Pere Goriot Read online

  This is why reading Balzac is so thoroughly refreshing. Instead of the enclosed, musty space of a consciousness examining its Self (“my story is limited to my feelings and my thoughts,” says Chateaubriand’s René), we find a curiosity about others and about the world. In Balzac’s anti-confessional fiction there is nothing to disclose, no self to unburden. His novels do not depend upon what D. H. Lawrence, attempting to probe the underbelly of the whole of French literature, calls a “dirty little secret,” shared by the author and his characters, that the reader must decipher (see Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, pp. 46 ff.). Balzac’s fiction depends rather on mutation, flexibility, change, chance, becoming. “‘There are no such things as principles; there are only events,’” says Vautrin (p. 120). Vautrin is outlining a moral philosophy, but taken as an aesthetic statement his pronouncement sums up rather well Balzac’s point of view as regards composition. Literature is an event. In writing, as in life, “ ‘you should cut your way through the world like a cannon ball’” (p. 128).

  “Eugène had yet to learn that no one in Paris should present himself in any house without first making himself acquainted with the whole history of its owner, and of its owner’s wife and family...” (p. 74). Eugène has a lot to learn at the outset of Père Goriot. The form of the novel closely resembles that of the bildungsroman, a genre in which an inexperienced young fellow sets out in the world and, in the process of completing a sometimes harsh apprenticeship, learns through experience something of its ways and wiles. Balzac hews quite closely to this form, commenting now and again on Eugène’s progress (“In the past month Eugène’s good qualities and defects had rapidly developed with his character” [p. 106]; “His education was nearly complete” [p. 266]). It is important to note, however, that Balzac’s novel, while borrowing some of the formal elements of the bildungsroman, differs from the classical versions of this model in that the type of knowledge most prized here is not the humanist wisdom that is the hard-won fruit of experience, but rather the technical mastery of certain strategies for success. Eugène has to learn “the whole history” of the houses to which he seeks entry: This type of knowledge, the sine qua non of social success, is not wisdom but information. Knowledge in Père Goriot has little to do with self-enhancement or enlightenment and everything to do with social survival. The knowledge Eugène seeks and acquires has an immediate use-value; factual rather than theoretical, its value is strategic and expedient. “Rastignac made up his mind that he must learn the whole of Goriot’s previous history; he would come to his bearings before attempting to board the Maison de Nucingen” (p. 93). The path to knowledge in these modern times leads not to the sage but to the informant (to M. Muret is a good example; see p. 96 et seq.).

  Knowledge in Père Goriot is thus eminently practical. Certainly, there is knowledge to be had from the study of books and the law, but Eugène rejects this curriculum (“The student studied no longer” [p. 92] ) in favor of an encounter with Paris and Parisian society, an encounter that the novel seems to recommend. “Those who do not know the left bank of the Seine between the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Rue des Saints-Pères know nothing of life” (p. 105), writes Balzac. The streets of Paris become Eugène’s schoolroom. And the salons, too. For it is at the elegant home of Madame de Beauséant that Eugène makes “a three years’ advance in a kind of law which is not a recognized study in Paris, although it is a sort of higher jurisprudence” (p. 77).

  What is it that Eugène must know in order to gain access to and succeed in the fashionable salons and private hôtels of Paris? First of all, as we have seen, he must be acquainted with the history of the houses (this in itself would have avoided his dreadful gaffe at Madame de Restaud‘s, which results in that house being closed to him). He must know that there are two Hotels de Beauséant, that of the Vicomte and that of the Marquis, and that these are located in the rue de Grenelle and in the rue Saint-Dominique, respectively. Beyond this, his “education” consists of a type of social grooming. For example, he must learn, and does learn, “‘not [to] be so demonstrative’” (p. 78). Like Lucien de Rubempré, hero of Lost Illusions, or any recently arrived provincial, he must lose his accent and adopt the language of the Parisians. And he must learn the language of love, even if in this post-Romantic epoch a lover’s discourse amounts to nothing more than “stereotyped phrases” (p. 134). To know these things—customs and language—is to know Paris, and to know Paris is to know these things. “To know its customs, to learn the language, and to become familiar with the amusements of the capital” (p. 38), these should be the goals of the student, for a student in Paris is first and foremost a student of Paris.

  On October 12, 1833, Balzac wrote to his sister, Laure: “And I am a father—that’s another secret I have for you—and thanks to a lovely person, the most naive creature, who fell like a flower from the sky, who comes to me in secret, demands of me neither letters nor attentions, and who says, ‘Love me for a year, I will love you all my life. ”’ The creature in question was Marie Daminois, a married woman, daughter of the novelist Adèle Daminois, and who bore Balzac a daughter, Marie-Caroline Du Fresnay (born June 4, 1834) . It is now known that Marie is the “Maria” to whom Eugénie Grandet is dedicated, and the title character of that novel appears to share some of her physical traits. Balzac seems to have had little to do with his daughter. He may have attended her first communion and occasionally come to play with her; in his will, he bequeathed to her a statuette of Christ on the cross (an ironic recognition of an unacknowledged child from the man who created Goriot, the “Christ of paternity” [p. 222] ) . Marie-Caroline died in Nice in 1930. She would not have known of the letter to Madame Eveline Hanska, Balzac’s longtime correspondent and companion, whom he was to marry in the last year of his life, in which her father writes: “I love Anna [Madame Hanska’s daughter] incomparably more than that little girl I see every ten years” (see Robb, Balzac: A Biography, p. 247).

  More meaningful to Balzac, but occurring after the composition of Père Goriot, seems to have been his experience with Madame Hanska, who in 1846 was expecting a child by him, although the pregnancy did not come to term. Balzac in his letters makes reference to the vital force he feels at the idea of becoming a father: “It seems to me that I have life, courage and happiness enough for three in my heart, in my veins and in my head.”

  There are several literary fathers who in Balzac’s oeuvre precede and anticipate Goriot. Among these we might single out Ferragus, chief of brigands, and a father who in his intensity and paternal absolutism seems to foreshadow Goriot: “Is it I, I who breathe only through your mouth, I who see only through your eyes, I who feel only through your heart, is it I who would fail to defend with a lion’s claws, with the soul of a father, my only possession, my life, my daughter?”4 But in truth nothing in Balzac’s life or anything in his early works could anticipate the majestic portrait of fatherhood he offers up in Père Goriot. “Since I have been a father, I have come to understand God” (p. 140): From what source does Balzac draw such a vision of paternity? From the creative act itself? From his experience of the conception and engenderment of a work of art? Perhaps, for in at least one place (Cousine Bette) Balzac writes of “the insane joy of generation” that accompanies “the creations of Thought,” and likens the literary offspring to a child: “But to produce! But to give birth! But to laboriously raise the child, put it to bed gorged with milk every evening, to kiss it every morning with the inexhaustible heart of a mother, to lick it clean, to dress it a hundred times in the most beautiful jackets which it incessantly tears ...” (cited in Picon, Balzac, p. 79). Balzac as a mother? The line between maternity and paternity is easily crossed: “Let each of us look around, and be frank with himself, how many Goriots in skirts would we see? Now, Père Goriot’s feelings imply maternity” (second preface to Père Goriot) .

  The flow of information, the flux of life, the endless onward (but not forward) movement of “civilization” (which is a “battlefield” [p. 82] ) : Thi
s is the dynamic setting for Père Goriot. In this novel there is a complex of stories, and there is also the matter, raised in the opening pages, of the reader and his or her reaction to these stories. Père Goriot tells among others the story of the “egotism and selfishness” that characterize life in Paris under the Restoration. “It is one of the privileges of the good city of Paris that any body may be born, or live, or die there without attracting any attention whatsoever” (p. 288). Yet the story of the general indifference that surrounds the sufferings and demise of the “sublime” Goriot is at once the story of the indifference, egotism, and selfishness of the reader. Père Goriot begins with an indictment of the bourgeois consumer, comfortably reclining in the “cushions of your armchair.” “You will read the story of Pére Goriot’s secret woes, and, dining thereafter with an unspoiled appetite, will lay the blame of your insensibility upon the writer, and accuse him of exaggeration, of writing romances” (p. 10). But Père Goriot is not a romance, nor is it a fiction; it is a “drama” in which “all is true.” Balzac insists that his work has nothing to do with the still rather unserious new genre (the novel); it is a documentary of the cramped modem soul, a soul shown to be cynical, pitiless, insensible, gluttonous, scheming, and, perhaps above all, indifferent:There was not a soul in the house who took any trouble to investigate the various chronicles of misfortunes, real or imaginary, related by the rest. Each one regarded the others with indifference, tempered by suspicion; it was a natural result of their relative positions. Practical assistance not one of them could give, this they all knew, and they had long since exhausted their stock of condolence over previous discussions of their grievances.... There was not one of them but would have passed a blind man begging in the street, not one that felt moved to pity by a tale of misfortune (p. 24).

  Is Balzac the artist who has recorded for our modern era the death of the soul? The death of all belief in something greater, grander, than the individual? The damning portrait of the boarders seems to suggest as much. So do other passages elsewhere in Balzac’s enormous oeuvre: “With the monarchy we lost honor, with the religion of our fathers, Christian virtue, with our sterile governments, patriotism. These principles now only exist partially instead of animating the masses.... Now, shoring up society, we have no other support than egotism. Woe betide the country thus constituted. Instead of believers, we have interest” (Le Medecin de campagne [ The Country Doctor]; “interest” meaning both self-interested motivations for action and financial interest).

  “He does not go in for deep psychology; he is not especially attached to the interior workings that make or unmake a soul,” wrote Lanson (in Vachon, p. 321). “I am not deep, but very thick”: The boarders in Père Goriot do not know the “interior workings,” the inner turmoil that forms the basis of the psychological novel and that marks some kind of attachment, however conflicted, to a greater ideal (of duty, faith, honor, etc.); they have known rather the strain of an exterior struggle that has worked over their bodies and left their faces “bleached by moral or physical suffering” (p. 20). Hence, Balzac claims himself to be “the inventor of the physiological novel,” a novel in which the characters, these “desolate souls” (“hapless beings” in this translation, p. 24) are moved not by pity or empathy, but by their stomachs. “‘Come, sit down to dinner, gentlemen, ”’ says Madame Vauquer, when Bianchon announces the death of Goriot, “or the soup will be cold” (p. 288). And the noise of civilization—“the rattle of spoons and forks” (p. 289)—covers over the events of the day.

  Among the upwards of 2,500 named fictional characters in La Comédie humaine there is, as far as I know, no translator. Had there been one, we would know everything about how translators lived and worked in the early nineteenth century; we would know in which quarter of the city they lived, what, where, and with whom they ate, where they bought their ink and quills and the price they paid for them, and a host of other details that, taken together, would make up a vivid portrait of a type, a complete sociology of the translator.

  The absence of a translator is hardly surprising, of course: In Balzac’s time the practice of translation did not amount to a self-sustaining profession (it does for only a few even today). In reading Père Goriot in English, one should remember that one is reading a translation, and it is perhaps worth giving a little attention here to the particular version we have before us, by Ellen Marriage, dating to 1901. Given what has been said about the disorderliness of Balzac’s style, it might be assumed that any hack with a knowledge of French could do a fair job of bringing him into English. Marion Ayton Crawford, translator of the widely read Penguin edition of Goriot, comes close to just such a position in her introductory remarks: “The translator of Balzac need not mourn the loss of French lucidity and grace of style, for whereas force is of the essence of his writing, lucidity is often a minor consideration and grace of little importance to him” (“Introduction,” p. 23). In other words, we need not mourn the loss of the eighteenth century, nor must we try to restore to Balzac an eighteenth-century refinement of diction. A different perspective is provided by the English writer Wilkie Collins, although I think his theory of translation is in the end quite close to Crawford’s. Collins was sensitive to the special challenges facing the translator of Balzac. After reflecting upon the popular success in England of Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Sue, he laments the lack of good translations of Balzac and the consequent neglect of this great author, who in Collins’s estimation is “superior to all three”:Many causes, too numerous to be elaborately traced within the compass of a single article, have probably contributed to produce this singular instance of literary neglect. It is not to be denied, for example, that serious difficulties stand in the way of translating Balzac, which are caused by his own peculiarities of style and treatment. His French is not the clear, graceful, neatlyturned French of Voltaire and Rousseau. It is a strong, harsh, solidly vigorous language of his own; now flashing into the most exquisite felicities of expression, and now again involved in an obscurity which only the closest attention can hope to penetrate. A special man, not hurried for time, and not easily brought to the end of his patience, might give the English equivalent of Balzac with admirable effect. But ordinary translating of him by average workmen would only lead, through the means of feeble parody, to the result of utter failure.5

  “Strong, harsh, solidly vigorous”: These are not the adjectives associated with French prose prior to Balzac, and they point to the originality of Balzac’s style. The task of the translator lies in respecting the brutish nature of this prose; it lies in resisting the temptation to Frenchify it, to prettify it, or, to borrow a quaint expression from Ellen Marriage, to “titivate it up” (p. 256). (Does Collins believe the task calls for “a special man” because the work is not pretty? In point of fact, up until the second half of the twentieth century, nearly all translators of Balzac were women, among them Ellen Marriage, Clara Bell, and Katharine Prescott Wormeley.)

  Comparing the different translations of Goriot is a kind of fascinating archaeological exercise. To get a feel for what the present translation offers, it might be useful to look at a sample from some of the others available. The idea is not to demonstrate the superiority of the current translation (although I believe it to be the equal of any published English version of Gofiot), but rather to see how translators at different moments in history have chosen to approach and interpret the task of translating Balzac. In the following sentence, Eugène has just returned, at two o’clock in the morning, from Madame de Beauséant’s ball, and resolves to spend the night studying in order to make up for lost time.

  It was the first time that he had attempted to spend the night in this way in that silent quarter. The spell of a factitious energy was upon him; he had beheld the pomp and splendor of the world (translated by Ellen Marriage, p. 40).

  He was going to remain awake all night for the first time in that silent quarter, for the sight of the splendors of society had magically given him a burst of
artificial energy (translated by Marion Ayton Crawford. London: Penguin Books, p. 57).