LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA
SAN DIEGO
\
5
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
BY
W. H. HELM
AUTHOR OF "STUDIES IN STYLE," ETC.
LONDON
EVELEIGH NASH
1905
The greater part of this book
is reprinted, by ptrmission,
from the EMPIRE REVIEW
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE METHODS OF BALZAC i
WOMEN OF THE " HUMAN COMEDY " . .29
MEN OF THE "HUMAN COMEDY". ... 67
BALZAC'S " COMEDIE ANGLAISE " . . . .93
BALZAC AND DICKENS 121
LITERARY REFERENCES IN BALZAC . . .151
THE HUMOUR OF BALZAC 179
THE METHODS OF BALZAC
SOME of his critics would have said that
to talk of " the Methods of Balzac " was to
offer a contradiction in terms, since Balzac
and method were incompatible. They
might have found much to support their
objection. The novelist himself held that
a man should fling himself headlong into
his work, as Curtius plunged into the gulf.
Perhaps the most pregnant saying in the
general preface of 1842, wherein the
scheme of the " Comedie " is set out, one
fully borne out by the novels themselves,
is that " La passion est toute I'humanite.
Sans elle, la religion, 1'histoire, le roman,
1'art, seraient inutiles." This phrase is the
keynote to the vast harmony which Balzac
composed. The love of man for woman
and woman for man is, of course, "la
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
passion " in particular, and it is more abun-
dantly displayed in Balzac's novels than in
those of any other writer, quite as abun-
dantly as mere lust is shown in the work of
Zola or Maupassant. Such loves as those
of Montauran and Marie de Verneuil, of
Montriveau and the Duchesse de Langeais,
of Felix de Vandenesse and Henriette de
Mortsauf, are indeed of the influences that
move the world. Yet passion takes other
strong forms in the " Comedie Humaine."
The passion of power as seen in Jacques
Collin the criminal, and Eugene de Ras-
tignac the conqueror of society, of the
artist as in "Le Chef-d'CEuvre Inconnu,"of
the miser as shown by old Grandet, even
the craving for gold for the mere love of
that particular metal as by Facino Cane,
and the rarer passion of the alchemist seen
in " La Recherche de 1'Absolu " all are
very fully analysed and exhibited. The
callous and savage lust also of the enemy
of the race, of the man or woman who
preys upon other men and women as a
crafty beast on its fellow-creatures, is pre-
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
sented with amazing force in such portraits
as those of Philippe Bridau, Maxime de
Trailles, and Valerie Marneffe.
There are, however, among the essential
factors of the "Comedie" personalities to
whom the word passion is hardly appli-
cable. Nucingen, who stands for ever the
crystallisation of the astute financier, whose
only restriction is the law, to whom con-
science is only of account in considering
its effect on the conduct of other men, is
never passionate. Cool and far-seeing in
his finance, cool and far-seeing in his rela-
tions with" his wife, and with his allies in
exacting tribute from the world, he is driven
to recognise that money cannot buy affec-
tion either from wife or mistress ; but the
infidelity of the one he turns to account in
his schemes, and the costliness of the
other only troubles him because he obtains
so small a return for his expenditure.
If passion is the dominant note in
Balzac's conception of life, it is also one of
the most powerful influences on his method.
Buffon distinguished between the genius
3
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
which touches the heart through the in-
telligence, and the talent of expression
which is accorded to all individuals of
strong passions and quick imagination.
Balzac possessed both the genius and the
talent. The driving power of this rare
combination was such that he could toil
for days without rest, and with very little
food, producing in one week what would,
in mere writing, be a month's work for
many an industrious author. When he
had finished his book or his chapter, he
would send it off to the printer, and when
he received the proofs, first, second, or
third revises, he would chop them about,
rewrite here, cut out a little there, and
add a great deal in this place or that until
there was perhaps as much again as before,
and the corrections in the end cost as
much as the first setting. All this, how-
ever, was not concerned with the great
and essential tasks of building the body,
of giving life to its organs, and intelligence
to its wits ; but with the refining of that
body, the quickening of that life, and the
4
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
sharpening of those wits. Sometimes,
indeed, he even took life out of his work,
as, in the opinion of Sainte-Beuve, hap-
pened when he rewrote " La Femme de
Trente Ans."
No writer to whom style was of the first
importance would dream of using Balzac's
method of introducing his characters to his
readers. It is a commonplace of criticism
that the characters should show themselves
by their actions, and conversation, and
recorded thoughts as the story proceeds ;
but Balzac requires far more than this.
He will devote fifteen or twenty pages
more on occasion to the topography of a
district, and we know our way about for
the rest of the book. He will give as
much attention to a description of every
external and internal characteristic of a
man or a woman, their physical peculiari-
ties, beauties and blemishes, their tricks
of expression and gesture, their clothing,
even to the shoelaces and the quality of the
silk of which the stockings are made, and,
when he has finished the portraits, we
5
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
know their subjects so well that, if we saw
them stepping out of their houses or step-
ping into their baths, we could hardly ever
fail to recognise them.
Mr. Froude, in a notable passage of
"Oceana," touches on the affinities and
differences of the real and the ideal, and
asks the question, " Has not a character
which has acquired a place in the minds
of mankind as real an existence, even
though a creature of imagination merely,
as if the person in question had been
born with a material body and had lived
a fixed number of years, and had worn
clothes and taken his regular meals, and,
in course of time, had died?" He
goes on to answer his own question.
" Ulysses, Hamlet, Julius Caesar are real
persons. Each of them stands with a
clear and fixed form before the minds of
all of us."
To those who have lived long in the
society of Balzac's people and met them
again and again, now in this company,
now in that, they are as real as any his-
6
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
torical character can be. Indeed, so great
was the novelist's power of combining ob-
servation and intuitive knowledge in the
presentation of his crowd of individual
types, that we do actually meet many of
them in the flesh, differently dressed no
doubt, to avoid being hooted in the streets,
with their curling locks cut short and their
jewellery less abundant. Who that knows
his " Comedie Humaine " has not met
Crevel and Matifat and Gaudissart a score
of times, has not watched the dainty steps
of Valerie as she passed to keep an assig-
nation, or the slow and weary walk of
Agathe Bridau, borne down with the
misery of outraged maternity and unre-
quited devotion ?
Balzac tried continually in youth, and
occasionally in the later years of his short
life, to attain a fine style. But he knew
before he was thirty that he could never
achieve his desire in that direction. He
found his power in the representation of
human character, and in that he knew that
he was above rivalry. His first and
7
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
strongest motive is the determination to
make his scenes and characters stand
clearly out. He will write a hundred
pages of introduction if necessary before
he begins to develop his story, and we are
called upon to listen to lengthy expositions
of historical or geographical or social con-
ditions in order that we may be prepared
to understand the relations of the characters
to one another and the milieu in which they
move. We may find that these immense
preparations weary us sometimes ; but if we
go steadily through with them they do, in
almost every instance, achieve their object.
He demands that we shall recognise "the
necessity of those preparations didactiques
against which some ignorant and voracious
people protest, seeking for emotions with-
out wishing to hear of les principes genera-
teurs" desiring " la fleur sans la graine,
F enfant sans la gestation. Is art, then,
stronger than nature ? " Allow him these
liberties and he will usually achieve his
object to his own and our satisfaction. He
was fully aware that, had it been possible,
8
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
it would have been better to be less dis-
cursive.
In any fair attempt to estimate Bal-
zac's success as a novelist, we must never
allow ourselves to forget that his main
object was not to write literature, but
history, the history of the manners and
morals of a particular period. On rare
occasions, as in " L' Enfant Maudit " and
" Maitre Cornelius," he laid his scenes in
the far distant past, and of course the
" Contes Drolatiques," which are classified
as part of the " Comedie Humaine," deal
with the Heptameronicor Rabelaisian age.
But the " Contes" are given at the tail of
the list, and are rather in the nature of those
final jollifications named in old theatrical
programmes at the end of a sentence which
says, " the whole to conclude with the
diverting extravaganza ." " L'Enfant
Maudit " and " Maitre Cornelius " are mere
episodes, and are really as far from the main
intention of the " Human Comedy " as
" Sur Catherine de Medicis," which is only
dragged in to allow the whole of Balzac's
9
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
avowed works in fiction to be grouped in
the one huge achievement, or " Seraphita,"
a wonderful study of mysticism, which
stands quite outside the general plan.
The time of the " Comedy " proper is from
1799, when the brave and honourable
Hulot leads the soldiers of the Republic
against the Breton royalists, as described
in " Les Chouans," to 1846, when his scan-
dalous brother, at eighty years of age or
thereabouts, marries his Norman cook,
at the end of " La Cousine Bette." In
other words, the period of the novels is
practically coterminous with the author's
life, Balzac having been born in 1799, and
having died in 1850.
He paints, then, the conditions of social
life, manners, thought, conversation, love-
making, dress and affectations during the
half-century which followed the overthrow
of the Directory and the rise of Napo-
leon's star on the i8th Brumaire, and ended
with the flickering out of the Bourbon star
over the head of that " king of grocers and
linendrapers " w r ho is the subject of many
10
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
contemptuous allusions in Balzac's novels.
His object was to provide a permanent
picture of a period which he saw to be the
end of an epoch. When he wrote " Les
Chouans " in 1827, railways were already
" in the air," and when, in 1842, he wrote
<{ Un Debut dans la Vie," he commenced
with a reference to the changes which the
introduction of railways would bring about,
and a prophecy that his description of cer-
tain scenes of contemporary life would
speedily possess the merits of an archaeo-
logical treatise. " Will not our nephews
be enchanted to know the truth concerning
the social life of an epoch which they will
call ' the old times ' ? " he adds. There lies
a large part of the charm possessed by the
" Comedie Humaine." With a great deal
of highly concentrated observation, and
more of highly-expanded imagination,
founded on an intuition which was Balzac's
greatest gift, he was able to construct
dramas, comedies and tragedies that were
essentially true to life, just as Cuvier, as
Balzac himself often reminds us, could
ii
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
reconstruct an entire animal from the pre-
sence of a single bone or tooth.
That he frequently " drops into " flowery
verbiage, more often than not with rather
unfortunate results, as contemporary critics
were ever ready to point out, and that he
justly regarded himself as a "poet" in the
broad acceptation wherein the French em-
ploy the word, must not be allowed to
obscure the fact that his real genius lay in
the conception of his plots and scenes and
characters, and the vividness of their pre-
sentation, apart from any question of the
ornaments of literature.
Having finished his descriptions, Balzac
was free to develop the picture of what-
ever phase of life served as the theme of
the work in hand. In that wonderfully
vivid representation of a government office
and the various officials and clerks and
officials' wives and relations, " Les Em-
ployes," the novelist's power of realising
types is seen at its height. Rabourdin,
the too clever and industrious official,
Baudoyer, his silly and successful rival,
12
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Bixiou, the witty cynic, Poiret, who cannot
see the points of Bixiou's remarks, the
Minister, the intriguing wives of Rabourdin
and Baudoyer, the priests, the money-
lenders, the servants, are drawn with a
precision and effect that render the book
the most vivid of its kind. The author,
without forcing his "situations," conveys
the story of the particular affair, always on
the whole going steadily forward, until the
culmination in the downfall of Rabourdin's
hopes of preferment and his retirement to
what will probably be a happier existence.
It is so with the affairs of the heart, which,
to speak more Hibernico, form the back-
bones of most of the novels. There may
as a rule be no wedding bells to satisfy
the English idea of a " happy ending," no
suicide to gratify the tastes of the problem-
atic-realistic class of reader, though sui-
cides and wedding bells do occur at the
ends of some of the stories ; but Balzac
almost invariably stops at the point where
the interest culminates, or, as in " Une
Double Famille," adds a few lines of
13
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
sequel which suggest far more than they
state. In such touches, as in the "asides"
which abound in his novels, Balzac has
concentrated much of his deepest know-
ledge of human tendencies.
The occasional difficulty of clearly ap-
preciating Balzac's precise intention is
partly due to the fact that his French is
notoriously difficult, a fact which, more
than anything else, has militated against
his popularity in this country. Popular in
the field where success is weighed by the
tonnage of the paper he never would be,
if every one could read easy French and
his French had been as easy as that of
" Paul et Virginie " or " Le Roi des
Montagnes." To apprehend Balzac it is
necessary to think occasionally, as well as
to read, to remember as well as to think.
The conduct of his men and women is so
finely studied, the lights and shades of
their souls so delicately expressed, that you
lose three parts of the sense if you hurry
over the pages as you would over the
latest "railway" novel. So little does
14
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Balzac appeal to the reader of the ordinary
sensational fiction that he rarely " piles up
the agony " where it does not pile itself up
in the natural course of the story. When
one thinks what opportunities for curdling
the blood a " popular " novelist of our own
day would have found in writing " Les
Chouans," " Le Cure de Village," or " La
Femme de Trente Ans," and how little
the author does actually dwell on the more
lurid incidents of those stirring books, the
width of the gulf which separates him, in
method as well as in intellect and power,
from the most successful purveyors of
sensation in fiction begins to be appre-
ciated. Moreover, the "situations" in
Balzac are not introduced at measured
distances. For " serial " purposes his plan
is deplorable, and seeing also that the
too economical publisher who cut out the
chapter headings and printed most of the
books without a break from end to end
set a fashion which it seems impossible to
overthrow where Balzac is concerned, the
chance of the " Comedie Humaine"ever
15
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
being widely enjoyed in this country, even
if all the public elementary schools were
to teach French instead of arithmetic, is
scarcely problematical.
Mr. Henry James, in that notable essay
on Balzac which introduces "Two Young
Brides " (Mr. Heinemann's English edition
of " Memoires de deux jeunes Mariees"),
dwells on the double personality in which
the author is revealed in the " Comedie
Humaine." In one suggestive passage
Mr. James writes :
" Of imagination, on one side, all compact,
he was on the other an insatiable reporter of
the immediate, the material, the current
combination, perpetually moved by the his-
torian's impulse to fix them, preserve them,
explain them. One asks one's self as one
reads him what concern the poet has with
so much arithmetic and so much criticism ;
so many statistics and documents, what
concern the critic and economist have with
so many passions, characters, and adven-
tures. The contradiction is always before
us ; it springs from the inordinate scale of
16
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
the author's two faces ; it explains more
than anything else his eccentricities and
difficulties. It accounts for his want of
grace, his want of the lightness associated
with an amusing literary form, his bristling
surface, his closeness of texture, so sugges-
tive, yet at the same time so akin to the
crowded air we have in mind when we speak
of not being able to see the wood for the
trees."
The criticism is wholly just. To the ap-
preciation and enjoyment of the "Com^die
Humaine " two personal qualities in the
reader are essential patience and reflec-
tion. The sentence would sound like a
sentence of death if uttered concerning a
novelist of the common type. The neces-
sity of "working up " the plot step by step
to the sensational or sentimental denouement
is not exemplified at all in most of Balzac's
novels. It is not that Balzac ignores the
full possibilities of sensational effects any
more than he is indifferent to the allure-
ments of " fine writing." As to the sensa-
tion, " La Grande Breteche " is assuredly
17 B
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
one of the most appalling tales we have,
and the " execution " of the informer in
" Les Chouans " is hardly less horrible than
the somewhat similar scene of the " execu-
tion" of the spy in Zola's " La Debacle."
The cynical, but not altogether heartless,
caricaturist Jean-Jacques Bixiou, in the
course of that vivid and acid narrative
wherein he lays bare the roots of Rastignac's
immense fortune, makes several remarks on
literary style. Having described Isaure
d'Aldrigger, with her " fair hair gushing in
bubbling cascades over a little head frank
and fresh as that of a na'iad who had put
her nose against the crystal window of her
fountain to see the flowers of spring," he
interjects : " that is our new style, made up
of phrases which are spun out like the
macaroni we were eating at dinner." There
is a good deal of this sort of floral decora-
tion in the " Comedie " itself, especially in
the matter of similes.
Balzac, indeed, indulged to an inor-
dinate degree in rather far-fetched similes,
and has had many disciples in this branch
18
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
of learning. The popular English novelist
who recently described a lady in curl-papers
as resembling the figure-head of a ship with
barnacles sticking to it, was not more in-
temperate in his fancy than the French
novelist on a hundred or a thousand occa-
sions. Balzac tells us, for instance, that
" la plaisanterie frangaise est une dentelle
dont les femmes savent embellir la joie
qu'elles donnent, et les querelles qu'elles
inventent ; c'est une parure morale, gra-
cieuse comme leur toilette. Mais la plai-
santerie anglaise est un acide qui corrode si
bien les etres sur lesquels il tombe qu'il en
fait des squelettes laves et brossds."
Of Valerie, on a very special occasion
when she was looking her best, both as to
herself and her costume, we are told that
" Elle ressemblait a ces beaux fruits coquet-
tement arranges dans une belle assiette et
qui donnent des demangeaisons a 1'acier du
couteau." Hortense, when she had seen
her husband's model of his " Samson and
Dalila," for the female figure of which
that same fascinating Valerie had sat, was
19
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
so affected, we hear, that " mille soup9ons
pousserent dans son ame comme poussent,
dans les Indes, ces vegetations, grandes et
touffues, du jour au lendemain."
If Balzac was often a little too free in his
similes, he was also rather careless as to
precise consistency of dates, in sequence of
events and in the ages of his characters,
and his arithmetical calculations are some-
times rather below the standard required
even in the entrance examinations for secon-
dary schools. It is rather remarkable that,
after so many editions, the most obvious
errors of this sort should be so carefully
repeated. If a misspelling is corrected,
why should it be greater sacrilege to correct
a numeral ?
For instance, Balzac tells us, in
" Beatrix," that the pretty Miss Fanny
O'Brien was twenty-one in 1813, and then
in 1836 she was forty-two ; while her man-
servant, who was fifteen when he entered
the house in 1813, was also forty-two in
1836. Errors of memory of an unusual
kind also occur, as when, in " Autre Etude
20
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
de Femme," Balzac makes Horace Bian-
chon the narrator on one page, and on the
next page has forgotten this fact, and de-
clares that "a un geste du complaisant
docteur [Bianchon] le silence re"gna." A
similar disregard of his own plan is seen
when, in " La Femme de Trente Ans," the
author suddenly " par une matinee de prin-
temps," turns the story into a " first per-
son" narrative, with many a "je" and
" moi."
In sampling the more tangible errors of
the " Comedie Humaine," one must not
forget the repetitions which often aggra-
vate the ear of the mind. Such sentences
as " Elle effraye par son silence et par ce
regard profond d'une profonde fixit6 ; " or
" pendant une annee entiere, il avait soigne"
la marquise avec le denouement le plus
entier," are trivial blemishes, if blemishes
at all ; but when we read of " gravures
d'Audran encadre"es dans des cadres en
acajou," and " tapisseries des Gobelins,
encadres des plus merveilleux cadres
sculpt6s," the effect is far more unpleasing.
21
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
The spitefully hostile reviewer, in fact,
had an easy time with Balzac, and could
fill a column with errors of style judiciously
selected. How easy it is to laugh at the
taste of a novelist who actually makes a
cultured nobleman say that his valet
" m'avait apport quelques affaires, que je
voulus placer dans ma chambre," and to
underline " affaires " in the quotation.
Let us come back from such evident
weaknesses of literary craftsmanship to
the contemplation of Balzac's actual
achievement. His subject was society,
his leading character woman, in a hundred
forms. Woman, as he perceived, is not
merely the counterpart of man, " When
Buffon painted the lion, he sketched the
lioness in a few sentences ; whilst, in
human society, the woman is not always
the female of the male." The history he
projected ought to have " a triple form " ;
it would not deal merely with men and
things, but with men, women and things.
Human society, indeed, has as many
different creatures as there are varieties
22
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
in zoology. The differences between a
soldier, a workman, a government official,
a barrister, a loafer, a savant, a statesman,
a merchant, a sailor, a poet, a pauper, a
priest, are, although more difficult to
appreciate, as considerable as those which
distinguish the wolf, the lion, the ass, the
crow, the shark, the seal, and the sheep.
Every one of the human types here
mentioned has its representatives among
the prominent characters of the " Human
Comedy," and in most of these "vocations"
the obverse and reverse are shown. We
have Hulot the noble soldier, and Philippe
Bridau the scoundrel ; Bourgeat the noble
workman, and Cerizet who sells his master ;
Rabourdin the honest if over-zealous
official, and Corentin the heartless and
cunning spy ; Popinot the charitable
lawyer, and Delbecq the astute engineer
of gross injustice ; Bixiou the witty and
entertaining idler, and Maxence Gilet who
sponges on his mistress ; Desplein the
successful surgeon, and Balthazar Claes
who ruins his family by his search for the
23
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
philosopher's stone ; Serizy, the admirable
Minister, and Baron Hulot who robs the
State ; Portenduere, the gallant sailor, and
the pirate captain of the Othello ; while
as for merchants, poets, paupers, and
priests, there are enough varieties of each
class to provide for every demand.
Nearly all these people are alive. It is
very rarely that Balzac fails to endow his
creatures with a large share of vital force,
even if they are mere " supers " at the
back of a scene. He worked from the
life, and he reproduced his originals, partly
because he had observed them so well, but
mainly because his power of induction,
where human character was in question,
was nothing less than inspiration.
When Hilarius, in the delightful comic
opera " La Poupee," finds the " doll " talk-
ing and singing so perfectly, he has no
suspicion of the truth, and, bursting with
conceit, cries, "My work" every time it
moves or speaks. Balzac was immensely,
and justly, proud of the figures he had
constructed, and, as has so often been told,
24
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
would talk to his sister and friends about
the forthcoming marriage of Mademoiselle
de Granville, or the appointment obtained
for Mademoiselle Mirouet's fiance, with
greater concern than of the happenings in
his own family circle. Sainte-Beuve recalls
how, during a whole season at Venice, one
saw nothing but Rastignacs, Duchesses de
Langeais and de Maufrigneuse, and how
several actors and actresses of that comedy
of society are said to have carried out their
assumed characters with literal exactitude.
The same serious game was played with
less completeness in Russia, Poland, and
Hungary.
" Not only mankind," writes Balzac,
" but the notable events of existence are
faithfully represented by types. There are
situations, typical phases, which reappear
in every life, and one of my chief objects
has been to describe them faithfully." He
went beyond the typical experiences of
humanity in such works as "Seraphita"
and " Louis Lambert," where the influence
of mysticism is so strongly exhibited, but
25
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
with that aspect of his work we are not
here concerned, Assuredly not devoid of
" romantic " tendencies, he was far more
" realistic," and we may regard him as the
strongest link between the two schools of
fiction.
It was, primarily, to paint " la bete
humaine " in every phase of its life, but
especially in its more luxurious lairs, that
he set out, first in the field to attempt the
work. Sympathy with the failings of man,
recognition of the resistless power of fate,
of heredity, of environment, are clear in
every novel from 4iis pen. It is in his
belief in the determinism of human actions
that he stands, in his treatment of character
and consequences, the most apart from
other great novelists. If he was one of
the first to liken a hero to a Greek god,
he was also one of the most effective ex-
ponents of the fatalistic creed expressed in
the Greek Tragedy, now so commonly
exploited in fiction. He essayed the most
stupendous task that any writer has ever
undertaken, a task before which that of
26
Herbert Spencer seems comparatively
small. Only we must remember that while
Spencer completed the task he had set
himself, Balzac died in the midst of his
work. Yet he lived to achieve immeasur-
ably more than any other student or painter
of social life has achieved. With the
present temper and tendencies of fiction,
the likelihood that Balzac's life-work will
be equalled in the future seems about as
great as that communication will be opened
up with the Martians, or women in general
become indifferent to the fashioning of
their clothes.
27
WOMEN OF THE "HUMAN
COMEDY."
A LADY whose reading is not wholly
confined to the novels of the hour was
heard to dismiss Balzac with the remark,
uttered with evident belief in its absolute
veracity, "There are no good women in
his books." One knows this easy species
of criticism too well. " Dickens never
drew a gentleman," " All Thackeray's
modest women are namby-pamby," are
phrases which are repeated with as much
assurance as the statements that "there
are no snakes in Ireland," " no owls in
Iceland," and "no cats mentioned in the
Bible." With the propounders of sweeping
literary generalisations it is certainly not
worth while to enter upon any discussion
during a casual meeting at a dinner table
29
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
or a garden-party, where most of the
company care no more about the characters
of the women in Balzac's novels than they
care whether the fisher of the murex made
a fortune by his fishing, or John Keats by
his poems. To begin with, one would
have to arrive at a mutual understanding
of the qualities of goodness. This much
may be conceded without any undue favour,
that, with rare exceptions, the most admir-
able creations of Balzac, whether women
or men, are persons whom Dr. Portman
would not have considered suitable com-
panions for Arthur Pendennis, and whose
conventional ideas would have appeared
quite dreadful to the worthy inhabitants
of Cranford.
Perhaps there is no surer evidence of
inferiority in a work of the imagination,
novel, play, or poem, than the unwritten
suggestion to the reader to divide the
characters into two distinct classes, the
"good" people and the "bad." In any
case, the game would be so difficult for
the reader of Balzac's novels that it would
30
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
cease to be amusing long before any
noticeable result was achieved. The
better and the worse might be sorted out,
more or less unfairly, but the " black" and
the " white " could not be classified without
allowing a large appearance of grey on
either side.
It is well to get over this question of
commonplace "criticism," nearly all the
women whose characters are most admir-
ably imagined and presented in the
" Comedie Humaine" being, in the very
English sense of the word, frail. Here
and there we have an Eve Chardon, an
Ursule Mirouet, an Honorine, pure as a
Sophia Western or a Lady Castlewood ;
but we must recognise the fact that it is a
darker side of social existence which, on the
whole, is presented tousinwhatmightalmost
as aptly have been called the " Human
Tragedy." For the partial reassurance
of anxious readers who know not Balzac
and may have seen some of his novels in
the hands of "young persons" it must be
added that vice in the " Comedie Humaine "
31
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
almost invariably leads to misery. The
endings of " La Rabouilleuse," Valerie
Marneffe, the "fille aux yeux d'or," and
Julie d'Aiglemont, for examples, might
satisfy the sternest Puritans, and indeed it
may be doubted whether any novelist has
shown the earthly penalty of sin in a more
terrible light.
In the analysis of the workings of the
human heart, and of whatever organ may
take its place in heartless people, of whom
there are many in his novels, Balzac toiled
more assiduously than any novelist before
or since. Nowadays we talk more of the
soul than the heart. It is the " psychology"
of M. Bourget, for instance, that we discuss,
not the " kerology," or whatever the correct
dog-Greek may be. There is no doubt a
very real distinction, the women of Balzac's
imagination being for the most part moved
by instincts almost as near to the animal as
to the spiritual, in spite of the fine words
in which their feelings are expressed.
Sainte-Beuve declared that he was in-
clined to call Balzac the lover of his
32
marquises ; and Mr. Henry James, in his
remarkable introduction to " Two Young
Brides," to which reference has already
been made, has said of the " great ladies "
of the " Comdie Humaine " that " it is as
surrounded by them, even as some magni-
ficent, indulgent Pasha by his overflowing
seraglio, that Balzac sits most at his ease."
Whether we agree or not depends on indi-
vidual impressions and not on matters of
proof. Often Balzac appears quite as much
at his ease with Madame Birotteau and
Cesarine, with Madame Grandet and Eu-
genie, with poor old Madame Desroches
and Agathe Bridau, with the unhappy
little Pierrette or the fortunate little Ursule
as with any of the luxurious and generally
passion-troubled marquises of " the Fau-
bourg." To one of the semi-great ladies
the provincial queens of the " Comedie,"
by the way, Mr. Henry James is not
entirely just. He tells his readers that
" The whole episode of Madame de Barge-
ton's ' chucking ' Lucien de Rubempre, on
reaching Paris with him, under pressure of
33 c
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Madame d'Espard's shockability as to his
coat and trousers, and other such matters,
is either a magnificent lurid document or
the baseless fabric of a vision. The great
wonder is that, as I rejoice to put it, we can
never really discover which, and that we
feel, as we read, that we can't, and that we
suffer at the hands of no other author this
particular helplessness of immersion."
The fact is, however, that not only did
Lucien " chuck " Nais quite as much as she
"chucked" him, but that the mutual disil-
lusionment came before Madame de Barge-
ton had seen her cousin Madame d'Espard,
after the flight to Paris. At the Vaudeville,
during the first visit to the theatre, we are
told of Lucien that " the presence of many
pretty women, beautifully dressed in the
very latest fashions, forced him to remark
the out-of-date toilette of Madame de
Bargeton. Although it was tolerably ambi-
tious, the materials, colours, and style were
alike old-fashioned. The coiffure also,
which had so charmed him at Angouleme,
now appeared in shocking taste compared
34
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
with the delicate devices exhibited by the
other women present." Similar thoughts
were troubling the pretty if ridiculously
adorned head of Nai's herself.
" II se preparait chez Madame de Barge-
ton et chez Lucien un d^senchantement sur
eux-memes dont la cause etait Paris. La
vie s'y agrandissait aux yeux du poete,
comme la societe prenait une force nouvelle
aux yeux de Louise."
It is not entirely gallant, therefore, to lay
upon Madame de Bargeton and Madame
d'Espard's " shockability " the entire re-
sponsibility for the breaking-up of the
Angouleme romance.
In the same lively and enthusiastic essay
to which I have referred, and which con-
tains one of the most obviously sincere and
understanding tributes to Balzac in the
English language, Mr. James has a strik-
ing passage on the particular question of
Balzac's representation of women. " He
gets (says the American critic), for further
intensity, into the very skin of his jeunes
marines into each alternately as they are
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
different enough ; so that any other mode
of representing women, or of representing
anybody, becomes, in juxtaposition, a thing
so void of the active contortions of truth
as to be comparatively wooden. He bears
children with Madame de 1'Estorade, knows
intimately how she suffers for them, and
not less intimately how her correspondent
suffers, as well as enjoys, without them.
Big as he is, he makes himself small to be
handled by her with young maternal pas-
sion, and positively to handle her in turn
with infantile innocence."
The expression of a belief in Balzac's
imaginative power could scarcely go further
than that "positively," but the extraordi-
nary force of Balzac's analysis of mental
workings must impress every careful
reader, and justifies, more than any of
his elaborate pictures of material objects,
his place among the High -Priests of
" realism."
" Women (declares the abominable
Colonel Philippe Bridau) are naughty chil-
dren ; they are animals inferior to man, and
36
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
we must make them fear us, for the worst
thing that can happen to us is to be ruled
by such creatures."
The opinion thus given by the biggest
blackguard that Balzac has invented or
presented is but a coarse and brutal ex-
pression of the idea uttered by the angry
hero of <( Locksley Hall."
Shall it not be scorn to me to harp on such a
moulder'd string ?
I am shamed thro' all my nature to have loved so
slight a thing.
Weakness to be wroth with weakness ! woman's
pleasure, woman's pain
Nature made them blinder motions bounded in a
shallower brain.
Balzac's own presentation of the
" woman " question, not formulated, but to
be gathered from his analysis of emotions
and "mental processes," is that women are
rather a distinct variety of the race than a
higher or lower form.
Among the women whose characters are
most clearly drawn in the novels are Hen-
riette de Mortsauf, the heroine of " Le Lys
37
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
dans la Vallee," Julie d'Aiglemont in "La
Femme de Trente Ans," the Duchesse de
Langeais in the " Histoire des Treize,"
Coralie in " Illusions Perdues,"and Valerie
MarnefFe in "Cousine Bette." These five
cover between them a great part of the
picture of woman's dealings with man in
the " Human Comedy." Henriette quite
openly prefers the romantic Felix de Van-
denesse to her hypochondriacal husband,
who allows her ample freedom, having
almost perfect confidence in her fidelity.
She remains virtuous, never allowing Felix
more than an occasional kiss on her hair
or her hand, and for ever urging upon him
the enormous superiority of a union of
souls over any physical sympathy. She
dies at length of jealousy and virtue com-
bined, the novelist leaving us in doubt-
though hardly in doubt after all as to
whether all the time this unhappy wife had
not been just as anxious to throw her bon-
net over the nearest windmill as her lover
to see her do it. Antoinette de Langeais,
more bound by matrimony than Henriette,
38
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
in spite of, or rather because of, the fact
that she is separated from her husband,
also remains " virtuous"- technically till
she dies. She dies, indeed, on the very
day that her lover comes to carry her off,
aided by the secret society to which he
belongs, from the convent in which she
had sought oblivion after her discovery of
the terrible truth that surrender may come
too late to be effective. Both these ex-
amples may suggest that the novelist be-
lieved in the proverb, "everything comes
to him who waits," if death does not come
first and what an if! Only, in the case
of Armand de Montriveau and Antoinette
de Langeais, when the gift so long sought
came to him at last he would not have it,
and when the gift she had so tardily sought
came to her she was no longer " in being."
Julie d'Aiglemont we become so fami-
liar with duchesses, marchionesses, and
countesses in Balzac's novels that we talk
about them by their Christian names as
readily as if they were mere Hetty Sorels
or Dolly Vardens appears in two charac-
39
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
ters. The man who, loving her from a
mere peep through a carriage window,
literally devotes his life to her and for her,
dying of pneumonia after hanging on the
sill of her window throughout a cold night
"to save her honour," makes no impres-
sion on her virtuous resolves, unless to
strengthen them. Yet Julie, like a name-
sake of hers on the other side of the
Pyrenees,
Whispering " I will ne'er consent " consented,
but Donna Julia consented with the lover
to whom she whispered, whereas in Julie's
case it was with another one.
Coralie, the piquant actress who takes
Lucien's worthless heart by storm, and
loves him so devotedly, is one of the least
selfish of the swarming amoureuses drawn
by Balzac. Frail, of course, she is, but
compared with the poet for whose love she
is happy to die in misery she is an angel
of light.
We come then to the last of the five
types that were named together Madame
40
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Marneffe. If Philippe Bridau is, as I
hold, the worst man drawn by Balzac,
Valerie Marneffe may take her place at
the other end of the chimney-piece. Their
figures in bronze would make a perfect
pair of ornaments for the drawing-room
of a wealthy blackmailer married to a
woman who had destroyed her first hus-
band. Valerie, linked by marriage to an
odious man, selling her beauty to two men
at once, giving it to a third, and promising
the reversion to a fourth who has pos-
sessed it before any of the rest, and been
deceived in his absence, is not merely im-
moral and false, she is a wicked mother
who neglects her only child, a swindler
who trades as much upon the better in-
stincts rare enough of her lovers as
upon her own shame. To sketch this
fascinating and horrible creature in few
words would be impossible. She is the
very incarnation of the evil wrought by
physical beauty, bright intellect, and
entire lack of principle combined. Her
horrible end, so utterly horrible as almost
41
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
to pass into the ridiculous, and thus to
prove the possibility of extremes meeting,
is but one among scores of instances of
the frequent appearance of that "poetic"
justice, that lex talionis, one may almost
call it, in the " Comedie Humaine," where-
by men who ruin others are ruined at the
last themselves, and women whose attrac-
tions are the curse of men are brought to
misery at the last by men with whose
affections they have played.
Balzac's ideal of woman is seen in
Madame de Camps, whose character he
presents with unusual economy of space,
perhaps by leaving her defects, " if that
angel had a fault," without mention ;
though he does tell us that she made her-
self out to be three years younger than she
actually was. Whatever her years, she
was charming in mind and in person, and
she was certainly under thirty, the age of
feminine perfection according to the Bal-
zacian philosophy.
" Have you, for your happiness, met a
woman whose harmonious voice lent to her
42
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
speech a charm equally diffused by her
manners, who knows when to speak, and
when to hold her tongue, who treats you
with delicacy, whose words are happily
chosen, whose language is refined ? Her
raillery caresses, and her criticism does not
wound ; she neither harangues nor argues,
but is pleased to conduct a discussion, and
puts an end to it at the right moment.
Her manner is affable and cheerful, her
politeness has nothing forced about it, her
attentions are not servile ; respect is with
her no more than une ombre do^lce ; she
never wearies you, and she leaves you
pleased with her and with yourself. Her
character is expressed in the things around
her. In her rooms, everything pleases
the eyes, and you breathe, as it were,
the air of a home. That woman is
natural. There is no sign of effort, she
does not advertise her attractions or her
feelings. Her opinions are simply ex-
pressed, because they are genuine. Per-
fectly frank, she avoids offending any one's
self-esteem ; she accepts men as God has
43
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
made them, pitying the bad, pardoning
faults and absurdities, appreciating the
differences of age, and never allowing
herself to be put out by anything, because
she has the tact to foresee everything.
Gentle and lively at the same time, she
assists before offering consolation. You
like her so much, that, if that angel does
wrong, you feel yourself ready to justify
her." The detail that this charming woman
married her second husband at Gretna
Green may be brought to the notice of
English readers.
No novelist has ever devoted more
space and attention to the personal
appearance of his characters than Balzac,
who, more than any other, seeks in the
physical form for the expression of the
spiritual or intellectual nature. As a re-
sult, we see many curious-looking people.
The personal appearance of Eugenie
Grandet, for instance, who, in popular
esteem, was once and may still be
quite the " leading lady " of the " Human
Comedy," is not at all of a kind that an
44
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
ordinary novelist would consider suitable
for a heroine. She ' ' belonged to that type
of girl, strongly built, that one sees in the
lower middle class, and whose charms
appear rather commonplace ; but if she
resembled the Venus of Milo, her figure
was dignified by that sweetness of Chris-
tian sentiment which purifies a woman
and lends her a distinction unknown to
the sculptors of antiquity. She had an
enormous head, with the forehead,
masculine yet delicate, of the Jupiter of
Phidias, and grey eyes on which her
chaste existence, en sy portant tout entiere,
iniprimait une lumiere jaillissante. (How
can one translate such phrases with
any hope of success ?) The traits of her
round face, formerly fresh and rosy, had
been affected by a small-pox clement
enough to leave no markings, but which
had destroyed the bloom of a skin that,
nevertheless, was still so soft and fine that
the pure kiss of her mother left for the
moment a red mark upon it. Her nose
was rather too big, but it was in harmony
45
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
with a mouth the colour of red lead
(minium], of which the lips a mille rates
were full of affection and kindness. Her
neck was of a perfect roundness. Her
rounded bosom, carefully veiled, attracted
the regard et faisait rfoer ; it lacked, no
doubt, a little of that grace which can be
acquired, but, for connoisseurs, the inflex-
ibility of that haute faille would have
been charming. Eugenie, tall and strongly-
built, offered then nothing of that pretti-
ness which pleases the world at large, but
she was beautiful with that beauty so easily
overlooked, and by which artists alone are
captivated."
A painter, seeking a model such as
Raphael found for his Madonnas, might
have seen in Eugenie, under her unruffled
brow, we are told, " a world of love, and
in her eyes the/ ne sais quoi divine. Her
features, the contour of her head, which
passion had not impaired or worn, resem-
bled the horizontal lines so softly traced in
the background of some placid lake. That
tranquil countenance, tinted, bordered with
46
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
light like a pretty opening flower, gave
rest to one's soul, and conveyed the charm
of the conscience which was reflected there,
and which redemandait le regard"'
One is tempted to give up as hopeless
as indeed it is the attempt to convey
Balzac's descriptions of women, in their
full significance, in another language than
the French in which they were written.
Balzac's French is in many ways peculiar
to himself. His adverse critics, at the
time when his novels were appearing,
found it easy, as I have shown elsewhere
in these pages, to make sport of his adjec-
tives and his similes and metaphors. Let
us glance at another of his leading ladies,
Mademoiselle Felicite des Touches, as
charming to the eye at forty as at one-
and-twenty, like many other of Balzac's
beauties, yet whose charms, as described
in imitation of some phrases of Gautier's
by Balzac, might seem ridiculous if one took
every word in its literal sense. She is less
than five feet high, she has high cheek
bones, rather straight hips, a neck which
47
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
shows "des plis d'une magnificence
athletique," and a shoulder-joint which
" semble appartenir a une femme colossale,"
while the tip of her nose possesses "a sort
of mobility which does wonders in those
moments when she is indignant, angry, or
antagonistic."
The truth or part of it at any rate is
that Balzac does not always mean exactly
what he says. If we heard of an English
girl that she had " une tete enorme,"
referring to her actual head and not to her
coiffure or that "1'attache des bras,"
" semble appartenir a une femme colossale,"
we should expect to see, when we made
her acquaintance, a young woman whose
size of head and of shoulders was a
deformity seriously detracting from her
personal charms. Yet in the cases of
Eugenie and Felicite there is no sugges-
tion that their creator regarded them
as inviting pity for any defects in their
beauty. One of the pitfalls for trans-
lators is in those many words which,
in ordinary parlance, are " the same in
48
both languages." There are dozens of
instances in Balzac where horrible and
terrible no more mean " horrible " and
" terrible " than en effet means " in effect,"
than vicaire means " vicar," curb " curate,"
libraire "librarian," or editeitr ''editor,"
or, to come nearer home, than "terrible' 1
means anything dreadful when a Kentish
farmer declares it is "a terrible good year
for hops." The French are accustomed to
use adjectives that are stronger than the
facts seem to us to justify, and for them-
selves the proper shade of meaning is
readily appreciable. To translate enorme
by "large" or colossale by "big," would
perhaps be nearer the truth in the above
quotations.
Balzac, as his readers soon discover, is
a great " generaliser." His Bretons and
Normans, for example, will always be true
to their racial characteristics, and so great
is Balzac's belief in race that a blonde or
a brunette, as the case may be, will have
certain tendencies, and will behave in
given circumstances in a certain way.
49 *>
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Some of his physical generalisations so to
speak may appear overdrawn to many.
For example, he tells us of Julie d'Aigle-
mont, that, " In common with nearly all
the women who have very long hair, she
was perfectly white. Her skin, of a
wonderful delicacy, a symptom that rarely
deceives, announced a true sensitiveness,
evidenced also by the type of her features,
which had that marvellous finish that
Chinese artists give to their fantastic
paintings. Her neck was perhaps a little
long, but that sort of neck is the most
graceful, and lends to a woman's head a
vague affinity with the magnetic undula-
tions of a snake. Even without a single
one of the thousand signs by which the
most hypocritical natures are revealed to
the observer, one would be able to discern
a woman's character by attentively watch-
ing the movements of the head and the
bendings of the neck, so varied, and so
expressive."
There is no more finished portrait of a
woman in the "Human Comedy" than
5
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
that of the Princesse de Cadignan. As
Duchesse de Maufrigneuse she has flitted
about the novels, but it is only when we
spend our time with her during her suc-
cessful courtship of Daniel d'Arthez, one
of the most high-principled men invented
by Balzac, that we have the whole charac-
ter of this accomplished woman displayed
before us. She is a creature after the
author's (literary) heart. He was never
more vigorous than in depicting men or
women in whom selfishness and dissimula-
tion are so closely interwoven with admira-
tion and fondness for others, usually of the
other sex, that they themselves do not
know when they cease to be genuine.
This admixture, of course, is a common
characteristic of men and women, but few
have illustrated it, even here and there, so
finely as Balzac over and over again.
The Princess is not far off forty, and has
never been more beautiful. She has spent
all her fortune ; her husband, for whom she
cares nothing at all, is in exile with his
Bourbon master, her past is so populous
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
that, in order to reassure the parents of the
rich heiress whom she seeks for her son
of nineteen, she is compelled to affect the
seclusion of a nun, depending for her
income on allowances from her family, and
for the very fiowers in her little garden in
Paris on her dear friend of the same age,
Madame d'Espard. Why Na'is d'Espard
is so devoted to Diane de Cadignan no one
can make out, though every one knows
simple affection cannot be the reason, that
exalted lady having never yet been known
to do anything from unselfish motives.
Both women are sighing for the ideal
love which they have not yet found. Each
wants to be adored by some ardent genius
who will throw his intellect and his heart at
her elegantly covered feet. The Princess
has, it seems, been adored by an enthusiast
to whom she has never spoken, and who is
now dead. Discovering that he was the
bosom friend of d'Arthez (the two men
were members of that dnacle which tried
to save Lucien from perdition) she makes
love to that genius under pretence that she
5 2
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
regards him as the twin-soul of her lost
adorer.
The manner in which she leads Daniel
on, works up his passion, repulses him at
critical moments, and makes him regard
her as a very goddess of beauty and love,
as in fact she deserves to be called, since
Venus was a goddess, is described by the
novelist with a verve and effect never
equalled, so far as I know, save in his
own account of the love-making of the
Duchesse de Langeais. But the Duchess
wore out her lover by her refusal to
accept him or reject him definitely, while
the Princess, like Madame de Beauseant in
" La Femme abandonnee," carries off her
lover to Switzerland and lives happily for
a good bit of " ever after." All the little
tricks of coquetry, the subtle allurements
of hair and toilette, the movements of the
head and hands, the raising or lowering of
the eyes, are touched in with admirable
effect, while the conversation of this
gifted amateur in the art of the stage
which she never trod, whose mise en scene
53
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
is in her own boudoir, is imagined and set
down with an intuition and vivacity not
surpassed even in "La Cousine Bette,"
where woman's wiles are so wonderfully
depicted. When she is telling the brilliant
tissue of lies by which she persuades
Daniel that she is a much-injured woman
of virgin soul, she artistically breaks off,
as if for shame, at the point where the
deepest secrets of her sufferings are
reached. No extract torn from the con-
text can ever give the full force of a scene ;
but a passage from the description of the
interview wherein Diane plays her best
cards and wins all the tricks as honestly
as Bret Harte's Chinee, may at least
suggest to those who have not read the
story the desirability of reading it. Of
course it loses much of its spirit in transla-
tion, but that is another reason for going
to the book itself. Diane has reached the
vital point in her mendacious narrative, and
having stopped, has fallen, or pretended
to fall, into a reverie.
54
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
' " Well ? " said Daniel in a soft and calm
voice. Diane looked up at him ; then she
lowered her eyes slowly, closing her eye-
lids by a movement which revealed the
finest modesty. Only a monster could
have been capable of suspecting hypocrisy
in the graceful undulation by which the
cunning Princess lifted her pretty little
head to plunge yet another regard in the
hungry eyes of that great man.
" Can I tell you ? Ought I ? " she said,
in allowing a gesture of hesitation to escape
whilst she looked at d'Arthez with a sublime
expression of dreamy tenderness. " Men
have such little faith in this sort of confi-
dence ! They believe themselves so little
bound to discretion ! "
" Ah ! " cried d'Arthez, " if you mistrust
me, why am I here ? "
" Eh ! my friend," she replied, giving to
her exclamation the appearance of an in-
voluntary avowal, " when a woman attaches
herself to any one for life, does she calcu-
late? It is not a question of my refusal
(what can I refuse to you ?), but of the
55
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
opinion you will have of me if I tell you
all. I will indeed confide to you the strange
position in which, at my age, I am placed ;
but what would you think of a woman who
could reveal the hidden sorrows of her
married life, who could betray the secrets
of another ? Turenne kept his word to
the robbers ; do I not owe to my torturers
the loyalty of Turenne ? "
" Have you given your word to some
one ? " asked Daniel.
" M. de Cadignan has not thought it
necessary to bind me to secrecy. You
ask then more than my soul ? Tyrant !
You wish me to bury my probity in
you ? " she said, throwing upon d'Arthez
a look by which she gave a higher price
to tha t false confidence than to all her
person.'
And so the scene progresses, till, " the
hour having arrived," Diane binds the poor
" great man" "in the inextricable meshes
of a carefully prepared romance, to which he
listened as a neophyte of the early days of
56
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Christianity listened to the words of an
apostle."
For the end of this remarkable scene, as
the reviewers say when they feel they have
told us as much of the story as is fair to
the author, "we must refer the reader to
the book itself."
Leaving the particular instance of the
fascinating Diane de Cadignan for the
general question of Balzac's womankind,
it must be noted that several of the most
spirituels of his men proffer their own
analyses of women of various types. What
Philippe Bridau professed to think of
woman in the abstract we have already
heard. Of the women a la mode Horace
Bianchon declares that he holds them in
horror, for the negative reason that "no
woman whose soul is elevated, whose taste
is pure, whose intelligence is bright, whose
heart is full of feeling, and who leads a
simple life, has the slightest chance of
being a la mode." From a Bixiou or a
Rastignac such an opinion would have
covered a bitter irony. From the doctor
57
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
who knows so much of human suffering it
comes through Balzac's imagination as
a genuine expression of opinion concerning
the Parisian women of his time.
Then there is Emile Blondet, who ana-
lyses the woman comme il faut, a creature
whose difference from the woman a la mode
is not necessarily small, the comme il faut
type being on the whole a finer one than
the merely a la mode.
"You cannot talk for half an hour with
a bourgeoise^ says M. Blondet, "without
her bringing her husband into the conver-
sation ; but as for a woman comme il faut,
if you know that she is married, she has
the delicacy to conceal the fact from you so
well that it has been a work of Christopher
Columbus to discover her husband. The
wit of the woman comme il faut, when she
has any, consists in leaving everything in
doubt, as that of the bourgeoise urges her
to tell everything. There lies the great
difference between these two women ; the
bourgeoise certainly possesses virtue, the
58
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
woman comme il faut does not know if she
has got it still, or if she will always have it ;
she hesitates and resists where the other
refuses point-blank pour tomber a plat.
That hesitation in everything is one of the
last graces left to her by our horrible
epoch."
No more horrible act is perpetrated by
any woman in the " Human Comedy " than
that of the young girl Rosalie de Watte-
ville, who wrecks the happiness of Albert
Savarus and the Duchesse d'Argaiolo by
forging letters which convince the Italian
lady that her Belgian lover is false, and
this at the very time when the death of the
old Duke d'Argaiolo, so patiently awaited,
gives Savarus the right todemand the reward
of his long fidelity. This " little Rosalie "
(who is terribly punished by Fate) offers in
the earlier pages of the novel a piquant illus-
tration of the hopelessness of the attempt to
bring up &jeune fille in complete ignorance
of everythingthather teachers do not impart
to her. She is so artful that she persuades
59
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
her parents to build a kiosk in the garden,
they being quite unconscious that their dear
child knows that, from the upper storey of
this summer-house, she will be able to see
into Albert's rooms ; and she encourages
clandestine meetings in this same kiosk
between her mother's maid and Albert's
valet, in order that the valet may show his
gratitude by bringing his master's letters to
her before they are despatched or delivered,
as the case may be. This is the sweet
little girl of eighteen who has read nothing
but the " Lettres edifiantes" and some
works upon the science of heraldry. Even
in the study of heraldry there are dangers
lurking, and Rosalie's remark on the
escutcheon of Savarus, made at a small
dinner-party in her own house, " No doubt
the bar is a sign of bastardy, but the bastard
of a Comte de Savarus is noble," while it
disconcerts her mother, leads her hen-
pecked father to remark, " You wished her
to learn heraldry, and she knows it well ! "
Another of Balzac's marked feminine
"types" is Juana de Mancini, who, after
60
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
her marriage to Diard, when she was
"struggling at every moment against her
nature, half Spanish and half Italian,
having dried up the fountain of her tears
by secret weeping, was one of those
typical creations destined to represent
feminine unhappiness in its largest ex-
pression ; sorrow incessantly active, and
the depicting of which would require ob-
servations so minute that, for people avid
of dramatic emotions, they would become
insipid. Such an analysis, where every
wife could find some of her own sufferings
described, would, if it were to comprise
them all, fill an entire book."
One of the two provincial predeuses
of the "Human Comedy" is Madame de
Barge ton, for whom " marriage and the
world were a nunnery. She lived on
poetry, as a nun lives on religion." The
other is Dinah de la Baudraye, who makes
such a fool of herself with Lousteau, the
unprincipled journalist. In the days before
she met that most unromantic of lovers
her provincial salon was very "select"
61
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
indeed, and very "cultured." "Desirous
of maintaining her intelligence at the level
of the mouvement parisien, Madame de la
Baudraye would not suffer from any one
empty remarks, nor worn-out compliments,
nor phrases without point ; she declined
to listen to that babbling of gossip, that
back-stairs tittle-tattle which is the chief
component of provincial conversation."
" By the best company," says Hazlitt
of some commonplace critic, " of which he
is perpetually talking, he means persons
who live on their own estates and other
people's ideas." That was not Dinah's
reading of the term. The bavardage to
which she refused a hearing was just
that "endless chatter and blast" of which
Emerson writes as one of the gravest
calamities that can come upon a house.
Mademoiselle des Touches, more, per-
haps, than any other woman of Balzac,
was accustomed to entertain what was
really "the best " company, so far as con-
versation is concerned. When, on a
notable occasion, the " Paron " de Nucin-
62
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
gen and his wife were present at one of
her most select "second parties," it was,
we may fancy, merely in order to allow the
Alsatian financier to make his remark,
containing more of esprit than he realised
" Gomme on oupliei"
The hostess of that occasion no doubt
had some affinities with George Sand,
Felicite, declares the cure" to the anxious
mother of Calyste, the handsome young
man who spends all his evenings in the
society of the celebrated woman-writer, is
" an amphibious being who is neither man
nor woman, who smokes like a hussar, and
writes like a journalist."
Among the comparatively few notable
women of Balzac's novels who are neither
wives nor lovers, Mademoiselle Zephirine
de Gu^nic stands out very clearly against
the light. This proud and devoted old
lady, so careful of the property of her
brother which she has safeguarded
through all the years of his exile under
the Revolution and the First Empire
that she will not spend twenty pounds for
63
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
the removal of the cataract which has
blinded her, watches over the little house-
hold almost as carefully without eyes as
with them. "Her attention not being dis-
tracted, she knew, without mounting there,
the size of the heap of walnuts in the
granary, and how much corn there was in
the box in the stable, without plunging
there her vigorous arm. She had, at the
end of a cord attached to her waistband, a
boatswain's whistle, with which she called
the cook by blowing once, and the man-
servant by blowing twice."
The most romantic of all Balzac's
heroines, and in some respects the most
heroic, is Marie de Verneuil in " Les
Chouans." She was, in fact, the first of
his heroines to receive any warm welcome
from the reading public, and she deserved
her success. This beautiful spy of the Re-
publican Government, who falls passion-
ately in love with the Royalist chief whom
she is sent to betray, and marries him with
the almost certain knowledge that both
will die within twenty-four hours of the
64
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
wedding, is as finely-imagined a character
as any in the whole series of novels. In
her case the working of the feminine brain,
so subtly analysed in almost every work of
Balzac's as in the instances of Madame de
Beauseant en >-etraite, of Madame Claes
in despair, of Madame Hulot in despera-
tion, of Beatrix in breaking hearts, and of
Lisbeth Fischer in devilish jealousy is
for the first time studied and illustrated
with the assurance and clearness of an
entomologist describing the functions of
the ganglia in a wasp or a beetle, combined
with the sympathy of the true artist for
the subject that he strives to present.
If these reminiscences of some typical
women of Balzac's novels seem to touch
more on frailty than fidelity, the excuse has
already been offered. One's justification,
in any case, could be suggested by the
single fact that he would not allow his own
nieces to read the majority of his books,
and that he wrote " Ursule Mirouet,"
wherein no woman " goes wrong," ex-
pressly for them and for other 'jeunes filles
65 E
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
to enjoy. That it is one of the most de-
lightful of the whole series of novels proves
conclusively, if any proof were required,
that it was not because his strength was in
the depicting of "easy virtue" that the
virtue of most of his heroines is so easy on
occasion.
66
MEN OF "THE HUMAN
COMEDY."
IT has been held by some highly compe-
tent judges that Balzac realised women
better than men. It is, at any rate, true
that there is no man in the novels so ex-
haustively studied as Diane de Cadignan,
Julie d'Aiglemont, Valerie Marneffe. The
men are, in most instances, just as much
alive as their wives or mistresses, but we
do not see so much of the working of their
inner consciences. We see them in action
more frequently than the women, but their
"mental processes " are not dissected and
explained with the same elaboration.
This difference may be accounted for, in
some degree, by the fact that Balzac had
studied the feminine character more closely
than the masculine, even if his studies were
67
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
carried out for the most part within the
confines of his own brain. But another
reason undoubtedly lies in the novelist's
theory "of love. He shared the opinion
expressed in some burning lines placed by
his favourite poet, Byron, in the mouth of
the Spanish cousin of Balzac's own Julie
d'Aiglemont, that
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence ; man may range
The court, camp, church, the vessel and the mart ;
Sword, gown, gain, glory, offer in exchange
Pride, fame, ambition, to fill up his heart,
And few there are whom these cannot estrange ;
Men have all these resources, we but one,
To love again, and be again undone.
In those days there was, at any rate, more
truth in this view of amorous affection than
there would be in the France of to-day,
save in the case of the convent-bred jeunes
filles, who are still guarded until marriage
with a care that would be intolerable to
the majority of girls of the corresponding
classes in this country. In England, of
68
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
course, with its ladies' clubs (where Felicite
des Touches, who shocked the Cure of
Guerande by her "mannish" behaviour,
could smoke her hookah without reproof),
and its swarm of " authoresses," women
are no longer driven by the absence of
alternatives to find " their whole existence "
in love. They have as many outlets for
their intellectual energies as they can want,
barring politics.
Some few of the women of Balzac's
novels were hard workers, with little time
to bother their heads or their hearts about
men ; but the leading ladies of the
" Comedie " are mostly under no necessity
to work, and are chiefly devoted to their
affaires du cceur. Passion being the prime
factor in Balzac's novels, and women being
more deeply affected by passion than men,
it is the women's minds that are chiefly
analysed. There is no man in the whole
" Human Comedy," not even the abnormal
Louis Lambert, with his imbecile exterior
and angelic intelligence, of whose thoughts
we know as much as we do of the thoughts
69
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
of the Princesse de Cadignan or of Madame
Graslin.
So far as frequency of appearance may
decide the point, the principal men of the
" Human Comedy " are Eugene Rastignac,
Henri de Marsay, Jean-Jacques Bixiou, and
Horace Bianchon. We are always meet-
ing one or another of the quartette at parties,
or at the theatre, in a squalid garret or a
silk-hung drawing-room.
Rastignac, the son of a provincial
nobleman who is far too poor to provide
for him in a becoming manner, starts his
Paris life in a fourth-rate boarding-house,
but speedily climbs into comparative
affluence by making successful love to the
neglectful daughter of his fellow-boarder
Pere Goriot, and indifferent wife of the
wealthy Alsacian Jew, peer of France, com-
pany promoter and financier, Frederic de
Nucingen. Originally a rather kindly and
conscientious young man, Rastignac, though
he never becomes a wholly unprincipled
scoundrel like Maxime de Trailles, the lover
of Goriot's other daughter (who, as old
70
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Gobseck says, "has nothing but mud in
his veins "), is so hardened by his early
experiences of the heartlessness of men
and women in Paris that he deliberately
sets out to conquer the world with its own
weapons, and succeeds so well that he
becomes a prominent statesman, and a mil-
lionaire d la mode de France. He is the
type of man, not at all unfamiliar in his-
tory, who, having succeeded in making the
path of love run smoothly, uses it as an
easy road to fortune. His intellect is
strong, but his conversation is not usually
brilliant. His aims are clearly defined, and
nothing is allowed to stand in his way. He
is the "pushful" man, who means to be
rich and powerful, and achieves his object
while still in the prime of life. The poor
youth whom we first meet, cursing his lot,
and tending his dying neighbour inMadame
Vauquer's nauseous pension, comes out
from the Chamber of Deputies he is now
a Minister into the garden to talk to us,
looking young still, in spite of his forty-
eight years, "dressed in black, without any
7'
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
decoration," laughing consumedly at the
things that are going on in the " House."
Leon de Lora asks him what he is so
tickled by.
" My dear fellow," replies Rastignac,
" in order to prove the sincerity of the
Constitutional Government, we are obliged
to tell the most awful lies with an in-
credible assurance. As for me, I am
variable. If there are some days when I
can lie like a programme, there are others
when I cannot be serious. To-day is one
of my laughing days. Well, at this
moment, the Prime Minister, called upon
by the opposition to reveal some of the
secrets of diplomacy, though it would
refuse to disclose them if it was in office
itself, is about to do his exercises in the
tribune ; and, being an honest man who
does not lie for his own pleasure, he whis-
pered in my ear before mounting to the
assault: 'I don't know what to tell them!'
In seeing him in the tribune, I have been
unable to control my laughter, and have
72
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
come out, for one cannot laugh on the
Ministerial bench, where my youth some-
times returns to me unseasonably."
The Comte de Marsay is a bigger
success in the world even than the Comte
de Rastignac, coming to be the Prime
Minister of Louis Philippe, after having
been the Adonis of half the grandes dames
of the " Comedie Humaine." He is one of
the " finest gentlemen " and most utter
cads in fiction, and we have no doubt that
Balzac knew him through and through.
The son of a great English nobleman
by an unprincipled French girl, Henri de
Marsay was educated by a worldly abbe,
who taught him so well that when this
worthy man died a bishop, in 1812, he
had "the satisfaction of leaving on earth
a youth of sixteen, whose heart and soul
were so well fashioned that he could get
over a man of forty. Who would expect
to encounter a heart of bronze, an alcohol-
ised brain, under the most seductive ex-
terior that the old painters, those nai've
73
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
artists, gave to the serpent in the Garden
of Eden ? That is yet nothing. The
good devil in violet had provided for his
favourite some acquaintances in the high
society of Paris who were worth many
thousands a year to the young man." He
was so handsome at twenty-two that no
woman could see him without emotion ; he
was "as brave as a lion," he was an
accomplished musician, with an exquisite
voice. " But, alas ! all his fine qualities,
his elegant faults were stained by a ter-
rible vice : he believed neither in men
nor in women, neither in God nor the
devil."
As we learn a little later in his history,
he had another dreadful characteristic, he
was incapable of forgiving. " The fero-
city of the Northmen, with which the
English blood is rather strongly coloured,
had been transmitted to him by his father.
He was resolute alike in his good feelings
and his bad," which were certainly in the
majority.
Henri de Marsay's nature and principles
74
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
are clearly shown in the horrible story of
his adventure with Paquita of the golden
eyes. He is perfectly selfish then, as at
all stages of his prosperous existence.
Jean-Jacques Bixiou, who combines his
work in the Civil Service with the practice
of caricature, is the leading fumiste, or
hoaxer, of the Comedy. He cannot be
wholly serious, and whether he is fooling
some thick-headed clerk in his office, some
rich manufacturer from the provinces, or
some confiding tradesman, his mouth is
always half-full of cynical remarks which
must find an outlet. He is not altogether
heartless, and if he makes others suffer he
knows how to bear misfortune for himself.
He, by the way, is responsible for one of
the two drawings which appear in the
unillustrated editions of Balzac's novels.
This caricature of Rabourdin killing the
incompetent officials in his bureau did a
great deal of harm to the object of its wit,
but Bixiou claimed too much for his powers
when he asserted, years afterwards, that
it "killed" Rabourdin, whose official fate
75
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
was sealed before the drawing was in cir-
culation.
The last of the four prominent men
named together is Horace Bianchon.
When we look round over the crowd of
characters in the "Comedie Humaine"-
there are said to be over two thousand,
and, without counting them, one can easily
accept the statement none stands out in
a finer light than this general practitioner.
He appears as often as anybody ; indeed,
few are encountered half so frequently in
Balzac society. Now we meet him at a
very " select " evening party, now at a
supper of journalists and actresses. We
see him one day at the deathbed of the
dying Goriot in a dirty garret of the Latin
quarter, and on another day at the death-
bed of a duchess in a splendid hotel of the
Faubourg St. Germain. He is at home in
all classes. He has friends who are dust-
men and friends who are peers of France,
struggling tradesmen and members of
"the high finance." He has no more or
o
less religion, in the ecclesiastical sense,
76
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
than his master Despleix, who attends a
mass once a year for a reason so excellent
that one dare not call him a hypocrite ;
but of that religion which consists in visit-
ing the fatherless and the widow and
charging them nothing for his services
he has far more than most of his acquaint-
ances who live "dans les bras de 1'Eglise.''
In many of his works of true charity he is
the partner of his uncle, Judge Popinot.
The uncle finds out the poor sufferers and
the money for their assistance as to food
and clothing, while the nephew gives up to
the relief of their sickness hours when he
might be freely pocketing whatever was
the Parisian equivalent in those times for
the doctor's guineas in Mayfair of to-day.
Position and title are nothing to him ; he
takes men as he sees them, and is rarely
imposed upon, but he does not expect to
find perfection in any class, and looks with
indulgence upon the errors of a rich mar-
chioness or of a poor fleuriste, though
possibly he might be less severe on the
fleuriste on account of the hardness of her
77
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
lot. Horace Bianchon himself makes no
pretence to moral impeccability. His most
serious fault is his conduct towards Rosalie,
the maid of the inn at Vendome. It is
true that if he had not trifled with her
affections we should never, as it seems,
have known the truth about the " Grande
Breteche," and thus have missed the most
thrilling tragedy in the whole " comedy,"
more thrilling even than the deaths of
Marie de Verneuil or Paquita ; more terri-
ble than the deaths of Adeline Hulot or
her abominable rival Valerie. Yet, though
he made love to satisfy his curiosity, it
does not appear that he made any false
promises of constancy to the pretty girl,
who, indeed, was only waiting for her
bricklayer fianct to return from abroad to
be married and enjoy the fortune that was
the price of silence. Horace did, however,
promise to keep her secret " with the
probity of a thief, the most loyal that
exists " ; and yet, many years after, he
told the whole story to the favoured com-
pany at the table of Camille Maupin.
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ASPECTS OF BALZAC
No figure stands out more prominently
in the " Comedie Humaine" than Jacques
Collin, though he does not appear in many
of the novels. He is the great criminal
great alike in resource, in courage, in auda-
city, and in achievement. Most readers of
Balzac make Collin's acquaintance in the
Maison Vauquer, where, under the name of
Vautrin, he dominates the place, awakens
thoughts of re-marriage in the ample bosom
of the landlady, and is sold to the police
who ''want" him very particularly, by the
soured Mademoiselle Michonneau. His
arrest is the subject of one of the most
powerful passages in Balzac. No extract
can give a fair idea of it. We see the wild
beast at bay, a beast that does not merely
roar and snap. The higher qualities of a
strong mind, as well as the lower quali-
ties wherein such crimes as Collin's germi-
nate, are laid bare to our sight. When he
turns to the mean, trembling woman who
has been the instrument of his betrayal,
and says, probably quite truly, "In uttering
two words I could have your throat cut
79
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
within a week, but I pardon you ; I am
Christian ; " and when he turns to the
staring boarders and asks, " Have you
never seen a convict before ? A convict
such as I am is a man less cowardly than
the rest, who protests against the hypo-
crisy of the social contract, as says Rous-
seau, whose disciple I am proud to call
myself," the man has such an air of force
in reserve that we sympathise with the
cook, Sylvie, who, looking round on the
astonished boarders, says, " Eh bien, c'etait
un homme tout de meme," just as the
courtesan Josepha had declared to Baron
Hulot, " On est une canaille, mais on a
du cceur." We meet Jacques Collin next
when Lucien de Rubempr, after the
failure of his attempt to capture Paris with
his pen, and the cruel, though uninten-
tional, irony of his reception at Angou-
leme as a "great poet," is walking along
the high road, thinking of suicide. A
Spanish ecclesiastic, who has dismounted
from his travelling-carriage and is walking
up a hill, gets into conversation with the
80
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
wretched poet, and, being as astute as any
criminal lawyer, soon finds out all about
the beautiful young man, and presently
persuades him to become his secretary
and make another start in life. This
philosophical priest is the terrific criminal
Collin, alias Vautrin, in one of his great
" incarnations." Lucien is persuaded, and
we see neither man again until we find
them, in another novel, living together,
Lucien as the tool of the genius an evil
genius, but still a genius who finds in
the poet's passion for the lovely Esther
Gobseck a means of obtaining money in
abundance. All goes well in crime, if very
ill in morality, until the assaults of Collin
on the fortune of Nucingen, the Alsatian
Jew, end in disaster, and both the work-
man and his tool are consigned to the
care of the police. The disgrace of Lucien
is complete for a young man with some
sensibility left, and he hangs himself in
prison. Collin saves himself by placing
his immense knowledge of crime and
criminals at the service of the police, and
81 F
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
enters upon his last " incarnation." He
is one of Balzac's strongest creations,
largely made up, no doubt, from the his-
torical records of the French convict sys-
tem, but endowed by the author with a
mental vigour equalled by few of the
heroes of the <c Human Comedy."
Much less prominently presented than
" Trompe-la-Mort," as Collin's fellows in
crime called him, is the Breton rebel,
" Marche-a-Terre," whose sinister influ-
ence and animal ferocity count for so much
in the romance of the beautiful spy, Marie
de Verneuil, as related in " Les Chouans."
This sullen peasant, whose very love is
half brutality, is as distinctly a type as any
man drawn by Balzac, and supplements
the studies of Breton characters given in
the earlier portion of " Beatrix."
Avarice plays a large part in the
" Com6die Humaine" how otherwise
could the picture have been so largely
true? Grandet, of Saumur, Hochon, of
Issoudun, Graslin, of Limoges, and Gob-
seek, of Paris, are the most notable misers
82
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
of the novels, and their natures are finely
differentiated. Grandet is the successful
wine-grower and landed proprietor, who
puts his money by in sums of fifty thousand
francs at a time. Hochon is less wealthy,
somewhat less devoid of humanity, and far
less interesting.
The Saumur miser is fully developed by
Balzac, and is admirably presented in the
opening pages of the novel in which he
lives. Having been Mayor of Saumur
under the Directory, he had, "in the in-
terests of the town," made excellent roads
which reached to his several estates in the
neighbourhood, and the rateable value of
his possessions had been " very advanta-
geously fixed." When Napoleon, who had
no love for Republicans, came into power,
Grandet left his municipal honours without
regret, having got all he wanted out of
them. " Providence desired, no doubt, to
console him for the loss of his official posi-
tion," for, in the very year of his dismissal,
he inherited fortunes from his wife's mother
and grandfather, and his own maternal
83
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
grandmother, three old people whose
avarice was so intense that they had kept
their money at home, so that they might
contemplate it secretly, " receiving higher
interest from the sight of their gold than
from the profits of investment. . . . There
was no one in Saumur who did not believe
that Grandet himself had a private hoard,
and gave himself nightly the ineffable de-
lights that the sight of a great heap of gold
procures. The avaricious people were
almost certain of it, merely from seeing
Grandet's eyes, to which the yellow metal
seemed to have lent its tints. . . . Finan-
cially speaking, Monsieur Grandet was a
mixture of the tiger and the boa-constric-
tor. He knew how to lie in wait, hidden
from sight, to watch his prey, to leap upon
it ; then he opened the mouth of his purse,
filled it with money, and lay down quietly,
like the 'snake which digests its food, im-
passive, cold, methodical. No one could
see him pass without feeling a sentiment
of admiration, of mingled terror and
respect."
8 4
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
The avarice of Graslin is mixed with
an appreciation of luxury, rarely indulged,
but strongly exhibited on occasion. In
this he stands apart from the Grandet and
Hochon types. His parsimony and heart-
lessness may be summed up together in
the single statement that he left the birds
in his aviary to starve, in order to save the
expense of feeding them.
Gobseck is much the most picturesque
and least unpleasing of Balzac's misers.
A cabin-boy, sailor, and even pirate in his
earlier days, this astute philosopher has
arrived at a knowledge of men equal to
that of any detective in fiction or probably
in fact. He sometimes charges two hun-
dred per cent, for a loan, but he is
strictly correct in his financial dealings.
His pleasures are studying human charac-
ters and playing dominoes with other
usurers at a favourite cafe. Among the
minor works of Balzac the portrait of
Gobseck is one of the most finished.
Maitre Cornelius, the fifteenth-century
miser, who sends his apprentices to the
85
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
gallows for taking money which he himself
has buried in his sleep, hardly comes
within the " Comedy " proper. It may be
noted that his nocturnal walks are dis-
covered by Louis XL, who sprinkles
flour on the floor, and sees the marks of
the miser's shoes the next morning.
If there are not many "good" women
in Balzac's novels, neither are there many
" good " men. Doctor Benassis is a very
Providence during his later life, thereby
atoning for his abominable treatment of a
loving and trusting woman in his earlier
years. The Curd of Montegnac is an
admirable example of the devoted village
priest. The Marquis d'Espard is of
stainless honour, and performs a noble act
of renunciation, but we do not see much of
him, nor of Bourgeat the water-carrier,
who is one of the most beautiful characters
of all.
This poor man from Auvergne, who by
hard work and privation has saved enough
money to buy a horse and dray, his life's
ambition, finding that his fellow-lodger, a
86
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
medical student of higher social origin,
cannot afford the fees for his examinations,
spends the money in helping the lad, and
does not cease helping him, in money and
personal service, until the medical student
has become a doctor. His devotion costs
him his life. To gain the money for the
student's needs, Bourgeat has exceeded
his physical powers. The young doctor
watches over him, and provides for all his
wants, but it is too late. The water-carrier
dies in the arms of the man who owes his
success to him. As told by Balzac, it is the
most beautiful story in the whole " Human
Comedy."
Among other characters in whom the
better side of our nature is strikingly ex-
hibited is the elder Hulot, the ill-educated
but distinguished soldier, the fearless officer
of stainless honour, who dies of shame on
the discovery of his brother's frauds. The
scene between this noble veteran and his
old friend and comrade, the Prince de Wis-
sembourg, when the certainty of Baron
Hulot d'Ervy's guilt is demonstrated by the
87
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Prince, is as impressive as any drawn by
Balzac.
Joseph Bridau, the artist who cares more
for his art than for making money, and
is so long in recognising the utter villany
of his brother's nature, is a fine character
of a lighter type. These two pairs of
brothers, the Hulots and the Bridaus, are
most effectively contrasted in the novels
in which they are respectively displayed
together, " La Cousine Bette " and " Un
Manage de Carbon." The elder Hulot
appears without the younger, as a prin-
cipal figure in " Les Chouans," where he
distinguishes himself as the commanding
officer of the " Blues," or infantry of the
Republican army, in 1799. Philippe
Bridau, as already said, is the worst
scoundrel of the " Comedie Humaine."
No doubt Jacques Collin is a worse offender
against the laws, and the thirteen con-
federates of the " Histoirede Treize" may
be guilty of more crimes. But in meanness
and selfishness there is none so perfect as
this vile creature, spoilt no doubt by his
88
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
doting mother, to whom he is ready to
refuse bread in her hour of need, who
breaks ner heart at last when he disowns
her, as an obstacle to his social advance-
ment. Maxence Gilet, the unprincipled
lover of " La Rabouilleuse," is bad enough,
with no moral principles that are dis-
coverable, but when he is killed in the
duel by Colonel Philippe Bridau, there
can be few readers who do not reflect that
the better man is the one who has lost his
life.
One of the most distinctly realised of
Balzac's men is Raoul Nathan, the erratic
man of letters and journalist, for whose
dishevelled hair and caustic humour the
pretty wife of Felix de Vandenesse so
nearly loses her reputation. " This Byron
badly combed, badly made," whose hands
"are unacquainted with the cares of the
nail-brush," deliberately aims at untidiness.
" He habitually holds one of his hands in
his open waistcoat, in a pose rendered
famous by Girodet's portrait of Chateau-
briand ; but he takes it less to be like
89
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Chateaubriand (he does not want to be
like any one) than to rumple the folds of
his shirt-front."
Nathan, who " bears some resemblance
to a genius," is a perfect egoist, who
allows a woman to whom he is faithless to
sell her property in order to find money
for his schemes. " Superlatively idle, he
has never done anything unless pricked by
the halberds of necessity. . . . The ban-
ality of his heart, the shamelessness of his
handshake, which grasps every vice, every
unhappiness, every treason, every opinion,
have rendered him as inviolable as a
constitutional monarch." This contemp-
tible creature is the idol of the gently
nurtured Marie de Vandenesse, who is
saved from her impending performance in
a version of "Beauty and the Beast"
wherein the Beast will not turn into a
Prince, by the affection and prudence of
her husband. The Flix who annoys us
by his vapouring in " Le Lys dans la
Vall6e " has become a very sensible hus-
band, after his rather severe lessons in
90
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
self-respect and conduct from Lady
Dudley and the Comtesse Natalie de
Manerville.
One could call up figure after figure that
stands out in the " Human Comedy " until
there was no space to consider any other
subject. Such men as Crevel, the ridi-
culous perfumer-captain, who is always
posing in Byronic attitudes ; Minoret, the
dabbler in psychology, whose " reconcilia-
tion " with the Church causes such conster-
nation to his relations ; Paz, who, to pre-
vent the woman he loves from loving him,
declares that he is the lover of a circus-
girl, and then goes off to buy the acqui-
escence of the circus-girl in the lie ; du
Tillet, the shopman, become a wealthy
financier, having ability and unscrupulous-
ness ; Gaudisssart, the commercial-travel-
ler, whose insinuating blarney is so ludi-
crously beaten by the babble of a lunatic ;
the Abbe Birotteau, whose saintly nature
is no match for the selfishness of his fel-
low-priest at Tours these men, and
scores of others, are drawn for us by
91
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
an artist who, whatever his defects his
want of delicacy or of sense of propor-
tion, his superstitions or his affectations
has never been excelled as an exponent
of character.
BALZAC'S "COMEDIE
ANGLAISE."
VOLTAIRE wrote from Ferney, in 1769, to
the Due de Richelieu : " I begin to think
that we are becoming too English, and
that it would be better for us to be French."
The words may remind English readers of
what is often forgotten, that there have
been several periods in French history when
English ways were much more affected in
France than they are in these days of
" 1'Entente Cordiale." Without going back
to the centuries when a large part of France
was under the same sovereign as England,
with the natural result of a similarity in
most things wherein the fashions are set
by Courts, we may remember that in the
years before the French Revolution, of
which Voltaire is speaking, and again
93
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
under the Restoration which followed the
downfall of Napoleon, not only were
English visitors abundant in Paris, but
many English people resided there. There
has probably never been since the Revo-
lution so large an admixture of Englishmen
in the social life of Paris as in the days of
which Voltaire speaks, unless it was in the
period of which Balzac writes, which pre-
ceded the general introduction into France
of railways things very rarely mentioned,
and still more rarely used, by the people of
the " Human Comedy." It is that very
introduction of railways that is responsible
for the decline of the relative number of
English people who really know Paris and
influence the Parisians.
Now that cheap Saturday to Monday
tickets are available, a thousand English
visitors might go to Paris for every one
who went in the days when the sea passage
was three times as long, or more, and the
land journeys were done by coach. But
the one, in the days of Sterne, or of
Walpole, or of Young, stayed in the
94
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
town and learned something of its people ;
whereas the typical "tripper" of to-day
comes back with an impression that the
boundaries of Paris are marked on the
north by the Palais Royal, on the south by
the Luxembourg, on the east by the Hotel
de Ville, and on the west by the Eiffel
Tower and the Captive Balloon, and that
the inhabitants are mainly waiters, police-
men, cab-drivers, and painted ladies.
Balzac, perhaps, was not in a position to
write a history of English manners, but he
saw enough of the English to add many
touches of actuality to the knowledge he
had gained from Richardson's novels and
Byron's poetry, and his references to Eng-
land and its people are frequent.
If he knew only from the accounts of
others, and from his meetings with English
visitors to the Continent, of what went on
across the Channel in the land of fogs, wife
markets, and sirloins of beef, no one can
read many of his novels without discover-
ing that he was greatly interested by the
English and their idiosyncrasies. The
95
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
first play that he wrote, in his early days,
was on a subject chosen from English
history. It was the defunct "Cromwell,"
wherein the experiences of Charles I. and
Henrietta Maria, after the triumph of the
Parliamentary forces, were treated with
very great freedom, among the characters
being the sons of Strafford and of Crom-
well. Of one scene Balzac wrote to his
sister: " The magnanimity of Charles re-
storing his sons to Cromwell is finer than
that of Augustus pardoning Cinna." The
play was received by the author's family
and friends with extreme coldness, and
speedily relegated to well-merited oblivion.
At any rate, the fact that he chose such a
subject shows that even then he had read
and thought a good deal of the people who
lived on the northern side of the Channel.
French writers on England, as a rule,
make ludicrous mistakes, and no doubt the
error is mutual. English novelists make
French characters do strange things
stranger than anything that Balzac sup-
poses English men and women to perpe-
96
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
trate, at home or abroad. Lapse of time
and increased facilities for travel seem to
have little effect in making the two nations
understand each other's peculiarities ; and
it is unlikely that many English who have
not long resided in France, and outside
their own colonies in French towns, know
our exuberant neighbours much better
than they were known by Arthur Young
or Lawrence Sterne. That Balzac never
lived in England is no reason why he should
not be better acquainted with English
ideas than are a large proportion of Eng-
lish settlers in France with the ideas of the
French. Our retired colonels in Normandy
frequently seem to regard the natives very
much as most Anglo-Indians regard the
people of Hindostan. Yet one can hardly
admit that the English character was
clearly appreciated in the " Comedie Hu-
maine."
Pride, reserve, aloofness, love of* ease,
good taste in material surroundings, are, in
Balzac's novels, prominent features of that
English character. "The English," he
97 G
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
himself declares, "make it a matter of
pride not to open their mouths in public
conveyances," a charge still frequently
made against us, not without foundation,
much as might be said in defence of this
reserve in strange company. " You know
the peculiar personality of the English,"
says Flix, in " Le Lys dans laValle'e":
" humanity seems to be a nest of ants upon
which they tread ; they are acquainted with
none of their species outside their own
social circle ; they do not so much as un-
derstand the language of the rest, who, for
them, are as if they had no existence." And
he goes on to regard the manners of the
English as presenting "an image of their
own island, where law governs all things,
all is uniform in every class, and where the
practice of virtue resembles the movements
of machinery which is started at regular
times. That people has put everything in
the form." That this was an idea of Eng-
lish ways very commonly held in the days
of the French Restoration is clear from
other sources. It was not denied that our
98
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
grandfathers and grandmothers came of
like passions with their Parisian or Tour-
angean contemporaries ; but it was be-
lieved that the English were trained, from
childhood upwards, to bottle up every feel-
ing that possessed them, save that of in-
difference to the existence of any person
outside their own sphere. The English
lady was surrounded, in Balzac's eyes, by
" fortifications of polished steel," and was
encaged in her home by golden wires. But
this very worship of formality and restric-
tion of liberty were the causes, as he held,
of the special charm of English women, of
" that exaltation of a sensibility wherein,
for them, life is necessarily summed up, of
the exaggeration of their carefulness of
themselves, of the delicacy of their love, so
charmingly depicted in those famous scenes
of Romeo and Juliet, wherein the genius of
Shakespeare has, with one touch, expressed
the English feminine type."
If, however, the great French painter
of human life looked upon cold reserve as
characteristic of our race, he also fancied
99
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
that it was very easy to see through us,
or, at any rate, through our grandmothers.
"These fair sirens," he writes, " appa-
rently impenetrable, yet so soon under-
stood, think that they can live upon love,
and spoil their enjoyments by never vary-
ing them." How could they vary them,
if they were not allowed enough liberty
to choose their own amusements? " The
seclusion which used to be compulsory for
the women of Greece, a seclusion now
becoming the mode in England," we are
told in " la Femme de Trente Ans," " is the
only safeguard of domestic morality ; but,
under the empire of that system, the
courtesies of life disappear, society, polite-
ness, and elegant manners being no longer
possible. The nations must make their
choice." Without insisting that such re-
marks necessarily reflect Balzac's personal
opinion, it must be tolerably clear to his
readers that Englishwomen, in his mind,
were divided into two great classes, those of
cloistral purity, and those whose conduct
was only ordered, if ordered at all, by fear
IOO
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
of social punishments. " These girls,
made of milk, with golden hair, whose
curls are twisted by the fingers of angels,"
girls " who are only born in the British
Isles," developed into such innocent,
simple-minded creatures as Fanny O'Brien
who was an Irishwoman by the way
or such dare-devil scorners of the seventh
and some other commandments as Ara-
belle, Lady Dudley.
To the credit of the English Balzac
places those milk-and-rose and golden-
haired beauties, that cleanliness which
distinguishes " all the English, even those
of the lowest classes," and the secret of
being comfortable. Bixiou thinks comfort
is " the only good thing they have in
England." We can accept the pretty
blondes and the " confort Anglais " as
facts ; but is it possible that, three-quarters
of a century ago, " the lowest classes " in
this country were remarkable for their
cleanliness ? Perhaps they were, cleanli-
ness, like most other qualities, being
relative, and Balzac having had many
101
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
opportunities of observing the lower strata
of Parisian life during his years of im-
pecuniosity. Washing is more general on
both sides of the Channel than in Balzac's
days. His worldly old Chevalier de
Valois, in "La Vieille Fille," was remark-
able in Alen9on society for the cleanness
of his linen, due to the fact that he lodged
over a laundry, and was a great favourite
with the blanchisseuses.
Balzac credits our manners also with
such a powerful influence on the French
professional classes of his own time that
he describes Baron Hulot's son, who is a
barrister, as one of those " walking coffins
containing what was once a Frenchman ;
the Frenchman stirs at times, and knocks
against his English case, but ambition
restrains him, and he consents to be stifled
therein." We may hold it also for a
compliment, even if we take second rank,
when Balzac asserts that " long before
English customs had made a woman's
bedroom sacred, that of a Flemish woman
was impenetrable."
102
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Some of the most complimentary remarks
about England are placed in the mouth of
Gerard, the highly intelligent engineer who
comes from Paris to superintend Madame
Graslin's expiatory plans for the improve-
ment of her property. During a discussion
on the evil results of the French law of
succession, Gerard remarks. "With the
breaking up of its landed estates England
would no longer exist. The great land-
owners there control the social machine.
Their fleet, under the nose of Europe,
seizes whole plots of the globe to satisfy
the needs of their commerce, to send there
the unfortunate and discontented. Instead
of making war against capable men, crush-
ing them, misunderstanding them, the
English ruling class seeks them, rewards
them, and assimilates them constantly.
With the English all is prompt in what
concerns the action of the Government, in
the choice of men and of things." On the
whole, however, English influences are not
considered from a kindly point of view, or
with much evidence of respect, in the
103
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
" Human Comedy " ; and apart from the
general agreement of the many persons
therein who mention the English, it is
pretty evident that Balzac himself did
not regard us as having a generally good
influence on the world. Desroches justly
describes Maxime de Trailles as being
"without faith or law," but adds that
" his private policy has been directed
by the principles which govern that of
the English Cabinet." Our Government
might be " prompt," but it was unprin-
cipled.
Lousteau declares that " blackmailing is
an invention of the English press, recently
imported into France," though he forgets
this statement a moment later, and asserts
that "the inventor of blackmailing is
Aretin."
De Marsay deplores the fact that his
countrymen on the mother's side, and he
derived little, save arrogance, from his
English father were copying so many
things from the English that the French
" might become hypocrites and prudes like
104
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
them." If a hypocrite or prude, the Eng-
lishwoman, according to the clever shop-
keeper in "Gaudissart the Second," is so
keen at bargaining that she is his " battle
of Waterloo," victory being, however,
usually on the side of the shopkeeper,
whose guile and wiles are so divertingly
described.
Bixiou, whose opinion of English com-
fort has been noted above, explains at con-
siderable length, and with his usual liveli-
ness of illustration, " the great law of the
improper " which reigns in England, declar-
ing that through the action of this " law,
London and its inhabitants will one day be
turned to stone." Cruellest of all, perhaps,
is a remark made about a certain type of
Frenchwoman : "She mistrusts her servants
as if she were an Englishwoman, who has
always a process for criminal conversation
in perspective."
Perhaps the most striking specimen of
the unsecluded and unshackled variety of
Englishwoman actually introduced into the
" Comedie Humaine " is Arabella, a great
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
lady of loose morals, whose position is so
well established, her prestige so immense,
and her impudence so unassailable, that she
is able to behave with an effrontery that
would have meant social ruin to one of less
influence or less indifference to the opinion
of others. She is the unplatonic mistress
of Felix de Vandenesse, whose conquest
of that passionate young man broke the
heart of his platonic mistress, the tanta-
lising and unhappy "Lys dans la Valise,"
Henriette de Mortsauf. Arabella is a
very dashing young woman, who rides
frisky horses, and has a superabundance
of health and animal spirits. She is also
about the age thirty to thirty-three
that Balzac regarded as the time of per-
fection for woman. It is no wonder that
Felix, sickening under the constant refusals
of Henriette to allow him more than an
occasional kiss upon her hand when he had
been particularly nice and good, should have
fallen before the direct onslaught of the
brilliant foreigner who offered so marked
an exception to the usual reserve of her
1 06
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
countrywomen, throwing down steel forti-
fications and bursting wires of gold with
supreme disregard for conventionalities.
Even in her case, exceptional as he feels
her to be, Balzac finds occasion for another
touch on his picture of Albion. " She
wanted," says Flix, "hot spices for her
heart to feed on, just as the English desire
fiery pickles to sharpen their appetites."
She assuredly managed to find the condi-
ments she needed.
Arabella was, for the most part, an excep-
tion in Balzac's imaginings of her country-
women. On one young Englishwoman, at
any rate, Balzac himself made a strong
if may be a temporary impression, accord-
ing to his friend Gozlan, as recorded in the
entertaining " Balzac en Pantoufles." Goz-
lan met the novelist one afternoon on the
boulevards, hungry for d'ejeimer. Balzac
took him into an English confectioner's in
the Rue Royale. Having ordered some
macaroni pdtts, he laid down on the table
some volumes he was carrying. " Do you
know what that book is ? " he asked Gozlan.
107
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
" No, my dear Balzac ! "
Hearing Balzac's name, the English girl
behind the counter started as if fascinated
by it. Balzac did not notice her, but said :
"It is the 'Pathfinder' of Fenimore
Cooper." And he poured out an enthu-
siastic appreciation of the American
novelist, forgetting his hunger, forgetting
where he was, and everything but his
subject.
" But you are not eating," said Gozlan.
" True," replied Balzac ; and in three or
four gargantuan mouthfuls, eating, laugh-
ing, and praising Cooper at the same time,
while he walked up and down the shop, he
gobbled up four macaroni pdtts, to the im-
mense astonishment of the girl, who was
amazed that a man who, as she had thought,
would feed upon flowers, air, and perfumes,
should eat so greedily.
"What do I owe you, mademoiselle?"
said Balzac, at length satisfied.
"Nothing, Monsieur de Balzac!" an-
swered the girl, in a tone which admitted
no contradiction.
108
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Balzac looked at his friend, hardly know-
ing how to reply to this delicate attention.
And then, after a moment's pause, he
presented her with Cooper's romance,
saying :
" I have never so much regretted,
mademoiselle, that I am not the author
of it."
We do not know whether Balzac ever
saw the girl again. He was not of the
nature of Sterne. This incident reminds
one of the buffet scene in the first act of
" Cyrano de Bergerac," with this one im-
mense difference, that Cyrano refused to
accept more than a grape and a macaroon,
while Balzac intending to pay, however
had eaten his fill.
Balzac had an immense admiration for
Cooper, whom, in an article of the 'Revue
Parisienne, he compared with Scott. He
greatly admired Scott ; but he criticised
"Quentin Durward" rather severely, be-
cause he held and others were, and are,
of the same opinion that the portrait of
Louis XI. was far from faithful. He
109
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
afterwards drew his own picture of Louis
in " Maitre Cornelius."
Balzac gathered many of his ideas of
England, perhaps most of them, from
Richardson's novel, "Clarissa Harlowe,"
which undoubtedly had considerable in-
fluence on the <( Human Comedy."
" True passion," says Raphael (the
hero, if one may call him so, of " La Peau
de Chagrin"), "expresses itself by cries,
by sighs that would weary a man of a cold
nature. It is necessary to love sincerely
oneself to appreciate the raptures of Love-
lace, when one reads ' Clarissa Har-
lowe.' "
I may note in passing that in one of
his references to Richardson's voluminous
book, Balzac shows a certain obtuseness,
possibly conscious, to some of his own
peculiarities as a novelist. "If one wished,"
he says of the " Salon Rogron" in " Pier-
rette," " to describe the circumlocutions,
the oratorical devices, the long conversa-
tions wherein the wit purposely obscured
the meaning, and the honeyed words
no
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
diluted the venom of certain intentions,
that would be to attempt a book as long
as the magnificent poem that is called
'Clarissa Harlowe." I do not wish to
suggest that Balzac indulged overmuch in
circumlocutions or "precautions oratoires,"
that his wit was ever allowed to shut out
the light, or that he mingled honey and gall
in his intentions. But assuredly some of
the interminable descriptions of the external
appearance of the principal characters in
many of his novels have more than a dis-
tant relationship with the longueurs of the
author of the " magnificent poem " referred
to above. Balzac, indeed, comes back
again and again to this matter of the
length of Richardson's work. In the won-
derful picture of the wheels within wheels
of bankruptcy presented in " Cesar Birot-
teau," he says, concerning the intrigues,
tricks, inventions, and deceptions of frau-
dulent bankrupts and their allies, " there is
no failure where enough of such things is
not engendered to furnish material for the
fourteen volumes of ' Clarissa Harlowe '
in
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
to any author who cared to undertake the
work."
We have seen something of Balzac's
conception of English women. In his
description of the mysterious and diaboli-
cally invested Melmoth suggested by
Maturin's once well-known novel, wherein,
by the way, the satanic personage was an
Irishman he gives us the means of know-
ing what he imagined an Englishman to
be like : " The oblong shape of the
stranger's face, the bulging contours of his
forehead, the livid hue of his complexion,
announced, as did also the cut of his
clothes, an Englishman. The man simply
smelt of England. At the sight of his
top-coat with its cape, his puffed-out neck-
cloth upon his frilled shirt-front, the white-
ness of which made his impassive face
more livid by contrast, a face whose red,
cold lips seemed like those of a vampire,
one divined the black gaiters buttoned
above the knees, and the half- puritan
costume of a rich Englishman who goes
out for a walk." It is not a pleasing
112
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
picture, nor does it strike one as particu-
larly true.
The typical Englishman, rich or poor,
surely does not suggest the vampire ;
while, as for the frilled shirt, the cravate
bouffante, and the overcoat, they were
common enough in Paris in the first thirty
years of the nineteenth century, if pictures
and prints are to be believed. Rich
Englishmen were sometimes present in
Balzac's mind in quite another connection.
In his days of struggle, when every penny
he earned was owed in advance for the
necessaries of life, he used to dream of a
millionaire who would be his patron, and
offer to finance him. " Humanity," he
was convinced, " has here and there its
good impulses ; and there are people who,
without being English, are capable of such
eccentricities." This was one of the
highest compliments, perhaps, that he ever
paid to our nationality.
Balzac was at one time a millionaire (in
francs) himself according to the gossip
of tout Paris, " Every one says you have
113 H
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
got a million francs, and are hiding them,"
said a friend one day.
"Oh!" replied Balzac, turning his
piercing eyes on his visitor, " I've got a
million, have I ? And where do I hide
that million ? " And then he added, "In
a butter jar," pointing at the particular jar
wherein he declared he had placed his
savings.
As to English greed for money to put
in the "butter-jars" of this country,
the romancing lawyer's clerk in " Un
Dbut dans la Vie " not only charges
English traders with selling munitions of
war to all the world without discrimination,
but adds, " They would sell them to the
devil, if he had any money."
The " Peau de Chagrin " offers several
effective illustrations of Balzac's notions of
English ideas and peculiarities. When
Raphael left the gaming table in the
Palais Royal, for instance, "he affected
the air of an Englishman for whom life has
no more mysteries." It was very likely
the same hell where Rastignac, as described
114
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
in " Pere Goriot," staked the money of
Fifine de Nucingen with such success that
her obligations to her former lover were
discharged with the winnings. At any
rate, it was none other than Rastignac
who, when Raphael had spent almost his
last franc, advised him boldly to adopt the
" systeme anglais," and thereby obtain
riches. This system was mainly based
on the notion that if you can once, by the
use of borrowed money for want of other
means, establish a credit with your trades-
men, they will supply you for a long
period without pressing for the settlement
of their accounts. Rastignac declared
that the more one borrows, the better his
credit becomes. But Raphael, " not being
accustomed, as Rastignac was, to the
English system, soon found himself with-
out a sou." The naming of the particular
device in question <( systeme anglais," is
only another instance of the reluctance of
any people to admit that anything vicious
is indigenous among them. That the
method by which, as we see every day in
"5
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
London or Brighton, undischarged bank-
rupts are able to drive the best horses and
most costly motor cars, to dine at the
most expensive restaurants, and occupy
the choicest boxes at theatres, is no more
" English " than " French," is as certain
as that much "French coffee" is roasted
and ground in England, that very many
" confections de Paris " are made in
London, and that more than half the
" chapeaux anglais " are manufactured
near the banks of the Seine. If a foreign
name is an attraction, it is adopted ; if a
native name is a detraction, we adopt a
foreign one in its place.
However that may be, the " systeme
anglais " was no good to Raphael, and it was
only when the ownership of the wild ass's
hide placed him in the way of material
wealth and moral destruction, that he knew
for a brief period the convenience of having
a regular income. In some material affairs,
so far as Balzac is a trustworthy guide,
the English taste is or was excellent.
Chez Fcedora, for instance, the " femme
116
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
sans coeur " of Raphael, "the salons were
furnished with exquisite taste every
room, as in the houses of the wealthiest
English people, had its special character ;
and the silk hangings, the ornaments, the
design of the furniture, every decorative
effect, was in harmony with a ruling idea."
In the same house, apart from the beauty
of the furniture and decorations, all the
characteristics of the "confort anglais"
were to be discovered.
Balzac, in common with most novelists
of untrammelled imagination and great
powers, was accused of immorality by con-
temporary critics.
" It is," he would say to his friends,
" their one resource when they have no-
thing to say as to the literary value of a
man's work. Moliere was attacked by
them for his Tartuffe, Richardson for his
creation of Lovelace, that man so vicious
and so brilliant. What could one not say
upon the house to which Lovelace took
Clarissa ? "
From these illustrations, an idea of the
117
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
point of view from which an amazingly
fertile and imaginative writer regarded our
grandfathers and grandmothers, and the
enduring characteristics of our race, may be
obtained. Outwardly calm, inwardly pas-
sionate, indifferent to the joys or sorrows
of any class but their own, leisurely, of
good taste in material things, conventional
in their ideas of morality, slaves to out-
ward appearance, yet indifferent to morals
where discovery was impossible, or where
in the rarest cases position placed the
individual above the reach of calumny
such were the educated classes of England
as they showed themselves, illuminated by
the glowing pages of " Clarissa Harlowe "
and " Pamela," to the author of " Eugenie
Grandet " and "Pierrette." It was rather
a hard, mechanical picture of England that
Balzac saw before him, and essayed to
reproduce in occasional sketches, a picture
wanting in harmonious composition, and
with the Rembrandt effects overdone.
Yet, in essentials, it is very much in the
manner of the representations of English
118
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
ways that are presented in the French
novels of our own time. We are still shown
as an unsympathetic race, caring much
more for outward and visible form than
for "inward and spiritual grace."
119
BALZAC AND DICKENS.
THERE is a danger from which many writers
on literary questions cannot escape, if, in-
deed, they do not run to meet it. It is the
temptation to sum up their views of one
author by giving him the name of another,
with a geographical adjective as prefix.
M. Maeterlinck, whose "Pell&is et Me"li-
sande," one is asked to believe, is really
very like " Romeo and Juliet," and whose
" Monna Vanna" has a remarkable re-
semblance, perhaps, to " Measure for
Measure," has been called " The Belgian
Shakespeare " times without number ; Vol-
taire has been ticked off as " The French
Swift"; Sterne as "The English Rabe-
lais" ; Alfred de Musset as " The French
Byron " ; and Balzac as " The French
Dickens."
121
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
It may be doubted whether any trick of
easy criticism is more abused than this
method of conveying an idea of the
characteristics of an unknown author by
representing him as a foreign imitation of
one who is known. I say unknown, in the
first case, for what would be the use of de-
scribing Maeterlinck as a " Shakespeare "
to a reader who was acquainted with the
work of both the Belgian and the English-
man, or of telling another reader who was
familiar with Balzac as well as with Dickens
that the two bore the same relation to each
other that the Greek Zeus bore to the
Roman Jupiter? It is strange that the
author of " Brutus " and " Artmire " and
"Zaire" has not often been labelled
"The French Shakespeare." Perhaps he
has, but, in any case, the title would not be
much more incongruous than the bracketing
of the authors of " Modeste Mignon " and
" Little Dorr it."
There are, for all that, certain points
apart from questions of style, with which
we are not here concerned on which com-
122
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
parisons, as well as contrasts may be drawn
between the novels of these immortals. We
may, as an opening, throw a glance over
some of the subjects which either novelist
selected. Certain examples may be cleared
out of our way at the outset. Balzac wrote
nothing at all akin to " Pickwick," or
"Great Expectations," nor did Dickens
produce any novels that remotely invite
comparison with " Seraphita," or " La Peau
de Chagrin." In saying this, I do not
suggest that there are not characters or
even incidents in any two of those books
that may afford points for comparison.
On the positive side we have the sor-
rows of maidenhood in humble life pre-
sented in "Pierrette" and "The Old
Curiosity Shop " ; the " grandeur and'de-
cadence " of a prosperous man of business
shopkeeper in one case, merchant in
the other in "Csar Birotteau " and
" Dombey and Son " ; the miseries of an
uncongenial school in " Louis Lambert "
and " David Copperfield " ; and something
of the tragedy of the French revolutionary
123
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
period in " Une Tenbreuse Affaire " and
"A Tale of Two Cities."
It is not in complete books, however,
that comparisons or contrasts can best be
drawn between " the French Dickens "
and "the English Balzac." It is rather in
pictures of life and character, individual
or domestic.
In nothing, perhaps, does the difference
of the nationality and temperament of these
novelists show more clearly than in their
presentation of the early struggles of young
men. Read again the pages which tell of
the coming of David Copperfield to town,
the adventures on the road of life of
Nicholas Nickleby and young Martin, and
then turn to Balzac's pictures of Rastignac,
Lucien de Rubempre", or Raphael de
Valentin. The good young man of the
Copperfield or Nickleby type is hardly to
be found, at any rate as a leading character,
in the novels of Balzac, while it is only
in some of the plainly-labelled " villains "
of Dickens such creations as Carker, Sir
John Chester, or Sir Mulberry Hawk
124
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
that the moral freedom of a Rastignac,
a F61ix de Vandenesse, or a Lucien de
Rubempre is even faintly suggested.
It is at this point, of course, that any
attempt to draw a parallel between Balzac
and Dickens must inevitably collapse. The
relations of the daughters of Goriot with
Maxime de Trailles and Rastignac respec-
tively, or even of Flix de Vandenesse
with Henriette, would place both women
and men outside the pale as "heroes" or
"heroines" in a novel by Dickens. The
relations of Lady Dedlock with the poor
law-writer, and of Edith Dombey with
Carker whatever they were are of im-
mense and sinister import in " Bleak
House " and " Dombey and Son," while
the relations of Dinah de la Baudraye with
the journalist Lousteau, and of Fifine de
Nucingen with Rastignac, are but the
natural incidents of life in "La Muse du
D6partement" and "Le P^re Goriot." One
can as easily imagine the effervescent Dinah
the "heroine" of a story by Dickens, as
one can imagine David Copperfield the
125
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
"hero" of a novel by Balzac. Even the
most unselfish woman of Balzac, Madame
Hulot, whose devotion to her husband and
children is sublime in its utter renunciation,
could have no possible counterpart in the
works of Dickens ; while, as presented by
his pen, the much-abused affection of old
Goriot would have softened the reminis-
cence of the excessively " business-like "
methods which had procured him the
means of spoiling his daughters, and pro-
viding them with husbands with whom
they could not be happy, and thus pre-
paring the way for the Maximes and
Eugenes to enter upon the scene. It is,
therefore, among the characters of Dickens
that are plainly unheroic, in the novel-
reader's sense of the term, that we must
seek for parallels, if any such there be,
with the creations of his French contem-
porary. Lisbeth Fischer, who is assuredly
far more than the titular " heroine " of " La
Cousine Bette," has no adequate counter-
part in English fiction. Yet there is at
least something of her unforgetting sense
126
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
of injury, her undying spite, in Rosa
Dartle.
The wonderful romances of personal
adventures, amatory and otherwise, told
by the two impostors on the carrier's cart
in " Un Debut dans la Vie," have a real
affinity with those told by Mr. Jingle on
the Rochester coach, and are no less
diverting if more elaborated.
I doubt, however, if the most deter-
mined seeker for a parallel between Balzac
and Dickens could find a much closer one
than is afforded by the characters of Uriah
Keep and Jean Goupil, the notary's clerk
in " Ursule Mirouet." The red-haired
hypocrite of Canterbury, with his splay-
feet, shrinking shoulders and grimaces of
humility, and the scandal-mongering russet-
haired creature of Nemours, with his
crooked nose, short and cranky legs, and
look which " seemed to belong to a hunch-
back whose hump was inside," have indeed
many things in common. The one dares
to cast glances of disgusting love from his
red-brown eyes upon the beautiful and
127
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
virginal Agnes, and endeavours to force
himself upon her by threats of evil to those
she loves. When David Copperfield dis-
covers Uriah's aspirations, he gives the
wretch a blow on his lank cheek with such
force that " my fingers tingle as if I had
burned them ; " and when justice has at
length overtaken Uriah, that cold-blooded
villain appears as a repentant sinner, " con-
scious of his past follies," to Mr. Creakle,
a Middlesex justice of the peace. Jean
Goupil, on the other hand, casts his yellow
goat's eyes upon the lovely and innocent
Ursule, nearly causes her death by his
horrible machinations; and when, by self-
interest, he confesses his evil deeds to her
lover Savinien, he receives from that
honest and devoted naval officer a blow
on the cheek which nearly knocks him
down. He also declares afterwards to a
juge de paix that he is "another man"
altogether.
It is true that while in Uriah's case
Copperfield 's remark that " there never
were greed and cunning in the world yet
128
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
that did not do too much and overreach
themselves," proves to be partly well
founded, Goupil, when we leave him at
the end of the novel, is very far from the
fate that he merited, and is, in fact, re-
garded with high respect in the town,
though rinding a punishment in his
rickety, hydrocephalous progeny. Uriah
was in high esteem with Mr. Creakle
and Mr. Creakle's supporters among the
visiting justices, no doubt, but he was
locked up in a cell for all that, while
Goupil was a flourishing country lawyer.
Yet here, it will be seen, the lover of
parallel instances might make out some
kind of a case. It would, however, be a
case made out by the suppression of much
more than was set forth. One reason why
I have dealt with it at some length is that
it illustrates rather forcibly what is, of
course, a fundamental difference between
Balzac and Dickens. Dickens never, or
"hardly ever," made his good people come
to an ill end, though they occasionally
die young, like Paul Dombey or Little
129 i
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Nell ; and his bad people, unless they do
really repent, never, or "hardly ever,"
come to prosperity. His literary opti-
mism, so far as the fate of worthy people
is concerned, was as strong as that which,
with less reserve, Rousseau had made
fashionable, and which is so beautifully re-
duced to absurdity in " Candide." When
Dickens allowed Steerforth to die in the
storm instead of " making an honest
woman" of Little Em'ly, he showed an
unusual preference for the dramatic to the
sentimental rounding off of the episode.
The name " Little Em'ly," by the way,
seems to illustrate a fixed idea of Dickens
on the subject of titles for his characters.
" II faut souffrir pour etre petite" appears
to have been his reading of the proverb.
"Little Nell," " Little Dorrit," Little
Em'ly," what hard times they all had,
poor girls !
If Balzac did not share the optimism of
Dickens, he at any rate did not work on
the lines laid down by some of the later
" realists," whose plan is to regard an
130
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
unhappy ending as " inevitable." If the
"lily in the valley" withers and dies, if
Sylvain Pons, Pierrette Lorrain, and other
good people, old and young, have to die at
the end of the books that tell their stories,
such novels as " Une Tenebreuse Affaire,"
" Cousine Bette" and " Ursule Mirouet,"
end with that mixing of the happy and the
sad, in varying proportions, which is near
to the experiences of life. It is a trite
observation that the note of absolute joy
or sorrow is almost always a false one to
strike at the end of a tale. Balzac does
not greatly believe in " poetic justice,"
while it is a cardinal article of the Dickens
system. Baron Hulot is "falser than all
fancy fathoms" to his devoted wife, and
marries again at eighty-five or so after she
has died of grief for his last infidelity.
The daughters of Goriot exhaust his re-
sources by their extravagances (or those
of their lovers), and he expires in a dirty
garret while they dwell in palaces. But the
young people in " Cousine Bette," in spite
of the follies of Wenceslas, the husband
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
of Hortense Hulot, are left comfortably
settled together, and the Vicomte and
Vicomtesse de Portenduere, in " Ursule
Mirouet," enjoy the most perfect bliss to
be found in Balzac the novel was written,
I may repeat, with a special eye to the
jeunes filles while their enemies, always
excepting Goupil, are overwhelmed by
disaster.
One of the strongest of the few connect-
ing links between Dickens and Balzac is
that both were accused by their contem-
poraries of bad taste, the English writer
being described as vulgar and " unable to
draw a gentleman," and the French writer
as " immoral " and not knowing a gentle-
man when he saw one. Perhaps the
cruellest things said of Balzac by Sainte-
Beuve of whose style Balzac had said
some rather nasty things in his novels
are contained in the passage wherein
Merimee and Balzac are compared. Meri-
mee, we are there assured, " is a man
of taste, of tact, of exact and rigorous
sense, who, even when at the height of his
132
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
imagination, preserves a moderation and
discretion of manner ; who has as much of
the personal sense of the ridiculous as
Balzac has little of it, and in whom, amid
his clearness, vigour of touch, and pre-
cision of burin we only feel the want of a
little of that animation of which Balzac had
too much. It might be said of Merimee
that the accomplished man of the world,
the honnfae homme, as it used to be said,
held the artist in check at the right
moment."
It is, at any rate, clear to the reader of
Balzac that some of the finest " gentlemen ''
and "ladies" of the "Human Comedy"
frequently act in a way that is contrary to
the elementary axioms of good behaviour.
Many things are tolerated nowadays that
would have been considered ill-bred in the
early years of the last century, and many
things are bad manners in one country
and not in another. With all allowances
for temporal and geographical differences,
it is hard to believe that in any age or
clime since the idea of courtesy was evolved,
133
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
whispering in company was not regarded
as an offence against the decencies of
social life. Yet in the " Human Comedy"
the men and women of the " faubourg "
think less of whispering about people who
are sitting within a few yards of them than
a 'bus driver thinks of loudly remarking
on the size and colour of a cabman's nose.
"A 1'oreille " is as common an expression
with Balzac as " s'il est permis," and not
less tiresome. We do not find David
Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby, who are
among the "no gentlemen" of Dickens,
whispering about their companions of the
hour as de Marsay or Rastignac whisper ;
and whispering is but a detail in the bad
behaviour of Balzac's fine people. One
little picture will serve to illustrate those
manners and customs of the pick of Re-
storation society that Sainte-Beuve's com-
parison of Balzac with Merime, and the
"no gentleman" contrast drawn between
Dickens and Balzac, naturally bring to
mind.
When the lovers from Angouleme, Nai's
134
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
de Bargeton and Lucien " de Rubempre "
first appeared in Madame d'Espard's box
at the opera, Henri de Marsay, the future
Minister, a man courted in the most
exclusive circles, the finest flower of
social exquisiteness, the successful lover
of duchesses, countesses, and baronesses,
was there also.
As the provincial poet entered the
box, and was presented by the Marquise
d'Espard to her friends, "although only
two steps from the newcomer, de Marsay
took his eye-glass to look at him ; his gaze
passed from Lucien to Madame de Barge-
ton, and from Madame de Bargeton to
Lucien, derisively comparing them in a way
cruelly mortifying to both ; he examined
them as if they were two strange animals,
and he smiled." Presently, when the Baron
du Chatelet, Lucien's rival in Madame de
Bargeton's esteem, had been presented to
Madame d'Espard by the General de Mon-
triveau, and had looked at Lucien with an
air that seemed to say, " What the devil is
he doing here ? " de Marsay leant towards
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Montriveau "to say to him, a foreille, de
maniere d se faire entendre du baron : 'Ask
him who is that singular young man who
has the air of a wax-figure in a tailor's
shop ? ' ' On the other side of the house
Rastignac, another aristocrat and friend of
many ladies, was diverting the company in
Madame de Listomere's box with witticisms
which Madame d'Espard could easily see
were aimed at her companions, and when
deMarsay had been across and brought back
some of these jests to Madame d'Espard,
that great lady asked Madame de Bargeton,
of course "sous Fe'ventail" to tell her more
about Lucien. Surely in all this the natu-
rally uncomfortable Lucien, whatever the
cut of his clothes and the lack of finish in
his manners, was at least no more con-
temptible than these "cultured " and "ex-
clusive " persons who stared at him and
talked about him "aforeille" and "sous
leventail" It is, I think, sufficiently evident
that Balzac regarded these whisperings as
in execrable taste, and that it is because he
believed them proper to the scenes and the
136
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
characters presented that he introduced
them into his descriptions.
In any case, the behaviour of many of
the "perfect gentlemen" of Balzac may
strike some old-fashioned minds as being
not much better than that of a "puffick
lydy " exemplified by some of the inhabit-
ants of the "Faubourg de sept Cadrans."
To take but one other instance of many.
The young Baron de Gu6nic having
been " thrown over " by Beatrix Marquise
de Rochefide whom he, by the way,
had literally thrown over a precipice in
order that if he could not possess her no
other man should is persuaded to marry
the charming Sabine de Grandlieu, and
manages to live happily with her until the
Marquise appears and enthrals him again,
consenting, now that he himself is married,
to accept his proposals. He causes much
scandal in his world and misery in his family
by his infidelity to his wife, and when at
last Beatrix decides that her education will
not be complete until she has tried vice as
well as "love," Balzac tells us that "Le
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
lendemain, Calyste parut a Beatrix ce qu'il
etait, un loyal et parfait gentilhomme, mais
sans verve ni esprit." There is also the
Colonel or General Montcornet Balzac
does not make up his mind which to call
him at the time who, curious to know the
name and position of a woman whom he
sees at a ball, says to her, " d'une voix mal
assume," as well it might be ; " Madame is
without doubt married ? " and when " 1'in-
connue " replies, " Oui, monsieur," asks if
her husband is present. Then, after another
" Oui, monsieur," this charming officer of
the Cuirassiers of the Guard goes on : " and
why then, madame, do you stay in this
spot ? Is it by coquetry ? " Montcornet
and other fine gentlemen, civil and military,
point at people in drawing-rooms, if not
always with the forefinger, at least with a
movement of the head, in a way that would
be held in bad taste in the log-cabins of the
backwoods. One of the most honest gen-
tlemen of the " Comedy," meaning merely
the men who have most consideration for
the rights and feelings of other people, is
138
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
the Marquis d'Espard, who endures the
contempt of the world, the anger and cold-
ness of his wife, and even the legal accu-
sation of insanity, rather than possess money
which he believes to be, in honour, though
not in law, the property of others money,
moreover, which he had inherited and not
acquired.
How far a similar discussion might be
carried in the case of Dickens, this is not
the opportunity to consider. He has not
needed defenders from the charge of not
knowing how to describe a gentleman.
The confusion of authors with their charac-
ters is one of the commonest of critical
defects, and one of the most unjust in its
consequences.
After this digression which is not
indeed a digression, being a progression
along another part of the main road we
must get back into the centre of the high-
way, and to the treatment of virtue and
vice by the English and the French novel-
ists respectively.
M. Emile Boutmy, whose unflattering
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
accounts of English manners and customs
of action and thought lately, and not
unnaturally, attracted a good deal of
attention, describes the male natives of
the southern portion of this island
" gallant little Wales " excepted, for he
specially disallows the possession of
gallantry to the Anglo-Norman section of
the islanders as bestial, hypocritical, and
coarsely animal in their loves, yet he
admits that the women are remarkable for
their chastity. This admission by an un-
friendly critic might suggest that there is
some justification for the comparative
absence of marital infidelity in English
fiction, and that the rarity of heroines who
misconduct themselves is not wholly due
to the hypocrisy of authors, but partly also
to a desire to be true to life. Whatever
may be the truth about French morality it
is certain that a series of short stories, or
a succession of novels wherein any English
author made the majority of his incidents
turn on the infidelity of married women,
would be justly resented here as an exhi-
140
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
bition of outrageous exaggeration. Yet in
France such fiction, as in the case of Mau-
passant, is not regarded as anything out of
the common, so far as its leading subject is
in question.
If, therefore, Dickens we are now con-
cerned with him among English authors,
but he is fairly typical in this respect
has no Dinah de la Baudrayes or Valerie
MarnefTes among the people who "bulk
largely " the expression suggests Old
Weller or Old Wardle rather than these
spirituelles beauties, but let it pass as the
" absolutely right" one in his novels, the
fact need not be regarded as due to a mere
determination to respect the prejudices of
the English reader. The limitations,
whether due to personal disinclination or
consideration for Mrs. Grundy, of the
English novelist in dealing with questions
of morals, in the narrow usage of the
word, do undoubtedly exclude him from a
rich field of imagination. Surely a critic
would need to be blinded by his delicacy
of taste who did not regard " La Cousine
141
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Bette " as among the greatest of novels, in
spite of the fact that it mainly depends for
its qualities on the life-histories of one of
the most unprincipled and faithless young
women, and one of the most disgraceful
old men in the whole range of fiction.
Thackeray's Steyne is an incidental, and
his Becky a paragon of virtue, in com-
parison. A Rosa Dartle and a Ralph
Nickleby were no good to Balzac, their
delinquencies were too circumscribed.
Profound virtue and vice, as Dickens
paints them, mark their possessors so that
one might know them across the street.
It is often so with Balzac also. Le sieur
Marneffe must have appeared almost for
what he was to every man he met, and the
sweetness of Ursule Mirouet was no less
obvious to strangers. But one would not
necessarily have guessed that even Jacques
Collin was "a bad lot," or that Arabelle
was " no better than she should be."
Collin, the convict, escaped from many
prisons, the desperado and swindler who
was for ever " wanted " by the police
142
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
when he was not in their hands, was for
all that one of those of whom the people
say, " Voila im fameux gaillard." It was
only the specially observant who noticed
that his character was deep, yet even they
did but suppose that his life held some
carefully hidden mystery. To turn from
this man, the criminal-in-chief of the
" Comedie Humaine," to the "leads"
among the intelligent bad characters of
Dickens Quilp, Jonas Chuzzlewit, and
the rest, excluding Jingle, who might be
called a "fameux gaillard," perhaps, but is
not a criminal of the " double-dyed " type
is to see again the difference between
the artist who paints his characters after
the life, and the artist who paints his
villains as black as a Jolloff negro, and
gilds his best people till they shine afar
like the freshly-gilt ball on the dome of
St. Paul's.
Quilp and Chuzzlewit, and Fagin, all, as
Balzac would have said, give out the very
stench of villainy, and no prudent person
could have trusted them with a half-
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
sovereign. " Phiz " and some other artists
may be partly responsible for the exag-
gerated pictures of scoundreldom that we
see in the bad people of Dickens, but the
author gave the lead to the illustrators.
Another meeting-place of Balzac and
Dickens is in the region of boarding-
houses. Cheap boarding-houses are, of
choice or necessity, the homes of many
in most countries where the natives have
white complexions. Could one ever visit
" Todgers's " without thinking of the
" Maison Vauquer," or enter the "pension
bourgeoise " situated " dans le bas de la rue
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve " without seeing
also the "Commercial Boarding- H ouse "
in "a kind of paved yard near the Monu-
ment " ? It is the odour of the place in
either case that first strikes the senses
as one enters.
At the Maison Vauquer, the very first
room " exhales an odour that is without a
name in the language, and must be called
' I'odeur de pension' The place smells of
stuffiness, mildew, sourness ; it makes one
144
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
shiver and feel damp, it penetrates one's
clothes ; it tastes of a room where one has
dined " ; and so on, the rest of the descrip-
tion being too realistic to look nice in a
translation. We flit across to " Todgers's,"
and find our nostrils assailed with hardly
less force by the atmosphere of that highly
respectable establishment. "There was
an odd smell in the passage, as if the
concentrated essence of all the dinners
that had been cooked in the kitchen since
the house was built, lingered at the top
of the kitchen stairs to that hour, and,
like the Black Friar in ' Don Juan,'
'wouldn't be driven away.' In particular,
there was a sensation of cabbage ; as if
all the greens that had ever been boiled
there were evergreens, and flourished in
immortal strength." That " evergreen "
touch is characteristic of " the English
Balzac," but such playfulness is only in-
dulged in on special occasions by " the
French Dickens," whose verbal quips and
cranks will provide material for some pages
all to themselves.
145 K
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Private houses are very different places
in France and England, and were so in the
great Dickens-Balzac period (about 1830
1850). The cheap boarding-house has its
common characteristics all the world over,
and that odour is one of them. Even the
ways of the landladies and their boarders
form a social curiosity which merited the
close attention given to it in " Pere Goriot "
and in " Martin Chuzzlewit," in which
English novel, we may remember, more
than one American boarding-establishment
also is described. Madame Vauquer was
plump, since, according to Balzac's observa-
tion, " embonpoint " was a natural result
of keeping a boarding-house, while " M.
Todgers " was "rather a bony and hard-
featured lady." There is no Vautrin at
Todgers's, only a Pecksniff, but he is hardly
less repellent, and certainly less "convinc-
ing " than the impressible victim of the
perfidy of " Fil-de-Soie." On the other
hand, the gcir$on, Christophe, is but a
shadow beside Bailey, a fact which leads
us at once to a region of the novelist's art
146
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
wherein Dickens is assuredly superior to
Balzac.
The boys of the English novelist may or
may not always be "human " boys. The
pathos of Jo and Oliver Twist is possibly
false in part, as false as the exaggerated
somnolence of the Joe of Dingley Dell.
Whatever their proportion of humanity
the fat boy and the boy Pip are "real."
Dickens was never afraid of boy-making,
but Balzac, whether afraid or not, very
rarely attempted the work. His school-
boys in " Louis Lambert " are but phan-
toms of boys, such solidity as they have
being, as one may most illogically say, of a
psychological kind. Louis himself, as de-
scribed towards the end of the book, when
a patient woman had devoted her life to
him, was physically more lethargic than the
Joe of Dingley Dell when sleepiest and
most replete, and even a prod in the calf
with a fork could not have aroused this
Swedenborgian youth. The characters
have nothing else in common. Henriette's
boy, again, in the " Lys dans la Vall6e," is
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
but an unfinished sketch. We never really
know him intimately. The Marneffes' neg-
lected boy (in " La Cousine Bette "), whose
unhappy childhood might seem to offer a
better chance to an imaginative writer even
than the childhood of the boy who fled from
the horrors of life under the Murdstone
rule, remains unknown. Regarded by his
parents as an encumbrance, and left entirely
to the care of a servant, the child of such a
manage suggests a dramatic figure. Balzac,
however, leaves him outside the wings of
his stage. He had to do with scenes
wherein the purity of infancy had no
chance of success. For all that, another
child whom nobody ever sees is the
subject of perhaps the most wonderful bit
of caustic comedy in a book that is full
of it.
Dickens, being a respectable English
author, wrote no " Cousine Bette," and
still less did he write any " Contes Drola-
tiques." The nearest approach to such
diversions as the "Contes" is to be seen
in " Pickwick " in the incidental humours
148
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
related by Sam Weller or Tom Smart ; the
manage a trots two dissenters and one
dissenting at the " Marquis of Granby,"
Dorking ; the innocent affair happily set-
tled out of court of Pott v. Pott and
Winkle ; and the unfortunate " wrong bed-
room business " in which Miss Witherfield,
Mr. Pickwick, and Mr. Peter Magnus were
the leading characters. It is, of course, no
" approach " at all.
These remarks are not intended to
suggest a close comparison between two
novelists who are among the greatest
glories of their respective countries. Rather
has the intention been to offer some few
bits of evidence of the futility of any
such comparison. Balzac was French of
the French, and Dickens English of the
English, and, in spite of the very real
sympathy which may exist between the
men of letters, of art, and above all of
science, on- the two shores of the Channel,
the literary ideals of the two nations are
not the same, the very terms used to
express sentiments and ideas are often
149
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
unconvertible from one language into
another, and France has never been nearer
to the credit of producing a Dickens than
England to the credit of producing a
Balzac. " English Balzacs " and " French
Dickenses " are chimeras of fiction in
themselves.
LITERARY REFERENCES
IN BALZAC
FRENCH critics of the present day are in-
clined to be disrespectful to Balzac's
literary reputation, mainly because, as they
declare with perfect accuracy, his style is
somewhat wanting in verbal elegance and
finesse. There is certainly little of rhyth-
mical preciosity in his " Comedie Hu-
maine " ; many of the descriptive passages
are tediously elaborated, and the meta-
phors, as his enemies had no difficulty in
showing, are frequently forced and occa-
sionally ridiculous. Indeed, one may
freely admit that, if " Illusions Perdues,"
" Le Pere Goriot," and the rest were to
be judged from the same standpoint as
" Marius the Epicurean," or even as
" Madame Bovary," it would be easy to
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
find many excuses for doubting whether
Balzac was a master of letters. With the
question of his literary style we are not at
this moment concerned, save for the nega-
tive reason that if we disregard his literary
form altogether we still have in his novels
an amount of history, social, commercial,
political, literary, artistic, and general,
which alone would render them of enor-
mous value and attractiveness to those
who are addicted to " the proper study of
mankind."
If we form our opinions of Balzac's lite-
rary taste from his novels as we may do
without fear of mistake, seeing how en-
tirely his letters and the statements of his
friends bear out the evidence thus obtained
we find that the authors whose names
and works come most frequently into
Balzac's mind when he pauses for an illus-
tration are all writers of English ; they are
Richardson, Scott, Fenimore Cooper,
Sterne, and Byron. No book ever made
a greater impression on Balzac than
" Clarissa Harlowe." It crops up here,
152
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
there, and everywhere in the "Come'die
Humaine." That " magnificent poem," as
he calls Richardson's novel, was, indeed,
far more than an object of admiration to
the French author ; it was in several
respects the model from which he worked.
The vastness of his plan, the exhaustive
detail of his descriptions, the formal elabo-
ration of the letters which fill so large a
space in the "Come" die," are, one may
well believe, as much the result of an
enthusiastic study of the French transla-
tions of Richardson's works as of the un-
biassed predilections or conclusions of
Balzac himself. The same qualities have
prevented thousands of readers from ap-
preciating either author. Just as the
pages upon pages of most solid descrip-
tion of incidents or states of mind in
Richardson's work have "choked off" all
that enormous class of novel-lovers at
least nine-tenths of the whole body
whose motto, if they know it not, is " cut
the cackle, and come to the 'osses," so
have the interminable descriptions of
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
places and persons in the " Human
Comedy."
If the Frenchman was the conscious
follower of the Englishman in this respect,
the disciple surpassed his master. How
many well-intentioned readers have given
up in despair the attempt to " get on "
with " Sur Catherine de Medicis," for
example, wherein fifty solid pages of his-
torical explanation form as strong a defence
for the body of the novel as the massive
fortifications described in the book itself
formed for that famous Chateau of Blois,
every turret and balustrade of which is so
well described by the novelist ! How
many have quailed before the account of
a Sylvain Pons, or a Madame de Barge-
ton, wherein every garment, from shirt or
chemise to overcoat or mantle, every stud
and brooch is enumerated and described ;
while the cheeks, eyelashes, nostrils, lips,
shoulders, hips, chest, knees, fingers and
toes are shown and explained with all the
unruffled patience of a lecturer on zoology
describing a new species of mammal from
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
the Philippines so rich in novelties of
that kind. To say this is not to sneer at
the author. I believe that such elabora-
tions were, as a rule, entirely in place, and
that, for the general purpose, a truly great
one, that he had in view, the majority
of the frequently condemned longueurs of
Balzac are essential to the artistic perfect-
ing of his life work.
The moral, the " admirable " moral, of
" 1'epopee domestique intitulee ' Clarisse
Harlowe/" Balzac tells us in " Modeste
Mignon," is that " 1'amour legitime et
honnete de la victime la mene a sa perte,
parce qu'il se congoit, se developpe et se
poursuit malgre la famille." If the French
novelist followed the methods of Richard-
son's work, he did not follow its " admir-
able moral," for I cannot recall one of his
novels in which " 1'amour legitime " leads
its ''victim" to ruin for the reason given.
Indeed, in the very story from which the
above passage is quoted, the audacious
and impudent heroine, whose love at any
rate is lawful and honest, however fatu-
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
ously commenced, is "conceived, deve-
loped, and pursued in spite of the family,"
and ends in " happiness ever after " for
the victim, though not precisely with the
poet she had supposed herself in love
with.
The charming man whom Modeste does
marry is himself inclined to be literary.
"Oh! parlez, dites un mot" (he writes
to Modeste), " et je vous aimerai jusqu'a
ce que mes yeux se ferment, comme le
Marquis de Pescaire aima sa femme,
comme Rome'o sa Juliette, et fidelement.
Notre vie, pour moi du moins, sera cette
/elicit^ sans trouble dont parle Dante
comme e"tant I'dement de son Paradis,
poeme bien superieur a son Enfer" These
last half-dozen words might be considered
ominous of future misery, since no man
"lawfully and honestly" in love could
make such a criticism in the midst of a
letter of imploring passion. Balzac is,
indeed, rather addicted to forgetting the
distinction between the author's narrative
and the words placed in the mouths or in
156
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
the letters of his characters ; and many of
his personal expressions of literary opinion
are introduced in such an indirect way.
We cannot doubt that for him the " Para-
diso " was superior to the " Inferno."
The novel already referred to, that
original and fantastic story of the "bold
little minx " who was inappropriately
named Modeste, is specially literary in
many of its references and descriptions,
the central episode being that of the young
girl whose mind is stuffed with romances
and with her own inventions, who has been
in imagination every kind of woman, from
a princess to a grisette, and who offers her
beauty and fortune to a poet whom she
has never seen except in a mezzotint en-
graving at three or four francs. At the
opening of the novel, she has suffered a
terrible loss.
" Overwhelmed with grief by the death
of her sister, Modeste had sought distrac-
tion in reading so continuously that her
mind became quite dazed at times. She
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
had been brought up to speak German
and French equally well, and she and her
sister had learnt English from (the Ameri-
can) Madame Dumay. Little regarded in
her reading by those around her, who were
without any literary knowledge, Modeste
gave for food to her soul the modern
masterpieces of English, German and
French literature Lord Byron, Goethe,
Schiller, Walter Scott, Hugo, Lamartine,
Crabbe, Moore the great books of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
histories and essays and plays and fiction,
from Rabelais to Manon Lescaut, from
Montaigne to Diderot, from the ' Fab-
liaux ' to the 'Nouvelle Helo'ise." The
thoughts of three countries filled with
confused images " cette tete sublime de
naivete froide, de virginite contenue, d'ou
s'lan9a brillante, arme'e, sincere et forte,
une admiration absolue pour le genie."
For Modeste a new book was a great
event; "she was made extravagantly
happy by a chef-dceuvre; she was miserable
when a book did not ravage her heart."
158
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
The perturbation of the loving souls
around this book-ridden girl, they being
ignorant of any language but French, and
of the very names of most of the authors,
native and foreign, whose works Modeste
devoured, is most amusingly described.
For instance, the worthy Madame Latour-
nelle, the notary's wife one of the ladies
" without literary knowledge " is specially
distressed by the girl's incessant reading
and its effects.
" Modeste, she says, is a young person
tres-exaltee, elle se passionne for the poems
of this writer, and the prose of that. You
have no idea of the effect that ' Le Dernier
Jour d'un Condamn^' has produced upon
her, but she seemed to me wild with her
admiration for that M. Hugo. I don't
know where these people (Victor Hugo,
Lamartine, Byron, and the rest) get their
ideas from. The little one has spoken to
me of ' Childe Harold.' I have not wished
to be contradicted ; 1 have had the simpli-
city to read it, to be able to reason with
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
her. I don't know if it is necessary to
attribute that effect to the translation, but
my heart palpitated, my eyes were dazed,
and I could not go on reading. There are
there comparisons which howl, rocks which
faint away, lavas of war. Of course, as it
is an Englishman who travels, one ought
to expect some eccentricities, but that ex-
ceeds all licence. One believes oneself in
Spain, and he puts you in the clouds above
the Alps ; he makes the torrents and the
stars talk ; and then there are too many
maidens ! ... it is past all patience. And
then, after the campaigns of Napoleon, we
have enough of the sounding brass, of the
fiery cannon-balls, which roll from page to
page. Modeste declares that all this bom-
bast comes of the translator, and that one
must read the original. But I shall not
learn English for Lord Byron. ... I am
too much a daughter of Normandy to be
captivated by everything that comes from
abroad, and above all from England."
As for Scott, the Waverley novels are
160
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
never mentioned without respect in the
" Human Comedy." " ' Les Aventures de
Nigel ' du grand romancier Walter Scott,"
" Le grand ecrivain Walter Scott, dans
son admirable roman, ' La Jolie Fille de
Perth ' " such references abound in the
" Comedy," with here and there touches of
critical appreciation, as when Balzac sagely
observes that "In the magnificent works
of Walter Scott, the character most outside
of the action comes, at a given moment, by
threads woven in the tissue of the intrigue,
to take its place in the denouement" One
Waverley novel, however, did not give
satisfaction to Balzac. The portrait of
Louis XI. drawn in " Quentin Durward "
was not in accord with the opinion of that
astute monarch formed by the author of
" Sur Catherine de Medicis," whose studies
of the history of France in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries had been con-
siderable, as we may see from that volu-
minous historical introduction to the last-
named book, already referred to. " Maitre
Cornelius," in which "Louis le Onzieme"
161 L
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
is introduced, was written, Madame Surville
has told us, to place the character of the
king in the light in which her brother
Honor regarded it.
The plethora of romances in the nine-
teenth century was due, in Balzac's opinion,
to the absence of romance, for he calls it
(in " L'Enfant Maudit") " un siecle ou les
romans s'ecrivent pr6cisement parce qu'ils
n'arrivent plus." It seems at first thought
a curious view for an author to take who
knew his period so well. Romance of the
sort with which he was chiefly concerned
not the axe and torture, poison and intrigue
romance of " Catherine de Medicis," or the
plot and counterplot romance of " Une
Tenebreuse Affaire" and " Les Chouans,"
but the romance of passion and pathos, as
represented so admirably in " Le Lys
dans la Vallee," the diamond-cut-diamond
romance of " Un Menage de Gar^on," and
the romance of abandonment and of de-
votion of "Le Cousin Pons," " Pierrette,"
and " Le Cure de Tours" was as plenti-
ful on every side as it is to-day, and as
162
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
it always will be till the curtain is rung
down on the last performance of the
" Human Comedy." What Balzac meant
by " romance," however, was most likely
" costume " romance, though by no means
in the slightly sarcastic sense in which we
generally use the term to-day. " Ivanhoe,"
" Kenilworth," and his own " L'Enfant
Maudit," are types of the kind of writings
that he had in his mind when he penned
that phrase. Probably it was the absence
of romance of the old sword and dagger
and deadly intrigue kind, in the rather
leaden-hued period of Louis Philippe, which
made Balzac so keen an admirer of Feni-
more Cooper's tales of trappers and path-
finders.
Insatiable reader as he was in his Ven-
dome days and afterwards, Balzac had little
time to read other men's writings when he
had settled down to his struggle for life as a
novelist Yet he did not, it is certain, share
the opinions of his own creation, the ador-
able Massimilla Doni, on the subject of
books in general and French books in
163
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
particular. " Most of my compatriots,"
says that tantalising Duchess to the French
doctor who is introduced to her in her box
at the opera in Venice, " read your useless
French productions."
" Useless ?" cries the doctor, with pat-
riotic astonishment.
"Yes, monsieur, useless, for what can
one find in a book that is better than the
things we have at heart ? "
And then, when the doctor remarks upon
her evident admiration for the despotism
under which Venice " groaned " in those
days, the Duchess asks : " And why should
I not love a system of government which,
in depriving us of books and of those
sickening politics, nous laisse les hommes
tout vntiers ? "
Balzac's views concerning the standard
authors of his country creep out now and
again. He had clearly rather a poor
opinion of the eighteenth-century philoso-
phers, as was natural in one who, whatever
his religious convictions, was a firm be-
liever in the necessity of Catholicism to
164
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
France, and a strong objector to Pro-
testantism and "heresies" of any shape.
Indeed, we have little doubt that at least
half the authors whose works were con-
tained in the package of books which the
only daughter of Cesar Birotteau gave to
her papa, on a certain famous occasion,
were held in less esteem by Balzac himself
than by those whose reverence for the
monarchical and ecclesiastical systems of
France was more strongly tempered by
reverence for " les droits de I'homme."
However that may be, we know that
" Cesarine, the dear child, had spent all her
little savings, a hundred louis, to buy books
as a surprise for her father ; Bossuet,
Racine, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu,
Moliere, Buffon, F6nelon, Delille, Ber-
nardin de Saint-Pierre, La Fontaine, Cor-
neille, Pascal, La Harpe, in fine, that
regulation library which is seen every-
where, and which her father was never
likely to read." It was on seeing this
charmingly-meant, if for the recipient
unprofitable, present that the pursy M.
165
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Matifat, who never said " Corneille," but
"the sublime Corneille," or " Racine," but
"the sweet Racine," was moved, according
to his habit, to exclaim : " Voltaire is the
second in every field ; he has more of wit
than of genius, but is a genius for all
that."
It has been declared by some of Balzac's
critics, anxious for the reputation of the
French press and publishing trade, that the
vitriolic picture of" literary circles" in " Il-
lusions Perdues " was an exception to the
author's consistent and persistent practice
of drawing from the life, as he observed it,
without malice or favouritism, and that he
deliberately sat down to " make it hot " for
the people who had abused his books or
hindered his success. Yet from contem-
porary sources wholly unconnected with
Balzac's affairs it is clear that, whether or
not Dauriat, and Lousteau, and Finot, and
Nathan are typical of the general run of
publishers, authors and journalists, they
are not uncommon types of their period.
The account of Lucien Chardon's (or
166
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Lucien de Rubempre, as he chose to call
himself) first interview with the prosperous
publisher Dauriat is obviously drawn from
personal knowledge, and probably little
exaggerated. " A new affair ? But you
know I have already eleven hundred
manuscripts. Yes, gentlemen, eleven hun-
dred. I shall soon be obliged to engage a
staff of clerks to register the manuscripts
as they arrive, a staff of readers to examine
them. There will be committee meetings
to vote upon the merits of the works, and a
permanent secretary to present the reports
to me. It will be a branch of the Academy,
and the academicians will be better paid
here than at the Institute." Some one
says : " It is an idea." "A bad one," re-
plies the publisher, and he proceeds to put
the purely commercial view of literature as
it has been put, with much less force as a
rule, by a thousand sorrowful writers since
Balzac wrote his wondrous novel.
Dauriat did not want, he scornfully
declared, the attempts of those who took
up literature because they could not be
167
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
capitalists, or boot-makers, or soldiers, or
servants, or office-holders, or sheriff's offi-
cers. No one need come to him without an
established reputation. Become celebrated,
and you would find bucketsful of gold.
"But, monsieur," interjects Lucien, "if
every publisher talked as you talk, how could
anybody bring out his first book ? " " That
is no concern of mine," continues the pub-
lisher. It was not his idea of amusement
to risk his money on doubtful enterprises.
He was not there to be a stepping-stone
to future glories, but to make money and
divide it with the celebrated writers for
whom he published. As to the poets, he
would have none of them. " Les vers
devoreront la librairie," he cries, in one of
Balzac's best puns. Why, his hearers
probably had no idea of the harm that
the success of Byron, Lamartine, Victor
Hugo, Casimir Delavigne, and Beranger
had caused. Their triumph was as bad
as an invasion of barbarians. He had at
that moment in his office a thousand
manuscripts of verse commencing with
168
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
nterrupted narratives, without head or
tail, in imitation of "Lara" and "The
Corsair."
Lousteau, after he and Lucien have left
Dauriat's shop, continues to discuss the
same topic, so intensely personal for the
" Byron of Angouleme," as Lucien found
some few to regard him. " The publishers,"
says the too experienced journalist, "will
sell or will not sell a book, that is for them
the sole question. A book, for them, re-
presents capital to risk. The more the
book is admirable the less chance it has of
being sold." As a comment on all the talk
he has drawn from memory and imagina-
tion combined Balzac remarks, with cha-
racteristic vehemence, that " outside of the
literary world there exists not a single
person who knows the horrible Odyssey by
which one arrives at what one must call,
according to his talents, vogue, mode, re-
putation, renown, celebrity, public favour,
those different ladders which lead to glory,
but which can never take its place."
Dauriat's contemptuous references to the
169
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
poets who besiege him are perhaps justi-
fied, from the business point of view, by
the experience of publishers even in our
own day, and they are not more galling for
the would-be climber of Parnassus than
the treatment of Lucien's " Marguerites "
by that other and older publisher who is
the first to promise at least a reading for
Lucien's ill-fated romance " L' Archer de
Charles IX." He has taken that cherished
MS. from its author, but hands it back
when Lucien has " the fatal idea " of show-
ing him his verses. " Ah ! " he cries,
" vous etes poete! Je ne veux plus de
votre roman. Les rimailleurs ^chouent
quand ils veulent faire de la prose. En
prose, il n'y a pas de chevilles, il faut abso-
lument dire quelque chose." The old man
was not in accordance with some of the
most admired modern stylists in his opinion,
but it held good in those days, when the
grandchildren of the prtcieuses were mostly
defunct and the mothers of the " precious "
novelists were mostly unborn. Balzac, at
any rate, if he sometimes repeated himself,
170
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
very rarely wrote without having some-
thing to say, and almost invariably suc-
ceeded in saying it.
Ossian (or rather Macpherson, who
made Ossian for us more surely than
Fitzgerald made Omar) is ready in Bal-
zac's mind when he wants an illustration.
The Duchesse de Langeais, according to
the shop assistant who sold the marabout
feathers to Madame Jules Desmarets on
an eventful day, had said that marabouts
gave to a woman " quelque chose de vague,
d'ossianique et de tres comme il faut,"
while the author himself describes the
emotions of the unknown person who re-
vealed the secrets of "The Thirteen" as
analogous to those " which agitated Mac-
pherson when the name of Ossian, his
creation, inscribed itself in every lan-
guage." Indeed, Balzac becomes quite ex-
cited on the subject of Macpherson's fame.
" That was assuredly, for the Scottish ad-
vocate, one of the most vivid, or at any
rate the rarest sensations that man can
give himself. Is it not the incognito of
171
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
genius? To write the 'Itineraire de Paris a
Jerusalem,' that is to take part in the glory
of a century ; but to endow his country
with a Homer, is not that to usurp upon
God?"
Scott and Macpherson, the one in in-
numerable references and allusions, the
other in few, chiefly represent North
Britain in the "Comedie Humaine."
For England, after Richardson, who fills
by far the largest place, the prose writer
most frequently introduced by Balzac is
Sterne, "Tristram Shandy" supplying
many illustrations, especially in the persons
of " Mon Oncle Tobie " and Corporal Trim.
It is evident that the humour and pathos of
Toby Shandy's character and adventures,
amatory and otherwise, made a strong im-
pression on the novelist, whose own old
soldiers, Marshal Hulot and Colonel Cha-
bert, to name but two, are presented with
so muchfeeling,and whose faithful retainers,
men and women, are amongst the most
admirable of his minor characters. Michu,
indeed, in "Une Tenebreuse Affaire," who
172
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
dies on the scaffold rather than betray his
masters, is more than worthy to rank with
Trim as a picture of fidelity, though Trim
would not have quailed if it had been neces-
sary to mount the ladder at Tyburn for
Uncle Toby's sake. Sterne, of course, was
better known to the French than most of
his contemporaries in English literature.
His ''Sentimental Journey" itself, more than
once alluded to by Balzac, appealed per-
haps more strongly to Parisians than to
Londoners.
Among English novelists, in the strict
sense of the term, Richardson is followed
by Anne Radcliffe in Balzac's fancy, and
" Monk " Lewis is not overlooked. When
he looks about for something to suggest
what we call weirdness a word which
seems to have no exact equivalent in French
Balzac often brings in " Mistress Rad-
cliffe " to show the kind of thing he means,
and Lewis is occasionally called upon to
serve the turn.
There is one English poet who, though
not frequently brought in, as Byron is, for
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
use as a personal example of a physical
type, as well as for purposes of literary
reference, is now and again introduced as
an illustration of defects of character. Of
Lucien Chardon (de Rubempre), before his
fall into vice, it is said : " Poor and modest,
the boy was a Chatterton without self-seek-
ing baseness, without the ferocious hatred
of the rich and successful, which led the
English poet to write libels on his bene-
factors."
Byron, as has been said, is brought in
not only as a poet, but as a type of humanity.
His curly hair is cited again and again, his
attitudes as seen in his portraits are repro-
duced with exaggeration by such poseurs as
the absurd Crevel. He is regarded very
much as the embodiment of the theatrical-
romantic ideals of the inexperienced young
men and young women of his period, France
in this, as in her jockeys, and neckties, and
a hundred other matters, following English
fashions with a greater zeal in the first half
of the nineteenth century than she has ever
done since. It is more the other way now,
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
at any rate in literature, and on the whole
the Anglomania of the thirtieswas a stronger
force than that of recent years, though
then, as of late, fondness for English horses
and frockcoats and collars was often com-
patible with no great respect for English
characteristics.
In any case, the poetry of Byron was
among the chief objects of Balzac's literary
admiration. The most astonishing episode
in " La Femme de Trente Ans " was
almost certainly suggested by " The Cor-
sair" and "Lara." The private assassin
and pirate chieftain with whose adven-
turous and murderous lot the hardly-used
Helene d'Aiglemont links her own life
in such improbable circumstances, and
with whom she abides so happily and
luxuriously on that rakish clipper the
Othello, is Conrad come again, again to
leave, in Balzac's ruthless study of fickle-
ness and fidelity, a name
Link'd with one virtue and a thousand crimes.
Before ending these notes on some of
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
the literary references of the " Comedie
Humaine," I may recall the fact that
Punch's long-haired poet who, on taking
up a copy of his verses from the table of
a professedly enthusiastic admirer, sadly
remarked, " You might at least have cut
the pages," was anticipated, more or less,
by the young German in " Le Cousin
Pons." When, in her efforts to attract
his admiration, Cecile sees Fritz Brimner
take up the German grammar that she has
carefully "hidden," and the pretty humbug
exclaims, " I wish to read Goethe in the
original ; I have been learning German
for two years," Brunner replies, " The
grammar is then very difficult to under-
stand, for there are not ten leaves cut."
The last quotation I will give is Balzac's
expression, through the mouth of one of his
most vivid characters, of the belief of the
unsuccessful author that the inferiority of
his sales is due to the superiority of his
brains. "Every man of superior mind
raises himself above the masses, his success
is then in a direct ratio with the time
176
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
necessary for his work to be appreciated."
The consolation of every unappreciated
author, in prose or in verse, since the art
of writing was invented or evolved, is
crystallised in that one sentence.
177
THE HUMOUR OF BALZAC.
FEW of Balzac's critics have devoted any
considerable share of their attention to his
wit and humour ; and most of the amusing
anecdotes that have been told concerning
his private life derive their entertaining
qualities rather from the ludicrous aspects
of some of his serious performances than
from any intention on his part to divert
his friends. We laugh over his ring,
" once worn by Mahomet," which the
Grand Mogul was to purchase for "tons
of gold," or his scheme for making a
fortune by keeping a grocer's shop to
which his presence behind the counter
would attract innumerable customers. But
these things were seriously regarded by
Balzac, while they were regarded by his
best friends as the toquades of a man
179
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
in whom the "artistic temperament"
abounded. In common with most people
in whom the humour-sense is strongly
developed, he was often curiously obtuse
to the humour generally rather costly
of his own performances. His schemes
for obtaining the vast fortune of which he
was so often dreaming were as wild as
anything in the " Arabian Nights," yet he
seems to have been perfectly serious about
them, and spent thousands of ill-spared
francs on their prosecution. He jumped
from scheme to scheme. If he had told a
friend on Monday that he was going to
make a huge income by growing pine-
apples in his back garden, on the principle
of the Englishman who having sold a pig
at a profit of a pound, was about to make
a thousand a year by fattening a thousand
pigs, he would have forgotten it on
Tuesday, and would inform the same
friends that at last riches were coming to
him by the importation of timber, overland,
from Russia or Poland.
Yet in spite of this failure to see the cruel
1 80
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
humour of his own eccentricities a word,
as he tells us, invented by the English Bal-
zac's power of seeing the humours of life in
general must have aided him to keep up his
courage in circumstances which would have
broken many a man of stout heart even
before they broke him. With his load of
debts accumulating as fast as they were
discharged, the necessity of hiding in out-
of-the way places whilst he toiled at his
novels, the pressure of engagements with
publishers and editors which sometimes
he could not carry out, and which, when
carried out, necessitated many days and
nights almost without sleep, Balzac is one
of the most complete examples in the
story of human endeavour of the strong
man struggling with adversity.
Even when his humour is entirely con-
scious, it is not usually of the kind that
appeals to that now famous personage "the
man in the street." That man requires a
certain effrontery on the part of witticisms,
they must stare him in the face, or he will
pass them by without notice. To be accepted
181
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
as a humourist by the world in general an
author must make jokes ; the majority of
readers will be satisfied with bad jokes, but
the minority will require jokes of a superior
quality.
Now it is just because Balzac " jocked wi'
deefeeculty " that he is not generally re-
garded as a humourist. Most of the jokes
in his novels are of poor quality, and as for
the puns, Charles Lamb, who desired that
his last breath should be inhaled through a
pipe, and exhaled in a pun, would have died
with a pun still unblown rather than have
allowed his reputation to be damaged at the
last moment by such specimens as Balzac
was accustomed to manufacture. It is true
that Balzac's puns are usually placed in the
mouths of his characters, and that their
inferiority may be attributed to his striving
after consistency of characterisation. In
that case, of course, the very badness of the
puns may often be regarded as their special
merit. Yet he so frequently draws our
attention to them, almost in the very words
" This is a pun," and offers so many com-
182
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
ments on their qualities, that we cannot
entirely acquit him of a personal fondness
for some of these things, even when he
knew that they were poor. Let us recall
one or two examples from the scores that
might be collected. Madame Crmiere of
Nemours, who says that the composer of
the Moonlight Sonata was rightly named
" Bete a Vent," and turns "affaire a vous "
into " un fer a vous," is a sort of Mrs. Mala-
prop, if partly conscious of her offences ;
Joseph Bridau intends to be funny when
he says of his soldier brother, who recoils
from the notion of serving under a foreign
government : " He is right, a Frenchman
is too proud of his Colonne s'encotonnerelse.-
where ; " while it is an acknowledged joker
who declares in the same novel that life is
" un qu'on bat" (un combat). One of the
happiest puns of Balzac, because it is at
once so simple and so fine in its point, is
that of the excellent Abbe Chaperon, who,
when the apparition of Dr. Minoret is
reported to the "hdritiers" in " Ursule
Mirouet," and one of those unworthy
183
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
creatures asks: "Croyez-vous aux reve-
nants ? " sagely replies : <( Croyez-vous aux
revenus ? "
That Balzac knew a bad pun from a good
is partly shown in his account of a social
evening at Angoulme, when, after Lucien's
recitations, some one who has seen the card
tables set out says : "That was very well
recited, but I prefer whist," a remark, writes
the author, " which was regarded as a
witticism because of the English meaning
of the word."
Some of the better puns of the ' ' Com6die
Humaine " are to be found in "La Cousine
Bette." When Hortense is uncertain how
far her aunt is speaking the truth about
the romantic Polish sculptor Wenceslas, she
says : " Prouve-moi que Wenceslas n'est
pas un conte, et je te donne mon chale de
cachemire jaune," and Lisbeth replies, quite
seriously and truthfully : " Mais il est
comte ! " Marneffe, complaining, as usual,
of his unhappy lot, says to the offensively
prosperous Crevel, who is maire of his
quarter : <( Si j'avais te comme vous, je
184
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
serais pair et maire." Another kind of word-
play not unfrequent with Balzac is brightly
illustrated when Lousteau, the unprincipled
and lively journalist, who sells the books
given him to review and buys his gloves
with the proceeds, says to those authors
who publish at their own expense : " J'ai
toujours votre livre dans les mains."
So much for the verbal witticisms. What
of the jokes that are not dependent on
such playing upon words ?
A whole series of practical jokes is per-
petrated on the citizens of Issoudun by the
ctisceuvrance of that town, rowdy youths
whose parents allow them latchkeys, and
who are captained by the dashing and im-
moral Maxence Gilet, the less evil of the
two scoundrels who divide the part of
"hero" in that amazingly original and
fascinating study of the effects of maternal
spoiling, " Un Menage de Garden." The
sous-pr6fet who, as Balzac quaintly says,
" united to the mania for having fresh eggs
for breakfast, that of liking to cook them
himself," is harassed by the nightly substi-
185
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
tution of hard-boiled eggs for fresh in his
hen-house, without ever suspecting that
there has been any trickery in the matter,
and is compelled to change his diet ; a
farmer loses his cart, which he has left in
the market-place, and finds it on the top of
the castle mound ; the watch-dogs in the
town are poisoned, and so on. These
"jokes" were not regarded by Balzac as
humourous, being entirelyappropriate to the
place and people with whom they are asso-
ciated, and especially to the odious type of
youth represented by the practical jokers.
I have touched on the puns and practical
jokes at the outset, in order to leave the
way open for a brief examination of the
qualities in which Balzac most clearly re-
veals himself as a humourist. His humour,
if we try to analyse it, shows much that is
kindly and sympathetic, as in the account
of the passion of poor old Madame Des-
coings for the lottery, and her ruinous
pursuit of a lucky terne> or group of three
numbers, during years of confident hope
constantly deferred. " She never gave up
186
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
trying for the term, which had not been
drawn for over twenty years. Towards
this period she began to mistrust the
administration. She accused the Govern-
ment, and believed it quite capable of sup-
pressing the three numbers in the ballot-
box in order to provoke the fury of the
actionnaires"
Regarded as a whole, however, the
humour of the " Comedie Humaine " is
bitter in its nature, being concerned for the
most part with the vices rather than with
the amiable weaknesses of men and women.
In the attacks on humanity made by Voltaire
or by Swift there is nothing more vitriolic
than the account of the events and con-
versations of the day on which L'Alcade
dans fembarras was produced at the
Panorama Dramatique (" Illusions Per-
dues "), an account wherein the literature,
the drama, the press, publishers, book-
sellers, managers, actors, editors, journal-
ists of the Restoration are represented as
a seething mass of corruption, existing on
blackmail, chicanery, and "log-rolling" of
187
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
the most degrading kind, every man an
unprincipled Ishmael, every woman save
perhaps Madame Vernou, who has soured
her husband's life, but is a comparatively
honest creature being beneath the con-
tempt of the three or four noble spirits of
the cdnacle of honest men from whom
Lucien de Rubempr is inevitably de-
tached by the interplay of his character
and opportunities.
One of the mildest of the crimes charged
against the Paris journalists of that time
is the utter disregard of fairness in the
reviewing of books. Lousteau, when he
first takes Lucien to his room, describes
how he review's books without reading
more than a few of their pages. Having
sold a "Voyage en Egypte " which had
just been sent to him, he replies to his
innocent acquaintance, who asks how on
earth he will be able to write an article
about the book :
" Bah ! you don't know how that is done !
I have glanced at the book here and there
1 88
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
without cutting it, and have discovered
eleven mistakes in French. I shall fill a
column in saying that, if the author has
learnt the language of the ducks engraved
upon the Egyptian obelisks, he does not
know his own, and I shall prove it. I
shall say that instead of talking about
natural history and antiquities he should
have discussed the future of Egypt, the
progress of civilisation, the means of bind-
ing that country to France, which, having
conquered and lost it, can at least gain a
moral ascendancy over it. I shall do the
patriotic trick, in fact, and fill up with
tirades upon Marseilles, the Levant, and
our commercial interests."
" But," asks his companion, " supposing
the author had done all you suggest, what
would you say then ? "
" Oh, then I should say that instead of
wearying us with politics, he should have
dealt with art, and painted the country
under its picturesque aspects."
It is no wonder that Lucien, whose ideals
189
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
are as yet little damaged, should cry out in
so many words, " Good heavens, and that
is criticism ! "
Balzac gathered the subjects of his hu-
mour from social types, but he went so
little into the world working so hard that,
as M. Bourget has said, he scarcely had
" le temps de vivre " that his imagination
supplied as much material, or more, than
his observation. The result is perhaps seen
in his habit of generalisation. His financiers,
his journalists, his politicians are almost in-
variably corrupt, his aristocrats wanting in
the most ordinary evidences of good man-
ners, as has already been illustrated from the
scene in Madame d'Espard's box at the
opera, where the choicest spirits among the
men of her exclusive set come to examine
the provincial cousin and the cousin's tame
poet, and the superfine de Marsay and his
associates whisper and stare and sneer with
a want of consideration for the feelings of
the new arrivals or of their hostess which
would be astonishing in the occupants of
a coster's donkey-cart on a Bank Holiday,
190
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
The wit and humour of Balzac lie so
much in the whole scheme of a book or
of a scene there are usually no chapters,
the publishers having done away with such
divisions in the author's lifetime, "to save
space " that, for the most part, to offer
specimens is to rank oneself with the man
who sent a brick as a sample of his house
to a possible purchaser.
As an instance of the difficulty of ex-
tracting the humour of Balzac without
losing most of its flavour, I may refer to
the account of Madame de Bargeton's
"evening" (in the first volume of " Illu-
sions Perdues "), of which, as a picture of
life and character, it would not be easy to
find many parallels in fiction. The various
types of the provincial aristocracy are in-
troduced to us as they arrive in the salon
of the queen of Angouleme society, in-
troduced with a description of their
peculiarities which might have led to their
speedy retirement if they had been able
to hear it. But first the host, who is no-
body in the world but the husband of the
191
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
wife whom he adores and obeys without
hesitation, even to the risk of his life, is
presented to us.
" A tdte-d-tete caused him the only em-
barrassment which disturbed his vegetative
life ; he was then obliged to seek in the
immensity of his internal void for some-
thing to say. Usually, he saved himself
such trouble in following the naive habits
of his childhood : he thought out loud ; he
initiated you into the smallest details of his
life ; he described to you his wants, his
little sensations, which, for him, took the
place of ideas. He did not talk of the
weather, nor take refuge in those common-
places of conversation by which stupid
people generally save themselves ; he
spoke of the most intimate interests of
his existence.
' To please Madame de Bargeton,' he
would say, ' I have eaten some veal, of
which she is very fond, and it has upset my
stomach. I knew it would, for it always
does ; what can be the reason ? '
192
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Among the guests was the musical
amateur, M. de Bartas, with whom " music
had become a monomania ; he only
brightened up when one talked of music ;
he suffered during a whole evening until
he was asked to sing. As soon as he had
bellowed one of his ballads his life com-
menced ; he strutted about the room,
raised himself on his toes when he was
complimented ; he affected to be modest,
and, when all had been said, came back to
music in starting a discussion on the diffi-
culties of the song he had sung, or in
praising the composer." Another guest in
the drawing-room of " Nai's " de Bargeton
on this memorable occasion was M. Alex-
andre de Brebian, " the hero of sepia, who
covered the walls of his friends' houses
with ridiculous drawings, and spoiled all
the albums in the neighbourhood." M. de
Bartas and M. de Brebian were great allies,
and allowed themselves, in their quality of
artists, a provincial kind of carelessness
which made them rather curious to see.
" Their rumpled clothes gave them the air
193 N
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
of the ' supers ' who in the smaller theatres
represent the people of high society invited
to weddings," a description which reminds
us of the famous " Adelphi guests " of
aforetime.
We also have the pleasure of meeting
M. de S6v6rac, a middle-aged maire, whose
mind is so possessed by the composition of
a monograph on silkworms that he cannot
help talking of it. He seems to a match-
making mother who is present to be a
likely parti for her gawky and stupid
daughter of twenty-seven, whom she re-
presents as sharing the tastes of all the
eligible men in turn. She says to M. de
S6ve"rac, when he has given an account of
his silkworms :
" My daughter has always loved animals.
So, as the silk that these little creatures
make is interesting to women, I will ask
your permission to bring my Camille to
Severac, to show her how it is obtained.
Camille is so intelligent that she will
understand directly everything you tell
194
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
her. Has she not understood, one day,
the inverse ratio of the square of dis-
tances ? "
Balzac, if in the humour that bubbles like
that of Mark Twain, or that squeaks like
that of Mark Twain's imitators, he is not
of much account, is strong in the humour
which depends on the discovery of affecta-
tion and the appreciation of motives. He
also was "the lord of irony." Recall, for
example, the extract from the local news-
paper concerning the marriage of " La
Rabouilleuse." That lovely peasant, after
being the mistress of a weak-minded
elderly man for years, becomes his wife,
in order that she may inherit his money.
As soon as the old man can be killed
through the over-indulgence into which he
is to be tempted, the abominable Colonel
Bridau, who has arranged the whole busi-
ness of the wedding, will himself marry the
widow and get rid of her in turn with the
aid of strong drink. It is the wedding
of the old victim and his unprincipled
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
mistress, under the compelling force of his
still more unprincipled nephew, that moves
the local newspaper to produce an article
wherein the world is informed that : "The
religious movement is making progress in
Berri. All the friends of the Church and
the right-thinking people of Issoudun were
witnesses yesterday of a ceremony by
which one of the principal landed pro-
prietors of the neighbourhood has put an
end to a scandalous situation."
One must read the whole novel to
appreciate the caustic humour of this inci-
dent, but its ironical point, not intentional
on the newspaper's part, must be evident
even with the sketch of the context here
supplied.
What bitter irony, again, is expressed
in the last lines in " Le Pere Goriot,"
where Rastignac, caught by the demon of
social ambition, and disillusionised by con-
tact with the world, leaves the grave of
the poor father of the neglectful and un-
grateful Delphine de Nucingen and Anas-
tasie de Restaud, and gazes over the
196
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
fashionable quarter of Paris from the high
ground of Pere-Lachaise. "He threw
upon that buzzing hive a regard which
seemed to drain its honey by anticipation
and uttered these grandiose words : ' A
nous deux maintenant ! ' And then, for
the first act of the challenge that he offered
to Society, Rastignac went to dine with
Madame de Nucingen."
The finest humour of Balzac cannot
even be suggested in quotations, unless
pages together are quoted. " Les Come*-
diens sans le savoir," for instance, contains
some intensely diverting things, especially
the account of the visit to Marius, the
superfine hairdresser ; but there is no one
" bit " in that account which can be cut
out without losing more than half its force.
This sketch of the provincial Gazonal
" taken round " by Bixiou the caricaturist,
and Leon de Lora, the " Mistigris " of past
years, who has never outgrown his high
spirits and love of joking, is a highly de-
lightful work of art which can only be
enjoyed as a whole.
197
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Balzac, with all his fondness for allu-
sions to the England of which he knew so
little at first hand, had probably never heard
the word ''spoof," which was not familiar
in the days of Richardson or Byron. But
the process, if not the word, was very
familiar to him, and is abundantly illus-
trated in his novels. In its perfection it is
seen in " Un Debut dans la Vie," the
journey in the carrier's conveyance to
Presle being chiefly occupied with a game
of " spoof," very amusing for the time
being to most of the players, but disas-
trous in its termination. " Les Employes "
is rich in finer humour, the foibles of the
place-hunting officials and their families,
the jealousies of the clerks, the denseness
of people who can never understand irony
being displayed under the strong light of
one of the most searching and most caustic
of humourists.
Both the leading prtcieuses of the
"Comdie," Dinah de la Baudraye and
Anai's de Bargeton, are admirable exam-
ples of the author's humour in charac-
198
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
terisation. Of Anai's, the brightest, per-
haps, of the two women, though she does
not court fame as a writer, Balzac tells us
that " she was prodigal beyond measure of
superlatives in her conversation, where the
least thing assumed gigantic proportions.
She began typiser, individualiser, synthe'-
tiser, dramatiser, siip'erioriser> analyser,
pottiser, prosaiser, colossifier, angdliser,
ndologiser, et trag^q^ter, for one must do
violence for a moment to the French lan-
guage if one wants to suggest the whim-
sical novelties of speech in which some
women indulge."
A few of the more detachable instances
of Balzac's humour however partially re-
presented in such extracts may be recalled
in no particular order.
Agathe Bridau, bewailing to her aunt
Madame Descoings that her boy Joseph
has been drawing in a studio, cries : " You
don't know what goes on in these studios !
The artists have naked women to paint
from." And the old woman replies, quite
simply, " I hope there is a fire there."
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ASPECTS OF BALZAC
Pierquin, the notary of Douai (in
" La Recherche de 1'Absolu "), became
celebrated for his answer to the Comman-
dant of the Camp at Saint-Omer, who
invited him to a military fete : " Monsieur
Pierquin- Claes de Molina- Nourho, Maire
de la ville de Douai, Chevalier de la Legion
d'honneur, aura celui de se rendre," etc.
That celui, surely, is a charming touch.
At Hochon's, when that miserly old man
" entertains " his relations from Paris at
Issoudun, dessert is wanted after dinner.
'" Aliens done, Gritte, du fruit ! " calls out
Madame Hochon, and the old servant
replies : " Mais, madame, n'y en a plus de
pourri." It is no wonder that " Joseph burst
out laughing as if he was among his friends
in the studio," and cried " Bah ! We will
eat them all the same." M. Hochon,
" much scandalised," fetched some peaches,
pears and plums.
Hochon's fellow-citizen, the President
of the Judicial Bench of Issoudun, before
reaching that position of dignity, had ren-
dered himself celebrated by one of those
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ASPECTS OF BALZAC
sayings which, in the country, coiffent pour
toute sa vie un homme dun bonnet ddne.
After having finished the preliminary in-
quiry into a criminal charge for which the
punishment was death, he said to the ac-
cused : " My poor Pierre, your case is
clear, you will be guillotined. Let that be
a lesson to you ! "
Of the jokes in the " Contes Drola-
tiques " I need not say much. I have
heard an accomplished critic describe
those stories as the cleverest things Balzac
ever wrote. To me it appears that their
effect depends very largely on the imi-
tation of the language and form of the
" Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles." Had they
been related in the French that Balzac
ordinarily employed, it is doubtful, I think,
whether the majority of them would be
thought very humourous. They do, un-
questionably, include some very witty
ideas. Perhaps there is no livelier touch
of its kind than is given in the cry of
the silk-dyer's wife to her husband when
she finds herself in the presence of an
201
imminent tragedy: " Arrete, malheureux,
tu vas tuer le pere de tes enfans ! "
If thehumourof the "Contes Drolatiques"
depends a good deal on the quaint old
French some hostile critics held that it was
more quaint than old the comicality of the
Germans and Alsatians of the " Come"die "
owes much to their queer pronunciation.
We are mildly amused when the " Paron "
de Nucingen says to Baron Hulot, who is
begging for a loan, " Rassirez-fus, cheu ne
fus ai vait 1'objection que bir fus vair aber-
cevoir que ch'ai quelque mdride a fus tonner
la somme ; " or when Schmucke, whose em-
brace has been misunderstood by Madame
Cibot, tells that French connection of
Mrs. Gamp that she is " eine pede." We
know from his sister that Balzac himself
laughed consumedly over these confusions
of tongues.
Some of the most unexpected sallies in
the "Comdie Humaine" are those directed
against the parvenus who assume a particle
if they have it not. Madame de Bargeton,
wishing to humiliate her would-be lover,
202
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
the " directeur des contributions indirectes "
at Angoulme, calls him " Monsieur Cha-
telet," and petrifies him by making him
understand that she knows he has no right
to the particle, for " M. du Chatelet, venu
au monde Sixte Chatelet tout court, avait
eu le bon esprit de se qualifier." Since M.
de Balzac himself was once Honore Balzac
tout court, and " avait eu le bon esprit de
se qualifier," there is a candour about his
references to the " illegale superfetation de
sa particule " by the director of indirect
taxes which is quite refreshing. A boo-
merang of like kind is aimed, in " Le Bal
de Sceaux," at Maximilien de Longueville,
of whom M. de Fontaine remarks, waggling
his head from side to side, that "His father
was an attorney before the Revolution ;
and the ' de ' that he has assumed since the
Restoration belongs to him just as much
or as little as the half of his fortune."
I will close these few illustrations of Bal-
zac's intentionally humourous sallies with
one or two specimens addressed directly to
his friends, and not gathered from his books.
203
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
The garden wall of his villa near Ville-
d'Avray, the ramshackle " Les Jardies,"
fell down and was rebuilt over and over
again, and always fell in the adjoining field.
At length Balzac, having bought the field,
said to a friend, with a sigh of contentment,
" The price was high, but no matter for
that ; one is always happy to be able to
end one's days at home. My poor wall
will at least be able to die in its bed."
To a lady whose house was so draughty
that even in summer it was cold, Balzac
replied, when his hostess said, " Must you
go so soon ? " : " Yes, Madame, I am going
into the street to warm myself a little."
Of unconscious humour there is truly
no lack in the novels of Balzac, such
humour as that over which the Revue de
Paris, in its bitterness at having lost the
action in which it claimed the right to
publish the conclusion of " Le Lys dans
la Vallee," made itself merry in its "Fin
d'une Histoire qui ne devait pas finir," in
June 1836, when the novel had appeared
in book form. The writer of that very
204
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
spiteful attack on Balzac's style declared that
in the book which Balzac regarded as a
masterpiece, he had found more nonsense,
more fatuity, more dulness, more preten-
tious extravaga.nce and bad French than
he had come across in all his previous ex-
perience ; and undoubtedly some of his
examples are absurd enough, such for ex-
ample as the passage wherein the narrator
says of Arabelle that she possesses that
science of existence which, among other
peculiarities, " verse a 1'heure dite un the"
suave, savammentde'plie," and "fait de la
matiere une pulpe nourrissante et coton-
neuse, brillante et propre au sein de
laquelle 1'ame expire sous la jouissance,
qui produit 1'affreuse monotonie du bien-
etre ? " There is no doubt much of this
kind of word-spinning in some of Balzac's
novels, but it nowhere else abounds as in
" Le Lys dans la Valtee."
If these examples of some aspects of
Balzac's humour cannot save perhaps in
the last instance of the unconscious afford
sufficient material for arriving at a judg-
205
ASPECTS OF BALZAC
ment on its quality, they will at least, I
hope, serve to convey to some who may
not yet have gone far along the highways
and byways of Balzac's domain, a distrust
of the old and paradoxical accusation of
want of humour against the proprietor.
The conclusions here suggested are simply
these, that for the most part Balzac was
not notably spirituel in his jesting, that his
finest wit was that of characterisation and
suggestion rather than of phraseology, and
that humour of a high quality is inherent
in his pictures of social and individual
types and experiences, humour which, if
sometimes forced in order to produce the
effect desired, and often bitter in its taste,
is the elixir of life in the gigantic body of
that mass of tragedies, the "Come" die
Humaine."
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