadydealing protagonist all too similar to Girardin himself.26 So he in turn rejected La Maison Nucingen, a portent of recurrent difficulty in Balzac’s relations with La

19 Cf. Ch. (iii) above; intended as a conte philosophique and promised (as Une vue du monde) to the Revue de Paris in Mar. : Corr. i. ; cf. V , P. Citron, vi. –, and Corr. ii. –. The related sketch Une vue du grand monde (C, Prospectus (Oct. )), along with La Peau de chagrin and Béatrix, is itself indebted to Miss Edgeworth’s Belinda, and owes its title to another of the Irish writer’s works: R. de Cesare (ed.), Les Fantasies de la Gina (Rezé, ), –, cit. R. Chollet, AB (), –. 20 See plan for Études de mœurs au XIXème siècle, where Une vue du monde figures in vol. iv, next to Conversations entre onze heures et minuit: PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. . Cf. also fo. , CHH xxviii. , and fo. , CHH xxviii. , but these do not identify the cycles in which the story was to appear. 21 Clark, ‘Vers une édition critique de la Maison Nucingen’. 22 Balzac to Karr,  Nov. , Corr. iii. –; see R. Guise, vi.  et seq. 23 Girardin to Balzac,  Nov. , Corr. iii. ; La Vieille Fille, La Presse ( Oct.– Nov. ); cf. e.g. Corr. iii, nos. , , , and P. Kinder, ‘Un directeur de journal, ses auteurs et ses lecteurs en ’, AB (). 24 Not written and published until ; see section (iv) below. 25 – July ; cf. Corr. iii, nos. , . 26 Cf. P. Kinder, ‘Balzac, Girardin et la publication de La Maison Nucingen’, AB ().

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Presse over the coming years.27 In the short term, Balzac had turned to César Birotteau, which had meanwhile been promised to Le Figaro, in place of the initial offer of La Maison Nucingen; both eventually first appeared in book form, the novel in December, the story, sandwiched between La Femme supérieure and La Torpille, in August .28 It was not until a social context was being woven in these other novels that La Maison Nucingen really came to life. The story emerges from a denser creative and fictional milieu than any of its predecessors, sharing the techniques, themes, and characters of the works with which it was composed.29 The nine sets of proofs were worked concurrently with, and as intensively as, the novels; in no way is La Maison Nucingen a poor relation. Balzac’s revisions progressively shift the emphasis away from Bixiou’s story of how Beaudenord came to marry Isaure d’Aldrigger (a vestige of the Rastignac–Delphine love interest which would have featured in the project of ), and towards the commercial world.30 Like César Birotteau and La Femme supérieure, for the purpose of serialization it was originally subdivided into chapters marking narrative progress;31 both César Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen share an overarching framing action—in the novel, Birotteau’s rise and fall, here, the acquisition of Nucingen’s fortune. The gradual introduction of successive characters delays our final encounter with the protagonist and the answers to the questions: How did Nucingen make his money? How did Rastignac make his way? La Maison Nucingen none the less owes much to earlier tales—to fantastic but socially critical frame stories like Sarrasine or L’Auberge rouge which reveal, or reconstruct, the sources of their protagonists’ wealth.32 It reflects the dualism of Sarrasine, but in a peculiarly parodic and ironized way. The main narrator, Bixiou, like his predecessor in the earlier tale, is a Balzac double, but a disillusioned version of his earlier self (vi. )— a debased dualist, flippantly dividing his story into twos—material and spiritual happiness (vi. ), Nucingen ‘cubique, . . . gras, lourd comme un sac’, Tillet like ‘du coton filé trop fin’ (vi. 27 Cf. Corr. iii.  and n. ; Kinder, ‘Balzac, Girardin’, , and ‘Balzac et La Presse’, Ph.D. thesis, Liverpool, , chs. – passim, which trace the relationship in detail; the fault was far from solely Girardin’s. Balzac did not publish again in La Presse until Le Curé de village (). 28  o vols., BF ( Oct. ). Cf. also Clark, ‘Vers une édition critique de la Maison Nucingen’; P. Citron, vi. –. 29 And even a passage of text, transferred from the story to César Birotteau: Lov. A , fo. , vi. c. 30 Cf. P. Citron, vi. ; BRC –. The story also draws directly on real figures beyond Girardin himself: La Maison Nucingen, ed. A.-M. Meininger (), –. 31 Clark, ‘Vers une édition de la Maison Nucingen’, . But neither César Birotteau nor La Maison Nucingen was published in daily instalments. 32 Similarities to these stories and to L’Élixir de longue vie suggest that the opening of La Maison Nucingen may even have been drafted in late . The comparison of the young man who is in love but destitute to having ‘une jambe glacée comme la mienne par le vent coulis de la porte, et l’autre grillée par la braise du feu’ echoes the opening of Sarrasine (vi. ; cf. vi. –); the private chamber of La Maison Nucingen recalls the boudoir of the earlier story (vi. , ).

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), the dark and blonde Aldrigger sisters (vi. , ), suggested perhaps by Aquilina and Euphrasie in La Peau de chagrin, twice republished in this period.33 The frame narrator’s restricted viewpoint (through a partition in a restaurant, he can hear, but cannot see, the story of Nucingen’s fortune being told) recalls the similarly limited perspective of Le Grand d’Espagne. Yet, once again, the main features are doubled: both Bixiou and Blondet tell Finot and Couture the story of how Nucingen and Rastignac made their fortunes by duping the Aldrigger parents, their two daughters, and Beaudenord—a reflection of César Birotteau. This stress on the narrating situation (vi. – and passim) is the story’s most striking characteristic. La Maison Nucingen celebrates conversation as the primary mode of social and fictional discourse, a manifestation of the very interconnectedness of life. ‘Opinions et forme, tout y est en dehors des conditions littéraires’ (vi. –). Evident in genesis (Esther and Nucingen emerge from Le Père Goriot, Massimilla Doni from Gambara, La Maison Nucingen emerges within César Birotteau as later La Cousine Bette within Le Cousin Pons),34 it has its inevitable impact upon genre. Desroches, Tillet, Claparon, Bixiou, Finot, Matifat, Werbrust, Palma, Gigonnet, and the Kellers recur in César Birotteau, La Maison Nucingen, and La Femme supérieure as within a social circle, or a miniature fictional cycle, the narratives they generate expanding the stories where they appear: Nucingen, d’Aldrigger, and Beaudenord have to be described because the story would be incomprehensible without them. Balzac’s compositional expansions, far from being an end in themselves, or filling space merely because it had to be filled, reflect a fundamental social truth. The story’s double frame, its seemingly serendipitous structure, express not just Bixiou’s narrative verve, or Balzac’s wanton ingenuity, but the fact that, in this inextricably interrelated world, just as the narrative itself is overheard, so everything occurs indirectly, at one, or more, removes. Rastignac loves Delphine par procuration; he is ‘comme un militaire qui ne place son courage qu’à quatre-vingt dix-jours’ (vi. , ). And Balzac’s banker is as secretive as his Ruggieri, ‘un conquérant qui sacrifie des masses pour arriver à des résultats cachés, ses soldats sont les intérêts des particuliers’ (vi. ).35 The duping of Beaudenord implies the duping of d’Aldrigger; the story of the one demands the other. Marriage is a cover for financial manipulation; money appears as the fundamental motive for transactions, for those that make them (we discover ‘ce qu’est Nucingen, financièrement parlant’, vi. ), and for the narrative itself: ‘Je lui donne de l’esprit pour deux mille francs’ says Bixiou to Blondet, ‘Ce Étphil. – (Dec. ); Balzac illustré, BF ( July ). Cf. A. Lorant, vii.  et seq., –, –; Les Parents pauvres d’Honoré de Balzac (Geneva, ), i. –; D. Adamson, The Genesis of ‘Le Cousin Pons’ (Oxford, ), chs.  and ; T. Farrant, ‘Les Premières Notes des deux bassons’, AB (). 35 See Ch.  above on Le Secret des Ruggieri. Nucingen’s secrecy reminds us of the common alchemical source of his story, César Birotteau, Gambara, Illusions perdues, and La Recherche de l’absolu. 33 34

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diable de Couture a tellement l’habitude d’anticiper les dividendes, qu’il anticipe le dénouement de mon histoire’ (vi. , ). As in La Peau de chagrin, value is accorded only by a social conspiracy of deception. Here, however, the chief exchange is virtual: Nucingen survives by trading rumour, the very stuff of the story, by manipulating markets to make himself and his shares known (vi. ), and at arm’s length, by using Rastignac to dupe Beaudenord. His vérités are as virtual as his share issues; he is a thoroughly post-modern millionaire. In La Maison Nucingen form is a miseenabyme of content, causal and narrative abstruseness an index of moral relativity. ‘ , comme  , comme  , expriment quelque chose de relatif ’ (vi. ). If Blondet’s remark is ‘Archi-morale’, he and his companions are not, and their reputation for scathing gossip impugns their credibility (as Bixiou implies, vi. ). Both narrative and commercial discourse are founded on rumour and fictional (mis-)representation; ‘donner le change’ is the tactic of both narrator and author, duping their victims with false ‘valeurs’;36 abuse of credit, in the secondary, financial sense, leads to its fundamental abuse as trust: ‘Nucingen a osé dire qu’il n’y a que des apparences d’honnête homme’ (vi. ). Narrators and author manipulate discourse, aware of its probable reception, devoid of responsibility for its impact. Just as Nucingen (and Rastignac, or Bixiou, their less culpable and satirical shadow) can shed crocodile tears for their victims (vi. ), so the authorial narrator, and by extension the author himself, is at arm’s length from the narrative he purveys: ‘c’est ce que cela fut: un potpourri de choses sinistres qui peint notre temps, auquel l’on ne devrait raconter que de semblables histoires, et j’en laisse la responsabilité d’ailleurs au narrateur principal’ (vi. ). We are not far from the trading in reputations of Illusions perdues. Authorial remoteness is ideologically indispensable. The fictional narrators’ quasi-theatrical37 immediacy creates more substantial, believable, and independent characters, and also, perhaps, more autonomous readers, faced both with reconstructing the factual truth of events (as in L’Auberge rouge or La Grande Bretèche), and with discovering a narrative and a moral telos in the story. Here, its very decentredness, its relation by fictional narrators, and its indissoluble interrelation with César Birotteau and La Femme supérieure, create a moral and narrative relativity which is paradoxically its thematic core. The virtual world of La Maison Nucingen removes thought from action, morality from its consequence. Although the framed story eventually reveals how Rastignac made his fortune, it does not question the fundamental social and moral fact established at its opening, ‘l’omnipotence, l’omniscience, l’omniconvenance de l’argent’ (vi. ). At best it offers an anti-moral, amoral in its import, an implicit celebration of its protagonists’ abilities to cut through the 36 37

et seq.

Cf. A. Kotin, ‘La Maison Nucingen, ou le récit financier’, Romanic Review,  (), –. Cf. J.-L. Bourget, ‘Ni du roman, ni du théâtre’, Poétique, :  (Nov. ), –, esp. 

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complex texture of legality: ‘Les lois sont des toiles d’araignées à travers lesquelles passent les grosses mouches et où restent les petites.’38 The moral is itself relativized by being placed in the mealy mouth of Blondet, and by the more absolute fact of the very unsoundness of the law, from which only chance can protect: ‘La Légalité tue la Société moderne’ (vi. ). A previous version of the ending had stressed journalism, as would Illusions perdues, as the ultimate relativizer of perspective: ‘le journalisme, c’est l’alchimie de l’intelligence’ (vi. c); in the final narrative it is an absolute moral relativity which carries weight: ‘Il n’y a pas de vertu absolue, mais des circonstances.’39 The published ending draws back into the wider social context and sends us back to the beginning: —Tiens, il y avait du monde à côté, dit Finot en nous entendant sortir. —Il y a toujours du monde à côté, répondit Bixiou qui devait être aviné. (vi. )

The pun underlines the convergence of literal and figurative; yet at the very same moment unravels this neat homology. There are neither moral nor narrative absolutes, but always other stories, characters, and perspectives. The end of La Maison Nucingen points paradoxically to its lack of moral and narrative telos; to the fact that however much satirists mock, a Nucingen will always survive them. La Maison Nucingen exemplifies, in microcosm, the laws which rule the world, the impossibility of narrative and moral conclusion.

(iv) Conversation and Contingency: La Torpille La Torpille defers, but does not solve, such problems of narrative and moral resolution. Conceived in May and composed in July , and published with La Maison Nucingen and La Femme supérieure that September,40 it emerged from the relativistic context of its companions. If what is now the first part of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes 41 derives from the pairing of a banker and a whore first mentioned in Balzac’s  note for Une fille de Paris,42 it was not to be fully developed until the completion of Les Amours d’un vieux banquier, the third part of 38 vi. . Blondet’s remark, which he attributes to Montesquieu, echoes a Balzac note of perhaps as early as : ‘Les lois sont des fils qui étranglent les petits et qu’emportent les grands (d’un auteur)’ (Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme, OD i. ). Was this La Maison Nucingen’s very first point of departure? 39 The dictum, attributed to Rastignac (vi. ), recalls Vautrin: ‘Il n’y a pas de principes, il n’y a que des circonstances’ (Le Père Goriot, iii. ). 40  Sept. , BF ( Oct. ),  o vols.; nd edn.,  Nov.  [dated ],  o vols., minus the preface to La Femme supérieure. 41 In fact, La Torpille corresponds broadly to somewhat under half of the first part of the novel (vi. –d), which was augmented by approximately two chapters in the de Potter edition of : cf. vi. . 42 PSF, fo.  (), CHH xxviii. . See sect. (i) above.

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Splendeurs et misères, in .43 In fact, La Torpille was prompted by more recent innovations: the debut of the prostitute heroine Esther van Gobseck, a pendant to the depraved Paquita of La Fille aux yeux d’or, in the  reworking of the first version of Gobseck, Les Dangers de l’inconduite, as Le Papa Gobseck; 44 and the creation of Vautrin, in Le Père Goriot, where the title is first noted.45 The Esther–Lucien– Herrera triangle forms the core of La Torpille. The story starts like La Peau de chagrin, with the protagonist’s attempted suicide, and continues with her provisional rescue by a demonic pact—delivered not by an antiquary, but by Herrera, a more human yet infinitely more ambiguous and sinister adversary (vi. d). Yet here La Torpille stops. If Balzac had Nucingen’s love for her in mind in , he does not mention Les Amours d’un vieux millionnaire until three years later, when both were brought to mind by Balzac’s rereading of La Maison Nucingen and Esther’s episodic reappearances elsewhere.46 In the final versions of Splendeurs et misères, the episodes recounting Nucingen’s love were incorporated, much like the digressions in La Maison Nucingen but on a more massive scale, into the overarching structure of the relations between Esther, Lucien, and Herrera, his true identity as Jacques Collin finally revealed, to be completed by La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin in .47 La Torpille could never have made a satisfactory self-contained narrative because it ends, not like the  Illusions perdues, with the breaking of a symmetrical protagonist pair (cf. v. , v. –, and nn. a, e), but even more in medias res, with the fact of Herrera’s mysterious omnipotence, his domination of Lucien and Esther, reduced to the apparently inconsequential scene of the two lovers espying that amoral person, ‘un vieux lascar qui ne croit ni à Dieu ni au diable’ (vi. e), from their window. It is an ending not so much pregnant, as stillborn. Yet if La Torpille lacks the circularity we expect of stories, it is nevertheless an open-ended text, growing contingently from Balzac’s contemporary creation, continuing likewise in its sequels still to come.48 Open-endedness, social and 43 vi. –. It was at this point that Nucingen moved centre-stage, as Balzac sketched out the overall shape of the work: La Torpille, Entre deux tigres, La Monnaie d’une belle fille, Les Peines de cœur d’un loup-cervier, La Fin de Vautrin. 44 Cf. ii.  and , and B. Lalande, ‘Les États successifs d’une nouvelle de Balzac: Gobseck’, RHLF ( and ). 45 Le Père Goriot, ‘Bulletin de travail’,  Jan. , Lov. A , fo. : cf. Pommier, L’Invention et l’écriture dans ‘La Torpille’ d’Honoré de Balzac,  n. . Vautrin, ‘qui excita tant de curiosité et d’étonnement lors de la publication du Père Goriot’, had been announced as the principal character of La Torpille in the Chronique de Paris in June  (BRC ). 46 Notably in La Rabouilleuse: cf. P. Citron, vi. . 47 La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin, La Presse ( Apr.– May ). The four parts of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes were not to be published as a unified whole until the Michel Lévy edition of La Comédie humaine (–),  vols. (vols. xviii and xix). 48 Its poorly managed ending, perhaps the worst in Balzac’s work, results from the conflict between publishing constraints and Balzac’s inflationary processes of composition, a nouvelle conceived as perhaps six feuillets expanding into a manuscript of thirty: vi. , and Pommier, L’Invention et l’écriture dans ‘La Torpille’ d’Honoré de Balzac, .

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conversational serendipity, are written into the tale from the start: the Châtelets’ and Rastignac’s discussion of Lucien (vi. –), the accident of Esther’s recognition at the opera, by Bixiou, Blondet, Finot, and des Lupeaulx, place us in the social world common to the two nodal centres of Balzac’s world thus far, Le Père Goriot and Illusions perdues, and La Femme supérieure (Les Employés), César Birotteau, and La Maison Nucingen.49 This convergence of two major character groups makes La Torpille as fundamental to Balzac’s creation as does its subject, the omnipotence of sexual desire.50 Where La Maison Nucingen deals with the sublimation of the sexual in the financial, in the shape of seduction by rumour and the broking of marriage for financial gain, La Torpille places its subject, and the reader, centre-stage. Where, in the earlier story, narrator and reader only ‘eavesdrop’ on the action, here we see it for ourselves. La Torpille moves from narrative to visual presentation, from the opening account of the ‘bal de l’Opéra’ to immediate confrontation with its habitués. They live and die by appearances: Lucien by his beauty, Esther and Herrera by anonymity. To see is to be empowered, to attain ultimate subjecthood; to be seen, conversely, is to be subject to others, to become their object. Both depend on theatrical manipulations: Esther ‘sait rire et fait rire’, ‘science des grands auteurs et des grand acteurs’ (vi. ); Herrera transforms his protégés’ identity and his own, becoming, via his personae as priest or soldier (vi. , ), totally inscrutable (vi. ).51 Esther, having been recognized, feels compelled to kill herself; Herrera ‘reforms’ her to make a marriage for Lucien: ‘vous devez vous changer entièrement . . . une parole, un geste qui décélerait la Torpille tue la femme de Lucien’ (vi. –; cf. ). Herrera’s power lies in avoidance of objecthood, in his manipulation of his own, and his protégés’, identity. Appearance is reality, social identity, identity tout court; its loss is social death. By making his world both audible and visible, Balzac transforms it from a Conversation entre onze heures et minuit into a Scène de la vie parisienne; 52 in stressing the self-consciousness of his characters’ mise-en-scène, he turns the tangential (gossip, La Maison Nucingen’s story overheard) into the central; he makes the scene the theme.

49 Indeed, La Torpille contains only two new characters, Vernou and the duchesse de Chaulieu: BRC . 50 Emphasized by La Torpille’s stress on instinct and the animalistic, and by its physiological references, as prominent as in La Vieille Fille: vi. , , –. 51 Cf. C. Bernheimer, ‘Prostitution and Narrative: Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes’, L’Esprit créateur, :  (), esp. , ; and R. D. E. Burton, ‘The Unseen Seer, or Proteus in the City’, French Studies, :  (Jan. ), –. 52 On  Aug.  Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (the complete novel minus La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin, not to be written until ) made its appearance in the de Potter edition, joined by Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit, now entitled Échantillon de causerie française; it was included in the Scènes de la vie parisienne in vol. xi of F the following month (BF ( Sept. ); cf. V ).

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The centrality of the theatrical is evident in strikingly direct presentation, where dialogue and description dominate. Its principal developments fall into four clearly divided ‘acts’;53 its vigorous and conflictual conversations, often amplified on proof,54 are accompanied by ‘stage-directions’ and telling gestures—Esther’s ‘attrayante pantomime’ in her first conversation with Herrera (vi. ), his frequent, and revealing, indifference to her charms (vi. –), a silent pause which reveals the extent of his command (vi. ), or, at the end, Lucien’s voiceless admiration for his saviour: ‘il se jeta dans les bras de l’homme qu’il avait outragé, répara tout par un seul regard et par la muette effusion de ses sentiments’ (vi. ). We get a complete picture of the situation—so complete, indeed, that the characters usurp much of the narrator’s diegetic function, incorporating, in the gossip they exchange, much of what could be properly narratorial exposition (vi. , , – passim). In the act of speaking, the characters assume power, but not in the way of La Maison Nucingen, however, where narrators and narratives so proliferate that author and action (other than the authorial narrator and his story) are almost excluded. In La Torpille, the narrator does not so much narrate, as provide the visual notation which sets Esther, Lucien, and Herrera in relief, conveying their situation’s enigmatic irony. Narrator and characters, indeed, are held in much finer balance than in La Maison Nucingen: if the characters play a more immediate role, in dramatic, dialogued exchanges with each other, rather than mere dialogued accounts of others’ earlier exploits, then the narrator is less a storyteller than a director, creating the situations and conditions which allow us to divine them. The setpiece descriptions are so expressive that places (the rue des Orties [ F: de Langlade] or Esther’s room, vi. –) virtually become people: 53 These ‘acts’ correspond to MS divisions (‘Le bal de l’Opéra’, ‘La Fille repentie’, ‘La pensionnaire’, and ‘Herrera’, vi. –d; d–c; c–b; b–e) with the interesting exception of ‘La pensionnaire’(d), which appears on the second proof at the moment when the final division, ‘Herrera’, disappears. It is as if, at the beginning of that section, Balzac were still envisaging a creator story, the last in a line from Les Souffrances de l’inventeur to César Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen, culminating in the omnipotent figure of Herrera, but was obliged by the imperatives of the larger narrative of which La Torpille was only part, to incorporate Lucien and Esther by its end. In the near future, Herrera, or rather, Collin/Vautrin, the character ultimately behind this persona, was to be developed elsewhere, notably in the play Vautrin () and the last part of Illusions perdues (): cf. Pommier, L’Invention et l’écriture dans ‘La Torpille’ d’Honoré de Balzac, –. A similar quadripartite structure was ultimately to characterize Splendeurs et misères overall, the episodes involving Esther, and subsequently Nucingen, being framed by a final return to the figure of Herrera in La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin (vi. ). 54 e.g. the conversation between the Châtelets and Rubempré (vi. b–h) and other elements of the ball scene, principally k; b; e; a; d; e, a; the description of Finot (h–e), or Lousteau’s characterization of Esther (o–e)—additions on the first two proofs. Esther’s first dialogue with Herrera (vi. b, f, a, etc.), and the first description of that character, were also developed on proof (f–a) and extensively reworked (c), as were those of Esther (e et seq., esp. a, j) and of Herrera’s relation to Lucien (g).

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En y passant pendant la journée, on ne peut se figurer ce que toutes ces rues deviennent la nuit; elles sont sillonnées par des êtres bizarres qui ne sont d’aucun monde; des formes à demi nues et blanches meublent les murs, l’ombre est animée . . . Certaines portes entrebâillées se mettent à rire aux éclats . . . Des ritournelles sortent d’entre les pavés. Le bruit n’est pas vague, il signifie quelque chose: quand il est rauque, c’est une voix; mais s’il ressemble à un chant, il n’a plus rien d’humain, il approche du sifflement . . . Cet ensemble de choses donne le vertige. (vi. ; minor variants on first edition)

This, one of Balzac’s major amplifications on proof,55 shows how his reworking of the narrator’s role tends in the same direction as his overall scenic aesthetic. A passage of authorial commentary, comparing Esther’s unhappy redemption to the death of Mme de Maintenon’s carp, moved from a muddy pond to a marble basin, is repositioned so that it no longer comes at the end of a summary of Esther’s life, but in its middle, enabling the narrative to continue with renewed vigour at the beginning of the next paragraph, with Esther’s lastditch attempt at redemption.56 And, just as much exposition is incorporated into dialogue, so description is focused through the characters’ eyes— Herrera’s, for example, as he contemplates the disorder of Esther’s room.57 As a result, the narrative is structured less explicitly, by the narrator, than implicitly, by the characters: the scene can speak for itself. The narrator’s commentaries nevertheless supply the ballast which stabilizes a volatile and disunified world: Quiconque a trempé dans le journalisme, ou y trempe encore, est dans la nécessité cruelle de saluer les hommes qu’il méprise, de sourire à son meilleur ennemi . . . On s’habitue à voir faire le mal . . .; on commence par l’approuver, on finit par le commettre. A la longue, l’âme, sans cesse maculée par de honteuses et continuelles transactions, s’amoindrit, le ressort des pensées nobles se rouille, les gonds de la banalité s’usent et tournent d’eux-mêmes. . . . Lucien ne sut rien répondre au patelinage de Blondet, dont l’esprit exerçait sur lui d’irrésistibles séductions, qui conservait l’ascendant du corrupteur sur l’élève . . . (vi. )

The parallel between Lucien’s prostitution, Esther’s, and Herrera, is clear, the authorial narrator ending this ex cathedra statement with, in the final clause, a mondain tone which might have come from his characters—style indirect libre avant la lettre, making the authorial narrator here almost as much a part of the scene as in La Maison Nucingen. The second proof makes the continuity between literary and literal prostitution unmistakeable:

55 vi. j–a, a development on first proof. The original manuscript narrative is more immediate, continuing directly from description of Esther’s street to the phrase ‘Le prêtre frappa’, and then to the interior of Esther’s room (vi.  and d). 56 vi. d, j. The Maintenon anecdote comes from Champfort: P. Citron, ‘Balzac, lecteur de Champfort’, AB (), . 57 vi. j–f, an addition on first proof.

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Lucien avait quitté le métier après en avoir subi toutes les horreurs, et il se trouvait là comme une fille repentie qui rencontre deux prostituées en exercice; il rougit en se sentant prendre la taille par Blondet, et demeura sans défense devant Finot, qui . . . conservait d’autant plus de supériorité sur lui qu’il avait joué le rôle de protecteur envers le talent qu’il avait exploité. (vi. e)

And, in the final text, a similar passage relates to Esther: Les femmes qui ont mené la vie alors si violemment répudiée par Esther arrivent à une indifférence absolue sur les formes extérieures de l’homme. Elles ressemblent au critique littéraire d’aujourd’hui . . . il a tant lu d’ouvrages, il en voit tant passer . . . qu’il arrive au dégoût de toute chose et continue néanmoins à juger. Il faut un miracle pour que cet écrivain produise une œuvre, de même que l’amour pur et noble exige un autre miracle pour éclore dans le cœur d’une courtisane. (vi. )

These parallels imply a global moral decline; perhaps the reader is even implicated with this disillusioned but indefatigably judgemental critic. The balance between his doxa and the characters’ action reflects other unifying symmetries. Lucien’s transformisme echoes Herrera’s (‘[il] recommence les Métamorphoses d’Ovide’, vi. ); both he and Esther are distinguished by their eyes (vi. , ), Esther ‘étrange’, Herrera ‘singulier’ (vi. ), Esther embodying ‘la plus haute opulence, la plus basse misère’ (vi. ) Lucien, ‘nécessairement extrême en tout, en bien comme en mal’, divining ‘l’ange dans la fille’ (vi. ). Such dichotomies are a powerful narrative motor, but one only set in action as La Torpille was extended, Lucien reflecting Nucingen as Esther’s lovers, Esther reflecting Herrera as Lucien’s, Collin echoing Nucingen as a great creator, Esther encompassing both splendeur and misère. In its  provisional state, La Torpille ends more like a love affair between Lucien and Herrera with, in the final view of this ‘vieux lascar’ (vi. ) from the window, only the hint of the triangular conflict to come. In contrast to the end of the  Illusions perdues (which, in Lucien and Mme de Bargeton’s departure and subsequent rupture, leaves open the circle otherwise closed by Eve and David’s marriage, and subverts an existing model of fictional coherence), the end of La Torpille ignores it altogether. The coherent work is in the future sequels. But this open-endedness was more than an accident of publishing, a mere commercial necessity. It becomes a central feature of the work itself, stemming from Balzac’s creation of a fictional society founded on conversation, and the increasingly threedimensional nature of its narrating world.

(v) Une fille d’Eve The appearance of La Torpille with La Femme supérieure and La Maison Nucingen58 is indicative of the symbiotic genesis of narrative sequels at this point in 58

La Femme supérieure, La Maison Nucingen, La Torpille (Werdet, ),  o vols. BF ( Oct. ).

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Balzac’s work. In October , Les Rivalités en province59 finally ended the hitherto inconclusive publication of Le Cabinet des Antiques, begun in the Chronique de Paris on  March ; two months later, Une fille d’Eve inaugurated one of Balzac’s two determinant newspaper collaborations of the s, with Le Siècle; Le Curé de Village simultaneously relaunched the other, with La Presse.60 But Une fille d’Eve was itself the quasi-sequel of a work still to appear, emerging endogenously from Les Amours forcés, the uncompleted novel which in  would become Béatrix.61 Une fille d’Eve, the story of Marie de Vandenesse’s nearadultery with Nathan, partially reverses Les Amours forcés, where Emma de Retzau plans to elope with a character called Nathan (Conti, in Béatrix).62 In , La Fausse Maîtresse would in turn reflect Une fille d’Eve, Thadée Paz hiding his adulterous love for Marie Laginska; and, in , Balzac would turn what had been intended to be a nouvelle, Sabine de Grandlieu, into a novel-length sequel to Béatrix.63 In the high years of his maturity as a novelist, Balzac proceeds as if he were still writing cycles of stories, fictions expanding less through mere extension than through the incorporation of authorial commentary, character sketches, and description into basic short-story structures, the feuilleton’s linear dynamic combining with the imagic coherence and circular patterns of short fiction. In its three weeks or so of composition, Une fille d’Eve alone went through seven sets of proofs. At some , words long, ‘roman assez bref ’, ‘court roman ou longue nouvelle’,64 it is a cas-limite in his fiction, perhaps the example par excellence of the tensions between brevity and length, linear and lateral expansion, cohesion and cross-reference to other creations, which lie at the centre of his work. Une fille d’Eve’s ultimate source in Balzac’s work lies in the  Scènes de la vie privée. Its protagonists, Marie-Eugénie and Marie-Angélique, are the daughters of Granville’s unhappy marriage to the prudish Angélique in Une double famille; its title, initially intended for La Femme abandonnée, appears in his notebooks Le Constitutionnel ( Sept.– Oct. ). Une fille d’Eve, Le Siècle ( Dec. – Jan. ); Le Curé de village, La Presse (– Jan.,  June– July,  July– Aug. ). On Balzac’s principal serialized work, see S. Vachon, ‘Balzac en feuilletons et en livres’, in A. Vaillant (ed.), Mesure(s) du livre (), and ‘L’Œuvre au comptoit’, AB (). 61 BRC –, –. 62 Lov. A , repr. ii. –. A. R. Pugh (BRC) details the networks linking these contemporary texts with Une fille d’Eve, itself inspired by Balzac’s adventure with Countess Maffei: cf. R. Pierrot, ii. –, and P. Citron, ‘Aux sources d’Une fille d’Eve’, AB (), –. 63 Les Petits Manèges d’une femme vertueuse, Le Messager ( Dec. – Jan. ). See BRC –. 64 R. Pierrot, ii. ; Citron, ‘Aux sources d’Une fille d’Eve’, . With the significant exception of one comment made after Une fille d’Eve was completed (LH i. ; cf. Ch. (ii) below), Balzac generally calls the work a nouvelle, no doubt counterdistinctively in relation to Béatrix, which is most frequently an ‘œuvre’ or ‘ouvrage’: Corr. iii. , ; , , ; cf. his references to La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons, LH ii. , . For Souverain’s calculations of length, see Corr. iii. –, –. 59 60

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from around .65 Though not written until six years later, Une fille d’Eve has much in common with earlier stories. It begins like a conte moral,66 in a domestic, feminine setting with the two innocent, emotionally ignorant protagonists. From this primal union, recalling Le Message and La Grenadière, but transposed to Paris, the narrative develops to the verge of chaos, in Marie-Angélique’s affair with Nathan. It is another story of adultery, of the tension between aristocrat and bourgeois, represented by the women’s two contrasting husbands, Vandenesse and du Tillet; another love triangle, built around starkly drawn antitheses imagically expressed, Nathan’s contortedness contrasting with Vandenesse’s rectitude, his movements ‘comme un cheval de race qui s’impatiente’ with Vandenesse’s ‘chevaux à tenue anglaise’, and more closely resembling Marie’s preferred ‘équipage . . . mal attelé’ (ii. –, at ); another story, like La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, deriving from an initial symbol, here the chassé-croisé: ‘Il eut passé pour fou, celui qui aurait dit au comte Félix de Vandenesse que, dans ce chassé-croisé, il perdrait sa couronne de pair et qu’elle se retrouverait sur la tête de son beau-père’ (ii. ). Yet from these bases, Une fille d’Eve develops very differently. Unlike many of those in the first series of Scènes, the two women are already married at the outset—something which complicates their situation both emotionally and practically. Though focused primarily, like the earlier stories, on one couple, Félix/Marie-Angélique—here (as in La Maison or Une double famille) with a third party, Nathan—the initiating role of a different couple, the two sisters, and the subsequent presence of Nathan’s actress lover Florine, permits more developed and substantial symmetries which bring Une fille d’Eve closer to a novel.67 Balzac uses a similar pair of contrastingly married women in the epistolary ‘livre d’amour’ he was writing concurrently, Soeur Marie des Anges, now Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées.68 But Une fille d’Eve’s contrasts are more complex: the nouvelle has no fewer than fifty-three recurring characters, eighteen more than Mémoires, and more than any other story in La Comédie humaine.69 To the six

65 Cf. PSF, fos. ,  (three times), , , CHH xxviii. , –, , ; fo. , CHH xxviii. , etc. Cf. Citron, ‘Aux sources d’Une fille d’Eve’. 66 Indeed, Une fille d’Eve alludes to Perrault’s La Barbe bleue (ii. ), and seems to rework elements of Marmontel’s Le Mari sylphe, notably the young wife’s claustrophobic boredom, and the husband’s conquest of her through improbable, effeminate, if not feminine, disguise (ii. , –; cf. Marmontel, Le Mari sylphe, in Contes moraux (London, ), i. – et seq.; –). Balzac had already drawn on the latter for La Dernière Fée: Premiers romans, ed. A. Lorant (), i. , n. ). 67 He was to construct Béatrix around similar oppositions: cf. A. Mura, Béatrix ou la logique des contraires (). 68 La Presse ( Nov. –Jan. ), with interruptions; Souverain,  o vols, BF ( May ); nd edn. F (Sept. ). 69 BRC , .

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protagonists, over the seven sets of proofs, Balzac appends extensive additions, much the method applied chiefly to conversation in La Torpille, but extended over their histories, relations, and associates.70 In manuscript, there are no chapter divisions before chapter , suggesting a brief, rapidly written story; but the drafting of chapters  to  only after proof-correction of their predecessors71 shows Balzac changing horses, from anecdote to story, and from story to nouvelle—or maybe riding all three. The expansion on proof of chapters  to  is an underpinning of addition with accretion, of linear with ‘lateral’ expansion. In consequence, the centre of gravity moves from a story’s enddirectedness (which illustrates or makes a point) to a novelistic emphasis on process—from showing ‘what’, to ‘how’; the fundamental point, and no doubt ending, Marie-Angélique’s renunciation of Nathan and return to Vandenesse, is somewhat assimilated within the textual conclusion relating Nathan’s capitulation to the regime and his receipt of the Légion d’honneur. Balzac’s creation of this conclusion by extracting it from what is now the middle of the story (ii. g, a), incorporating elsewhere elements shared with Les Amours forcés or plagiarisms of Onuphirus,72 reverses the technique of La Duchesse de Langeais (which incorporates in its midst the end of Dezesperance d’amour), and uses a technique of composition by collage already implicit in the  reframing of La Grande Bretèche as La Grande Bretèche ou les trois vengeances.73 Speed and simultaneity of composition were to make it commonplace in Petites misères de la vie conjugale, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, Le Diable à Paris, or narratives such as Les Comédiens sans le savoir or Splendeurs et misères.74 In taking a conte-moral structure and using antithesis to drive it forward (here via subsidiary complications such as the involvement of Tillet’s associates in the penultimate episode), Une fille d’Eve does nothing new. What is striking is the 70 e.g. amplification of the opening, du Tillet’s or Marie-Eugénie’s pasts, and the sister’s education (ii. b, a, b, a, f, d); the portraits of Schmucke and Vandenesse (ii. d, b, c, a); the development of Nathan’s history, character, and associations (ii. a, a, b) or Florine’s (ii. c); the addition of doxa on good marriages, balance, or model husbands (ii. a, c, a); the development of continuous narrative into dialogue or scenes, as in Le Bal de Sceaux (cf. Ch.  above): ii. a, a, a and b, a, a, b, c, e, a); the three-page addition detailing the plot against Nathan: ii. b; and additions of doxa and narrative combined: ii. a, a, b, b. 71 Lov. A , fo. ; cf. R. Pierrot, ii. –. 72 Citron, ‘Aux sources d’Une fille d’Eve’, –, and R. Pierrot, ii. ; E. Brua, ‘Gautier aide de Balzac’, AB (), –, and P. Berthier, ‘Balzac lecteur de Gautier’, AB (), –, cit. R. Pierrot, ii. –,  n. ,  n. . 73 La Grande Bretèche ou les trois vengeances, ÉtM  (), is a further reframing, after Le Conseil (: see Ch.  above) of La Grande Bretèche with two stories from Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit and a new preamble and conclusion. Balzac would engage in similar reorderings in Pierre Grassou (), the  recasting of Le Curé de village, and the reworking of Le Secret des Ruggieri in Catherine de Médicis expliquée (–), where in each case the opening of a narrative becomes its core. 74 Cf. Chs. , , and  below.

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sequential operation of these contrasts in the feuilleton,75 whose daily publication, with only two interruptions, must have made the alternatory effect very striking. In using antitheses for linear extension, in holding ‘lateral’ and linear development, cohesiveness and dissipation, in tension, Une fille d’Eve uses a story’s structures to write a novel. But contrast also motivates the story more fundamentally. Its absence is the trigger for adultery: La vie résulte de deux principes opposés: quand l’un manque, l’être souffre. . . . Vandenesse, en satisfaisant à tout, avait supprimé le désir, ce roi de la création. . . . L’extrême chaleur, l’extrême malheur, le bonheur complet, tous les principes absolus trônent sur des espaces dénués de productions: ils veulent être seuls, ils étouffent tout ce qui n’est pas eux . . . il la jeta dans l’infini le plus bleu, le moins nuageux de l’amour. (ii. )

The blue eternity (a clin d’œil to Mademoiselle de Maupin, later misquoted: ii. ) connotes both the Ideal and ennui; it suggests both the force which drives Marie-Angélique to the unlikely fantasy of Schmucke as lover, and the extreme rigidity of the conte moral. In opposition to these inflexible opposites stands their transcendence, culminating when Vandenesse, disguised as a woman at the bal de l’Opéra, reveals to his wife the truth of their situation by allowing her to observe Nathan and Florine together. It is Florine, rather than Nathan, who achieves a truly eclectic encompassing of diversity. Where Nathan is but a dissipator, concealing ‘mille rivalités à couvert sous des systèmes’, incapable of ‘la continuité du travail appliquée à la création d’un monument’ (ii. –), 75 R. Pierrot lists the divisions of the first, newspaper, publication on ii. , which correspond to Balzac’s indications on proof. There are no chapter, or rather instalment, divisions in MS before episode III (Lov. A , fo. ), which equates to the beginning of episode VI in Le Siècle (ii. b); this, and episodes VII and VIII, however, are all clearly marked in MS and are closely similar to those of the first newspaper publication (Lov. A , fos. , , , ). Episodes I and II are not marked until the first proof (Lov. A , fos.  and ), and episode II becomes episode III on second proof (ibid., fo. ; approximately equivalent to ii. ), whilst episode IV appears on fo. ; the third proof introduces episode V (ibid., fo. ); the only significant further change is the modification of episode VIII to episode IX on seventh proof (fo. ). Découpage was often more arbitrary, if not always quite as random as Gautier suggests (La Vie de Balzac, ed. R. Bolster (), –). What strikes one here is Balzac’s attention to his text’s architecture, to effects of alternation and contrast, and the absence of ‘cliffhanging’ endings: on fourth proof, for example, he actually undercuts the dramatic effect of an episode which originally closed ‘Dans cette pensée, il tomba sur la comtesse . . . comme un milan sur sa proie. Cette charmante créature . . . fut pénétrée par la bouillante énergie de ce poète enragé d’ambition’ (Lov. A , fo. , ii. ), transposing and reworking the two paragraphs that now follow, ending the episode more reflectively (and novelistically), with Marie’s happiness at her conquest: ‘Elle goûta la première joie que donne un succès nécessaire’ (ii. a and b). Balzac planned to divide Qui a terre a guerre and Les Mitouflet ou l’élection en province along similar lines, ‘par petits fragments’, giving each ‘l’intérêt d’un article’ (Corr. iii. ,  Apr. ). If ‘les scènes simples conviennent à Balzac’ (E. Gaboriau, Le Commerce ( Oct. ), cit. R. Guise, ‘Balzac et le roman-feuilleton’, AB (), ), in his feuilleton successes, La Cousine Bette or the latter parts of Splendeurs et misères, they stand in tension with these novels’ overall form.

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Florine, beneath apparent superficiality, has the cognitive powers and fundamental integrity central to creation, becoming, via her many incarnations, something like the shape-shifting Protean narrator of La Peau de chagrin, ‘blond à Bordeaux, fluet à Brest’ (x. ). Her apartment reconciles opposites—order within diversity, luxe ‘placé sans aucune symmétrie, mais avec un art inaperçu’ (ii. )—which are all the more powerful for being concealed. Like some abbaye de Thélème where ‘tout ce monde s’aimait ou se haïssait suivant les circonstances’ (ii. ), Florine’s apartment mirrors her character, constitutes a plea for tolerance. Along with Vandenesse’s cross-dressing, unlike Marsay’s (in La Fille aux yeux d’or), freely adopted, a voluntary, if carnivalesque, assumption of vulnerability, it constitutes a kind of proto-Flaubertian prière de ne pas conclure: an invitation to recognize that Schmucke is no Bartholo and Nathan no seducer; that the truth lies not in judgement but in sympathetic understanding; that only by dichotomizing dualities can a unidimensional world-view be transcended in a wider, virtual, and more permissive apprehension. This proto-Flaubertian, or perhaps Rabelaisian, withholding of judgement corresponds to the story’s narrative irresolution, and to its preface’s emphasis on work still in progress: ‘L’auteur attend  pour vous finir des aventures dont le dénouement a besoin de trois années de vieillesse’ (ii. ). But genesis is not the fundamental reason why Une fille d’Eve seems incomplete. Its initial image, the chassé-croisé, is the ballet step where ‘un partenaire passe devant l’autre’, or one foot glides in front of the other, before they resume their original positions: the story recounts a near-adultery which leaves Nathan ruined and returns Marie to her husband. Like L’Interdiction, it recounts a non-lieu, a non-event, or rather, an event whose point lies as much in the characters’ interrelations as in some external moral judgement. This can be seen in its genesis, where an authorially narrated manuscript acquires accretions fusing commentary and narrative (ii. a, a, b, b), and which are themselves overwhelmingly outnumbered by mimetic notation of characters’ backgrounds, appearance, and association. But it is also apparent in its contingent and ambiguous implications, which seem both to support and to undermine any univocal morality. Vandenesse shows genuine nobility of character, warning Marie-Angélique about Nathan, forgiving her thereafter; Granville voices an unmistakably balzacian view on women’s education (‘On veut faire des saintes, on obtient des . . .’, ii. ); but both are ironized by what readers may know of their notorious pasts. That these are alluded to, but not explicated, in Une fille d’Eve, leaves the moral question open (readers of Une double famille or Le Lys will take a different view from readers of Une fille d’Eve alone),76 along with that of the judgement of Nathan, who, if less worthy than Vandenesse, has loved Marie-Angélique sincerely. 76 The fourth edition of Une double famille, the second of the Scènes de la vie parisienne, was published in Dec. ; the second edition of Le Lys had gone on sale on  June.

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That Une fille d’Eve should end with Nathan’s relativity of principle underlines the paradoxical centrality of centrelessness, the fact that its point, its moral message, lies in the interrelation of its characters. The choice of Vandenesse and Trailles as protagonists means that it cannot fully be understood without reading Le Lys dans la vallée, César Birotteau, La Maison Nucingen, and L’Interdiction; with the addition of Massol or du Bruel, or great lists of other recurring characters— Finot, Plantin, Lousteau, Vignon, Vernou77—it attests a movement from constat, the province of the récit, to présence, the mimetic immediacy of the novel.78 Béatrix develops analogously, but more extensively, its characters gradually introduced via potential pairings (Camille Maupin, Conti, Nathan, Vignon, Félicité des Touches), taking from Les Amours forcés its primarily narrative character,79 allowing time for the fin ‘en queue de poisson’ (ii. ) it was ultimately to acquire. Béatrix even embodies the récit/roman, constat/présence dichotomy, in that Camille’s first novel, a mirror-image of Adolphe, recounts but one side of a ‘passion trompée’ (unlike Adolphe, the woman’s, ii. ), and her later remark: ‘ADOLPHE, cet épouvantable livre de Benjamin Constant, ne nous a dit que les douleurs d’Adolphe, mais celles de la femme? hein! il ne les a pas assez observés pour les peindre’ (ii. ) asks for a fuller experience of the feelings of both sexes.80 In Une fille d’Eve, constat is undoubtedly important, in the presentation of characters and moral judgement, and it has a fin ‘en queue de poisson’, in the juxtaposition of BRC . The term présence is used by C. Du Bos in a discussion of Adolphe, a common source of Béatrix and, later, La Muse du département (B. Guyon, ‘Adolphe, Béatrix and La Muse du département’, AB ()): ‘Guerre et paix est la présence de la vie, Adolphe en est le constat: de l’un à l’autre, la distance est celle du plus grand des romans au plus grand des récits’. Drawing on Ramon Fernandez, he states: ‘nombre d’œuvres, et parmi elles la plupart des romans de Balzac, sont de nature mixte et participent des deux genres . . . Voici, dit-il, comment on pourrait distinguer le roman du récit: Le roman est la représentation d’événements qui ont lieu dans le temps, représentation soumise aux conditions d’apparition et de développement de ces événements.—Le récit est la présentation d’événements qui ont eu lieu, et dont la reproduction est réglée par le narrateur conformément aux lois de l’exposition et de la persuasion . . . La différence est donc que l’événement du roman a lieu tandis que celui du récit a eu lieu, que le récit s’ordonne autour d’un passé’ (Messages, st series, nd edn. (), –, cit. C. du Bos, Approximations, ed. M. Crépu (), ). Balzac was exploring a similar notion at the time of Béatrix and Une fille d’Eve when he declared himself a partisan of ‘l’Éclectisme littéraire’, a fusion and transcendence of ‘littérature des Images’ and ‘littérature des Idées’, the literary counterpart of the colour versus line debate in visual art: ‘Enfin certaines gens complets, certaines intelligences bifrons, embrassent tout, veulent et le lyrisme et l’action, le drame et l’ode, en croyant que la prefection exige une vue totale des choses. Cette école, qui serait l’Éclectisme littéraire, demande une représentation du monde comme il est: les images et les idées, l’idée dans l’image ou l’image dans l’idée, le mouvement et la rêverie. Walter Scott a entièrement satisfait ces natures éclectiques’ (Études sur M. Beyle, Revue parisienne ( Sept. ) (CHH xxviii. ; see also Le Cabinet des antiques, preface, iv. ). Florine and Nathan, Balzac doubles, in their very imperfections show him projecting himself into his characters much more completely and diversely than in earlier ‘serial monographies’ such as La Messe de l’Athée, Facino Cane, Gambara. 79 The first draft (Lov. A ) has very little narratorial commentary or reflections by characters. 80 Cf. La Muse du département: ‘Dans Adolphe, les femmes ne voient qu’Ellénore, les jeunes gens y voient Adolphe; les hommes faits y voient Ellénore et Adolphe; les politiques y voient la vie sociale!’ (iv. ). 77 78

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the Vandenesses and Nathan. But whilst Béatrix closes with references to La Fontaine,81 archetype of the moral fable, Une fille d’Eve ends in a sense more absolutely, with Marie’s revulsion, as violent as Mme de Rochefide’s at the end of Sarrasine: ‘Le monde me dégoûte . . . je n’y veux plus aller’ (ii. ). The year  is framed by œuvres nées jumelles. La Torpille and Une fille d’Eve present two contrasting narrative models: a triangle based on elongation, and a triangle based on doubling, which is also the model of Béatrix. As the comparison of these twin texts demonstrates, none of these models or genres is mutually exclusive; indeed, the peculiar power of these texts lies in a tension between linearity and circularity, between self-containedness and tangential reference to his wider œuvre. Un grand homme de province à Paris,82 the centre of Illusions perdues, ‘l’œuvre capitale dans l’œuvre’,83 written immediately after Une fille d’Eve, cannot be completely interpreted without reference to this, the text in which Nathan emerges and develops. But the period is also marked by more complex reflections and refractions, explored in Une fille d’Eve’s preface, first published after the story, in the very year of Balzac, ‘roi des romanciers’.

81 Both generalized and specific (to Les Deux Pigeons: ii. b and n. ; Fables, . ii). Cf. the closing alternatives of La Muse du département pre-F (‘Un dénouement horrible mais vrai’ and ‘Cette fable doit vous apprendre que, etc. . . .’ (iv. a, c) and B. Guyon’s comments (‘Adolphe, Béatrix and La Muse du département’, –). 82 Souverain,  o vols., BF ( June ). 83 LH i. ,  Mar. .

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‘Roi des Romanciers?’ Scenes, Satires, and Serials, – ‘Roi des romanciers’: Balzac’s  coronation (by Stendhal) seems as amply deserved as his earlier enthronment as ‘roi de la nouvelle’.1 Béatrix, Un grand homme de province à Paris (the central part of Illusions perdues), Le Curé de Village in ; Pierrette in , Une ténébreuse affaire, Les Deux Frères and Les Lecamus (the first parts of La Rabouilleuse and Sur Catherine de Médicis), and the beginning of Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées and Ursule Mirouët in —all cemented Balzac’s reputation as a novelist. Yet, by , publishing was once again in crisis,2 and as important as these novels, and more numerous, is a counterpoint of shorter fictions—not only the six stories included in La Comédie humaine (Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, Massimilla Doni, Pierre Grassou (), Z. Marcas, Un prince de la Bohème (), and La Fausse Maîtresse ()), but also series of articles (Petites Misères de la vie conjugale, –, and those given to the collective publication Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, –), as well as his  contributions to his second ill-fated venture into newspaper ownership, the Revue parisienne, together with other brief publications.3 Alongside came frequent but generally unsuccessful forays into theatre: L’École des ménages, refused by the Comédie française in , and Vautrin, more successful but immediately censored.4 If his output had a  Mar. , Corr. iii. ; cf. Ch. (i) above. N. Felkay, Balzac et ses éditeurs, – (), p. ; about % fewer novels were published in  in comparison to : M. Iknayan, The Idea of the Novel in France, – (Geneva, ), p. . Cf. F. Barbier, ‘Une production multipliée’, in R. Chartier, H. Martin, andJ.-P. Vivet (eds.), Histoire de l’édition française (), iii. Le Temps des éditeurs, –, at . 3 For example, the preface to Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût, paid for but never written (Corr. iii. , ; cf. xii.  and P.-G. Castex, ‘Balzac et Brillat-Savarin’, AB ()); Le Champion du notaire innocent, malheureux et persécuté: introduction d’un roman inédit (Journal de Paris ( Oct. ); cf. W. Conner, ‘Épisode inconnu de l’affaire Peytel’, AB (), esp. –), a brief text contemporary to Un épisode sous la Terreur itself republished as Un inconnu: épisode de la Terreur in the same journal on – Dec., and the sempiternal extract from Le Médecin de campagne, Histoire de l’Empereur racontée dans une grange par un vieux soldat, published as a single volume in Dec.  (ix. –, V ). Alongside ran ‘trailers’ for Un grand homme de province à Paris (Comment se font les petits journaux, La Presse ( June ), v. –, –) and Le Curé de village (Le Messager (– Mar. )), and brief extracts later incorporated in longer work (Une scène de boudoir, the preamble from Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit (), published in L’Artiste on  and  Mar.  and incorporated in Autre étude de femme in ). Cf. V – passim and S. Vachon, ‘Balzac dans quelques “journaux reproducteurs” (I)’, AB () and (II), AB (). 4 R. Guise, ‘Un grand homme du roman à la scène’, AB (), esp. –. 1 2

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common genetic source, its generic outcomes were more diverse: the cause was coherent, its effects ever more fragmented. Without shorter works, the central aesthetic of Balzac’s opus would have been inoperable—as is suggested by his determinant theoretical statement in this period, the preface to Une fille d’Eve.

(i) The Preface to Une fille d’Eve The preface to Une fille d’Eve is a dry run for the Avant-propos to La Comédie humaine.5 Detaching the author from, declaring the objectivity of, his work, it is his strongest statement yet of the link between it and society, between society and literary genre. Balzac’s work would no more exist without the varied stimulus of French society than the merveilleux of the Arabian Nights without ‘la réclusion de la femme’ (ii. ). The author is neither judge, nor political theorist: ‘Il est historien, voilà tout’ (ii. ). Yet if this is a bid for the promotion from storyteller Balzac had been seeking for a decade,6 it is undercut by a questioning of history’s objectivity, by the recognition that this histoire is a cycle of histoires. The characters of the Études tell stories about each other; the narratives themselves show characters at different stages, mimicking the anachronistic experiences of real life: Vous trouverez, par exemple, l’actrice Florine peinte au milieu de sa vie, dans Une fille d’Eve . . . et vous la verrez à son début dans Illusions perdues . . . Ici l’énorme figure de de Marsay se produit en premier ministre, et dans Le Contrat de mariage, il est à ses commencements . . . Enfin, vous aurez le milieu d’une vie avant son commencement, le commencement après sa fin, l’histoire de la mort avant celle de la naissance. D’abord, il en est ainsi dans le monde social. Vous rencontrerez au milieu d’un salon un homme que vous avez perdu de vue depuis dix ans . . . puis vous allez dans un coin du salon, et là quelque délicieux conteur de société vous fait en une demi-heure l’histoire pittoresque des dix ou vingt ans que vous ignoriez. Souvent cette histoire scandaleuse ou honorable, belle ou laide, vous sera-t-elle dite, le lendemain ou un mois après, quelquefois par parties. Il n’y a rien qui soit d’un seul bloc dans ce monde, tout y est mosaïque. Vous ne pouvez raconter chronologiquement que l’histoire du temps passé, système inapplicable à un présent qui marche. (ii. –)

Balzac’s narrative is not simply diachronic, but a fragmented composite of images and accounts gathered at various times and places—a diversity demonstrated by the inclusion in a single volume of fictions as various as Massimilla Doni and Une fille d’Eve (ii. ; publishing necessity parading as aesthetic virtue, but also, Balzac argues, as experiential fact). His Études are perforce generically diverse; recurring characters imply recurring narratives, and a refusal of narrative and moral closure demonstrated in his most recent story, Une princesse parisienne, now Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan. 5 Une fille d’Eve (first book publication), Souverain,  o vols., BF ( Aug. ). The first edition of Massimilla Doni occupies vol. ii, but is not mentioned on the title-page. 6 Since at least Le Dernier Chouan: cf. ii.  and Ch.  above.

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(ii) Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan 7 Contingency is the centre of this story. Its protagonists, Diane de Cadignan, formerly Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, and D’Arthez, drawn from Le Cabinet des Antiques and Un grand homme de province à Paris,8 carry a baggage of reputation—good, in the case of D’Arthez, dubious, in Diane’s. The recurrence of characters in this story enables Balzac to depict an evolution over time: Diane attributes her pre- adventures (in Le Cabinet ) to historical vicissitudes, and tries to redeem them by maternal affection. Yet Les Secrets presents character as a palimpsest of narratives, multiple orders of truth and lies. On the one hand is ‘objective’ evidence, given by Rastignac and Blondet, of Diane as ‘la plus habile coquette, la plus enivrante courtisane du monde’ (vi. ; cf. –), together with her trophy portraits of her former lovers, and her deception of Marsay (vi. , ), which the story’s ‘scenic’ presentation seems to corroborate—there is a striking preponderance of dialogue, reflecting perhaps the temporary abeyance of Balzac’s theatrical projects.9 On the other is a more inward truth, difficult of access beneath the many slanderous layers of the first, and which—according to Diane—society, guided by its malice, can never know (vi. ). ‘Si c’était un mensonge, il serait bientôt orné de commentaires . . . mais faire croire à une vérité! Ah! les plus grands hommes y ont péri’ (vi. ). This is, the narrator tells us, ‘une de ces comédies inconnues jouées dans le for intérieur de la conscience, entre deux êtres dont l’un sera la dupe de l’autre . . . un drame horrible qu’il faudrait nommer l’envers du vice’ (vi. ). Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, ‘un de ces drames . . . qui ne sont point du domaine scénique’, turns on categorial—and hence generic—classifications, on the paradoxes of virtue and vice, inner and outer, physical and emotional virginity. The semiotic instability of secrets, connoting variously Diane’s innocence of love, her contact with Mme d’Espard or D’Arthez (vi. ; –; , , , ) suggests interpretations transcending schematic alternatives of truth and lie. If her deceptions are undeniable, it is for us to decide what we make of them. Uncommented but ironic narration suggests that Diane, like some Marivaux or Musset heroine, is falling in love unawares (vi. First published as Une princesse parisienne in La Presse (– Aug. ). Cf. A. R. Pugh, ‘Du Cabinet des Antiques à Autre étude de femme’, AB (), esp. –. The chronological proximity of Le Cabinet, Les Secrets, and Un grand homme makes the unfinished sketch Perdita (xii. –) more likely to be an offshoot of Les Secrets than a sketch for one of the nouvelles contemporary with Honorine (pace A.-M. Meininger, xii. –). What is indubitable is that Perdita is complete in itself and resistant to further development: Schuerewegen, ‘Avortements (sur les “Ébauches rattachées à La Comédie humaine”)’, in S. Vachon (ed.), Balzac: une poétique du roman (Montreal and Saint-Denis, ), –. 9 See V , , . 7 8

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; cf. , ).10 This unselfconscious aspect of her affection goes a long way to redeem her. Its quasi-literary characteristics attest a fundamentally cerebral nature which reveals both her calculation (‘il nous faut un homme de génie’, vi. ) and, in the end, the quality of her love: ‘il n’y a que les gens de génie qui sachent aimer’ (vi. ). The finesse which has made her ‘heartless’ is also what suits her to D’Arthez, enabling her to answer and excite a superior sensibility which reconciles and transcends the material and the spiritual: ‘Elle avait compris la grandeur des gens de génie, elle avait compris qu’ils ne soumettent pas la femme d’élite aux lois ordinaires’ (vi. ; cf. , , ). By meeting D’Arthez on his level, she has shown herself deserving of his love. She has progressed from her superficial first affairs (an emotional reaction to her parents and her husband), to a considered relationship of spiritual affinity.11 The transcendence of the material in the spiritual constitutes the very core of their affair. It is to the imaginative suggestiveness of Diane’s gestures, voice, or dress, that D’Arthez falls most truly prey (vi. –; cf.  and ). Daniel unites ‘grandeurs de l’intelligence’ with ‘naïveté du cœur’, Diane great beauty with a remarkable heart (vi. ; , ); their two names are an almost anagrammatical self-reflection. In this light, Diane’s seduction of D’Arthez by talking about the dead Chrestien is less a callous pretext than an index of the nature of their love: Chrestien’s ideal and voiceless adoration is a model for their own relations, for their ‘sentiments qu’ils n’osaient s’avouer’ and ‘constantes déclarations muettes’, its polarity of imagination and intensely felt desire (vi. –; – passim): ‘Elle eût dit: “Finissez, vous allez me faire mourir!” elle eût parlé moins énergiquement. Elle resta pendant un moment les yeux dans les yeux de d’Arthez en exprimant tout à la fois du bonheur, de la pruderie, de la crainte, de la confiance, de la langueur, un vague désir et une pudeur de vierge’ (vi. ). Language is weaker than gesture or glances: in this resides the puissant impotence of non-linguistic exchange. If Diane’s gaze is richly polysemic, it is also endlessly ambiguous, signifying all and nothing. Her confession may be ‘forgée dans l’arsenal du mensonge’, but D’Arthez ‘sondait en lui-même cet amour et le trouvait infini’ (vi. , ). Such instability points to the virtual vertiginousness of love, most intense but most imperilled when least expressible, because at its most inward and subjective. Love’s visionary subjectivity transcends any conventional morality: ‘Gens de génie’ indeed do not subject ‘la femme d’élite’ to ‘lois ordinaires’ (vi. ). The ‘femme adorable’ is lying in quest of true love (vi. , ), and that is enough to redeem her. 10 It was with Musset that Gautier classed Balzac in an article in La Presse on  Nov. : Guise, ‘Un grand homme du roman à la scène’, AB (), p.  n. . 11 Cf. M. A. Simons, ‘Le Génie au féminin ou les paradoxes de la princesse de Cadignan’, AB ().

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All this makes Diane the heroine of an eminently Stendhalian text; La Chartreuse de Parme is perhaps the parent perdu of Les Secrets.12 Its narrator is at least as urbane, and it polarizes love around intimacy and distance, the real and the ideal. D’Arthez loves Diane in part because she is detached, just as Fabrice feels most for Clélia when they are physically most remote.13 Cerebration, even cristallisation, is central to the process. D’Arthez’s reflective idealization of Diane, his love for her at a distance, through Chrétien, suggests striking similarities between Balzacian practice and Stendhalian theory.14 Both works value the spiritual above the material, the aesthetic above the moral, and bonheur above all else. The cause is irrelevant if the effect is delight: ‘Trompeuse ou vraie, elle enivrait Daniel . . . Certes, souvent Talma, sur la scène, a été fort au-dessus de la nature. Mais la princesse de Cadignan n’estelle pas la plus grande comédienne de ce temps?’ (vi. ). Artifice is central to art and to love, which is as virtual as truth itself. Whilst Fabrice falls for Marietta, a ‘mauvaise comédienne de province’, and deceives La Fausta, Anetta Marini, or even himself with the words or appearance of affection,15 Diane’s ‘manège’ is ‘si habile qu’il arrivait à la vérité pure sur une âme neuve et franche comme celle de d’Arthez’ (vi. ). Like fiction itself, her ‘atroce élégie’ may derive from a lie, but it is spoken ‘avec l’accent inimitable du vrai’ (vi. ). As the novelist D’Arthez remarks, ‘Nous n’inventons jamais que le vrai’ (vi. ). The homologies of love and art, and truth and lie turn Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, like La Chartreuse,16 into a mise-en-abyme of literary creation, D’Arthez believing Diane’s confections as the reader believes the writer’s. Plotting their relationship as carefully as any of his works, she entwines him in ‘un roman préparé de longue main’ (vi. ), or resembles ‘un grand artiste se complaisant dans les lignes indécises d’une ébauche’ (vi. ), hoping to find ‘autant d’imagination dans l’amour qu’il en mettait dans son style’ (vi. ). The final paragraph, as lapidary as the end of La Chartreuse, alludes to this union of love and art: ‘La princesse . . . passe tous les étés à Genève dans une villa avec le grand écrivain, et revient pour quelques mois d’hiver à Paris. D’Arthez ne se montre qu’à la Chambre’ (vi. ). In , it was augmented by a sentence: 12 Published barely four months earlier (BF ( Apr. )), and mentioned in the preface to Une fille d’Eve (ii.  and n. ). Balzac’s encomium of La Chartreuse, Études sur M. Beyle (Frédéric Stendalh [sic]) appeared in the last issue of the Revue parisienne on  Sept. , replacing a promised ‘Nouvelle inédite’ (CHH xxviii. –; ). 13 Balzac particularly admired these episodes, and Stendhal’s ability to depict passion in a work ‘plus chaste que le plus puritain des romans de Walter Scott’: CHH xxviii. –; . 14 Not only in De l’amour, which Balzac admired, but also in La Chartreuse de Parme: his article on Stendhal’s novel compares Chrestien unfavourably with Ferrante Palla: ‘Mon Michel Chrestien, amoureux de la duchesse de Maufrigneuse, ne saurait avoir le relief de Palla Ferrante, amant à la Pétrarque de la duchesse de Sanseverina’ (CHH xxviii. ; ). 15 La Chartreuse de Parme, . viii, . xiii, . xxvii, xxviii. 16 Cf. e.g. R. Pearson, Stendhal’s Violin: A Novelist and his Reader (Oxford, ),  et seq.

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Est-ce un dénouement? Oui, pour les gens d’esprit; non, pour ceux qui veulent tout savoir.

Balzac’s ‘gens d’esprit’ are perhaps his Happy Few, who recognize that a story does not need a denouement to be finished, and that D’Arthez’s poesis is more real than literary, created with Diane. The totality of truth is unknowable, because always a subjective construct, contained here, but also in other stories elsewhere. The relations between subject and object, material and spiritual, imagination and reality, art and life, form the core of another work where Stendhal seems again to be central, Massimilla Doni.

(iii) The Potential of Impotence: Massimilla Doni Massimilla Doni begins where Les Secrets ends, with dichotomies between sex and art, creativity and impotence, the material and the ideal.17 Balzac treats the Armance-like theme of Emilio’s incapacitating idealization of Massimilla with characteristic candour: she is torn between ‘un mari qui se savait si loin du but qu’il ne s’en souciait plus, et un amant qui le franchissait si rapidement avec les blanches ailes de l’ange qu’il ne pouvait plus y revenir’. Armance is perhaps the secret link between Les Secrets and Massimilla Doni, for Balzac’s sometime friend Latouche’s Olivier ou le secret in turn owes its theme and very title to Mme de Duras’s eponymous work, the ultimate inspiration of Stendhal’s first novel.18 If sheer mental intensity of desire causes Emilio to ‘overshoot’ with his wife, he ‘scores’ with Clara Tinti, a singer whose all-enveloping sensuality engulfs any merely cerebral impediments to bonheur. But the fiasco, unlike Stendhal’s, is not primarily physical.19 Emilio’s success with Clara threatens his idealized love for Massimilla; the excessive desire of La Tinti’s other lover, the tenor Genovese, has its aesthetic price—the quality of his performance: ‘Quand un 17 Massimilla Doni emerged from, and was originally called, Gambara, and was eventually published two years after its twin in Une fille d’Eve (), vol. ii; cf. Ch. (iv) above. Given its frequent presentation with Gambara, or of both with Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, which they only joined in F (Étphil.  and  (Aug. ); cf. R. Guise, x. ) Massimilla Doni is considered here in the light of Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, the other story closest in terms of genesis, if ostensibly not of theme. 18 See Pearson, Stendhal’s Violin, –; A.-M. Meininger, ‘Balzac et Stendhal en ’, AB (),  and n. ; and M. Bury, ‘Le Français en Italie dans Massimilla Doni’, AB (), –. R. De Cesare is cautious about locating Balzac’s reading of Armance prior to  (‘L’Italianismo di Balzac e l’influenza di Stendhal’, Balzac e Manzoni e altri studi su Balzac e l’Italia (Milan, ), –); but for K. Ley, the Stendhalian intertext is central, notably as a response to the more purely aesthetic and sensualist analysis of Mosè in the Vie de Rossini, chs.  and : Die Oper im Roman (Heidelherg, ), –, ,  et seq. 19 Indeed, M. Le Yaouanc suggests that Balzac is seeking to establish a ‘médecine transcendante’, bridging the gap between physiology and metaphysics: Nosographie de l’humanité balzacienne (), cit. M. Milner, ‘Le Sens “psychique” de Massimilla Doni’, AB (), –. The ‘footballing’ metaphors are Balzac’s.

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artiste a le malheur d’être plein de la passion qu’il veut exprimer, il ne saurait la peindre, car il est la chose même au lieu d’en être l’image’ (x. ; cf. ; , , ).20 The dichotomies of feeling and expression, of esprit and matière, form the core of Massimilla Doni. Potentially transcended when Emilio and Massimilla finally make love, their consummation is also a fall from grace, a selling-out of the sublime to the grotesque. Gambara, Massimilla declares, ‘est resté fidèle à l’É que nous avons tué’;21 but Balzac drives the message home: Comment dire le dénouement de cette aventure, car il est horriblement bourgeois. Un mot suffira pour les adorateurs de l’idéal.22 La duchesse était grosse. Les péris, les ondines, les fées, les sylphides du vieux temps, les muses de la Grèce, les vierges de marbre de la Certosa da Pavia, le Jour et la Nuit de Michel-Ange, les petits anges que Bellini le premier mit au bas des tableaux d’église, et que Raphaël a faits si divinement au bas de la Vierge au donataire, et de la madone qui gèle à Dresde . . . quelques vierges du Duomo de Milan, les peuplades de cent cathédrales gothiques, tout la nation des figures qui brisent leur forme pour venir à vous, artistes compréhensifs, toutes ces angéliques filles incorporelles accoururent autour du lit de Massimilla, et y pleurèrent! (x. )

This prolix mot bespeaks the paradox: how to be suggestive without being explicit, how to be explicit without being crude.23 As in Les Secrets, the highest ideals are polarized, least manifest because most intensely imagined, yet focused on objects far beyond, whose very otherness intensifies the attention they command. Vendramin’s opium-driven hallucinations lead him to a delusive ideal—not a real woman, but a metaphorical idea of the feminine, set at several removes, and far back in the past (x. ). His absolute solipsism contrasts tellingly with the extreme of interaction, sexual intercourse, and Massimilla’s resultant pregnancy. Similar polarities operate in La Tinti’s affair with Cataneo, so physically attenuated that it is entirely sublimated in the divine harmony between his violin and her voice (x. ).24 One day ‘il mourra The theme of Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien. Cf. Ley, Die Oper im Roman,  et seq. x. ; an addition of F. 22 Balzac’s capitalizing and italics suggests a certain ironizing of the ideal found also in other contemporary texts: in Nathan’s misquoting of Mademoiselle de Maupin in Une fille d’Eve (ii. ), in Le Cabinet des antiques, and in Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, dedicated to Gautier in . Cf. L. de Laguérenne, ‘D’un portrait de Mademoiselle de Maupin à la duchesse de Maufrigneuse dans Le Cabinet des Antiques: une lecture créatrice de Balzac’, AB (), –. Gautier’s influence is most present in Balzac’s work between  and : in the recasting of Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, in La Frélore, whose plot seems to derive from Le Capitaine Fracasse (cf. R. Guise, xii. –), and perhaps most visibly in the androgynous protagonist of Béatrix, Camille Maupin. 23 Cf. Une fille d’Eve, preface, ii.  and n. ; Corr. v. –. 24 When the two are perfectly attuned, ‘ce vieillard tombe alors en extase, ses yeux morts jettent leurs derniers feux, il est heureux, il se roule à terre comme un homme ivre’. This is the singe/violon anecdote of the Physiologie, in which the wife is the instrument and the husband the monkey (Cataneo is described as a ‘vieux singe’), moved from marital to philosophical ground: 20 21

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dans quelque attaque d’accord parfait’ (x. ). Egotistical delectation is the heart of aesthetic experience: like Frenhofer and Vendramin, Cataneo and the aesthete Capraja are ‘poètes pour eux seuls’ (x. ), for music transcends the subject–object boundary, speaking directly to the soul: l’homme a des touches intérieures que les sons affectent, et qui correspondent à nos centres nerveux d’où s’élancent nos sensations et nos idées! Capraja . . . voit dans les arts la collection des moyens par lesquels l’homme peut mettre en lui-même la nature extérieure d’accord avec une merveilleuse nature, qu’il nomme la vie intérieure. (x. –; cf. –) 25

Yet unlike Les Secrets, Massimilla Doni, explicating in extenso, does not trust the reader’s violin: Beyliste Franco-Italian contrasts are burdened with Balzac’s doxa, the supralinguistic suggestiveness of music26 is, perversely, explained at length, notably in Massimilla’s central commentary on Rossini’s Mosè (x. –), where she tells her consort, and the reader, what to think.27 Her remarks pre-empt our response, binding music, the least referential and most suggestive of the arts, by the linguistic ties it allegedly transcends. The story undermines its own agendas: conceived as ‘un grand ouvrage par sa pensée, et petit par le volume’,28 whose resonance would far exceed its textual bulk; in fact, it is almost the opposite, excessive explanation deadening the suggestive core.29 Such anti-suggestive explication arises largely from genesis, Balzac attempting to amplify the ineffable in an unwonted struggle to fill space when he returned to the story in .30 In consequence, the Stendhalian raciness of passages like the opening account of Massimilla’s marriage (which could almost be pastiche), or the closing summary of the characters’ fates (x. –, cf. xi. –. New editions of the Physiologie were published either side of Massimilla Doni, in  and  (xi. –). But Cataneo’s search for a perfect harmony of voice and violin also reflects Hoffmann’s Krespel: P.-G. Castex, Nouvelles et contes de Balzac (), –: T. Lewis, ‘The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman on Balzac’, Ph.D. thesis, London, , . 25 For a more detailed exposition of these theories, cf. Ley, Die Oper im Roman,  et seq. 26 See J. Martineau, ‘La Physiologie musicale balzacienne’, AB (), esp. –. 27 x. , ; cf. , . Whilst Massimilla’s interlocutors have their say, there is little sense of discussion evolving, and it is clear that the argument will eventually go her way. It is thus all the more surprising that the immediate stimulus for this extensive commentary, created between Nov.  and Feb. , only after the first two chapters had been written (R. Guise, x. –), should have been a conversation with George Sand (Corr. iii. , cit. P. Brunel, ‘Mosè dans Massimilla Doni’, AB (), –); Massimilla’s sermonizing is more comprehensible as a response to Stendhal’s discussion in his Vie de Rossini. Cf. Ley, Die Oper im Roman,  et seq. 28  July , LH i. . Balzac’s remark in fact refers to Jules ou le Nouvel Abeilard, whose subject matter was later incorporated into Massimilla Doni. 29 In so doing, Balzac is acting on his own remarks to Stendhal about La Chartreuse de Parme: ‘je fais une fresque et vous avez fait des statues italiennes . . . Cela [la fin] tourne trop court, eu égard au torse et à ses magnificences. Puis il manque le côté physique dans la peinture de quelques personnages, mais c’est un rien, quelques touches’ ([?] Apr. , Corr. iii. ). 30 It had originally been started in , as the first version of Gambara: cf. ch. (iv) above.

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), is rather buried by ponderous encrustations on the narrative structure— doxa on the Alps, or on the opening of the season at La Fenice (x. –, , , , ). ‘Rien ne trahit plus l’impuissance d’un auteur comme l’entassement des faits.’31 Balzac’s entassement is the mirror of Émilio’s, whose very physical impotence is itself the obverse of cerebral intensity, ‘au-dessus des expressions amoureuses autant que la cause est supérieure à l’effet’ (x. ),32 a visionary sublimation: Le désir soulève mon crâne en y remuant ce monde invisible au lieu de soulever mon corps inerte; et l’air devient alors rouge et pétille, des parfums inconnus et d’une force inexprimable détendent mes nerfs, des roses me tapissent les parois de la tête, et il me semble que mon sang s’écoule par toutes mes artères ouvertes, tant ma langueur est complète. (x. )

Impotence is not energy’s absence, but its intense mental concentration on a virtual ideal; Emilio’s Protean impotence is emblematic of the story as a whole. The highest forms of experience are supralinguistic and solipsistic, embodied musically in the trill, and absolutely in synaesthesia (x. , –), which suggests experience tangentially and allusively, without impugning by direct designation the mysterious subjective transcendence to which it aspires. Referentiality, not analogy, is the demon, attempting fraudulently to designate linguistically a truth beyond expression in the realm of the ideal—to itemize the ineffable. As Balzac’s explications perhaps unwittingly show, expression debases and invalidates this currency of the self, for music can only be suggested by itself: ‘le sublime est toujours semblable à lui-même’(x. ); ‘la puissance se reconnaît à cette simplicité’ (x. ).33 Music need not designate: it is experience, acting like love on the very fibres of the being. ‘Il n’y a que la musique pour exprimer l’amour’ (x. ): both are at once cause and effect, stimulus and response, immanent yet transcendent. Balzac and Emilio squander the suggestive potential of impotence, Emilio in physically expressing his desire through the defining act of procreation, Balzac, in the act of definition, restricting the ideal grotesquely to the real. Lettres sur la littérature, le théâtre et les arts, Revue parisienne ( July ), CHH xxviii. . Italians, according to Balzac, use expression, rather than overt comment, to make their points: ‘au lieu d’une épigramme qui peut comprommettre, les Italiens se jettent un regard ou un sourire d’une indicible expression’ (x. )—a reflection, perhaps, of ginginer, the word Balzac reports in his article on Stendhal’s Chartreuse, ‘verbe milanais qui signifie tout ce qui se passe à distance entre deux amants avant de se parler’ (CHH xxviii. ). 33 Cf. the text’s statements on other physical sensations such as pain and love: ‘la douleur est une dans son expression, surtout quand il s’agit de souffrances physiques’ (x. ); ‘L’amour . . . sera toujours l’amour. Il est partout semblable à lui-même, il est comme le soleil de nos âmes, on se chauffe partout où il brille’ (x. ). By implication, then, to draw distinctions in these things is to deny the monistic nature of the world and, therefore, the directness of musical response which Massimilla identifies in Mosè: ‘Ici . . . la science a disparu, l’inspiration seule a dicté ce chefd’œuvre, il est sorti de l’âme comme un cri d’amour!’ (x. ). 31 32

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The obliquity and ultimate futility of reference is the story’s final paradox. Commissioned, not spontaneously conceived, its title inspired by Raphaël’s painting,34 subservient to publishers’ demands, to Gambara, to extrinsic philosophical aims, its raison d’être is perpetually decentred. Doxa merely exacerbates the problem, adding a focus of attention away from the main action—a kind of meta-action, parallel to and imposed upon the first. What might pass in a novel, where there is space for subplots and other centres of attention, fragments the story, the secondary focus of commentary on Rossini’s Mosè detracting from the narrative itself. Balzac’s obtrusive expansion of Massimilla’s account merely reinforces the emphasis on themes at the expense of plot, creating a lecture which receives no serious challenge from her interlocutor. In its pursuit of the elusive, the commentary brings the main action to a halt. ‘Partout ailleurs, la Cataneo eût peut-être été fatiguante’ (x. ); but she is wearying here as well.35 Massimilla Doni, apart from Sur Catherine de Médicis the last of the Études philosophiques to be completed, reveals the limitations of the auxiliary model— of narrative as an illustration of philosophy, or vice versa. Whilst these discourses are juxtaposed, in causal terms they are insufficiently combined, coherence of theme being stressed at the expense of coherence of form and action. Such inconsistencies make the story a cas-limite in Balzac’s fiction: if brevity does not suffice to make a story, then diversity is not enough to make a novel. Discourses must be not merely juxtaposed, but formally combined, in narratives necessarily related to each other; diversity contained by the constraints of parallels and unity of action.

(iv) The Limits of Satire: Pierre Grassou 36 The path from Massimilla Doni to Balzac’s next story, Pierre Grassou, leads from the sublime to the mundane. After toying with a theatrical, rather than operatic, treatment of the theme of Paradoxe sur le comédien, La Frélore,37 rejected 34 Raphael’s Maddalena Doni, which Balzac had seen on his trip to Florence in  (LH i. –,  Apr. ). Cf. D. Adamson, ‘Balzac and the Visual Arts’, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, , ; F. Pitt-Rivers, Balzac et l’art (), –. The picture is reproduced in J.-P. Boyer and E. Boyer-Peigné (eds.), Balzac et la peinture (Tours, ), . 35 Pace Brunel, ‘Mosè dans Massimilla Doni’, : the integration of the commentary is ‘subtile et multiple’, indeed; but it is still disproportionate to the structure of the story. 36 A version of this and the following section appears as ‘Le Sujet de la satire: Pierre Grassou et Les Français peints par eux-mêmes’ in a special number of Équinoxe ( (Spring , –), ed. T. Kashiwagi. 37 xii. –. La Frélore was probably first conceived in Aug.  for Le Livre d’or, a collective volume by members of the Société des Gens de Lettres, and abandoned when Le Livre d’or (and its director, Francey) collapsed: Corr. iii. nos. ,  (Nov.–Dec. ). In August, Lassailly, with whom, along with Gautier, Gozlan, and Karr, Balzac was to have contributed to two octavo volumes of Romans du cœur, had asked Balzac, apparently in difficulty composing La Frélore, to

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doubtless because too close to Massimilla, Balzac progressed towards Pierre Grassou via two main stages, the project for Un gendre, and L’Artiste, a penportrait for the collective series Les Français peints par eux-mêmes.38 Pierre Grassou relates how the eponymous artist becomes ‘un gendre’ by marrying Virginie, the daughter of his bourgeois sitter Vervelle, and reverses Massimilla Doni. Mediocrity, not genius, makes Grassou, the painter-hero, impotent (vi. ). Incapable of creation, he produces innumerable copies which are taken for Old Masters (vi. ). Pierre Grassou turns on the tension between similarity and difference, copying and originality—the paradoxical characteristics of bourgeois interest in art. The story begins with overproduction, with a Salon, ‘ce bazar’, swamped by mediocrity (vi. –).39 Grassou’s first Salon exhibit is a plagiarism, yet sufficiently different from its model to conform to a cliché of originality (vi. ). Such repetitive novelty characterizes the Vervelles’ desire to ‘perpétuer leur figure’ or collect Old Masters. That these are Grassou’s copies does not matter. At stake is not creative genius (too dangerous, as the artist-genius Joseph Bridau shows: vi. –), but the commodity fetish applied to art. Though uniqueness and quality are important in owning paintings (the roi bourgeois, buying one of Grassou’s pictures, ‘avait enfin découvert un filon plein d’or’, vi. ), accumulation is the ultimate aim. Grassou’s standing actually increases when Vervelle discovers that his paintings are really Grassou’s copies. An artist who is not just himself, but ‘Rubens, Rembrandt, Terborg, Titien’ (vi. ), is a much better deal, offering ‘genius’ and the satisfactions of false consciousness at bargain price. Copying and accumulation unite Grassou to Vervelle, and both to the new economics of the Salon; art has assumed the reproductive character of commerce. ‘Inventer en toute chose, c’est vouloir mourir à petit feu; copier, c’est vivre’ (vi. ). Grassou embodies the stupidity of repetition. He even eats repetitively, ‘avec cet air patient et résigné qui dit tant de choses’ (vi. ). The prudent, frugal Grassou appeals to the bourgeois because he is one. substitute La [sic] Princesse parisienne (Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan) (Corr. iii. nos. , ); but nothing came of it. At approximately the same time, Balzac began Pierre Grassou for Babel, another collective volume by the Société des Gens de Lettres, completing the first draft in Sept. and the two remaining drafts the following month. The story was published in the second volume of Babel at the beginning of Dec. . Cf. xii. –, –; vi. ; and Corr. iii. –. 38 Lov. A , fo.  and vi. . Balzac’s manuscript hesitations reflect the process (vi. a). On Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, see below, sect. (v). 39 Balzac’s comments accurately reflect the position in the Salon during most of the s: cf. vi.  n.  and ; N. McWilliam, ‘Opinions professionnelles: critique d’art et économie de la culture sous la Monarchie de Juillet’, Romantisme, :  (), esp. –; P. Monnet, ‘Balzac et les Salons’, in Boyer and Boyer-Peigné, Balzac et la peinture, –; and Balzac’s own remarks on the Salon of : ‘tout y est d’un médiocre à faire trembler, hormis un tableau de Meissonnier [sic] . . . et un tableau de Cogniet . . . Deux tableaux sur ! Nous touchons le prix de nos fautes’ (LH i. ,  Mar. ).

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Such homologies abolish the differences which generate meaning, endless similarity blunting critical faculties, creating the relativism and universal exchange demanded by the omnipotent rule of money.40 Multiplication, accumulation, infinite interchange, denoting the absence of intrinsic value, define artistic as much as bourgeois success.41 As forme, not fond, defines the Salon, so Grassou is significant only through his appearance and relations, rather than in himself. Just as money has no inherent, but only potential and contingent value, in relation to what it might purchase, so Grassou himself exists merely parasitically, by association with others: his mentors, Bridau, Schinner, and (in F) Lora, and the dealer Magus, who brings him the clients by whom he exists, and eventually, even his wife. It is money which ultimately defines Gras-sou, emptying his being of everything, apart from financial exchange: ‘Grassou de Fougères ressemblait à son nom’ (vi. ). He is the empty man of satire, a relation, a token, an economic function, rather than something in himself. Money is the symbolic core of Pierre Grassou; the Salon’s surfeit of mediocrity is the condition of his success: ‘Maintenant que le moindre gâcheur de toile peut envoyer son œuvre, il n’est question que de gens incompris. Là où il n’y a plus jugement, il n’y plus de chose jugée (vi. ). Vervelle’s indiscriminate ‘nous aimons les Arts’ implies that taste is merely gustatory. ‘Depuis que le livret est devenu un gros livre’, the Grassous can make their way (vi. ), and the Salon booklet recall the stockmarket’s Grand-Livre.42 Virtually all the story’s major features read financially. Grassou’s copy of Greuze’s noce de village is, like his painting of the Vervelles, a venal enterprise anticipating his marriage to their daughter, presented by Magus as potential ‘portraits de famille’ (vi. ). Envisaging the red-haired Virginie as his future wife, Grassou ‘se faisait les plus étranges raisonnements: l’or était le plus beau des métaux, la couleur jaune représentait l’or, les Romains aimaient les femmes rousses, et il devint Romain’. That Balzac moved the passage on Magus from the centre to the opening stresses ‘l’omnipotence, l’omniscience, l’omniconvenance de l’argent’ (vi. ), as does his other major modification, the introduction of Joseph Bridau (vi. a–b), reducing its natural core, Grassou’s artistic development, to a flashback (vi. e–c; cf.b). The overdetermination of money points to Pierre Grassou’s ostensibly satirical design. Composed as a pièce de circonstance for Babel, the keepsake of the Société des Gens de Lettres, it is full of topical references, from the Salon battle over genre painting (vi. –) to mentions of real persons and events.43 It is hard 40

Cf. M. Babelon, ‘Pierre Grassou ou le jeu du faux’, AB (). Only the greatest of artists can reconcile originality and repetition. When Vervelle declares ‘nous aimons les Arts’ (vi. ), he uses a vague term which emphasizes multiplication and lack of intellectual rigour—something echoed in Vervelle’s mass production of canvasses. 42 Cf. Monographie du rentier: CHH xxviii. . 43 Such as the colourman Belot (later replaced by Brullon in Furne: vi. a and n. ), or the Republican insurrection of  May , in which Grassou’s conduct earns him the Légion d’honneur (vi. ). 41

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to take Grassou seriously—or the magnificently vegetal Vervelles (vi. ): a real artist, Balzac tells us, would have mocked them, but Grassou paints Virginie with pink cheeks ‘excellents pour des enseignes de parfumeur’ (vi. ). Yet Grassou is presented too ambiguously to be merely a satirical target. His impecunious struggles recall the author’s own;44 the satire of royal connoisseurship (vi.  and n. ) is undercut by Balzac’s interest in it (vi.  and n. ), the mocking of Vervelle’s copies by the author’s collection of fakes.45 Grassou is a fantôme du miroir, only once called a scélérat, viewed with some affection by the narrator: ‘On connaît des médiocrités plus taquines et plus méchantes que celle de Pierre Grassou qui, d’ailleurs, est d’une bienfaisance anonyme et d’une obligeance parfaite’(vi. , ).46 Pierre Grassou goes beyond merely lampooning venality in art to present a more overarching picture of the artist’s material struggle,47 and, in marrying art (Grassou) to money (Vervelle), a more even-handed view of artist-bourgeois relations than other contes artistes. As M. Andréoli remarks of Balzac’s ‘serious’ artist tales (Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, Gambara, and Massimilla Doni), ‘l’humour est un des visages que revêt chez l’écrivain l’angoisse née . . . de la prostitution qu’implique l’œuvre d’art’.48 Perhaps the final irony is that Pierre Grassou, so critical of the capitalist system applied to art, and written to aid an organization, the Société des gens de lettres, opposed to it, was, like its author, subsequently absorbed by the very system it sought to target, via its pirated republication in Le Magasin littéraire.49 The limits of satire in Pierre Grassou point to a fundamental lesson of Balzac’s œuvre: the relativity of values, and of viewpoint, and the universal hegemony of money. As Journal des journaux observed, ‘ce qu’il y a de curieux, c’est que les gens attaqués seront ses plus ardents lecteurs’.50

vi. –, notably Grassou’s serial self-education (vi. ). Balzac’s career as a collector did not begin in earnest until , but he constructed an imaginary museum at Les Jardies as early as : L. Gozlan, Balzac en pantoufles (), –, cited Adamson, ‘Balzac and the Visual Arts’, ; cf. D. Oger, ‘La Collection personnelle de Balzac’, in Boyer and Boyer-Peigné, Balzac et la peinture, –, esp. –. 46 Additions on first proof and in F respectively: vi. d and e. 47 Pierre Grassou was contemporary with Les Souffrances de l’inventeur, which, although mentioned in Apr. or May , in the preface to Un grand homme de province à Paris, probably did not crystallize until it was announced in Le Siècle on  Dec. of that year, one month after the publication of Pierre Grassou. 48 ‘Sublime et parodie dans les “Contes artistes” de Balzac’, AB (), . 49 (July ), –; pirated in Balzac’s eyes, although probably not in those of Balzac’s lawyer, since his case against the director of the journal, Boulé; cf.  n. was dropped: Corr. iv.  and nn. –. The story was also reproduced in Journal des journaux, Le Voleur, and Le Constitutionnel in , and again by Le Magasin littéraire in : S. Vachon, ‘Balzac dans quelques “journaux reproducteurs” (II)’, AB (), esp. , –. 50 Ibid. . 44 45

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(v) Les Français peints par eux-mêmes and Petites Misères de la vie conjugale This paradox—that every subject was also potentially an object, every reader also a target—is implicit in these two significant groups of articles of –. Balzac’s contributions to Les Français peints par eux-mêmes were prompted by the financial need which impelled Grassou. They grew (together with other contracts exploiting works old and new)51 from Balzac’s agreement to write two articles, L’Épicier and La Femme comme il faut, at the high price of , francs each,52 for Curmer’s new collective enterprise involving prominent authors such as Gautier, Nodier, and Janin. Balzac contributed three further articles, Le Notaire, Monographie du rentier, and La Femme de province,53 Curmer turning to him each time he relaunched the collection. Les Français is a kind of mass Physiologie, capitalizing on the vogue for the genre and for livres illustrés, stressing the wholeness yet diversity of the collective. Over the three years from its inception in , it offered pen-portraits (and illustrations by artists including Charlet, Gavarni, and Grandville) of virtually every social type;54 to this extent, it is a forerunner of La Comédie humaine. Lengthier than in his novels or stories, these portraits have a flatly caricatural quality which would have distorted a story like Pierre Grassou, but were corrected as obsessively as any less ephemeral work. L’Épicier is more than twice as long as the  version of La Silhouette: Balzac replaces its hyperbolic opening and pyrotechnical punctuation with an imposingly magisterial tone, more appropriate to Les Français’ monumental enterprise,55 rewriting almost every sentence with meticulous redraftings (phrases moved within paragraphs, words transposed or exchanged for others)56 explicable only by the fact that 51 Notably with Charpentier for a reprinting of the Physiologie du mariage, and with Souverain for Un grand homme de province à Paris, signed alongside work on numerous theatrical projects: V –. 52 Corr. iii. –,  Dec. ; L’Épicier, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, I: , ( Apr. ), –, dated  (a reworking of the  Apr.  article for La Silhouette); La Femme comme il faut, ibid. vol. I:  (c. end May ), –, dated . 53 Le Notaire, Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, :  (c. Dec. ), –, dated ; Monographie du rentier and La Femme de province, ibid. : – (c. Mar. ), –, dated , and :  (c. June ), –, dated . Balzac was paid  frs. for the first two and  frs. for the third, together with  frs. for an elogious review of Les Français (signed G. de N[erval]!) ( June,  Oct. and  Nov. ), Corr. iii. –, , and ;  Sept. , Corr. iii. ). These lower payments were still much more, however, than those allotted to other contributors such as Borel, offered  frs. for an article Curmer subsequently refused to publish (Corr. iii.  n. ). 54 In all  instalments spread over a total of eight volumes, five on Paris, three on the provinces. Individual numbers began appearing in ; volumes between  and . 55 The extravagant opening of  is buried in the midst of the second paragraph in : ‘Il y a des gens qui . . . ont dit épicier! comme on dit raca!’ becomes ‘Du haut de leur fausse grandeur, de leur implacable intelligence, ou de leurs barbes artistement taillés, quelques gens ont osé dire raca! à l’Épicier’, etc. (OD ii. , , CHH xxviii. ,). 56 Thus ‘Casquetté’ () becomes ‘mal en casquette’ (); a reference to Le Constitutionnel is moved forward a few lines; the paragraph detailing the grocer’s goods is largely reordered;

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Balzac had promised unpublished articles to Curmer (Corr. iii. ). The phenomenon shows a striking ‘genre-blindness’ in his work: what criticism divides into ‘literature’ and ‘journalism’ was written with equal commitment, regardless of its context. La Femme comme il faut is already Diane de Cadignan;57 there is a Marcas or a Vervelle in his rentier, a Crottat or Roguin in Le Notaire, dimwitted, ‘gros et court’.58 But the most significant feature of these articles is that they show Balzac grappling with a central problem for any realist—how to render interesting the mundane. Le Notaire seems to struggle to spin the matter out: brief static description is followed by an account of the notary’s life-cycle (a reversal of the butterfly’s, CHH xxviii. ); Le Rentier interlards a similar description with snatches of shareholder’s conversation and crowns it with a survey of rentiers.59 The ‘difficulty’ points to the differences between these discursive, essay-based presentations of generalized situations and types, and plotted dramatic narratives dealing with individualized types like Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan or Pierre Grassou. Balzac makes the banal engaging by creating miniature paradoxes and enigmas, parodically subverting the routinely and rigorously imposed classification of the Codes 60 and ultimately of natural history, of Linnaeus’s classification from external form. The resultant caricatural opacity lightens and defamiliarizes features too ordinary to merit comment (listing in Le Notaire; the rentier’s noeuds de soulier). By stressing its subjects’ physical and physiological attributes, it effectively materializes them, creating mystery from the commonplace: ‘Son masque, bouffi d’une niaiserie papelarde . . . offre l’immobilité du diplomate, mais sans la finesse’ (OCI xxvi. ; cf. , ); ‘Que fait-il? on ne sait’ (OCI xxvi. ; cf. ). Only in the last article, La Femme de province, contemporary with Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, is there a change of tone: the Codes’ ‘vous avez élevé une église’ becomes ‘vous avez été assez osé pour élever une église’, etc. (OD ii. , , , OCI xxvi. , ). 57 ‘Vous la surprendrez au coin du feu, sur sa causeuse, d’où elle vous saluera sans se lever’; both use ‘phrases stéréotypées’ and ‘répétai[en]t le soir ce qu’elle[s] avai[en]t lu le matin’ (OCI xxvi. , ; vi. , –). 58 OCI xxvi. . One type of rentier, Le Tactiurne, seems to anticipate Z. Marcas (OCI xxvi. –; cf. viii. ); the rentier’s wife, like the innkeeper’s in L’Illustre Gaudissart, is even named Mme Mitouflet (OCI xxvi. , iv. ,  et seq.). Balzac mentions Les Mitouflet ou l’élection en province (later Le Député d’Arcis) in Apr. and May  and in Jan.  (Corr. iii. – and , Corr. iv. ), during the composition of his articles for Les Français. 59 Balzac, disabled by a fall on  June , took a remarkably long time to produce these articles: the contract had been signed on  June, but only on  Oct. did he promise to deliver them by the end of that month (Corr. iii. , ). 60 Balzac was simultaneously re-exploiting these models in his Traité des excitants modernes, also published, like Les Français, by Curmer: cf.  Nov. , Corr. iii. , where the Traité appears as Tabacologie, and R. Fortassier, xii. –. Charpentier published Traité des excitants modernes as a pendant to the work which had inspired Balzac’s codificatory enterprises, Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût, on  May . The Traité des excitants modernes itself recycles an anecdote from Voyage de Paris à Java: xii. a–a.

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pseudo-scientific discourse gives way to a melancholically sympathetic exploration of the mistreatment of femmes de province. Balzac’s portraits for Les Français open everything to observation and comment, recuperating and interpreting even the characterless and banal. The quest for universal meaning results only in its universal absence, an infinitely proliferating yet self-defeating ‘traité de Rienologie’(OCI xxvi ). The notary has ‘l’air notaire’, the rentier waits with ‘une patience de Rentier’; ‘son plus grand défaut est de n’avoir pas de défauts’ (OCI xxvi. , , ). ‘Racine est Racine’:61 this, as in Pierre Grassou, is the homology of the bourgeois, who likes the familiar because it neutralizes the critical tensions the artist positively seeks. Balzac’s rentier ‘attend avec bonheur le retour des mêmes choses aux mêmes saisons’ (OCI xxvi. ), believing nothing and agreeing with everything: ‘Sa morale consiste à n’avoir de discussion avec personne’ (OCI xxvi. –): a freedom from inherent value like that of money itself. The artist, ‘[qui] recule épouvanté’ at the sight of the notary (OCI xxvi. ), and mocks his eternal adversary, the grocer, is undoubtedly the implied reader of these portraits, with whose viewpoint the actual reader can be expected to agree. Yet Balzac is no longer writing, as in , for La Silhouette, but for a larger, more diverse public, including grocers, shareholders, and notaries: ‘il y aurait du danger à publier dans Le Siècle Le Notaire,’ wrote its literary editor, Desnoyers, to Balzac, ‘en raison de la très grande quantité de notaires parmi nos abonnés’;62 indeed Curmer, the very publisher of Les Français, had actually trained as one (Corr. iii. , ). That Le Siècle never published Le Notaire points to a disconcerting similarity between writer and reader, subject and object, the very polarities on which critical apprehension depends. Balzac’s rentier is like a crazy, demon version of the observer, a fantôme du miroir devoid of purpose or critical sense: Le Rentier sait qui a nourri le dernier cheval monté par Napoléon, et il a mené ses amis voir ce cheval intéressant. (OCI xxvi. ) Le Rentier ressemble à un batteur d’or, il lamine des riens, il les étend, les change en événements immenses comme superficie . . . Le Rentier existe par les yeux, et son constant usage de cet organe en justifie son hébétement. La curiosité du Rentier explique sa vie . . . Il court examiner par lui-même le dallage de la place Louis XV, il sait où en sont les statues et les fontaines . . . il se rend chez les inventeurs qui mettent des annonces à la quatrième page des journaux, il se fait démontrer leurs perfectionnements et leurs progres . . . Son admiration est infatigable. (OCI xxvi. )

Balzac’s rentier seems to anticipate Baudelaire’s flâneur, taking his bain de multitude: ‘tout est fête, étonnement, matière à examen pour lui’ (OCI xxvi. ). R. Barthes, ‘Racine est Racine’, Mythologies (), . R. Sieburth’s assertion (‘Une idéologie du lisible: le phénomène des Physiologies’, Romantisme, :  (), ) that taxonomy is so foregrounded as to exclude any resemblance to real social types would thus seem to be factually incorrect. 61 62

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Yet this prostitution is ultimately self-undermining: it shows the impossibility of stepping outside the system of subject–object relations to gain total subjecthood and indemnity to mockery.63 Narrator and reader are caught in a tunnel of mirrors, any fully external standpoint constantly threatened by the omnipresent gaze of the other. Satire is limited in Pierre Grassou and Les Français, but only because it is limitless, exposing all to potentially critical scrutiny. ‘Si vous le regardez trop attentivement’, we read of Le Rentier, ‘il s’inquiète, et se contemple lui-même pour chercher le motif de cette inquisition’ (CHH xxviii. ). Every subject is also an object, caught in the ocular culture of self-regard. Satirist satirized, biter bit: Les Français peints par eux-mêmes.64 Petites Misères de la vie conjugale, an article series authored, unlike Les Français, solely by Balzac, adds to the paradoxes of satire a crucial element of alternation—something new in his journalism (if not in, say, Karr’s Les Guêpes,65 or Même histoire). The eleven articles, published mostly weekly in  and ,66 form a sequence of incidents, scenes, and anecdotes exposing the running sores of marriage, linked only by recurrent but scarcely individuated players placed in a variety of banal or degrading, but always marital, situations. We are repeatedly buttonholed as ‘Vous’, a kind of universal husband suffering universal woes, assimilated to the scene’s main types: Adolphe, his wife Caroline, her friend Mme Desaulnais (later de Fischtaminel: xii. , e–g), her son Charles. In the first articles, the protagonists’ names even vary, making them both individual and typical: Adolphe is also Jules; Caroline, Claire; Charles is also Adolphe.67 In a novel this could look careless; in a newspaper it seems general, makes the article more a report, relates it to any potential reader. We are less implied than implicated: scarcely individuated types extend the satire

63 Indeed, on occasion the narrator indulges in explicit self-satire, undermining his own views in the startling comment of La Femme comme il faut: ‘aujourd’hui tout drôle . . . toise impertinemment la plus jolie duchesse’: OCI xxvi. . 64 For a more sinister interpretation of this panoptisme, cf. Sieburth, ‘Une idéologie du lisible’. 65 Karr’s series of satirical pamphlets Les Guêpes, published monthly from Nov. , consists of brief snippets of satirical gossip, chiefly on politics and the arts. Cf. Ch. (i) below. 66 C ( Sept. ), xii. –; ( Oct. ), xii. –; ( Oct. ), xii. –; ( Oct. ), xii. –; ( Nov. ), xii. – and ; ( Nov. ), xii. –; ( Dec. ), xii. –; ( Dec. ), xii. –; ( Jan. ) xii. –; ( Feb. ), xii. –; ( June ), xii. –). The few references to Petites misères in Balzac’s contemporary correspondence suggest that the articles, unlike most of his serialized work, were written individually, more or less au jour le jour, and were not, as R. Pierrot implies, fragments of an already completed work (Corr. iii. –, , and Corr. iv. , ). Elsewhere, he asks Dutacq ‘faites donner au porteur deux numéros de la dernière Caricature, afin que j’ai la copie de la misère’ (Corr. iii. ), with a view to correcting the newspaper text for book publication (something he did with, for example, Ursule Mirouët (cf. J.-L. Tritter, xii. , and Corr. iv. ). Petites misères de la vie conjugale was not published in book form until , with the present articles considerably reorganized and augmented by subsequent articles. See J.-L. Tritter, xii. –. 67 xii. , . Cf. also A. R. Pugh, ‘Un chapitre retouvé des Comédiens sans le savoir: “La Comédie gratis”’, AB (), .

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outwards, making association with the doltish husband difficult to escape: the Physiologie’s technique sur le terrain.68 The periodic form of Petites Misères (each article is self-contained yet part of the whole) has a necessary influence on the way they read. All briefer than Balzac’s articles for Les Français, they form a kind of halfway house between such self-contained pieces, and the serialized novel with component elements contained in a developing plot. The newspaper’s necessarily episodic publication conveys the continual yet random cussedness of conjugality; the sequence of short sharp episodes demonstrates precisely that these are petites misères, whilst the paradoxical unpredictability of conjugal conflict, the ostensibly unmotivated nature of its pains, attests the spouses’ mutual incomprehension.69 Petites Misères’ casualness, mundanity, and repetition were admirably suited to the medium and its message: that chance, for the newspaper, the novelist, and the husband, is what we call causation we cannot comprehend. Their alternatory forms, together with their use of dialogue, would eventually serve in the serialized novels of the end of Balzac’s career—La Cousine Bette, Le Cousin Pons, and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes.

The Physiologie du mariage had been republished in Oct. , and again in Dec. . Features wittily expressed in the organization of the first published version (Petites misères de la vie conjugale (Chlendowski, ),  o vol.), and Bertall’s vignette showing the spouses on a seesaw: S. Le Men, ‘Balzac, Gavarni, Bertall et les Petites misères de la vie conjugale’, Romantisme,  (), –, at . 68 69

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Towards the Comédie, – (i) The Revue parisienne Satire, with serialization, formed the double impetus of Balzac’s major enterprise of , the Revue parisienne. Founded in July, against the background of his persistent difficulties with newspapers,1 and intended to provide a platform for the author’s own ideas and works,2 the Revue sought to rival Karr’s Les Guêpes, a highly successful satirical monthly, covering everything from fiction to politics to fashion, which had been appearing since November .3 The Revue imitated virtually every aspect of its model. It shared its offices, administrator, periodicity, and format; it was written singlehandedly, and covered a similar range of subjects.4 Its three monthly issues (July–Sept. ) contain a political diary (Lettres russes), literary reviews (the Lettres sur la littérature, and the Études sur M. Beyle, Balzac’s laudatory account of La Chartreuse de Parme), 1 In  La Presse had substituted Le Curé de village for La Maison Nucingen and La Torpille (Corr. iii. –); in , Le Siècle had exchanged Mémoires d’une jeune mariée [sic] for ‘six nouvelles’ (Corr. iii. – and –,  Jan. and  May) and refused Pierrette, (LH i. ,  Dec.), only later to change its mind and, to Balzac’s outrage, bring out a censored version (Corr. iv. –)—a continuing feature of this publication (Corr. iv. –, , , –). In  Balzac published nothing in La Presse (which nevertheless continued to press him to honour his agreements of : Corr. iv. – and –), and was refused by the Gazette de France and La Phalange, but had Ursule Mirouët accepted by Le Messager (Corr. iv. , –, –). Balzac also had difficulties with book publishers, however: a letter to Souverain of Sept. reproached him with sending the proofs of another novel in place of those of Le Curé de village, and a note from Souverain’s exasperated printer merely commented: ‘M. de Balzac est un auteur    ’ (Corr. iv. , ; cf. also –, –, –, –, and V . 2 Sainte-Beuve, with whom Balzac had been having an ongoing polemic ever since the former had revealed the true identity of Horace de Saint-Aubin (RDM ( Dec. )), was a particular target, especially since the publication of De la littérature industrielle (RDM  (Sept. )). Cf. Balzac’s response (A M. Émile de Girardin, rédacteur en chef de ‘La Presse’, La Presse ( Sept. ), Corr. iii. –). Over half the second of Balzac’s Lettres sur la littérature (Revue parisienne ( Aug. )) is devoted to panning Port-Royal. 3 Cf. D. P. Scales, Alphonse Karr, sa vie et son œuvre (–) (Geneva and Paris, ), ch. , esp. –. 4 Stendhal even wrote to Balzac at its offices in rue du Croissant ‘chez M. Alphonse Karr’ (Corr. iv. ); its administrator, Dutacq, former director of Le Siècle, was also shared with Le Charivari and Le Figaro (Corr. iv. – and n.). The only contributions not by Balzac are a sonnet by Auguste de Belloy, in the second number, and collaboration on the Lettres russes by Louis de Cardonne (a model for Z. Marcas: viii. –), and Alphonse Toussenel, a journalist with La Démocratie pacifique (Corr. iv.  n. , –). But Balzac refused an unsolicited dialogue (a scène historique?) from the comte de Rivarol (Corr. iv. – and n.).

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and the important article Sur les ouvriers, evidence of the author’s fleeting flirtation with Fourierism.5 All attest the vital engagement with the contemporary which characterizes the two stories Balzac wrote for it, Z. Marcas and Les Fantaisies de Claudine (F: Un prince de la Bohème).

(ii) Z. Marcas If the real-life referents of Z. Marcas 6 are known, its literary origins are more elusive. Marcas, a composite of Balzac and the opposition journalist Armand Carrel, is a theorist of genius and model of integrity; Thiers, real-life enemy of both, represents the opportunist ‘homme incomplet [qui] n’a que l’idée de monter en croupe derrière chaque événement’.7 Both fell in , the year the story is set: Thiers toppled by events, Carrel in a duel—and Balzac (or his politicial ambitions at least) in the Chronique de Paris fiasco.8 But Z. Marcas seems to have arisen as tracelessly as its hero falls, leaving no pre-text in Balzac’s writings. There is an absence at the heart of this tale. It is a false frame-narrative, only partly enclosed at its end, and beginning, like Les Fantaisies de Claudine, in an apparently authorial first person. Marcas’s life story never properly starts, but simply emerges, in style indirect libre, mixed with ‘tartines graissées de fromage et humectées de verres de vin’ from Rabourdin’s summary (viii. –), and finishes so quickly that only the past anterior can express it (viii. ). We never hear more than fragments of Marcas’s wisdom, apart from the simple central truth that a brilliant youth has been neglected by a mediocre gerontocracy: ‘Je ne crois pas que dans dix ans la forme actuelle subsiste . . . La jeunesse éclatera comme la chaudière d’une machine à vapeur’ (viii. ). This prediction, made in  or  (the times of the story’s action and composition) points uncannily to the median date of ;9 yet Marcas’s truths are a shibboleth the reader is denied. Like Juste and Rabourdin, we are ‘de la tribu des lévites modernes, sans être encore dans le Temple’ (vii. ). His story is a brief, fragmented chronicle of a career foundering for want of opportunism: Marcas, like his creator, is condemned to earn his daily bread, to be bogged down in obscurity and detail, rather than to travel the high road to power and enjoy its vast perspectives. So everything is viewed partially, as if glimpsed obliquely from the wings of the political stage. Rabourdin sees Marcas through a hole in the wall—or does he? ‘je ne vis que des ténèbres’ (viii. ); when a prominent politician visits, we, like the narrator, do not see, but only hear, him (viii. ). 5 In the second issue of the Reuve parisienne, Balzac defended Fourier against Louis Reybaud: CHH xxviii. –. 6 7 Revue parisienne ( July ). viii. ; cf. A.-M. Meininger, viii.  and n. . 8 Cf. Meininger, viii.  et seq., and Les Employés,  (), –. 9 Balzac was interested in such numerology: PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. .

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Marcas is an affreux du miroir, an authorial self-deletion, a phantasmatic projection of the horror of creation reduced to copying, of genius and ambition in the bin.10 Incompleteness and non-fulfilment form the initial and unifying principles of Z. Marcas: ‘Entre les faits de la vie et le nom des hommes il est de secrètes et d’inexplicables concordances ou des désaccords visibles qui surprennent; souvent des corrélations lointaines, mais efficaces, s’y sont révélées’ (viii. ). The whole truth is always elsewhere: life’s complexity surpasses narrative or perception, which can see it but darkly and recount only in dim summary ‘les factions inutiles faites au pied de la fortune qui s’envolait . . . les courses du solliciteur haletant, les tentatives essayées sur des imbéciles’ (viii. ). These very failures found the story. Z. Marcas symbolizes the decisiveness and the difficulty of connecting, a mot d’ordre spelt out in his very name: ‘Ne voyez-vous pas dans la construction du Z une allure contrariée? ne figure-t-elle pas le zigzag aléatoire et fantasque d’une vie tourmentée? . . . Toute la vie de l’homme est dans l’assemblage fantastique de ces sept lettres’ (viii. –). Its Z, its seven letters mimic the shape and sound of the barred French seven, ‘le plus significatif des nombres cabalistiques’ striking out the Z of Balzac’s own. Delivering the author from evil, it determines his creature’s destiny: Marcas sleeps ‘A sept heures’; he dies aged , ‘sept lustres’; his ruin recalls Palmyra, ‘Sept lieues de ruines!’ (viii. , ); the students’ abode is ‘haut de sept pieds’ (viii. , ); the writing is on the wall. Seven is the gambler’s lucky number, but Marcas is a loser. Mar-cas, with his sinuous Z but desire to go ‘droit au but’, mirrors Mar-say; yet ‘les ambitieux doivent aller en ligne courbe, le chemin le plus court en politique’.11 It is within Balzac’s wider fictional world that Z. Marcas has most meaning. Its emptiness indicates causation vested not in individual stories, nor even, Marcas implies, in chains of events leading to a conclusion, but ubiquitious, omnipresent, and so complex that its totality is ultimately unknowable. Geometry and algebra express this abstract and theoretical fact, ‘inexplicables concordances’ or ‘désaccords visibles’, ‘corrélations lointaines, mais efficaces’ between real-life ‘faits’ and ‘noms’.12 Chance results from ‘une immense équation dont nous ne connaissons pas toutes les racines’ (viii. ); Rabourdin’s account of Marcas’s life is a ‘synthèse algébrique’, true as its abstraction, yet immeasurably less complex than the life itself. Marcas has in common with the rest of Balzac’s world the central problem of extrapolating 10 The brief life of Marcas’s newspaper (three months, like the Revue parisienne), and his endless nocturnal scribbling (viii. ,  n. ) parallel Balzac’s contemporary situation. Cf. Meininger, viii.  n. , and P. Citron, ‘Les Affreux du miroir’, Europe ( Jan.–Feb. ), . 11 Une fille d’Eve, ii. . 12 In the context of the Revue parisienne, Z. Marcas was ‘à la fois le complément et le commentaire des Lettres russes’ (J.-H. Donnard, Les Réalités économiques et sociales dans ‘La Comédie humaine’ (), , cit. Meininger, viii. ).

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from the particular to the general, from theory to practice: ‘Quand on part de zéro pour arriver à l’unité, les chances sont incalculables. Pour les ambitieux, Paris est une immense roulette, et tous les jeunes gens croient y trouver une victorieuse martingale’ (viii. ). The problem of reconciling polar opposites—‘le fait’ and ‘l’unité’, the part and the whole—forms a less tangible and proleptic version of Cuvier’s reconstruction of whole worlds from a single fossil.13 This is the central paradox of Z. Marcas: wholes may be formally complete, but not totalities; conceivable, yet not achievable. No one narrative encompasses Balzac’s creation; each, if putatively autonomous, contains a part of the truth of the whole, which is everywhere and nowhere and always elsewhere. Affirmations of this emptiness bind frame and story: Rabourdin’s views on the unknowable complexity of causation echo Marcas’s (viii. , ); their destiny echoes his. Like him, they see no opportunity, only an abyss (viii. , ). Whilst Juste sounds Marcas’s name ‘comme une fusée à son départ’, Marcas ‘fit détoner une allumette phosphorique’ (viii. ). Their only common feature is their void.14 The presence of absence is nowhere more tellingly embodied than in two framing images: ‘tout encrier peut devenir une Vésuve’ (viii. )—an opening image of potential, like an exploding boiler (viii. ), of transition from liquid to fire—and the closing picture of the extinct volcano, the ‘cratère du pouvoir’ which the burnt-out Marcas has plumbed (viii. ). And, at the story’s centre, approximately halfway through, is the image of Paris as ‘une immense roulette’ (viii. ): a hollow-hearted circle reversing that of La Fille aux yeux d’or. Marcas has detected something empty in the state: a vacuum resulting from structure and form (Balzac’s term: viii. ). ‘Il avait cru voir la trahison au centre du pouvoir, non pas une trahison palpable, saississable, résultant de faits; mais une trahison produite par un système, par une sujétion des intérêts nationaux à un égoïsme’ (viii. ). These frame-like images embody this story’s hollow circularity. Inkwell, volcano, crater are enclosed yet empty, framing nothing. Fiction cannot give the thing itself, but only point to truths elsewhere.

13 La Peau de chagrin, x. . Cuvier, Balzac writes, ‘est poète avec des chiffres, il est sublime en posant un zéro près d’un sept’. 14 The despair of Z. Marcas directly echoes Balzac’s: demoralized by the censorship of Pierrette, the banning of Vautrin, and the failure of other theatrical enterprises, he wrote to Mme Hanska: ‘Je suis au bout de ma résignation. Je crois que je quitterai la France et que j’irai porter mes os au Brésil ( July , LH i. ; cf. ).

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(iii) Les Fantaisies de Claudine (F: Un prince de la Bohème) Les Fantaisies de Claudine 15 reverses Z. Marcas. Where Marcas fails, the mercurial La Palférine succeeds; where Marcas is marginalized, his successor is nearly always centre-stage; where Z. Marcas anticipates its hero’s call to fame, Les Fantaisies are tales of past caprices; where Marcas’s name maps his destiny, La Palférine is explained by his lineage.16 Women, absent there, are omnipresent and omnipotent here—like narrators: if Marcas is virtually mute, this story is an orgy of orality: Nathan, already encountered in Une fille d’Eve and Béatrix, tells how his outrageous, about-town friend La Palférine abandons Antonia and seduces Claudine, who falls desperately in love with him. To keep her on a string, he sets her a series of honours for her husband, Du Bruel, to achieve, thereby transforming this dancer into a dame worthy of her aristocratic consort. Claudine’s fantaisies are really La Palférine’s, realized through the commoner Du Bruel. The story is a foodchain of frivolity, a miniature, manipulative ego system, its vicariousness illustrated by the fact that only some way in is Nathan’s identity as narrator revealed; that of his listener, Augusta, baronne de Rastignac, Delphine’s daughter and Eugène’s wife, is withheld until the end.17 Like Sarrasine, Les Fantaisies is a récit-contrat, with a first-person narrator telling a story to seduce. But where in Sarrasine this disastrously fails (vi. ), here Mme de Rastignac falls for La Palférine simply by hearing about him. The virtuality of this love-object attests the incomprehensibility of absolutes, their being beyond containment in a single or even many accounts; and the inevitability of the specifics in which absolutes must be embodied, of the particular characters and situations which narratives involve.18 15 Un prince de la Bohème, first published as Les Fantaisies de Claudine, Revue parisienne ( Aug. ), was probably written hurriedly, as the absence of dated documents, and Balzac’s singlehanded drafting of the Revue parisienne suggests (pace J.-A. Ducourneau and R. Pierrot, ‘Calendrier de la vie de Balzac ()’, AB (), –, at ). It was reworked for first book publication as Un prince de la Bohème in Honorine suivi de Un prince de la Bohème (de Potter, Oct.  (dated ),  o vols.; the third, Furne, edition was published in . Les Fantaisies de la Gina, begun in Aug. , pursued in Jan.  but never completed is similarly flippant in tone but ends with a shock, inspired by Miss Edgeworth’s Belinda: cf. CHH xxviii. –; OD ii.  n. ; Les Fantaisies de la Gina, ed. R. de Cesare (Rezé, ). 16 As a bourgeois’s absence of onomastic origin demonstrates: ‘monsieur est-il né?’, La Palférine insolently asks (vii. ). 17 Another starting-point of Un prince de la Bohème is as pastiche of Sainte-Beuve’s attacks on ‘littérature industrielle’, on Balzac as president of the Société des Gens de Lettres, devoted to defending authors against the depredations of Belgian publishing piracy, and on Balzac’s literature itself. Cf. P. Berthier, vii. , –. 18 Sarrasine’s absolutes conceal specifics, and vice versa: its narrator deters his listener from passion both generally and in particular, with him. And that listener (Mme de Rochefide, protagonist of Béatrix in F) regards absolutes are strictly contingent: less than three years later she elopes with Conti, and has affairs with du Guénic and La Palférine (ii. , ; vii. ). The frigid Foedora, audience of the tale in the Béchet edition, was a more credible cenobite. Her replacement in F suggests that Balzac’s faith in absolutes had worn thin: vi. c, a.

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In Les Fantaisies, subtitled ‘La Bohème à Paris’, these are relatively accessible; its general value is implicit. The informal opening, and the initially anonymous narrator, generalize its import: for the Revue’s reader, Nathan was potentially no more than a name, but, if we have never heard of Baroness Rastignac, Nathan’s gossipy vignette is enough to invent her (vii. ; a). In principle, it is up to us to decide whether these are fictional characters, or real people we simply do not know—an ambiguity assisted by the Revue’s real-life context. Yet the complexity of the other context of Balzac’s widening fictional world invites us to a more-than-passing acquaintance with its cast. Les Fantaisies de Claudine contains not more recurring characters than any previous story, but perhaps more secondary recurring characters. If L’Interdiction was a crossroads, then Les Fantaisies is a queue. Its recurring protagonists—Nathan, Claudine, her lover Du Bruel—endow it with a potential for dispersal of interest borne out by La Palférine, Antonia, Lousteau, Finot, du Tillet, Desroches, Bianchon, Bixiou, Blondet, Couture, Des Lupeaulx, Mme Anselme Popinot, Chaffaroux, Réthoré [sic], Chaulieu, and the episodics—Mme de Chissé and Mme de Bonfalot.19 The powerful force-field of the rest of Balzac’s creation was potentially impugning the coherence of this story. This is perhaps even truer of the  book version of Les Fantaisies, Un prince de la Bohème. The number of recurring characters increases to twenty-six, by the addition of Mme de la Baudraye, de Trailles, Arthur, and Mme Schontz from Béatrix in a new prologue and epilogue; the newsy immediacy of the  story is effectively placed in a second frame. After a new opening dialogue, Mme de la Baudraye, the bluestocking novelist-heroine of La Muse du département (also ), reads what is broadly the  text (minus its epilogue, and its listener, Mme de Rastignac) to Nathan for his approval. His story, Les Fantaisies de Claudine, is now a fictional novella, Mme de La Baudraye’s transcription of his account of La Palférine’s affairs, delivered in conversation to Mme de Rochefide, who replaces Mme de Rastignac as the woman who falls for him; the  text has become, in short, the story of a story. With Augusta de Rastignac disappears much of the inwardness of Les Fantaisies: put in the mouth of Mme de la Baudraye, Augusta’s allusion to her own marital unhappiness (‘dans certains ménages, c’est la femme qui est du Bruel’—that is, who is deceived—vii. ) has no immediate referent, whilst the fact that Nathan is now the audience of his own tale changes the tone, replacing an inward, rather solipsistic conclusion with a flippant, outward-looking ending. Making Mme de la Baudraye’s framed narrative a novella accords with her writerly pretentions in La Muse du département, and provides the reader with the organized, 19 No less than twenty-six major (recurring) characters appear or are mentioned in Un prince. Most were present in Les Fantaisies in . But the  additions, with the exception of Mme de la Baudraye, all appear in the epilogue, right at the end: Arthur, Béatrix, Mme de Schontz, Maxime de Trailles. Only one recurring character was added in , or rather converted from an episodic one: Z. Marcas.

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‘literary’, and contextual elements (biographical details, physical descriptions) generally absent from conversation. Yet the new epilogue counters this transparency: —Et le dénouement? demanda Lousteau qui revint au moment où Mme de La Baudraye achevait la lecture de sa nouvelle. —Je ne crois pas aux dénouements, dit Mme de La Baudraye, il faut en faire quelquesuns de beaux pour montrer que l’art est aussi fort que le hasard; mais, mon cher, on ne relit une oeuvre que pour ses détails. —Mais il y a un dénouement, dit Nathan. —Eh! lequel? demanda Mme de La Baudraye. —La marquise de Rochefide est folle de Charles-Édouard. Mon récit avait piqué sa curiosité. —Oh! la malheureuse! s’écria Mme de La Baudraye. —Pas si malheureuse! dit Nathan, car Maxime de Trailles et La Palférine ont brouillé le marquis avec Mme Schontz et vont raccommoder Arthur et Béatrix. (Voyez Béatrix, Scènes de la Vie privée.) (vii. )

Such references can seem self-indulgent, incomprehensible without flawless knowledge of La Comédie humaine.20 But their difficulty merely reflects the inherent complexity of life, matching the infinity of possible stories and the limitations of narrative with an authentically provisional ending: in this final page alone, dénouements are twice undone, once by Mme de la Baudraye, once by Nathan, announcing, in the final lines, that Mme de Rochefide’s affair with La Palférine is already half over.21 Conclusion would exclude us from ‘gens d’esprit’, from the Balzacian Happy Few.22 This story’s situational ambiguities, its mixture of autonomy and dependence on other narratives, are reflected in its characters and its structures: Claudine and Du Bruel are fiery, fickle, yet fundamentally content; La Palférine is the opposite of Du Bruel, who is enslaved by Claudine as La Palférine enslaves her. The symbolism, imagery, and parallels which generally unify Balzac’s stories are supplanted by a cohesiveness of viewpoint—the authorial narrator’s, and Nathan’s, which governs the framed narrative and selects the experiences which form its diffuse focus. Construction is not concentrated or convergent, confronting rivals in dramatic scenes, but linear and 20 As A. R. Pugh remarks, ‘Que de complications peu nécessaires . . . Pour qui ne connaît pas La Muse du département et Béatrix, les allusions sont obscures . . . quelle idée délicate Balzac a gâchée . . . Balzac a changée le sens de son idée primitive, qui était excellente, et l’a rendue en outre incompréhensible’: ‘Note sur l’épilogue de Un prince de la Bohème’, AB (), –; cf. P. Berthier, vii. –. Balzac was averse to explanatory notes, but used them: CHH xxviii. ,  n. . 21 This meaning is clear, but the chronology is confused: P. Berthier, vii. . 22 Cf vi.  and Ch.  sect. (ii) above on Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan. The passage was added to that story for its publication in vol. xi of the Furne Comédie humaine on  Sept. ; the De Potter edition of Un prince de la Bohème, where this new epilogue first appears, was published a month or so later, in Oct. or Nov.

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associative, comprehending contrasts in the narrators’ discursiveness. We hear of everything—La Palférine’s and Antoinette’s affair, his chance encounters in the street, his duels with strangers. Anecdotes are prompted by their pertinence: Nathan’s accounts are continuous potted histories, pivoting on the documentary evidence of letters (breaking off with Antonia, vii. ; Claudine’s adulation of La Palférine, vii. –), occasionally interrupted by the listening marquise, enlivened with thumbnail sketches (vii. –; –; cf. , ). The serendipities of oral narrative and chance encounters seem to govern the story’s structure; they pay hommage, along with its title, to Nodier’s Histoire du roi de Bohème 23 and ultimately to Sterne, anticipating ‘street stories’ and novels like Les Comédiens sans le savoir and Splendeurs et misères. Un prince de la Bohème furthers the move from a world of authorial narrative to one based on social discourse, where conversation scripts the events in characters’ lives. If divergent interests strain the cohesion of this story, they increase that of Balzac’s wider world, where recurring characters are potentially more comprehensible than episodic ones, and go some way towards making his opus accessible as a whole. The fictional audience’s presence, narratorial hesitations and spontaneous asides (vii. ; cf. , ) and the associative nature of the anecdotes reflect the chance encounters described (vii. , ). The scrupulous imitation of serendipity (it is no accident, perhaps, that Nathan listens ‘avec l’attention d’un enfant à qui sa mère raconterait Le Grand Serpentin vert’,24 vii. ) seeks to make art as real as life, vesting the very structure of the story in social interaction. Conversation is causation in Un prince de la Bohème; it shapes reality itself. Nathan ‘creates’ La Palférine so that his female listener falls for him; La Palférine and Trailles script marital rift and reconciliation. Balzac’s characters, ever more rounded as they more frequently recur, are increasingly their own, and others’, narrators. Where Sarrasine or Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit rely on contrasts, contracts, or conflicts between frame- and framed-story audiences, sometimes (in, say, Le Conseil) with overtly didactic ends, Nathan’s narrative innoculates against adultery less than it infects: so far from ending with an explicit moral or some tangible, material consequence, his story wheels off into infinity, its chain of exploitation from La Palférine to Claudine to Du Bruel breaking off when one last trophy, ‘la Croix du Sud’, proves elusive (vii. ). Failure to gain this unreachably stellar distinction, in its dizzying leap from a real specific to an absolute, shows both Tullia’s unbounded passion and narrative’s inability to encompass it. It leaves 23 vii. –; cf. D. Sangsue, Le Récit excentrique (),  and n. . The ‘eccentric’ and ‘Bohemian’ connotations of Nodier’s  novel, one of the works grouped by Balzac into the École du désenchantement (Lettres sur Paris, Le Voleur,  ( Jan. ), OD ii. ), is echoed by the story’s  dedication to Heine, who had resurrected in poetic form the Bohemian hero Till Eulenspiegel. Cf. vii.  n. . 24 Tale by Mme d’Aulnoy (–), who is cited four times in La Comédie humaine and twice to Mme Hanska (LH ii. , ). Cf. S. Swahn, Balzac et le merveilleux (Lund, ), .

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the story, like desire, open-ended and unendingly cumulative; accretive, yet never definitively sated.

(iv) La Fausse maîtresse: Form and Fragmentation The Revue parisienne, set up in emulation of Karr’s petite brochure, was destined to get short shrift. Balzac lacked Karr’s commercial flair; his supposed carte blanche bore but two of his stories, and three articles. The Revue’s collapse after just three issues points to a larger paradox in his work: his ambitions were becoming global whilst their realization remained partial. With the rare exceptions of novels like Une ténébreuse affaire or Ursule Mirouët, or Dom Gigadas,25 nearly all his output between September  and December  consisted of fragments and isolated or multiple articles.26 This fragmentation had diverse causes: lack of inspiration, preoccupation with the theatre, difficulties with publishers, the feasability and lucrativeness of short articles.27 Yet it also indicates a growing generic homogenization, and a levelling of ‘literature’ and ‘journalism’. Les Guêpes and the Revue parisienne are journaux-livres—the designation chosen by Karr’s Figaro in , tellingly echoed by the ambiguous title of Briffault’s Historiettes contemporaines, courrier de la ville.28 Book and paper were interchangeable: the author asks for a copy of La Caricature (for Petites misères) and ‘une Guêpe’ in the same breath, or equates Petites misères and Les Fantaisies de Claudine (Corr. iii. , iv. ). If the equation of journal and book had been foreshadowed by the Revue de Paris in , what is striking a decade later is the use of the nouvelle as a unit of currency. A story was an instalment, a space

25 Une ténébreuse affaire, Le Commerce (– Feb. ); Ursule Mirouët, Le Messager ( Aug.– Sept. ); on Dom Gigadas, BF ( Sept. ), generally attributed to Balzac’s amanuenis F. de Grammont, cf. Corr. iii.  n. , V , and P –. 26 e.g. the series of Petites misères de la vie conjugale or of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes already discussed, of Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (Nov. –Sept. , see Ch.  below), parts of La Rabouilleuse (Les Deux Frères, La Presse ( Feb.– Mar. )) or of Le Curé de village (Le Messager (– Mar.); Le Voleur ( Apr. )); isolated sketches such as Une scène de boudoir (L’Artiste (,  Mar. )) or single volumes (Physiologie de l’employé, BF ( Aug. ); Histoire de l’Empereur racontée dans une grange par un vieux soldat (Dec. ), an extract from Le Médecin de campagne). Cf. V – passim. 27 On difficulties with newspapers, see V ; even La Presse, hitherto indulgent, became impatient in Aug.  (Corr. iii. –; P. Kinder, ‘Balzac et La Presse’, Ph.D. thesis, Liverpool, , ii. –, ). Nov. of that year marks the beginning of Balzac’s notorious reclusion at Passy whilst he worked furiously on feuilletons in a bid to put his affairs in order; hope of improvement would only come in Apr.  with the contract for La Comédie humaine. See P – and Ch.  below; R. Bouvier and E. Maynial, Les Comptes dramatiques de Balzac (), – et seq. 28 Pub. . Eugène Briffault, a journalist on Le Temps, who may have sought to contribute to the Chronique de Paris, published his Historiettes in imitation of it and of Les Guêpes. Cf. Corr. iii. ; LH i.  n. .

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which might be filled with whatever Balzac proposed.29 The Revue parisienne was not an aberration, but a continuum with Balzac’s other productions; a continuum brought about, paradoxically, by short fiction, and which anticipates the publication in instalments of what is virtually a journal-livre, La Comédie humaine. These phenomena are attested by ‘le roman . . . intitulé Ursule Mirouët’, whose length was never specified,30 and by La Fausse Maîtresse, written as a replacement for works owing, but undelivered, to Le Siècle.31 Both exemplify the tension between the centrifugal and the centripetal already seen in Z. Marcas and Un prince de la Bohème. Ursule Mirouët’s manuscript is a primarily linear narrative which for publication was expanded, with some loss of cohesion, by the addition or amplification of secondary characters such as Bongrand’s son or Dionis, or by significant modifications to the plot.32 La Fausse Maîtresse, the last complete Balzac fiction to appear before the inauguration of La Comédie humaine in , shows even more the seriousness and diversity of these tensions. La Fausse maîtresse draws on two main threads: on the venerable theme of Deux Amis,33 noted in –, exploited in Balzac’s eponymous sketch and its near contemporary Le Frère d’armes; 34 and on Balzac’s contemporary fictional world. Both were ready-made, could be embroidered quickly, and were easily integrated into what, within six months, would be La Comédie humaine. La Fausse Maîtresse echoes these forerunners. Paz, loyal to his friend Adam Laginski, hides his love for Laginski’s wife, Clémentine du Rouvre. The martial aspect of earlier versions here becomes political unrest, the luxury and 29 But of which papers often disposed, frequently exchanging one work for another. In  La Presse had substituted Le Curé de village for La Maison Nucingen and La Torpille (Corr. iii. –; in , Le Siècle exchanged Mémoires d’une jeune mariée [sic] for ‘six nouvelles’ (Corr. iii. –). Book publishers did likewise: in Apr. , a contract with Souverain and Lecou refers to ‘romans ou nouvelles’ (Corr. iv. ); in Oct., Piquée, director of Le Musée des familles, a halfway-house between book and paper, asks Balzac for ‘une nouvelle de votre composition’; Balzac replies proposing David Séchard, which in  became Les Souffrances de l’inventeur, the third part of Illusions perdues (Corr. iv. – and n.). 30 Although implicit in a letter from Durangel, editor of Le Messager, referring to payment of  centimes per line not exceeding a total of , frs. ( June , Corr. iv. ). 31 Cf. Perrée, director of Le Siècle, to Balzac,  Nov. , where the work is described both as a feuilleton and a nouvelle (Corr. iv. ), and R. Guise, ii. –. La Fausse Maîtresse (Le Siècle (– Dec. ); F, vol. i,  June ) was probably first conceived in Aug. , during the composition of Ursule Mirouët: BRC . 32 In particular to the nature of the love between Ursule and Savinien. Cf. M. Fargeaud, iii. –. 33 Found, for example in the Heptaméron (th nouvelle) La Fontaine (Fables, . xi), and Diderot (Les Deux Amis de Bourbonne). Cf. Ch. (iii) above. 34 PSF, Lov. A , fo. r; Deux Amis, xii. –; Le Frère d’Armes, CD . viii, written Mar. . La Fausse Maîtresse also reacts against Sue’s Mathilde, mémoires d’une jeune femme, published in La Presse ( Dec. – Sept. ) to greater acclaim than Balzac’s Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées ( Nov.– Dec. ,  Dec.– Jan. , – Jan. ; cf. LH i.  and n. , and Kinder, ‘Balzac et La Presse’, ii. –).

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calm of Clémentine’s boudoir contrasting with the personal and social storms to come.35 But Balzac builds on earlier deux amis tales by giving Paz a sham mistress, the fairground rider Malaga (Marguerite Turquet)—a ploy which, along with the use of recurring characters as protagonists, shapes the story in an entirely telling way. Clémentine had her first, walk-on role in Ursule Mirouët; with the stagecraft of an ever more confident director, Balzac now develops her career. Casting her as protagonist is an index of conceptual continuity (she has already been mentioned, so a fuller account must now appear), but also of a certain fragmentation and narrative relativity: important players (Rastignac, Trailles, Bianchon, Ronquerolles) make merely momentary appearances (ii. –, ; –, , –); Mmes de l’Estorade, de Portenduère, de Vandenesse, du Guénic, and de Maufrigneuse are just, so to speak, spearcarriers (ii. ). Though they are not developed in this story, they create at its opening a variety of centres of interest difficult coherently to contain. La Fausse Maîtresse starts hesitantly36 and digressively, with reflections on Polish exiles and their names, on Clémentine and her wider family, on the architecture of her hôtel (ii. –). Character-based variety succeeds this narrator-driven diversity, the story moving from centres dictated by the author to ones suggested by its actors: Clémentine’s exclamation opens scene one in medias res most theatrically,37 preparing, yet delaying, the hero’s arrival in episode two— for which readers of Le Siècle had to wait two days;38 a casual gambit (‘Racontez-moi maintenant vos relations avec lui’) triggers Adam’s exposition; reflected in Clémentine’s response, it develops into conversation (ii. –). The discourses of author and characters are combined, in a hybrid mirroring of the melding of theory and practice in Balzac’s earlier Deux Amis.39 Structured authorial narrative and more serendipitous forms of dialogue are sharpened by the consciously-crafted writing of theatre: 40 an eclectic mix characteristic of Balzac’s maturing style. ii. –. Balzac had exploited similar contrasts in La Paix du ménage: cf. above, Ch. . Hesitations reflected in the manuscript (Lov. A , fos. –); cf. R. Guise, ii. –, and variants on – passim. 37 ii. . At the time of writing La Fausse Maîtresse, Balzac was also working on Les Ressources de Quinola, programmed for the Odéon on  Dec. , but not actually staged there until  Mar. of the following year. Cf. Corr. iv. –, –, , and P , . Nearly all the scenes and dialogues in the story are present on MS. With the rare exceptions of Paz’s first interview with Malaga, her establishment in her apartment, and subsequent rejection of him, there are no examples of significant expansion of dialogue from continuous narrative found commonly in the first series of Scènes de la vie privée. Cf. ii. c–c, c–f, a–c, and above, Ch. (iv). 38 Episode one—ending with the words ‘mièvre, maigre et rouge’—appeared on  Dec. , its successor, beginning ‘Voilà Paz’, on  Dec. (ii. ). 39 Cf. N. Mozet, xii. . 40 Such as Clémentine’s response to Paz’s praise of Malaga’s ‘franche nature de jeune animal’: ‘“—Le fait est que je ne voudrais rien avoir d’animal”, dit la comtesse en lui lançant un regard de vipère’ (ii. ). As in Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, there are many examples of telling ‘stage directions’, most of them relating to Clémentine (cf. e.g. ii. ). 35 36

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Despite, or because of, this heterogeneousness, La Fausse Maîtresse is organized around several different symbols. Theatrical references connote its central premiss. Illusion and deception belie the truth, reflecting Malaga’s occupation, and the predicament of any modern woman (‘aujourd’hui elle est toujours en scène’). So do references to horses (‘Ne faut-il pas toujours s’exercer au manège des sourires . . .?’ (ii. , which carry their traditional allusion to the sexual act: if Adam is ‘vraiment chevaleresque’ (ii. ), it is Paz who is mistaken for an Englishman (‘ils aiment les chevaux’) and has ‘les plus charmants équipages de Paris’ (ii. , , ). Malaga, says Clémentine, would jump through a hoop for him ‘et retomberait très bien sur son cheval’ (ii. ). Yet these usages are unstable. Whilst Balzac’s symbolism is elsewhere generally consistent (in, say, La Paix du ménage, Le Colonel Chabert or La Grenadière), in La Fausse Maîtresse a second metonymic nexus, playing on paternity and the ambiguity of the word fille, changes both in nature and significance, reflecting incoherences central to the story. Paz, animated by ‘un orgueil de père et de Dieu’ (ii. ) in his love for Clémentine, herself ‘Élevée chez un père dissipateur’ (ii. ), presents himself as ‘un père au désespoir’ to Malaga, who replies ‘je passerai pour votre fille . . . sans soupçonner la profonde véracité de cette proposition (ii. ). But Paz equally experiences for Clémentine an ‘émotion maternelle’ (ii. ), declaring in his farewell letter, ‘J’ai connu les plaisirs de la maternité dans l’amour’ (ii. )—an androgyny which, for all that it suggests an ideal, is no more coherent as a reality than any of its predecessors in Sarrasine or La Fille aux yeux d’or. Other wordplays (Malaga’s ‘Pendant l’hiver je suis sans feux’, ii. —the actor’s bonus, lovers, and also, literally, a fire) attest a similar semiotic mobility, reflecting the thematic and generic instability of the work itself. The more we look, the more the story seems to be in its characters and, ultimately, in its language. Clémentine may notice ‘le contraste si heurté . . . entre le capitaine et le comte, entre ce petit Polonais à figure étroite et ce beau militaire’, but by the end of the sentence she is comparing ‘ce paladin et ce palatin’[sic, ii. ]—a difference of one consonant, meaning everything, and nothing.41 The ‘servitude volontaire’ which she detects at their first meeting contains in essence the whole story, as does the ‘sorte de mésestime’ she experiences in response. But more crucially, these mixed feelings are directly related to Paz’s polyvalent status, his irreducibility to any category as ‘un amphibie social, un être à la fois secrétaire et intendant, ni tout à fait intendant ni tout à fait secrétaire’ (ibid.). These are not the only classifications which collapse: Adam’s distinction between friendship and love (‘L’amitié, mon ange, ignore les banqueroutes du sentiment et les faillites du plaisir. Après avoir donné plus qu’il n’a, l’amour finit par donner moins qu’il ne reçoit’) is immediately reversed by Clémentine and rendered meaningless: ‘—D’un côté comme de l’autre’, she replies. His attempt to transcend this opposition by declaring ‘nous 41

Both words share a Latin root, palatinus.

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sommes, mon ange, aussi amis qu’amants’ (ii. ) is doomed to failure, for each category automatically suggests its opposite: the friends could also become lovers, something putatively true of Paz and Clémentine, and borne out by a further reversal when Malaga becomes Adam’s mistress (ii. , ): Paz acts as Adam’s decoy just as Malaga is a decoy for Paz. In view of these problematic categories, it seems no accident that Malaga should belong to ‘le monde interlope des femmes équivoques’ (ii. ), or that Paz’s tale, like Marcas’s, seems to come from his very name: ‘Pazpartout’ (also the title of the final chapter in Le Siècle: ii. , ,  n. ), suggesting a narrative organized around both its action and a metaphoric nexus which points to its aporias. Paz’s polyvalent speaking name, like Marcas’s, points to the void at the story’s heart, to the futility of its categories and symbolic groupings, to its dependence as much on signifiers as on signifieds or narrative, to its ultimate affinity to poetry. Such imagic instability reflects the tension between unity and disunity in La Comédie humaine itself. La Fausse Maîtresse, unlike earlier deux amis stories, proposes no clear moral. Relativity of perspective bespeaks relativity of narrative: where La Fontaine’s fable and Diderot’s story 42 are morally unambiguous, La Fausse Maîtresse reverses the terms of the question to imply that the matter is more complex. Self-sacrifice is not enough, or too much: Paz creates greater evils in seeking to disguise his feelings and to save his friendship with Adam: the initial lie, that Malaga is his mistress, leads to a second when he asks her to play that role (ii. , ); his integrity is more gravely impugned than had he acknowledged his true feelings, or really had a mistress. If pressures on moral integrity parallel those on narrative integrity, their effect would have been markedly less without the linear extensiveness of serialization. Though doubtless prompted partly by practical reasons (Balzac had got a good deal from Le Siècle, and needed to fill its columns ),43 La Fausse Maîtresse also exploits, more than any earlier story, an aesthetic of alternation, following its digressive opening with linear expansion based on the contrast of dialogue scenes and authorial narration (ii. –, –, –, –). If Paz’s creation of his ‘héroïque mensonge’ and his first visit to Malaga create pivotal contrasts of the kind already encountered in Le Colonel Chabert, the ensuing narrative is founded on much more rapid alternation which echoes the frequent scene changes of the stage—Malaga’s establishment by, rejection of, and return to Paz (three months in three pages, ii. –), Clémentine’s disgust and recriminations after sighting them together (ii. –). The five chapters form Les Deux Amis, Fables, . xi; Les Deux Amis de bourbonne (). Perrée’s only letter concerning La Fausse Maîtresse does not specify its length (Corr. iv. ). But Balzac had some trouble with the ending, envisaged as two instalments but eventually occupying only one (R. Guise, ii. ). Despite having already given Les Lecamus (now pt. I of Sur Catherine de Médicis, xi. –) to Le Siècle ( Mar.– Apr. ), he was obliged to follow it with Albert Savarus ( May– June ). 42 43

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five large acts which, unusually for Balzac’s serialized works, correspond to the five major movements of the story, forming an overarching pattern of contrast and recurrence.44 The epilogue ending, augmented in the  Furne edition by the addition of La Palférine, who effectively abducts Clémentine, parallels those of the first Scènes de la vie privée, but reinforces the implicitly relativistic moral: compared to La Palférine’s brutal assault, Paz’s detached deception seems innocent. The incident gives Clémentine her come-uppance, fulfilling her prediction that, alone in Paris, she would fall prey to any adventurer (ii. ), and making her the victim of a covert ploy (the ‘soi-disant amie’ La Palférine uses to entrap her) which echoes both Paz’s deception and her own, in spying on him at the carnival. But this ending also suggests the loss of their unrealized affair: ‘A toute heure, Clémentine espère revoir Paz’. Whilst the manuscript leaves the narrative hanging (Clémentine casually asks ‘Savez-vous ce qu’est devenu notre pauvre comte Paz?’), Le Siècle adds her brief sighting of him (which takes place, with journalistic immediacy, ‘Hier’), and ends more urgently: ‘à toute heure, elle croit revoir Paz’. In incorporating La Palférine into the abduction episode, the Furne edition retains the poignancy and immediacy of its predecessors, yet tangentially connects them to the action of Balzac’s larger world, suggesting the infinite mirroring of narratives, events, perspectives, and moral stances. La Fausse Maîtresse echoes Le Lys dans la vallée, where Félix, caring for the dying M. de Mortsauf, saves the husband of his lover, as does Thaddée in caring for Adam,45 and reflects the love in war, the calm and tumult of another story of unrealized adultery, La Paix du ménage.46 And Paz’s sublimated affection for 44 The chapter divisions were made on proof (R. Guise, ii. ). In Le Siècle, ch. I ends with the first scene between Adam and Clémentine, who expresses her impatience to meet Paz (ii.  and n. .); ch.  begins with Paz’s arrival (), continues with a second scene of Adam’s expositions of his relations with Paz to his wife (ii. –), continues with their expedition to the opera, ending with its aftermath (ii. – and  n. ); ch. , beginning the next day, continues one month later (ii. ) with Paz’s encounter with Clémentine in the Champs-Élysées (ii. ), his invitation to dinner (ii. ), the ensuing conversation in which Paz reveals his alleged mistress (ii. –) and then visits Malaga to engage her (ii. – and n. ). Ch.  begins one month later, with Malaga’s establishment in her apartment, and, as befits a fourth act, contains Paz’s ruptures and reconciliations with her and with Clémentine in the rapid series of brief scenes already mentioned. Dialogue predominates here more than in any other part of the story. Ch.  ends with Clémentine’s sighting of Paz with Malaga at the carnival and his decision to leave their service (ii. – n. ), but the final chapter begins with the peripeteia of Adam’s illness (a period of forty-five days ending in three short scenes occuring within an hour of each other: ii. –). It continues with Paz’s call to serve in the Khiva expedition and his long last conversation with Clémentine (ii. –), his letters confessing his love (ii. –), and ends with an epilogue, occuring three years after the main action, in which Clémentine again briefly encounters Paz (ii. d). 45 Cf. M. Le Yaoanc, Nosographie de l’humanité balzacienne (), , cit. R. Guise, ii. . 46 La Paix du ménage, which immediately precedes La Fausse Maîtresse in vol. i of the first edition of La Comédie humaine of , prefigures these contrasts and even its imagery, from the ‘étalage de marchandises qui divertissent les regards’ and the comment that ‘personne n’est sur de son lendemain, et chacun jouit de la vie en usufruitier prodigue’: ii. –) to the ‘femme frêle et délicate qui garde son dur et brillant harnais de fleurs’ (ii. ). Cf. ii. –, and Ch. (iv) above.

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Clémentine makes him one of Balzac’s gallery of unrecognized creators, like Chrestien, Marcas, or Cataneo, a ‘poète par l’âme’ (ii. ), whose ‘plaisirs silencieux, ensevelis dans son cœur’ (ii. ) enable him to sit above the action and view it with painful acuity: Rien ne ressemble plus à l’amour divin que l’amour sans espoir. Un homme ne doit-il pas avoir une certaine profondeur dans le coeur pour se dévouer dans le silence et dans l’obscurité? Cette profondeur, où se tapit un orgueil de père et de Dieu, contient le culte de l’amour pour l’amour . . . avarice sublime en ce qu’elle est constamment généreuse et modelée enfin sur la mystérieuse existence des principes du monde. L’Effet, n’est-ce pas la nature? . . . mais la Cause n’est-elle pas, aux yeux de quelques âmes privilégiées et pour certains penseurs giantesques, supérieure à la Nature? La Cause, c’est Dieu . . . En proie à des joies de créateur indicibles, Thaddée était en amour ce que nous connaissons de plus grand dans les fastes du génie.47

Tracing such mirrorings is more than a specialist’s game: ‘Chaque sentiment humain comporte des analogies avec cette situation où l’esprit abandonne l’Effet pour la Cause, et Thaddée avait atteint à cette hauteur où tout change d’aspect’ (ibid.). In fiction, that hauteur is ultimately the reader’s, who has the privilege of seeing both cause and effect, the characters’ subjective truths and public misconceptions of them—a central theme of Balzac’s post- fiction, and to some degree a transcendence of the earlier distinction between study of effect in the Études de mœurs and of causes in the Études philosophiques.48 ‘La profondeur vient de l’intelligence du lecteur et non de la pensée exprimée, un livre est moins un effet qu’une cause.’49 Balzac’s partitioning of cause and effect, like any such division, is too schematic: but in the dichotomy of its dogmatic, authoritative pretensions and its untidier reality lies its very power. Balzac’s shorter fictions in the period – embody manifold tensions: between the individual and the type, the centrifugal and the centripetal, between the cohesion and self-containedness of single narratives, and that of the creation as a whole. Such dichotomies, fostered by the modes of production and publication of Balzac’s creation post-, answer those between univocal morality, and plurivocal relativism brought by narrative fragmentation and prolongation in serialized works, and by the use of recurring characters. The year  was to see the inauguration of La Comédie humaine: within its overarching and ostensibly single and unifying structure, these conflicting yet complementary characteristics were to be laid out. The mosaic was to become a monument. Or rather, a monumental mosaic. 47 48

ii. . Balzac considerably reworked this important passage. Cf. ii. e. 49 PSF, fo. , CHH xxviii. , –.  Oct. , LH i. , cit. R. Guise, ii. .

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‘La Grrrrrrande Comédie’, – ‘La grrrrrrande Comédie’: Mme Hanska’s rolling ‘r’s1 acknowledge, yet ironize, her future husband’s project’s ambitiousness and scope. Both acknowledgement and irony seem justified. For the idea of making mere œuvres complètes a Comédie humaine occurred almost accidentally. The title was not thought of until ,2 but by April two years later the first, Furne, edition was coming helter-skelter off the presses, in a largely haphazard sequence which would continue until .3 And Balzac’s Dantean cosmography is mirrored, and even mocked, by his own tales in the Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (–), a carnivalesque story-series directed by Hetzel. Without it, Hetzel would probably not have become the publisher, indeed almost the originator, of the Comédie humaine.4 Reported by Balzac:  Nov. , LH i. ; cf. , . First mentioned in a letter to an unidentified publisher, possibly Curmer or Dutacq, concerning a compact edition of his works: Corr. iv.  and n. ; cf.  n.  and R. Pierrot, ‘A propos d’un livre récent: Hetzel et l’Avant-propos de La Comédie humaine’, RHLF :  (), –, and P . Balzac probably did not read the Paradise until : R. Guise, ‘Balzac et Dante’, AB (),  et seq., cit. M. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien (Paris and Lille, ), . 3 Sixteen o vols published between Apr.  and Sept. , complemented by a seventeenth in Nov. . The Avant-propos did not appear until July , three months after the first instalment had been issued; the fifth volume was, in order of publication, the fourth, which did not itself emerge until Dec. , three years after the third; the seventh volume did not come out until Sept. , fourteen months after the eighth, and simultaneously with the eleventh (v. , ); the thirteenth was followed, at eight months’ distance, by the twelfth. Cf. V – passim. 4 On these scènes and Hetzel’s role in the drafting of the Avant-propos, see my ‘Balzac, Satire and Subversion: The Private Life of the Avant-propos to La Comédie humaine, in K. Grossman, M. Lane, B. Monicat, and W. Silverman (eds.), Confrontations: Politics and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century France (Amsterdam and Atlanta, ), –. Balzac contributed the following tales to Hetzel’s Scènes: Peines de cœur d’une chatte anglaise (: – ( Feb. )); Guide-âne à l’usage des animaux qui veulent parvenir aux honneurs (: – (end Apr. )); Voyage d’un moineau de Paris à la recherche du meilleur gouvernement (: – (c. June )); Voyage d’un lion d’Afrique à Paris et ce qui s’ensuivit (: – (Nov. )); Les Amours de deux bêtes offerts en exemple aux gens d’esprit. Histoire animau-sentimentale (: – (Aug.–Sept. )), although Hetzel collaborated on Voyage d’un lion (Peines de cœur d’une chatte anglaise et autres scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, ed. R. Fortassier (), ), as on many tales by other contributors to the collection. Balzac is thought to have had a hand in several other tales (Corr. iv.  n. ), but his authorship of the Voyage d’un moineau de Paris, signed by Sand in the first edition, has been disputed. The Scènes inaugurated relations between Balzac and Hetzel, and a long-standing friendship. 1 2

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Hetzel is symptomatic of the determinant impact of commerce on genre in the remainder of Balzac’s career. Between  and his death in  the author wrote only two completely new stories, Honorine and Un homme d’affaires ( and ); the remainder rework and re-present earlier narratives (Autre étude de femme, ), form pen-portraits for Hetzel’s other major collective series, Le Diable à Paris (–), or do both (Gaudissart II, ); many would themselves be reincorporated both in short fictions so disjointed that they can scarcely be called stories (Les Comédiens sans le savoir, , in chronology of composition the last tale of La Comédie humaine), and in novels as long as Splendeurs et misères. If Balzac’s short fiction found a haven in collective livres illustrés such as Hetzel’s Animaux or Le Diable, the success of mega-feuilletons like Mathilde or Les Mystères de Paris made novel serializations over many months by big-name authors unrivalled in ensuring newspaper subscribers’ brand loyalty.5 A ‘Nouvelle courte’, Balzac wrote in , was ‘de l’argent perdu’ (Corr. iv. ). Yet in his work there is a certain genre blindness, the same fragments reappearing, sometimes in several places— a realization of the nightmare vision of copying in Pierre Grassou. His shorter fictions had become a matter of framing and reframing—developments acknowledged in the Avant-propos to La Comédie humaine.6

(i) Comédie humaine, Avant-propos Balzac’s reluctance to write the Avant-propos (he had wanted Sand to do it, and the opening was virtually ghosted by Hetzel) reveals a desire to transcend genre, to make his creation super-literary, to give it virtually the status of life itself. Like La Peau de chagrin’s preface, and the Introductions to the Études de mœurs and the Études philosophiques, the Avant-propos gives a spurious, notionally genetic account of the Comédie’s creation, presenting its ‘idée première’ as ‘une comparaison entre l’Humanité et l’Animalité’ (i. ). Yet it so multiplies perceptual parameters and generic frameworks as to make them ostensibly self-negating. The opening unité de composition, a biological and zoological model present also in Hetzel’s animaux,7 is apparently undercut by the very elements which 5 Mathilde, La Presse ( Dec. – Sept. ); Les Mystères de Paris, Journal des débats ( June – Oct. ). It is in  that newspaper serialization of fiction begins to exceed the nouvelle’s single-figure number of episodes, in works such as Soulié’s Les Quatre Sœurs, Dumas’s Le Chevalier d’Harmenthal, and the  instalments of Mathilde: R. Guise, ‘Balzac et le roman-feuilleton’, AB (), – and ‘Le Roman-feuilleton (–)’, Doctorat d’État thesis, Nancy, , pt. III, chs. –; cf. P. Kinder, ‘Balzac et La Presse’, Ph.D. thesis, Liverpool, , ch.  passim, and, on Balzac’s rivalry with Sue, J.-L. Bory, Eugène Sue, Le Roi du roman populaire (), esp. ch.  and –. 6 For a more generalized approach to the implications of reframing cf. A. Pasco, Balzacian Montage (Toronto, ), passim. 7 Although the model is of longer standing: cf. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, ch. , esp.  et seq. and –.

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constitute it, ‘les molécules organiques de Buffon’, ‘l’emboîtement des parties similaires de Charles Bonnet’, ‘la belle loi du soi pour soi’ (i. ). Difference and diversity are implicit in, indeed the very nature of, unity. ‘L’animal est un principe qui prend sa forme extérieure, ou pour parler plus exactement, les différences de sa forme extérieure, dans les milieux où il est appelé à se développer. Les Espèces Zoologiques résultent de ces différences’ (i. ). Disparities form the constantly-evolving frame of Balzac’s investigation: Il a donc existé, il existera donc de tout temps des Espèces sociales comme il y a des Espèces Zoologiques . . . Mais la nature a posé, pour les variétés animales, des bornes entres lesquelles la Société ne devait pas se tenir . . . Si quelques savants n’admettent pas encore que l’Animalité se transborde dans l’Humanité par un immense courant de vie, l’épicier devient certainement pair de France, et le noble descend parfois au dernier rang social. (i. –)

Balzac’s ideas conflate those of the two principal adversaries of contemporary biological debate, fusing Cuvier’s taxonomies with the evolutionism of SaintHilaire, suggesting that categories can change.8 Balzac’s hierarchy is in fact a constantly mobile dynamic, a ‘drame à trois ou quatre mille personnages’, articulated through various genres manipulated and transcended in a striving towards a totalizing account of reality, raising ‘le roman’ to ‘la valeur philosophique de l’histoire’ (i. ). Scott is the transgeneric model par excellence, combining ‘l’esprit des anciens temps’, ‘le drame, le dialogue, le portrait, le paysage, la description’, ‘le merveilleux et le vrai, ces éléments de l’épopée’, placing ‘la poésie’ alongside ‘la familiarité des plus humbles langages’ (i. ). There is nothing unified called ‘the novel’ which transcends these different genres, except in the mind of the reader; perhaps in Mme de Staël’s sense, as the genre which bridges the gap between ‘la vie réelle et la vie imaginaire. L’histoire de chacun est . . . un roman assez semblable à ceux qu’on imprime, et les souvenirs personnels tiennent souvent à cet égard lieu d’invention’.9 Balzac is acknowledging literature’s subservience to life, what fiction owes to its readers. His enterprise is—plus ou moins—intuitive, imaginative, and creative, catching ‘le sens caché dans cet immense assemblage de figures, de passions et d’événements’, the writer ‘un peintre plus ou moins fidèle, plus ou moins heureux . . . des types humains’, who are created ‘par la réunion de traits plus ou moins homogènes’ (ibid.). The Comédie humaine’s supposedly transcriptive 8 Balzac inclined more towards Saint-Hilaire after , but never abandoned Cuvier: A. Michel, ‘Balzac et la logique du vivant’, AB (), –, esp.  n. , . Cf. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien, –. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire indeed sought ‘l’Étude simultanée de l’unité et de la diversité’ (Notions synthétiques et physiologiques de Philosophie naturelle (), –, cit. Andréoli, La Système balzacien, ), a notion echoed virtually simultaneously by Massimilla Doni: ‘Là est le cachet du grand maître: l’unité! C’est un et varié’ (x. ). 9 G. de Staël, De l’Allemagne, ed. S. Balayé (), ii. . If Balzac does not draw explicitly on Staël’s cricitism (though the Avant-propos mentions Corinne, i. ), its response-based view of the novel parallels both Diderot’s (in, say, Éloge de Richardson) and Balzac’s own.

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duties, ‘dressant l’inventaire des vices et des vertus’, ‘rassemblant les principaux faits des passions’, ‘choisissant les événements principaux de la vie’ (ibid.; my emphasis) assert not the pre-eminence or even viability of literal transcription, but the creation’s autonomy from its maker. Seen in this light, some of the Avant-propos’s more notorious assertions—‘Le hasard est le plus grand romancier du monde’; ‘La Société française allait être l’historien, je ne devais être que le secrétaire (i. )—appear less as defences of ‘melodrama’, or of a naïve transcriptive realism, than as declarations of independence. Chance is creative because it promises endless possible connections, Balzac a secretary because his fictions stand on their own. The Avant-propos stresses what might be called the embodiment of the work: the extent to which a sense of real presence transcends its philosophical core. Just as ‘la Société devait porter en elle la raison de son mouvement’ (i. ), so the writer’s task is to present ‘la poésie et la philosophie sous de saisissantes images’ (i. )—images as much virtual as actual, as much subjective as real. If the existence of characters like Roland, Lovelace, Werther, or Adolphe becomes ‘plus longue, plus authentique que celle des générations au milieu desquelles on les fait naître’, if they ‘ne vivent qu’à la condition d’être une grande image du présent’ (ibid.), then that is because, ‘Conçus dans les entrailles de leur siècle’, their existence is as much in the reader’s imagination as in their actual textual form. This insistence, introduced early in the Avant-propos, on a transcendent subjectivity, on a notion of genre—that is, of frames for apprehending texts—based on subjective conception rather than definition, anticipates the increasingly diverse and mobile grilles de lecture which figure later in this preface. Its juggling of literary genres gives way to a broader mixing of media, the author becoming successively ‘peintre’, ‘conteur’, ‘archéologue’, ‘nomenclateur’, ‘enregistreur’, and ‘artiste’ (i. )— multiple ways of approaching its subject matter, of making a mosaic (to revisit the image of Une fille d’Eve’s preface: ii. ) greater than its parts. The Avantpropos’s ‘opinions arrêtés’, its ‘décision quelconque sur les choses’, its support of Church and State, coexist with an implicit, but ostensibly denied, materialism, along with Bossuet, Bonald, Napoleon, Scott, and Lavater (i. –). The opening’s fundamentally evolutionary and historical premisses are accompanied by a medley of other potential hierarchies, ‘les hommes, les femmes et les choses’ (i. ), the ‘divisions si naturelles . . . en Scènes de la vie privée, de province, parisienne, politique, militaire et de campagne’, themselves corresponding to another system: childhood and adolescence for the Scènes de la vie privée, ‘l’âge des passions, des calculs, des intérêts et de l’ambition’ for the Scènes de la vie de province, and so on. The categories both break down, and build up, in the act of being created. When Balzac declares: ‘Mon ouvrage a sa géographie comme il a sa généalogie . . . ses lieux et ses choses, ses personnes et ses faits . . . son armorial, ses nobles et ses bourgeois, ses artisans et ses paysans, ses politiques et ses dandies, son armée’ (i. –), the encompassing of these categories in ‘tout son monde enfin!’ suggests that the monde is both the whole world, and its individual people.

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The apparently self-defeating proliferation of these systems invites us to see them comparatively, in conjunction with each other, to view pretensions to univocal moral consistency in the context of the whole Comédie humaine. The assertion that every crime finds its ‘punition humaine ou divine, éclatante ou secrète’ (i. ) directs us away from authorial doxa to an autonomous creation, to whatever ‘moral’ we may find. ‘Cromwell fut, ici-bas, sans autre châtiment que celui que lui infligeait le penseur’ (ibid.); and so it is with many of Balzac’s characters. Meaning is as much contingent upon on ‘le penseur’ as inherent in the works, since the novel, as reformulated by Balzac, has no ideal, no sublime essence, towards which to aspire. If ‘le roman ne serait rien si . . . il n’était pas vrai dans les détails’ (ibid.), then this is because the focus on the particular encourages us to make potentially infinite connections between individual details, other elements, and the whole. As the Avant-propos ends by reminding us, ‘le public décidera’: judgement is infinitely deferred, residing in the countless subjective grilles de lecture which readers might apply. The Avant-propos is both an assertion of unity and a declaration of diversity, less a confirmation than a collage, or a kaleidoscope. Its relative importance is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the tardiness of its appearance, not at the beginning, but a month after the publication, on  June , of the first volume of La Comédie humaine—proof of its author’s concern less with doxa than with an ‘histoire de la société peinte en action’(LH i. ) and the rapidity of production and availability of the whole. The Avant-propos’s constantly shifting frames of judgement and of reference both direct and challenge our reading of Balzac’s opus.

(ii) Autre étude de femme Such characteristics shape the only story composed expressly for the Comédie, Autre étude de femme.10 None more embodies the Comédie’s modular nature; but it is this very piecemeal quality which makes it most like life. Autre étude was put together rapidly, from parts of earlier stories, in order to fill volume ii of the Furne Comédie humaine. Much of the text comes from the  Conversation entre onze heures et minuit, joined to La Femme comme il faut from Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (and in FC by La Grande Bretèche),11 and prefaced by the story of Marsay’s first affair12 in a new frame-story salon narrative recounted by F, vol. ii, BF ( Sept. ). La Grande Bretèche did not appear in the first,  edition of Autre étude de femme, since a modified version of this  story, La Grande Bretèche ou les trois vengeances, which had appeared in the  Béchet-Werdet edition, was to be incorporated in Dinah Piédefer (now La Muse du département): BRC  et seq. 12 First published as Une scène de boudoir, L’Artiste (,  Mar. ). Autre étude de femme’s complex genesis is presented by N. Mozet: iii. –. 10 11

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Bianchon, who is emerging as La Comédie humaine’s pre-eminent fictional storyteller.13 Balzac hands over to his characters: it is appropriate, and revealing, that Histoire du Capitaine Beauvoir should be placed in the mouth of the brutal Montriveau, abductor of the duchesse de Langeais; that Blondet, a journalist, should describe La Femme comme il faut, or the empirical Bianchon relate what is largely a detective story, La Grande Bretèche. Balzac’s recycling of narratives and characters mirrors their circulation in society; and his characters’ conversations help to create the autonomy of his world. Both title and text of Autre étude recognize the existence of other characters and narratives beyond its bounds, the possibility of their infinite reformulation. The story moves from Marsay’s teasingly ambiguous treatment of sexual conflict to the schematic opposition of marriage and adultery in the last of its stories (chronologically one of the earliest), La Grande Bretèche. Autre étude measures the distance between Balzac’s dualism and his polyvalent variousness, between the univocal, and a unity composed of diversities. It is a story about narrative, and about the infinite forms it can assume. Yet even in Marsay’s tale, as befits its sexually ambivalent narrator, virtually every element contains its opposite. The ‘deux soirées’ which are nearly always found at balls, the ‘soirée officielle’ and ‘la véritable soirée’ (which echoes Herrera’s ‘deux Histoires’, iii. , v. ) are mirrored by an infinity of dualisms, each reversing the last: Mlle des Touches’s salon may be ‘le dernier asile de cet esprit français d’autrefois’, but its wit has ‘mille détours’, its conversation ‘de curieuses confidences, plusieurs portraits, mille folies’ (iii. , ). This notation was already present in Une conversation, in ; but, in the context of the Comédie, it assumes an altogether greater depth of perspective. In Marsay’s tale, a close contemporary of La Fausse Maîtresse, strings of paradoxes (Charlotte is ‘frêle’ but ‘fort’, women ‘poêles à dessus de marbre’: iii. –, ) lead to an ultimate reversal, in the shape of Charlotte’s plan to marry the duke who has hitherto been the decoy ‘faux amant’ she has used to hide her affair with Marsay. Every meaning suggests its opposite. Marsay’s deception of the duke puts both on an equal footing; there is no moral high ground, only a hall of mirrors offering endless reversals and reflections. Jealousy and vengeance are impossible, asserting the centrality of what they deny (iii. , ); and Charlotte, by making Marsay her lover, not her husband, has placed him in a nominally inferior, but actually superior, position, one beyond society’s rules and reproach. If Autre étude revisits, in the person of Charlotte, some of the dubiousness and dramatically ironic delight in mendacity of Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, it exploits more fully than that story the dependence of meaning on the context of La Comédie humaine. Its characters are no mere passive extras; their pasts 13 Bianchon became Étude de femme’s narrator in , in succession to Raphaël de Valentin, and that of La Muse du département in : BRC , ,  et seq. See A.-M. Lefebvre, ‘Bianchon, un astre du cosmos balzacien’, AB (), esp. –.

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colour their reactions, and make the frame as important as the tales it contains. The duplicitous Diane de Cadignan can particularly appreciate why, in Marsay’s tale (iii. ), vengeance could be a victory for its victim; Delphine de Nucingen’s comment about his first love, ‘Combien je plains la seconde!’ reminds us that this lover was Delphine herself (iii. ). Characters and readers must reframe her remarks in other contexts—Le Père Goriot, or Splendeurs et misères, which sets Nucingen’s naïve response to Marsay’s story (‘Gomme on ouplie!’) in the dual perspective of Delphine’s clear memory of their affair (Marsay’s ‘sourire imperceptible’ makes her blush) and her husband’s obliviousness both of his wife and of his pursuit of Esther the previous year.14 This resituation of characters and events in relation to various parameters— other characters, narratives, readers, editions of the text—constitutes, in the fullest sense, the very edification of the story, its moral and narrative construction. Encounters with new characters, circumstances, and perspectives, construct a morality subtler and more complex than the simpler messages of, say, La Maison du chat-qui-pelote or La Vendetta. Lady Dudley’s position as wife of Marsay’s biological father, Félix de Vandenesse’s lover, seducer of his valet, and tormentor of Lady Brandon,15 qualifies her to give an altogether more generous appreciation than Marsay, or perhaps the reader, of Charlotte’s motives (iii. –). The shift of perspective invites a reassessment of marriage and adultery or love and marriage not as mutually exclusive, but as compatible dualities. What is fundamentally at issue in Autre étude is the polarity between character, morality, and identity as absolutes, and as relative. If the ‘grande dame . . . est morte avec l’entourage grandiose du dernier siècle’ (iii. ), and with her, the superior sensibility of an aristocratic élite, ‘Aujourd’hui, tout drôle qui peut convenablement soutenir sa tête sur un col . . . toise impertinemment la plus jolie duchesse’ (iii. ). In following Lady Dudley’s grande dame with La Femme comme il faut, Autre étude juxtaposes essentialist and relativist views of social identity, contrasting an ancien régime conception of character as an absolute, where the grande dame did not need to define herself, but simply was, with a contemporary picture of personality as virtual and mobile, other-defined by appearance:16 14 Autre étude de femme is set at the turn of  and , the time of the first publication of Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit in the Contes bruns, and of Marsay’s appointment as Prime Minister (A.-M. Meininger, iii.  n. ). Nucingen’s affair with Esther spans  and  and is recounted in what is now the second part of Splendeurs et misères, Esther ou les amours d’un vieux banquier. This was not published until the year following Autre étude (Le Parisien ( May– July )); the present discussion takes the more synthetic and virtual viewpoint of FC. 15 Le Contrat de mariage, iii. ; Le Lys dans la vallée, ix. –; Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées, i. . 16 G. Genette’s limiting of such instability to ‘remaniements hatifs’ (Figures III (), –) seems too reductive; F. Schuerewegen (Balzac contre Balzac (Paris and Toronto, ), ) extends this instability to the reader.

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Autrefois une femme pouvait avoir une voix de harengère, une démarche de grenadier, un front de courtisane audacieuse . . . elle était néanmoins une grande dame; mais aujourd’hui, fût-elle une Montmorency . . . elle ne serait pas une femme comme il faut. (iii. )

The femme comme il faut has no essence: she is constantly re-presenting herself in line with the need to manipulate her appearance for reception (iii. ), a product of her environment, determined by her relations: ‘Votre belle promeneuse, vous la retrouverez aux Italiens . . . Elle se montre alors sous un aspect si différent, que vous diriez deux créations sans analogie’ (ibid.). These tensions, between uniformity and diversity, the absolute and the relative, illuminate the social significance of frame narrative in Autre étude de femme. It pits the spontaneity of salon conversation against its ossification in print.17 Conversation, formerly a ‘feuilleton parlé’, has been replaced by ‘des feuilletons écrits . . . de petits journaux plaisants comme des croque-morts et légers comme le plomb de leurs caractères. Les conversations françaises se font en iroquois révolutionnaire . . . par de longues colonnes imprimées dans des hôtels où grince une presse à la place des cercles élégants qui y brillaient jadis’ (iii. ). Autre étude is a threnody for the conte, a lament of money’s reification of the truly human. It is in the context of this comment of  that the true value of the salon, already included in Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit of ten years earlier, becomes apparent: ‘Là, nul ne pense à garder sa pensée pour un drame; et, dans un récit, personne ne voit un livre à faire’ (iii. ). Its uniqueness and spontaneity, the ‘allure serpentine’ of its ‘phénomène oral’, bespeak the grace and elegance which ensures a civilized life. The diverse parameters of Autre étude, ‘conte, roman, drame, mille folies’, echo those of the Avant-propos, and of the Comédie itself, constituted by an infinite process of framing and reframing, of presenting and re-presenting stories in the light of different characters’ and audiences’ perspectives, in terms of varied time and place. Autre étude de femme is a microcosm of the infinite mobility and relativity of the relations which compose La Comédie humaine.

(iii) Honorine Much of this is reflected in Honorine,18 which frames the potentially selfcontained story of Octave’s covert protection of, and eventual reunion with, his estranged wife Honorine, as his secretary Maurice de l’Ostal’s account, related to an audience including Félicité des Touches, protagonist of Béatrix and hostess 17 In salons, indeed, literature was invariably read aloud: ‘Des Salons littéraires et des mots élogieux’, M ( Nov. ). On the literary salons see A.-M. Fugier, La Vie élégante ou la formation du Tout-Paris, – (), . 18 La Presse (– Mar. ); republished with minor variants with Un prince de la bohème in Oct. or Nov.  and in vol. iv of the Scènes de la vie privée in F in . .

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of Autre étude de femme,19 Sérizy, and Granville. Like Autre étude de femme, Honorine is a product of circumstance, dashed off ‘pour avoir cent ducats . . . en trois jours’20 in order to meet obligations to La Presse,21 then meticulously revised in the two months prior to first publication,22 the frame (the ‘Introduction’ and the ‘epilogue’) being added after the core narrative had been drafted.23 The manuscript bemoans the tiredness of such devices as une machine fourbie dont abusent les . . . livres, et qui se produit sous bien des formes: un manuscrit trouvé dans une armoire—un legs fait par un suicidé—un torrent qui coule, comme dans l’Heptaméron—un vieillard près d’expirer—un portefeuille égaré—etc. Mais le récit démontrera qu’il eut été bien plus facile à un homme sans esprit d’inventer mieux, et que le vrai a seul le droit d’être aussi dépourvu de malice que l’est cet honnête exposé.

Amplified when first published, the passage is a double-bluff for shocking into credulity the doubtless jaded readers of La Presse (ii. g). But this is more than a routine.24 Honorine establishes causal links between the core story and its frame, doubling Octave’s secret adulation of his wife with Maurice’s: he, as gobetween, begins to fall for her himself. His repressed and unrequited love finds an outlet in marriage to the Onorina who is asked to leave the salon at the beginning of the frame story (ii. )—yet the situation’s full inwardness we can but retrospectively infer. Delicacy and elusiveness form the heart of Honorine. If it looks like a rerun of Une double famille, with Octave’s ‘keeping’ of his wife as mistress as the conjugally 19

In F; in the first publication, Mme d’Espard. – Dec. : LH i. –,  Jan. . Pressed for time, Balzac seems to have drawn on an external source, in this case E. Alletz’s L’Union mal assortie, for the situation of Honorine, as he did also for Un début dans la vie and Modeste Mignon. Cf. P. Citron, ‘Rencontres de personnages’, AB (), –. 21 Balzac’s relations with La Presse had been turbulent since its refusal of La Torpille and La Maison Nucingen: V  and n. , . During the early s Dujarier, its administrator, had repeatedly to chase Balzac for copy, notably the two parts of La Rabouilleuse and Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées: see e.g. Corr. iv. nos. , , , , etc. 22 The number of minor, but detailed modifications is striking. There seem to have been at least two sets of proofs for La Presse, now lost; the opening was composed of six extra sheets belatedly added: Histoire du texte, ii. , and Corr. iv. , , –, and . 23 ii. a, a; the Introduction which heads the MS consists of six leaves lettered A–F (Lov. A , fos. –) which precede the  sheets of the MS and correspond broadly to ii. –g; the MS contains no trace of the framing conclusion, and the letters of  Jan. and  and  Feb.  (Corr. iv. , –) explicitly refer to the separate despatch of these passages. Later in the month Balzac asks his printers to ‘faire corriger le plus promptement possible les  [sic!] paquets que je leur envoie’ promising that ‘le reste de l’article parviendra demain’(Corr. iv. ; this is presumably the corrected version of the ending), indicating that there was at least one more set of proofs between  Feb. and Honorine’s appearance in La Presse between  and  Mar. Balzac’s fear of having written ‘une sottise’ (LH i. ,  Mar. ) stems perhaps from having overrevised his work, but was unfounded: ‘Le succès a été crescendo. Mais La Muse du département . . . est bien supérieure’ (LH i. ,  Mar. ). 24 Pace M. Bardèche, Balzac (), p. . 20

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correct version of Granville’s real live kept woman,25 Honorine is much closer to Paz’s supposed affair with Malaga in La Fausse Maîtresse, taking his already farfetched ploys even further: Honorine believes that her manufacture of artificial flowers really is sufficient to support her (when in fact only Octave buys them), Maurice disguising himself as a monomaniacal dahlia-fancier in order to drive her back to her husband. Symmetries suggest the spouses’ compatibility (Honorine looks as if she is , Octave is old before his time: ii. , ), but they point also to an unbridgeable gulf. Both are devoured by unrequited love—but Honorine’s is not for her husband. Whilst her eventual return to him seemingly places conjugal duty above emotional inclination, confirming orthodox views (ii. –; ), it is only achieved by enormous pressure and the threat of surveillance and social exclusion: ‘votre mari saurait où vous iriez’, ‘le comte . . . vous ferait refuser pas tous les couvents du monde’ (ii. , ; cf. ). Endlessly exposed to the judgements of male authority (‘Votre âme me semble pure’ says Maurice, who calls ‘la religion’—his churchman uncle— ‘pour vous juger’, ii. , ), she is reduced to the level of ‘un animal’, or even ‘une chose’ (ii. , ), compelled to realize that her life is ‘sans issue’ (ii. ). The very extremity of these methods explains their failure. Honorine is tortured and killed by being forced to bear her husband’s child, whilst he, having sacrificed her life ‘au plus fugitif de tous les plaisirs’ (ii. ; an alarmingly limited view), ends by his regretting his act. Honorine starkly contrasts such dualistic, cut-and-dried assessments with subtler apprehensions of emotional complexity, dogmatic official discourse with the characters’ more ambiguous truth. Octave’s legal right to his wife wins a terrible Pyrrhic victory: ‘la Loi, c’est un piquet de gendarmes, c’est une femme saisie et amenée de force ici! n’est-ce pas conquérir un cadavre?’ (ii. )—a victory as brutal, and beside the point, as Chabert’s demand that ‘tous ses droits d’époux soient reconnus’ (iii. e). Plot complexities, Octave’s deviousness, and the extensive accounts of the main actors’ feelings, all suggest insights which cannot be stated, but only contextually intuited and inferred: ‘Ceci est le drame de mon âme’ cries Octave, ‘mais ce n’est pas le drame extérieur qui se joue en ce moment dans Paris! Le drame intérieur n’intéresse personne! (ii. ; cf. ). This is an elegiac revisiting of the ‘comédies inconnues’ (vi. ) of Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, perhaps a lament at lack of newspaper interest in them; but it also recalls La Femme abandonnée, which Balzac had in mind (Corr. iv. ; LH i. ). Such passages allow room for the infinitesimal variations of emotional state, the oscillations, agitations, reiterations, and reversals occasioned by undecidable alternatives: Honorine’s fantasies about flight to America (ii. ), Octave’s ‘énervements’, ‘hilarités de fou’ and ‘appréhensions d’assassin’, the 25 Une double famille had recently been revised (F, vol. i, BF ( June )), and perhaps suggested Honorine’s ‘epilogue’ with its similarly time-worn protagonists: ii. –; cf. ii. –. Both stories may be seen in the context of La Cousine Bette’s assertion that amour and plaisir are an ‘ouvrage en deux volumes’ (vii. ).

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‘continuel paroxysme de terreurs, de joies, de désespoirs’ which take up his life (ii. ; cf. ). Honorine is Balzac’s first story of neurosis since Adieu. If it is structured on the familiar pattern of accelerating contrasts, of ever more rapidly alternating scenes between the spouses leading to their ‘combat’ and final letter exchange (ii. , –), its organization and outcome embody less resolution than irresoluble tensions—the conflicts between Octave’s wishes and his wife’s, between her rights and social rules, between inflexible judgements and the more elusive reality of experience. Honorine turns on her fight for self-determination, her struggle to assert the claims of her subjecthood against the law: ‘Je sais tout ce que votre oncle pourrait me dire’, she tells Maurice, ‘il n’est pas plus instruit que ma conscience . . . Personne, monsieur, ne peut me prouver que l’amour se recommence, car je ne puis et ne peux accepter l’amour de personne’ (ii. –). The ending demonstrates the catastrophic consequences of imposing one individual’s wishes on another, when those of the first, the husband, are underpinned by society, religion, and the legal system. For none of this establishment’s representatives can cast the first stone with impunity: Octave, meting out punishment at the Palais de Justice, encourages it in his own household, and adultery, a crime for the Church, is but an offence for the courts (ii. ).26 ‘Il y a deux morales: la morale du Monde et la morale du Code. Là où le Code est faible . . . le Monde est audacieux et moqueur. Il est peu de juges qui ne voudraient avoir commis le délit contre lequel ils déploient la foudre assez bonnasse de leurs considérants. Le Monde, qui dément la loi . . . punit la maladresse après avoir encouragé l’hypocrisie’ (ii. –). As Octave has earlier stated, ‘personne ne se superpose à son cœur . . . la douleur d’autrui’; we understand others only ‘par une analogie très vague’ (ii. ). With what right is he, or anyone else, able to judge his wife’s feelings, determine her life, or claim that ‘Honorine est heureuse’ (ii. )? It is in this that the story’s subjective and objective, its moral and aesthetic elements converge. The tension between the protagonists also ensures the suggestiveness of the Ideal. As in Massimilla Doni, intensity of idealization depends on the sublimation of a violent, indeed, violating, desire. For Octave, it is impossible to ‘pénétrer dans ce cœur: la citadelle est à moi, mais je n’y puis entrer . . . par la violence de mes paroles, vous devez croire à la passion physique la plus intense’ (ii. , ). Honorine is a sleeping beauty whose prince will take her by force (cf. ii.  n. ); the catastrophe occurs when he attempts against her will to make his Ideal real. Honorine explores how two notionally perfect individuals can be torn apart by their union in fact. These perils are expressed by the epigraph: ‘Idéal! fleur bleue à cœur d’or, dont les racines fibreuses, mille fois plus déliées que les tresses de soie des fées, plongent au fond de notre âme pour en boire la plus pure substance!’27 The 26 27

Cf. R.-A. Courteix, Balzac et la Révolution française (), –. ii. a; T. Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, ed. G. van den Bogaert (), .

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unquoted continuation of Gautier’s passage talks of poisonous ‘fleurs trompeuses’, all-embracing, but all-obscuring, a potentially dangerous delusion.28 In Balzac’s story, insistent imagery of blue, white, and violet connotes the Madonna’s supernatural perfection, whilst suggesting the dangers of the Ideal (ii. , , , , ).29 Honorine’s accumulation of a ‘musée de fleurs’, Octave’s obsessive hoarding, ‘une histoire de nos douleurs’ (ii. , ), point to a forlorn desire to fix the transient, to reify life. But if real and ideal prove incompatible, they derive from a common source. Her floral ‘poetry’ is a fetishistic sublimation, exemplified by Octave’s sleeping in her shawl (ii. ). ‘La botanique exprime’, she says, ‘toutes les sensations et les pensées de l’âme, même les plus délicates’ (ii. ); but ‘cette fleur [qui] se déssèche, solitaire et cachée’ (ii. ) is an image of sexual desire turned sour.30 Honorine’s meaning resides in the balance of opposites—Ideal and real, the protagonists’ competing desires. She is happiest with her freedom circumscribed by Octave’s protection, yet free to pursue her solipsistic goal (ii. ). Nowhere is this compromise expressed more poignantly than in the ending, where Maurice recounts Octave’s remorse at this equilibrium fatally disrupted: ‘J’ai, dans ma conscience, entendu des cris. Honorine n’a pas crié seule . . . Je mourais, rue Payenne, des plaisirs que je n’avais pas; je mourrais en Italie des plaisirs que j’ai goûtés!’ (ii. ). Honorine’s ‘cris’ unite sexual ecstasy and mortal anguish; bodily union with alienation of spirit from the other. By trying to join together the material and the ideal, Octave creates only an irreparable fracture. Honorine’s experience radically questions the nature and indivisibility of virtue. Sleeping with her husband is nearer prostitution than making flowers, impugning her liberty and her fidelity to her lover: ‘combien de vertus faut-il fouler aux pieds pour, non pas se donner, mais se rendre à un mari qu’on a trompé?’ (ii. ). Honorine can be read both as a plea for more diverse and alternative relationships than official doxa would allow, and as a tale of the perversions caused by the conflicts of religion and civil law, of passion and marriage (ii. , ). Such dichotomies are reflected, or prismatically refracted, in the work’s frame-story form. Balzac’s simple precept-and-example structure is atomized. We can declare, but with perhaps rather more inwardness than did the author of his two horsemen in the Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme, ‘Toutes les choses humaines ont autant de côtés qu’il y a de personnes qui les considèrent’.31 For not only is there no simple answer to the opening question, ‘qui de la femme T. Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin, ed. G. van den Bogaert (), –. Cf. ii.  n. . 30 And, to this extent, reverses Gautier’s inspiration for the blue flower image, ch. I of Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and debases the absolutes of Le Lys dans la vallée or Séraphîta: cf. P. Knight, Flower Poetics in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford, ), , . 31 OD i. . cf. Ch. (i) above. 28 29

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ou de l’homme, avait tort dans la faute de la femme?’ (ii. ), or to Maurice’s closing challenge, ‘Était-elle vertueuse?’ (ii. ): the responses are diversified and coloured by the varied experiences and secret histories of the recurring characters who give them. Adventurers like Félicité des Touches (Béatrix) or Léon de Lora (La Rabouilleuse and Un début dans la vie) take a far more liberal view than Vignon or Camille Maupin; recurring characters, as in Autre étude, both link the story to others, and act as reflective centres of consciousness and perception. Honorine’s frame-narrative form permits a gradual penetration to the truth of its protagonists’ sentiments, the complexity of their relationships, the undercurrents of events and arrière-pensées. Maurice’s initial reluctance to marry and have children, his restrictive view of matrimony as incompatible with love (ii. ), are only retrospectively explained by Honorine’s advice to have children early in order to avoid the depredations of the Ideal (the ‘événement inconnu’ mentioned by the exposition, ‘une de ces crises de la vie intime si promptement ensevelies sous les courants journaliers . . . que, plus tard, les actions les plus naturelles semblent inexplicables’: ii. –). These contexts doubtless explain why Honorine reverses earlier enigma stories like La Femme abandonnée or Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan. Its frame makes the narrative both a proleptic and a retrospective discovery of the truth. Maurice frequently stresses his narrative’s distance from the action, the looseness of his recollections (ii. , , –). The story is focused through an uncharacterized authorial narrator, who describes Maurice and his initial reluctance to marry; only subsequently, in Maurice’s story, through the mediation of his uncle, the abbé Loraux, are we gradually introduced to Octave, to his secret, and to Honorine herself (ii.  et seq.). Yet she is hedged about by guardians: Mme Gobain, the gardener, Maurice; and, on another level of refraction, his assumed identity as florist—something further complicated when he invents a secretary to account for his own relationship to Octave. Not until Maurice begins to fall for Honorine, and the process threatens to become too diegetically and emotionally involved, are these perspectives collapsed with the protagonists’ exchange of letters (ii. –), only to be hypothetically opened out with the revelation that his wife Onorina has been listening to his story (ii. ) and the final discussion between des Touches, de l’Ostal, Lora, Vignon, and Maupin. That their secret histories—like, earlier, Granville’s, or Sérisy’s—should colour their views suggests, more deftly than any commentary, the individual’s divine right in moral matters—but a divine right where God’s unknowable transcendent providence seems to whisper a determinant word: ‘La conscience est chez l’homme le truchement de Dieu’ (ii. ). Narrative emboîtement, established society and religion versus desire, a perspectival mosaic to which one might add gender reversal32—it is unsurprising that 32 Honorine’s request that Octave take care of her child is but one part of a wider network of transferred sexuality: Octave has ‘une sollicitude maternelle’ for Maurice (ii. ), who kisses his uncle ‘comme si c’eût été ma mère’ (ii. ), and promises Honorine ‘la tendresse d’une mère’,

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Gide found Honorine amongst Balzac’s tales to be ‘une des mieux écrites’.33 The very subtleties and corrections which led him to fear having written a sottise 34 are also what make it most modern, what denies narrative and moral closure in favour of more subjective and virtual perceptions.

(iv) The End of the Story? Un homme d’affaires, Gaudissart II, and Les Comédiens sans le savoir ‘Ce terrible besoin d’argent, car il faut vivre, et toujours trouver  fr. par mois dans mon encrier et dans ma cervelle, ce qui me condamne à toujours créer, ce besoin, qui vient de me faire écrire Honorine en  jours, du  au  décembre, va me faire encore écrire d’ici à  jours Le Dernier Amour’.35

Le Dernier amour was no more completed than many other projects which litter the final part of Balzac’s career.36 The ‘terrible besoin d’argent’ resulted in a massive crisis in mid-, which found Balzac camped in Giroux’s printing works, desperately drafting none other than Les Souffrances de l’inventeur (the last part of Illusions perdues) simultaneously with Esther ou les amours d’un vieux banquier (the second of Splendeurs et misères), Balzac’s current major works, to be joined by Modeste Mignon and the fourth part of what by now had become Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Peines de cœur d’un millionnaire, in August . In the interim, debt continued to determine his output—the reissue of earlier stories under new titles, the hurried production of La Muse du département under the competitive label Les Mystères de province, the unsuccessful play Paméla Giraud, and a return to the theatre determined by a restrictive contract with Loquin.37 ‘Ainsi, je dis Zut! aux romans!’, he wrote to Hetzel on  February  (Corr. iv. ), turning to a lucrative series of articles for the latter’s latest collective publishing enterprise, Le Diable à Paris,38 a pseudo-Lesagian conspectus of the ‘l’amour sans le désir’ (ii. –). Only Honorine is able to reframe her role in other than infantile parenting terms: ‘Bah! suis-je une femme?’ she asks, ‘Je suis un garçon doué d’une âme tendre, voilà tout.’ Maurice swiftly reproaches her contumacy: ‘Votre vie est une négation de tout votre être’ (ii. )—a statement arguably truer of her marriage. 33 A. Gide, Journal, ed. E. Marty and M. Sagaert (), ii.  ( June ). 34 35 LH i. ,  Mar. .  Jan , LH i. –. 36 Notably L’Infidélité du mari (an anti-Honorine), and La Conspiration Prudhomme (Lov. A , fo. v, xii. ), the scène de la vie privée Perdita (another possible mirroring of Honorine: A.-M. Meininger, xii. ; cf. T. Takayama, Les Œuvres romanesques avortées de Balzac (–) (Tokyo and Paris, ), –), Gendres et belles-mères (the latter confused with Les Ambitieux de province: Corr. iv. , LH i. , , which was to be ‘le grand roman pour un journal quelconque, LH i. ) and Le Programme d’une jeune veuve, later linked with Modeste Mignon (see viii.  n. ; xii. , and Ch.  below). 37 V ;  July , Corr. iv. ;  Mar. , LH i.  n. . Cf. R. Guise, ‘Un grand homme du roman à la scène’, AB (), –, esp.  et seq. 38 Le Diable à Paris,  o vols, BF ( Apr. ); vol. i was completed on  Dec. , vol. ii on  Dec. . Balzac’s articles, all bar two incorporated into La Comédie humaine, are: Philosophie de la vie conjugale à Paris. Chaussée d’Antin (c. Aug. ), now part of Petites misères de la vie conjugale (xii. – and –); Un espion à Paris: le petit père Fromenteau, bras droit des gardes du commerce (

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capital from the viewpoint of visiting emissaries from hell.39 Amongst those who contributed to the two volumes of articles, anecdotes and pen-portraits of social types, framed by portentous statistical and historico-geographical treatments of the capital, were Janin, Karr, Nerval, Nodier, Sand, Stendhal, and Sue, together with the illustrators Bertall, Gavarni, Grandville, and Monnier. Debt is the highly relevant subject of Balzac’s first piece for Le Diable, Les Roueries d’un créancier, now Un homme d’affaires,40 which takes as its starting-point Bixiou’s eminently Balzacian assertion that ‘payer en mars ce qu’on ne veut payer qu’en octobre est un attentat à la liberté individuelle’ (vii. ). Un homme d’affaires relates how Cérizet, protagonist of Les Petits Bourgeois, concurrently being composed,41 disguises himself as a retired customs official, Denisart, and Hortense, his lover, as Denisart’s mistress, in order to trick Maxime de Trailles into repaying a debt. The story, despite its brevity, is considerably more involved than its predecessors. Trailles, already in debt to Claparon and Cérizet, worsens his situation by taking Antonia (from Un prince de la Bohème) as a mistress and obtaining for her a cabinet littéraire, resisting Cérizet’s attempts to claim the money back directly (vii. –). Croizeau, one of the habitués of Antonia’s cabinet, emulates another, Denisart (Cérizet in disguise), by deciding to take a mistress, choosing Antonia to play that role, and enticing her with riches if she will be his wife. When Trailles, who has bought the reading-room half in cash and half with a promissory note in Antonia’s name, proves unable to pay, Croizeau provides the first thousand of the outstanding , franc debt (vii. ). Nucingen, from whom Trailles has won one thousand écus, then tells him that the creditor Claparon has made ‘une opposition’ countermanding Nucingen’s payment of this debt to Trailles, Claparon, as prior creditor, having first claim on any of Trailles’s funds (vii. ). But Trailles, owed the money he has won from Sept. ) recycles two pages from Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (vi. –) and which would be reutilized in Les Comédiens sans le savoir (vii. –), as would Une marchande à la toilette ou Madame La Ressource en  (c. Oct. ; vi. – and vii. –). Un Gaudissard [sic] de la rue Richelieu: les comédiens [sic] qu’on peut voir gratis à Paris ( Oct. ) provided the tale entitled Gaudissart II, whilst Ce qui disparaît de Paris (Jan. ) figures in an abandoned text, L’Hôpital et le peuple (xii. –). See V –, , . As soberly documentary as Balzac’s final contribution, Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris (Mar.–Apr. ), neither was ever republished during his lifetime. On Le Diable à Paris, cf. my ‘Du livre illustré à la ville-spectacle: Balzac et Le Diable à Paris’, in K. Bowie (ed.), La Modernité avant Haussmann (), –. 39 Balzac’s doubts about the viability of the enterprise (LH i. ) were well founded: Hetzel was still trying to dispose of copies in : A. Parménie and C. Bonnier de la Chapelle, Un éditeur et ses auteurs: P.-J. Hetzel (Stahl) (), . 40 Les Roueries d’un créancier was originally intended for Le Diable but refused by Hetzel who, deeming it unsuitable, sold it to Le Siècle where it appeared on  Sept. ; but space was probably not the only reason for Hetzel’s refusal (pace R. Pierrot, AB (),  n. ). Les Roueries became Esquisse d’homme d’affaires d’après nature in F, vol. xii (), and Un homme d’affaires in FC (A.-M. Meininger, vii. ). 41 BRC –; A.-M. Meininger, viii. –; left unfinished and completed by Rabou after Balzac’s death. The story shares nearly half its characters with the novel: BRC .

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Nucingen, is himself now also a creditor, and equally entitled to oppose Claparon’s ‘opposition’; and, as the lawyer Desroches explains, ‘Il y a longtemps . . . que dans un cas semblable, mais où le trop honnête débiteur . . . ne voulut pas payer Maxime, nous avions rudement mené le créanicer opposant, en faisant frapper des oppositions en masse, afin d’absorber la somme en frais de contribution’—fixed fees levied on each creditor regardless of the sum claimed (vii. ). The conjunction of creditors and circumstances leaves Maxime in a position of strength, able to rule his creditors by swallowing their funds in legal fees and so subdividing repayments as to make, for them, the whole exercise ruinous. Trailles, on Nucingen’s advice, decides to sell Antonia’s cabinet to pay the , francs still owed for it (vii. ), and ten days later, Croizeau, anxious to free her from her business in order to marry her, announces that he has found a lady purchaser who will pay , francs cash. Not only this: Denisart, he announces, has lost Hortense, his mistress, who wants to sell her furniture. Trailles, keen to establish Antonia in a higher sphere, sells the cabinet for , francs cash and for the same sum buys Hortense’s furniture (which is worth at least ,) from Denisart. But at the very moment he hands the money over, Denisart reveals himself to be Cérizet, by whom Trailles has been duped into repaying his debt. This plot is already involved enough, but it is further complicated by being presented as a récit-contrat, enclosed within a frame including Cardot, Desroches, Bixiou, Lousteau, La Palférine, and Nathan, as a story told by Desroches in response to Malaga’s bet that he cannot tell a tale which will enable him to repay her cabinet-maker. As Balzac knew only too well, une dette peut en cacher une autre.42 Un homme d’affaires is a drolatique reversal of its forerunners—an anecdote about an escapade, rather than a searchingly serious exploration of experience. Where Honorine intimates infinitesimal nuances of emotion, Un homme d’affaires is a raucously blunt delivery of hard fact: Cérizet and Claparon come to blows over their business before the action proper even starts (vii. ); where Honorine’s select audience listens sagely to a tale about strangers, here a wider, more bohemian group pitches in with talk about their common world. Told at carnival time (vii. ), the story, like the carnival, depends on upending orthodoxies: debtors turn out to be creditors, the biter Trailles is bit. But where the carnival posits only temporary reversal, Un homme d’affaires turns on the identity of opposites: Antonia is Mlle Chocardelle, the loser Denisart the triumphant Cérizet. Its many puns, which in the drolatiques function as suggestive euphemisms diverting direct attention from sexual fact, here do the opposite, underlining the similitude of contraries. Denisart’s ‘j’en ai vu de belles avec les belles’, his assertion that his mistress ‘n’est pas dans ses meubles, elle est dans les miens’ (vii. ) both reveal the identity of their disparate figurative 42 Balzac was worsted in similar circumstances in —ironically by Hetzel, the refuser of this story: R. Bouvier and E. Maynial, Les Comptes dramatiques de Balzac (), –.

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and concrete referents: ‘Croizeau pouvait payer les trois mille francs sans rien toucher’ (vii. ), in a sense both financial and erotic; Antonia’s ‘tante’ (procuress) is only her aunt au sens propre, far less useful than her homonym. If opposites in fact coincide, then authority and anarchy become as one: the assembled lawyers and artists ‘ressemblaient à des magistrats riant avec des justiciables’ (vii. ); Cérizet edits ‘un journal d’Opposition qui serait ministériel in petto. Ainsi ce fut le Gouvernement qui dénatura ce beau caractère’ (vii. , ). The story turns on the legal ‘opposition’ which creates ‘la confusion des deux qualités . . . de créancier et de débiteur’ (vii. ) before collapsing its whole edifice of opposites, the entire arborescence converging on a single, tiny, point: ‘Et c’est ainsi que le menuisier à qui Malaga devait cent écus fut payé’ (vii. ). Un homme d’affaires is a mystification played on characters and readers alike. Neither Malaga nor the staunchest balzaciens seem fully to understand its abstruse stratagems of debt.43 Complexities of plot and character stand in parallel: Balzac, in the past year’s frenzied creation more immersed in his world than ever before, uses numerous secondary figures with little explanation,44 causing problems for Hetzel, Le Diable’s publisher, who complained that Les Roueries seemed ‘faite pour autre chose que mon livre’ (Corr. iv. ). Le Diable was itself hardly tightly focused; but a story about disguise was not tailor-made for a collection concerned largely with deducing identity from appearance. Balzac did little to oblige; despite his attempt to generalize Les Roueries by adding a prologue on the lorette (vii. ; cf. ), Hetzel duly sold it on for publication in Le Siècle.45 Les Roueries d’un créancier, the last of Balzac’s stories conceived and written at one fell swoop,46 brings to a head the conflict between La Comédie humaine’s notional integrity, and the reality of its fragmented publication. The increasing recurrence of characters in Balzac’s fiction was bound to collide with the reframing of his narratives in diverse formats. Le Diable à Paris’s descriptive, free-standing articles were directly opposed to La Comédie humaine’s increasingly non-descriptive, non-explanatory stories, whose full significance had come to depend on an ever more detailed knowledge of other fictions. Les Roueries d’un créancier, the only one of Balzac’s stories rejected effectively because of its recurring characters, crystallizes the conflict between the integrity of the individual narrative and the imperatives of his wider world. 43 H. J. Hunt and A. R. Pugh regard them as obscure (Balzac’s Comédie humaine, nd edn. (London, ), ; BRC ); A.-M. Meininger makes no comment. 44 Cf. e.g. vii. –, BRC –. The first published version, Les Roueries d’un créancier, presents recurring characters even more baldly: vii. . 45  Sept. ; cf. A.-M. Meininger, vii. –. 46 It is possible that the similarly brief Gaudissart II was also composed as one piece. But the existence of no less than eight sets of proofs, now in a private collection and unavailable for consultation, suggests that its composition may have been more fragmented than that of Un homme d’affaires.

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Balzac’s other articles for Le Diable conform more closely to its ethos. Philosophie de la vie conjugale à Paris revives the oscillations of the first Petites misères de la vie conjugale (to which it was later added), the wife continually turning the tables on her hapless husband. Un espion à Paris and Une marchande à la toilette both pursue the debt theme with portraits of the bailiff ’s spy and the secondhand clothes woman, effectively a lesser, female, Gobseck, just as the shop assistant of the next article, Un Gaudissard [sic] de la rue Richelieu (now Gaudissart II), is the stationary counterpart to the travelling salesman of , and the only such article to be integrated virtually tel quel as a free-standing story into La Comédie humaine.47 If Les Roueries d’un créancier had threatened Hetzel’s fragmentation, then his Diable took the hindmost, in the spectacular delights and atomized form of Balzac’s last two stories, Gaudissart II and Les Comédiens sans le savoir, assembled largely from pieces first published elsewhere.

(v) Gaudissart II and Les Comédiens sans le savoir ‘Savoir vendre, pouvoir vendre, et vendre!’ Seeing and selling shape Gaudissart II from the start. Its paean to the Protean splendour of contemporary Paris48 presents the city as designed to satisfy ‘l’organe le plus avide et le plus blasé qui se soit développé chez l’homme depuis la société romaine . . . l’œil des Parisiens!’ (vii. ). Consumption is ultimately ocular: the eye, both anatomical and absolute, an almost physiological urge, spurs ‘les soixante mille commis et les quarante mille demoiselles qui s’acharnent à la bourse des acheteurs’ (vii. ) to ‘des efforts de l’intelligence, des ruses, dignes de Molière’: this is La Peau de chagrin’s savoir and pouvoir recast as commerce, with vouloir replaced by vendre.49 One is reminded of Grandville’s Vénus à l’Opéra, who made her début in the same year as Gaudissart II.50 Gaudissart II ’s all-engulfing eye makes us the ironically detached observers of a series of commis and customers—and makes one of them, an arrogant Englishwoman, buy a hitherto unsellable shawl. Appearance, the customers’, and the commis’, sends the oldest assistant to the bourgeoise, or the most Byronic 47 Un Gaudissard [sic] de la rue Richelieu appeared prior to publication in Le Diable in La Presse with the subtitle Les Comédiens qu’on peut voir gratis à Paris ( Oct. ), and as Gaudissart II in F, vol. xii, BF ( Aug. ). The following year it was published, divided into numbered sections and reframed with a short new introduction and incorporating Un grand littérateur (an episode subsequently integrated in FC into Les Comédiens sans le savoir: vii. –) with an Avant-propos signed L’Éditeur (vii. –) as Le Provincial à Paris () (BF ( June )),  o vols., vii. –, V . The hyperbolic confidence of this preface, rather out of tune with Balzac’s other utterances at this time, seem to make his sole authorship unlikely (pace A.-M. Meininger, vii.  n. )—as the documentary evidence would suggest: Corr. v. –). 48 For a wider exploration of the theme, cf. C. Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford, ), passim. 49 x. ; cf. Ch.  above. 50 Grandville, Un autre monde (), .

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to the Englishwoman, and determines her every move: ‘Elle faisait semblant de ne voir que les châles; tandis qu’elle regardait les commis et les deux acheteurs avec hypocrisie’ (vii. ; cf. , ). Observation and manipulation of her vanity allows the manager to push her into the purchase (vii. ). Power resides in appearing yet controlling appearance, in being, and seeing, without being seen other than as one desires. Selling is theatrical deception, a ‘petite comédie’, or ‘vaudeville’; the manager enters like a deus ex machina ‘quand l’intrigue trop embrouillé exige un dénouement subit’ (vii. –). A similar stress on the visual as spectacle explains the choice of artists, Lora and Bixiou, as guides for Lora’s Pyrenean cousin, Gazonal, in Les Comédiens sans le savoir, and its preoccupation with the city as a stage (vii. , ). That the visual is so consciously thus conceived (with persons and events persistently presented as theatre, Gaudissart II and Les Comédiens sans le savoir divided into tableaux)51 shows the importance of distanced critical observation of contemporary reality in these stories, and the significance of their provisional title Les Comiques sérieux.52 Indeed, the very omnipresence of such topoi seems indissociable from the markedly subservient role which narrative causation has assumed. Where Gaudissart II reverts to the precept-and-example model of Balzac’s earliest work, with anecdotes illustrating a proposition (vii. ), the model of Les Comédiens sans le savoir is almost the reverse: Gazonal’s journey to Paris to settle a lawsuit, his meetings with Jenny Cadine and Suzanne du ValNoble, his lawyer Massol’s and the newspaper director Gaillard’s mistresses, in the hope that they might help his case, is a scant pretext for a succession of scenes illustrating the generally spectacular theme; there is no sense of the causal complexity of lawsuits found in Splendeurs et misères or L’Interdiction, or anything comparable to the financial involvedness of Un homme d’affaires. If the visual is illustrated, and the text in some sense unified, by the concluding ocular image—at the end, Gazonal has been amused by Paris ‘à l’œil!’ (vii. )— both visually, and for nothing—then other things fragment it: Gazonal seems scarcely consistent—both his accent and his innocence are intermittent—and the Parisian types he encounters, the marchande à la toilette Madame Nourisson, the clairvoyant Madame Fontaine, the police spy Fromenteau, all recycled from Le Diable—form, with others, so many centres of diversity within a loose and flexible frame. This generic character results from a protracted and complex evolution, during which scenes, many of them recycled from Hetzel’s Diable, were added, removed, and rearranged at will—something facilitated by the picaresque, 51 In the case of Gaudissart II only in its second version, third publication in Le Provincial à Paris: vii. –. These subdivisions were removed in F, as were those of Les Comédiens sans le savoir, which was presented as tableaux in all versions except F and FC: vii. –. 52 Catalogue des ouvrages que contiendra ‘La Comédie humaine’ (), reproduced V .

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travelogue form Balzac had chosen for the tale.53 Les Comédiens sans le savoir is a ‘street story’, its scenes linked by chance or caprice, its characters wandering around Paris, encountering others on their way. It places showing above telling, the instantaneous above the protacted, effects above causes, types above individuals, details and parts above the whole. Jenny Cadine is important as much as an example of a rat, or a marcheuse, as for her role in solving Gazonal’s problem; Mmes Nourrison or Fontaine almost solely because they are types; Gaudissart, merely one of many, as his scarcely individualized title, or the listing of Gaudissarts, implies (vii. –, ). All this reflects salient features of Hetzel’s Diable: its loosely framed articles, the importance of detail, the anonymity of the Parisian passer-by.54 It is in the street, or in public spaces like theatres, that most of Gavarni’s illustrations for Le Diable show Parisian types. But, in Balzac’s hands, such features appear in a radically different light. The redrawing of textual boundaries, in the recycling of his Diable articles in the narrative context of Les Comédiens, parallels the 53 Les Comédiens sans le savoir was first envisaged as Voyage de découverte exécuté dans la rue de Richelieu, an article for Kugelmann’s collection Les Rues de Paris, long before the contract with Hetzel for Le Diable à Paris or any of Balzac’s articles for that collection had been written ( Jan. , LH i. ; vii. , ). As with Les Roueries d’un créancier, Hetzel was a major influence in the fragmentation of Balzac’s initial conception, complaining that ‘le lien entre ces articles est toujours un lien’ (Corr. iv. ; cf. ). None the less, A.-M. Meininger somewhat overstresses the unity of Balzac’s project (vii. –): Voyage de découverte was never envisaged as anything other than a concatenation of scenes, and, for all that Balzac’s first plans predate Le Diable, and despite his anxiety to bring his articles out, or even publish them himself as an illustrated Tableau de Paris ( Aug. , LH i. , ), there is nothing to suggest that Voyage de découverte would have been more likely to have been realized than any of Balzac’s many other projects, without Le Diable’s spur; it was not until some time after all these articles had appeared separately in Le Diable that Les Comédiens sans le savoir was published. There are three main versions: I: Le Courrier français, – Apr. , twenty-nine chapters serialized in eight instalments approximating to vii. – and –, with the Chodoreille chapter (vii. –) moved to a. II: F, vol. xii,  Aug. , minus this same chapter, but augmented by Le Luther des chapeaux (Le Siècle ( Aug. ), vii. –), Un espion à Paris (vii. –), and Une marchande à la toilette (vii. –). But this version was composed after III: the Roux and Cassanet edition published during  (BF ( June )), and which incorporates Gaudissart II, revised to include dialogue between Bixiou, Lora, and Gazonal and split into chapters to form a continuum with the remainder of the text (vii. –). The whole corresponds approximately to: vii. –, –, –, –, –, –. This version omits Le Luther des chapeaux (vii. –), and advances the Chodoreille episode (vii. –), moved to its present position in FC. Cf. A.-M. Meininger, vii. –. 54 P.-J. Stahl’s (Hetzel’s) ‘Les Passants à Paris’ (Le Diable à Paris, i. –) contains some protoBaudelairian notions on the flâneur (though the term is not used): ‘Un passant est quelque’un qui ressemble à tout le monde et ne peut se distinguer de personne . . . Il n’y a de passants qu’à Paris . . . Le passant est quelqu’un qui est seul et qui reste seul au milieu de tout le monde, qui ne se soucie pas de vous et qui vous est indifférent, à tort peut-être—car tout passant est un secret. / Paris est la ville du monde où l’on peut faire, à propos d’un passant, le plus grand nombre de conjectures. Comme, dans la rue, rien ne distingue un homme d’un autre homme, un passant peut être, au gré du spectateur, un ministre ou un grand acteur, un prince ou un député . . . Et de même que la beauté d’une femme est surtout dans l’œil de celui qui l’aime, de même la qualité d’un passant est dans l’œil de celui qui l’examine.’

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redefining of social ones. ‘Une des plus grandes fautes que commettent les gens qui peignent nos mœurs est de répéter de vieux portraits’ remarks Bixiou. ‘Aujourd’hui chaque état s’est renouvelé. Les épiciers deviennent pairs de France, les artistes capitalisent, les vaudevillistes ont des rentes. Si quelques rares figures restent ce qu’elles étaient jadis, en général les professions n’ont plus leur costume spécial, ni leurs anciennes mœurs’ (vii. ). The new context of Balzac’s portraits reconfigures them: his story, and his types, reflect a society on the move, where old divisions no longer hold: literally, in the protagonists’ peregrinations around Paris, a ‘cours sinueux et capricieux’ (vii. ); and metaphorically, in the social mobility of its characters. The hairdresser Marius’s conception of his ‘pratiques’ as ‘clients’, his ‘coupes’ as ‘œuvres’, and of his trade as art, raises more serious questions about the demarcations between the two (vii. –)—questions suggested also by Dubourdieu’s allegorical painting of Harmony, where ‘Il y a tout!’: a protoFlaubertian account of the incoherence which accompanies any too-totalizing system.55 Individuals belie their type: ‘cantatrices italiennes’ turn out to be ‘maîtresses de piano de la rue Montmartre’; ‘Le limonadier . . . peut avoir cinquante mille francs de rentes, un garçon de restaurant est un électeur éligible’ (vi. , ). Bixiou puns, the Deputy Giraud lies, ‘pour pouvoir établir la sincérité du gouvernement constitutionnel’; the Chamber is simply another Théâtre français (vii. ,). In each case, Balzac’s types break, or in Giraud’s case reverse, the link between signs and signifiers, être and paraître, or right and wrong. His types, and genres, are characterized not by essence but by existence. They are coloured by their contexts. Les Comédiens’ ‘kaléidoscope’ (vii. ) of portraits, its carnival of narrative, spells the end of rigidly conceived generic, narrative, and textual boundaries in Balzac’s work: it marks the end of ‘the Story’. In a sense, as its title implies, this text is a kind of miniature Comédie humaine, where characters and narratives are juggled by the author, and where the reader may meet them in any order. As we are about to see, Les Comédiens is but one part of an orgy of narrative framing and reframing, a kind of generic meltdown at the end of Balzac’s career. Gaudissart II and Les Comédiens sans le savoir are about a society so developed that it verges on decline. As Pons’s collecting mania and gluttony are two kinds of self-indulgent overkill, and Collin’s tranformation into Chief of Police at the end of Splendeurs et misères a reversal of orthodox polarities of right and wrong, so Les Comédiens presents a panorama of Parisian pretensions, of a city where all is possible. Gaudissart II scans the exquisite excess of its ‘luxe babylonien’, set on satisfying the superficial—an all-devouring world of infantile but monumental self-indulgence symbolized by l’œil des Parisiens:

55 vii. ; cf. e.g. Frédéric’s tour of the revolutionary clubs, or Pellerin’s motley canvas: L’Éducation sentimentale, ed. P. M. Wetherill (), –, .

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Cet œil consomme des feux d’artifice de cent mille francs, des palais de deux kilomètres de longeur sur soixante pieds de hauteur en verres multicolores, des féeries à quatorze théâtres tous les soirs, des panoramas renaissants, de continuelles expositions de chefsd’œuvre, des mondes de douleurs et des univers de joie en promenade sur les Boulevards ou errant par les rues; des encyclopédies de guenilles au carnaval, vingt ouvrages illustrés par an, dix mille caricatures, dix mille vignettes, lithographies et gravures. Cet œil lampe pour quinze mille francs de gaz tous les soirs; enfin, pour le satisfaire, la Ville de Paris dépense annuellement quelques millions en points de vues et en plantations. (vii. –)

Yet this decadence is also a powerfully Protean regeneration. There is an uncontainable trop-plein in this ‘exigence . . . devenu sans bornes’ (vii. ); a sense of textual and social barriers collapsing, of industry becoming art (Marius), and of orders being confused (Dubourdieu), of the aristocracy of commerce: shops are ‘aussi riches que les salons de la noblesse avant , la splendeur des cafés . . . souvent efface, et très-facilement, celle du néoVersailles’ (vii. )—this in texts written when that most paradoxical of regimes, that of the roi bourgeois, was about to implode under the pressure of irresoluble contradictions.56 The eclecticism of the Parisians’ ‘verres multicolores’, ‘mondes de douleurs et de joies’, the ‘encyclopédies de guenilles au carnaval’, is also a generative fusion which finds its parallel in the generic eclecticism of Balzac’s own contemporary texts, where boundaries are constantly redrawn and fragments repeatedly recycled. Such breakdown of strongly marked generic and textual divisions, the framing and reframing of pen-portraits, characters, and narratives effectively gives them a life of their own. The imperatives of publishing, and of the Comédie, had made writing unified contes and nouvelles almost impossible; but stories, and their structures, had persisted in other, longer, works.

56 ‘Un prolétariat déshabitué de sentiments, sans autre Dieu que l’envie, sans autre fanatisme que le désespoir de la faim, sans foi ni croyance, s’avancera et mettra le pied sur le cœur du pays. L’étranger, grandi sous la loi monarchique, nous trouvera sans Roi avec la Royauté, sans lois avec la Légalité, sans propriétaires avec la Propriété, sans gouvernement avec l’Élection, sans force avec le Libre Arbitre, sans bonheur avec l’Égalité’ (Le Curé de village, ix. ).

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Constellations and Supernovellas Nouvelle and Novel, ‒ (i) Constellations C’est moi qui ai prédit que le public accepterait cette publication comme une chose très sérieuse, et qu’il finirait par y voir une histoire au lieu d’y voir des romans. (Corr. iv. )

A History, a story, more than novels: Balzac’s conception of his opus in January . The assumption of novels within history, their absolution into story, implies both a unity, a continuity of production, but also spaces within it for reflection and creation: Hugo m’a dit que bien des personnes voyaient en moi un très audacieux architecte et que la Comédie humaine avait toutes les proportions d’un grand monument, ainsi, du moment où les lacunes nuisaient à la vente, je m’y suis mis avec intrépidité, mais il ne faut pas que les Éditeurs nuisent aux lacunes. (Corr. iv. )

Yet Balzac’s frenzied final years owe as much to the maniac as to the mason, to debt and professional rivalry as to a desire to prepare his place in posterity.1 ‘Dieu merci mes rivaux sont Molière et Walter Scott, Lesage et Voltaire, et non pas ce Paul de Kock en satin et à paillettes [Eugène Sue]’ (LH i. ,  Sept. ). But it was the phenomenal success of the latter’s Mystères de Paris (–) that the collective series Les Mystères de Province,2 if but in title, sought to emulate; it was by Dumas’s La Reine Margot that Les Paysans were defeated, and over both authors that he was finally to triumph with La Cousine Bette and La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin ().3 1 By , Balzac’s liabilities had risen to over , frs.: R. Bouvier and E. Maynial, Les Comptes dramatiques de Balzac (), esp.  et seq.; cf. G. Robb, Balzac: A Biography (London, ),  et seq. 2 H. de Balzac, C. Ballard, F. Soulié, A. Brot, Souverain,  issues of  o vols., BF ( Nov. and  Dec. ). La Muse du département appears as Dinah; Albert Savarus, Un drame au bord de la mer, and Facino Cane, are renamed as Rosalie, La Justice paternelle and Le Père Canet for the occasion: A.-M. Meininger, i. . 3 La Cousine Bette, Le Constitutionnel ( Oct.– Dec. ); La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin, La Presse ( Apr.– May ). It was only after Balzac’s death that the latter was integrated into Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (P. Citron, vi. ).

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If contracts on occasion precluded new short fiction,4 earlier works were framed and reframed within others, linked together in larger narrative wholes, or issued and reissued, often in unusual ‘constellations’—the index of his attempts to assemble a fortune alongside the relative stability afforded by the  contract for La Comédie humaine, on the margins of his major work.5 The practice had been foreshadowed by the reuse of anecdotes in the  Physiologie, and, with the significant exception of the  story-concatenation Même histoire, hitherto restricted to short fiction (Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit (), La Grande Bretèche ou les trois vengeances (), and Autre étude de femme). Même histoire was itself reworked and republished as La Femme de trente ans in :6 in  and thereafter, such groupings became a central publishing method. Some of these constellations had been long since planned; others were merely commercially expedient. La Torpille was finally modified to become (as had been long intended) the first part of Esther ou les amours d’un vieux banquier,7 and was joined by Les Peines de cœur d’un millionnaire to make Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes.8 Sur Catherine de Médicis 9 groups together Le Martyr calviniste,10 La Confidence (formerly Le Secret) des Ruggieri and Les Deux Rêves. Amongst the more gratuitous, volume-filling alliances were the  accompaniment of Splendeurs et misères by Échantillon de causerie française,11 and the following year of Béatrix by Les Premières Armes d’un lion12 and of Modeste Mignon by Un épisode sous la Terreur and Une passion dans le désert.13 Some of these publications, like Les Mystères de province, merely relabel old material with little or no other modification. Others insert earlier material into new texts: La Femme de province, from Les 4 Balzac’s Aug.  contract with de Potter explicitly forbade publication in ‘les revues reproductives et à bon marché qui donnent les romans en un seul numéro’ (Corr. iv. ) as a way of protecting sales. During most of  his activity was paralysed by the aftermath of earlier illstarred dealings with Loquin and Dumont; those with Chlendowski were hardly more fruitful: Bouvier and Maynial, Les Comptes dramatiques de Balzac, –, –. 5 Via theatrical projects such as Les Ressources de Quinola, republications and illustrated editions of earlier work, as well as new novels: Bouvier and Maynial, Les Comptes dramatiques de Balzac, –, –, etc. And Balzac had outstanding debts to Le Siècle and to La Presse, even after the publication of Honorine—his shortest fiction of , and the only one to appear in La Presse that year: ibid. , and Corr. iv. –. 6 Scènes de la vie privée, th edn., vol. iii,  Nov. . 7 Le Parisien ( May– July ); perhaps the most extraordinary compositional act of his career, conducted concurrently with the completion of Illusions perdues, Balzac actually sleeping at the printer’s: J. Pommier, L’Invention et l’ecriture dans ‘La Torpille’ d’Honoré de Balzac (Geneva, ), –. 8 De Potter,  o vols., BF ( Aug. ). 9 First published as Catherine de Médicis expliquée (Souverain,  Sept. ),  o vols. 10 First published as Les Lecamus: étude philosophique, Le Siècle ( Mar.– Apr. ). 11 Namely the nine stories from Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit not already republished in La Muse du département or Autre étude de femme: xii. –. 12 La Lune de miel, the final part of Béatrix, published as Les Petits Manèges d’une femme vertueuse (Le Messager ( Dec. – Jan. )) and Les Premières armes d’un lion, now Autre étude de femme (Chlendowski/Souverain,  May ),  o vols. 13 Chlendowski,  Jan. ,  o vols.

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Français peints par eux-mêmes, and the preamble and conclusion from La Grande Bretèche ou les trois vengeances, are scattered through La Muse du département,14 whilst Histoire du Chevalier de Beauvoir and Histoire d’un bras (Le Grand d’Espagne),15 are used largely unmodified, together with Fragments d’un roman publié sous l’Empire par un auteur inconnu.16 And some reframings make a mockery of genre categories or chronology: parts of Une marchande à la toilette had appeared in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes: Esther17 before the production of the whole article in Le Diable à Paris, the reuse of more fragments in the Comédie humaine publication of Splendeurs et misères (F, Dec.  (?)), and of the whole article again in Les Comédiens sans le savoir.18 ‘Je fais avalanche’, wrote Balzac to Mme Hanska on  September  (LH i. ). The avalanche submerges most previous boundaries; but it creates an eclecticism, and perhaps ultimately a syncretism, implicit in Balzac’s designs. The material is convincing both in its original and its subsequent context; it functions in line with the principle that every part of Balzac’s creation is part of another, that generic frames and grilles de lecture may be mobile: ‘La cause fait deviner un effet, comme chaque effet permet de remonter à une cause’ (x. ). Indeed, textual, generic, and perceptual boundaries are so much blurred as to be potentially self-cancelling;19 we may even believe we are experiencing the nearest thing to a direct confrontation with reality: ‘une histoire, au lieu de romans.’ A text as long or opinionated as Balzac’s Introduction (–) to Sur Catherine de Médicis hardly seems frameless. But its whole effect is nevertheless to remove the barriers between the reader and its world, to relate the novel’s Renaissance past to the reader’s present, the writing of history to contemporary reality, to provoke a direct confrontation with the subject matter and make it part of Balzac’s giant, truth-telling enterprise: ‘Aussi l’histoire de l’établissment de la maison de Médicis . . . n’est pas l’histoire d’une république, ni d’une société, ni d’une civilisation particulière, c’est l’histoire de l’homme politique, et l’histoire éternelle de la Politique, celle des usupateurs et des conquérants’ (xi. ). And the last pages of Balzac’s Introduction are narrative, forming almost a continuum with the story to follow. Le Martyr calviniste itself, like Les Chouans, seeks to familiarize the past by comparing it with the present (xi. , ,  et seq., , –, , , , ). 14 Dinah Piédefer, Le Messager ( Mar.– Apr. ); republished as La Muse du département in vol. vi of F,  Apr. . La Femme comme il faut figures on iv. a, b–b, b–b, a of the Pléiade edition; the preamble and conclusion of La Grande Bretèche, on d–a, a–c, a–a, and, in the Souverain republication of La Muse at the end of Oct. , the whole story (iii. –) which, however, does not appear in the Comédie humaine version of La Muse. 15 From Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit (): iv. b–b and d–d respectively. 16 Les Causeries du monde ( Sept. ), iv. a– and N. Mozet, –. 17 18 BF ( Aug. ). Cf. Ch.  n. . 19 Cf. L. Dällenbach, ‘Le Tout en morceaux (La Comédie humaine et l’opération de lecture II )’, Poétique,  (), .

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This is almost an attempt to abolish genre—to transcend the distance between reader and subject matter. However, the effect of such familiarizing comparisons can be paradoxical.20 A statement like ‘La parure d’une femme de  eût été le déshabillé d’une grande dame de ’ (xi. ) focuses our attention both, and apparently exclusively, on the past, but also on the ostensibly troublesome difference between past and present which comparison seeks to expunge. Yet this same troublesome element of comparison constitutes the intellectual nexus of the work: it is in the measuring of the difference that meaning is created. A text like Sur Catherine de Médicis is potentially both framed and frameless, genred and genreless—both history and fiction, reality and art. And texts like those reframed in La Muse du département and Splendeurs et misères do not so much do away with genre, as, for the reader acquainted with various versions (as some of Balzac’s contemporaries doubtless were), hold it in hypergeneric tension with other versions of themselves. This tension bears directly on the generic status of Balzac’s final works. The meaning and the inwardness of La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons depend on both familiarity and distance, on the presence and absence of generic instructions for reading—on our absorption in the action as reality (the absence of frame), and on our critical detachment from it as fiction. The portrait of Pons, which could very easily have been written for Le Diable à Paris, plays on such alternatives: the innocent account of his appearance (‘un homme âgé d’une soixantaine d’années . . . le nez à la piste, les lèvres papelardes’) is immediately paralleled by the Parisians’, and the narrator’s, analytical hypotheses about Pons as a man ‘à qui tout le monde eût donné plus que cet âge’, resembling ‘un négociant qui vient de conclure une excellente affaire’ or ‘un garçon content de lui-même au sortir d’un boudoir’. The ‘spectacle’ of Pons’s appearance, a reality so theatrical that it succeeds in ‘animer le visage du Parisien, blasé sur tous les spectacles possibles’, is mirrored by the actor Hyacinthe’s hat, a theatricality so real that there is nothing contrived about it at all—except, perhaps, in the eye of the beholder: ‘On demandait à Hyacinthe, un acteur célèbre par ses saillies, où il faisait faire les chapeaux à la vue desquels la salle pouffe de rire: “Je ne les fais point faire, je les garde”, répondit-il. Eh bien! il se rencontre dans le million d’acteurs qui composent la grande troupe de Paris, des Hyacinthes sans le savoir qui gardent sur eux tous les ridicules d’un temps, et qui vous apparaissent comme la personnification de toute une époque’ (vii. ). La Cousine Bette’s opening, in contrast, depends on the contradictory, indeed nonsensical, status of Crevel, ‘capitaine bourgeois’ of the garde nationale—agent of authority as fomenter of subversion (vii. –).21 But both 20 Cf. e.g. Mérimée’s disconcerting suggestion that the reader compensate for the absence of a physical description of Charles IX by inspecting his bust in the Louvre (Chronique du règne de Charles IX (), ed. R. J. B. Clark (London, Toronto, Wellington, Sydney, ), –. 21 The garde nationale had played an equivocal role on more than one occasion in recent French history, notably in the sacking of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois on  Feb. . Cf. A. Fierro,

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rely on a duality of perspective, on the storyteller’s and listener’s external viewpoint, and on the novel-reader’s identification with the action. This ambiguity of genre is a striking feature of Balzac’s final fictions. Works like Illusions perdues or, still more, Splendeurs et misères, become more generically diverse during their protracted composition; the third part of Splendeurs et misères, Où mènent les mauvais chemins,22 moves between narratorial presentation of judicial process, of the protagonists’ backgrounds, and more direct and scenic confrontations: Granville ‘bumps into’ Camusot (vi. ) as casually, it would seem, as Lora and Bixiou into their acquaintances in Les Comédiens sans le savoir, and much of the latter part of Où mènent les mauvais chemins takes place in public spaces—the Conciergerie, the Grève, the Salle des Pas-perdus. But the difference is that, as Balzac elsewhere remarks, ‘la moitié des hasards sont cherchés’,23 and that the encounters both of Granville with Camusot, and of Asie with those she gulls by her disguise, are profoundly contrived, like Collin’s, in his incarnation as Herrera. It is in this third part of Splendeurs et misères that some of the major elements in La Comédie humaine come together, as the examining magistrates try to ‘fix’ Collin and Rubempré in the light of their previous exploits, and the reader to relate them to Le Père Goriot or Illusions perdues and to grasp the attendant secondary characters—amongst them Mme d’Espard from L’Interdiction, Mme de Sérisy, Granville, Camusot, even the humble Poiret. But (as is not the case in Illusions perdues, which is less of a crossroads, and where only Collin’s identity is truly unstable) these attempts are constantly undermined, as boundaries of personality and even place are set in doubt. ‘Qu’estce que c’est que ces grands murs-là?’ asks Asie of the Conciergerie (vi. ); but she knows the answer better than the lawyers, or the very ushers (vi. ). Where characters and fortress-like buildings of earlier texts—La Maison du chatqui-pelote, Eugénie Grandet—are fixed and virtually impenetrable, frontiers are here mobile, bastions (for those with multiple identities) totally permeable. Such mobility is reflected by plurality of genre, in the ubiquitous dialogues and quasi-theatrical scenes connoting other genres—theatre, roman-feuilleton, article de mœurs—and of textual boundaries, in the shape not only of narratives, pen-portraits, and articles incorporated into more than one text, but also, for example, of the division into brief chapters of the first publication of Où mènent les mauvais chemins in L’Époque, which disappears in F.24 This constitutes both an Histoire et dictionnaire de Paris (), –. In  Balzac had been imprisoned for failing to turn up for duty, becoming the victim of an ‘inflexible état-major d’épiciers jaloux de tout confondre’ (LH i. ,  Apr. ; cf. N. Felkay, ‘Balzac et la Garde nationale’, AB (). 22 First published as Une instruction criminelle in L’Époque (– July ), and under its present title in F, vol. xii ( Aug. ). 23 La Muse du département, iv. . Balzac, indeed, postulates that chance does not exist: it is simply a revelation of the hidden links between phenomena: M. Andréoli, Le Système balzacien (Paris and Lille, ), . 24 L’Époque (– July ). Cf. also La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons, both subdivided in first newspaper and book publications, but not in F or FC. See A. Lorant, vii. –; Les Parents

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absorption of short forms within the novel, and a hypertrophy of the pluralism Balzac had formerly sought in the conte;25 a reflection of Les Comédiens sans le savoir’s sense of categories—social, generic, and literary—being transgressed, of an old order falling into decay: the decline of Hulot, the rise of Crevel and Trailles in La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons, the instability of identities and proliferation of disguise in Splendeurs et misères. The supposedly total explicability of the world is always countered by its opposite: Collin’s scrutiny of passersby is undermined by the widespread use of disguise (vi. ), the absolute incomprehensibility of the slang of the bagne by the narrator’s explanation (vi. –), his assertion of the juge d’instruction’s sovereignty by the evidence of Camusot being suborned by his wife (vi. , ). The episodic, expository portraits which open another novel of decay, Les Paysans, seem to derive directly from Balzac’s immediately contemporary scenes for Hetzel’s Diable.26 The eclectic mixing of Balzac’s final fictions all but subsumes genres in the catch-all category of the novel.

(ii) La Muse du département La Muse du département 27 is the prime example of the polyvalent work. Envisaged as ‘un roman de la dimension d’Une fille d’Eve’,28 relating how Dinah de la Baudraye, not a Parisian but a provincial muse, is seduced by the Parisian journalist, Lousteau. La Muse, though considerably longer than its predecessor, owes much of its material, characters, and situation to short fiction. It develops La Grande Bretèche ou les trois vengeances (), in which the  stories La Grande Bretèche, together with Histoire du chevalier de Beauvoir and Histoire d’un bras (Le Grand d’Espagne) from Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit were told by character-narrators called Gravier, Bianchon, and Lousteau to a provincial Muse, pauvres d’Honoré de Balzac (Geneva, ), vol. i, bk. III, ch. , and D. Adamson, The Genesis of ‘Le Cousin Pons’ (Oxford, ), ch. , –. 25 In Théorie du conte and the second dixain of drolatiques. Cf. Chs. (iii) and (v) above. 26 Les Paysans, La Presse (– Dec. ). The novel had been submitted in replacement of copy which Dujarier, its director, had requested in Apr. , but which Balzac never wrote (Corr. iv. –, –); he was working on articles for Le Diable and Les Paysans simultaneously in the second half of . Les Paysans’ episodic descriptiveness—hardly what readers were expecting— along with other kinds of generic uncertainty, soon prompted its withdrawal from La Presse. See T. Bodin, ix. –; ‘L’Accueil aux Paysans, de l’anathème à la gloire’, AB (); P. Kinder, ‘Balzac, La Gazette de France, et Les Paysans’, AB (), esp. –, and ‘Balzac et La Presse’, Ph.D. thesis, Liverpool, , ch.  passim; M. Andréoli, Lectures et mythes (), –; and S. Swahn, Le Pourquoi du récit (Uppsala, ), –. 27 Le Messager ( Mar.– Apr. ); 1st edn: F, vol. vi, BF ( May ); nd edn: Les Mystères de province (Souverain),  o vols., BF ( Nov. and  Dec. ). 28  Mar. , LH i. . The nd edn of Une fille d’Eve had appeared in F, vol. ii on  Sept. ; Balzac’s choice of the story as his reference-point attests the links between it, Béatrix, Adolphe, and La Muse. Cf. Ch. (v) above.

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Mme de La Baudraye, at Sancerre; and the core of her portrait in  is simply the  article La Femme de province from Les Français peints par euxmêmes.29 But the already dubious generic integrity of these pieces is altogether impugned by the reframing (and in the case of La Femme comme il faut, fragmentation) they suffer here30—nothing less, indeed, than a violation of ‘la Charte du conte’ (vi. ). The three narrators of  become Dinah’s three provincial lovers, on the model of La Vieille Fille (iv. ), and the story of this femme supérieure’s seduction is combined with that of a provincial election, being explored concurrently in Le Député d’Arcis,31 to create a dual-pronged exposition, relating Dinah’s scheme of persuading Lousteau and Bianchon to become deputies for Sancerre to the unhappy marriage which is the motive for her actions. It is this extensive account of her personal life, and its poetic expression in Dinah’s verses, which constitutes the original infringement of ‘La Charte du conte’—of straightforward diachronic narrative, as the scraps of Olympia ou les vengeances romaines, the novel Bianchon finds wrapping Lousteau’s proofs,32 attest: la littérature de l’Empire allait droit au fait sans aucun détail, ce qui me semble le caractère des temps primitifs . . . Elle avait des idées, mais elle ne les exprimait pas, la dédaigneuse! elle observait, mais elle ne faisait part de ses observations à personne, l’avare! . . . elle n’avait pas de mots à faire chatoyer; elle vous disait Lubin aimait Toinette, Toinette n’aimait pas Lubin, Lubin tua Toinette, et les gendarmes prirent Lubin qui fut mis en prison, mené à la cour d’assises et guillotiné. Forte esquisse, contour net! Quel beau drame! Eh bien, aujourd’hui les barbares font chatoyer les mots. (iv. –)

La Muse rewrites this Charte to accommodate poetry, theatre, vaudeville, melodrama, and music. Dinah hopes to ‘débuter un jour sur le grand théâtre de Paris’ (iv. ) as a pseudo-Sand (iv. , ), executing ‘une sonate de paroles et des duos de dialectique’ (iv. ) for ‘des confidents de tragédie’ (iv. ; cf. , ). As the work progresses, generic boundaries shift: the ‘longue et monotone tragédie conjugale’ turns into a ‘tragi-comédie’ (iv. , ), and almost to tragedy, or melodrama, when La Baudraye suddenly appears, like Chabert, to demand his conjugal rights (iv. ; cf. iii. ). Lousteau finds a vaudeville in Olympia ou les vengeances romaines where provincials see ‘une mystification’ (iv. –, ), and his successive betrothal to Félicie, surprise by Cf. above, Ch. (v) and n.  and V ; iv. –. La Femme de province is spread across the exposition of the novel: iv. , –, –, . Indeed, Balzac’s contract for the article stipulated that it could only appear integrated into other Scènes de la vie de province ( Nov. , Corr. iii. )—a determinant factor in its usage. 31 Balzac’s most concentrated work on Le Député d’Arcis had been between Dec.  and Feb.  (cf. C. Smethurst, viii. ), the period during which he was also working on La Muse du département. He abandoned Le Député on  Mar. , the day before La Muse began to appear in Le Messager, and was not to return to it until . Cf. C. Smethurst, ‘Introduction à l’étude du Député d’Arcis’, AB (). 32 In fact, the reused Fragments d’un roman publié sous l’empire par un auteur inconnu: iv. a–. 29 30

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Dinah, liberation from and eventual return to her, mixes comedy, farce, and the reverses of the feuilleton (iv. –).33 Balzac’s novel reflects a larger and eclectic literary and cultural evolution: ‘Moi, je suis effrayé’, says Bianchon, ‘de l’éducation du public en fait de littérature.’ The reader, who formerly sought only ‘de l’intérêt’, in fiction, now demands ‘du style, de l’intérêt, du pathétique, des connaissances positives; il a exigé les cinq sens littéraires: l’invention, le style, la pensée, le savoir, le sentiment’ (iv. ). The physiological image is significant: this is a reframing not only of literature, but of life. It is literature which has educated the public, bringing the fundamental changes in mentalité and expectation which make feeling and response its ultimate purpose.34 Modern critics, wise by the hindsight of Madame Bovary,35 might underplay the seriousness of the phenomenon: the Sandisme which Balzac distinguishes from its creator at the outset (‘tant il est vrai que, moralement parlant, le bien est presque toujours doublé d’un mal’, iv. ),36 is dangerous precisely because the insidious ploys of empathetic, ‘bleeding heart’ literature encourage an identification between author, heroines, and readers which may lead to the very opposite of the authenticity to which all aspire—to Dinah’s imitation of Sand’s dress and speech, to her learning how to suffer—as much from literature as from life (iv. )—and to the confusions of category which lead some to take Dinah’s poetry as a parody of the Romantics (iv. ), Dinah to mistake Lousteau’s clever exploitation of their discourse for true love, and the ‘Manfred du feuilleton’ (iv. ) to regard her heartfelt feelings as merely ‘de la copie’ (iv. , ). As for Balzac himself, to copy is to create. La Muse implies, like Illusions perdues, that literature has engulfed everything, that eclectic proliferation of genre has led to the erasure of the boundaries between literature and life: ‘les inventions des romanciers et des dramaturges sautent aussi souvent de leurs livres et de leurs pièces dans la vie réelle que les événements de la vie réelle montent sur le théâtre et se prélassent dans leurs livres’ (iv. –). Even Lousteau’s plan to live with Dinah is rejected by Bixiou: ‘Nous avons vu ce sujet-là dans vingt vaudevilles’ (iv. ).37 If such boundaries are hard and fast in the  Grande Bretèche, where frame stories are didactic, and quite distinct from their frame, in the Furne version of 33 The chapter divisions in Le Messager and the Souverain edition correspond to these reversals, matching them with theatrical images: iv. , –, , , . 34 See C. Mounoud-Anglés, Balzac et ses lectrices (), esp. chs.  and . 35 B. Guyon sees Dinah as simply ‘une Bovary sans rêves’ (La Muse du département, Introduction, in L’Oeuvre de Balzac, ed. A. Béguin (), ix. , cit. A.-M. Meininger, iv. ); cf. J. Pommier, ‘La Muse du département’, AB (), –. 36 iv. a, and T. Bodin, ‘Du côté de chez Sand’, AB (), esp. –; N. Schor, George Sand and Idealism (New York, ), ch. , and S. Van Dijk, ‘George Sand et les mouvements d’émancipation féminine’, in D. A. Powell and S. Malkin (eds.), Le Siècle de George Sand (Amsterdam, ), esp. –. Sandisme was a stylistic, as well as a social, phenomenon: M. Iknayan, The Idea of the Novel in France, – (Geneva, ), –. 37 Cf. L. Schehr, Rendering French Realism (Stanford, Calif., ),  et seq.

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La Muse, La Grande Bretèche is omitted,38 and the other tales perform an almost anti-exemplary function. Neither M. nor Mme de la Baudraye see in the Chevalier Beauvoir story ‘la moindre prophétie qui les concernât’ (iv. , ). Yet this narrative is here used more dramatically and proactively than in its earlier incarnations, to prompt Dinah’s passion for, and rejection of, Lousteau. And the ‘roman’ Lousteau sees in Cardot’s marriage proposition is written against genre when his daughter’s lover turns out to have died from pleurisy, rather than, as in fiction, murdered by some jealous brother (iv. ). The exemplary model of short fiction is consistently undercut. La Muse implies harder gender divisions, yet a more active role for women, than narratorial doxa might allow: Balzac’s dogmatic and on occasion ostensibly misogynist statements (‘vous ne serez plus une femme, vous serez un poète’; ‘Il suffit d’une résistance quelconque pour qu’une femme désire la vaincre’, iv. , ; cf. , , , , , ), present a vigorous picture of woman reinforced by Dinah’s decision to leave the feckless Lousteau, and her selfless support of him to the end. The nouvelle remains the fundamental model,39 and La Muse retains a storyteller’s distance between the reader and its events: there are hardly any familiarizing appeals to our knowledge, and virtually everything is narrated at arm’s length, explained, or scenically presented, often with heavy dramatic irony—Cardot’s delight at Lousteau’s supposed probity, Lousteau’s duplicitous switch from celebrating Dinah’s departure to celebrating her arrival (iv. , ; , ). But although La Muse has a story’s circularity (the abbé Duret who encourages Dinah at the beginning is paralleled by the priest who advises her mother at the end, and an epilogue unifies the action), these unities are undermined by the untidiness of life. ‘Dans la nature, ces sortes de situations violentes ne se terminent pas, comme dans les livres, par la mort ou par des catastrophes habilement arrangées; elles finissent beaucoup moins poétiquement par le dégoût, par la flétrissure de toutes les fleurs de l’âme, par la vulgarité des habitudes’ (iv. ). The epilogue’s apparent union, the happy family of Baudraye’s ‘voici mes enfants’, is mocked by Milaud’s reminder of their varied paternity: ‘voilà nos enfants’. Dinah, persuaded by the priest, ‘revenait tout bonnement à la Famille et au Mariage; mais, selon quelques médisants, elle était forcée d’y revenir’ (iv. , ). The situation’s futility is symbolized by the parce que on the lover’s former seal, which Lousteau uses when he appeals to her to help pay his debts. What should be the story’s climax, the moment of greatest selflessness and love, 38 It is only into the Souverain edition of La Muse (Les Mystères de province, BF ( Nov. )) that La Grande Bretèche is integrated (iv. a); it had not appeared in the first publication of Le Messager, and in vol. iv of F. it was inserted between Béatrix and Modeste Mignon; FC intended it for Autre étude de femme, where modern editions now place it. Cf. N. Mozet, iii. –. 39 Ceci n’est pas un conte, Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, and especially Adolphe, are repeatedly invoked (iv. ; ; , , , , ). Cf. B. Guyon, ‘Adolphe, Béatrix and La Muse du département’, AB (), and J. Guichardet, who sees an equally important role for the conte de fée: ‘Balzac et le conte de fée’, RSH  (), .

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is emptied of all significance by the lovers’ separation. Parce que is both ‘Un grand mot, le mot des femmes, le mot qui peut expliquer tout, même la création’ (iv. ), and meaningless—like marriage, ‘ce mensonge que veut la Société’ (iv. ), or the story: formally complete, yet fundamentally inharmonious.

(iii) Supernovellas: Le Curé de village, Pierrette, and L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine If the constellation of smaller texts, their framing and reframing, forms one major short-fictional model in Balzac’s later career, it overlaps with a second, the expansion of short fictions into what might be called ‘supernovellas’. Le Curé de village was conceived as a pendant to Le Médecin de campagne; 40 but we may infer that an important impetus was a desire to answer Hugo’s Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, ‘sombre élégie, inutile plaidoyer contre la peine de mort’ (ix. ), as Le Lys dans la vallée had answered Volupté.41 Part one of the first publication is a murder story, an amplified Auberge rouge; part two is a flashback account of Véronique’s adulterous love for the murderer, whilst the conclusion narrates her confession and death.42 The first book version43 reorders this cycle diachronically by inverting parts one and two,44 thereby mirroring Pierre Grassou, where Magus’s visit to Grassou is moved from the middle of the story to become its initial, catalytic, element.45 But the one effect reverses the other: where the reordering of Pierre Grassou makes its structure more explanatory, turning what had originally been an opening account of Grassou’s life into a later flashback, that of Le Curé de village, along with other features of the first book publication, such as the development of description and of the addition 40 LH i. ,  Sept. , cit. A. Lorant, ix. ; the work was Balzac’s third attempt, after the rejection of La Maison Nucingen and La Torpille, to satisfy the terms of his initial  contract with La Presse for La Vieille Fille. Cf. Kinder, ‘Balzac et La Presse’, ii.  and n. , and ch.  passim. 41 See R. Niess, ‘Sainte-Beuve and Balzac: Volupté and Le Lys dans la vallée’, Kentucky Romance Quarterly (). The themes of Le Curé de village reach back further, and wider, than Hugo: R. Guise, ‘Balzac, Lecteur de Gozlan’, AB (); P. Barbéris, ‘Notes sur Le Curé de village’, AB (), ‒; R. Guise, ‘Une publication préoriginale dans Le Messager’, AB (), –; P. Citron, ‘Autour de quelques personnages’, AB (), –; R. Fayolle, ‘Butifer et Farrabesche’, AB (), –; E. Brua, ‘Le Thème du condamné à mort’, AB (). 42 Le Curé de village, Véronique, Véronique au tombeau: La Presse (– Jan.,  June– July, – July, and  Aug. ). 43 Souverain,  o vols, BF ( May ). 44 Cf. A. Lorant, ix. –, and, for full details of the work’s complex genesis, Le Curé de village, suivi de Véronique et de Véronique au tombeau, ed. Ki Wist (Brussels, ); Le Curé de village, manuscrits ajoutés pour l’édition Souverain de  (Brussels, –), and Le Curé de village. Les Manuscrits de premier jet de Honoré de Balzac (Brussels, ). 45 vi. e, a, a, and A.-M. Meininger, vi. . Balzac had likewise displaced Grandet’s speculations in Eugénie Grandet: see Ch. (vii) above.

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of a new episode reflecting the main plot,46 makes it more presentational, stressing process as much as event, increasing the pathos of Véronique’s situation. Other works underwent comparable development. Pierrette,47 too, was conceived and composed as a nouvelle,48 and was perhaps inspired by one,49 but Balzac proceeded to much more radical dismantlings and reformulations via innumerable corrections and whole pages of interpolation over eleven sets of proofs.50 And, in what was eventually to be grouped under the title L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine, the last fiction he completed, Balzac wrote a prequel, Madame de la Chanterie, to the nouvelle he had initially composed, Les Méchancetés d’un saint.51 The prequel is effectively an exposition après coup: it outlines Godefroid’s history prior to the events of Les Méchancetés, which itself was later followed by three further parts—two flashbacks (parts three and four) recounting Mme de la Chanterie’s shady past, the crime and punishment which have led to her subsequent life of repentance, and a last part, L’Initié, where Godefroid joins with her works of charity in the present.52 Bar L’Initié, the overall pattern is more or less that of Le Curé de village: exposition, story, revelation, all framed within repentance; and L’Envers as a whole is virtually a text-book progression from constat to présence, from récit to roman.53 The initial nouvelle, Les Méchancetés, is a frame narration, shorter than Z. Marcas, in which Alain, the saint of the title, recounts his past misdeeds and repentance to Godefroid; the next two parts take basically the same frame-story form, initally related by Alain, subsequently via legal documents relating to Mme de la Chanterie which he gives Godefroid to read (viii. –). These documents constitute further stories within the story, yet they also add a more heterogeneous, 46 Farrabesche, Le Messager (– Mar. ); ix. ––––, V ; Guise, ‘Une publication préoriginale dans Le Messager’, –. 47 Le Siècle ( [and not, as the Pléiade edition states, ] – Jan. ); first publication (with Pierre Grassou), Souverain,  o vols, BF ( Dec. ). 48 LH i. , Corr. iii. . 49 Monsieur Pierre, Le Magasin pittoresque, – (Jan. ): P. Citron, ‘Une source possible de Pierrette’, AB (), –; there is perhaps a reminiscence of Stendhal’s Les Cenci (RDM ( July )) at the end: iv. – and n. . 50 J.-L. Tritter, iv. –; ‘Les Épreuves de Pierrette’, AB (). 51 Les Méchancetés d’un saint, Le Musée des familles ( Sept. ) (viii. –); substituted for Un début dans la vie, which had been commissioned as a nouvelle by Le Musée but not published because over length (J. Guichardet, viii. –; cf. below, sect. (iv). Madame de la Chanterie: première partie, Le Musée des familles ( Sept. ) (viii. –). 52 Madame de la Chanterie [pts. III and IV], Le Musée des familles ( Oct. and  Nov. ) (viii. –, –); the whole ensemble first appeared together under the title L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine: première partie, in F, vol. xii,  Aug.  (and simultaneously as La Femme de soixante ans (Gabriel Roux et Cassanet, ),  o vols. L’Initié, the second part of L’Envers, appeared in Le Spectateur républicain ( Aug.– Sept. ) (viii. –). L’Envers was not published in its entirety until after Balzac’s death, in . Cf. J. Guichardet, viii. –. 53 Cf. Ch. (v) and n.  above.

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‘novelistic’ element. The final part, L’Initié, moves to présence. It is not Mme de la Chanterie’s past told by Alain, but Godefroid’s experience of charity ‘on the ground’, seen through his eyes, unfolding ‘as it happens’; an impression of présence reinforced in F by the insertion into the earlier parts of L’Envers of a linking passage which fleshes out the characters of Mme de la Chanterie and Godefroid—his attraction for her, and his incipient conversion.54 Yet on the final page this great mass of human life, spanning Revolution, Restoration, and Balzac’s present, is caught in Mme de la Chanterie’s confrontation with, and forgiveness of, her tormentor Bourlac, and the whole novel is crystallized as an exemplum, in the sentence which he utters: ‘la bienfaisance donne des droits à l’obligé’ (viii. )—a sentence which no doubt lay behind Balzac’s first sketch for Les Méchancetés, the conte moral Robert l’Obligé, itself probably derived from the Chronicles of the Canongate.55 The influence and presence of short fiction in Balzac’s later novels is ubiquitous, revealing the extent to which, sometimes using subjects suggested or inspired by Mme Hanska or his sister Laure, Balzac sought to write contes moraux which, acquiring a life of their own, would become both morally problematic and develop or be incorporated into longer works.56 In the early s, three novels in particular expand such stories: Albert Savarus, Un Début dans la vie, and Modeste Mignon.

(iv) Moral Novels? Albert Savarus, Un début dans la vie, and Modeste Mignon Triggered by Mme Hanska’s lettre de rupture ( Feb. , LH i. ), Albert Savarus is, with Un Début dans la vie and Modeste Mignon, driven by the subservience of short narrative to an extrinsic moral aim. Written, like many of 54 viii. –. Other brief additions in Le Musée des familles effect narrative transitions (viii. –, –). The former comments: ‘Madame de la Chanterie, de même que Les Méchancetés d’un saint, sont deux épisodes d’un ouvrage auquel l’auteur travaille depuis longtemps. Or, pour ne pas dépasser l’étendue accordée au genre dit Nouvelles, il a fallu supprimer toute la portion qui se trouve entre la première partie et la seconde de cet épisode. On verra d’ailleurs qu’il est assez superflu, pour l’intelligence de cette seconde partie, de savoir comment Mme de la Chanterie influe sur l’existence de Godefroid’ (viii. a)—a striking statement of generic polyvalence. 55 Lov. A , fos. –; accompanied by a second sketch, Les Comptes moraux (A , fo. ; see viii. –). The draft opening of Robert l’Obligé carries the title Traité de l’obligation, which is heavily scored out: narrative emerging from doxa. The benefactor theme appears in the introduction to the Chronicles of the Canongate, mentioned by Balzac in letters of , , and most explicitly in : LH i. , , ; cf. viii. –; it is echoed in Le Dernier Bienfait d’un père (Une double famille), and recurs in works as diverse as Illusions perdues, Splendeurs et misères, and Honorine. 56 Notably La Cousine Bette, in addition to the works discussed below. See A. Lorant, ‘Histoire de Lélio: documents inédits’, AB (), esp. –, and Les Parents pauvres, –. Mmes Hanska and Surville doubtless also prompted such contemporary dabblings in children’s literature as Valentine et Valentin (a title probably suggested by the name of Balzac’s niece, Laure’s daughter, Valentine). Cf. R. Chollet, xii. ; M. Bardèche (ed.), La Femme auteur (), –.

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Balzac’s stories, in one rapid, concentrated burst, Albert Savarus57 combines reframing and expansion, using Rosalie’s discovery, via Savarus’s nouvelle L’Ambitieux par amour, that he is in love with another, to trigger the remainder of the action—a revisiting of the flashback technique of La Peau de chagrin or Le Curé de village. Frame narrative and framed story parallel each other insistently: Rodolphe, hero of L’Ambitieux par amour, is a Frenchman visiting Switzerland, just as Savaron visits Besançon and falls in love with an Italian; Rodolphe, ambitieux par amour, devotes his life to her conquest but ultimately fails, like Savaron with his election; both are betrayed by their lovers. The construction is rigidly oppositional: Rosalie spies on Savaron just as Rodolphe/Savaron spies on Francesca; Savaron retreats to the Chartreuse and Rosalie to its namesake, in her garden. This is the kind of return to narrative basics Balzac makes when unsure of his ground: Albert Savarus’s frame reflects its story as closely as those of Sarrasine, L’Auberge rouge, or Le Grand d’Espagne. But here the mirroring is directly of Balzac’s life: 58 L’Ambitieux is the nouvelle of Savarus’s affair, just as Albert Savarus itself narrates an ‘ambitieux par amour’ who fails. Savarus, like Balzac, establishes a review, buys a house to be electorally eligible (i. , ), and is a commoner courting a widowed noble lover. Albert Savarus, like L’Ambitieux par amour, is a projection of the lovers’ anxieties—tokens of love exchanged between Paris and Wierzchownia, or France and Italy, in lieu of real relations. Albert Savarus expands La Fausse Maîtresse,59 its interactions occurring at one or more removes. Balzac hides behind Savarus, Savarus behind Rodolphe, Mme Hanska behind the duchesse d’Argaiolo, herself hidden, in L’Ambitieux par amour, by the fictional princesse Gandolphini, who hides Mme Lamporani, who hides Francesca, who hides the supposed Fanny Lovelace (i. , , , , , ); Rosalie is replaced by the mother who eventually marries M. de Soulas in her stead (i. ).60 Savarus’s love for the duchess is transferred to her portrait, and to her letters, tokens which accompany him when he leaves, or focused on their letters which, like Mme Hanska’s own, cause such distress when they fail to arrive (i.  and n. , ). The plot turns on that displacement, on the extreme investment of emotion in the letters which enables their subversion, Rosalie’s imitation of Savarus’s handwriting and interruption 57 First mentioned by Balzac on  Apr. , the first draft was probably being finished by  May (LH i. , , and n. ). Albert Savarus appeared in Le Siècle between  May and  June and in F, vol. i, on  June , the proofs being corrected concurrently (i. –). But one idea for the novel may date back as far as May  and Le Nouvel Abeilard, something vestigially present in the comparison of M. de Watteville’s tomb to Héloïse’s: cf. R. Pierrot, LH i.  n. , and i. ). For a complete account, see Rosalie (Albert Savarus), ed. C. Smethurst (). 58 Cf. Smethurst, ibid., esp. –; P. Citron, Dans Balzac (), , cit. F. Schuerewegen, who examines the problems of a biographical reading: Balzac contre Balzac (Paris and Toronto, ),  and  et seq. 59 Published five months earlier: Le Siècle (– Dec. ). 60 Just as Mme Hanska’s ‘terrible tante’ Rosalie, who encouraged her to break with Balzac, lies behind her namesake in the novel: cf. LH i.  n.  and Lorant, Les Parents pauvres, i. –.

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of his missives to Francesca causing the collapse of their affair: not a fausse maîtresse but une vraie—of the kind Balzac himself had in Princess Belgiojoso or Mme Guidoboni-Visconti.61 Both L’Ambitieux par amour and Albert Savarus can be seen as nouvelles exemplaires or contes moraux, ‘une grande leçon pour l’homme, sans y mêler de leçon pour la femme, et je veux montrer comment en donnant à la vie sociale un but trop vaste, et en fatiguant le coeur et l’intelligence, on arrive à ne plus vouloir ce qui avait été l’objet de toute la vie au début’ (LH i. ). Yet Balzac’s novel is more ambiguously poised between explicit condemnation and exoneration of Rosalie.62 Her desires emerge as duplicitous distortions because she has been repressed (as comparisons with Molière’s Agnès attest); her rebellion against parents and priests is understandable. The symbolism of lakes, of dammed-up passion, Rosalie’s miniature Chartreuse, all point to sublimation subsuming love itself, to art absorbing life,63 just as the novel, in Albert Savarus, literally absorbs the nouvelle, and all other genres—letters from Savarus, Francesca, his friend Hannequin, the Italian comedy which underpins the action (cf. i.  n. ). As in La Muse du département, Balzac uses that absorption to eschew and implictly to ironize some of Romanticism’s potentially extremer manifestations—in particular, expressive simile. Symbols are objectified in the landscape and the action; Rosalie’s maiming embodies her emotional incapacity. As La Muse recommends (iv. ), Ideals are pursued to their mundane conclusions: the Stendhalian possibility of retreat to the Chartreuse is undercut by Rosalie’s miniature version in her garden, Albert’s renunciation by her entirely credible decline into an eccentric old maid. Albert Savarus, ‘ce petit-grand sujet’ (LH i. ), unlike Balzac’s longer works, concentrates on a single issue, and subordinates showing to telling. Its subplots (the chapter’s legal battles, the affair between the servants Jérôme and Mariette) are so minor and so closely related to the main action as scarcely to deserve the name. Savarus’s triumphant stand on the hustings, a potentially dramatic, dialogued confrontation is, unusually, merely reported (i. ). Though the novel broaches wider issues—women’s education, the election, the situation of provincial France, the power of the clerics—the neatness with which the central love and political interests are interrelated gives it the economy and concentration of the nouvelle. Albert’s love determines his political actions, just as Rosalie’s influence governs his local involvements and the course of his affair. The nouvelle is omnipresent: in its casual opening and pointed ending, Savarus leaving Besançon suddenly, ‘comme il était venu’ (i. ; also the first line of La Fontaine’s own epitaph); in Balzac’s device of 61 Cf. Rosalie, ed. Smethurst, –; D. Adamson and R. Pierrot, ‘Quelques lueurs sur la Contessa’, AB (). 62 Pace F. Schuerewegen, who suggests that Rosalie is actually exemplary: Balzac contre Balzac, . 63 Cf. J.-L. Steinmetz, ‘L’Eau dans La Comédie humaine’, AB (), –; Le Curé de village, ix. –; A. Lorant, ix. –.

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an epilogue dramatically embodying its message. Most striking, perhaps, is the story’s self-containedness: though life goes on at the end, the distribution de prix settles the scores of the protagonists, and there is no sense (as there is in La Fausse Maîtresse or Les Comédiens sans le savoir) of any ongoing wider world.64 That the first of the novel’s few recurring characters, Genovese and La Tinti from Massimilla Doni, occur not within Balzac’s story, but Savarus’s (i. ), indicates how much Balzac focused through his protagonist, and how much that narratorial focus characterizes the narrative. Complete and largely self-contained, this ouvrage, which Balzac always leaves generically neutral,65 has much which typifies the nouvelle. *

*

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N’est-ce pas une folie que d’imaginer qu’après avoir puisé impunément pendant  ans à cette source, je pourrai y puiser impunément pendant  autres années!66

Albert Savarus incorporates the nouvelle of a fictional author; Un début dans la vie and Modeste Mignon, like Le Cousin Pons, are inspired by the nouvelles of others.67 Un Début dans la vie is based on Laure’s conte moral about three braggarts who are confronted by those they have slandered, Le Voyage en coucou.68 Alfred boasts of imaginary military exploits, Jules of being an artist; Joseph denies his mother and calumniates the count who, unbeknown to them, is travelling incognito with them. The denouement is triggered when the count, safely in his château, confronts the three: the intendant is dismissed for collusion to defraud the count with Claudin, one of his smallholders, who, with Alfred, is sent away; but the count forgives Jules, in whom he sees promise, and becomes his patron. In the epilogue-conclusion six years after the main action, Jules is a success and the others have gone to the dogs. The moral is clear: 64 The definitive ending was only added in the first book publication in F; in Le Siècle, Balzac adopted the newspaper technique of an ending continuous with real time (i. g). Cf. Ch.  above on Adieu. 65 It is variously ‘une grande leçon’, a ‘petit-grand sujet’, ‘une belle et poétique page’, ‘un chefd’œuvre’ (LH i. –), and generically undesignated elsewhere. 66 LH i. ,  Jan. . 67 Cf. Adamson, The Genesis of ‘Le Cousin Pons’, –, Lorant, Les Parents pauvres, i. –, and T. Farrant, ‘Les Premières Notes des deux bassons: une source balzacienne retrouvée’, AB (), –. 68 Balzac decided to use Le Voyage en coucou when he realized that the nouvelle originally proposed (David Séchard, now Les Souffrances de l’inventeur, last part of Illusions perdues) was, at , lines, too long for Le Musée des familles. But during composition, Balzac doubled the length of his original project for Le Musée, a nouvelle called Les Jeunes Gens, which first version corresponds to the first half of the text eventually published, and added a continuation as long, Le Danger des mystifications, the title under which Un début dans la vie was first published. Le Danger des mystifications was written semi-concurrently with Albert Savarus (part one, Balzac’s MS version of Le Voyage en coucou, like the first draft of Albert Savarus, was probably finished by mid-May). It was first published in La Législature ( July– Sept. ), before its first book publication (with the nd edn of La Fausse maîtresse: Dumont,  o vols., BF ( June )) and appearance in F in . Cf. P. Barbéris, i. –; BRC –. Le Voyage en coucou is reproduced in i. –.

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A chacun selon ses œuvres . . . Hâbleurs nés ou à naître, si vos mensonges font sourire et sont excusés dans votre jeunesse, ils vous font perdre toute considération quand ils y survivent, et dégénèrent en caractère; tout homme qui respecte sa parole, au contraire, mérite l’estime de tous, quel que soit le rang où Dieu l’a fait naître. (i. )

Balzac keeps the whole plot, cast, short-story structure and many of the details of Laure’s nouvelle, but amplifies it vastly. The artist-figure, Jules, subdivides into a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ half, Joseph Bridau and the rapin Léon de Lora, nicknamed Mistigris, from Les Deux Frères (; now first part of La Rabouilleuse). Matters Laure’s story simply mentions are much expanded to become pretexts for a whole series of récits intercalés illustrating the main action: the story of the carrier Thierry, who in Un début becomes Pierrotin, his family, and the social, economic, and geographical conditions of L’Isle-Adam in which he operates; the antecedents of the count (who becomes the comte de Sérizy, from Le Contrat de mariage and L’Interdiction) and his family difficulties; the corruption of Moreau, his bailiff (Laure’s Renaud) are all explored at length (i. –). Balzac enlarges on behaviour Laure’s story simply mentions: Oscar’s presumption is attributed to his father’s death and to the overindulgence of his mother, the remarried Mme Clapart. In Laure’s nouvelle it is the painter Jules who is thus orphaned, as well as being the hero; Balzac’s transference of Jules’s family background to the more morally ambiguous Oscar makes the latter’s behaviour more credible, stressing its psychological causes as well as its effects, in a more novelistic stress on process. Oscar’s arrogance, and Mme Clapart’s indulgence, are additionally elucidated by the weakness of her invalid husband, Clapart, and her affair with Moreau. His conspiracy to defraud the count, embryonically present in Laure’s nouvelle, is developed into a subplot involving the new characters M. and Mme Reybert who, in an episode added by Balzac, attempt unsuccessfully to avenge a past slight from Moreau by revealing his plans to the count—an attempt which founders, ironically, on the count’s refusal to believe ill of others. Perhaps Balzac’s most significant modification is the attribution of Jules’s fatherlessness to Oscar, which turns Laure’s fairy-tale of an orphan made good with help of a fairy godfather (the count) into a psychologically plausible explanation of his behaviour. It is a restructuring with significant moral and narrative implications. Laure keeps her good and bad protagonists distinct (Jules becomes a success whilst Joseph, the bailiff ’s godson, goes to the bad), making a didactically explicit contrast between the consequences of different kinds of behaviour. But Balzac, by making Oscar the orphan, Moreau’s godson, and also, as part two reveals, Cardot’s nephew, concentrates attributes more widely dispersed in Laure’s story, and is able to turn the painter-figure, Joseph Bridau, into a more fully developed and separate character who, though successful, does not stand as schematically as the representative of right against wrong as does Jules against Joseph. Balzac’s tightens Laure’s nouvelle’s structure, bringing Joseph’s family relations (as Moreau’s god-, perhaps even his natural, son, and

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Cardot’s nephew) into direct conflict with his behaviour, as well as using his status as an orphan to explain it. And by making Oscar, the flawed protagonist, the one who makes good, but in a questionable manner, Balzac creates morally mixed messages from elements Le Voyage en coucou keeps apart. Out of the univocal morality of Laure’s story Balzac draws the dialogism of the novel. It is in part two that Balzac expands that story most extensively.69 Where her nouvelle, by virtue of its brevity, juxtaposes the braggarts’ unmasking, the count’s forgiveness, and Jules’s triumph (i. –), Balzac makes Oscar’s rehabilitation a slow and painful business, a matter of process rather than event. The negotiation of his lawyer’s articles with Moreau, his gradual progress in Desroches’s office, his second, ‘fourth act’ indiscretion, paralleling and outdoing the first, in gambling away legal fees and failing to collect the verdict for which they were to pay, his conscription to the army, are all Balzac’s additions, reinforcing the forward movement of the narrative: the story of ‘un début dans la vie’ takes over from Le Voyage en coucou.70 Yet the insertion of such elements into the overarching structure of Laure’s nouvelle makes more causal sense of the count’s closing clemency, his purchase of Oscar’s freedom being explained by Oscar’s rescue of his son in battle (i. ). And, as in Balzac’s stories, a network of mirrorings and parallels reinforces the unity and cohesion of the narrative, enabling the reader to measure its progress: Oscar’s failure to collect the verdict parallels Marest’s non-delivery of the tenancy agreement in part one, his rescue of the vicomte’s son fulfils a prediction that his vanity would lead him to great military exploits; the reunion of all the braggarts on the same journey, but twenty years later, at the end, echoes their first unhappy exploits. Though Un début dans la vie is structured around, or rather within, a nouvelle, and built up from récits intercalés which explain the main action, these brief narratives are, paradoxically, novelistic in effect. The burgeoning of stories relating to the main events multiplies centres of action, lessening its emphasis on event, enhancing the novelistic sense of process, undermining the univocal morality of its model: the proliferation of bastardized proverbs in part one (‘Paris n’a pas été bâti dans un four’, ‘Les bons comtes font les bons tamis’ (i. ) ‘Trop parler suit’ (i. ; cf.  and n. , etc.), Godeschal’s bogus legal registers in part two (i. –), jeopardize the letter of the law—literally, when the registers trigger the night of gambling which leads to Oscar’s second downfall. The dissolution of such univocal morality creates a carnivalesque undermining of authority, legal and literary: the legal documents, which an ‘expert’ might place in the eighteenth century, correspond more to sixteenth-century language, and are as nonsensical as the proverbs (i. ). Un début dans la vie’s heterogeneous material—contes, letters, registers, proverbs, conversation— together with its use of dialogue, more widespread than in Albert Savarus, attest 69 70

Cf. Barbéris, Histoire du texte, i.  et seq., and BRC –. As was actually the case in composition. Cf. P. Barbéris, i. , and BRC, –.

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its novelistically plural nature. Balzac’s narrative, and its doxa, more than pays lip service to the moral axioms of its model, voicing sentences against hâbleurs, producing the ruined and dissolute Georges Marest as an example of what Oscar nearly became. The narrative’s excessive circularity, which ends with the unlikely coincidence of the very same travellers making the very same journey, but twenty years later (a parallel in which even Laure’s story does not engage) and the closing observation that Oscar’s adventure has taught him to appreciate probity, discretion, ‘l’hiérarchie sociale et l’obéissance au sort’ (i. ) all reinforce its explicit lesson. But this lesson is significantly nuanced by events and by other, uncommented, material. That two lawyers’ mistresses, Fanny and Florentine, lead Oscar astray, or that it is in his mistress’s apartment that Cardot must confront him, the blankly presentational closing assertion ‘C’est enfin le bourgeois moderne’—all illuminate morality somewhat differently: only the count is unimpeachable. The fact that these instances are unremarked upon makes them, paradoxically, all the more revealing, and points up the relationship between showing and telling: telling, short fiction’s primary mode, is here dichotomous with showing, the novel’s neutral presentation, just as brevity, textual and structural, is held in tension with extension, Oscar’s initial error with its incommensurable consequences. ‘En amour, en toute chose peut-être, il est certains faits, minimes en eux-mêmes mais le résultat de mille petites circonstances antérieures . . . dont la portée devient immense en résumant le passé, en se rattachant à l’avenir’ (Albert Savarus, i. ). This remark explains the importance of structural parallels: they predict the future yet look back to the past. Moreau’s ‘quel levier qu’une scène pareille’ (i. ) both marks Oscar’s first disgrace and anticipates amendment. Laure’s story, as reworked in Balzac’s novel, reinforces Balzac’s ambiguously dualistic morality. Where her character Joseph’s vanity leads only to evil, Oscar’s vanity, in his heroic military rescue of Sérizy’s son, leads also to good. As Balzac remarks in Albert Savarus, ‘il n’y a presque pas de vertu qui ne se double pas d’un mal’; one might add that, in Balzac’s work, ‘il n’y a presque pas de roman qui ne se double pas d’un conte’—and vice versa. The cumulative effect of such dialectics seems dialogic; but is putatively encompassed by a transcendent ‘unité’, ‘un et varié’ (Massimilla Doni, x. ). ‘Supernovellas’ like Un début dans la vie hold the novel in tension with short fiction; but the accumulation of short fictions creates an effect which is paradoxically novelistic. *

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Based on a nouvelle by Mme Hanska which she recounted to Balzac but destroyed,71 short fiction is ubiquitous yet submerged in Modeste 71 LH i. ,  Mar. . The initial stimulus for the story came from Balzac’s reading, during his visit to St Petersburg from July to Oct. , of Sebsastien Albin’s (Mme Hortense Cornu’s) Goethe et Bettina, correspondance inédite de Goethe et de Mme Bettina d’Arnim (), of which Balzac wrote a brief review, Goethe et Bettina (M. Regard, i. –; P ). The name Mignon

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Mignon,72 the story of an imaginative provincial’s seduction by Canalis’s poetry and eventual marriage to Ernest de la Brière, the secretary who has replied to her letters. Though masked by many flashbacks and extraneous developments which Balzac added piecemeal to his manuscript,73 the conte de fées underpins Modeste’s whole story, her adoration by the hunchback Butscha coming from La Belle et la bête via The Black Dwarf and Notre-Dame de Paris, mixed with elements of Cinderella in her seduction by her Prince Charming, Canalis/La Brière. But, in contrast to Albert Savarus and Un début dans la vie, the importance of the conte is here less structural than semantic. Cultural reference to tales and fables abounds, ostensibly objective correlatives of the protagonists’ own experiences: Modeste presents herself to Canalis in a roman which is really a fairy-tale of claustration, almost a Belle aux bois dormant (i. ), or, at the disruption of her marital plans by her father’s unexpected return, is ‘affligée comme Perrette en voyant ses œufs cassées’ (i. ). Butscha, in loving her, risks making La Belle et la bête a reality (i. –), whilst Hérouville’s bachelor status is blamed on his aunt, ‘qui ne connaissait pas les fables de La Fontaine’ (i. ); ‘Nous avons joué la fable de Bertrand et Raton’, declares Canalis (i. ). Poet and secretary, like Mignon and Dumay, or Oscar and Georges and Joseph and Léon in Un début, are, along with Adam and Thaddée in La Fausse Maîtresse, or Pons and Schmucke, two of Balzac’s numerous reworkings of Les Deux Amis. In Modeste Mignon, as in La Muse du département, literature absorbs life: it is by Canalis’s writings, not the man, that Modeste is seduced; much happens at one or more removes, as it does in La Fausse Maîtresse, and depends on Butscha’s or Dumay’s intervention. Modeste Mignon is perhaps more a matter of life absorbing literature: it is in her mind that Canalis’s writings and those of others metamorphose to make literary experience her own, turning contes, poetry, drama, comes from the character in Wilhelm Meister, which, like Torquato Tasso and Werther, is alluded to in the text (i. , , ). But short fiction was also largely influential in the conception: Mme Hanska’s idea for a story about a girl who falls in love with poetry came from Maria Edgeworth’s novella Angelina ou l’amie inconnue (French trans. , republ. ), which Balzac perhaps also read (M. Regard, i. –). Mérimée’s La Double Méprise, mentioned in Balzac’s review (i. ), may also have been instrumental, whilst A.-M. Meininger sees parallels with Stendhal’s Le Rose et le vert: ‘Balzac et Stendhal en ’, AB (), –. 72 Journal des Débats (– Apr.,  May– June, – July ); Chlendowski,  o vols., BF ( Dec. ); F, Scènes de la vie privée vol. iv, Dec. , dated /, BF ( Nov. ), although F was probably printed before the Chlendowski edition: i. –. S. Swahn suggests that Modeste’s very name may come from one of Mme d’Aulnoy’s contes (Le Cabinet des fées, v. –, Balzac et le merveilleux, ); for a different gloss on the role of the conte, cf. Guichardet, ‘Balzac et le conte de fée’. 73 Notably the rise of Modeste’s father, his associate Dumay, and its bearing on attractiveness to suitors, elements probably absent from Mme Hanska’s nouvelle, and mostly from the Maria Edgeworth text on which it was based, but present in Les Petits Bourgeois and Le Programme d’une jeune veuve, the projects Balzac abandoned to begin work on Modeste Mignon. Cf. Histoire du texte, i. –, and BRC –. Balzac also sketched the beginning of Un grand homme de Paris en province before turning to the novel: ibid. –, and xii. –.

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into her own imaginary romans (i. , , , ).74 Literature’s objective correlatives are transformed into Modeste’s subjective imaginings. Yet if Modeste Mignon, like La Duchesse de Langeais a decade earlier, develops short fiction’s potential for representing subjectivity, the later novel explicitly problematizes the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity as an ongoing tension in the artwork. Modeste Mignon posits a relationship between art and life, history (or reality) and the novel, resembling that outlined in Balzac’s letter of  January  quoted at the head of this chapter (Corr. iv. ). The agglomeration of narratives creates a diversity like that of life itself. Describing the contrast between Mme Latournelle, who understands Modeste’s situation, and the blind Mme Mignon, who does not, the narrator remarks: ‘Aujourd’hui plus que jamais, les romanciers disposent de ces effets, et ils sont dans leur droit; car la nature s’est, de tout temps, permis d’être plus forte qu’eux. Ici la nature . . . se donnait le plaisir de faire l’histoire plus intéressante que le roman (i. ). Truth, history, or nature can outdo the novel, ‘de même que les torrents dessinent des fantaisies inédites aux peintres’ (ibid.), but art is a kind of psychic projection which, in a huge creative impulse, can transcend its own objecthood to ‘accomplir des tours de force en disposant ou léchant les pierres à surprendre les statuaires et les architectes’ (ibid.) and create something fluid, mobile, and virtual.75 Works of art are objects; yet the true artwork can transcend its own material finitude. These concerns parallel the tension between different narrative forms in this and other Balzac narratives. Magnitude is simply a matter of perspective: Modeste Mignon is full of examples of the dichotomy between large and small, of the way in which any subject or event is capable of expansion. ‘Gens de cœur’ may be recognized by ‘petites choses’ (i. ); ‘Quand les grandes choses s’en vont, elles laissent des miettes’ (i. ); ‘On expie le bonheur de dix ans en dix minutes’ cries Mme de Chaulieu when Canalis abandons her (i. ). Modeste’s sister Bettina’s epitaph is ‘la table des matières d’un livre inconnu’ (i. ). Any event, portrait, scene, or description may potentially be expanded: the ‘précis rapide’ exploring the speculation of Dumay and Mmes Latournelle and Mignon on the causes of Modeste’s inexplicable happiness ‘développée savamment, aurait fourni la matière de tout un tableau de mœurs (combien de familles peuvent y reconnaître les événements de leur vie)’ but ‘suffit à faire comprendre l’importance des petits détails donnés sur les êtres et les choses pendant cette soirée’ (i. ). Balzac stresses the reader’s identification with the action (‘reconnaître’, ‘faire comprendre’): these dichotomies, between objectivity and empathy, large and small, together with the resonance of events in On (mis)reading in Modeste Mignon, cf. Schehr, Rendering French Realism,  et seq. Torrents are emblematic of sexual repressions: ‘On se croit en Espagne, il vous met dans les Alpes, il fait parler les torrents et les étoiles; et puis, il y a trop de nuages!’ (i. ). The game of whist is equally an analogue for love: (i. ). For Balzac, indeed, the world of the imagination is ‘aussi niée de nos jours que celle de Christophe Colomb au seizième siècle’ (i. ). 74 75

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the minds of character or reader have major generic implications. ‘La plupart des drames sont dans les idées que nous formons des choses—les événements qui nous paraissent dramatiques ne sont que les sujets que notre âme convertit en tragédie ou en comédie (i. ). Genre is a matter of conception, not definition; ultimately, of the individual’s subjective perception. These generic concerns parallel the novel’s central thematic dichotomies— between the internalization of emotion and its expression, between the subjective experience of love and its more questionable objective existence, between the rights of the family and of the individual, between the ideal and the real, art and life. Modeste is simply in love with love (i. –); her subjectivity completely determines her response to her situation. Awaiting Canalis’s reply to her first letter, ‘l’air fut plein de langues de feu, les arbres lui parurent un plumage’ (i. ). Her life is lived in her mind—like Butscha’s, who, like all hunchbacks, according to the narrator, ‘vivent en eux-mêmes’, with his own ‘roman’ (i. , ). The potentially solipsistic experience of love (at a first meeting, the lover ‘fait alors à soi seul des poésies secrètes qui valent celles de la femme’ (i. )), ultimately challenges the lover’s empathetic ability—here, Modeste’s desire to ‘pénétrer au cœur d’une de ces existences anormales, de connaître les ressorts de la pensée’ (i. –), which leads her to doubt his feelings and very existence (i. , ). Music, the absolute form of non-verbal expression, is, as in Massimilla Doni, the highest embodiment of this subjectivity, of the individual’s solipsism: ‘l’homme, seul dans la création, est à la fois la harpe, le musicien et l’écouteur’ (i. ). As Mme Mignon remarks, ‘il n’y a qu’une fille amoureuse qui puisse composer de pareilles mélodies sans connaître la musique’ (i. ). Such subjectivity parallels and encourages our identification with the action: if Modeste plays within herself ‘la comédie de l’amour’ (i. ), and becomes the ultimate generic paradox, an ‘édition des Mille et une Nuits, tirée à un exemplaire’ (i. ), then her impatience will allow ‘toutes les jeunes filles, romanesques ou non’ to ‘imaginer dans quelle impatience vécut Modeste pendant quelques jours’ in her obsession with Canalis (i. –).76 Identification transcends and ultimately surpasses any external reality: ‘nous avons dans nos rêves des poèmes plus beaux que l’Iliade’ (i. ), and is for this reason ultimately uncontainable: Modeste wins her debate with her father on whether poetry is ‘l’un des agréments de la vie’ or ‘toute la vie’, on whether novels are a source of evil, or its mere reflection (i. ) with the words: ‘On ne les écrirait pas, mon cher père, nous les ferions’ (i. ). Yet, like Modeste’s worship of the Ideal over the real (i. , , , , –, –, etc.), or her assertion, 76 There are many such appeals to the reader: ‘les gens véritablement Modestes . . . comprendront les jouissances infinies’ (i. ); ‘Il y a tant de pères, tant d’enfants . . . pour comprendre l’ivresse d’une pareille fête [Modeste’s reunion with her father], que la littérature n’a jamais besoin de les peindre’ (i. ); Charles Mignon’s discussion of literature supposes absolute identification with the events described (i. ).

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by her independence in love, of the individual’s rights above society’s, her subjectivity risks foundering on reality: ‘La Famille, quelque sotte et cruelle qu’elle soit, a raison contre Lovelace. La Famille, c’est la Société’ (i. ). The battle between father and daughter is one of reason versus feeling (i. ), and Modeste has to choose between ‘la célébrité qui fut comme un phare pour elle, et la pauvre Réalité que le hasard lui jette’ (i. ). That she gains in Ernest the suitor who unites the two confirms both the sad reality that Canalis did not write his own letters, and also that ideals in love can exist. This thematic and formal convergence is borne out by Modeste Mignon’s structure which, like that of La Fausse Maîtresse, reduces oppositions to homologies. When the lawyer’s clerk Butscha, Modeste’s would-be suitor, allies himself with La Brière and dupes Canalis, love, law, and lyricism are collapsed: ‘Ode et code!’ he tells him, ‘vous faites dans l’Ode et moi dans le Code, il n’y a qu’un C de différence entre nous. Or, code vient de coda, queue!’ (i. ). The final hunting scene, when Modeste chooses La Brière (or rather, he finally emerges from the pack) is an important instance not of circular mirroring of the opening, but of convergence with the novel’s central themes. The thread of amorous pursuit culminates here, underlined by the reference to Diane de Maufrigneuse, ‘digne de son nom’ (i. ), and the echo of her pursuit of D’Arthez in Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan. More centrally, the relations between inherent and attributed meaning, the relative status of sign and signified, of feeling to sublimation and of persons to their representatives, hitherto explored in Modeste’s correspondence with the Ernest she takes to be Canalis, here attains its most absolute form, the fetish—or rather, an allusion to, or fetish of, a fetish: —Voici les dames, car Jupiter sent des odeurs fétiches, dit le second piqueur en remarquant la manière de flairer de son chien favori. —Fétiches? répéta le prince de Loudon en souriant. —Peut-être veut-il dire fétides, reprit le duc de Rhétoré. (i. ; Balzac’s emphasis)

Placed at the end of the novel, the remark is too clearly overdetermined to be ignored. Yet the throwaway manner of its making integrates it into the dialogic context of the novel, and thus (ironically, given the subjective nature of the fetish and of the error) into its real, objective world. The determinedly suggestive loss of the countess’s arm ‘dans la guerre de l’indépendance’ at the end of Le Grand d’Espagne creates a pointe, a neat convergence which, in its very contrivedness, and despite the tale’s attempts to collapse them, is of literature rather than life: indépendance is there both marital and martial.77 In other words, form strikes more than content—a distinctive marker of short fiction. But the unpeeling of fétiche from fétide creates an effect which both is, and is not, the reverse. It ‘untidies’ the ending, dissociating hermeneutic, diegetic, and 77

Repr. iv. ; cf. Ch. (ii) above.

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symbolic, makes it more messily like the real; yet it also ties it up, in the overlap with the fiction’s fundamental subject, the false consciousness inherent in all desire. And that is why we laugh. Modeste Mignon illuminates the paradoxical and dichotomous relationship between objective and subjective, illusion and reality, large and small, literature and life—the equation at the heart of Balzac’s shorter fictions.

Conclusion Balzac’s Shorter Fictions Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle in which they shall happily appear to do so. Mais, malgré la richesse de ces œuvres où la contemplation de la nature se place à côté de l’action, à côté d’individus qui ne sont que des noms de personnages, je songeais combien tout de même ses œuvres participent à ce caractère d’être—bien que merveilleusement—toujours incomplètes . . .1

Towards the end of Illusions perdues, when Lucien’s luck and guile are running out, his financial and legal engagements come home to roost: en Banque (saisissez bien cette expression?), dès qu’un effet transmis de la place de Paris à la place d’Angoulême est impayé, les banquiers se doivent à eux-mêmes de s’adresser ce que la loi nomme un compte de retour. Calembour à part, jamais les romanciers n’ont inventé de conte plus invraisemblable que celui-là; car voici les ingénieuses plaisanteries à la Mascarille qu’un certain article du Code de commerce autorise, et dont l’explication vous démontrera combien d’atrocités se cachent sous ce mot terrible: la légalité! (v. )

The passage starts to close the fiction; it takes us back to the beginning as Lucien is returned to his beginnings in Angoulême. The whole novel is brought full circle. A series of puns on ‘comptes de retour’ collapses the referential and the symbolic (v. –— these accounts are both narrative and pecuniary),2 and echoes the play on linguistic and mimetic significance in the novel’s opening description of Séchard: Jérôme-Nicolas Séchard, fidèle à la destinée que son nom lui avait faite, était doué d’une soif inextinguible. . . . Sa passion laissait sur sa physionomie oursine des marques qui la rendaient originale: son nez avait pris le développement et la forme d’un A majuscule corps de triple canon . . . Sa tête chauve et découronnée, mais ceinte de cheveux grisonnants qui frisottaient encore, rappelait à l’imagination les Cordeliers des Contes de La Fontaine. (v. )

1 H. James, Roderick Hudson, ed. T. Tanner (Oxford, ), p. xli; M. Proust, La Prisonnière, in A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. J.-Y. Tadié et al. (–), iii. . 2 Cf. C. Prendergast’s provocative reading of this passage: The Order of Mimesis (Cambridge, ),  et seq.

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Séchard is a drunkard, his nose both flesh and capital A, as the novel itself both seems real, yet is also just black marks on paper. Both passages contain the theme of the whole narrative in nuce: these are truly Illusions perdues— Lucien’s, and the reader’s. Balzac’s narrative emerges as from a seed containing its essence, ‘comme une graine contient une belle fleur avec ses parfums et ses riches couleurs’— as Balzac speculates of passion in La Femme abandonnée (ii. ). If the process of genesis is invariably more complex,3 the notion of unity which implicitly underlies these images is central to our ability to apprehend even a fiction as long as Illusions perdues as a complete, and hence implicitly ‘brief ’, whole. Such unity is derived from Balzac’s stories: in La Fille aux yeux d’or, the prologue’s ‘ceinture de la plus impudique des Vénus’, Paris, anticipates Paquita’s semicircular boudoir (v. ; cf. ; ). But in a work as long as Illusions perdues, the seed can grow: ‘le Prêtre, le Médecin et l’Homme de justice’, the three men ‘qui ne peuvent pas estimer le monde’ and who end Le Colonel Chabert (iii. ) become, in Les Souffrances de l’inventeur, the nub of a whole narrative development, when Lucien, destitute and desperate, sees both the doctor and the vicar of Marsac (v.  et seq.). The end of Le Colonel Chabert begins, in figurative terms, the end of Illusions perdues, anticipating Lucien’s ‘redemption’—financial, spiritual, and narrative—by the arch-criminal Jacques Collin (Vautrin), disguised as the Spanish priest Herrera, in its last pages (v.  et seq.), which themselves prepare Lucien’s return in Splendeurs et misères. And in turn, at the end of Où mènent les mauvais chemins (now part three of Splendeurs et misères), Balzac had written the title ‘Dernière incarnation de Vautrin’ (vi. c). ‘Je ne sais par où commencer . . .’, says Camusot at the opening of La Dernière Incarnation; ‘Commence par la fin! . . .’, replies his wife. The beginning is an ending, and vice versa: just as ‘Enfin, tout était fini’, and Popinot has put the last signature on Lucien’s acquittal, comes the news of his suicide (vi. –). Illusions perdues, ‘l’œuvre capitale dans l’œuvre’ (LH i. ), ‘cette grande petite histoire’ (v. ), unites the dichotomy of literary and literal, objective and subjective, ‘petit’ and ‘grand’ which lies at the heart of any narrative. In La Maison Nucingen, Blondet has to stop Bixiou from giving every detail of Godefroid’s meeting with Isaure d’Aldrigger in extenso: —Isaure, reprit Bixiou qui regarda Blondet de travers, avait une simple robe de crêpe blanc ornée de rubans verts, un camélia dans ses cheveux, un camélia à sa ceinture, un autre camélia dans le bas de sa robe, et un camélia . . . —Allons, voilà les trois cents chèvres de Sancho!4 3 In the opening passage of Illusions perdues, for example, the description of Séchard is only developed as an afterthought: v.  and b. 4 Don Quixote, pt. I, ch. . The passage is also mentioned in La Peau de chagrin and had been referred to in Nodier’s Histoire du roi de Bohème et de ses sept châteaux (): x.  and n. .

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—C’est toute la littérature, mon cher! Clarisse est un chef-d’œuvre, il a quatorze volumes, et le plus obtus vaudevilliste te le racontera dans un acte. Pourvu que je t’amuse, de quoi te plains-tu? (vi. )

Any narrator has to decide how much to tell and how much to omit; but Bixiou is less adept than his creator. Clarissa could be told in one act, but not without losing its glorious sense of duration. Balzac’s work turns on the dichotomies of petit and grand, expansion and concentration, objectivity and subjectivity, real and fictional time: ‘il y a, comme l’a dit Napoléon, une petite et une grande morale’ (i. ); the slightest cause (‘une contredanse’, ‘un air chanté au piano’, ‘une partie de campagne’) can result in ‘d’effroyables malheurs’ (ii. ); Illusions perdues itself depicts a world where ‘les petites choses deviennent grandes’; Splendeurs et misères demonstrates that ‘les plus grands événements de la vie sont traduits par de petits faits-Paris’ (v. , vi. ; cf. e.g. i. ; iii. ; iv. ; CHH xxviii. , ). ‘Les grands ouvrages ne sont peut-être que de petites idées longuement développées’ (xi. ; cf. v. ).5 The petit/grand dichotomy is central, for it embodies the very paradox of perception, its dependence on the relationship between small and large, between the seeing eye, or ‘I’, and the world outside. Balzac’s fiction derives from this fundamental fact. His first narrative, the ‘deux cavaliers’ anecdote in the Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme, explores it (‘l’un s’écrie qu’elle est noire, l’autre qu’elle est blanche . . . elle est blanche d’un côté et noire de l’autre. Voila l’opinion’: OD i. ). That this first narrative should emerge within a philosophical treatise demonstrates the essentially purposive and exemplary nature of narrative in Balzac’s work: stories are told for a reason, not merely to entertain; they always have a point. Philosophy is the beginning and end of Balzac’s enterprise, which began with this Discours and is crowned by the Études philosophiques and the Études analytiques; the illustrative function of narrative doubtless helps to explain why most of the Études philosophiques, unlike the Études de mœurs, are stories. But the ‘deux cavaliers’ anecdote also shows that Balzac’s shorter fiction is almost always exemplary, as it were, of a question: he begins writing because he cannot decide an issue (in the Discours, whether or not the soul is immortal), because he wants to let both sides have their say: ‘et ils avaient tous les deux raison.’ This illuminates a fundamental and potentially confusing conflict between narrative and doxa in Balzac’s work, between particular and general, part and whole. Narrative emerges as illustrative of doxa in the Discours, the Codes and, later, the Physiologie; it embodies the relation between the general and the particular which is one of the crucial axes of his world. Yet Balzac’s narrative is invariably subversive of doxa, both illustrating, yet also undermining, the prescriptions of the Codes, proposing ‘male’ and subversive ‘female’ readings in the 5 Cf. e.g. iv. ; v. , ; vi. ; vii. –; ix. , , , ; xii. ; CHH xxviii. , , , .

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Physiologie; it has—however much Balzac might have seen it as a dialectic, or the fallen fragments of a transcendent unity— an inherently dialogic tendency which is at odds with the univocal morality which has been associated with the story.6 This tendency is most clearly apparent in the first Scènes de la vie privée, which take the forms and themes of the conte moral, the oppositional structures which confront characters and divide them into opposing camps (and which were later to form the basis of novels like Eugénie Grandet, La Vieille Fille, Le Cousin Pons, or La Cousine Bette), but subvert its morality; it derives both from the Codes and Physiologie, but also from the character of these scènes as shrunken novels, boilings-down of the rebourrages of Le Dernier Chouan. The grande synthèse is putative, and infinitely deferred. It is in the mind of God, and of the author; it is a gleam in the eye of driven readers. In , as at the very beginning of his career, Balzac became a conteur almost by accident. He became a novelist almost accidentally too, in La Peau de chagrin’s unplanned expansion from conte fantastique to novel. But that work’s dualities are also dichotomies, uniting vouloir, pouvoir, and savoir, and the ‘fantastic’ and ‘realistic’ readings of the pact. La Peau de chagrin forms a crucial juncture in Balzac’s opus, not just because it started as a conte and was expanded, but because it explores the relations between microcosm and macrocosm, between fiction and the reader’s experience, between the book and life itself. La Peau de chagrin begins an evolution of the relationship between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ narrative in Balzac’s work, an evolution which would see narrative less as something external to, and illustrating, doxa, than as endowed with what Du Bos called présence, internalized and identified with by the reader, who is called on actively to reflect, rather than be the mere passive recipient of a moral. The conte is thus at the heart of the novel; its pluralism enables its development into a truly omnipotent form. Between  and , short stories constituted almost the whole of Balzac’s output. The conte was to bear the burden of his totalizing presentation of reality, and to reach its apotheosis in the planned Cent Contes drolatiques. That this project did not come fully to fruition may be explained by several related factors. There was a change of fashion, away from Rabelais and the Renaissance; a loss of faith in ‘naïve’ literature; and a waning of the folie du conte. Publishing conditions changed too: the revival of the book trade, and, in October , Balzac’s contract for the Études de mœurs (and in July  for the Études philosophiques) effectively removed the drolatiques’ function as Balzac’s main fictional cycle, and transferred it to these collections. With that function went recurring characters, originated in La Belle Impéria, but only consistently developed from Le Père Goriot in . Henceforth, Balzac’s engagement with the contemporary was to be made not by attacking it from without, via the pseudo-Renaissance conte, but by representing it from within. 6

Cf. F. Goyet, La Nouvelle – ().

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This development began with La Transaction (Le Colonel Chabert) before the first dixain was even published; but it was not without its difficulties, or the conte without its legacy; Balzac’s opus was to develop in cycles of stories, like those of the Renaissance. Le Colonel Chabert was to become Balzac’s first modern psychological nouvelle in that, unlike any of the  Scènes de la vie privée, it gives an in-depth account of the emotional impact of events on one character, largely from that character’s perspective, rather than of the events themselves. But in developing its first version, La Transaction, from a mirroring of Madame Firmiani, Balzac is using the essentially cyclical model of the Renaissance nouvelle, yet not without considerable modification: the manuscript’s melodramatic subject matter is attenuated and made more credible in the first published version, and particularly in the revisions of . Le Colonel Chabert focuses on an individual’s emotions, but not through them. Les Célibataires (now Le Curé de Tours) brings another development which is yet more novelistic. In focusing from the outset, not on, but through an individual’s psychology (in this case, through Birotteau’s displaced desires), this story effectively transfers the principles of énergie vitale from the philosophical or quasifantastic context in which they had been hitherto explored (Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, La Peau de chagrin) to a realistic one, allowing the psychological exploration of, and identification with, the protagonist, towards an emphasis on process as much as outcome, which are the prerogatives of the novel. La Transaction and Les Célibataires form a blueprint for Balzac’s novels which would be developed during  and  in texts such as La Femme abandonnée and Eugénie Grandet. It is Eugénie Grandet and, a year later, Le Père Goriot (and ultimately, the publishing context of the Études de mœurs, which gave a new stable background for Balzac’s writing) which form the turning-point: the stories written alongside them, L’Illustre Gaudissart and Un drame au bord de la mer, herald a secondary role for short stories as ‘gap-fillers’ between longer novels, rather than the main thrust of Balzac’s writing which they were to retain until the end of his career. These ‘symbiotic stories’, written in the shadow of the related novels, inaugurate a new relationship between the story and the novel, between brevity and length, part and whole, which is determinant in Balzac’s opus, and explained in the Introductions to the Études de mœurs and the Études philosophiques. They establish that opus as a cathedral, with its arches, aisles, and sculptures; as an edifice still under construction. The dimensions of each tale differ from the others, and each is, of course, shorter than the whole. Illusions perdues, begun in this period, in , and completed in , is ‘un chapitre du grand roman de la société’ (v. ); but La Comédie humaine is not remotely a long novel. It is rather a cycle of stories, ‘les Mille et une nuits de l’Occident’, with all that that implies; a mosaic, where the narratives are the tesserae; a kaleidoscope whose shape is determined by the order of our encounters with the fictions, and finally, ‘une histoire, au lieu de romans’, a reality where the proliferation of

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narrative frames and grilles de lecture makes genre effectively ‘transparent’. That La Comédie humaine was left unfinished at Balzac’s death makes it an effectively open system, with no fixed order of reading, leaving great vistas and the potential for practically infinite reconfiguration. As Théorie du conte and his other contemporary writings show, Balzac wanted the conte to be able to do everything. Works like the Physiologie, or the stories of the  Scènes de la vie privée, with their admixtures of picture and drama, show the fundamentally eclectic but ultimately syncretic nature of Balzac’s work. Commerce stopped the conte from fulfilling this catch-all role; but Balzac’s faith in the genre explains its persistence, and the enduring presence of short stories in his opus, and of short-fictional features (dramatic unity, symbolic coherence, dualistic structures, narrative circularity) in even his longest works. The Contes drolatiques persist in his thoughts long after the third, last published, dixain (LH i. , ii. ), and he was still planning stories the year before he died. There is a generic indeterminacy in his work, which takes its ‘forme extérieure’, like the ‘animal’ in his Avant-propos, ‘dans les milieux où il est appelé à se développer’ (i. )—the evolutionary feature which explains dissimilarities of final form in works whose origin is shared—Melmoth réconcilié and Les Souffrances de l’inventeur, César Birotteau and La Maison Nucingen. But nearly everything Balzac successfully completed was planned as, or involved, short fiction, and almost anything which was not was doomed to failure—the mammoth novel cycle Histoire de la France pittoresque; the projected epic novel La Bataille, mentioned more than virtually any other, but of which only ten words were ever written (xii. ); the panoramic novel Les Paysans, withdrawn at protests from the excruciated readers of La Presse—for all its remote origins in the Contes philosophiques. As early as , Rabou had protested at the ‘métaphysique phylologique’ [sic], which opens Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit, with the words: ‘Ceci vous apprendra, mon bougre, à être conteur comme la nature vous a fait, et non embêtant comme elle a fait Victor Cousin’ (Corr. i. ). Brevity was as essential to conception as to execution; even Balzac, it seems, could not get to grips with big ideas all at once. This explains why so many of Balzac’s fictions, even the longest, start in his notebook as single sentences (or sentences), why their first drafts are generally short, continuous narratives, within which ‘micronarratives’ about given characters and episodes develop. ‘Quand on copie la nature, il est des erreurs de bonne foi: souvent, en apercevant un site, on n’en divine pas tout d’abord les véritables dimensions; telle route paraissait d’abord être un sentier, le vallon devient une vallée, la montagne facile à franchir à l’œil a voulu tout un jour de marche’ (Illusions perdues, v. ). But it also suggests why, in his career’s second half, after the experiment of Même histoire, he joins together shorter narratives to create even the longest novels, Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères. Balzac’s fiction moves from an early focusing of narrative around the narrator (Une heure de ma vie) or a mirroring of the narrator (Corsino, Sarrasine, La Peau de

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chagrin, Louis Lambert) to its centring around narrative (the frame stories of the early s, Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit, and Le Médecin de campagne); and thence, with the invention of recurring characters, to a use of characters as central focus (La Messe de l’athée, Facino Cane, Z. Marcas). As serialization becomes increasingly important in the late s and early s, narratives use these characters in more presentational, dramatic, theatrically dialogued scenes: Une fille d’Eve, Un prince de la bohème, and La Fausse Maîtresse. Stories like these, most strikingly Un homme d’affaires, are primarily meeting-places for characters, more than self-contained fictional entities; the imperatives of the creation as a whole create centrifugal forces, and put the unity of the individual story increasingly under strain. The dominant unity and cogency is that of the work as a whole, as is reflected in the prevalence of quasi-theatrical scenes, and, in Autre étude de femme and Honorine, as in the early s, by a use of frame stories. But a decade later, the emphasis is different. Where earlier frame stories like Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit use salon narrative for ideological reasons, as a way of asserting, even encouraging, the cohesion of society at large (part of the enterprise of social renovation shared by the Contes drolatiques), here the cohesion is that of Balzac’s own fictional world. It has become an analogue of the real one, in the way La Peau de chagrin’s preface announced, its characters, narrators—persons in their own right. It was for the fictional Bianchon, not his real-life doctor, Nacquart, that Balzac called on his deathbed. From Balzac’s original project for œuvres complètes, La Comédie humaine was created almost fortuitiously, but driven by ‘une comparaison entre l’Humanité et l’Animalité’ (i. )—perhaps not quite in the way the Avant-propos mentions, but by the dual imperatives of his Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux and the people of his world. The experience of writing self-contained pen-portraits, scenes, and series such as Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, Petites misères de la vie conjugale, and Hetzel’s animaux prepared Balzac for what was effectively a grand enterprise in publishing in instalments, La Comédie humaine. In , his contributions to Hetzel’s Diable à Paris would reverse the process, in scenes which would both make up and break down a fictional reality: Les Comédiens sans le savoir is a mosaic whose fragmentation seems to answer that of metropolitan consciousness itself. These developments are reflected in Balzac’s contemporary major novels. Whilst the central novel of Illusions perdues, Un grand homme de province à Paris, involves much peregrination about Paris, as Lucien trails from Vidal and Porchon to Doguereau, or discovers the Cénacle and Lousteau’s circle, it incorporates none of the portraits of Les Français, which were being written simultaneously, and (with the possible exception of Lucien’s frantic search for Finot) creates a gradual unfolding which corresponds to Lucien’s discovery of this world. In the case of Splendeurs et misères, the traffic is in the opposite direction. The article Madame La Ressource ou une marchande à la toilette in Le Diable à Paris

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was worked up from parts of the portrait of Mme Nourisson in Splendeurs et misères (vi. –), and the effectiveness of many parts of this longest work of La Comédie humaine depends on brief chapters and a rapid alternation of scenes which, for all that it owes to theatre, introduces a new kind of brevity towards the end of Balzac’s career.7 Stark contrasts such as these, and those between whole fictions, are central to the perspectival relief of La Comédie humaine. The first half of Balzac’s career was a general movement from conte to novel; the remainder, a development of the conte alongside and within the novel. But, in absolute terms, there is no end to Balzac’s brevities. They are present in the contes and nouvelles of the Comédie; in innumerable articles and scenes; and in the bite-sized units of even his longest works. The relation between petit and grand, between shorter and longer fiction, lies at the heart of his opus. Short fiction, far from being a transient phenomenon, is the cradle and crucible of Balzac’s enterprise: it is the Urform of his creation as a whole.

7 Cf. especially the passages on Lucien and Herrera’s trial in the third part of Splendeurs et misères, Où mènent les mauvais chemins (vi. –), which, unlike the last, was not serialized during Balzac’s lifetime.

Select Bibliography (The place of publication is Paris unless otherwise stated; publisher name and book format is given only in the case of Balzac’s works, or of works of joint or uncertain authorship, published during his lifetime.) I II III

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES THESES COMPLETE AND COLLECTED EDITIONS OF BALZAC’S WRITINGS (a) Editions published in Balzac’s lifetime (b) Later editions IV SINGLE OR GROUPED WORKS BY BALZAC (a) Contemporary editions of Balzac’s writings excluding works published exclusively in newspapers and reviews, Codes and Physiologies and Romans de jeunesse (b) Collected stories and essays (modern editions) by chronological order of publication (c) Single works by Balzac (modern editions) (d) Romans de jeunesse (editions published in Balzac’s lifetime) V WORKS OF JOINT OR UNCERTAIN AUTHORSHIP VI CORRESPONDENCE VII PRIMARY PRINTED SOURCES (a) Codes and Physiologies (b) Works by writers other than Balzac (including modern editions) (c) Newspapers and periodical publications VIII SECONDARY SOURCES (a) Books (b) Articles    At the Institut de France (Collection Lovenjoul): A  Le Bal de Sceaux,  fos. A – Béatrix ou les amours forcés,  and  fos. A  Les Célibataires [Le Curé de Tours],  fos. A  Mémento pour les Cent Contes drolatiques,  fos. A  Les Cent Contes: théorie du conte,  fos. A  Corsino,  fos. A  La Fausse Maîtresse,  fos. A  Gambara, étude philosophique,  fos. A  Gloire et malheur [La Maison du chat-qui-pelote],  fos. A  La Grande Bretèche,  fos. A  Honorine,  fos. A  Imprudence et bonheur,  fos.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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A  Maître Cornélius,  fos. A  Le Message,  fos. A  Notes philosophiques [Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme],  fos. A  Notes prises par Balzac pour ses romans autographes,  fos. A  Notes sur le classement et l’achèvement des œuvres,  fos. A  Notice biographique sur Louis Lambert,  fos. A  La Paix du ménage,  fos. A  Pensées, sujets, fragments,  fos. A  Le Père Goriot,  fos. A  Le Prêtre catholique,  fos. A  Recueil de couvertures de manuscrits et titres d’œuvres,  fos. A  Recueil de fragments manuscrits,  fos. A  Le Refus,  fos. A  Le Secret des Ruggieri,  fos. A  Sténie ou les erreurs philosophiques,  fos. A  Tableaux d’une vie privée,  fos. A  La Torpille,  fos. A  La Transaction,  fos. A  Une fille d’Eve,  fos. A  Une fille d’Eve [proofs],  fos. A  Une heure de ma vie,  fos. A  La Vendetta,  fos.   A, D., ‘Balzac and the Visual Arts’, D.Phil., Oxford, . G, R., ‘Le Roman-feuilleton (–): la naissance d’un genre’, Doctorat d’État, Nancy, ,  vols., repr. Lille, ,  microfiches. J, A. R. W., ‘L’Artiste de  à ’, MA, Manchester, . K, P., ‘Balzac et La Presse’, Ph.D., Liverpool, ,  vols. L, T. W, ‘The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on Balzac’, Ph.D., London, . M, A.-M., ‘Honoré de Balzac. Les Employés. Édition critique et commentée. Doctorat d’État, Paris, ,  vols. T, M. J., ‘Balzac and the writers of the école du désenchantement’, Ph.D., Cambridge, .       ’  (a) Editions published in Balzac’s lifetime La Comédie humaine: Oeuvres complètes de M. de Balzac (Furne et Cie; Furne; J.-J. Dubochet et Cie; J. Hetzel, –),  o vols. Études de mœurs au XIXème siècle (Mme Charles-Béchet; Werdet, –),  o vols. Études philosophiques (Werdet, Delloye & Lecou, Souverain, –),  o vols. Oeuvres complètes de Horace de Saint-Aubin, mises en ordre par Émile Regnault (–),  o vols.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

(b) Later editions La Comédie humaine, ed. P.-G. Castex et al. (–),  vols. L’Œuvre de Balzac ed. A. Beguin and J.-A. Ducourneau, Club français du livre edn. (–),  vols. Œuvres complètes, ed. M. Bardèche, Club de l’honnête homme edn. (–),  vols. Oeuvres complètes de Balzac, Michel Lévy edn. (–),  vols. Œuvres complètes illustrées, facsimile de l’édition Furne-Hetzel de –, ed. J.-A. Ducourneau (–),  vols. Œuvres diverses, ed. R. Chollet, R. Guise, N. Mozet (, ),  vols. Premiers romans, ed. A. Lorant (),  vols. Romans de jeunesse, ed. R. Chollet (Lausanne, ),  vols. Le Théâtre inédit de H. de Balzac, ed. D. Milatchitch ().        (a) Contemporary editions of Balzac’s writings excluding works published exclusively in newspapers and reviews, Codes and Physiologies of joint or uncertain authorship, other such works, and Romans de jeunesse Balzac illustré. La Peau de chagrin: études sociales (Delloye & Lecou, ),  o vol. Le Cabinet des Antiques, Gambara (Souverain, ),  o vols. Catherine de Médicis expliquée, Le Martyr calviniste (Souverain, ),  o vols. Les Cent Contes drolatiques, colligez ès abbaïes de Touraine, et mis en lumière par le sieur de Balzac, pour l’esbattement des pantagruelistes et non aultres: premier dixain (Gosselin, ),  o vol nd edn. (). Les Cent Contes drolatiques, colligez ès abbaïes de Touraine, et mis en lumière par le sieur de Balzac, pour l’esbattement des pantagruelistes et non aultres: second dixain (Gosselin, ),  o vol. Les Cent Contes drolatiques, colligez ès abbaïes de Touraine, et mis en lumière par le sieur de Balzac, pour l’esbattement des pantagruelistes et non aultre: troisième dixain (Werdet, ),  o vol. Code des gens honnêtes, ou l’art de ne pas être dupe des fripons (Barba, ),  o vol. Code pénal: manuel complet des honnêtes gens, par Horace Raisson (Roret, ),  o vol. Les Comédiens sans le savoir (),  o vol. (published anonymously). Les Contes drolatiques, colligez ez abbayes de Touraine et mis en lumière par le sieur de Balzac, pour l’esbattement des pantagruélistes et non aultres. Cinquiesme édition, illustré de  dessins par G. Doré (Société générale de librairie, ),  o vol. Contes philosophiques (Gosselin, ),  o vols. Le Curé de village (Souverain, ),  o vols. Un début dans la vie, La Fausse Maîtresse (Dumont, ),  o vols. Le Dernier Chouan ou la Bretagne en  (Canel, ),  o vols. La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin (Chlendowski,  []),  o vols. Dialogue d’un vieux Grenadier de la Garde impériale, surnommé le sans peur (Simon père et fils, ),  o vol. Un drame dans les prisons (Souverain, ),  o vols. Du droit d’aînesse, par M. D*** [Balzac] (Delongchamps, Dentu, Petit, ),  o vol. La Femme de soixante ans (Roux & Cassanet, ),  o vols.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY



La Femme supérieure, La Maison Nucingen, La Torpille, par M. de Balzac (Werdet, ),  o vols.; nd edn. (),  o vols. Une fille d’Eve [and Massimilla Doni] (Souverain, ),  o vols. Un grand homme de province à Paris, Scène de la vie de province (Souverain, ),  o vols. Histoire de la grandeur et de la décadence de César Birotteau parfumeur, chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, adjoint au maire du ème arrondissement de la ville de Paris, etc., Nouvelle Scène de la vie parisienne (Boulé,  []),  o vols. Histoire de Napoléon racontée dans une grange par un vieux soldat (),  o vol. Histoire intellectuelle de Louis Lambert, par M. de Balzac. Fragment extrait des ‘Romans et contes philosophiques’ (Gosselin, ),  o vol. Honorine suivi de Un prince de la Bohème (de Potter,  []),  o vols. Le Livre mystique. Par M. de Balzac (Werdet, ),  o vols. Le Lys dans la vallée (Werdet, ),  o vols. Le Médecin de campagne (Mame & Delaunay-Vallée, ),  o vols. Modeste Mignon (Chlendowski, ),  o vols. Modeste Mignon, Un épisode sous la Terreur, Une passion dans le désert (Chlendowski, ),  o vols. Les Mystères de province. Bibliothèque de romans nouveaux, La Muse du département (vols. i–iii), Rosalie (vols. iii–iv) (Souverain, ),  o vols. Nouveaux Contes philosophiques (Gosselin, ),  o vol. Les Parents pauvres, vols. i–vi (Chlendowski, ),  o vols.; vols. vii–xii (Pétion, ),  o vols. La Peau de chagrin, Roman philosophique (Gosselin & Canel, ),  o vols. La Peau de chagrin: nouvelle édition revue et corrigée (Charpentier, ),  o vol. Le Père Goriot, Histoire parisienne (Werdet & Spachmann, ),  o vols. Petites misères de la vie conjugale (Chlendowski, ),  o vol. Petites misères de la vie conjugale (Chlendowski, ),  o vol. Physiologie de l’employé (Aubert & Lavigne, ),  o vol. Physiologie du mariage, ou méditations de philosophie éclectique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal, publiées par un jeune célibataire (Levavasseur & Canel, ),  o vols. Physiologie du mariage, ou méditations de philosophie éclectique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal, publiées par de Balzac (Ollivier, ),  o vols. Physiologie du mariage ou méditations de philosophie éclectique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal: nouvelle édition semblable à celle de la Physiologie du goût publiée par le même éditeur (Charpentier, ),  o vol. Physiologie du mariage ou méditations de philosophie éclectique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal, nouvelle édition revue et corrigée (Charpentier, ),  o vol. Physiologie du mariage ou méditations de philosophie éclectique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal, nouvelle édition (Charpentier, ),  o vol. Physiologie du mariage ou méditations de philosophie éclectique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal, nouvelle édition (Charpentier, ),  o vol. Pierrette, Pierre Grassou (Souverain, ),  o vols. Le Provincial à Paris (Roux & Cassanet, ),  o vols. Romans et contes philosophiques, ‘seconde [for ‘première’] édition’ (),  o vols.; quatrième [for ‘deuxième’] édition revue et corrigé, (Gosselin, ),  o vols. Scènes de la vie privée, publiées par M. Balzac, auteur du ‘Dernier Chouan ou la Bretagne en ’ (Mame & Delaunay-Vallée, Levavasseur, ),  o vols.; nd edn. (Mame & Delaunay-Vallée, ),  o vols.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, Esther, Échantillon de causerie française (de Potter,  []),  o vols. La Veillée, Histoire de Napoléon contée dans une grange par un vieux soldat (),  o vol. (b) Collected stories and essays (modern editions) by chronological order of publication: Short Stories, ed. A. W. Raitt (Oxford, ). Le Contrat de mariage, Une Double Famille, L’Interdiction, ed. S. S. de Sacy (). Le Colonel Chabert, El Verdugo, Adieu, Le Réquisitionnaire, ed. P. Berthier (). Les Célibataires, Le Curé de Tours, Pierrette, ed. A.-M. Meininger (). Études de femme, Autre étude de Femme, La Femme abandonnée, La Grenadière, Madame Firmiani, Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan, Le Message, pref. J. Roudaut, ed. S. S. de Sacy (). Louis Lambert, Les Proscrits, Jésus-Christ en Flandre, pref. R. Abellio, ed. S. S. de Sacy (). Une fille d’Eve suivie de La Fausse maîtresse, ed. P. Berthier (). Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, Gambara, Massimilla Doni, ed. M. Eigeldinger and M. Milner (). La Muse du département, Un prince de la Bohème, ed. P. Berthier (). La Maison du chat-qui-pelote, Le Bal de Sceaux, La Vendetta, La Bourse, ed. A.-M. Baron (). Peines de cœur d’une chatte anglaise et autres Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, ed. R. Fortassier (). Saggi letterari della ‘Revue parisienne’, ed. F. Fiorentino (Pisa, ). Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu et autres nouvelles, ed. A. Goetz (). Sarrasine, Gambara, Massimilla Doni, ed. P. Brunel (). Écrits sur le roman, Anthologie, ed. S. Vachon (). (c) Single works by Balzac (modern editions) Annette et le Criminel, ed. A. Lorant (). Béatrix, ed. M. Regard (). César Birotteau, ed. P. Laubriet (). Code des gens honnêtes ou l’art de ne pas être dupe des fripons, ed. M. Mourlet (). Le Colonel Chabert, ed. P. Citron (). Le Colonel Chabert, ed. S. Vachon (). Le Cousin Pons, ed. A. Lorant (). Le Curé de village, manuscrits ajoutés pour l’édition Souverain de : édition originale de documents de la collection Lovenjoul, précédé de la genèse du roman par Ki Wist, Brussels (–). Le Curé de village, suivi de Véronique et de Véronique au tombeau (Brussels, ). Le Curé de village: les manuscrits de premier jet de Honoré de Balzac. I: Le Manuscrit primaire du ‘Curé de village’, . II: Les Ajoutés importants, ou manuscrits secondaires, . Avant-propos et notes par Ki Wist (Brussels, ). Le Curé de village, ed. N. Mozet (). L’Église, ed. J. Pommier (). L’Enfant maudit, ed. F. Germain (). Falthurne, manuscrit de l’abbé Savonati, ed. P.-G. Castex ().

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY



Les Fantaisies de la Gina, ed. R. de Cesare (Rezé, ). La Femme auteur, ed. M. Bardèche (). La Femme de trente ans, ed. P. Citron (); —ed. C. Massol (). Gambara, ed. M. Regard (). Gambara, Massimilla Doni, Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, ed. M. Eigeldinger (). Illusions perdues [], le manuscrit de la collection Lovenjoul, p.p. Suzanne Jean Bérard (Introduction et notes) (). Illusions perdues, ed. P. Berthier (). Louis Lambert, ed. J. Ducourneau & J. Pommier (). La Maison Nucingen, ed. A.-M. Meininger (). Massimilla Doni, ed. M. Milner (). Le Médecin de campagne, ed. P. Berthier, pref. E. Le Roy Ladurie, nd edn. (). Le Médecin de campagne, ed. P. Barbéris (). La Muse du département, Un prince de la Bohème (). La Peau de chagrin, ed. P. Citron (). La Peau de chagrin, ed. P. Barbéris (). Le Père Goriot, ed. P.-G. Castex (). Le Père Goriot, ed. S. Vachon (). Physiologie du mariage préoriginale, ed. M. Bardèche (). Physiologie du mariage, ed. M. Regard (). Peines de cœur d’une chatte anglaise et autres scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, ed. R. Fortassier (). Pensées, sujets, fragments, ed. J. Crépet (). La Rabouilleuse, ed. R. Guise (). Rosalie (Albert Savarus), ed. C. Smethurst (). Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, ed. A. Adam (). La Vieille Fille, ed. P.-G. Castex (). (d) Romans de jeunesse (single works published in Balzac’s lifetime) Annette et le criminel ou suite du ‘Vicaire des Ardennes’, publiée par M. Horace de Saint-Aubin, auteur du ‘Vicaire des Ardennes’ (Buissot, ),  o vols. Le Centenaire ou les deux Béringheld, publié par M. Horace de Saint-Aubin, auteur du ‘Vicaire des Ardennes’ (Pollet, ),  o vols. Clotilde de Lusignan ou le beau juif, manuscrit trouvé dans les Archives de Province et publié par Lord R’Hoone (Hubert, ),  o vols. La Dernière Fée ou la nouvelle lampe merveilleuse, par M. Horace de Saint-Aubin (Barba, Hubert, Mondor, Bobée, ),  o vols. La Dernière Fée ou la nouvelle lampe merveilleuse, par M. Horace de Saint-Aubin, auteur de ‘L’Héritière de Birague’, de ‘Jean-Louis’, de ‘Clotilde de Lusignan’, du ‘Vicaire des Ardennes’, du ‘Centenaire’, etc., seconde édition revue, corrigé et considérablement augmentée (Delongchamps,  []),  o vols. Le Vicaire des Ardennes, publié par M. Horace de Saint-Aubin, bachelier ès lettres, auteur du ‘Centenaire’ (Pollet, ),  o vols. Wann-Chlore (Canel, Delongchamps, ),  o vols. [published anonymously].



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       Album historique et anecdotique (),  o vol. L’Anonyme ou ni père ni mère, par A. de Viellerglé Saint-Alme (Charpentier-Méricourt, ),  o vols. Babel: publication de la Société des gens de lettres (P.-J. Renouard, ),  o vols. Une blonde: histoire romanesque, précédée d’une notice nécrologique sur un homme qui n’est pas mort, par Horace Raisson (Bréauté, ),  o vol. [C, L. (ed.),], Choix d’anecdotes, de contes, d’historiettes, d’épigrammes et de bons mots, tant en prose qu’en vers (Librairie ancienne et moderne, ),  o vols. Contes bruns: par une (sic: the title-page carries Johannot’s vignette of an inverted head in place of the names of the authors Balzac, Chasles, and Rabou) (Canel & Guyot, ),  o vol.; ed. M. Milner (Marseilles, ) (reprint of  edn.). Le Corrupteur, par A. de Viellerglé (Lugan, ),  o vols. Le Diable à Paris, Paris et les Parisiens, Mœurs et coutumes, caractères et portraits des habitants de Paris, tableau complet de leur vie privée, publique, politique, artistique, littéraire, industrielle, etc., etc. (Hetzel, ),  o vols. Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Curmer, –),  o vols. La Grande Ville, nouveau tableau de Paris, comique, critique et philosophique, par Ch. Paul de Kock. Illustrations de Gavarni, Victor Adam, Daumier, Daubigny, etc. (Bureau central des publications nouvelles, ),  o vols. L’Héritière de Birague, histoire tirée des manuscrits de Dom Rago, ex-prieur des Bénédictins, mise au jour par ses deux neveux, M. A. de Viellerglé, auteur des ‘Deux Hector’ et de ‘Charles Pointel’, et Lord R’hoone (Hubert, ),  o vols. [R, H.-N.], Histoire de Napoléon et de la grande armée (Librairie parisienne, ),  o vols. Jean-Louis ou la fille trouvée, par A. de Viellerglé et Lord R’Hoone, auteurs de ‘L’Héritière de Birague’ (Hubert, ),  o vols. Le Livre des conteurs (Lequien, ),  o vols. Mémoires anecdotiques sur l’intérieur du palais, et sur quelques événements de l’empire depuis  jusqu’au premier mai , pour servir à l’histoire de Napoléon, par L.-F.-J. de Bausset, ancien préfet du palais impérial (Baudoin frères, ),  o vols. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution française, par Sanson, exécuteur des arrêts criminels pendant la Révolution (Librairie Centrale,  [reprinted , ]),  o vols. Les Mystères de province: par H. de Balzac, C. Ballard, F. Soulié, A. Brot (Souverain, ),  o vols. [C, L. (ed.)], Nouvelle Anthologie, ou choix de chansons anciennes et modernes (Librairie ancienne et moderne, ),  o vol. Œuvres choisies de Napoléon (Librairie ancienne et moderne, ),  o vols. Petit Dictionnaire critique et anecdotique des enseignes de Paris, par un batteur de pavé (),  o vol. Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (Hetzel, ),  o vols. Le Tartare ou le retour de l’exilé, Pollet, ,  o vols.

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  B, H. de, Correspondance, ed. R. Pierrot (‒),  vols. ——Lettres à Madame Hanska, ed. R. Pierrot (),  vols.     (a) Codes and Physiologies B-S, J.-A., Physiologie du goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante, ouvrage théorique, historique et à l’ordre du jour, dédié aux gastronomes parisiens, par un professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés littéraires et savantes (),  vols. ——Physiologie du goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante, ouvrage théorique, historique, et à l’ordre du jour, dédié aux gastronomes parisiens, par un professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés savantes. Nouvelle édition précédée d’une Notice sur l’auteur, par M. le Baron Richerand. Suivie d’un Traité sur les excitants modernes [the st edn. of Traité des excitants modernes] (). ——Physiologie du goût, ou méditations de gastronomie transcendante, ouvrage théorique, historique, et à l’ordre du jour, dédié aux gastronomes parisiens, par un professeur, membre de plusieurs sociétés savantes. Édition précédée d’une notice de M. le Baron Richerand, suivie de La Gastronomie, poème en quatre chants par Berchoux (). R, H.-N., Code gourmand, manuel complet de gastronomie, contenant les lois, règles, applications et exemples de l’art de bien vivre, par l’auteur du Code des honnêtes gens (n.d. []). ——Code civil, manuel complet de la politesse du ton, contenant les lois, règles, applications et exemples de l’art de se présenter et de se conduire dans le monde (). ——Code conjugal, contenant les lois, règles, applications et exemples de l’art de se bien marier et d’être heureux en ménage, par H. Raisson (n.d. []). ——Code de la toilette, manuel complet d’élégance et d’hygiène contenant les lois, règles, applications et exemples de l’art de soigner sa personne, et de s’habiller avec goût et méthode, par l’auteur du Code civil (n.d. []). ——Code de la conversation, manuel complet du langage élégant et poli contenant les lois, règles, applications et exemples de l’art de bien parler (n.d. []). ——Code du littérateur et du journaliste, par un entrepreneur littéraire (). ——Code galant, ou l’art de conter fleurette, par Horace Raisson (n.d. []). ——Code de la chasse, manuel complet du chasseur, par Horace Raisson, suivi du Code de la pêche, par M. de C . . . y (n.d. []). ——Code des boudoirs, moyens adroits de faire des conquêtes, de devenir bientôt heureux en amour et d’acquérir un certain aplomb auprès des femmes, par un jurisconsulte de Cythère, indispensable aux novices (n.d. []). Y, J.-G., L’Art d’obtenir des places, ou la clef des ministères, ouvrage dédié aux gens sans emploi et aux solliciteurs de toutes les classes, nd edn. (), rd edn. (). ——L’Art de faire des dettes et de promener ses créanciers (). ——L’Art de promener ses créanciers, ou complément de l’art de faire des dettes ().

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

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

B, M., ‘Pierre Grassou ou le jeu du faux’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, F., ‘Archaïsme et originalité dans les Contes drolatiques de Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, P., ‘Les Mythes de la dernière fée’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Notes sur Le Curé de village’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac, Dupin et les statistiques’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘L’Accueil de la critique aux premières grandes œuvres de Balzac (–)’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘L’Accueil de la critique aux premières grandes œuvres de Balzac (–)’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, M., ‘Autour des Études philosophiques’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, A.-M., ‘Romans de jeunesse, genèse du roman: La Dernière Fée, roman originel’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘De Lord R’hoone à Louis Lambert’, Le Courrier balzacien, :  (), –. ——(ed.), ‘Balzac et la nouvelle’, L’École des lettres,  (–), –. B, C.-P., Quelques caricaturistes français, in Œuvres complètes, ed. M. Ruff (). B, J., ‘Notes concernant les deux premiers tomes de la nouvelle édition de La Comédie humaine dans la Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, S.-J., ‘Une énigme balzacienne: la spécialité’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, P., ‘Balzac et Swedenborg. Einfluss der Mystik Swedenborgs und SaintMartins auf die Romandichtung Balzacs’, Romanische Studien,  (). B, C., ‘Prostitution and narrative: Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes’, L’Esprit créateur, :  (), –. B, P. ‘Les Ratures d’Une fille d’Eve’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘La Présence de l’Espagne dans la presse française des années : autour de Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, L., ‘La Figure du père dans les œuvres de jeunesse de Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, A., ‘La Caricature politique sous la Monarchie de Juillet’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts,  (), –. B, T., ‘Du côté de chez Sand’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘L’Accueil aux Paysans: de l’anathème à la gloire’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, G., ‘Le Médecin de campagne et Le Curé de village, étude comparée de leur composition’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B-J, H., ‘Une théorie de la nouvelle et son application aux Chroniques italiennes de Stendhal’, Revue de littérature comparée, : – ( Jan.–June ), –. B, E., ‘La Composition balzacienne dans Ferragus et La Fille aux yeux d’or: de la négligence à l’ambivalence’, Orbis Litterarum,  (), –. ——‘Écriture frénétique, écriture drolatique dans L’Héritière de Birague’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘L’Écriture de la maxime dans le récit balzacien’, Poétique,  (), –. —‘Pratiques balzaciennes de la digression’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, J., ‘Un modèle de Horace Bianchon’, Revue des sciences humaines (Oct.–Dec. ), fasc. , pp. –. B, R., ‘La Structure symbolique de Séraphîta et le mythe de l’androgyne’, L’Année balzacienne (), –.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY



B, J.-L., ‘Ni du roman, ni du théâtre: La Maison Nucingen’, Poétique, :  (), –. B, F. P., ‘La Nouvelle en : la société, la misère, la mort et les mots’, Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises,  (), –. B, E., ‘Le Thème du condamné à mort’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Gautier aide de Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, P., ‘Mosè dans Massimilla Doni’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Variations balzaciennes sur Don Juan’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. B, R. D. E., ‘The Unseen Seer, or Proteus in the City: Aspects of a NineteenthCentury Parisian Myth’, French Studies, :  ( Jan. ), –. B, M., ‘Le Français en Italie dans Massimilla Doni’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. C, P.-G., ‘Balzac et Brillat-Savarin: sur une préface à la Physiologie du goût’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. C, N., ‘La Grande Bretèche: tradition orale, souvenirs livresques, cadre tourangeau’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. C, R., ‘De Dezespérance d’amour à La Duchesse de Langeais’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Le Second Dixain des Contes drolatiques’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Une heure de ma vie, ou Lord R’Hoone à la découverte de Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Un épisode inconnu de l’histoire de la librairie: la Société d’abonnement général. Avec le texte inédit de Balzac’, Revue des sciences humaines ( Jan.–Mar. ), fasc. , pp. –. ——‘Balzac et sa “Grande Affaire de librairie”: l’acte de société de ’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Une épreuve inconnue du Vicaire des Ardennes’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Trophée de têtes chez Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘A travers les premiers manuscrits de Balzac (–): un apprentissage’, Genesis,  (), –. C, P., ‘De la “Scène de village” au Médecin de campagne, naissance et avatars d’un texte de Balzac’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France,  (), –. ——‘Autour de quelques personnages’, L‘Année balzacienne (), ‒. ——‘Aux sources d’Une fille d’Eve’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Rencontres de personnages’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Les Affreux du miroir’, Europe, – ( Jan.–Feb. ), –. ——‘Note sur Sarrasine’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Une source possible de Pierrette’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac lecteur du Don Juan de Byron’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Le Rêve asiatique de Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac, lecteur de Champfort’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Interprétation de Sarrasine’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. C, W., ‘La Composition de La Fille aux yeux d’or’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, :  () –. —‘Épisode inconnu de l’affaire Peytel’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. D, R. C., ‘Le Colonel Chabert: Between Gothicism and Naturalism’, L’Esprit créateur,  (), –.



SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

D, L., ‘Du fragment au cosmos (La Comédie humaine et l’opération de lecture I)’, Poétique,  (), –. ——‘Le Tout en morceaux (La Comédie humaine et l’opération de lecture II)’, Poétique,  (), –. D, H., ‘Balzac italianisant: autour de Sarrasine’, Revue de littérature comparé,  ( July–Sept. ), –. D, J.-L., ‘Balzac-oxymore: logiques balzaciennes de la contradiction’, Revue des sciences humaines,  ( July–Sept. ), fasc. , pp. –. D, J., ‘Balzac et le nom de Paquita Valdès’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. D, C., ‘La Saint-Barthélemy: de la “scène historique” au drame historique’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, :  (), –. D, J.-A., and P, R., ‘Calendrier de la vie de Balzac ()’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. D, D., ‘Du Neveu de Rameau à La Maison Nucingen’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Une princesse parisienne, ou la fascination d’un personnage’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. E, J.-D., ‘Balzac voyant dans Facino Cane’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. E, A. G., ‘The Formal Short Story in France and its Development before ’, Studies in Philology,  (), –. F, G., ‘Le Travail de style dans les révisions de La Peau de chagrin’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Le Rôle poétique de la doxa balzacienne’, in R. Le Huenen and P. Perron (eds.), Le Roman de Balzac (Montreal, ), –. F, M., ‘Sur la route des Chouans et de La Femme abandonnée’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Dans le sillage des grands romantiques: S.-H. Berthoud’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac et les messieurs du Muséum’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, :  (), –. ——‘La Naissance d’un sujet: Le Grand Propriétaire’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. F, T., ‘Les Premières Notes des deux bassons: une source balzacienne retrouvée’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Le Sujet de la satire: Pierre Grassou et Les Français peints par eux-mêmes’, Équinoxe: revue internationale d’études françaises,  (Spring ), –. F, R., ‘Notes sur la pensée politique de Balzac dans Le Médecin de campagne et Le Curé de village’, Europe, – ( Jan.–Feb. ), –. —‘Butifer et Farrabesche’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. F, N., ‘Balzac et la garde nationale’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Les Quatre Faillites de Louis Mame’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘L’Incendie de la rue du Pot-de-Fer’, Le Courrier balzacien (), –. F, S., ‘Folie et discours chez Balzac’, Littérature,  (), –. F, A., ‘Nouvelle, subjectivité, structure: un chapitre de l’histoire de la théorie de la nouvelle et une tentative de description structurale’, Revue de littérature comparée, : – ( Jan.–June ), –. F, R., ‘Les Études analytiques: du rejet à une pleine reconnaissance’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. F-M, L., ‘Balzac et l’androgyne’, L’Année balzacienne (), –.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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F-S, N., ‘Maître Cornélius ou les dangers du dogme’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. G, F., ‘L’Effet Peau de chagrin’ in R. Le Huenen and P. Perron (eds.), Le Roman de Balzac (Montreal, ), –. G, J., ‘Sleeping Beauty as an Ironic Model for Eugénie Grandet’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, :  (Fall–Winter ), –. G, F., ‘Du nom au genre: le cas de la short story’, La Licorne, ‘Dynamique des genres’,  (), –. G, H., ‘Le Projet du recueil Études de femmes’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Les Essais philosophiques du jeune Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. G, S. J., ‘Balzac’s Changing Attitudes Towards Diderot’, French Studies,  (), –. G, F., ‘L’Enfant maudit: esquisse d’une préhistoire’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. G, G., ‘Novella, Nouvelle, Novelle, Short Novel?—A Review of Terms’, Neophilologus,  (), – and –. G, H., ‘Jules Janin et Balzac’, in D. G. Charlton, J. Gaudon, and A. R. Pugh (eds.), Balzac and the Nineteenth Century: Studies in French Literature presented to H. J. Hunt (Leicester, ), –. G, R., ‘A propos de quelques textes critiques du XXème siècle sur la nouvelle’, Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises,  (), –. G, A., ‘Frenhofer et les maîtres d’autrefois’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. G, J., ‘Balzac et le conte de fée’, Revue des sciences humaines,  ( July–Sept. ), –. G, R., ‘Balzac et l’Italie’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Balzac et Dante’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Balzac et le roman-feuilleton’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Balzac, lecteur de Gozlan’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Une publication préoriginale dans Le Messager’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Un grand homme du roman à la scène, ou les illusions reparaissantes de Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –; L’Année balzacienne (), –; L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Le Problème de Falthurne’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Balzac lecteur des Élixirs du diable’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Balzac et le roman historique: notes sur quelques projets’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, :  (), –. —‘Les Mystères de Pensées, sujets, fragments’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Balzac et la presse de son temps’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Balzac et la presse de son temps: le romancier devant la critique féminine’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——L’Excommunié, L’Année balzacienne (), –. G, J., ‘Romance elements in Eugénie Grandet’, L’Esprit créateur,  (Spring ), –. G, B.,‘Sur la première philosophie de Balzac’, Revue d’histoire de la philosophie et d’histoire générale de la civilisation,  (Oct. ), –. ——‘Balzac “invente” les Scènes de la vie de province’, Mercure de France, :  ( July ), –.



SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

G, B.,‘Adolphe, Béatrix and La Muse du département’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac, héraut du capitalisme naissant’, Europe, – ( Jan.–Feb. ), –. H, D. R., ‘Scott, Balzac, and the Historical Novel as Social and Political Analysis: Waverley and Les Chouans’, Modern Language Review, :  ( Jan. ), –. ——‘Clotilde de Lusignan, Ivanhoe, and the Development of Scott’s Influence on Balzac’, French Studies, :  (Apr. ), –. ——‘Fiction and Historical Change in La Cousine Bette and the Lesson of Walter Scott’, Forum for Modern Language Studies,  (), –. ——‘The Popularity of Scott’s Novels in France and Balzac’s Illusions perdues’, Journal of European Studies, : / (Mar. ), –. H, S., ‘Dualistic Patterns in La Peau de chagrin’, Nineteenth Century French Studies, :  (Sept. ), –. H, M., ‘Supercherie et hallucination: La Peau de chagrin’, Revue de littérature comparée, :  (Oct.–Dec. ), –. H, O. N., ‘The Engendering of Violence and the Violation of Gender in Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or’, Romance Studies,  (Autumn ), –. ——‘Balzac’s Go-between: The Case of Honorine’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, : – (–), –. H, V., ‘L’Art de la brièveté: genèse et formes du récit court. “Short stories” et “Kurzgeschichten”’, Revue de littérature comparée, : – ( Jan.–June ), –. H, L.-F., ‘Éros en filigrane: Le Curé de Tours’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Mignonne et Paquita’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. J, F., ‘La Cousine Bette and Allegorical Realism’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,  (), –. J, M.-F., ‘Quelques emprunts possibles de Balzac à Hoffmann’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. K, M., ‘Balzac et la psycholinguistique’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Logic and Language in La Peau de chagrin’, Studi francesi,  (May–Aug. ), –. ——‘The Mythic Structure of La Peau de chagrin’, Studi francesi,  ( Jan.–Apr. ), –. K, T., ‘Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, conte d’amour ou conte de peinture?’, Équinoxe,  (Spring ), –. ——‘La Poétique balzacienne dans Facino Cane’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. K, D., ‘Balzac’s L’Auberge rouge: On Reading an Ambiguous Text’, Symposium,  (), –. K, P., ‘Un directeur de journal, ses auteurs et ses lecteurs en : autour de La Vieille fille’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac, La Gazette de France, et Les Paysans’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac, Girardin et la publication de La Maison Nucingen’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. K, A., ‘La Maison Nucingen, ou le récit financier’, Romanic Review, : – ( Jan.–Mar. ), –. L-L, P., and Nancy, J.-L., ‘Genre’, Glyph,  (), –. L, M., ‘Méphistophélès et l’androgyne: les figures du pacte dans Illusions perdues’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. L, G., ‘La Politique dans La Vieille fille’, Écrits de Paris (Nov. ), –.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY



L, B., ‘Les États successifs d’une nouvelle de Balzac: Gobseck’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, :  ( July–Dec. ), –; :  ( Jan.–Mar. ), –. L, W.-O. ‘Poetik des Pastiche zu Balzac’s Contes drolatiques’, Honoré de Balzac (Munich, ), –. L, M., ‘Du légitimisme drolatique: Le Prosne du ioyeulx curé de Meudon’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. L, A.-M., ‘Bianchon, un astre du cosmos balzacien’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. L M, S., ‘Balzac, Gavarni, Bertall et les Petites misères de la vie conjugale’, Romantisme,  (), ‘Le Livre et ses images’, –. L Y, M., ‘Introduction à Un drame au bord de la mer’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. L, A., ‘Histoire de Lélio: documents inédits’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Journal de Mme Hanska ( mars – avril )’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Une lecture de Wann-Chlore’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. L, L. F., ‘Honoré de Balzac and the Voyant: A Recovered Alchemical Discourse’, L’Esprit créateur, :  (Summer ), –. M, J., ‘Le Théâtre historique et le romantisme, –’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, :  ( Jan.–Mar. ), –. M, J., ‘La Physiologie musicale balzacienne’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. M, R., ‘Balzac disciple de Rabelais et maître des Contes drolatiques’, in Balzac et la Touraine (Tours, ), –. ——‘A propos des Contes drolatiques: réalités et fictions dans La Belle Impéria’, Revue des sciences humaines (), –. M-B, C., ‘L’Énigme de Ferragus: du roman noir au roman réaliste’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. MW, N., ‘Opinions professionnelles: critique d’art et économie de la culture sous la Monarchie de Juillet’, Romantisme, :  (), –. M, A.-M., ‘La Femme abandonnée, L’Auberge rouge et la duchesse d’Abrantès’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Théodore: quelques scènes de la vie privée’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac et Stendhal en ’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac, Gambara, ed. M. Regard (), & Massimilla Doni, ed. M. Milner ()’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac et Henry Monnier’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Théâtre et petits faits vrais’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Histoire des Scènes de la vie de province’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. M, C., ‘Balzac paysagiste: La Grenadière’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. M, M., ‘L’Arabesque et la ménippée’, Revue des sciences humaines,  ( July–Sept. ), fasc. , pp. –. M, A., ‘Balzac et la logique du vivant’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac ou l’idée contre l’idée reçue’, in Voix de l’écrivain: mélanges offerts à Guy Sagnes (Vincennes, ). M, M., ‘Le Sens “psychique” de Massimilla Doni’, L’Année balzacienne (), –.



SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

M, G. D., ‘Balzac’s Treatment of History in Maître Cornélius’, Philological Quarterly, :  (Oct. ), –. M, G., ‘Position de l’énigme et la lecture de Maître Cornélius’ in R. Le Huenen and P. Perron (eds.), Le Roman de Balzac (Montreal, ), –. M, N., ‘Ma mère la ville: Tours en Balzacie’, Corps écrit,  (), –. M, P., ‘Sur Un début dans la vie’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. N, R., ‘Sainte-Beuve and Balzac: Volupté and Le Lys dans la vallée’, Kentucky Romance Quarterly, :  (), –. N, C. ‘Du fantastique en littérature’, Revue de Paris,  ( Nov. ), –. ——‘De quelques phénomènes du sommeil’, Revue de Paris,  (Feb. ), –. N, J., ‘La Suisse de Balzac ou les ambiguités d’un discours amoureux’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. N, P., ‘Peau de chagrin—peau d’âne’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. P, F., ‘Idéologies et formes dans Le Médecin de campagne’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. P, A. G., ‘Balzac’s Relationships with the Caricaturists and Popular Dramatic Satirists of the July Monarchy’, Australian Journal for French Studies, :  (Jan.–Apr. ), –. P, W., ‘Preceptors, Fathers and Ideology: The Strange Narrative of Balzac’s Médecin de Campagne’, French Forum, :  ( Jan. ), –. P, C., ‘La Fille aux yeux d’or et la quête paradoxale de l’infini’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. P, R., ‘A propos d’un livre récent: Hetzel et l’Avant-propos de La Comédie humaine’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, :  (), –. ——‘La Véritable Édition originale de Gambara’, in Mélanges d’histoire du livre et des bibliothèques offerts à M. Frantz Calot, conservateur en chef honoraire de la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (), –. ——‘Les Enseignements du “Furne Corrigé”’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac. Oeuvres complètes, édition nouvelle établie par la Société des Études balzaciennes (sous la direction de Maurice Bardèche)—Paris, Club de l’honnête homme (–,  volumes in o illustrés)’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——and A, D., ‘Quelques lueurs sur la Contessa’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. P, M., ‘Significations spirituelles de la mer dans La Comédie humaine’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. P, J., ‘Deux Moments dans la genèse de Louis Lambert’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘La Muse du département et le thème de la femme mal mariée chez Balzac, Mérimée et Flaubert’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘La Genèse du premier Louis Lambert’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France,  (), –. P D, E., ‘Scott and the French Romantics’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, :  ( June ), –. P, A., ‘Les Codes littéraires et Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. P, A. R., ‘Personnages reparaissants avant Le Père Goriot’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Du Cabinet des Antiques à Autre étude de femme’, L’Année balzacienne (), –.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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——‘Un chapitre retouvé des Comédiens sans le savoir: “La Comédie gratis”’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. —‘Note sur l’épilogue de Un prince de la Bohème’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘The Genesis of César Birotteau: Questions of Chronology’, French Studies, :  ( Jan. ), –. ——‘La Composition du Médecin de campagne’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Les Épreuves du Médecin de campagne’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. R, A. W., ‘Notes sur la genèse de La Grande Bretèche’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘L’Art de la narration dans Ferragus’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. R, L., ‘Une interprétation de La Peau de chagrin’, L’Année Balzacienne (), –. R, M. L., ‘Narration, génération, transformation: La Grande Bretèche de Balzac’, L’Esprit créateur, :  (Spring ), –. S, J., ‘Diderot et Sarrasine’, Diderot Studies,  (), –. S, R., ‘Une idéologie du lisible: le phénomène des Physiologies’, Romantisme, :  (), –. S, M. A., ‘Le Génie au féminin ou les paradoxes de la princesse de Cadignan’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. S, E. B., ‘Who’s Who: Non-Characters in Le Colonel Chabert’, French Forum,  (), –. S, K., ‘Remarques sur le “Swedenborgisme” balzacien’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. S, C., ‘Introduction à l’étude du Député d’Arcis’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. S, L., ‘Die Wortbildung als stilistisches Mittel exemplifiziert an Rabelais. Nebst einem Anhang über die Wortbildung bei Balzac in seinen Contes drolatiques’, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanischen Philologie,  (), –. S  L, C. , ‘Les Études philosophiques de Honoré de Balzac (Édition Werdet)’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, :  ( July–Sept. ), –. S, H., ‘Towards a Definition of the Novella’, Seminar,  (), –. S, J.-L., ‘L’Eau dans La Comédie humaine’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. T, T., ‘Interférence de éléments narratifs dans la genèse du Député d’Arcis’, Équinoxe,  (Spring ), –. T, E., ‘Une source inconnue de L’Élixir de longue vie de Balzac’, Revue de littérature comparée, :  (Oct.–Dec. ), –. T, R., ‘Structures of Initiation: On Semiotic Education and Its Contradictions in Balzac’, Yale French Studies,  (), –. T, G., ‘La Composition de La Duchesse de Langeais, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, :  (Oct.–Dec. ), –. T, M. J., ‘La Pandore et La Physiologie du mariage’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. T, P., ‘Rabelais et Honoré de Balzac’, Revue des études rabelaisiennes,  (), –. T, B. R., ‘Balzac the Printer’, French Studies,  (), –. ——‘Balzac and La Caricature’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, :  ( Jan.–Mar. ), –. ——‘Three Articles Wrongly Attributed to Balzac’, Modern Language Review, :  ( Jan. ), –.

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T, B. R., ‘Balzac and the Feuilleton des journaux politiques’, Modern Language Review, :  (Oct. ), –. ——‘Un ouvrage inconnu de Balzac: les Mémoires anecdotiques de L.-F.-J. de Bausset’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘The Source of Balzac’s L’Élixir de longue vie’, Revue de littérature comparée, :  (), –. ——‘Les Œuvres diverses de Balzac (–)’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Two Unknown Novels by Balzac: Marie Stuart and Une Blonde’, Symposium, :  (Spring ), –. ——‘Balzac et les romans de Viellerglé’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac et les saint-simoniens’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac anecdotier: de l’Album historique et anecdotique () à La Comédie humaine’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. T, R., ‘Inventaire des impressions balzaciennes’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. T, J.-L., ‘Les Épreuves de Pierrette’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. T, R., ‘L’Imitation de Rousseau dans Sténie’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. U, A., ‘La Crise de – dans la vie et dans l’œuvre de Balzac’, Europe, – ( Jan.–Feb. ), –. V, S., ‘Balzac dans quelques “journaux reproducteurs”: répertoire des spoliations (I)’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Balzac dans quelques “journaux reproducteurs”: répertoire des spoliations (II)’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘L’Oeuvre au comptoir: la moitié de La Comédie humaine a paru en feuilletons’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Les Enseignements des manuscrits d’Honoré de Balzac: de la variation contre la variante’, Genesis,  (), –. V, E. ‘Le Frère d’armes, examen de l’archaïsme d’un conte drolatique’, Année balzacienne (), –. V, A., ‘Jésus-Christ en Flandre, Érasme et Ghelderode’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. V D, S., ‘George Sand et les mouvements d’émancipation féminine: lectures étrangères’, in D. A. Powell and S. Malkin (eds.), Le Siècle de George Sand (Amsterdam, ), –. V, A., ‘La Représentation de l’utopie dans Le Médecin de campagne’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. V, A., ‘Du Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme de Balzac’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. ——‘Sur la Lettre à Charles Nodier’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. W, L., ‘Présence de Hoffmann dans les œuvres de Balzac (–)’, L’Année balzacienne (), –. W-B, J., ‘La Durée romanesque dans Eugénie Grandet’, L’Année balzacienne (), –.

General Index Note: Proper names of subjects of study, titles of primary source material and key terms. Where a subject or work appears both in the text and in the footnote on a given page, reference is made to its appearance in the main text only. Abou Hassan  n. Abrantès, L., duchesse d’  n.,  n. Adam, V.  n. Addison, J.  n. Aesop  n. Albin, S. (Mme H. Cornu)  n. Alletz, E.  n. Ampère, J.-J.  n. analogy: and mimesis , –, , ‒, ,  anecdotes: Balzac’s early use of ; compilation of, ‒, ; definition , ; exemplary role , , ‒, , ; and prescription ‒; and Le Dernier Chouan, , ; and early stories, , , , ; in journal narrative , , ; development of ‒, , ‒, , , ; as narrative unit , , , , , ; in collective works ,  Annales romantiques  n.,  n.,  n. The Arabian Nights  n.,  n., ; see also Les Mille et une Nuits aphorisms ‒, , , , , ,  Arago, E.  n. Ariosto ,  Arnim, A. von  n. art, see visual art L’Art de faire des dettes et de promener ses créanciers  n. L’Art d’obtenir des places  n. articles: newspaper ‒; Balzac’s exploitation of , , , , ‒, ; in literary reviews ‒ et seq.; narrative developments of , , , , , , ; critical and political , ‒; generic status of ‒, , ; use in stories and novels ,  article series , , , ‒, , , ‒, ,  L’Artiste ,  n., , ,  n., , ,  n.,  n.,  n. Arts (as genre)  L’Association mensuelle  n. Aulnoy, M.-C. Le J. de Barneville, comtesse d’ , ,  n. axioms , , 

Ballard, C.  n. Balzac, L. (Mme A.-D. de Montzaigle)  Bandello, M.  n. Barthélémy, A.-M.  n. Baudelaire, C.-P. ,  n., ,  n., . Bausset, L.-F.-J. de,  n. Bayle, P.  n. Beaumarchais, P. C. de  n. Béchet, Mme veuve C. ,  n.,  Beethoven, L. van ,  Belgiojoso, princesse E.  Bellangé, J.-L.-H.  Bellet, B.-L.  n. Bellini, G.  Belloy, A. de  n.,  n. Belot  n. Bernard, C. de  n.,  Berny, Mme L. de , , ,  n.,  n., ,  Bertall (Arnoux, A. d’)  n., . Berthoud, S.-H. , , , , ,  n. Béthune, M. de.,  n. Beyle, H., see Stendhal, F. Bible, The  n. Boccaccio ,  n.,  n.; see also Decameron Bock, A.,  Boieldieu, F.-A.  n. Bonald, L.-G.-A.  Bonnet, C.  n.,  Borel, P.  n. Borget, A.  Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, J.-H.  (Paul et Virginie) Bossuet, J.-B.  Bouilly, J.-N. ,  n. Boulé  n.,  n. Bourbon, Cardinal de  Bourbons,  n. Bourget, P.,  brevity: narrative ; forms of ; as grille de lecture ; in early stories , ‒, ; and early newspapers , , , , ; and serialization ; and compression ‒,  n.; constraints of –, , ; relation to length , , , ; and subject-matter, ‒;



GENERAL INDEX

brevity: (cont.): as criterion for story ; and complexity ; virtue of ; and unity ; and conception ; and alternation, . Briffault, E.  Brillat-Savarin, A. ,  (Physiologie du goût),  n.,  n. Brindeau, A.  Brot, A.  n. Brullon  n. Buffon, G.-L.-L., comte de ,  n.,  Buloz, F.  n. Byron, Lord  n. (The Corsair), ,  (Manfred),  (Manfred) Le Cabinet des fées  n.,  n. Le Cabinet de lecture  n. Calvin, J.  Canel, U. ,  n. Canterbury Tales, The  Cardonne, L. de  n. caricature , , , , , , , ‒ La Caricature , , , , , , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  Carraud, Z.  n. Carrel, A.  Casanova de Seingalt, G.-J. ,  n.,  n. Castel, L.  n. Castil-Blaze, (F.-H.-J. Blaze),  n. Castries, H. Marquise de,  n., ,  n., , ,  n.,  n. Les Causeries du monde  n. Cellini, B.  n. Les Cent-et-une nouvelles des Cent-et-un ,  Cervantes, M. de ,  n. Champfort, S.-R. N. de  n. La Charge ou les folies contemporaines  Le Charivari  n. Charles IX  Charles X ,  Charlet, N.-T.  Charpentier, G.  n.,  n. Chasles, P.  (Contes bruns),  n., ,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n. Chateaubriand, F.-R., vicomte de  (René), ,  Chekhov, A.  Chlendowski, L.  n. Chronique de Paris ,  n., , , , , , , , ,  n., , ,  n., , ,  n. Code de commerce  n.,  Code gourmand (Raisson)  n. Code Napoléon ,  (Code civil), , 

Codes ‒, , , , , , , , , , , , , ; see also Balzac, Code conjugal, Code des gens honnêtes ou l’art de ne pas être dupe des fripons, Code du littérateur, Code pénal: manuel complet des honnêtes gens Cogniet, L.  n. Le Commerce  n.,  n.,  n. Constant, B. C. de Rebecque,  (Adolphe), , ; ,  n.,  n. (Adolphe) Le Constitutionnel  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. conte: Balzac’s conception of , , ‒, , , ; use of , , , ‒, , ; connotations of ‒, ; definition, , ‒, , , , , ; diversity and pluralism of , , , , , ; exemplary role of ,  n.; and fable, ; as fundamental narrative model , , , ; and national renewal ; and novel ‒, , , , , , , , , , ; and nouvelle , ; and oral narrative, , ; abandonment of ‒, , ; inadequacy as narrative unit ; commercial constraints on ; Renaissance conte, , , , ; see also oral narrative, tale, Balzac, Théorie du conte conte arabe  n. conte à rire  conte artiste , , , , , , , , ,  conte brun , ,  conte drolatique ,  conte fantastique , ,  n., ,  n., , , ,  conte historique , , , ,  conte moral , , ‒, , , , , , , , , ,  conte oriental ,  conte philosophique , ,  conteur: Balzac as ‒, , , , , , , , , ; as focus for other genres ; oracular purpose ; as one of many roles  Le Conteur  Cooper, W.F. , ,  Le Courrier français  n. Cousin, V. ,  Cromwell, O.  Curmer, L. , , ,  n. Cuvier, G.-C.-F.-D., baron , ,  cycles: narrative , , , , ; within novel ‒, ; ‒ (oeuvres concentriques); fragmentation of ;

GENERAL INDEX

                                          

Balzac’s opus as , , ; repetition within ; failing of ; role of ; in Comédie humaine , ‒, ‒ Dante Alighieri  n., ,  n., , ,  Daumier, H.  David, J.-A.  n. David d’Angers (P.-J. David)  Davin, F. ,  n., , , , ,  n. Déaddé, E.  n. The Decameron ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  Defauconpret, A.-J.-B.  n. Delacroix, F.-V.-E. , , Delécluze, E.-J.  Delloye, H.-L.  n. La Démocratie pacifique  n. Descartes, R. , ,  n. Deschamps, E.  n. Desnoyers, L. , Devéria, A.  Diderot, D.: ,  (Ceci n’est pas un conte);  n.,  n., , ,  n. (Rêve de d’Alembert),  n.,  n.,  (Paradoxe sur le comédien),  n.,  n., ,  n., ,  n.,  n. (Ceci n’est pas un conte) Dino, D. de Biren, duchesse de  Dow, G.  drama: and story, ‒, ‒, ‒, , , , , , , , , ; dramatic rhetoric , ; contrast ; structure ‒; action ; technique , ; as image , ; absorbed in novel ; Balzac’s dramatic projects  n., , , ; see also drame, tableau, scene, theatre drame , ,  n., , , , , ,  Droz-Desnoyes, M.,  n. Du Bos, C.  n.,  n., ,  n.,  Dufresny, C. R.  Dujarier, A.  n.,  n.,  n. Dumas, A.  n.,  Dumont, H.  n.,  n. Dupuytren, G.  Durangel  n. Duras, C.-R.-L.-B. de Kersaint, duchesse de  Durier, S.-N.  n. Dutacq, A. ,  n.,  n.,  n. Devéria, A.  n. L’Écho de la jeune France  n. Edgeworth, M.,  n.,  n.,  n. Egmont, H.  n.



L’Émeraude. Morceaux choisis de littérature moderne,  n.,  n. L’Encyclopédie  n. energy, sexual: and artistic creation ‒; , ‒, , ‒, ‒, ‒; and avarice ‒; in Contes drolatiques, ‒; and language ‒, ‒, ‒, , ‒; and mimesis , ‒; theory of énergie vitale ; and transcendence ‒ (androgyny), ‒, ‒, , ‒, ‒, ‒, –, ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒; see also analogy, synaesthesia epic , , , , ,  (La Bataille) L’Époque  esquisse de moeurs  esquisse historique ,  L’État  n. étude objectivity of ; mise en abyme of ; ; transparency of ; and histoire ; see also Études analytiques, Études de moeurs, Études philosophiques étude de moeurs , ; see also esquisse de moeurs, observation de moeurs L’Europe littéraire  n., ,  n. exemplary narrative: ‒ passim, , ‒, ; limits of ‒, ; development of , ‒, , ; transcendence of , ; return to ; and mimesis , , , , ‒; persistence in later work , , , , ‒, , , , , ; undermining of , ,  fables  n. (La Fontaine), , ,  fairy tale , , , , ,  n., ,  fait divers  the fantastic: ; Balzac’s development of , ‒; in early stories ‒, ‒; and generic ambiguity ; and the real , ‒, , , ; and satire ‒; as social criticism ‒, ; see also conte fantastique ‘Les Fashionables’  Faust  Ferrière, H. de la  n. Le Feuilleton des journaux politiques  n.,  n. Le Feuilleton littéraire  n. Le Figaro ,  n., , , ,  Flaubert, G. ,  n., , ,  (Madame Bovary). folie du conte , , , , ,  (waning of), ,  (last gasp of),  Fourier, F.-C.-M.  Fournier, H.  n.



GENERAL INDEX

frame narrative: in Comédie humaine , ; social context , , , ‒, ‒; immediacy , ‒, , ‒, ; themes and techniques , ‒, ,  n., , , ‒, , , ‒, , , ‒, ‒, ; in novel , , , , , ; reframing of , ‒, , ‒, , , , , ; viability of  Francey, A.  n. Freud, S. , ,  n.,  n.,  n. Furne (edition):  n., ,  n.,  n., ,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Furne corrigé:  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Gaboriau, E.  n. Gavarni, P. (S.-G. Chevalier), , ,  n., ,  n.,  Gautier, T. ,  n., ,  (Onuphirus),  (Mademoiselle de Maupin),  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  Gay, S. (M.-F. N. de La Valette)  La Gazette de France  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Genlis, C.-S.-F. comtesse de ,  n., ,  n. St Genevieve  Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, É. ,  Germeau, A.  Gérard, F.-P.-S, baron  Gérard-Fontallard, H.  Gide, A.-P.-G.  Girardin, E. de  n.,  n., , ,  n.,  n. Girodet, A.-L. de , ,  Giroux, L.-V.-J.  Le Globe ,  n. Goethe, J.-W. von  (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers), ,  (Werther),  n. Gosselin, C.  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n. Gothic novel , , , ,  (`roman à la Radcliffe’), ; see also roman noir Gozlan, L.,  n.,  n.,  n. Grammont, F. de  n. Grandville (J.-I.-I. Gérard) , , ,  Greuze, J.-B.  Grimm, J.-L.-K.  n. Gros, A.-J., baron ,  Les Guêpes , , 

Guidoboni-Visconti, F.-S. Lovell, comtesse  Hanska, Mme É.  n., ,  n., , ,  n., ‒, ,  n.,  n., , , , ,  n. Hamilton, comte A.  Haydn, J.  Heine, H.  n. Henri II  L’Heptaméron  n.,  n.,  n., , ,  n.,  Heredia, F.  n. Hetzel, P.-J.  n., , , ,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  Heyse, P.  Himly  n. histoire: and authenticity ; Balzac’s usage of ; connotations , ; and conte ,  n.; and generic eclecticism , , ; and history, , , , ‒, , , , , , , ,  ; and mimesis , ‒, , , , , , , , , ; and novel , ; Balzac’s opus as cycle of histoires  historical novel ‒, , ‒, , ,  n. ‒ history: as context , , , ‒, , , ‒; and fiction, , ‒, , ; and social criticism ‒, , , , ; and novel , , ; as subject ‒, ‒, , ‒, , , , , , ‒; and technique ‒, , , ‒, ‒, , ; transcending novel  Hoffmann, E.T.A.,  n., , ,  n.,  n.,  n. (Ritter Gluck, Mademoiselle de Scudéry), ,  n., , ,  n., ,  n.,  (Das öde Haus, Das Majorat),  (Das öde Haus, Das Majorat),  (Das Majorat), ,  n.,  n.,  n. D’Holbach, P.-H.-D., baron  n. St Honoré  Hugo, V.-M., vicomte  n., ,  n. (Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné)  (Les Orientales), , , ,  n., , ,  n., , , ,  n. (Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné), ,  (Notre-Dame de Paris) The Iliad  Ingres, J.-A.-D.  James, H.  Janin, J. ,  n. (L’Ane mort et la femme

GENERAL INDEX

                                          

guillontinée)  (La Maison suspecte),  n.,  n., ,  Jesus Christ , , , ,  Journal de Paris  n. Journal des connaissances utiles  n.,  n. Journal des débats ,  n.,  n.,  n. Journal des journaux  journal-livre ,  Jouy, V.-J.-É. de ,  n.,  n., Julius II  Karr, A. ,  n.,  n., , , ,  Kock, P. de  Kugelmann  n. La Boétie, É. de  La Fontaine  (La Courtisane amoureuse), , ,  n.,  n., , ,  n., , , ,  La Pasta, G.-M.-C. Negri, Mme  Lacroix L.-P.-B.-P. (`Le bibliophile Jacob’), , . Lafayette, M.-M., comtesse de (La Princesse de Clèves)  Lamartine. A.-M.-L.- de P. de ,  Lammenais, F.-R. de ,  (Paroles d’un croyant) Lassailly, C.  n. Latouche, H. de , ,  n., , ,  n.,  Lavater, C.  Lecou, V.  n.,  n. Leibniz, G.-W.  n.,  n.,  n. La Législature  n.,  n. length ; textual and contractual , , ; causes of in Balzac’s work , , , ; distinguishing novel from story ; effect of genesis on ; fortuitousness of in early work ; as grille de lecture, ; excessive , , , , ; and extension , ‒, , , , , , , , ; relation to brevity, , , ; and subject-matter, ‒; effect of, ‒; of articles ; unspecified in novel  Lepoitevin de L’Égreville, A. (Lepoitevin Saint-Alme) ,  Lesur, C.-L.,  Lethière, G.-G.  letter-novel,  n., ,  Leuwenhoeck, A. van  n. Lesage, A.-R. ,  n. (Gil Blas),  Lewis, M.-G. , ,  Linnaeus, C. von 



Liszt, F.  n. Le Livre d’or  n. Locke, J.  n. Loève-Veimars, F.-A., ,  n.,  n.,  n. Loiseau d’Entraigues, J.  Loquin, L.-F. ,  n. Louis XI , ,  Louis XV  n. Louis XVI  Louis XVIII ,  Louis-Philippe ,  Lucian  Mabuse (Jan Gossaert)  Le Magasin littéraire  Le Magasin pittoresque  n. Maffei, C. C.-S., comtesse  n. Maintenon, F. d’Aubigné, marquise de  Maistre, J.-M., comte de  (Soirées de SaintPétersbourg) Malebranche, N. de  n. Mame, L.-C.  n.,  n.,  n. Manon Lescaut ,  Marat (J.-P. Mara)  Marguerite de Navarre, ,  n.; see also L’Heptaméron Marmontel, J.-F.  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Martignac, J.-B.-S.-G., vicomte de (Martignac law)  n. Marx, A.-M.  St Mary of Egypt  Maturin, C.-R.  (Melmoth),  Maupassant, G. de  n.,  maxims , , , , ,  Medici, Catherine de ,  Meissonier, J.-L.-E.  n. melodrama , , , , , , , ,  Mercier, L.-S.  Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle  n. Mérimée , ,  n., ,  n., , ,  n.,  n. Le Messager  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.  n.,  n.,  n. Metzu, G.  Meyerbeer, G. ,  ‘Michael journaliste’  Michelangelo Buonarroti  Les Mille et une Nuits,  n., , ,  La Mode  n., , ,  n., , , ,  n., , ,  n. Molière, J.-B. P. de  (Sganarelle), , , 



GENERAL INDEX

Monnier, H.-B. , , ,  Monsieur Pierre  n. ‘Les Moustaches’  Montaigne, M.-E. de  Montalambert, C.-F., comte de  n.,  Montesquieu, C. de S., baron de La Brède et de ,  n. Montolieu, Mme I. de ,  n.,  n. Montzaigle, L., Mme A.-D. de  Montyon, J.-B. A., baron de (Montyon prize)  n.,  Mozart, W.-A.  (Don Giovanni),  Murillo, B.-E.  Mucius Scaevola  Le Musée des familles  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. music , ‒, ‒,  Musset, A. de , , , , , ,  n. myth  Nacquart, J.-B.  Naigeon, J.-A.  n. Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte)  n., , ,  Necker, A.  n. Nerval, G. de  n.,  Nettement, A.-F.  n. Nisard, J.-M.-N.-D. ,  n. Nodier, J.-C.-E.  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n., , , , , , ,  n. nouvelle: Balzac, roi de la , ; characteristics of ‒, ‒, ‒, , ; connotations of , , ; and conte, , ; economy of ‒; excessive length of ; expansion of , , ‒, ‒; as model ; as narrative unit , ,  n.,  n.,  n.; and novel , , , , , , , ; psychological ‒, , , ; Renaissance , , ; and story ; and unity ,  nouvelle exemplaire  Novalis (F. von Hardenberg)  n. novel: absorbing other genres ; as catchall category ; César Birotteau as archetype of realist ; characteristics and conception of , , , , , , , ; concatenation of ‒; Comédie humaine and ; and conte , , ,  n., , , ; diversity as criterion for ; and empathy  n.,  n., , ; emergence from story , , , , , ‒; flexibility as term ; and history , ; lack of

ideal of ; liberation from narrator ‒; and newspaper ; and nouvelle , , ; pluralism of , ‒; présence as character of , ; and stories , ,  n., ‒, , , , ‒; and story-cycles ; stress on process, , ,  observation de moeurs in Codes, ‒; in Physiologies, , ; ‒; see also penportrait Oedipus (Oedipus complex)  L’Opinion  n. oral narrative: , ; and authenticity , , ; as means of social cohesion , ‒; as conversation , ‒, , , , , , , ; in Contes drolatiques, ; and history ; and gossip , ; and narrative structure ‒; and word-spinning  Orleans, duc d’ (Charles IX)  Ossian  Ostade, A. van  n. Ourliac, E. , ,  n. Ovid (P. O. Naso)  Paganini, N.  n. Palissy, B. de  n. La Pandore  n.,  n. Le Parisien  n. , ,  n.,  n. Le Parisien-L’État  n. Paul et Virginie  pen-portrait , , , ; in Codes ; in collective works , , ‒, , , ; as enigma ‒, ‒, , ‒, , , , ; expansion of ; generic status of , , ‒; in literary reviews , ‒, , , , , , ; as narrative device , , ‒, ‒, ‒, –, , ‒, , , , , , , , , ; in newspapers , , , ‒, ; reuse of , , ; of social types , ‒, , ‒,  Perrault, C.,  (La Barbe bleue, Peau d’âne),  (La Belle au bois dormant),  n.,  (La Belle et la bête, La Belle au bois dormant) Perrée, L.-M.  n.,  n. Petrarch (F. Petrarca)  n. Petronius (C. Petronius Arbiter)  La Phalange  n. Philipon, C. ,  philosophy ‒, , , , , , , , , ‒, , ‒, , 

GENERAL INDEX

                                          

Physiologies , ,  n.; see also Physiologie du mariage picaresque, the  Pichot, A.  n.,  n., , , , , ,  Piquée, F.  n. Planche, J.-B.-G.  n.,  Plon, H.  n. Poe, E.-A. , ,  poetry , , , , , , , ,  , , ; poetic narrative ,  Polignac, J.-A.-A.-M.,  Polyclitus  Pommereul, F.-R.-J. de  n. Potter, L. de  n. Pourbus the Elder, F. I., ,  Poussin, N. , , ,  Pradier, J.-J.  ‘Les Premières Loges et le paradis’  La Presse  n.,  n., , , , ,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  Prévost, A.-F., abbé (Manon Lescaut) ,  La Princesse de Clèves  Proust, M.  Pygmalion , ,  Pyrrho of Elis ,  n. (pyrrhonism) La Quotidienne  Rabou, C.  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  Rabelais, F. , , , ,  n., , ‒ n., ,  (Gargantua), , , , , , ,  (abbaye de Thélème),  Radcliffe, A. , ,  Raisson, H.-N.  n., , ,  n. Raphael (R. Sanzio) , , , , ,  n. Ratier, C.-V.-H.  n.,  récit , , ,  récit-contrat  n., , , , ; narrative exchange , ,  recurring characters: aesthetic impact of ‒, , ‒, , –, ‒, ‒, ‒, , ‒; insertion in Le Père Goriot ; and interpretation, , ‒, , , , ; as manifestation of complexity , ‒, , , ‒, ; as narrators , , , , , ‒, ‒, ‒, , ; and narrative recurrence , ‒, ‒, , , , ‒; and scale of Balzac’s



world ‒, , ‒; and its selfcontainedness , , , ‒, , ; as subject of stories ; systematic use of , , ,  Rembrandt H. van Rijn , ,  René  Le Rénovateur  n. René  Revue étrangère  n. Revue française  n. Revue de Paris ,  n.,  n., , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  Revue des deux mondes ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Revue et gazette musicale  Revue parisienne  n.,  n., , , ,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n., ‒,  n.,  n., , ,  R’Hoone, Lord (Balzac)  n.,  Reybaud, L.  n. Richardson, S.  (Lovelace),  (Clarissa) Ricourt, A.,  n. Riffaterre, M.  Rivarol, A., comte de  n. Robespierre, M.-F.-M.-I. de ,  Roland (Chanson de Roland or Orlando furioso)  roman: definition , , ; connotations of , , ; and generic eclecticism , , ; and generic indeterminacy , , ; and history ; as image of society , ; and length , ; as part of larger novel, ; in Romans et contes philosophiques ; raised to level of history ; as reflection of reality ; as romance or adventure , , , , ; as solipsistic absorption of other genres ‒; Balzac’s supposed abandonment of ; unsuitability as unit for his opus, , ; relation to story , ; to récit ,  see also novel, romance, sub-genres below romance ,  roman-feuilleton , , ,  n.,  roman gai  roman noir ,  roman personnel  roman philosophique ,  Romieu, A.  Rossini, G.  n., ,  n. (Mosè),  Rousseau, J.-J.  (Les Confessions) Rubens, P.-P. 



GENERAL INDEX

Le Salmigondis , ,  n. Sanson, C.-H.  Le Saphir , , ,  n. Saint-Aubin, H. de (Balzac)  n. Saint-James, Mme (J.-A. T.-D. Baudard de Vaudésir), baronne de  Salle, E. de  n. Sand, G. (Aurore Dupin) ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., , , ,  satire: anticlerical , , ; and caricature ‒; in dialogue scènes , , ‒; and the fantastic , , –; and generic eclecticism , –; in  Scènes de la vie privée ; of money, contingency of ‒, ‒, ‒; in newspaper press , ‒, ; as source of `mainstream’ work ‒,  scene: dialogue, satirical , ; objectivity of , ; connotations of ; as drama ‒, , , ; evolution and generic character ‒; and juxtaposition , ‒; as pictorial technique ‒, , , , , , ; as structural unit , , ; as theme  Scènes contemporaines laissées par feue Madame la vicomtesse de Chamilly  Schlegel, F. von  Scott, Sir W. , , , , , , ,  n., ,  n.,  n., , , ,  n.,  n., , , , ,  Scheffer, A. ,  Schlesinger, M.  Seneca, L. A.  n. serialization: ‒; beginnings of , , , , ; of Comédie humaine , ; of Études de moeurs ; Balzac’s practice of , , ‒, , ‒, ‒; impact of , , ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  see also roman-feuilleton Shakespeare, W.  n.,  n.,  n. Le Siècle  n., , , ,  n., ,  n., , , , ,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Siger de Brabant  n. La Silhouette , , , , , , , ,  Sixtus V, Pope  Société d’abonnement général ,  n. Société des Gens de Lettres  n.,  n., , ,  n. Soulié, M.-F. ,  n.  n. Souverain, H.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Le Spectateur républicain  n.

Spinoza, B.  n. St Bartholomew’s day massacre  n.,  Sainte-Beuve, C.-A.  (Volupté),  n.,  n.,  Saint-Simon, M.-H. de Rouvroy, marquis de  n. (Saint-Simonian) Staël (A.-L.-G. Necker), baronne de  n.,  Stendhal, F. , , ,  n.,  n., , , , ,  n. (L’Abbesse de Castro, La Chartreuse de Parme),  n., , ,  n.,  n. (Études sur M. Beyle), , , , ,  n., , ,  n., ,  n. Sterne, L. , , , , ,  St Germain l’Auxerrois, sacking of , ,  n.,  n. Storm, T.  Sue, E. (M.-J.)  n.,  (Mathilde, Les Mystères de Paris), ,  Surville, L.  n.  n.,  n., , ‒ passim (Le Voyage en coucou) Swedenborg (E. Swedberg)  n., ,  n. Le Sylphe , ,  n. synaesthesia , , , ‒,  tableau ‒, , ‒, , , ,  Taine, H.  tale , ; and authenticity , , , , ; brevity of ; cautionary, ‒, , , , , ; in Comédie humaine ; contingency of ; cultural reference to ; as cycle , , ; dramatic ; form of , , , , , ‒, ; framed, in novel , , ‒, in story , , , , ; and irony , ; and length ‒; morals in , , , , ; and novel , ‒; and oral narrative, , ; personal (Contes drolatiques) ; pictorialism in ; provincial ; symbiotic genesis , , ‒, ‒, ; technique, in newspaper ; see also conte and subgenres, cycles, exemplary narrative, fairy tale, frame story, oral narrative, récit Tasso, T.  Le Temps  n.,  n.,  n. Teniers, D.  n. Terborch, G.  theatre ; dialogue , ; Balzac’s forays into , , , , ; and generic eclecticism ‒; politics as ; and society as spectacle , , , , ; as tableau ; theatrical immediacy , , ; theatrical notation , ‒, ,

GENERAL INDEX

                                          

, ‒, , , ; see also drama, drame, scene, tableau Tieck, L. von  Titian (T. Vecellio)  Touchet, M., duchesse d’Entragues  Toussenel, A.  n. treatise ‒, , , , , , , ,  types, see observation de moeurs, pen-portrait Ulliac de Trémadeure, S.  n. L’Universel  n., ,  n. Verninac de Saint-Maur affair  n. Véron, L.-D. , ,  Vernet, E.-J.-H.  Verville, F.-V. B. de ,  ‘Le Vieil Homme ou l’Antiquaire et ses antiquailles’,  n. Viellerglé, A. de (pseud. of Lepoitevin and Balzac),  n., ,  n. Vien, J.-M.  Villèle, J.-B.-S.-J., comte de  n. Villemain, F.  n. visual art: Balzac’s contact with artists ‒; and caricature ‒, ‒, ; and



drama ‒; fusion of literature and ; and illustration , , ‒, , ; as inspiration ‒, ; as metaphor for Balzac’s opus ; and mimesis ‒, , ; as mise en abyme ‒; and music , ‒, ; in newspapers ‒; as objective correlative , ; and society as spectacle , , ‒; as subject , ‒, ‒, ‒, ; visual notation ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, , , ‒, , , , ‒; and vital energy , , , ‒, , ‒, , ‒, ; see also caricature, pen-portrait, scene Vitet, L.  Le Voleur ,  n.,  n.  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Voltaire , ,  (Candide, L’Ingénu), ,  Werdet, E.  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n. Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers)  Ymbert, J.-G.  n. Zola, E.  n.,  (Soirées de Médan)

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Index of Works Note: Comédie humaine titles are capitalized; the dixain and story number of Contes drolatiques is given after the title. Works of joint or uncertain authorship are marked with an asterisk. ADIEU , , , ‒, , , , , , , , , , , ,  n. Agathise , , ,  n. ALBERT SAVARUS , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ‒, , , ; see also Les Mystères de province, Rosalie Album historique et anecdotique*  Les Ambitieux de province  n. A M. Émile de Girardin, rédacteur en chef de `La Presse’  n. Les Amours de deux bêtes offerts en exemple aux gens d’esprit  n. Les Amours d’un vieux banquier  Les Amours d’un vieux millionnaire  Les Amours forcés  n.,  n., ,  Annette et le criminel  n., ,  L’Anonyme ou Ni père ni mère*  n.,  L’Apostrophe (CD I.x) , , ,  n.,  L’Archevêque ,  L’Artiste  Des artistes  n.,  A trente ans  n. L’AUBERGE ROUGE ,  n., , , , , , , ,  n.,  n., –, , , , , , , ,  n., , , ,  n., , , , , , ,  AUTRE ÉTUDE DE FEMME , ,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n., , ‒, , , ,  n., ; see also La Grande Bretèche, Les Premières Armes d’un lion, Une Conversation entre onze heures et minuit AVANT-PROPOS DE `LA COMÉDIE HUMAINE’  n., , , ,  n., , , ‒, , ,  Babel*  n.,  LE BAL DE SCEAUX , , , , , , ‒, , , , , , , , ,  n.; Balzac illustré: La Peau de chagrin  n. La Bataille ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  BÉATRIX ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n., ,  n., , , ,  n., ,  n., , , ,  n.,  n.; see also Les Amours forcés, Les Petits Manèges d’une femme vertueuse, Sabine de Grandlieu

La Belle Impéria (CD I.i) , , , , , ,  n., ,  n., ,  La Belle Impéria mariée (CD III.x)  n., , , ,  Berthe la repentie (CD III.iv)  n.,  n., , , ,  Les Bons Propous des relligieuses de Poissy (CD II.iii)  LA BOURSE  n., , , , ,  n.,  n.,  LE CABINET DES ANTIQUES  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n., ,  n.,  n., ,  n., ,  n.; see also Les Rivalités en province Des caricatures ,  n. Catalogue des ouvrages que contiendra `La Comédie humaine’,  n. Catherine de Médicis expliquée  n.,  n.,  n. Causeries du soir* , ,  Ce qui plaît aux parisiennes see Philosophie de la vie conjugale à Paris Les Célibataires , , , , , , , ‒, , , , ,  n., , , , ; see also LE CURÉ DE TOURS, Le Prêtre catholique Les Cent Contes drolatiques , ,  n., , , , , , , , , , ‒ (first dixain), , , , ,  n. (critical reaction), , , ‒ (second dixain), , , , ,, , ‒ (third dixain), ,  n., ,  Les Cent Contes drolatiques: théorie du conte, see Théorie du conte Le Centenaire ou les Deux Béringheld  Ce qui disparaît de Paris  n. Ce qui plaît aux parisiennes, see also Philosophie de la vie conjuale à Paris CÉSAR BIROTTEAU , ,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n., , , ‒, , , , , ,  n., ,  Le Champion du notaire innocent, malheureux et persécuté,  n. Le Charlatan , , , 



I N D E X O F WO R K S

Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu , , , , ,  n., , ,  n., , , , ‒, ,  n., , ,  n., , , , , , , , ,  n.,  n., , ,  La Chière Nuictée d’amour (CD II.vii) , ,  n. Choix d’anecdotes, et contes, d’historiettes, d’épigrammes et de bons mots*  LES CHOUANS , , ; see also Le Dernier Chouan and Le Gars Clotilde de Lusignan ou le Beau Juif , , , ,  Code conjugal* ,  Code des gens honnêtes ou l’art de ne pas être dupe des fripons , , , , ‒, , , ,  Code du littérateur*  Code pénal: manuel complet des honnêtes gens  n.; see also Code des gens honnêtes La Colique ,  LE COLONEL CHABERT , , , , ,  n., , , , , , , , , ‒, , , , , , , ; see also La Comtesse à deux maris, La Transaction. La Comédie du diable* ,  n.,  n., , ,  n. LA COMÉDIE HUMAINE ‒, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  n., , , ,  n., , , , , , , , , ,  n., , ,  n., , , ,  n., , , , ,  n.,  n., , ,  n., , ‒, , ,  n., , , , , , , , , , , ,  LES COMÉDIENS SANS LE SAVOIR , , ,  n., , , ,  n., ‒, , , , ; see also Les Comiques sérieux, Un espion à Paris, Un grand littérateur, Le Luther des chapeaux, Une marchande à la toilette, Voyage de découverte exécuté dans la rue Richelieu Les Comiques sérieux  Comment fust basti le chasteau d’Azay (CD II.iv)  Comment la belle fille de Portillon quinaulda son iuge (CD III.v) ,  n., ,  n., , , Comment se font les petits journaux  n. Complaintes satiriques sur les moeurs du temps présent  n.,  n., , , , ,  n.,  Les Comptes moraux  n. La Comtesse à deux maris , , , , , 

LA CONFIDENCE DES RUGGIERI, , , , , , ; see also Le Secret des Ruggieri La Connestable (CD I.vi)  n.,  n.,  Le Conseil , , , ,  n.,  La Conspiration Prudhomme  n. Contes artistes  Contes bruns* , , , , , ,  n. Contes drolatiques: see Les Cent Contes drolatiques Contes philosophiques  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  LE CONTRAT DE MARIAGE ,  n., , ,  n., ; see also La Fleur des pois La Convention des morts  Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit ,  n.,  n., , , , , , , ,  n., , , , , ,  n.,  n., , , , , ,  n., , , ; Conversations entre onze heures et minuit , ,  n.; see also Le Grand d’Espagne, Histoire du Capitaine Beauvoir, Histoire d’un bras, Une scène de boudoir Le Corrupteur*  n.,  Le Corsaire  n. Corsino ,  n., ‒, , , , , , , , , , , ,  LE COUSIN PONS , , , ,  n., ‒, ,  n.,  n., , ,  n.,  n., ,  n., , , ‒, , , , ; see also Histoire d’une clarinette LA COUSINE BETTE , , , , ,  n., , , ,  n., ,  n., ,  n., ,  n.,  n., ,  n., , ‒, ,  n.,  Croquis [I] , , ,  n. Croquis [II]  n.,  n., ,  n. Le Curé d’Azay-le-Rideau (CD I.ix) ,  n.,  LE CURÉ DE TOURS , , , , , , ,  n., , , , ‒, ; see also Les Célibataires. LE CURÉ DE VILLAGE  n.,  n., ,  n., ,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ‒, ,; see also Farrabesche, Véronique, Véronique au tombeau Cy est desmontré que la fortune est touiours femelle (CD III.vi.)  n.,  n.,  Le Danger des mystifications  n.,  n.; see also Les Jeunes Gens Les Dangers de l’inconduite ,  n., ,  Le Dangier d’estre trop coquebin (CD II.vi.)  La Danse des pierres 

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David Séchard ou les souffrances d’un inventeur ,  n.,  n.,  n. UN DÉBUT DANS LA VIE ,  n.,  n., ,  n., , ‒, ; see also Le Danger des mystifications Le Départ  n., ,  n. LE DÉPUTÉ D’ARCIS ; see also Les Mitouflet ou l’élection en province Le Dernier Amour  Le Dernier Bienfait de Melmoth ‒,  Le Dernier Bienfait d’un père , ,  n. Le Dernier Chouan , , , , , , ‒, , , ,  n.,  Le Dernier Napoléon ,  n. La Dernière Fée ou la nouvelle Lampe merveilleuse , , , , ,  n. LA DERNIERE INCARNATION DE VAUTRIN (SPLENDEURS ET MISERES DES COURTISANES, IV)  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n., ,  La Dernière Revue de Napoléon , ,  n.,  n. Les Deux Amis  n., , , ,  Les Deux Frères  n., ,  n.,  Les Deux Musiciens  Le Deux Rencontres  n.,  n. LES DEUX REVES  n., , ‒, , , , ,  n., ,  Dezesperance d’amour (CD II.x)  n.,  n., , , ,  n.,  n.,  Le Diable à Paris* , ,  n.,  n., , , ‒, , , , , ,  Dinah  n.; see also Dinah Piédefer  n.,  n. Dires incongreus de trois pelerins (CD III.viii) ,  Discours sur l’immortalité de l’âme  n. , , , , , , , , , ,  n., , , , ,  n., ,  n., ,  Le Doigt de Dieu  n.,  n. Dom Gigadas  Le Dôme des Invalides ,  n.,  n. UNE DOUBLE FAMILLE , , , , , , , , , ,  n., , , , , , ,  n. see also La Femme vertueuse UN DRAME AU BORD DE LA MER  n., , , , , , , ,  n., ; see also La Justice paternelle, Les Mystères de province Du Droit d’aînesse*  n. Le Droit d’aînesse  n.,  n.

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LA DUCHESSE DE LANGEAIS , ,  n., ,  n., ‒, , ,  n., , ; see also Ne touchez pas la hache D’ung iusticiard qui ne se remembroit des choses (CD III.ii) ,  D’ung paoure qui avoit nom le Vieulx-par-chemins (CD III.vii)  n.,  Échantillon de causerie française  n.,  Ecce homo  n.,  n. L’École des ménages  L’Église ,  n, ,  n. EL VERDUGO  n., , ,  n., ‒, , , , , , , , ,  L’ÉLIXIR DE LONGUE VIE , , , , , , , , , , ,  n.,  n., ,  (Bartoloméo and Juan), , , , ,  n., , , ,  n.,  n. LES EMPLOYÉS  n.,  n., ; see also La Femme supérieure L’ENFANT MAUDIT , , , , , , ,  n.,  n., ; see also La Perle brisée Un entracte* ,  Entre deux tigres  n. L’ENVERS DE L’HISTOIRE CONTEMPORAINE ‒; see also La Femme de soixante ans, L’Initié, Madame de la Chanterie, Les Méchancetés d’un saint, Robert l’Obligé, Traité de l’obligation L’Épicier , , ,  UN ÉPISODE SOUS LA TERREUR  n., ,  n., , , , , ,  n., ,  n.,  see also Un inconnu: épisode de la Terreur, Mémoires de Sanson Un espion à Paris: le petit père Fromenteau  n., , ,  n. Esquisse d’homme d’affaires d’après nature  n. Essai sur la situation du parti royaliste  n. Essai sur les forces humaines  Esther ou les amours d’un vieux banquier  n.,  n., ,  n., ,  De l’État actuel de la librairie  n. ÉTUDE DE FEMME , ‒,  n., ,  n. Études de femme ,  n. ÉTUDES DE MOEURS AU XIXEME SIECLE, , , , , , , , ,  n.,  n., , , ,  n., ,  n., , , ‒, ,  n., , ,  n., ,  n., , , , , ,  Étude de moeurs par les gants  n.

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ÉTUDES PHILOSOPHIQUES , , , ,  n.,  n., , ,  n., ,  n., ,  n., , , , , , ‒, , , ,  n.,  n., , , , ,  n.,  n., , , , , ; see also Romans et contes philosophiques, Contes philosophiques ÉTUDES ANALYTIQUES ,  n.,, ,  Études sur M. Beyle  n.,  EUGÉNIE GRANDET ,  n., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ‒, , , , , ,  n., ,  L’Expiation  n.

UNE FILLE D’EVE ,  n., , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n., , ‒, ,  n., , , ,  Une fille de Paris , ,  La Fin de Melmoth  La Fin de Vautrin  n. La Fleur des pois  n. Fragments d’un roman publié sous l’Empire par un auteur inconnu ,  n. Fragment d’une nouvlle satyre ménipée , Les Français peints par eux-mêmes* ,  n., , ,  n., , ‒, ,  n., , ‒, ,  La Frélore  n.,  Le Frère d’Armes (CD I.viii)  n.,  n., 

FACINO CANE , ,  n., , , , , , ,  n.,  n.,  n., ; see also Les Mystères de province, Le Père Canet La Faillite de Nucingen  Falthurne , , ,  n. Les Fantaisies de Claudine , ‒ Les Fantaisies de la Gina  n. Farrabesche  n. La Faulse Courtizane (CD II.v)  LA FAUSSE MAITRESSE , ,  n.,  n.,  n., , , ‒, , , , , , ,  LA FEMME ABANDONNÉE , ,  n., ,  n., ‒, , ,  n., , , , , , , ,  La Femme auteur  n.,  La Femme comme il faut , ,  n., , , , ,  n.,  La Femme de province , , ,  La Femme de soixante ans  n. LA FEMME DE TRENTE ANS ,  n., , ,  n.,  n., ; see also A trente ans, La Dernière Revue de Napoléon, Le Doigt de Dieu, L’Expiation, La Femme de trente ans [I], Même histoire, Premières fautes, Le Rendez-vous, Souffrances inconnues, La Vieillesse d’une mère coupable, Une vue de Touraine La Femme de trente ans [I]  n.,  n.,  n., , ,  n. La Femme vertueuse , ,  n. FERRAGUS , , , , , , ,  n.,  La Femme supérieure  n.,  n., , , , , , ; LA FILLE AUX YEUX D’OR , , , ,  n.,  n., ,  n., , , , , , , , ,  n., , , , , , ; see also Une passion dans le sérail

GAMBARA , ,  n., , , , , , ‒,  n., , , , , ,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  Le Garçon de bureau ,  Le Gars  n., ,  n. (Avertissement) Gavarni  n. Un Gaudissard de la rue Richelieu  n.,  GAUDISSART II ,  n., , ,  n., ‒; see also Le Provincial à Paris Un Gendre  Gendres et belles-mères  n. Gloire et malheur , ,  n. GOBSECK , , , , , , , , , ,  n., , , , ; see also Les Dangers de l’inconduite, Le Papa Gobseck, L’Usurier Goethe et Bettina  n. Le Grand d’Espagne , , , ,  n., , , , , , ,  Un grand homme de Paris en province  n. UN GRAND HOMME DE PROVINCE A PARIS (ILLUSIONS PERDUES, II)  n.,  n.,  n., , , ,  n.  n., ; see also Comment se font les petits journaux Un grand littérateur  n. Le Grand Propriétaire  La Grande Bretèche  n., , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  n., , ; see also La Grande Bretèche ou les trois vengeances  n.,  n., ,  n., , , ,  LA GRENADIERE , , ,  n., , , , , , ,  n., , , ,  Guide-âne à l’usage des animaux qui veulent parvenir aux honneurs  n. La Haute Banque  n.,  L’Héritier du dyable (CD I.iv)  n.,  n., 

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L’Héritière de Birague*  n., ,  n. Les Héritiers Boirouge  n. Une heure de ma vie , , ‒, , ,  n.,  Histoire de la France pittoresque , ,  Histoire de la succession du marquis de Carabas  n., ,  n.,  n. Histoire de l’Empereur racontée dans une grange par un vieux soldat  n.,  n. Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande Armée* ,  Histoire de Napoléon racontée dans une grange  Histoire du Capitaine Beauvoir , ; see also Histoire du chevalier de Beauvoir Histoire du chevalier de Beauvoir  n., ,  Histoire d’un bras ,  Histoire d’une clarinette  Histoire intellectuelle de Louis Lambert ,  n.,  HISTOIRE DES TREIZE  n., , , ; see also LA DUCHESSE DE LANGEAIS, FERRAGUS, LA FILLE AUX YEUX D’OR Histoire et physiologie des boulevards de Paris  n. Historique du procès auquel a donné lieu Le Lys dans la vallée  n. UN HOMME D’AFFAIRES , , ‒, ,  see also Esquisse d’homme d’affaires d’après nature, Les Roueries d’un créancier HONORINE ,  n., , ‒, ,  n.,  n.,  L’Hôpital et le peuple  n. L’ILLUSTRE GAUDISSART  n.,  n., , ,  n., , , , , ,  n.,  ILLUSIONS PERDUES , , ,  n., , , ,  n., ,  n., ,  n.,  n., , ,  n., , , , , , , ,  n., , , , ,  n., , , ,  n., , ,  n., , ,  n.,  n., ‒, , , ; see also David Séchard, LES SOUFFRANCES DE L’INVENTEUR, UN GRAND HOMME DE PROVINCE A PARIS Imprudence et bonheur*  n. Un inconnu: épisode de la Terreur  n. L’Incube (CD IV.i.)  Indiana, par George Sand*  n. L’Infidélité du mari  n. L’Initié  Une instruction criminelle  n. L’INTERDICTION , , , ‒, , ,  n.,  n., ,  n., , , , , , 

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Jean-Louis  JÉSUS-CHRIST EN FLANDRE  n.,  n., ‒, , , ,  n.; see also La Danse des pierres, Le Dôme des Invalides, L’Église, Zéro. Les Jeunes Gens,  n. Le Jeusne de Françoys premier (CD II.ii)  Les Joyeulsetez du Roy Loys le Unziesme , , , ,  (CD II.v) Jules ou le nouvel Abeilard  n.,  n. La Justice paternelle  n. Les Lecamus  n., , ,  n.,  n. Lettre à Hippolyte Castille  n. Lettres russes  Lettres sur la littérature, le théâtre et les arts ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  Lettres sur Paris ,  n. Les Litanies romantiques  n., , ,  Le Livre des conteurs* ,  LOUIS LAMBERT , , , , , ‒, , ,  n., , ; see also Histoire intellectuelle de Louis Lambert, Notice biographique sur Louis Lambert La Lune de miel  n. Le Luther des chapeaux  n. LE LYS DANS LA VALLÉE , , ,  n., , ,  n., , , ,  n.,  n.,  Madame de la Chanterie ,  n. MADAME FIRMIANI , , , , , , , ,  n.,  n., , , , , ,  n.,  n., , , , ,  n.,  Madame la ressource ou une marchande à la toilette  n., , ,  n., ,  LA MAISON DU CHAT-QUI-PELOTE ,  n., , , , , , ,  n., , , , , , , , , , ,  n., , , , , , , , ,  n., , , , ; see also Gloire et malheur LA MAISON NUCINGEN , ,  n., ,  n., ,  n., , , , , ‒, ,  n., , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., , ; see also La Faillite de Nucingen, La Haute Banque, Une vue du grand monde MAITRE CORNÉLIUS , ,  n., , ,  n., , ‒, , , , , , ,  n., , ,  n., , , ,  LES MARANA  n., , , , , ,  Une marchande à la toilette, see Madame la ressource ou une marchande à la toilette

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Marie Touchet ,  LE MARTYR CALVINISTE ,  Les Martyrs ignorés  n. MASSIMILLA DONI , , ,  n., , ,  n., , ,  n.,  n., ,  n., , , , , ‒, ,   n., , , , ; see also Jules ou le nouvel Abeilard Les Méchancetés d’un saint ,  LE MÉDECIN DE CAMPAGNE , , , , ‒, ,  n, , , , , , ,  n.,  n., , ; see also Histoire de l’Empereur racontée dans une grange par un vieux soldat, Histoire de Napoléon racontée dans une grange, Scène de village, La Veillée: histoire de Napoléon racontée dans une grange MELMOTH RÉCONCILIÉ , , ‒, , , , , ; see also Le Dernier Bienfait de Melmoth, La Fin de Melmoth Même histoire , , ,  n., , , , , , ,  Mémoires anecdotiques sur l’intérieur du palais*  MÉMOIRES DE DEUX JEUNES MARIÉES  n.,  n., , , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.; see also Soeur Marie des Anges Mémoires de Sanson ,  n.,  n. Un ménage de garçon en province  n. LE MESSAGE  n.,  n., , , ‒, , , , ,  n.,  LA MESSE DE L’ATHÉE , , , , , , ,  n., , , , ,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  Le Ministre  Les Mitouflet ou l’élection en province  n.,  n. De la Mode en littérature  n. MODESTE MIGNON ,  n.,  n.,  n., , ,  n., , , ‒; see also Le Programme d’une jeune veuve Moeurs aquatiques  La Monnaie d’une belle fille  n. Monographie de la presse parisienne  n. Monographie du rentier ,  n., , , ,  Monographie de la vertu ,  n. La Mort de ma tante ,  n. Des Mots à la mode  n. LA MUSE DU DÉPARTEMENT  n. , ,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n., , ,  n., ‒, , ; see also Dinah Piédefer, Les Mystères de province La Mye du Roy (CD I.iii)  n.,  Les Mystères de province  n., , , ,  n.

Naïfueté (CD III.ix) ,  Ne touchez pas la hache , , , ,  n., ,  n.,  n. La Nonne d’Égypte  Le Notaire , ,  Notice biographique sur Louis Lambert , ,  Notice sur la vie de La Fontaine  n.,  n.,  n. Nouveaux contes philosophiques  n., ,  n.,  n. Nouvelle anthologie, ou choix de chansons anciennes et modernes*  Nouvelle théorie du déjeuner  Oeuvres de l’Abbé Savonati  Oeuvres choisies de Napoléon*  L’Opium ,  OU MENENT LES MAUVAIS CHEMINS (SPLENDEURS ET MISERES DES COURTISANES, III) , ,  n. Le Pacte*  n.,  LA PAIX DU MÉNAGE , ,  n., ‒ passim, , , , ,  n., ,  Paméla Giraud  Le Papa Gobseck  n.,  n.,  LES PARENTS PAUVRES ; see also LE COUSIN PONS, LA COUSINE BETTE UNE PASSION DANS LE DÉSERT , , , , ‒, , , ,  Une passion dans le sérail  LES PAYSANS ,  n.,  n., , , ; see also Le Grand Propriétaire, Qui a terre a guerre LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN ,  n., , , , , , , , , , , ,  n., ,  n., , , , , , , ‒, ‒ and ‒ passim, , , , ,  n., , , , , , ,  n.,  n., , , , , ,  n., , ,  n., , , , ,  n., , , ,  n., , , ‒; see also Le Dernier Napoléon Le Péché vesniel (CD I.ii)  n.,  n., ,  Les Peines de coeur d’un loup-cervier  n. Les Peines de coeur d’un millionnaire ,  Peines de coeur d’une chatte anglaise  n. Pensées, sujets, fragments  n. ,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ‒,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. Perdita  n.,  n. Le Père Canet  n.

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LE PERE GORIOT , , , , , , , ,  n., , , , , ,  n., ‒ passim, ‒, ,  n., , ,  n., , ,  n., , ,  n., , , , , ,  La Perle brisée  n.,  n.,  n. Perseuerance d’amour (CD III.i) , ‒, ,  Les Petits Bourgeois ,  n. Petit dictionnaire critique et anecdotique des enseignes de Paris*  Le Petit Mercier  n. Les Petits Manèges d’une femme vertueuse,  n.,  n. PETITES MISERES DE LA VIE CONJUGALE ,  n. ,  n.,  n., , , ‒, ,  n., , ; see also Philosophie de la vie conjugale à Paris Philosophie de la vie conjugale à Paris  n.,  n.,  Physiologie de l’employé  n. PHYSIOLOGIE DU MARIAGE , , , , , , ‒, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  n.,  n., , , ,  PIERRE GRASSOU , ,  n.,  n., , ‒, , , , , , ,; see also L’Artiste, La Frélore, Un Gendre PIERRETTE  n., ,  n.,  n., ,  Plan d’un traité sur l’immortalité de notre âme  n. Les Premières Armes d’un lion  Le Prêtre catholique  n.,  n. Premières fautes  n. UN PRINCE DE LA BOHEME , , ,  n., , , ‒, ,  n., , ; see also Les Fantaisies de Claudine Une princesse parisienne  n., ,  n.,  n. Le Privilège  n. Le Programme d’une jeune veuve  n.,  n. LES PROSCRITS , ‒, ,  n., , ,  n. Le Prosne du ioyeulx curé de Meudon (CD II.viii) , , ,  n. Le Provincial à Paris  n.,  n. La Pucelle de Thilhouze (CD I.vii)  n.,  n.,  Qui a terre a guerre  n. LA RABOUILLEUSE , ,  n.,  n., ,  n., ,  n.,  n., , ;



see also Les Deux Frères, Un ménage de garçon en province LA RECHERCHE DE L’ABSOLU  n., , ,  n. La Reconnaissance du gamin  Récréations, par Henry Monnier*  n. Le Refus  n., ,  n., , Le Rendez-vous  n.,  n., ,  n. Le Républicain ,  LE RÉQUISITIONNAIRE  n., ,  n., , , , , , , , ,  n.,  Les Ressources de Quinola  n.,  n. Les Rivalités en province  n.,  n.,  Robert l’Obligé  Romans du coeur*  n. Romans et contes philosophiques , ,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  n., , , , , , ,  n., ,  n.,  n.,  Les Roueries d’un créancier ‒,  n. Rosalie  n.,  n.,  n. Sabine de Grandlieu  Des salons littéraires et des mots élogieux ,  n. SARRASINE , , , , , , , , , , , ‒, , ‒ & ‒ passim, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  Une scène de boudoir  n.,  n.,  n. SCENES DE LA VIE DE CAMPAGNE  n.,  n.,  SCENES DE LA VIE DE PROVINCE ,  n.,  n.,  n., , ,  n. SCENES DE LA VIE MILITAIRE  n.,  SCENES DE LA VIE PARISIENNE  n.,  n., , ,  n., , ,  n.,  SCENES DE LA VIE POLITIQUE  n.,  SCENES DE LA VIE PRIVÉE , ,  n., , , , , , , , , , , , , ‒ passim, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  n.,  n., , , , ,  n.,  n.,  n.  n., ,  n., , , , ,  n., , ,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., , , ; see also Tableaux d’une vie privée Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux* ,  n.,  n., , ,  Scènes de salon  n. Scène de village  n.,  n. Scènes de village  n. Le Secret des Ruggieri  n., , , , , ,  n.,  n., 



I N D E X O F WO R K S

LES SECRETS DE LA PRINCESSE DE CADIGNAN , , , ,  n.,  n., , ‒,  n., ,  n.,  n., , , , ; see also Perdita, Une princesse parisienne SÉRAPHITA , , ,  n.,  n., ,  n. Soeur Marie des Anges  Les Souffrances de l’inventeur (project)  n.,  n.,  n.,  n. LES SOUFFRANCES DE L’INVENTEUR (ILLUSIONS PERDUES, III)  n.  n.,  n.,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n.,  Souffrances inconnues  n. SPLENDEURS ET MISERES DES COURTISANES , , , ,  n., ,  n., ,  n., , , , , ,  n., ,  n., , , , ,  n., , ,  n., , , , , ,  n., , , , , ; see also Les Amours d’un vieux banquier, Les Amours d’un vieux millionnaire, LA DERNIERE INCARNATION DE VAUTRIN, Esther ou les amours d’un vieux banquier, Un espion à Paris: le petit père Fromenteau, Une fille de Paris, Une instruction criminelle, Madame la Ressource ou une marchande à la Toilette, OU MENENT LES MAUVAIS CHEMINS, Les Peines de coeur d’un loup-cervier, Les Peines de coeur d’un millionnaire, La Torpille Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes: Esther  Sténie  n., , , ,  n. Le Succube (CD II.ix) , , , ,  n. SUR CATHERINE DE MÉDICIS , ,  n.,  n., , ,  n., , , ; see also Catherine de Médicis expliquée, LES DEUX REVES, Les Lecamus, LE MARTYR CALVINISTE Sur la destruction projetée du monument au duc de Berry  n. Sur le moyne Amador (CD III.iii)  n., , , ,  n.,  Sur les ouvriers  Tabacologie  n. Tableau de Paris  n. Tableaux d’une vie privée , , ,  UNE TÉNÉBREUSE AFFAIRE  n.,  n., ,  Le Tartare ou le retour de l’exilé*  Théorie de la démarche , , Théorie du conte , ‒, , ,  n., , , ,  n., 

La Torpille  n.,  n., , , , , ‒, , ,  n.,  n.,  n., ,  n. Tout ,  Traité de la vie élégante  n.,  n. Traité de l’obligation  n. TRAITÉ DES EXCITANTS MODERNES ,  n.; see also Tabacologie La Transaction , , ,  n., , ,  n., , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  n.,  Les Trois Cardinaux  n.  n. Les Trois Clercqs de Sainct-Nicolas (CD II.i) ,  URSULE MIROÜET  n., ,  n.,  n., , ,  L’Usurier  n. Valentine et Valentin  n. Vautrin  n., ,  n. La Veillée: histoire de Napoléon racontée dans une grange  n. LA VENDETTA , , , , , ‒, , ‒ passim, , ,  n., ,  Véronique  n.,  n. Véronique au tombeau  n. Le Vicaire des Ardennes  n., ,  La Vie d’une femme  n. LA VIEILLE FILLE , ,  n., , , , , , , , , ,  n., ,  n.,  n., , , ,  n., ,  n.,  La Vieillesse de Don Juan  n. La Vieillesse d’une mère coupable  n. Les Voisins  n. Voyage de découverte exécuté dans la rue Richelieu  n. Voyage de Paris à Java  n., ‒,  n. Voyage d’un lion de Paris et ce qui s’ensuivit*  n. Voyage d’un moineau de Paris à la recherche du meilleur gouvernement*  n. Une vue de Touraine  n.,  n.,  n. Une vue du grand monde , ,  Wann-Chlore , , ,  Z. MARCAS , , , , , , , ,  n., , ,  n., ‒, , ,  Zéro, conte fantastique , , , , , 