The Human Comedy Read online

  Again in “A Passion in the Desert” we are given a framed tale of some complexity: The story opens at Monsieur Martin’s menagerie (an actual Parisian attraction of Balzac’s time). The narrator’s woman companion expresses surprise that Martin’s beasts have been so thoroughly tamed that he can enter their cage with impunity. To which the narrator responds that he, too, was surprised on his first visit to the menagerie, but that he encountered there a one-legged soldier who claimed it could be easily explained. It is from this soldier that the narrator heard the tale of the panther met in the desert, which he now writes down for his woman friend—but withholding the end, which he will have to deliver as a spoken coda to the tale. The links between the tale told and the situation of its telling are by no means obvious here. What, if anything, does the soldier’s amputated leg have to do with his adventure with the panther? Are her teeth responsible? And if we learn from contemporary accounts that Monsieur Martin was reputed to master his wild beasts by satisfying them sexually before a performance, what further connections do we want to tease out among the various forms of passion? Freud began his momentous Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality with a discussion of “the perversions,” in order to go on to show that “normal” sexuality was simply what was most widely accepted on a spectrum of “psychosexuality,” that is to say, sex in the mind.

  There are passions other than the erotic at play in these tales: those aroused by politics and money, for instance. In “Z. Marcas,” the ups and downs of the title character’s political career during a turbulent period in French history are told episodically, partially, obliquely by the two students who share a landing with him in a cheap lodging house. It’s as if Balzac were writing a political biography but refusing to do it straight, understanding that the story of a disillusioned political veteran can be more effectively told through its effects on two ambitious young men with their futures before them. If Marxist critics, starting with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, have been among the most appreciative of Balzac’s readers, it’s because Balzac —who loudly declared himself a monarchist and Catholic—had no use for the compromise regimes of his lifetime, and denounced their incoherence and corruption. Born in 1799, in the year following Napoleon’s coup d’état, Balzac lived as a child through the epic of the Napoleonic Wars and the Empire, then the collapse of Waterloo and the subsequent Restoration monarchy, which in turn collapsed in the Revolution of 1830, which brought the rule of the “Citizen King,” Louis Philippe d’Orléans (from the younger branch of the royal family), along with the exile of the last of the Bourbon monarchs. The Restoration ought to have pleased Balzac—but it was in his judgment not a true, vigorous reinstatement of monarchy but a simulacrum, where the aged rulers of France were out of touch with the real dynamics of the time, and the restored aristocracy was far more concerned with its privileges and petty class distinctions than with the responsibilities of power and leadership. It ended, as it deserved, in revolution, in 1830, and the “bourgeois monarchy” of Louis Philippe, no longer king of France but “King of the French.” Marcas suffers through these regimes, with the reward of ingratitude.

  Balzac’s quarrel with the Restoration returns in “The Duchesse de Langeais,” the four-part novella in which the opening of the second chapter is devoted to a disquisition about the place of the Faubourg Saint-Germain in French politics and history. Named for the quarter of Paris where the aristocracy began settling in large town houses in the late seventeenth century—many of them still stand in the seventh arrondissement of Paris—the “noble Faubourg” was a place, a class, and a concept. But according to Balzac, it never took on the role that it should have for the Restoration to be a success. The nobility, concerned with its own privileges and prerogatives, didn’t recruit aspiring young men of talent—like Balzac—who were only too eager to join its ranks. It failed to act on the model of the Tory Party in England, which reached into the middle class to renew its forces and anchor itself more firmly in the affections of the citizenry. The French Restoration was a gerontocracy—the two kings of the era, Louis XVIII and Charles X, were both brothers of Louis XVI, guillotined in 1793, and old men by the time they ascended the throne—out of touch with the youth of the country. It was, in Balzac’s judgment, a cold, mean, selfish time. The result was a more and more vigorous and vocal political opposition. Journalists were in the vanguard during the three “glorious days” of the Revolution of 1830: New rules tightening censorship of newspapers helped to spark the insurrection.

  The Revolution was no more to Balzac’s liking than the Restoration. The rule of a king who dressed in the bourgeois black frock coat and top hat only confirmed his cynical view of the forces in control of his country. France entered an era of capitalist and industrial expansion. “Enrichissez-vous”: get rich, the prime minister François Guizot said (perhaps apocryphally) to his countrymen. And so the French did—at least those who had the means to invest in factories, railroads, and various manipulative stock market schemes. The workers—witness the revolts of the Lyons silk workers and various short-lived uprisings of the Paris proletariat—were largely excluded from this newfound prosperity. Balzac, writing most of his Human Comedy in the 1830s and 1840s, after the July Revolution but setting the majority of his tales under the Restoration, has the benefit of a historian’s hindsight on a regime and a cultural moment that failed. That lends depth to his analysis. But hindsight also increased his anxiety about the future of French society. If social historians continue to find Balzac a great source text, it’s because he delved into most of the forces that were transforming his country and saw what the Marxists call the contradictions of a nascent capitalist society.

  “Capitalist” is what Balzac calls the usurer Gobseck in the long short story, or short novella, that bears his name. It’s possibly a misuse of the term, yet Gobseck’s loans, often at exorbitant rates of interest, do oil the capitalist machinery. At a time when loans between individuals most often took the form of the kind of IOU known as a lettre de change—an exchangeable and discountable promissory note—the moneylender was a key figure. Gobseck sits at the still center of the turning earth in The Human Comedy. He probably appears in more of the novels and tales than any other character, with the possible exception of the lawyer Derville, who is the narrator of Gobseck’s story here. Sooner or later, it seems, everyone must come to Gobseck for cash. In this manner, as he tells the young Derville, he gets to see the spectacle of human emotion in its rawest and most stripped-down condition. Gobseck lives without wearing himself out through the ravages of passion, including sex, that he sees devouring his compatriots. He has learned the superior pleasures of the observer. “Well, I tell you,” he says to Derville, “every human passion, writ larger by the play of social interests, they all come and parade before me in my life of calm. Furthermore, that scientific curiosity of yours, a kind of struggle with man always getting the worst of it—I replace it with insight into the springs that set mankind moving. In a word, I possess the world with no effort at all, and the world has no grip on me.”

  Money offers possession of the world without an expenditure of life’s vital forces—which Balzac believed to be limited, expendable in a brief flaming existence, or else to be hoarded over the long life of the miser and the observer. The elegant young men and women of Paris parade through Gobseck’s life—as well as the honest seamstress Fanny Malvaut, whom he will bring to Derville’s attention. In the process, we as readers get to see the stuff of other dramas recorded elsewhere in The Human Comedy in a new perspective. In particular, “Gobseck” casts a new light on the final chapter of Balzac’s most famous novel, Le Père Goriot. In Old Goriot we saw Anastasie de Restaud, one of Goriot’s daughters, as a tragic figure exploited by her husband; here we are given the husband’s point of view, as he struggles to rescue the family fortune that Anastasie is squandering on her unscrupulous lover, Maxime de Trailles.

  Derville tells the story of Gobseck late one evening in the noble house of the Vicomtess
e de Grandlieu, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The Vicomtesse is concerned that her daughter, Camille, is paying too much attention to the suit of young Comte Ernest de Restaud. She believes him to be without fortune, and though his father is of impeccable nobility, his mother (née Goriot) she can scarcely tolerate. Ostensibly, then, Derville tell his story of Gobseck in order to reassure the Vicomtesse and Camille that Ernest will soon come into a handsome fortune (though the story becomes racy enough along the way that the Vicomtesse feels obliged to pack Camille off to bed). It’s a long detour through Gobseck’s affairs—including the loan at fifteen percent that allows Derville to set up his law office—before we reach the story of how the old Comte de Restaud set up a transfer of funds into Gobseck’s name in order to save them from his wife—but then on his deathbed was so closely guarded by her (since she is afraid he will disinherit her two adulterine children in favor of Ernest) that he could not sign the codicil that would have returned the money to his son. Anastasie, Ernest, and the rest of the family are reduced to penury—which proves character-building. And now that Gobseck has died, at age eighty-nine, Ernest will have a tidy sum.

  A kind of cautionary tale, then, to assuage the fears of the Vicomtesse about a future son-in-law, but far more than that: the story of money itself in its accumulation. Money is indeed one of Balzac’s chief protagonists throughout The Human Comedy, and here we are at the heart of its acquisition and growth. It is telling that at the end of the tale, Gobseck has acquired more than he can disburse: Bankrupt creditors have filled his apartment with things, with goods, many of them spoiling and useless, a kind of accumulation of surplus capital that the system cannot handle. Though it is only alluded to in this story, the future of Gobseck’s cash legacy is instructive. He leaves it to his one descendant, his niece Esther. She has had an extraordinary existence, from bit player at the Opéra to fashionable prostitute, then redemption through her passionate love for the young poet and novelist Lucien de Rubempré—but then a forced return to prostitution willed by Jacques Collin, alias Vautrin, the former convict and mastermind of Lucien’s career who knows Lucien must raise one million francs in order to buy back his mother’s entailed properties, proving his right to carry the name of landed gentry and enabling his marriage to Clotilde de Grandlieu of the noble Faubourg. The plot goes awry. Esther is sold to the Baron de Nucingen, an Alsatian banker and the husband of Goriot’s other daughter, Delphine—but after one night spent honoring “the debt of dishonor,” as she calls it, Esther commits suicide. She leaves Nucingen’s payment in an envelope for Lucien under her pillow—but it’s stolen by the household servants, which will lead to Lucien’s arrest. When Derville tracks her down with the news of her immense legacy, it’s too late. Too late for everyone: Esther is dead, and Lucien has hanged himself in prison. The money is parceled out to Lucien’s provincial relatives. The trajectory of Gobseck’s fortune suggests Balzac’s thoroughly ironic view of the new moneyed classes coming to power in France.

  “The Duchesse de Langeais,” the final tale of the volume, clearly cannot be classified as a short story or tale but rather as what Henry James called “the blessed nouvelle,” indicating by his word choice that he thought it a French form little used by English novelists. Its advantage for Balzac seems evident, and here it yields one of his most perfect works. “The Duchesse de Langeais” shows, once again, how short forms both stimulate and discipline Balzac’s extraordinary imaginative powers. Rather than bursting the seams of novelistic form—as some of his longer works do—the short stories and novellas seem packed to the stretching point but nonetheless intact, with a palpable form to them. Here Balzac’s mastery becomes evident in his concentration of force within form.

  The story of the duchess and her admirer General Armand de Montriveau opens with a notable and enigmatic abruptness on a rocky island in the Mediterranean, site of a convent of the Barefoot Carmelites where the music of the choir of nuns reveals to the interested, passionate listener—the general who has lost her and has been seeking her everywhere—the hidden presence of a Frenchwoman. Then we flash back some years, to the games of love and seduction as they are played in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. As we read into the third chapter, though, these will take on a sinister kind of seriousness, leading to a scene that might figure in The Story of O and seems to result in an erotic conversion but one that the other party can’t understand. And then the fourth chapter, returning to the Mediterranean isle, plays out the dramatic denouement. The presentation of the story is highly cinematic: It is full of strikingly rendered settings and moments of intense confrontation and fraught dialogue—and it has been made into a film several times, most recently by Jacques Rivette (in a version that to me loses much of the dynamic of the story). The novella shows Balzac’s ability to manipulate different time strata with perfect ease, to reveal the deep nature of the central enigmas of love and passion parsimoniously, so that when we think we have understood it’s only in part, and perhaps most notably his ability to sustain a kind of erotic tension throughout: Games of love become almost unbearably intense. Desire rules over the organization of life, and of story. “The Duchesse de Langeais” is one of the most perfect of Balzac’s works—everything, even the very baroque excursus on organ music as a go-between bringing together the divine and the human, even the scene of incipient S/M, fits perfectly and ministers to the overall effect.

  Balzac has repeatedly, from the beginning of his career, been accused of writing badly. It is true that he often reaches for a kind of sublime that seems tasteless and over the top. We may sometimes wonder at Henry James’s unstinting admiration for someone who had little of his own delicacy of touch. Yet once we have accepted the premises of Balzac’s kind of expressionism—his recourse to melodramatic plots, hyperbolic speech, and dramatic confrontations where all the moral stakes are laid on the table—we can see that when he is writing at highest intensity he is incomparable. The goal of his melodramatic imagination is to find the latent intensities of life, to make dramatic action tell us about the ethical stakes of our engagements with ambition, love, and one another. That this takes him beyond the bounds of the “realism” for which he became famous into something else, some more occult realm where the real is trumped by the nearly surreal, has bothered those who want to confine the novel to more behavioristic premises. Balzac refuses to be confined in any manner—for him, fiction has a permit to go anywhere and explore anything. His short fiction may give him the greatest freedom of all; it allows the exploratory probe onto ground that not only is forbidden to politer, more repressed forms of expression but also is only partly grasped. Some of its mystery can never quite be known. To open up what society and the novel of manners repress, to stage a kind of explosive upthrust of that which is ordinarily kept down, under control, is Balzac’s delight and his passion. He asks to be read in a spirit of adventure and daring.

  —PETER BROOKS

  THE HUMAN COMEDY

  FACINO CANE

  To Louise, in witness of fond gratitude

  AT THE time, I was living on a little street you probably do not know, rue de Lesdiguières: It starts at rue Saint-Antoine across from a fountain near place de la Bastille, and ends at rue de la Cérisaie. A passion for knowledge had flung me into a garret room where I worked nights, and I would spend the day in a nearby library established by Monsieur, the king’s brother. I lived frugally; I had accepted all the conditions of monastic life so necessary to serious workers. In fine weather I would at most take a brief stroll on boulevard Bourdon. There was only one activity that could draw me away from my studious routine, although this was virtually part of the same passion: I would walk about observing the customs of the neighborhood, its inhabitants and their character. As poorly dressed as the workmen myself, careless about decorum, I never put them on their guard—I could mingle in their groups, watch them closing deals and arguing as they ended the day. In my own work, observation had already become an intuitive habit; it could penetrate into the soul witho
ut neglecting the body, or rather, so thoroughly did it grasp the external details that it moved immediately beyond: It allowed me to live a person’s life, let me put myself in his place, the way a dervish in The Thousand and One Nights would take over a person’s body and soul by pronouncing certain words over him.

  Occasionally, on some nights between eleven and midnight, I would come across a workman and his wife on their way home from the Ambigu-Comique music hall, and I would spend some time following them from boulevard du Pont-aux-Choux to boulevard Beaumarchais. These good folk would be chatting about the show they had just seen; eventually they would get around to talking about their work; the woman tugged her child by the hand, ignoring his whining or questions; the parents calculated the money they expected to collect the next day, the twenty different ways they’d spend it. Then they would move on to the household details: laments over the high price of potatoes or the long winter and the rising cost of peat; vehement remarks on the baker’s bill; then on to more venomous spats with each displaying his feelings in picturesque terms. Listening to these people, I could join in their lives: I would feel their rags on my back, I would be walking in their tattered shoes; their longings, their needs would all move through my soul, or my soul through theirs. It was a waking man’s dream. I would rage with them against the tyranny of the shop foremen or the bad clients who made them come back time and again without giving them their pay.