Thoughts on Balzac
Balzac claimed “A generation is a drama of four or five thousand prominent characters. That drama is my book.”
According to Oscar Wilde, “The 19th century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.”
In 1832 Honoré de Balzac started weaving a tapestry of novels and stories to describe his life and times. Echoing Dante’s Divine Comedy, by 1839 he entitled his by then prodigious output “La Comédie Humaine.”
The narratives were divided into “Etudes de Moeurs”, “Etudes philosophiques” and “Etudes analytiques”. They spanned recent history, laying bare the vicissitudes of post-revolutionary France.
Balzac claimed “A generation is a drama of four or five thousand prominent characters. That drama is my book.”
He was not far short. In total, he amassed 2,472 characters across his 90 completed works. Excluding animals. They came from all walks of life, many re-appearing throughout the opus, suitably aged.
Commander Hulot, for example, makes his entrance in Balzac’s breakthrough novel Les Chouans of 1829. He finally hobbles onto the scene in La Cousine Bette, Balzac’s last novel in 1846.
Character development was a key consideration for Balzac. The young Rastignac in Le Père Goriot, starts out as a naïve law student before falling under the pernicious influence of Vautrin.
By the end of the novel, Rastignac has made his bed: success at any price and hang the consequences. Since then, his name has been a French by-word for unprincipled social climbers.
Rastignac’s progress through Parisian society typified the age. Balzac’s world was one of turmoil and opportunity. In his short lifetime he saw the rise and fall of Napoleon, the establishments of the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy under Louis-Phillippe, and finally the outbreak of the 1848 revolution.
The pre-revolutionary framework of social certainties had disappeared. Paris was besieged by opportunists bent on making their fortune.
Balzac’s father was a case in point. A peasant from Tarn, he learned to read and write before setting off for Paris with one louis in his pocket. In no time he rose to become Secretary to the King’s Council.
Balzac followed suit studying law before turning to writing. After a spell locked in a garret, he emerged with Cromwell, a five-act play in verse. A tragedy. He then turned his hand to churning out potboilers. Though dire, they proved a useful precursor for his later writing.
Balzac was himself an enthusiastic entrepreneur, sinking his money into unwise ventures. Everything from owning a printing press, to mines in Sardinia, to growing pineapples in Paris. His early foray into publishing, left him with debts of 50,000 francs, which dogged him throughout his life.
Money is a persistent theme in Balzac’s writing. Changing one’s social status did not come cheap. Money in France at the time was in short supply. Paper money was rarely used. To satisfy commercial demands, complex, irregular arrangements of unprotected loans proliferated.
A safer route to financial solvency was a successful marriage. Early in Eugénie Grandet, Balzac’s acclaimed novel of 1833, the author speaks of “the only god that anyone believes in nowadays - Money in all its power.”
Eugénie Grandet’s miserly father, a former cooper made good, becomes hugely wealthy but keeps the family on a shoestring. Candles are only used every other evening. Claiming poverty, old Grandet even borrows back the housekeeping from his embattled wife.
Local families circle as the daughter comes of age, seeking a profitable marriage for their eligible sons. Enter Charles, Eugénie’s cousin from Paris. The crimped Adonis Charles finds out the following day his father, Grandet’s brother, has lost anything and topped himself. Charles mopes in bed for several days, winning Eugenie’s heart in the process.
Grandet promptly sends Charles to the Indies to make his way. The young man soon forgets all about his cousin and the promises made to her. Making his fortune in nefarious ways, he returns to France with his sights set on the daughter of a noble Parisian family. But his plans are stymied until he has settled his father’s debts.
The jilted Eugénie, now fabulously wealthy after Grandet’s death, magnanimously pays her uncle’s debts. She finally consents to marry the local lawyer, a long-time suitor. But on condition, he keeps himself to himself.
Eugénie lives out her disillusioned life, adhering to the austere strictures of her youth. As Balzac writes “God poured quantities of gold into her lap, although gold meant nothing to her.”
As a curious aside, the Indies also feature in Balzac’s play Mercadet. The main character repeatedly asks his creditors to wait for his associate, currently making his fortune in the Indies, to return. The associate is called Godeau. Samuel Becket, when asked about the coincidence, claimed to have had no knowledge of Balzac’s piece.
The other side of Balzac’s coin is the law. Balzac was keen to flaunt his knowledge of legal snares and loopholes.
The unrecognisably disfigured Colonel Chabert, on returning from Napoleon’s war, tries to regain his fortune and his wife, now happily, and bigamously, re-married into the nobility. Chabert approaches a lawyer, Derville, a recurring character in La Comédie Humaine.
Derville advises Chabert of the legal entanglements facing him. Eventually Chabert, like Eugénie Grandet, becomes the victim of deception and malpractice and takes himself off to the workhouse to live out his end in destitute dignity.
Balzac’s writing is more than gritty realism. Ever-present is an understanding of the workings of the human heart.
Balzac spent his first four years being lodged with a wet nurse. He was then whisked off to boarding school at the age of eight, only seeing his mother twice in the next six years. He had a miserable time, and in his teens considered drowning himself in the Loire.
Possibly resulting from his chaotic childhood coupled with his closeness for his sister Laure, Balzac developed a strong affinity for women. Most readers at that time were women, a fact he was quick to recognise.
He wrote successfully on women’s themes. The three women portrayed in Eugénie Grandet are finely observed, arguably more multi-faceted than their male counterparts.
His own relationships were many and varied. Like Charles in Eugénie Grandet, older, well-positioned society mistresses showed him the ropes. Then he spread his wings, developing a reputation as a lady’s man.
But his long-standing, epistolary relationship with Ukrainian Ewelina Hanska was his most significant relationship. He wrote to her almost daily. They eventually married in 1850, only for Balzac to die three months later. On his deathbed, he kept asking for Horace Bianchon, his ubiquitous doctor in La Comédie Humaine.
The French literary establishment at the time turned its nose up at Balzac’s overblown prose. His tendency to kick off his stories with some mind-numbingly long descriptive passages did not help.
This short extract is from the beginning of Le Père Goriot, describing Mme. Vauquer and her apartment. It forms part of a 17-page descriptive introduction:
“Mme. Vauquer is an oldish woman, with a bloated countenance, and a nose like a parrot’s beak set in the middle of it; her fat little hands (she is as sleek as a church rat) and her shapeless, slouching figure are in keeping with the room that reeks of misfortune, where hope is reduced to speculate for the meanest stakes. Mme. Vauquer alone can breathe that tainted air without being disheartened by it. Her face is as fresh as a frosty morning in autumn; there are wrinkles about the eyes that vary in their expression from the set smile of a ballet-dancer to the dark, suspicious scowl of a discounter of bills; in short, she is at once the embodiment and interpretation of her lodging-house, as surely as her lodging-house implies the existence of its mistress. You can no more imagine the one without the other, than you can think of a jail without a turnkey.”
Considered the first realist, Balzac set the scene for the radical evolution of French literature that was to follow. But if Flaubert, Proust, Henry James and others cavilled at his writing style, no one doubted his powers of observation and his sweeping control of his sprawling palette of characters and stories. His successors all drew on the master, as the launchpad for their own unique styles.
