Honore de Balzac

tutorials, study guides, web links and commentary

A Commission in Lunacy

July 28, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

A Commission in Lunacy (1836) is one story from the many which make up La Comedie Humaine. Its original French title was L’Interdiction and it features two characters – Eugene de Rastignac and Horace Bianchon – who appear in many of Balzac’s other novels and stories which constitute the fictional world he generated.

A Commission in Lunacy – commentary

Structure

This story is a very brief episode in the vast work that is The Comedie Humaine. It has a simple but very powerful structure. Basically, it is in two parts, contrasting Greed and Honour, pivoting around Principle. It can also be seen as the ‘new’ values of vulgar social ambition contrasted with old-fashioned patrician modesty and restraint. In briefest terms, it is Self-interest versus Self-sacrifice.

We are introduced to a fashionable society woman who wishes to bring legal proceedings against her estranged husband. Her damning case against him is discussed in close detail.

The judge who will examine the case is then presented as a somewhat saintly figure – neglected by himself and the state, he spends his spare time and money helping the poor.

He then interviews both parties to the dispute. First the wife, who is exposed as a self-indulgent and money-grabbing villain. Then her husband, who is revealed as a man of integrity who has voluntarily repaid a family debt of honour.

Characters

The principal characters in the story illustrate perfectly the complex nature of La Comedie Humaine – its interdependent associations and overlapping events, as well as the recurrent appearances of its individuals.

Eugene de Rastignac and Horace Bianchon are old friends, both former student lodgers at the Maison Vauquer which features in the novel Old Goriot (1834). Rastignac was an ambitious student of law who has risen rapidly via social connections to become an influential politician.

Horace Bianchon was once a humble student of medicine who has mixed with raffish arrivistes but who has never lost his Hippocratic principles of helping those in need. He has risen to become a leading medical authority in fashionable Paris, and he appears in several other Balzac novels, including Cousin Bette (1846) and Lost Illusions (1837-1843).

Popinot the judge is Bianchon’s uncle, and he also appears in a number of other episodes in La Comedie Humaine. So too does the judge who replaces him in the final pages of the story. Camusot has recently arrived in Paris from the provinces: he presides over the report on the d’Espard case and decides in favour of the Marquis.

Interestingly, we learn in another novel Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life that Camusot is assisted in reaching this judgement by Lucien Rubempré, who also appears in several volumes of La Comedie Humaine.

What is a ‘commission in lunacy’?

This expression is not merely a picturesque example of translation. The French title of the story is L’Interdiction. The Commission in Lunacy was a body established (in the UK) in 1845 to oversee the treatment of people who were deemed mentally ill. It was a board comprising legal and medical experts, plus a cohort of laymen.

The main theme

At the heart of this story is a conflict between what Balzac sees as two sets of social values. The Marquise is greedy, self-obsessed, and full of vulgar social ambition. Her husband the Marquis on the other hand represents self-denial, honesty, and a respect for an old-fashioned but honourable system of values.

The Marquise is obsessed with appearances: she lies about her age and doesn’t even wish to be seen with her own teenage sons in case this reveals how old she is. She lives in luxurious surroundings, but wants to have her husband committed as a lunatic so that she can take over his money. She constructs what adds up to a pack of lies and distortion to defame him in court.

The Marquis on the other hand lives in a simple (but tasteful) fashion: he brings up his two sons; and he has lived within his means for twelve years so as to pay back to the Jeanrenaud family wealth that has been unfairly seized from them by his own grandfather. Meanwhile he is working (and providing employment for others) on a scholarly research project which has the backing of a distinguished Parisian publishing house.

The general picture

Balzac is renowned for his insights into the social, political, legal, and economic workings of society. Indeed Frederick Engels said of him “I have learned more from Balzac than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together”. Balzac exposes how society is governed via money, law (especially inheritance), property, political power, and ruling elites.

What is not so frequently remarked upon is how realistically he renders the material fabric of the living world he creates. He has acute powers of observation, and can depict both the architectural history of someone’s housing, plus their moral and aesthetic attitudes as revealed by interior decor.

[Monsieur d’Espard] restored the woodwork to those brown tones beloved in Holland, and by the old Parisian bourgeoisie, which, in our day, afford such fine effects to painters of genre. The walls we hung with plain papers which harmonised with the woodwork. The windows had curtains of some material that was not costly, and yet was chosen in a manner to produce an effect in keeping with the general harmony. The furniture was choice and well arranged.

Whoever entered these rooms could not fail to be conscious of a peaceful, tranquil feeling, inspired by the stillness and silence that reigned there, by the quietness and symphony of the colouring

Balzac – selected reading

The best current editions of the major novels are those published in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback series. Each volume contains a critical introduction, a note on the text, a bibliography of further reading, a chronology of Honore de Balzac, and most importantly a series of explanatory notes giving historical, geographical, and scientific information about details mentioned in the text.

Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Ursule Mirouet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Selected Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

A Commission in Lunacy – plot summary

Eugene de Rastignac and Horace Bianchon discuss the fashionable socialite Marquise d’Espard. Bianchon warns against women of this type, whilst Rastignac thinks a connection with her will assist his social ambitions.

Jean-Jules Popinot is a conscientious but neglected judge who dresses badly. He devotes his early mornings to supporting the poor and destitute. His nephew Bianchon arrives to discuss the petition made by the Marquise to have her husband declared insane.

The petition claims that Marquis d’Espard has become demented and is under the psychic influence of Mme Jeanrenaud and her son. The Marquis has also become obsessed with the subject of China, has taken his two sons away, and given Mme Jeanrenaud a million francs. Bianchon persuades his uncle to see the Marquise.

The Marquise devotes her life to looking young and maintaining an exclusive salon. She lives in luxurious surroundings and has taken on Rastignac as a protégé.

The Marquise explains how she was abandoned by her husband when she was twenty-two. But Popinot unpicks her arguments and exposes her as a greedy gold-digger.

The fat Mme Jeanrenaud visits Popinot and rejects the claims made against her. Popinot then visits the Marquis who lives modestly and tastefully in the Latin quarter. He is a patrician of the old school.

Questioned by Popinot, the Marquis explains that he has been repaying a debt of honour caused by his family’s illegal seizure of Jeanrenaud’s assets. He proposed this restitution to his young wife, but she refused to participate. He also explains his major research project into Chinese culture and history.

Popinot writes a report exonerating the Marquis to the Commission in Lunacy, but he is unable to present it in court, because he has compromised himself by socialising with the applicant, the Marquise. He is being replaced on the case by a new provincial lawyer Camusot. However, Popinot is awarded the Legion of Honour.

A Commission in Lunacy – characters

Eugene de Rastignac	a socially ambitious man-about-town
Horace Bianchon	a young and principled Parisian physician
Jean-Jules Popinot	a scrupulous and neglected lower court judge
Marquis d’Espard	an old-fashioned and high-principled aristocrat
Marquise d’Espard	his estranged wife, a self-indulgent socialite
Mme Jeanrenaud	the overweight head of family disenfranchised by the d’Espards

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Cesar Birotteau

August 2, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

Cesar Birotteau had been in Balzac’s ‘bottom drawer’ as a rough draft for six years before it was published. Finally Le Figaro offered him 20,000 Francs if he could make it ready for 15 December 1837. He had despaired of interesting publishers in an apparently lightweight tale of a mediocre shopkeeper. But Balzac correctly believed that Birotteau’s commercial rise and fall illustrated important features of business enterprise and speculative investment that underpinned the workings of what might be called ‘early capitalism’.

Cesar Birotteau – original illustration

Cesar Birotteau – commentary

Structure

The structure of the novel could not be more simple – or more dramatic. This is reflected in its full title, which is Histoire de la grandeur et decadence de Cesar Birotteau – History of the rise and fall of Cesar Birotteau.

Part I covers Birotteau’s commercial rise – the success of his perfume business, his election to deputy mayor, and the expansion of his property in Paris. But embedded within all this success there are some over-confident financial investments and rash dealings with shady speculators, including the notary Roguin. This part of the novel culminates in the expensive grand ball to which he invites all his influential associates.

Part II plots his downfall – beginning a week after the ball when the bills must be paid. The corrupt notary Roguin absconds with his clients’ money, which precipitates Birotteau into a cascade of debt. He tries to raise money from various bankers without success, and is finally declared bankrupt. He takes a menial job (as do his wife and daughter) and they eventually scrape enough to pay off part of the debt. His former assistant Popinot eventually pays the rest and marries his daughter Cesarine. But Birotteau is overcome by the emotional strain and the reversal in his fortunes, and he dies at the wedding party.

Thus Part I of the novel concludes with Birotteau at the height of his success with a lavish party. Part II echoes this event, with Birotteau having repaid his debts and recovered his honour, with another party celebrating his daughter’s marriage. But Birotteau is worn out with worry and emotional strain – and he dies. The symmetry and the dramatic trajectory of rise and fall are striking.

The financial theme

Part I shows how easy it is, following a modest commercial success, to become drawn into an ever more extravagant style of living. This seductive process is compounded by two further evils of economic life. The first is spending money which has not yet been earned. The second is speculating in schemes over which one has no financial control and which have a high factor of risk, such as gambling on the stock exchange or speculating on the value of real estate.

Part II reveals how difficult it is to recover from a financial disaster. First Balzac outlines in great detail the workings of the law relating to bankruptcy – and in particular how the creditors can stack the odds in their own favour, even to the extent of creating ‘false creditors’. Second, he dramatises quite relentlessly how bankers can control the availability of credit through self-interested networking. Finally he shows the life-sapping efforts necessary to repay debts through the medium of hard work.

Balzac was well aware of all these forces – because he had first-hand knowledge of them. He borrowed money, enjoyed a lavish life-style, and invested in rash speculative ventures which collapsed. He was declared bankrupt, and worked his way out of debt by colossal efforts of literary industry – which eventually killed him at the age of fifty-two. You could almost say that Cesar Birotteau was a prophetic account of his own life story – since he overworked himself to get out of debt, married late, and died shortly afterwards.

La Comedie Humaine

In common with many of the other novels and stories which make up Balzac’s grand vision of French society, Cesar Birotteau features characters who crop up in other works. They might be simply named en passant such as the money-lender Gobseck and the judge Camusot, or they might play a substantial role such as the banker Nucingen and the travelling salesman Gaudissart.

The connections between these named characters and their recurrence in various works is one of the things that gives La Comedie Humaine its spectacular social depth.

Anselme Popinot, the modest and club-footed assistant to Birotteau, is the nephew of Jean-Jules Popinot, who is initially in charge of investigating the court case featured in A Commission in Lunacy.

Sarah Gobseck appears as la belle Hollandaise, the prostitute and mistress of the notary Roguin. She is the grand-niece of the money-lender Jean-Esther Gobseck and the mother of Esther Gobseck who becomes mistress to Lucien Rubempre – both of whom feature in Gobseck and Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life.

Maxim de Trailles crops up in a role he frequently occupies in https://mantex.co.uk/la-comedie-humaine/La Comedie Humaine. He is a rake and a compulsive gambler who is helping to ruin Sarah Gobseck, as he does Anastasie de Restaud in Old Goriot.

Gaudissart the boastful salesman who boosts the sales of Popinot’s hair restorer Cephalic Oil features in a number of later works. He goes on to become the owner of a boulevard theatre and is a key figure in Cousin Pons.

The wealthy banker Frederic Nucingen appears in several novels in La Comedie Humaine, particularly the important volumes Old Goriot, Lost Illusions, and Cousin Bette. His mistress is Esther Gobseck (daughter of Sarah) and his wife Delphine becomes the long-term lover of Eugene de Rastignac.

Balzac – selected reading

The best current editions of the major novels are those published in the Oxford World’s Classics paperback series. Each volume contains a critical introduction, a note on the text, a bibliography of further reading, a biographical chronology of Honore de Balzac, and most importantly a series of explanatory notes giving historical, geographical, and scientific information about details mentioned in the text.

Cesar Birotteau – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Ursule Mirouet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Selected Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

Cesar Birotteau – plot summary

I Having been made deputy mayor, Cesar Birotteau’s ambition is inflamed. He wants to expand his business and put on a social show, whilst his wife Constance urges caution and restraint. He plans to borrow money to invest in a dubious real estate scheme. He also claims to have discovered a cure for baldness.

II Birotteau has arrived in Paris from Tours. Apprenticed to perfumier Rogon, he learns the details of the trade and during the Revolution becomes an ardent Royalist. He rises to the position of head clerk and dreams only of quiet retirement to Chinon. He falls in love with attractive shop girl Constance and marries her in 1800.

Birotteau buys the perfume business from Rogon and moves to a more fashionable location. He ‘invents’ skin creams ‘Double Paste of Sultan’ and ‘Carminative Balm’. Constance advises him to distribute wholesale at a discount. The business prospers and expands. Birotteau is successful but uneducated. He takes on commonplace ideas and dotes on his daughter Cesarine.

Birotteau employs as chief clerk the ambitious and unscrupulous Ferdinand du Tillet, who tries to seduce Constance. He is dismissed, but steals money from the shop. Tillet then sets himself up as a man of means and becomes a stockbroker then a banker.

III The notary Roguin has impoverished himself by keeping la belle Hollondaise (Sarah Gobseck) as mistress. He has also misappropriated the funds of his clients. Du Tillet persuades him to ‘borrow’ more and invest them secretly in a speculative scheme involving land in the Madeleine district. He persuades Roguin’s mistress and Mme Roguin to do the same. Mme Roguin at this point also becomes du Tillet’s lover.

Du Tillet makes money and influential contacts. But Sarah Gobseck loses money to pay the gambling debts of her lover Maxime de Trailles. Du Tillet invents a scheme to use money from Birotteau and Claparon, a ‘straw man’ whom he recruits. Birotteau proposes to set up young Popinot in a shop to sell his new hair restorer.

IV Birotteau goes ahead with plans to extend his home into the neighbour’s house. He negotiates an agreement with the obsessive landlord Molineux. He orders the nuts for producing the hair-restoring oil, ‘Comagene Essence’.

V Birotteau discusses the Madeleine land project with his uncle Pillerault who has also invested. He checks with scientist Vauquelin that the oil will be good for the scalp. Preparations are made for the house extension and the launch of the second shop.

VI Popinot engages the services of Gaudissart to promote the new hair oil, now called ‘Cephalic Oil’. There is a dinner for the Madeleine investors, joined by du Tillet’s straw man Claparon, who is a sham operating out of his social depth. Meanwhile there is also a dinner to celebrate the launch of Popinot’s hair oil. Judge Popinot arrives to take his young nephew to draw up legal papers.

VII Birotteau extends the guest list of his grand ball to include lots of dignitaries. The apartments are given an expensive refurbishment. The grand ball is an extravagant success. But there are hints of problems to come.

Part II

I A week later Birotteau feels burdened by debt and uncertainty as the bills for his expansion start to arrive. His promissory notes are being refused, and he has no ready cash. The young notary Crottat breaks the bad news. Roguin has held the Madeleine scheme finances without giving receipts. He has squandered the money and disappeared. Sarah Gobseck’s furniture has been sequestered and she has been assassinated. Birotteau has a breakdown, during which time he is visited by Claparon, demanding money for the Madeleine scheme.

II Birotteau seeks help from his uncle and his lawyer, but the case is hopeless. Meanwhile Cephalic Oil is a success and Finot works as a tireless publicist, placing adverts in the press. Birotteau seeks credit from the lofty banker Keller, who refers him to his business-man brother, who wants to see the deeds of the Madeleine scheme.

III The Kellers refuse credit, but du Tillet lends him money, with the malign intention of ruining his former boss. He also gives him a false letter of recommendation to the banker Nucingen. Birotteau reveals his plight to Constance, who supports him.

IV Birotteau appeals to Nucingen, who flatters him, but refers him back to du Tillet. When du Tillet refuses, Birotteau applies to the phoney banker Claparon, who is no use either. Even young Popinot refuses to help him – on the advice of his uncle the judge.

V Popinot reverses his decision, but Pellerault says it is too late because Birotteau’s public reputation is now ruined. Birotteau’s brother the priest responds, but with only a thousand Francs. Pellerault and Popinot make one last attempt to raise the money, but it fails. Birotteau is forced to declare himself bankrupt and he resigns his position as deputy mayor. Constance then applies to Royalist connections, securing jobs for her husband and daughter. She is employed by Popinot. Birotteau accepts his downfall.

VI Balzac explains the tangled web of influences and procedures that obtain in Parisian bankruptcy cases. Birotteau is examined by Molineux but protected by Pellerault. All Birotteau’s assets are sold off and the creditors receive almost sixty percent of their claims. Birotteau, his wife, and his daughter work tirelessly to pay off the rest of the debt.

VII Eighteen months later Birotteau is able to make a partial payment to his creditors. Du Tillet is forced to pay a high price for land that Popinot owns. Constance reveals du Tillet’s original theft and burns his love letters to her. Popinot then pays off the remainder of the debt and restores the Birotteaus to their former home. Birotteau re-visits the Bourse in triumph, having cleared his name. He returns to his old home at the wedding celebrations of Popinot and Cesarine – but the emotional strain is too much for him and he dies of a broken heart.

Cesar Birotteau – characters

Cesar Birotteau	Parisian perfumier, deputy mayor and Royalist
Constance Birotteau	his attractive and loyal wife
Cesarine Birotteau	his pretty daughter
Ferdinand du Tillet	Birotteau’s former head clerk who becomes a ‘banker’
Anselme Popinot	Birotteau’s modest club-footed apprentice
Roguin	Parisian notary who absconds with clients’ money
Mme Roguin	his estranged wife who becomes du Tillet’s lover
Sarah Gobseck	la belle Hollandaise, Roguin’s mistress
Maxime de Trailles	Sarah Gobseck’s lover, a compulsive gambler
Jean-Baptiste Molineux	a mean and monomaniac landlord
Claude Pillerault	retired honest ironmonger, uncle to Constance
Nicolas Vauquelin	a famous chemist
Gaudissart	a successful travelling salesman
Charles Claparon	a bogus banker, stooge to du Tillet

More on Honore de Balzac
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Cousin Bette

July 12, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Cousin Bette (1846) is often regarded as the greatest of Balzac’s many novels and stories. It is an action-packed story that deals with all his favourite themes – financial greed, sexual desire, and the drive for social status – plus some spectacular examples of successful and failed revenge. The setting is upper-class society in Paris, most of whose inhabitants are ruthless social climbers, wallowing in financial corruption, adultery, and a world of polite hypocrisy.

Cousin Bette – background

La Cousine Bette (full French title) was first published as a serial in La Constitutionnel in 1846. This was a newspaper featuring commerce, politics, and literature. In 1847 the novel appeared in book format, published by Chlendowski. A year later it appeared as Volume XVII in the definitive Furne edition of Balzac’s collected works, given the title La Comedie Humaine.

The novel began life as a long story called Le Parasite (an ironic reference to Bette’s role in the family) and from the start it was seen as a companion novel to Cousin Pons which appeared the following year. Balzac wrote the whole of Cousin Bette in only two months – an astonishing rate of literary production, even by his normal standards.

In fact he abandoned his usual practice of editing his work on printers’ proof copy. Instead he sent his instalments directly to the newspaper editor. He never saw his work until it was published, and he had to write feverishly in order to stay ahead of the daily instalments. These are still available at Le Constitutionnel online archives (in the original French). See entries for 8 October to 3 December 1846.

It is worth noting that his original text was split into short scenes, each of which was given a descriptive and sometimes ironic title (‘A third father for the Marneffe child’). These titles were removed in later editions in order to save space – but they make the novel much easier to read, and offer an additional level of entertainment.

Cousin Bette – commentary

Sex and money

It is quite clear from this novel that Balzac sees the principal forces driving his characters as their desire for sex and money, quite apart from their social climbing and a taste for sumptuous living. The main character Hulot is an example of sexual obsession, who ruins his family in his pursuit of courtesans and young girls. His counterpart Valerie Marneffe uses her sexual allure to achieve a rich and comfortable life in the upper echelons of society. The two items – sex and money – are often directly related.

But it is interesting to note the differences in the ways these two topics are treated Whilst there is no shortage of desperation, dramatic irony, and social ruin into which characters are prepared to put themselves in their pursuit of sex – the female characters passively and the males actively – there is remarkably little explicit mention of any sexual activity.

This can be explained by the literary conventions of the period. It would simply not have been possible to publish descriptions of explicit sex in the early nineteenth century – either in France or any other European country. In fact novels produced in France were considered dangerously racy for even hinting at sexual desire.

Yet the reverse is true of the financial connections that dominate the characters’ lives. Everybody seems to be aware to the last Franc how much people are worth, how much they spend on their homes, how much it costs to maintain a mistress or furnish an apartment, and how big some daughter’s dowry will be.

Characters such as Crevel and Hulot offer quite clearly defined sums of money in return for sexual favours from their mistresses – sometimes in the form of regular incomes. Crevel offers to pay a specific dowry for Adeline’s daughter Hortense if Adeline will become his lover. When she refuses, his similar offer to Valerie Marneffe makes even clearer the business-like nexus between cash and sex:

Be all mine. You won’t regret it. To start with, I’ll give you a share certificate with eight thousand Francs a year, but as an annuity. I won’t give you the capital until you’ve been faithful to me for five years.

The separation of sexual desire from conventional marriage might strike many readers as rather surprising, if not shocking. But there are legal and socially structural reasons why this was prevalent. For an explanation of the French establishment of the Napoleonic Code and its effects on marriage and inheritance, see my comments on Balzac’s earlier and equally powerful novel Old Goriot (1834).

Baron Hulot

From the opening of the novel until its very last sentence, Baron Hulot is obsessed by his pursuit of sex. He disgraces and ruins his family by his behaviour, he spends (squanders) thousands and thousands of Francs on keeping one mistress after another, and he neglects his saintly wife who dies with shock when she overhears him propositioning a kitchen maid when he is eighty years old: ‘My wife hasn’t got long to live, and if you like you can be a baroness’. For good measure, he is also guilty of embezzlement. He sets up a fraudulent operation in government military supplies to Algeria, and when the crime is exposed his elder brother has to repay the debt in order to save the honour of the family.

Valerie Marneffe
Hulot spends much of the novel in thrall to the young and attractive Madame Marneffe, until he is displaced by Crevel – who has more money. She is adept at sustaining multiple simultaneous relationships, extracting money from her admirers, and living in luxury at secret locations. Even though she is married to the seedy clerk Marneffe, she counts Hulot, Crevel, Steinbock, and Montes amongst her lovers. When she becomes pregnant she manages to persuade all five men that they are the father of her child. Her success appears unstoppable, until she and Crevel are poisoned by the jealous Montes – both of them dying in a gruesome and lingering manner.

Cousin Bette
Bette is the ‘poor relation’ of the novel. She is a cousin of the Hulot family, and bitterly resents their patronising attitude to her. She is motivated entirely by revenge – in a series of psychologically complex manoeuvres. First she takes Steinbock under what is supposed to be her maternal wing; but she is intensely jealous when he marries Hortense and becomes a member of the family. She allies herself with Valerie Marneffe in order to extract money from the Hulots, and she gradually becomes obsessed with the idea of marrying Hulot’s elder brother and being a countess. But none of her schemes are successful, and she dies of tuberculosis, taking her secret hatred of the family to her grave.

Cousin Bette – study resources

Cousin Bette – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Cousin Bette – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Cousin Bette – Everyman – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Everyman – Amazon US

Honore de Balzac

Cousin Bette – plot summary

Monsieur Crevel calls on Adeline Hulot to pay court to her. He reveals his illicit relationship with the singer Josepha, whom Adeline’s husband Hector Hulot stole to be his own mistress. Crevel predicts that Hulot will ruin himself with expenditure on women, and he offers to supply a dowry for Adeline’s daughter Hortense in exchange for her ‘favours’ as a lover. She flatly refuses his proposal.

Cousin Bette is a ‘family parasite’ who remains stubbornly unfashionable. She secretly has under her protection Count Steinbock, a young sculptor, but as his patroness, not his lover. She files legal papers to record the financial support she has given him.

Josepha leaves Hulot for a much richer man. Adeline consoles her husband for this loss, and he promptly takes up with Madame Marneffe. Their daughter Hortense meets Steinbock, who immediately falls in love with her. Hulot promotes Steinbock, who immediately rises to fashionable success.

Mme Marneffe reveals the relationship between Steinbock and Hortense to Bette, who is furious. The two scheming women become accomplices. Bette vows to avenge herself on Steinbock and the Hulots. Crevel seeks revenge on Hulot as a sexual rival.

Bette has Steinbock arrested for debt so that he cannot marry Hortense, but he is released the same day. Hulot engages in fraudulent business deals to fund his daughter’s marriage and his own expenses in keeping a mistress. He moves his wife into a smaller apartment to save money.

Crevel is envious of Hulot’s possession of Mme Marneffe. Bette accumulates money from Crevel and Hulot, both of whom think she is working on their behalf. She also ingratiates herself with Adeline. Hulot incurs further debts which the family cannot meet. Bette schemes to marry into the family as an act of revenge.

Tbe young Brazilian Montes suddenly appears as Mme Marneffe’s youngest lover. She hides him in her bedroom whilst Hulot rages jealously about Crevel. Valerie then tricks Crevel into deposing Hulot as her ‘protector’. Crevel reveals his hidden love nest to Hulot and pretends that they are both better off without her. Next day they all meet at Valerie’s where she is deciding between Crevel and Montes as her ‘protector’.

Steinbock’s reputation declines and he lives extravagantly. Bette persuades him to borrow money from Mme Marneffe Steinbock flirts with Valerie and asks her to pose for a sculpture. He lies to his wife Hortense, and they quarrel, but are reconciled by Adeline. Valerie becomes pregnant with Hulot’s child.

Hortense leaves Steinbock and goes to live with her mother. Montes, Crevel, Hulot, and Steinbock all believe they are the father of Valerie’s child – and Monsieur Marneffe pretends to be. Hulot’s fraud in Algeria is uncovered. He continues to meet Valerie Marneffe in Crevel’s love nest, until there is suddenly a police raid. This is exposed as a trap set by Mme Marneffe herself. The official report of Hulot’s Algerian fraud is silently quashed by his young boss as a favour.

But Hulot must find money to cover up the Algerian swindle. His wife Adeline offers herself to Crevel in exchange for the money. Crevel turns her down – but is touched by her piety and offers to lend her the money.

Hulot’s brother pays the missing Algerian money in order to protect the family’s good name – but he then dies. Adeline seeks to ‘rescue’ her husband morally, but he runs away and hides in secret, pursued by debtors.

He visits Josepha, who sets him up in an embroidery shop with money and a sixteen year old mistress. Valentin Hulot and his mother Adeline are also given money and jobs. Valerie Marneffe bears a stillborn child, and her husband dies.

Adeline visits Josepha where they both learn that Hulot’s embroidery business has gone into debt and he has run off with another young girl. Josepha promises to help her find Hulot. Bette finds Hulot and lends him money to set up another business with the girl.

At a courtesan’s dinner party it is revealed to Baron Montes that Valerie Marneffe is about to marry Crevel and has Steinbock as a lover. Crevel vows to kill her, but even when confronted in the love nest with Steinbock, she bluffs her way out

Crevel and Valerie Marneffe both become infected with the deadly disease Montes has threatened to use as a revenge. They both die, leaving money to the Hulots.

Adeline meets the fifteen year old Atila who is living with Hulot in hiding. She takes her husband back home, and the whole family is re-united. Cousin Bette dies, along with her secret hatred of the family. Adeline discovers Hulot seducing the young kitchen maid and dies of shock, after which Hulot, now eighty years old, marries the maid.

Cousin Bette – principal characters

Baron Hulot	a 60 year old rake, ex-army administrator
Count Hulot	his honourable older brother
Adeline Hulot	the Baron’s attractive and saintly forgiving wife (48)
Hortense Hulot	their daughter, who marries Steinbock
Victorin Hulot	the son, who becomes a successful lawyer
Lizbeth Fischer	their cousin, an old maid at 41
Celestin Crevel	a wealthy rake, mayor in Paris, former perfumier
Celestine Crevel	his daughter, married to Victorin Hulot
Josepha (Mirah)	young Jewish singer, mistress to Crevel and Hulot
Valerie Marneffe	young and attractive, with multiple lovers
Jean-Paul Marneffe	her seedy and depraved husband
Wenceslas Steinbock	a young Polish count and sculptor
Baron Montes de Montejanos	a rich Brazilian, lover to Valerie Marneffe

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Eugenie Grandet

June 7, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Eugenie Grandet (1833) was one of the first great works to emerge from Balzac’s grand survey of French society, a collection to which he gave the general title La Comedie Humaine. It’s a short novel, but one that signals all the themes he was to explore in the many volumes that followed. Principal issues include social ambition, thwarted dreams, disappointed love, greed, and underpinning everything else the accumulation of property and the yearning for social status.

If you have not read Balzac before, this is a good place to start. The story is quite simple. A young provincial girl Eugenie is dominated by her tyrannical father, the miser Felix Grandet. She falls in love with her playboy cousin Charles, and when he is suddenly left penniless she gives him all her money and waits seven years for him to make his fortune abroad. Events do not turn out quite as she hopes – or as the reader might think.

Eugenie Grandet – commentary

Characterisation

This is an early work by Balzac, and some of the characters are not particularly well defined. It is difficult to tell the difference between the members of the Grassins and the Cruchots for instance, the two families who are both hoping to marry a son to the heiress Eugenie. But one character dominates the entire narrative – the miser Felix Grandet. He is relentlessly mean, penny-pinching, acquisitive, and pathologically obsessed with money – gold in particular. His character dominates the entire novel, from first page to last.

He not only apportions the meagre rations for the family meals every day, but he puts out the fire in one room so as to save fuel when going into another. He doles out the lumps of sugar for people’s coffee – and even cuts up the lumps into smaller pieces in his spare time.

This petty domestic tyranny is quite amusing, yet at the level of commercial enterprise he is enormously successful. From his origins as a humble cooper, he acquires vineyards; he sells his wine at a profit; he outsmarts his competitors; he buys and sells commodities at the right time, and he calculates the profitability of his land to maximise its return on investment.

However, the extent of his greed reaches far more serious depths. He eventually defrauds his own daughter by arranging a legal document in which she signs over control of her own inheritance to him. And he remains au fond a study in pathological avarice – obsessed by gold, which he hoards in his closely guarded room and gloats over at night in private. He is memorable because he is so much larger than life figure.

His daughter Eugenie on the other hand is the innocent victim of his psychological sadism and domestic tyranny. Eugenie and her mother suffer his bullying without complaint for the major part of the novel. There is an element of Cordelia and King Lear in their relationship.

But Eugenie’s provincial Calvary is interrupted by a major occurrence in her otherwise uneventful life. She falls in love with her dashing cousin Charles. This at first has all the appearance of a fairy tale – the princess in her metaphorical tower rescued by the arrival of a handsome prince.

Balzac continues to exploit reader expectations in pursuit of this portrayal of virtuous innocence. Eugenie and Charles seal their mutual love with a pact of fidelity, Eugenie gives him all her money to fund his colonial expedition, and she then waits for him patiently for seven years. It is at this point that Balzac reveals his creative genius with a double irony and a dramatic shift in Eugenie’s characterisation.

The double irony

Charles turns out to be a shallow-minded adventurer. He is revealed as an unscrupulous slave trader who on return to Europe seeks to marry into the lower echelons of the aristocracy. His letter to Eugenie renouncing their pact of eternal love strikes her like a hammer blow.

But she does not capitulate to the shock in a conventional manner. Instead, she contracts a marriage of convenience to someone else – on the explicit condition that it is never consummated. She does this still bearing what she calls ‘an inextinguishable love in [her] heart’- for the memory of what Charles once was to her. That is part one of the double irony.

Part two comes in successive phases. First Eugenie marries her wealthy suitor the President de Bonfons. She thereby enhances her social status, and then on his early demise (and because they have by her design no children) she inherits his personal fortune to add to her own. Even after paying off her uncle’s bad debts she is still in possession of seventeen million Francs – a fact whose significance is not lost on the greedy and ambitious Charles.

But a further twist is yet to come – less dramatic, though just as significant in terms of the novel’s major themes. This immensely rich Eugenie, a widow at thirty-three, then lives on in the drab house where she was raised. Furthermore, she voluntarily adopts the frugal lifestyle of her earlier years, even dressing in her mother’s clothes. She becomes, in one sense, not unlike her father.

The Napoleonic Code

There is one feature to the background of events in the novel which may not be immediately apparent to readers unfamiliar with French society and its conventions. Following the revolution of 1793 there was a radical overhauling of the legal system. This included a law that required property and capital to be inherited solely via family connections.

If you are English with a million Pounds in the bank, you can leave this money to whomever you wish by making a will. You can nominate as legatees your children, your friends, or the Battersea Dogs Home. But in France, your money (and property) can only be willed to your children. [This is an over-simplification of a very complex system.]

In Eugenie Grandet the gold-obsessed Felix Grandet has made everyone suffer whilst amassing his considerable wealth. But fortunately for the sake of poetic justice, the entire property and its income from rents and dividends on government bonds reverts to Eugenie following her father’s death. She also increases her net worth by marrying the President – and because it is a marriage of convenience with no consummation and no possible children – she inherits all the President’s wealth on his demise.

The intrusive narrator

This is a term used to describe stories or novels in which the person telling the story (the narrator) intrudes his or her own opinions into the account of events. The narrator might be a fictional character, or it might be the author. Many narratives are presented by neutral or ‘invisible’ narrators who remain absent from the story they are telling.

Balzac on the other hand is one of literature’s most famously intrusive narrators. He pretends to be offering a neutral and unbiased account of events. This is in keeping with his claim that he is acting like a scientist or a professional sociologist, recording the history of French manners in the post-revolutionary epoch.

But he intrudes regularly and quite blatantly into his own stories to deliver his opinions on French history, to give mini-lectures on the workings of the financial markets, and homilies on ‘behalf’ of his own characters. He generalises wildly on the nature of men and women and their ‘place’ in society; he volunteers his opinions on famous works of art; and he proselytises repeatedly on behalf of the Catholic Church and the need to retain a Monarchy

This is a feature of Balzac’s style which some of his critics have found very irritating, but his defenders (and I am one of them) point out that many of his opinions reflect a well-founded knowledge of the way society worked at the time of his writing. His personal beliefs (Catholicism and Monarchism) can safely be ignored, because they do not seriously affect the logic of his narratives. And many of his aesthetic judgements have been substantiated by subsequent commentators and have stood the test of time. If there are occasional infelicities, this is a small price to pay for the entertaining exuberance of his volcanic creativity.

Balzac was a prodigiously productive novelist – but he was also a failed businessman. He knew how the markets worked. He knew that contracts drawn up by lawyers in one generation could influence the destinies of characters in the next. He knew the connections between the law, the stock market, and the lifestyles people could afford.

We read him not just as a great story teller, but also as a perceptive sociologist and even a political philosopher. When he reveals exactly the sources and extent of each character’s income, this is his method of showing how morals and manners were closely related to economics. It is not surprising that Balzac was one of Karl Marx’s favourite novelists.

Eugenie Grandet – study resources

Eugenie Grandet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Eugenie Grandet – Everyman – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Everyman – Amazon US

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – plot synopsis

Portrait of Bourgeois

An old miser Felix Grandet becomes a wealthy landowner and vine grower in Saumur. The locals speculate enviously on the extent of his wealth and wonder who will marry his daughter Eugenie. Grandet imposes a frugal and cheese-paring regime on the whole household, which is run by his faithful servant Big Nanon.

On Eugenie’s birthday the house is visited by the Grassis and the Grachots who bring presents. Both families are trying to marry a son into the Grandet family. Suddenly, a dashing young cousin Charles Grandet arrives from Paris.

The Cousin from Paris

Charles is a playboy and a dandy. Eugenie is overwhelmed by his charm and novelty. Grandet receives a letter from his brother Guillaume consigning the boy to his care. The brother is bankrupt and about to commit suicide. Charles wonders why his father has sent him to such a wretched and miserable house.

Provincial Love

Eugenie falls in love with Charles. She and Nanon start to break the frugal house rules to provide Charles with some lunch. Grandet arrives and is outraged by their extravagance. Grandet reveals to Charles the fact of his father’s death. He then sells off his wine stock and plans to invest in government bonds. He also devises a scheme to rescue his brother’s honour and the family name – but without spending any money.

A Miser’s Promises and Lovers’ Vows

Grandet pretends he is going to recover his brother’s debts and recruits the Grassins to act for him. He then travels secretly at night to sell all his gold. Eugenie reads Charles’ goodbye letter to his lover Annettte. She then gives him all the gold coins she has saved.

Grandet makes a lot of money from the sale of his gold. Eugenie and Charles enjoy the innocent birth of their love whilst he prepares to depart for the Indes. Grandet buys up all of Charles’s gold and arranges legal papers that renounce any claims Charles has on his father’s estate. Grandet then delays payments of his brother’s debts for the next five years.

Family Sorrows

Grandet discovers that Eugenie has given all her gold to Charles. He imprisons her in her room, and her mother becomes ill with the worry. The town’s people get to know and disapprove of Grandet. The lawyer Gruchot intercedes to point out that if Mme Grandet dies, Eugenie will inherit all her estate, depleting Grandet’s capital and property. Because of this, Grandet lifts his ban on Eugenie, but it is too late to save Mme Grandet, who dies. Grandet then cheats Eugenie out of her inheritance.

For the next five years Grandet instructs Eugenie on the running of his estates, then he too dies. As a result, Eugenie inherits seventeen million Francs, from which she pays Nanon a generous annuity. Nanon marries the gamekeeper, who becomes steward for the whole Grandet estates.

The Way of the World

For seven years Eugenie simply endures her fate. But Charles meanwhile has been a slave trader and an unscrupulous trader in the Indes. He has made his fortune, and is planning a loveless marriage into the fallen aristocracy in order to acquire a name and status. Eugenie receives his letter of dismissal from Paris and is devastated.

With her hopes crushed, she contracts an unconsummated marriage to the President de Bonfons. When he dies shortly afterwards, she becomes a widow at thirty-three, and the heiress to an even greater fortune. She devotes her life to charitable works, and goes on living a frugal life in the house of her father.

Eugenie Grandet – prinipal characters

Felix Grandet	a wine-grower, land-owner, miser, dealer in currency and government stocks
Mme Grandet	his timid and long-suffering wife
Eugenie Grandet	his innocent and virtuous daughter
Guillaume Grandet	his brother, who becomes bankrupt and commits suicide
Charles Grandet	Eugenie’s dashing and handsome cousin, with whom she falls in love
Big Nanon	the tall and strong household servant
Mr Conoillier	the gamekeeper who becomes the estate steward
President de Bonfons	suitor to Eugenie, who she eventually marries

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Gobseck

July 12, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Gobseck (1830) is a powerful novella that features a character who crops up in several novels of Balzac’s Comedie Humaine. Jean-Esther van Gobseck is an amazing Scrooge-like character who has reduced his entire life to the acquisition of wealth. He is also a miser who lives in a state of extreme frugality. The story also includes characters who appear later in the later novel Old Goriot (1834), including Anastasia de Resaud, a glamorous socialite who is prepared to rob her own husband to pay off her lover’s gambling debts.

Honore de Balzac

Gobseck – background

Gobseck is a short novella that first appeared as a newspaper serial in 1830 under the title L’Usurier. It was then published in the periodical Le Voleur later the same year, and after that as a single volume with the title Les Dangers de l’inconduite. It was given its definitive title of Gobseck when it appeared in the definitive Furne edition of La Comedie Humaine in 1842.

All of these separate publications illustrate Balzac’s commercial enterprise in exploiting the potential value of his work, recycling the same materials in so many different formats. He was a great novelist, but there was nothing precious or dilettante in his approach to literature He was a professional writer of immense energy and practical application. He wrote with high literary ideals, but he also wrote to make money. In fact he was usually paying off debts incurred through his extravagant lifestyle and business ventures that had gone wrong. As the French critic Hyppolyte Taine observed ‘the most complete description of Balzac is that he was a man of business – a man of business in debt’.

Gobseck – critical commentary

Gobseck is is essentially a a study in extreme avarice. The principal character is a money-lender who charges exorbitant interest rates. He is also a business speculator who who strikes crooked deals with collaborators and even rivals. The foundation of his wealth is in colonial exploitation of the Dutch East Indes. He is also a collector, and a hoarder of precious objects. Most importantly, he has reduced his personal morality to two principles – the relentless pursuit of self-interest, and the worship of gold.

Throughout the story he appears to be consistent in his methods and the successful application of his principles. But the conclusion of the story reveals the ultimate futility of his enterprise. The house he lives in is packed with foodstuffs that have gone rotten whilst he has been haggling over their selling price. As for his gold and other material assets, he has absolutely no one – no friends, neighbours, or relations – to whom he can bequeath them. He neither uses nor enjoys the artefacts he has collected. His obsession is ultimately reductive. He stands alongside Felix Grandet, the avaricious father in Eugene Grandet (1833) as one of the great and tragic misers of Balzac’s fiction.

And yet …

Gobseck is supposed to be an emotionless puritan with no interests except self-interest and the relentless acquisition of money. Yet his descriptions of his creditors and their domestic interiors are those of an aesthete. He knows the names of furnishings, fabrics, and the details of decorative wood inlays, It is difficult to escape the suspicion that these reflect the interests of Balzac himself, who was a great enthusiast for sumptuous interior décor.

He [Balzac] was a profound connoisseur in these matters; he had a passion for bric-à-brac, and his tables and chairs are always in character.

This observation by implication criticises Balzac of failing to make a distinction between his own interests and those of his fictional character. It is certainly true that Balzac intrudes his own political and religious beliefs, his opinions and manifestos on taste with prodigious vitality throughout his fictional work

There is also an argument that he puts a lot of himself into his fictional characters – as do many novelists in their work. In addition to this, it should also be kept in mind that there can be unacknowledged contradictions between an author’s conscious and unconscious intentions. In other words, Balzac is creating a character (Gobseck) whom he is offering as a negative example of greed and excessive puritanism – but he cannot resist giving this character a knowledge and appreciation of furniture, interior décor, and fine arts that Balzac posessed himself.

Is it a novella?

There is good reason for considering Gobseck as an extended character sketch sandwiched into a short story. The basic structure of the tale is the issue of Camille de Grandlieu and her infatuation with Ernest de Restaud. Her mother thinks Restaud is not a suitable marriage prospect because he lacks money. This issue is resolved by the family lawyer Derville, whose largely first-person account terminates with the information that Restaud has inherited generously, and will therefore be acceptable.

But his explanation involves the potted life history of Gobseck, plus his complex financial dealings with the Restaud family. This notably includes his relationship with Anastasia, who tries to pawn her family’s diamonds in order to raise money to pay off the gambling debts of her lover, the playboy Maxime de Trailles.

This episode not only has the substance of a literary form longer than the short story, but it also forms part of a larger literary work – Old Goriot. Anastasia is the elder daughter of Father Goriot, a man who has been brought to the point of ruin by his two spendthrift and morally bankrupt daughters.

The most convincing reason for considering Gobseck as a novella is that it has as its controlling symbol and metaphor that of avarice. This is Gobseck’s raison d’etre, and it dictates all his actions from the start of the narrative up to its quasi-tragic conclusion. But other characters are also tainted by their relationship to money. Madame de Grandlieu would not dream of letting her daughter marry a young man unless he was rich. Anastasia de Restaud is up to her ears in debt. She has fleeced her own father and still needs more money to pay off de Trailles’ gambling debts.

Money runs through all aspects of the story like the letters in a stick of rock. It is a theme, a metaphor, and a symbol all in one. And that is one of the constituents of a novella – that it has unifying elements holding all its parts together.

La Comedie Humaine

From 1834 onward Balzac conceived of his novels as free-standing but interlocking elements in a huge study of French society to which he gave the general title of La Comedie Humaine. He used the device of recurring characters and overlapping events to produce a sort of three-dimensional literary portrait of post-revolutionary France.

Gobseck is a very good example of how this method works. The rapacious and eponymous money-lender is the central figure in this novella, but he crops up in a number of the other works as a minor character – in Old Goriot (1834), Cesar Birotteau (1837), and The Unconscious Comedians (1846).

But more importantly, the dramatic incident of lending money to Anastasia de Restaud to pay off her lover’s gambling debts also forms part of the plot of Old Goriot. Anastasia is the elder daughter of Goriot, who is a doting father. She and her sister Delphine have brought about his financial ruin by the demands they have made on his good nature. We thus have a more fully-rounded portrait of her selfish and self-indulgent nature than from one novel alone.

We also know that even after being rescued from her financial problems by borrowing yet more money from Eugene de Rastignac (another recurring figure) she cannot be bothered to go to her own father’s funeral.

If you wish to track any of the characters and their appearances in Balzac’s whole oeuvre, there is a huge list on line with detailed biographies at – The Repertory of the Comedy Humaine

Gobseck – study resources

Gobseck – Paperback – Amazon UK

Gobseck – Paperback – Amazon US

Balzac – Complete Works – Kindle – Amazon UK

Balzac – Complete Works – Kindle – Amazon US

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

Gobseck – plot summary

Young Camille de Grandlieu has an enthusiasm for Ernest de Restaud, but her mother thinks he has not enough money to get married. The family lawyer Derville recounts the history of a money-lender Jean-Esther van Gobseck – from his earliest days as a Dutch imperialist adventurer to his later years as a desiccated and miserly usurer.

Gobseck believes that the only worthwhile values are self-interest and the worship of gold. He describes a morning recovering debts from clients. The first is aristocratic Anastasia de Restaud and the second is a poor seamstress Fanny Malvaut. He considers his influence over those who have fallen into debt as a form of power. He is also part of a usurer’s cabal that meets weekly to share information.

Derville buys the practice where he works with a loan from Gobseck. He pays off the debt in five years and marries Fanny Malvaut. He attends a bachelors’ breakfast banquet where he meets the dandy Maxime de Trailles who is in need of money to pay off gambling debts. Anastasia de Restaud (his lover) offers her family diamonds as security on a loan. Gobseck strikes a murky deal that includes bills of credit in de Trailles’ name which he has bought cheaply from another money-lender. Restaud then calls, demanding the return of his family’s jewels. He is forced to enter a legal agreement drawn up by Derville.

Restaud visits Derville to arrange papers relating to his will and a false sale of his property. He leaves his younger children out of his will, since he believes they may not be his own offspring. Restaud then falls ill and dies in conflict with his wife. She burns a secret counter-document to his will. Gobseck arrives and immediately takes possession of the house, which now belongs to him. He lives in the house and becomes a government liquidator for Haiti and San Domingo.

He appoints Derville his executor, who on searching the house following Gobseck’s death finds it packed with trinkets, gifts, antiques, and foodstuffs that had turned rotten because he had been haggling so long over the price. Ernest de Restaud inherits enough money to enable him to marry Camille.

Gobseck – principal characters

Madame de Grandlieu	an aristocratic grande dame
Camille de Grandlieu	her young daughter, in love with Ernest de Restaud
Maitre Derville	lawyer to the Grandlieu family, neighbour of Gobseck
Jean-Esther van Gobseck	a Dutch Jewish miser and money leander
Anastasia de Restaud	an improvident and adulterous wife
Ernest de Restaud	her only legitimate son, who marries Camille

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La Comedie Humaine

June 23, 2018 by Roy Johnson

La Comédie Humaine is the title Balzac gave to an epic series of novels and stories he wrote depicting French society in the first part of the nineteenth century. It comprises almost 100 finished and fifty unfinished works. The first parts were written without any overall plan, but by 1830 he began to group his first novels into a series called ‘Scènes de la vie privée’.

Honore de Balzac

In 1833, with the publication of Eugenie Grandet, he envisioned a second series called ‘Scènes de la vie de province’. He also devised the strategy of creating characters who were introduced in one novel and then reappeared in another.

This literary technique was a direct reflection of the fact that his novels were serialised in newspapers and magazines. Serial publication was the nineteenth century equivalent of the modern soap opera and the twenty-first century television drama series. Balzac first used this device in his novel of 1834, Le Père Goriot.

He then devised an even more elaborate structure for subsequent works which included private, provincial, and Parisian life, plus political, military, and country life. As the stories, novellas, and novels were moved from one part of this conceptual framework to another, he changed their titles and put them into new groups.

As an enterprising businessman, he also re-published the works in book format and made more money out of the same product. However, he was always hopelessly insolvent – largely because of his lavish life style and because he was paying off the debts on various failed business enterprises.

The logic of this structural framework for his fiction is not always convincing. Lost Illusions for instance is categorised as part of ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ – and it’s true that the events of the narrative begin and end in Angouleme in south-west France. Yet the majority of the novel takes place in Paris, in a very urban, indeed a metropolitan city.

Balzac actually believed that his grand design and enterprise was something of a quasi-scientific study or research project:

Society resembles nature. For does not society modify Man, according to the conditions in which he lives and acts, into men as manifold as the species in Zoology?

This is essentially a materialist philosophy of the world – one which sees the larger forces in society shaping how people behave and what they believe – rather than the other way round. It is very close to what Marx and Engels only a few years later formulated as classic Marxism. This possibly explains why Balzac was one of the writers they most admired, because he revealed the links between capital accumulation and the ideology of the ruling class.

Balzac also regarded himself as a historian of manners, basing the wide scope of his scheme on the example of Walter Scott, whose work was popular throughout Europe at that time.

French society would be the real author. I should only be the secretary.

He believed that his work should vigorously exalt the Catholic Church and the Monarchy. But he also thought that it was his duty to show the real social forces at work as people fought for their existence in what we would now call a Darwinian struggle for survival. Fortunately for us, his artistic beliefs outweigh his religious and political opinions – though it has to be said that there are many passages of overt proselytising in his work.

Given the interlocking nature of these works and taking into account the huge scale of his endeavour, it is not surprising that the scheme was never completed. Balzac was dead by the age of fifty-two – worn out with overwork.

Notwithstanding the incomplete nature of this grand project, one glance at the lists below reveals the prodigious nature of Balzac’s sheer productivity. There are years in which he wrote not one but two and even three novels that are now considered masterpieces of European literature.

1901 edition in sixteen volumes

La Comedie Humaine

Scenes de la vie privee

1829. At the Sign of the Cat and Racket (novel)
1830. The Ball at Sceaux (novella)
1830. Vendetta (novella)
1830. A Second Home (novella)
1830. Study of a Woman (story)
1830. Domestic Peace (story)
1830. Gobseck (novel)
1831. The Grand Breteche (story)
1832. La Grenadiere (story)
1832. The Deserted Woman (story)
1832. Madame Firmiani (story)
1832. A Woman of Thirty (novel)
1832. Colonel Chabert (novella)
1832. The Purse (story)
1834. Father Goriot (novel)
1835. The Atheist’s Mass (story)
1835. The Marriage Contract (novel)
1836. The Commission in Lunacy (novella)
1836. Albert Savarus (novella)
1838. A Daughter of Eve (novel)
1839. Beatrix (novel)
1841. Letters of Two Brides (novel)
1842. A Start in Life (novel)
1842. Another Study of Woman (story)
1843. The Imaginary Mistress (novella)
1843. Honorine (novella)
1844. Modeste Mignon (novel)

Scenes from Provincial Life

1832. The Vicar of Tours (novella)
1833. Eugenie Grandet (novel)
1833. The Illustrious Gaudissart (story)
1836. The Old Maid (novel)
1837. Two Poets (novel)
1839. The Collection of Antiquities (novel)
1839. A Distinguished Provincial (novel)
1840. Pierrette (novel)
1841. Ursule Mirouet (novel)
1842. The Black Sheep (novel)
1843. The Muse of the Department
1843. Eve and David (novel)

Scenes from Parisian Life

1836. Facino Cane (story)
1837. Cesar Birotteau (novel)
1837. A Harlot High and Low (novel)
1838. The Firm of Nucingen (novel)
1838. Esther Happy (novel)
1838. The Government Clerks
1838. The Wrong Side of Paris
1840. Secrets of the Princessm de Cadignan
1840. Sarrasine (novella)
1840. Pierre Grassou (story)
1843. What Love Costs an Old Man (novel)
1844. A Prince of Bohemia
1846. The End of Evil Ways (novel)
1846. A Man of Business
1846. Gaudissart II
1846. The Unconscious Comedians
1847. The Last Incarnation of Vautrin (novel)
1854. The Lesser Bourgeoisie

The Thirteen

1833. Ferragus (novel)
1834. The Duchess of Langeais (novel)
1835. The Girl with the Golden Eyes (novel)

Poor Relations

1846. Cousin Bette (novel)
1847. Cousin Pons (novel)

Scenes from Political Life

1830. An Episode Under the Terror (story)
1840. Z. Marcas (novella)
1841. A Murky Business (novel)
1847. The Election

Scenes from Military Life

1829. The Chouans (novel)
1830. A Passion in the Desert

Scenes from Country Life

1833. The Country Doctor (novel)
1835. The Lily of the Valley (novel)
1839. The Village Rector (novel)
1844. The Peasants

Philosophical Studies

1830. Farewell
1830. El Verdugo (story)
1831. The Conscript (story)
1831. The Wild Ass’s Skin (novel)
1831. The Hated Son
1831. Christ in Flanders
1831. The Unknown Masterpiece (story)
1831. Maitre Cornelius
1831. The Red Inn (story)
1831. The Elixir of Life
1831. The Exiles (novel)
1832. Louis Lambert (novel)
1834. The Quest of the Absolute (novel)
1834. A Drama on the Seashore (story)
1834. The Maranas
1835. Melmoth Reconciled
1835. Seraphita (novel)
1837. Gambara (story)
1839. Massimilia Doni (story)
1842. About Catherine de Medici

Analytical Studies

1829. The Physiology of Marriage
1846. Little Miseries of Conjugal Life

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Lost Illusions

June 28, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, further reading

Lost Illusions (Illusions Perdues) (1837-1843) is one of Balzac’s greatest novels. It is in three parts and originally appeared in serial form. The three volumes which make up the whole work are The Two Poets (1837), A Great Man in Embryo (1839) and Eve and David (1843). The story begins in the provinces, moves to Paris, then returns to provincial life. There is also a sequel in the equally outstanding A Harlot High and Low (1838-1847).

Honore de Balzac

Lost Illusions – commentary

Structure

The basic structure of the whole work is quite simple – but it has subtle and complex relationship to the main themes of the narrative.

Part One begins in the provinces – the south-west city of Angouleme, where two ambitious young friends David and Lucien are keen to pursue their ambitions. David stays at home to develop research into the printing industry and he lives a settled domestic life. Lucien takes the opposite approach and elopes with a married woman in search of literary fame in Paris (which the critic Walter Benjamin called ‘the capital of the nineteenth century’).

Part Two is entirely given up to Lucien’s rise and fall as a writer and a socialite. It presents an excoriating critique of journalism, newspapers, the theatre, and literary commerce in general. Lucien is feted and lionised on a very flimsy basis – largely on the strength of his good looks. He struggles to survive because he lacks income, and when his money runs out he is thrown on the social scrap heap.

Part Three returns to the provinces where these two themes are merged again. Lucien becomes the prodigal son back home: David is on the verge of commercial success. But both are struggling against superior forces. David is the innocent victim of legal and commercial sharks, and he is lucky to survive in time to collect his rightful legacy. Lucien makes matters worse for his family, and after deciding to commit suicide is rescued only by falling into the clutches of a master criminal.

At first sight, the three parts do not seem to be well integrated. Part Two is so long it appears to overwhelm the two adjacent parts. And the narrative in Part Three is forced to jump backwards chronologically to explain what has been happening in Angouleme whilst Lucien was in Paris. But there is an important compositional factor which should be taken into account on the issue of overall coherence.

Balzac’s writing method

Balzac conceived and wrote his novels as the separate minor parts of a gigantic undertaking, La Comedie Humaine. This enormous compilation is an attempt to render the whole of French society and its development in the early part of the nineteenth century. It was a fictional world generated in what the critic George Saintsbury calls a ‘somewhat haphazard and arbitrary’ manner.

In any given year, Balzac might be working on two or even three separate parts of La Comedie Humaine. He would write (and publish) one novel, then later write another separate book dealing with a minor character from the first. It was rather like the completion of a huge literary jigsaw puzzle – one which progressively expanded the more he wrote.

To make matters more complex, he often changed the titles of the separate parts when they were transferred from serial publication in newspapers and magazines into single volume book format. All of these factors tend to militate against structural consistency. It is a miracle that La Comedie Humaine is as coherent as it is.

Names

There is an interesting reflection of social manners in the use of names throughout the novel. Lucien is the most obvious example. His name is not Lucien Rubempré, but Lucien Chardon. He has adopted a new patronymic because it disguises his origins as the son of a chemist, and the borrowed name has more aristocratic associations. But as soon as this deception is uncovered in fashionable society, he is ostracised as a parvenu and social climber – which is what he is.

Anais de Bargeton privately adopts the name of Louise for Lucien alone as a flirtatious link between them. She wants the pleasure of a mild affair without endangering her social reputation. She drops this affectation as soon they elope to Paris then go their separate ways

Baron Sixte du Chatelet, the dilettante ‘tax collector’ is a social fraud. He has adopted the ‘aristocratic particle’ de quite illegitimately to enhance his social standing. It is significant that Mme de Bargeton introduces him as Monsieur Chatelet at her salon in order to humiliate him before the other guests. However, it does not stop her eventually marrying him.

It is also worth noting in this regard that Balzac himself did exactly the same thing. He called himself Honore de Balzac without any legitimate claim to this distinction.

The business of literature

Balzac was intensely conscious of all aspects of what might be crudely termed ‘the book trade’. Lost Illusions contains scenes and even explanatory essays on all aspects of what is called ‘literary production’ – particularly its commercial elements. These range from the printing of books and even the production of the paper from which they are made.

It also includes the distribution of literary products and their reception into the marketplace. In addition he deals with the establishment of literary reputations via criticism and popular journalism, and the manner in which these are manipulated via very dubious commercial practices.

The novel starts with a study in printing technology as old miser Sechard sells his antiquated hand press equipment and cheats his son in doing so. There are full accounts of typography, setting type in cases, and the laborious process of proof-reading and editing text.

When Lucien reaches Paris he is confronted by all sorts of good and bad practices. His literary friends in the Cénacle have high ideals, but they live in poverty and earn their livings through odd-jobbing.

Perhaps the most amusing example of Balzac’s scathingly ironic view of the literary world comes when Lucien visits the offices of a newspaper. The naive young literary would-be expects to find grand premises, staffed by hard-working editors and creative journalists. Instead he finds a shabby one-man office concerned only with ‘subscriptions’. The newspaper is run by an editor who visits only occasionally, and it is written by journalists who do not exist. Copy for the publication is cobbled together on the fly from various sources, produced by writers unpaid and unseen.

Lucien’s friends in the Céacle and his colleague Etienne Lousteau give him warnings that represent Balzac’s extremely negative views on the business of journalism and the establishment of literary reputations. Reviewers accept bribes and produce their sycophantic criticism accordingly; they even extract favours from publishers and writers in exchange for favourable mention; and if refused, they will turn and pour scorn on the very same production.

The seedy side of the book trade is also exposed, with both reviewers and booksellers exhorting free copies from publishers, then selling them on at a profit. Wholesalers are motivated entirely by per item discounts and percentage reductions – with the actual value of the work in question completely disregarded.

The implications of all the literary activities to which Lucien is introduced are that books are a commodity like anything else such as cabbages or sacks of coal. Publishers are only interested in milking established literary reputations or whatever happens to be fashionable at the moment.

This seemingly cynical view of publishing is based on harsh economic realities. The publisher Dauriat explains the situation very clearly. He needs to make an advance payment to the author, then pay for good reviews in order to make the resulting sales profitable.

Obviously this is the sceptical-cum-cynical view of an author commenting on negative aspects of the business of publishing. But Balzac was himself a printer and a bookseller who knew the commercial aspects of the business first hand – from which he both profited and suffered. It is interesting to note that the system he exposes is virtually the same today – almost two centuries later.

Balzac knew this world very well – because he was a writer who also owned print production, and just like his idol Walter Scott, he virtually bankrupted himself by trying to combine the roles of writer, printer, and publisher. In fact, despite his immense success as a novelist, most of his earnings were swallowed up paying off debts – which were increased because of the extravagant life style he enjoyed.

Balzac is unrelenting in exposing the dubious and even corrupt relations that exist between journalists, theatre management, dramatists, actors, and the commercial enterprise in general. Authors pay to have their scripts considered; reviewers are instructed by newspaper editors how to report on theatrical productions; and organised groups of people (claqueurs and siffleurs) are paid to applaud or whistle at particular scenes and actors. Almost everywhere there is money oiling the wheels of reputations – and the last consideration of all is artistic merit.

Lucien’s review of a play featuring the eighteen year old actress Coralie who becomes his lover is hailed as a ground-breaking journalistic novelty. But it is nothing more than a plot summary with whimsical touches and entire paragraphs blatantly puffing up the two principal performers. The clear inference is that the feuilletons are pedalling second-rate material.

La Comedie Humaine – 1901 edition in sixteen volumes

The business of business

Balzac was fascinated by the economic realities of life, and was keen to expose the detailed workings of material production, economic exchange, accountancy, and the system of banking and money which underpinned it all. Indeed, he even reproduces the solicitors’ accounts of David Sechard’s debts to show how legal fees have tripled the original amount of Lucien’s original three forged ‘bills’. (These are what we would now call ‘cheques’).

The scheming Cointet brothers illustrate perfectly the role of enterprises swallowing up their competitors to enlarge their own hold on the market. But they are not just printers: they are also paper manufacturers. These two essential parts of literary production had not yet become separated. Even more surprisingly, they also act as bankers.

It is not surprising that Balzac was much admired by Karl Marx, who believed that in works such as Lost Illusions the author exposed the essence of capitalism in all its moral, social, legal, and economic workings.

The realist novel

Balzac was one of the founders of what we now call the ‘realist novel’ – that is, fictional narratives which give an accurate and unsparing account of the society and its workings. A realist novel will normally include recognisable locations, credible characters, and dramas which reveal the way the world really operates. They also commonly offer a sharply critical view of social conflicts, and are prepared to explore topics such as corruption, poverty, crime, and other negative aspects of human behaviour.

Balzac creates a detailed and comprehensive account of the social milieu in which his dramas take place. The beginning of Illusions Perdues is set in the provincial location of Angouleme, and he provides what is virtually a sociological description of the city, its geography and economic history, plus the class stratification of its inhabitants.

This might at first seem like mere scene setting, but it demonstrates the provincial world from which the protagonist Lucien Chardon wishes to escape in his quest for fame in the capital, Paris. It also reveals how even the topography of a location can have an influence on the people who live there

In addition to this socio-economic understanding of society, Balzac also has an incredibly detailed perception of its physical details and their implications. His description of a house both reinforces the realism of its presentation (rather like a Dutch interior painting) and shows that he is vitally aware of the surfaces, the textures, colours, and the fabrics of the world in which his characters live.

When Lucien makes his first visit to Mme de Bargeton, he is overawed by entering a level of society far above his own. But the narrative reveals Balzac’s critical view of the Bargetons’ down-at-heel aspirations to domestic grandeur:

Lucien walked up the old staircase with chestnut banisters, the steps of which ceased to be of stone after the first flight. Crossing a shabby little anteroom and a large drawing-room, dimly lit, he found his sovereign lady in a small salon with wainscots of wood, carved in eighteenth-century style and painted grey. The upper parts of the door were painted in camaieu. The panelling was decorated with old red damask, poorly matched. The old-fashioned furniture was apologetically concealed under loose covers in red and white check. The poet caught sight of Madame de Bargeton seated on a couch with a thinly-padded quilt, in front of a round table covered with green baize, on which an old-fashioned, two-candled sconce with a paper shade above it cast its light.

Lost Illusions – study resources

Lost Illusions – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Lost Illusions – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Lost Illusions – Random House – Amazon UK

Lost Illusions – Random House – Amazon US

Illusions perdues – Wikipedia

All characters in La Comedie Humaine

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

Lost Illusions – plot summary

Part I – The Two Poets

Old miser Sechard sells an out-of-date printing press to his son David, who employs his poor school friend Lucien Chardon as a proof-reader. The two young men are soul mates with idealistic cultural and intellectual ambitions.

Lucien is introduced to local Angouleme society lioness Mme de Bargeton by her admirer the Baron Sixte du Chatelet. Lucien is flattered and falls in love with her. She decides to cultivate and promote him as a poet, and persuades him to change his name to Rubempré. Lucien would like David to share his good fortune, but his friend turns down the offer. David is very shyly in love with Lucien’s sister Eve.

Lucien delivers a poetry recital amongst the Angouleme elite, who are bored and snobbishly insult him. David proposes marriage to Eve, with a view to creating a business that can support Lucien in his ambition. David delivers a lecture on paper-making techniques to Eve in order to explain his plans. David’s miserly father refuses to help him improve the house he lives in.

Lucien develops his affair with Mme de Bargeton, and lives off the earnings of his mother, his sister, and David. But Lucien is frustrated by the refusal of Nais to give in to his romantic demands. Du Chatelet spreads rumours about the affair and eventually a duel is fought. Nais decides to leave for Paris and demands that Lucien go with her. Lucien borrows more money from David and his family.

Part II – A Great Man in Embryo

Du Chatelet follows Anais and Lucien to Paris, advising her not to compromise herself. Lucien spends money he cannot afford on fashionable clothes, but at the opera he becomes disenchanted with Anais – and she with him. He is ostracised when it is revealed he is a chemist’s son. Du Chatelet acts ambiguously but gives him sound advice. Lucien decides to renounce society and joins a group of poor Bohemian artists, convinced he will soon become rich and famous.

Lucien begins to approach booksellers with his novel and collection of poems. He finds a publisher but rejects the terms he is offered. Fellow writer Daniel d’Arthez encourages him and advises him to avoid journalism. The fellowship club together to give Lucien support, and he continues to accept money from his family.

Lucien decides he will take the risk and attempt to earn a living from journalism. He visits a newspaper office, only to discover that there is almost nobody in charge. He shows his collection of sonnets to Etienne Lousteau, who warns him against the corrupt world of journalism and the shabby end of book trading and criticism.

Lousteau takes Lucien into the grubby but fashionable world of journalism and the book trade in the wooden galleries of the Palais-Royal. A publisher pours scorn on poetry but agrees to read Lucien’s work. Lousteau takes Lucien to the theatre where they mix with actresses and critics.

Lousteau explains the complex financial networks of patronage, bribes, backstabbing, and ownership that connects theatre management, reviewers, and newspaper editors. He holds out a tempting but tainted offer to Lucien, who is suddenly the object of interest to the young actress Coralie. Lucien writes a review of the play and is immediately invited to join the staff of a newspaper.

The journalists enjoy a debauched dinner party with the actresses, during which newspapers are criticised by the very people who write for them. The actress Coralie takes Lucien back home where he remains for two days in the sumptuous apartment maintained by her rich ‘protector’ Camusot.

After improving the manuscript of his novel, the Cénacle reproach Lucien for becoming a journalist. His relationship with Coralie is exposed by her protector Camusot, who reluctantly condones it. Lucien attends a newspaper editorial meeting where they discuss the invention of canards, but his collection of sonnets is still refused by publisher Dauriat.

Lousteaux instructs him on how to write negative critical articles. Lucien writes a damning critique of a Dauriat publication, which prompts Dauriat to buy Lucien’s poems outright and harness his services. Lucien then writes another article praising the same book. He also writes a column satirising Mme de Bargeton and Baron du Chatelet.

Lucien’s theatre reviews are heavily edited to suit the theatre’s relationship with the newspapers. He is introduced to the organisation of claques, siffleurs, and re-selling of complementary seats. Lucien and Coralie throw a lavish dinner party at which his success as a journalist is ‘crowned’.

Lucien mixes in the aristocratic society that once shunned him. He is encouraged to get rid of Coralie, join the political conservatives, and apply for royal permission to adopt the name Rubempré. He is implored to stop attacking Mme de Bargeton, whom he meets again and who flatters him.

Lucien lives beyond his means, runs up debts, and does less and less work. He moves away from literature towards politics. Lousteau explains the journalistic system of blackmailing celebrities who have something to hide.

Lucien unsuccessfully tries to raise money, and gambles away the little he has. The Céacle warns him not to join the Royalists, but he ignores them. He becomes an object of ridicule and a symbol of betrayal. He pays for good reviews of Coralie’s new performance and is forced to write a damning review of d’Arthez’ excellent new book. Coralie fails in her new part, and Lucien is refused his promotion to the name Rubempré.

His review arguments spill over into a duel, in which he is injured. He becomes bankrupt and when Coralie dies he hasn’t enough money to pay for her funeral. He forges bills in his brother-in-law’s name, pays off his debts, and decides to go back home.

Part III – An Inventor’s Tribulations

Lucien arrives back in the Angouleme region to discover that David and the family have been plunged into debt because of the forged bills.

Previously, Eve took over the press whilst David pursued his dream of new paper making techniques. They enter into a dubious business relationship with rival printers Cointet. Eve is shocked to learn the truth about her brother Lucien’s degenerate life in Paris. Then his forged bills arrive in Angouleme.

David and Eve cannot meet the bill, which has been loaded with extra legal charges. The bill is sent back to Lucien, who is advised to delay matters – which merely adds further costs. David consults lawyer Petit-Claud who is in the pay of the Cointet brothers. Finally the legal costs are three times the size of the original debt. Petit-Claud inflames tensions between David and old Sechard, who still refuses to help his son, who goes into hiding to avoid arrest.

David succeeds with his new invention. Both the Cointets and his own father want to know his secret. Petit-Claud ties to arrange a financially advantageous marriage. At this point Lucien reaches home.

Lucien is accepted back into the family – but with reservations on both sides. He is suddenly celebrated as a writer in the local press – but the adulation has been artificially arranged by Petit-Claud.

Petit-Claud pretends to assist Lucien, whilst secretly plotting against him. Lucien orders stylish new clothes from Paris and attends a grand celebration held in his honour. He plans to flatter Louise again and wangle a research grant for David. But David is tricked with a forged letter to emerge from hiding and is arrested.

Lucien decides to commit suicide but when he leaves home he is dissuaded by a Spanish priest Carlos Herrera (Vautrin the arch-criminal in disguise). Vautrin promises him financial support in exchange for Lucien’s allegiance.

Meanwhile Petit-Claud persuades Eve and David to reach a compromise with the Cointets, who enforce a disadvantageous business deal. Lucien’s money arrives a day too late to save them. Cointet goes on to become rich; David gives up his experiments and inherits his father’s fortune. Petit-Claud advances his legal career. For news of Lucien the reader is referred to the next instalment of the Comedie Humaine, which was to be A Harlot High and Low.

Illusions Perdues – characters

Jerome-Nicolas Sechard	a miserly printing press and vineyard owner
David Sechard	his son, a typographist with scientific ambitions
Lucien Chardon	David’s poor school friend, a handsome would-be writer
Mme Anais de Bargeton	an attractive social lioness with snobbish ambitions
Baron Sixte du Chatelet	a dilettante tax collector with social ambitions
Daniel d’Arthez	a talented writer, Lucien’s close friend in the artistic fellowship
Etienne Lousteau	a successful young freelance journalist
Coralie	an eighteen year old Jewish actress
Camusot	a rich and retired silk merchant and Coralie’s ‘protector’
Dauriat	a publisher at Palais-Royale
Boniface Cointet	a paper-maker, printer, and banker in Angouleme
Cerizet	David’s duplicitous employee
Pierre Petit-Claud	an ambitious and scheming provincial solicitor
Vautrin	a master criminal, ex-convict, and homosexual (real name Jaques Collin)

More on Honore de Balzac
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Old Goriot

June 24, 2017 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Old Goriot (1834) is the second masterpiece to come out of Balzac’s multi-volume project to dramatise the whole of French society – La Comedie Humaine. It tells the story of an old man who is reduced to poverty by the rapacious greed of his own daughters. He loves them dearly, but they spend all his money on lovers and self-indulgent lifestyles.

The novel also covers the rise in society of Eugene de Rastignac, an ambitious young law student from the provinces who is attracted to the glamour of fashionable society. He rapidly acquires a beautiful mistress whom he cannot afford, but he retains sufficient moral integrity to stand by his old friend Goriot in his dying hours.

Old Goriot – critical commentary

The serial novel

This is the first of the Comedie Humaine series in which Balzac introduced the device of recurring characters. A secondary character in one volume might crop up as the principal character in a later novel. Alternatively, a character might appear in several volumes in the series. Balzac was plotting the rise (and fall) of individuals in what is now called ‘serial fiction’. This is roughly the same device that came to be used in twentieth century radio soap operas, or twenty-first century multi-part television drama series.

For instance, the character of Rastignac is introduced into Old Goriot as a young law student from the south of France who has arrived in Paris as a student of law. He becomes caught up in fashionable society and rises (very rapidly) because of social and family connections. In later volumes of the Comedie Humaine Rastignac rises even further and becomes a member of the government and eventually a peer of the realm.

Balzac was exploiting the technological means of distributing his literary product which were available to him at that time. He wrote obsessively, sent his manuscripts off to printers, re-wrote and corrected proofs, sometimes for publication the following day. His work appeared in newspapers, magazines, and printed book formats – often all at the same time. He was immensely productive, became very successful and rich, but lost a lot of his money because of reckless business ventures and an extravagant lifestyle. He was almost like one of the characters in his own novels.

The Napoleonic Code

Following the French revolution Napoleon established a new legal code in 1804. It was designed to replace archaic and over-complex laws relating to people and their property. One of its stipulations (still in force today) is that the inheritance of property and capital must pass through a strictly defined path of family relations

One of the side effects of this requirement (and in common with other countries with monarchies and aristocracies) was that people with money were more inclined to form marriages based on someone’s wealth (and social status) rather than on any romantic attachments.

There was also a dowry system in common usage that required a potential bride to be offered along with a substantial financial incentive to any prospective husband. The marriage was a legal contract between two owners of property or capital. Romantic liaisons were a separate matter, conducted discretely or secretly once the formal marriage had been established.

Balzac’s novels are a clear illustration of this system in practice. Anastasia de Restaud is married, but spends her afternoons with her lover Maxime de Trailles. In fact she is in conflict with him because she is paying off his gambling debts. Rastignac’s cousin Mme de Beauseant makes no secret of her affair with the Portugese nobleman Marquis d’Ajuda-Pinto. She too is in conflict with her lover, because he is threatening to marry the rich young woman Berthe de Rochefide.

Delphine de Nucingen is married to the German banker Baron Frederic de Nucingen – but you would hardly think so. She spends her evenings at the theatre with Rastignac, whilst her husband spends his time with a mistress (also from the theatre). Old Goriot eventually pays for a separate apartment where Rastignac can live and where his daughter is free to visit as a lover. Goriot dislikes Nucingen, and feels no qualms at all in facilitating his daughter’s adultery in this way.

Anyone doubting the persistence of this system of hypocrisy and double standards should acquaint themselves with the recent history of the English Prince of Wales who was married to Diana Spencer but was also conducting a long term affair with the married woman Camilla Parker Bowles – whom he eventually married after his wife’s death in what many see as mysterious circumstances.

Narrative compression

Events move very rapidly in this novel. Rastignac arrives in Paris as a humble law student, yet almost immediately via the social connections provided by his aunt, he is circulating amongst fashionable society. And he just as immediately conceives a socially ambitious project to raise his status to that of the young aristocratic blades who are his contemporaries.

His main problem is that he lacks the financial wherewithal to live such a life. He borrows money from his mother and sisters – and repays it; he gambles and has astonishing (barely credible) good luck; and his good looks win him the love of an attractive woman with a rich husband. He also has the protection of the godfather Old Goriot, who supports him and even organises for him a bachelor apartment in a fashionable district of Paris.

This ultra-rapid rise has something of the fairy-tale about it, but it should be kept in mind that in Balzac’s scheme of French society Rastignac had still further to go. In later volumes he becomes a politician, then a minister, and eventually a peer. Balzac was plotting the stages of social advancement, ascents up the greasy pole of social climbing and the careers of arrivistes .

This is not to say that the whole of La Comedie Humaine needs to be taken on board before an appreciation of its individual parts can be made. But it does help in making an assesment of a particular volume that Balzac had other parts of his grand scheme already written or planned which threw light on each other.

Balzac and 19C literature

Balzac was a towering figure in nineteenth century literature, with an influence that stretched across Europe and beyond to America. He himself had been influenced by the pan-European influence of Walter Scott, and he was to influence Charles Dickens and contemporaries such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. He was a great influence on Henry James, whose novel Washington Square (1880) is almost an American version of Eugenie Grandet.

Balzac more or less invented what we now call the ‘serial’ novel. That is, a fictional world in which characters come and go from one episode or novel to another. They might be a minor character in one episode, then the major figure in another. This literary technique was facilitated both by the technical means of production and Balzac’s prodigious creative powers in being able to supply the text for the newspapers, magazines, and books in which his characters made their appearances.

He had a great influence within the realm of French literature, and his style of realistic detail was taken up by Emile Zola in his series of twenty novels called the Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-1893). These novels sought to document society under the Second Empire. Forty years later Marcel Proust created an account of the collapse of the French aristocracy at the start of the twentieth century in Remembrance of Things Past. This has many elements and echoes of Balzac’s work.

Old Goriot and King Lear

It should be apparent to anyone familiar with King Lear that Old Goriot follows a similar plot and is concerned with the same principal theme. Shakespeare’s character King Lear is a rich patriarch who divides his kingdom for the sake of his daughters – only to be then neglected and betrayed by two of them.

In Old Goriot the sisters Anastasie and Delphine behave towards their father exactly like Goneril and Regan do towards their father King Lear. They accept all the money he gives them and demand more, whilst showing him no respect or thanks at all. And similarly to the plot of King Lear their husbands seek control of the daughters’ inherited wealth to support their oiwn ends.

Anastasie squanders huge sums of money paying off her lover’s gambling debts, whilst Delphine’s husband Nucingen wants the money to support his dubious property development schemes. Both daughters pretend to be respectful but shamelessly neglect their father. Neither of them can be bothered to be present when he is dying, and even at his funeral they send token empty carriages

The parallels with King Lear are neatly completed by the minor figures of Taillefer and his daughter Victorine. The dubious Taillefer is a fabulously wealthy man who has unjustly disowned his daughter. She loves him with unquenchable devotion, and represents the third daughter Cordelia in the Shakespeare tragedy. Cordelia is rejected by Lear throughout the drama, but then is reunited with him only in death. Victorine too is ultimately re-united with her father on his death bed, but she does inherit his wealth.

Henry James however, in his extended essay on Balzac, casts doubt on the novelist’s acquaintance with the Shakespeare text:

Balzac’s masterpiece, to our own sense, if we must choose, is Old Goriot. In this tale there is most of his characteristic felicity and least of his characteristic infelicity. Shakespeare had been before him, but there is excellent reason to believe that beyond knowing that King Lear was the history of a doting old man, buffeted and betrayed by cruel daughters, Balzac had not placed himself to be in a position to be accused of plagiarism. He had certainly not read the play in English, and nothing is more possible than that he had not read it in such French translations as existed in 1835.

The accusation of plagiarism simply does not arise. Shakespeare himself took the plot outline of his play from an earlier source (Holinshed’s Chronicles) and even if Balzac was intimately acquainted with the Lear text, he transforms and re-imagines the story line completely, making it into something quite different – which he describes as ‘this obscure but appalling Parisian tragedy’.

Old Goriot – study resources

Old Goriot – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Old Goriot – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

Old Goriot – Everyman – Amazon UK

Old Goriot – Everyman – Amazon US

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

Old Goriot – plot synopsis

A Family Boarding House

The Maison Vauquer is a seedy boarding house in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Run frugally by the widow Madame Vauquer, its principal inhabitants are Pere Goriot, a retired pasta merchant, Eugene de Rastignac, a law student, and Vautrin a shady character of unknown occupation.

When Goriot first arrives he is quite prosperous and Mme Vauquer has designs on him. She tries to allure him but fails, and so turns against him. Later, Goriot’s fortunes begin to decline, and malicious rumours are circulated about him. He is visited by young women, but he explains they are his two daughters.

The ambitious student Rastignac is provided with an entree into fashionable society by his aunt. Goriot is selling off his silver plate to the money lender Gobseck. Mysterious fellow boarder Vautrin seems to know everybody’s business. Rastignac visits Anastasia de Restaud where he is snubbed by both her husband and her lover Maxime.

Rastignac then goes to see his cousin Mme de Beauseant who is engaged in a dispute with her Portugese lover. There he learns the history of Goriot’s two daughters and their rejection of their father. Rastignac vows to enter fashionable society, and writes to his mother and sisters for money.

Entry on the Social Scene

Rastignac’s mother and sisters send him money. Vautrin outlines to him the difficulties of professional success and lists the vices and corruption underlying fashionable society. Vautrin reveals his plans to become a rich plantation owner and proposes a devil’s pact with Rastignac. He will find him a rich wife in exchange for a lump sum. He has in mind fellow boarder Victorine, whose father is a wealthy man.

Rastignac gets new clothes and is introduced to Delphine de Nucingen at the theatre. He flatters her unashamedly. He reports the meeting to Goriot , who deceives himself about the devotion of his daughters.

Rastignac gambles at roulette for Delphine and wins money which she owes to her former lover, who has just left her. Rastignac indulges himself in fashionable society and gets himself into debt. He borrows money from Vautrin, gambles successfully again, and pays off his debts.

Vautrin is revealed as an ex-convict (‘Death Dodger’) whose real name is Jacques Collin. Rastignac is frustrated by Delphine, so he pays court to Victorine Traillefer. Goriot reveals his scheme to house Rastignac in an apartment that his daughter Delphine can visit. Vautrin has meanwhile arranged for Victorine’s brother to be killed in a duel.

There is an impromptu party at Maison Vauquer where Vautrin drugs Rastignac and Goriot – but next day he is betrayed to the police and arrested. The woman who betrayed him is forced to leave.

Goriot takes Rastignac to the bachelor apartment he has arranged and paid for. Mme Vauquer is upset at the loss of boarders. Rastignac receives an invitation to a grand ball. Anastasie has money problems. Delphine has kept Rastignac dangling for almost two years.

The Father’s Death

Nucingen’s property schemes are in trouble, and he needs control of his wife’s money. Anastasie has sold her husband’s family diamonds to pay off her lover’s gambling debts – but she still needs more money Rastignac gives her a bill of exchange for twelve thousand Francs. The sisters quarrel and harass their ailing father.

Goriot is dying, but both sisters go to Mme de Beauseant’s ball. The old man is nursed by Rastignac and young doctor Bianchon, neither of whom have any money. When Goriot dies, he is given a pauper’s funeral.

Old Goriot – principal characters

This is a quick guide to the main players in Old Goriot. For a comprehensive survey of all the characters in La Comedie Humaine, see the excellent compilation of notes by Anatole Cerfberr and Jules François Christophe at Gutenberg.org. They give an alphabetical list of potted biographies of all the main characters in the whole series of novels

Given any single Balzac novel as a starting point, you can trace where a character has come from and what happens to them in subsequent parts of the great work.

Madame Vauquer	widowed boarding house keeper
Eugene de Rastignac	an ambitious law student from the South
Old Goriot	a retired and impoverished pasta merchant
Vautrin	a celebrity convict (‘Death Dodger’) real name Jaques Collin
Marquis Ajuda-Pinto	a Portugese nobleman, Claire de Beauseant’s lover
Horace Bianchon	a medical student and friend of Rastignac’s at Maison Vauquer
Monsieur de Trailles	Anastasie’s lover, a playboy and gambler
Monsieur Taillefer	a rich but heartless father
Victorine Taillefer	his devoted but neglected daughter
Anastasie de Restaud	Goriot’s elder daughter
Delphine de Nucingen	Goriot’s younger daughter
Baron de Nucingen	corrupt German banker and speculator

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Reading a Balzac Novel

July 23, 2018 by Roy Johnson

If you read any of Balzac’s famous novels – say Cousin Bette, Eugenie Grandet, or Old Goriot – you will probably have in your hands a paperback or an old hardback single volume that offers you all the elements of a traditional novel. It will have memorable characters, a complex plot, and a detailed insight into the workings of French society.

It will also be self-contained. The narrative it presents will be complete, and all the information you need to understand the story will be contained in the one volume you hold in your hands. And yet that sense of completeness will be slightly deceptive – because the world Balzac created in his fiction actually expands beyond the confines of any single novel. What he created was an entire world documenting French society between (roughly) 1800 and 1840.

La Comedie Humaine

Balzac began publishing fiction in 1820s, but from 1834 onward he conceived of his novels and stories as free-standing but interlocking elements in a huge study of French society to which he gave the general title of La Comedie Humaine. (This is a nod towards Dante’s The Divine Comedy.)

He used the device of recurring characters and overlapping events to produce a sort of three-dimensional literary portrait of post-revolutionary France. This grand scheme includes (as he categorized them) Scenes of Provincial Life, Scenes of Parisian Life, Scenes of Military and Political Life, and what he called Philosophic Studies.

Between 1820 and 1848 Balzac produced a total of over ninety finished novels, short stories, and novellas, plus enormous amounts of journalism and theatrical endeavours, the latter of which are largely forgotten today. He was astonishingly productive, and in any given year he might be working on not one but two or three novels at the same time – novels which are now regarded as masterpieces of European literature.

Characters

He was so absorbed in the fictional world of his own creation, he eventually came to regard it as real. This is rather like contemporary fiction in serial form such as the radio programme “The Archers”. Listeners commonly discuss the Ambridge characters as if they were real people.

In his late novel Ursule Mirouet (1841) Balzac introduces a character, the abstemious and entirely virtuous clergyman Abbe Chaperon:

Abbe Chaperon’s arguments with his maid about household expenses were more meticulous than Gobseck’s with his – if indeed that notorious Jew ever did employ a housemaid.

The Abbe is being compared with a character Gobseck (a rapacious money-lender) who is the central figure in the novella, Gobseck (1830). He also crops up in a number of the other works as a minor character – in Old Goriot (1834), Cesar Birotteau (1837), and The Unconscious Comedians (1846). But Balzac makes this comparison as if his readers will be fully conscious of who is being discussed – as indeed they might have been at the time.

Similarly, a mysterious character called Vautrin appears in Old Goriot. He seems to know everybody’s business; he has very cynical views about society; and it turns out that his real name is Jacques Collin. He reappears in a later novel, Lost Illusions (1837-1843), but this time masquerading as Abbé Carlos Herrera, a Spanish diplomat. He is in fact a French master criminal who has escaped from prison and is leading the life of an adventurer, attracted mainly to handsome young men.

After taking his young protégé Lucien Rubempré to Paris he sets him up in stylish quarters with a lover Esther Gobseck (daughter of the above-mentioned money lender). This forms the main plot of A Harlot High and Low (1838-1847). Subsequently Vautrin is arrested and goes back to prison, but he manages to secure his release and later joins the police force as an informer.

This complex literary technique has two important outcomes. First, it allows Balzac to create a three-dimensional account of society. A fictional character might have a very small role to play in one novel, yet that same person might be the entire subject of a major drama in another work. Second, the reader is offered what might be called a ‘stereoscopic’ reading experience.

For instance, in those scenes set in middle and upper-class Paris, any visit to the theatre or the opera is likely to include mention of Eugene de Rastignac, Lucien Rubempre, Horace Brianchon, and Daniel D’Arthez. These are young men about town who know each other and form a fashionable entourage or backdrop to the events of the story. Yet each of these characters has a complex personal history which forms the substance of the other novels in La Comedie Humaine.

Rastignac is a former law student who rises in society, marries into the rich Nuncingen family, and eventually becomes a peer of the realm. Rubempré (born Lucien Chardon) has talent but lacks principles, and ends up hanging himself in prison. D’Arthez is a writer with talent and principles who resists the lure of journalism and produces work of outstanding quality. Bianchon is a humble and self-sacrificing doctor who acts honourably whatever the circumstances, and is admired at all levels of society.

La Comedie Humaine contains over two thousand named characters, of which five hundred appear in several different novels and stories. The introduction of these overlapping and reappearing characters is designed to generate the sense of a real, knowable world in all its complexity. But as the literary critic David Bellos points out, it also produces the opposite effect, which is nevertheless life-like:

The paradox is that a device designed to give solidity to a vast panorama of social life actually gives it what is perhaps its most life-like feature—inexhaustible fragmentariness. Balzac’s world opens on to infinity through the central device that first appeared as a means of closing it off.

If you wish to track any of the characters and their appearances in Balzac’s whole oeuvre, you will find a huge list on line with detailed biographies at – The Repertory of the Comedy Humaine

Choosing a text

During his short life Balzac wrote a prodigious amount – novels, stories, novellas, essays, and even plays. His work appeared in newspapers, magazines, and as individual printed books. Because he is so famous as a classic novelist, his works have been translated many times, and they are available in any number of formats.

1905 edition in sixteen volumes

There are modern translations, older versions from the nineteenth century, ‘collected works’, and all sorts of eBook compilations which probably don’t even mention the name of a translator.

One thing is worth noting in making your choice of text. Balzac broke up the overflowing torrent of his original narratives into separate chapters with sub-titles. These individual headings were particularly suitable for newspapers and magazines, where unbroken blocks of text are not visually attractive. But in various editions of his work produced later in book form, these sub-titles were sometimes omitted in order to save space.

This apparently innocent change can be a sad loss – for two reasons. The first is that the novels become more difficult to read without these chapter breaks. The second is that Balzac’s choice of sub-titles often present a form of satirical running commentary on the content of the events he describes. They are both an aid to interpretation and a source of amusement. They also reveal the structure of the work, which is not always apparent when the story is presented as one continuous block of text.

Balzac – selected reading

Pere Goriot – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Eugenie Grandet – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Bette – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

Ursule Mirouet – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Selected Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

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The Illustrious Gaudissart

July 2, 2018 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, study guide, plot summary, study resources

The Illustrious Gaudissart (1833) features a character who will crop up in a number of Balzac’s later novels – Scenes from the Life of a Courtesan (1838-1846), Cesar Birotteau (1837), and Cousin Pons (1846-1847). Gaudissart goes on later to become the owner of a theatre, but is here put forward as the epitome of the travelling salesman.

The Illustrious Gaudissart – commentary

The story offers a wonderful example of Balzac as a satirical, ironic sociologist. He astutely identifies a new social type and pours mockery onto him as a vulgar parvenu, a man who (to quote Oscar Wilde) ‘knows
the price of everything and the value of nothing’.

The first part of the story is a detailed analysis of everything Balzac sees as meretricious and shoddy in this ‘hail fellow, well met’ type with his jokes, his sales patter, and his lack of social or ethical depth.

Balzac was a staunch conservative, royalist, and Catholic. He sees this new style of seedy entrepreneur as an example of the declining civic values following the revolution. Yet Balzac was himself an ambitious and hard-working provincial – with social aspirations. He cannot but partly admire Gaudissart’s persistence and enterprise – peddling newspaper subscriptions and life insurance policies, plus selling hats and the ‘article Paris‘ at the same time.

He takes from the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast among the drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human pyrotechnic is a scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by himself, an unbelieving priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he expounds the better for his want of faith. Curious being! He has seen everything, known everything, and is up in all the ways of the world.

The story is essentially an episode in which this vain, boastful, and over-confident con man is duped by wily provincials. The narrative peters out with a rather farcical conclusion, but leaves behind an interesting study in ‘enterprise’ which sits comfortably within the grand scheme of La Comedie Humaine.

Gaudissart II

In a later story by this title, published in 1846, the name Gaudissart is used as a generic term to describe all cunning salesmen. The story centres on a fashionable Parisian store in which the manager sells an Englishwoman an expensive shawl. He does so by a mixture of subtle sales techniques, psychological insight, flattery, and boastfulness mixed with a dash of sharp practice. Balzac sees this example of ‘Gaudissart’ as a social force.

The Illustrious Gaudissart – study resources

The Human Comedy – NYRB Classics – Amazon UK

The Human Comedy – NYRB Classics – Amazon US

Cousin Pons – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

Cousin Pons – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

All characters in La Comedie Humaine

Cambridge Companion to Balzac – Cambridge UP – Amazon UK

The Illustrious Gaudissart – plot summary

Ch.I The commercial traveller as a new social type. He moves between the city and the provinces but belongs to neither. His task is to extract commissions by persuasion. Gaudissart is a successful example who is living in Paris in semi-retirement – all things to all men. He is approached to sell life insurance, and thinks to promote newspaper subscriptions at the same time – to both a Monarchist and a republican publication.

Ch.II Gaudissart promises to bring home wealth to his mistress Jenny Courand. He also plans to sell subscriptions to a children’s newspaper – and he nurtures secret political ambitions. He writes Jenny a letter from the provinces, boasting of his commercial success.

Ch.III He arrives in Tours, a city which prides itself on hard-headed realism. When Gaudissart tries his vague salesmanship on M. Vernier, the Tourangian as a joke steers him towards Margaritis, the local lunatic, pretending that he is a banker.

Ch.IV Gaudissart tries to sell life insurance to Margaritis, who in his turn tries to sell wine (which he doesn’t have) to Gaudissart. In the end Gaudissart buys the wine, and Margaritis buys subscriptions to the children’s newspaper.

Ch.V Gaudissart discovers that he has been duped and complains to Vernier. The two men quarrel and a duel is arranged. It turns out to be a farce, with Vernier shooting a cow in a nearby field. They call a truce, and Vernier takes out twenty subscriptions to the children’s newspaper. Gaudissart later brags about killing a man in a duel.

The Illustrious Gaudissart – characters

Felix Gaudissart	a 38 year old boastful travelling salesman
Jenny Courand	Gaudissart’s mistress in Paris, a florist
Vernier	a retired dyer in Tours
Margaritis	a lunatic in Tours who thinks he owns vineyards

More on Honore de Balzac
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Honore de Balzac

tutorials, study guides, web links and commentary

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

A Commission in Lunacy – commentary

Balzac – selected reading

A Commission in Lunacy – plot summary

A Commission in Lunacy – characters

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

Cesar Birotteau – commentary

Balzac – selected reading

Cesar Birotteau – plot summary

Cesar Birotteau – characters

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Cousin Bette – background

Cousin Bette – commentary

Cousin Bette – study resources

Cousin Bette – plot summary

Cousin Bette – principal characters

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Eugenie Grandet – commentary

Eugenie Grandet – study resources

Eugenie Grandet – plot synopsis

Eugenie Grandet – prinipal characters

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Gobseck – background

Gobseck – critical commentary

Gobseck – study resources

Gobseck – plot summary

Gobseck – principal characters

tutorial, commentary, study resources, further reading

Lost Illusions – commentary

Lost Illusions – study resources

Lost Illusions – plot summary

Illusions Perdues – characters

tutorial, commentary, study resources, web links

Old Goriot – critical commentary

Old Goriot – study resources

Old Goriot – plot synopsis

Old Goriot – principal characters

Balzac – selected reading

tutorial, study guide, plot summary, study resources

The Illustrious Gaudissart – commentary

The Illustrious Gaudissart – study resources

The Illustrious Gaudissart – plot summary

The Illustrious Gaudissart – characters

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