History of the Thirteen (Penguin ed) Read online

  HISTORY OF THE THIRTEEN

  Honoré de Balzac was born at Tours in 1799, the son of a civil servant. He spent nearly six years as a boarder in a Vendôme school, then went to live in Paris, working as a lawyer’s clerk then as a hack-writer. Between 1820 and 1824 he wrote a number of novels under various pseudonyms, many of them in collaboration, after which he unsuccessfully tried his luck at publishing, printing and type-founding. At the age of thirty, heavily in debt, he returned to literature with a dedicated fury and wrote the first novel to appear under his own name, The Chouans. During the next twenty years he wrote about ninety novels and shorter stories, among them many masterpieces, to which he gave the comprehensive title The Human Comedy. He died in 1850, a few months after his marriage to Evelina Hanska, the Polish countess with whom he had maintained amorous relations for eighteen years.

  Herbert J. Hunt was educated at Lichfield Cathedral Choir School, the Lichfield Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford. He was a Tutor and Fellow at St Edmund Hall from 1927 to 1944, then until 1966 he was Professor of French Literature and Language at London University and from 1966 to 1970 was Senior Fellow of Warwick University. He published books on literature and thought in nineteenth-century France; he was also the author of a biography of Balzac, and a comprehensive study of Balzac’s writings: Balzac’s ‘Comédie Humaine’ (1959, paperback 1964). His translation of Balzac’s Cousin Pons appeared in the Penguin Classics in 1968. He died in 1973.

  HONORÉ DE BALZAC

  History of the Thirteen

  TRANSLATED AND

  INTRODUCED BY

  HERBERT J. HUNT

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  Histoire des Treize first published 1833–5

  This translation first published 1974

  Translation and Introduction copyright © the Estate of Herbert J. Hunt, 1974

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196121-7

  Contents

  Introduction

  Select Bibliography

  Preface

  FERRAGUS: CHIEF OF THE COMPANIONS OF DUTY

  1. Madame Jules

  2. Ferragus

  3. A wife under suspicion

  4. Where should one choose to die?

  THE DUCHESSE DE LANGEAIS

  1. Sister Thérèse

  2. Love in the parish of Saint Thomas Aquinas

  3. The real woman

  4. …God disposes

  THE GIRL WITH THE GOLDEN EYES

  1. Parisian physiognomies

  2. A singular love affair

  3. The call of the blood

  Introduction

  AT the age of thirty Honoré de Balzac,1 after ten years of varying activities, began work on that cycle of novels, short stories and reflective studies which, by 1840, he had decided to call The Human Comedy. By 1848, Balzac being worn out and almost moribund, his productivity having ceased, the work comprised over ninety items. It was in 1834 that the idea came to him of dividing both present and future works into ‘Studies’: Studies of Manners, Philosophical Studies and Analytical Studies (very few of these latter materialized). His Studies of Manners, subdivided into types of ‘Scenes’, began in 1829 with Scenes of Private Life. Around 1832–3 he started to develop a new category, Scenes of Provincial Life, and, almost simultaneously – he wrote fast and furiously, and was generally occupied with several stories at a time – a third category: Scenes of Parisian Life. The evolution of the three other types of scene: Political, Military and Country Life, does not concern us here.

  History of the Thirteen (Ferragus2 and The Duchesse de Langeais were first published in 1833–4, The Girl with the Golden Eyes in 1835) laid the foundation of the Paris ‘Scenes’, for even though Chapters 1 and 4 of The Duchesse de Langeais have their action in Majorca, the core of the action is in Paris. Moreover Balzac almost goes out of his way to characterize aspects of the Parisian way of life in this trilogy of fictions. Ferragus gives a description (minute as always with Balzac) of certain unsavoury areas of that city, with an intimate glance at the interrelation between criminal and harlot types and, at the end, a gruesome but masterly satire on bureaucratic red tape as it concerns the attempt to obtain official sanction for the cremation of Clémence Desmarets. The Duchesse de Langeais includes a searching criticism, practically a denunciation, of the French aristocracy almost hermetically sealed in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. We are shown a class clinging to its titles and privileges, failing to follow the example of the English aristocracy by recruiting its ranks from lower but more vigorous elements in the community, and failing thereby to take up its natural mission as a guiding force in the new political, social and economic structure created by Revolution and Empire. Balzac’s personal motives for this criticism will be considered later. More than a quarter of The Girl with the Golden Eyes is devoted to a vivacious evocation of five classes, ‘spheres’, or ‘circles’ in Paris – proletariat, lower bourgeoisie, upper or professional bourgeoisie, the world of artists and the aristocracy – with their multifarious occupations and preoccupations; all of them wasting their lives in the avid quest for gold and the pleasures they hope it will buy : propter vitam vivendi perdere causas. All are inhabitants of a Dantesque inferno, of which Balzac was already constituting himself the historian (see p. 318 and note 6). Ferragus in particular, with its subordinate theme of the fanatically devoted father (p.123) points directly to that ‘histoire parisienne’ – eminently Parisian – Old Goriot, which, by the end of 1834, was already coming into print.

  Another conspicuous feature of this trilogy is that it purports to be the history of a secret society. The Thirteen brings out an amusing though perhaps regrettable trait in Balzac’s psychology. He had from youth onwards a taste for the mysterious and the terrible, the cloak-and-dagger element so characteristic of the ‘Gothic’ novel or the ‘novel of terror’. In his years as an apprentice writer (1819–24) he himself had dabbled in this genre. He had invented a criminal gangster, Argow the Pirate, who appears in Le Vicaire des Ardennes (1822) and Annette et le criminel (1824). Even after the pseudonymous ‘Horace de Saint-Aubin’ had blossomed out into Honoré de Balzac, melodramatic elements were liable to crop up in his novels: the ‘Parisian captain’ in The Woman of Thirty and, above all, the criminal leader Vautrin in Old Goriot and A Harlot High and Low (the sequel to Lost Illusions). He himself was to found a ‘secret society’ in 1838 – the Chevaux Rouges – one which, however, never succeeded in being anything more than a spasmodically functioning dining-club. Hence, thanks to the boyish gusto which Balzac retained throughout life, his creation of the Thirteen in 1833–5.3 Only five of the prominent members are ever named, and four of them appear in this trilogy: Ferragus, Armand de Montriveau, the Marquis de Ronquerolles and Henri de Marsay. The Preface g
ives a description of the association. Ferragus uses their services fairly extensively in the novel that bears his name. Armand de Montriveau calls upon them, first of all when he is preparing his threatened vengeance on Antoinette de Langeais, and again, in the final chapter, for the abduction of ‘Sister Thérèse’ from the remote convent from which she only emerges as a corpse. Henri de Marsay has the aid of Ferragus and Ronquerolles when he is preparing to punish Paquita Valdes because she has made him ‘pose for another person’.4 The members of this association are rich, all-powerful, sinister and unscrupulous. They even seem to possess preternatural powers. On p. 75 Ferragus seizes Auguste de Maulincour by the hair and shakes his head several times, thereby inducing a disease which brings him lingeringly to death. It has been maintained that this is plausible as a method of administering arsenic,5 but it is easy to remain sceptical on this score. Armand de Montriveau, when Antoinette tries to repel his advances with allusions to her marriage bonds, boasts of possessing power over fate, though in fact he may merely be referring to the diabolical resourcefulness of the Thirteen (p. 222). But no such Anne Radcliffe rationalization is possible in the case of Henri de Marsay: he is positively credited with an occult power which enables him to condemn to death anyone he chooses; a power due, it seems, to a pact he has made with the demon (p. 363): here we are definitely back in the ambience of the ‘Gothic’ novels as developed by Monk Lewis and Maturin, indeed by Balzac himself in his novel of 1822, Le Centenaire. We can now leave this aspect of the trilogy while observing that, when all is said and done, the Thirteen do not unduly obtrude and that the essential interest of the three fictions is a psychological one.

  But readers will notice that one of these figures – Ferragus – bears the title Chef des Dévorants (Chief of the Companions of Duty). Balzac explains (pp. 23–5) what the ‘companionships’ were, though not with complete accuracy. A brief definition of them here will help to show why Balzac attached Ferragus to them. The Compagnonnages were associations of guilds of skilled craftsmen which had survived from the Middle Ages and which, it appears, still subsist, picturesquely and anachronistically, in the twentieth century. They claimed to date back, like the freemasons, to the time when Solomon was building the Temple at Jerusalem. They were divided into three ‘rites’ or devoirs (duties): Children of Solomon, or Companions of the Duty of Liberty; Children of Master Jacques; and Children of Papa Soubise. They had their secrets, their ritual initiations, their passwords and customs: for instance, each postulant, before passing out as a fully fledged Compagnon, had to make a tour of France practising his craft (joiner, weaver, stone-mason, ironworker, etc.), receiving hospitality at each stage of his tour in a lodging-house kept by a ‘mother’. Contrary to what Balzac says on p. 25, all members of these three societies were Dévorants, that is to say, members of a devoir; but the title Dévorants was more specially applied to the Children of Master Jacques. In the early nineteenth century they were famous for their rivalries and quarrels, which often led to bloodshed and murder. They were arousing much interest at the time when Balzac was writing. One Agricol Perdiguier (whose nickname – see Balzac’s remarks on nicknames on p. 24 – was Avignonnais-la-Vertu) was to publish in 1839 his Livre du Compagnonnage, which inspired the novelist George Sand, always tenderly sympathetic towards the working classes, with her fiction of 1840, Les Compagnons du Tour de France. The reasons which determined Balzac to make Ferragus a leader of Compagnons are not far to seek: Ferragus, alias Gratien Bourignard, is an escaped convict. He is the most sinister member of the Thirteen, even though he ends up as a pathetic, even comic figure; and the violence for which the Compagnons were notorious, but above all their tradition of loyalty to the members of their devoir (see p. 24), afforded him a means of heightening the melodramatic element in his novel.

  These quasi-extraneous elements having been dealt with, we are now free to consider the three novels in their essential themes. Stripped of its melodramatic excrescences, and allowing for the interest contained in Balzac’s evocation of the grisette, Ida Gruget, and her relations with Gratien Bourignard, Ferragus is a middle-class tragedy. Jules Desmarets is a middle-class Othello, with a young military fop – Auguste de Maulincour – to take the role of Iago. It is a genuinely tragic love story, a striking contribution to the many studies extant of connubial bliss being destroyed by suspicion and misunderstanding, one which culminates in conjugal anguish and premature death; one which may perhaps be put on a level with Madame de La Fayette’s great novel of 1674, La Princesse de Clèves, even though it falls short of it in respect of perfect taste, classical sobriety and restraint. Does the turn of events command the reader’s total adherence? He may feel a little restive as he advances from p. 77 onwards: why at this stage could not husband and wife discuss their difficulties frankly, with Clémence revealing the truth that her father is a criminal fleeing from justice? The answer is that people rarely behave reasonably in moments of emotional stress. Jules and Clémence miss the opportunity to come to terms. Her rapid collapse and death, recounted in such lavish detail, accord with a romantic convention of the time: emotional disruption may well involve physical disintegration. Balzac was of his era in subscribing to this. There is much here over which few late-twentieth-century readers will shed tears with Balzac. They will be less likely to withhold their admiration from the dry irony of the Père-Lachaise descriptions, which Balzac was scarcely to surpass even in Cousin Pons (1847).

  The Duchesse de Langeais brings us closer to Balzac’s personal history, as also to his political commitments between 1831 and 1833. It is not too much to say that the Revolution of July 1830, which elevated Louis-Philippe of Orléans to the throne as ‘roi des Français’, left Balzac cold. His scepticism about the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ brought him into contact with a leader of the legitimate royalist party, the Duc de Fitz-James. His already conservative opinions became more and more pronounced and, early in 1832, he began to contribute to a legitimist periodical, Le Rénovateur. This was essentially a temporary adherence, although Balzac was to remain a reactionary throughout his life. He had his ideas (expressed in the second chapter of The Duchesse de Langeais and elsewhere) on what the legitimists ought to do in order to take effectual action: this was too much for them, and it was not long before they dropped him, and he dropped them. But towards the end of 1831 he had become emotionally involved. Fitz-James’s niece, the Marquise de Castries, started a pen-friendship, at first anonymous, with him. He discovered who she was. They met. He fell in love both with her and with the prospect of having a marquise for a mistress. Their friendship reached the tender stage. In the early autumn of 1832 they went off on a holiday together – to Aix-les-Bains in Dauphiné and then on to Geneva. All this time Balzac had been wooing her assiduously, but she refused to accord him her ultimate favours. They parted, he furious, dejected, humiliated; and he brooded over the humiliation for some time to come. Regarding himself as the victim of a heartless coquette (though she did have valid reasons for refusing herself) he naturally took to the pen to avenge, or at any rate to compensate, himself; initially in the first, unpublished version of his Country Doctor (1833), and then in The Duchesse de Langeais.

  This novel is therefore the study of a society coquette and of the wiles she adopts in order to enslave an impressionable, but heroic and austere ex-soldier. She goes too far and ‘toys with the axe’ (the original title of the novel was Touch not the Axe! – see p. 251). Montriveau plans an exemplary punishment for her : branding with a hot iron. At this juncture the coquette in her disappears and the true woman asserts herself. Henceforth she is wholly his and even makes shameless advances to him (the reactions of her kinsfolk to this conduct enable Balzac to display his gift for satire, so much more effective than his predilection for sentimental effusion). Montriveau is too obdurate. She flees the world and becomes a nun, and he does not succeed in recapturing her alive.

  One must not of course exaggerate the personal element in this story, but it is certainly there. It is a cas
e of wish-fulfilment. The all-conquering Balzac, transformed into a heroic aristocrat, brings a proud society queen to his feet. But if that were the sole interest of the novel, it would scarcely be sufficient. Balzac, as always in his fictions in which personal reminiscences are blended, rises above them. He has sense enough to let Antoinette de Langeais put potent arguments to Montriveau in favour of resistance to the selfish impulses of a would-be seducer (p. 234 and elsewhere). Throughout the novel he emphasizes one theme: the difference between passion and true love (see p. 266 ff.), clinched in the ironical conclusion of p. 305: ‘From now on be content with passion. Love is an investment we ought to think out cautiously.’

  And so, discounting the personal element in the story, we should ask ourselves also, with regard to the psychological element, what credibility we can accord to the picture of Antoinette’s surrender and self-humiliation when she comes under the threat of the branding-iron. ‘Duchesses are tough,’ says de Ronquerolles, ‘and women of her kind are more amenable to cruelty than to kindness.’ Who could doubt that this is sometimes true in certain cases? What perhaps is nowadays less acceptable to us is Antoinette’s reaction after apparent rejection: retirement to a convent, espousal with God, romanticism at its worst! Similarly, in The Girl with the Golden Eyes, Henri de Marsay’s half-sister, after stabbing Paquita to death, exclaims: ‘I’ve only God left to love!’ and announces her intention of taking the veil.

  So we come finally to the third novel – a very short one. It represents an incursion into what was then virtually still a forbidden zone. Homosexuality had been frequently treated by the less respectable of eighteenth-century novelists, and it was at least hinted at by a few of Balzac’s own contemporaries. He himself had already treated it discreetly in a short story of 1830, Sarrasine. Vautrin, his master-criminal, making his first appearance in Old Goriot (1834–5), is a homosexual, though Balzac does not over-emphasize the fact. There were a few cases of lesbianism in real life known to him. Hence perhaps the fact that in The Girl with the Golden Eyes Balzac by no means draws a veil over realities. No more than de Marsay does he express horror or distaste at the idea of the lesbian relationship between Paquita and Margarita (p. 377); he seems rather to be more concerned with the question of verisimilitude. How indeed, we ourselves may ask, is it conceivable that Paquita should become infatuated with such an unspeakable cad6 as Henri de Marsay? The explanation is that he is almost a replica of his half-sister Mariquita. It is the ‘call of the blood’. Balzac then seems to treat the theme with less moral misgivings than Baudelaire was to show in Les femmes damnées (Les Fleurs du Mal).