Balzac x 3

Le Père Goriot (Gallimard, 2012)
by Honoré de Balzac
France, 1835

The Girl with the Golden Eyes [La Fille aux yeux d'or] (Melville House Publishing, 2007)
by Honoré de Balzac [translated from the French by Charlotte Mandel]
France, 1835

"Honoré de Balzac's 'Vision' of Paris"
by Owen Heathcote
England, 2013

In a brief but illuminating-for-this-particular-Balzac-neophyte essay on "Honoré de Balzac's 'Vision' of Paris" included in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris edited by Anna-Louise Milne (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 71-84), Owen Heathcote makes the claim that "Balzac's appetite for observation"--and in particular his mythification of the city in print--"has contributed to establishing what 'Paris' is to such an extent that his vision is now inseparable from the so-called actual city.  It is no exaggeration to say that this author, famed for his 'realism,' also gave us the 'idea of Paris,' a 'paper cathedral' that absorbs the material world and replaces it with text" (74).  Whatever you make of the details of Heathcote's argument, his contention provides a convenient enough prism through which to view two Parisian novels which couldn't be more dissimilar in terms of artistic quality: Balzac's grand, wrenching Le Père Goriot and the same author's dreadful, often clownish The Girl with the Golden Eyes [La Fille aux yeux d'or].  How can thinking about these two works as examples of "Balzacian Parisian novels" help us to appreciate them in a different light than we might on purely aesthetic grounds?  As many of you already know, Le Père Goriot begins with a famous extended description of a down-at-the-heels boarding house home to a motley crew of Parisians and ends with an even more famous description of another sort of Parisian rest home, Père Lachaise cemetery, from which the no longer innocent Eugène de Rastignac, a transplanted provincial, surveys a panorama of the city which has just educated him in what it will take for him to survive amid all the meanness and scheming and social climbing of his new urban milieu.  The novel's worthy of its hype on many different levels, of course, but for my $$$ one of the not so secret secrets to its success is the way the impressionable young Rastignac is forced to choose between two role models--a charismatic criminal named Vautrin who, in the course of a nearly 10 page-long rant against society, tells Rastignac that the only two choices in life are between "une stupide obéissance ou la révolte" ["mindless obedience or revolt"] (147) and that "l'honnêteté ne sert à rien" ["honesty doesn't serve anyone"] (152), and the long-suffering title character, at one point described as "ce Christ de la Paternité" ["this Christ of fatherhood"] (282), who sacrifices everything for his two daughters' well-being only to be rejected by them in his hour of need.  Rastignac's choice should be clear but ultimately isn't given the accomplished and devastating high-wire act Balzac pulls off in the finale.  Unfortunately, where Le Père Goriot tells a story of substance and depth with appropriate references to local color even at its most melodramatic (for example, as early as the third page in, a mention of the Catacombs leads the narrator to blurt out--"Comparaison vraie!  Qui décidera de ce qui est plus horrible à voir, ou des coeurs desséches, ou des crânes vides?" ["A true comparison!  For who can say what's more horrible to observe: either dried-up hearts or empty skulls?"] [23]), The Girl with the Golden Eyes is hollow, bombastic and buffoonish in its telling of what's essentially a pulp love story.  Which is not to say that the descriptions of "the soul of Paris" being responsible for its "cadaverous physiognomy" (4) aren't amusing or that the narrator's claim that "all passion in Paris is focused on two goals: gold and pleasure" (21) is any less serious a critique of the headlong pursuit of power and wealth than the one found in Le Père Goriot.  However, unintentionally funny lines like the description of hero Henri de Marsay's "slim, aristocratic waist" (34) and howlers like the Girl with the Golden Eyes' description of a love nest as "this retreat was built for love" (87) read more like a parody of a gothic novel which just happens to be set in Paris rather than the complex statement about Paris Balzac set down in Le Pére Goriot.  Heathcote, interestingly enough, provides one reason to consider taking The Girl with the Golden Eyes seriously in speaking of the "feminisation of Paris which runs throughout La Comédie humaine."  Although it pains me to even think about ever reading the ridiculous The Girl with the Golden Eyes again, I must confess that Heathcote almost tempts me with his provocative assertion that just as "'Woman,' like Paris" is both "an enigma to be solved" and "a territory to be conquered" for Le Père Goriot's Rastignac, "if, moreover, as will be seen in La Fille aux yeux d'or, Paris is also associated with the courtesans of ancient Babylon or imperial Rome, then the identification of woman and Paris extends back in time and over space: the feminisation of Paris facilitates the transformation of description into myth and the transformation of La Comédie humaine into a new, but age-old, epic with Paris as its epicentre.  At the same time, Paris also becomes a new, nineteenth century hell - both as irresistible lure and as inescapable labyrinth" (75).  Interesting thoughts to be sure--although Heathcote clearly missed a chance to go after some low-hanging fruit when he neglected to associate The Girl with the Golden Eyes' description of an elderly woman as "the old mummy" (72) with the ancient Egyptians as he maybe could have and should have given all that ancient Babylon and imperial Rome talk.  Whatever!

Le Père Goriot and The Girl with the Golden Eyes were books #8 and #9 out of a projected vingt-quatre read for the Books on France 2014 Reading Challenge.  Still way off the pace but a little less so than I was a month ago.  No need to play the all-novellas-in-translation card just yet, but there may be after Germinal!

Le Colonel Chabert

Le Colonel Chabert (Le Livre de Poche, 2012)
by Honoré de Balzac
France, 1832

Have you ever come back from the dead?  If not, it may be difficult for you to understand why the tormented title character of Balzac's 1832 novella might have been better off succumbing to his horrific wounds at the battle of Eylau, where he was left for dead and buried in a common grave, and it will most certainly be difficult for me to explain why this account of Colonel Chabert's legal proceedings to restore his name and fortune after years of recovering from his near death experience on the battlefield hits like such a ton of bricks.  In any event, I don't expect that I'll be giving away too much by mentioning that the colonel's renewed relationship with his former wife--who has remarried and is now a mother to a political opportunist's young children--is at the heart of this sobering meditation on an Empire era man of honor's pursuit of justice in Restoration days.  Three things, in particular, make this a standout as a reading experience.  First, there's the deliciously creepy way the poor protagonist is described as the bearer of a "physionomie cadavéreuse" ["cadaverous aspect"] (70), is forced to explain which Colonel Chabert he is to the lawyer Derville ("--Celui qui est mort à Eylau, répondit le vieillard" ["'The one who died at Eylau,' responded the old man"]) (72), and is even referred to as a dead man talking by the narrator ("--Monsieur, dit le défunt, peut-être savez-vous que je commandais un régiment de cavalerie à Eylau" ["'Monsieur,' said the deceased, 'perhaps you know that I commanded a cavalry regiment at Eylau'"]) (73).  Then there's the just plain creepy way Colonel Chabert recalls being buried alive among the dead in 1807 before he regained consciousness and found new life among the living: "Le peu d'air que je respirait était méphitique...J'entendis, ou crus entendre, je ne veux rien affirmer, des gémissements poussés par le monde de cadavres au milieu duquel je gisais" ["The scant amount of air that I was breathing was noxious...I heard, or thought I heard, I don't wish to swear on oath to anything, some groans uttered by the world of cadavers in the midst of which I was lying"] (75, ellipses added).  Finally, you have to love the way indignation is the order of the day in Balzac's brisk, bracing telling of a story in which a Grande Armée survivor is brought low by the machinations of a lying woman--and a legal system which is all too willing to accept him as an impostor.  On that note, here's a quick portrait of monsieur Derville, the one lawyer who is willing to help Colonel Chabert if the old soldier will only allow himself to be helped: "Un sourire malicieux et mordant exprima les idées moitié philosophiques, moitié railleuses qui devaient venir à un homme si bien placé pour connaître le fond des choses, malgré les mensonges sous lesquels la plupart des familles parisiennes cachent leur existence" ["A malicious and mordant smile expressed the half philosophical, half scoffing ideas which were beginning to come to a man so well placed to discern the innermost recesses of things in spite of the lies behind which the majority of Parisian families hide their existence"] (110).  A narrative knuckle sandwich.

Balzac (1799-1850)

Eugénie Grandet

Eugénie Grandet (Le Livre de Poche, 2009)
by Honoré de Balzac
France, 1833

While I wasn't really sure what kind of storytelling experience to expect from my first Balzac ever, what I got was so plain and old-fashioned in some respects that I at times felt a little like an early '80s postpunk fan being confronted with a mid-'70s Bruce Springsteen record by mistake.  What the hell?  That being said, Eugénie Grandet wasn't exactly bad as an exemplar of 19th century earnest realism.  Balzac's relatively straightforward tale of woe--a miser's daughter discovers that her father isn't the only man in the world to place the love of money above love and all else in his life--is related with a subtlety that surprised me, and there was probably just enough of an off-kilter vibe to the characterizations to make up for the lack of narrative flashiness. Although I doubt I'll be reading too much more of La Comédie humaine anytime soon, that Springsteen comparison might seem like more of a slight than was called for if/when you stop to consider that this little book is big and contradictory enough to contain an outsized character like Monsieur Grandet, who at one point accuses his nephew of being a good for nothing for being more upset over his father's death than with his father's debts which he has inherited, and an occasionally sympathetic narrator who, despite casting Eugénie and her mother as "coeurs purs" ["pure hearts"] in contrast to père Grandet's personification of "L'Argent dans toute sa puissance" ["Money in all its power"], is still willing to chastise the Grandet women in a rare intrusive outburst: "Encore, combien d'ignorance dans leur naïveté!" ["Still, how much ignorance in their naïvety!"] (93).

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)

I'm two weeks late for this post due to the reading hangover occasioned by Spanish Lit Month, but Eugénie Grandet was read with Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza fame.  Her review can be found here.

"Eugénie Grandet" et "L'Éducation sentimentale" Group Reads

Eugénie Grandet

Sentimental Education

With Spanish Lit Month finally set to kick off within a few short hours now, estimados lectores/chers lecteurs, I thought I'd take advantage of what little time is left in June to bring your attention to two French group reads (oui, deux of them!) that I'm looking forward to participating in this summer.  First up is Balzac's 1833 Eugénie Grandet, which Bellezza of Dolce Bellezza and I will be discussing sometime during the last three days of July.  Next up is Flaubert's 1869 L'Éducation sentimentale [Sentimental Education], which Frances of Nonsuch Book, Bellezza, and I will be posting on during the weekend of August 24th-26th.  Feel free to join us for either or both of these works if interested and time permits.