Gambara by Balzac

I thoroughly enjoyed Balzac’s novella Gambara–a tale that runs to almost 90 pages in my NYRB edition packaged with a companion piece of sorts, The Unknown Masterpiece . In Gambara, it’s  New Year’s Eve 183o, and a wealthy, young Milanese nobleman is strolling in Paris on the look out for love and adventure. We’re told that Count Andrea Marcosini ”is banished from his country, where several liberal escapades had rendered him persona non grata to the Austrian government.” (Of course, I’m thinking about Casanova.) The Count, due to his wealth, is not in hardship and is viewing his exile rather like an extended holiday. He expects to return in a couple of years and face no long-lasting consequences.  

On New Year’s Eve, the Count spies a poorly dressed, but pretty woman, and he begins following her, not bothering to hide his interest. Part of the Count’s attraction to the woman springs from the sense that the woman suffers conflicting emotions. She notes his presence and may even seem interested but at the same time, she blushes and seems annoyed by the Count’s attentions. Her responses spark “unruly dreams which were exciting him,” and I think that’s a polite 19th century way of saying that the Count was enjoying sexual fantasies about the woman as he follows her.

“For after all,” he said to himself, “if she was avoiding me and wanted to put me off the scent, that means she’s attracted to me. With women of her kind, resistance is a proof of love.”

The woman’s poverty and tatty clothing seem to be erotic stimuli rather than a turn-off. The first step of this adventure ends when the woman slips inside a building and the Count discovers that she appears to live in some squalid lodging connected to a table d’hôte, and again, this very squalidness adds to the adventure and turns the Count on:

He wanted her in that very house he had seen her enter. “Am I enslaved by vice?” he asked himself, with some alarm. 

Of course, with this powerful attraction eating away at the Count’s peace of mind, he returns to the rue Froidmanteau and while he wants to see the woman again, he decides a sly way to discover more would be to dine at the table d’hôte. Served by fellow countryman, Signora Giardini, the Count finally meets the object of his sexual obsession, Signora Marianna Gambara along with the annoying encumbrance of a husband. According to his host and chef, Giardini, many men have tried to seduce the beautiful Signora Gambara but all have failed. She remains loyal to her husband–in spite of the fact that he earns no money and is an eccentric musician.

The Count is intrigued by the Gambaras, and dining with Giardini in dingy, crude conditions allows him to monitor the object of his desire safely. Signora Gambara, of course, knows that the Count is there for her, but her husband, completely ”mad” according to Giardini, is blissfully unaware of anything but his music. The Count is in a unique position, financially, to help both the Gambaras and the chef, Giardini, for both the musician Gambara and the chef, Giardini are idealists and will suffer nothing less than perfection. What torture, then that both men have difficulties with their respective trades and passions. Giardini, for example, boasts he serves “the best table in Paris”:

Yes, eccellenza, a quarter of an hour from now you’ll learn the sort of man I am. I’ve introduced refinements into Italian cooking which will astound you. I am a Neapolitan, eccellenza, which means I am a born chef. But what use is instinct without knowledge? Knowledge! I’ve spent thirty years acquiring knowledge, and you see where it’s brought me. Mine is the story of all men of talent! My discoveries, my experiments have ruined three restaurants in succession, in Naples, in Parma, in Rome. Today, now that I’m reduced to making a trade of my art, I indulge my ruling passions more than ever before. I serve these poor refugees some of my favorite dishes–and that’s how I ruin myself!  

If I were the Count about to eat Giardini’s food, that comment about ruining three restaurants would have made me nervous. After all, there are several ways to interpret Giardini’s complaint as the Count is about to discover.

Curiously Giardini’s table seems crowded with idealists: a mediocre composer who’d like to write operas, a deaf orchestra director, exiled political radical Ottoboni, a journalist doomed to obscure papers because he refuses to sensationalize, and then, of course, Signor Gambara who has a very special problem….

The Count, a practiced seducer, realizes that Signora Gambara worships and protects her husband and so with no small amount of craftiness, the Count lays siege to the wife through courting her husband. But that’s enough of the plot. I thoroughly enjoyed the story for its exploration of human nature, and Balzac shows that giving people what they say they want doesn’t solve problems. Is the Count happy, for example, with Signora Gambara, or is desire directed towards her as an unattainable object? Will Giardini be happy creating endless dishes in a situation in which resources are not a concern? Perhaps idealists are never meant to function in a less-than-perfect world. Or then again, perhaps Idealism offers a safe refuge for the talentless and those whose talent is hampered by other issues. There’s a pleasurable cynicism to this story seen mainly through the way the Count hunts Signora Gambara, and the way in which, through Balzac’s intelligent mind, we see the consequences of his characters achieving that which they desire the most.

The Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac

Back to Balzac for the story, The Unknown Masterpiece–a story that found its way into the Jacques Rivette film, La Belle Noiseuse (1991).  This is a story about three artists, and I read the NYRB edition which includes another story, Gambara. To the two, I preferred the latter story, but more of that in another post.

The Unknown Masterpiece is less than 40 pages in my edition, and the story opens in 1612 with a young, poor artist, Nicolas Poussin pacing in front of the home of a famous painter, Porbus, the court painter of Henri IV. Perhaps he wouldn’t have had the courage to knock at the painter’s door, but Poussin is passed on the stairs by a very elderly man who is admitted into the painter’s residence, and Poussin drifts in too.

While Poussin is in awe of being in the presence of Porbus, a man whose talent he admires, the elderly man, an artist named Frenhofer, doesn’t exactly lavish praise on the paintings. According to Frenhofer, the paintings may be anatomically correct, but they lack life:

The old man sniffed. “Good? … Yes and no. Your lady is assembled nicely enough, but she’s not drawn alive. You people think you’ve done it all once you’ve drawn a body correctly and put everything where it belongs, according to the laws of anatomy! You fill in your outline with flesh tones mixed in advance on your palette, carefully keeping one side darker than the other, and because you glance now at a naked woman standing on a table, you think you’re copying nature–you call yourself painters and suppose you’ve stolen god’s secrets! … Brrr! A man’s not a great poet just because he knows a little grammar and doesn’t violate usage! Look at your saint, Porbus! At first glance she seems quite admirable, but look again and you can see she’s pasted on the canvas–you could never walk around her. She’s a flat silhouette, a cutout who could never turn around or change position.

Frenhofer, a man of strong opinions, demonstrates his theories on a painting that belongs to the young artist Poussin, and the seemingly slight alternations he enacts make a convincing argument. Poussin’s ‘good’ painting is transformed into something magnificent, “a picture steeped in light.”

Frenhofer invites Poussin and Porbus back to his studio, and while there, the men admire a portrait of Frenhofer’s model. Frenhofer admits that he’s “failed to find [is] a flawless woman,” and later Poussin offers Gillette, his lover and his model to Frenhofer….

The intro by Arthur C. Danto states that Poussin and Pourbus were two very real artists, and that the latter was “the leading portraitist of his era.” Danto argues that the three artists “are, so to speak, the spirits of Past, Present, and Future.” I didn’t interpret the characters in the same way–to me they were three artists who are at various points in their respective careers. With the appearance of Gillette, Balzac introduces the theme of the artist’s sacrifice to Art, but there’s another theme here–the Quest of Idealism. Gambara also explores the exhausting possibilities of Idealism, so the pairing of these two stories in one volume is appropriate.

The Unknown Masterpiece asks the questions: “What is art?” and “What is a masterpiece?” “Would we recognize a masterpiece if we saw it?” and finally “Who decides if something is a masterpiece?”  By this point in the story, I thought of Andy Warhol’s Oxidation Paintings (Piss Paintings)–one, which according to an internet source, sold for $1,889,000 back in 2008. For these paintings, canvases were prepared with copper paint and then urinated on with this result:

Ah, what price art!

But back to something truly beautiful–the Girl with the Pearl Earring–a painting I recently saw which is, btw, much more beautiful than expected and something that Frenhofer would admire. The young girl who posed for the painting seems very much alive

Her eyes seemed moist to me, her flesh was alive, the locks of her hair stirred … She breathed

Translated by Richard Howard

The Red Inn by Balzac

The Red Inn (L’Auberge Rouge), a short story from Balzac, is a seemingly simple tale that asks the question: how does one accept a fortune that is gained on blood–a fortune that is not morally yours?

This tale begins at the home of a Parisian banker who is entertaining friends and business acquaintances with dinner. Included in the guests is a German named Hermann who is asked to tell the guests a story over dessert:

At this moment the guests were in that happy state of laziness and silence which follows a delicious dinner, especially if we have presumed too far on our digestive powers. leaning back in their chairs, their wrists lightly resting on the edge of the table, they were indolently playing with the gilded blades of their dessert-knives. When a dinner comes to this declining moment some guests will be seen to play with a pear seed; others roll crumbs of bread between their fingers and thumbs; lovers trace indistinct letters with fragments of fruit; misers count the stones on their plate and arrange them as a manager marshals his supernumeraries at the back of the stage. These are the little gastronomic felicities which Brillat-Savarin, otherwise so complete an author, overlooked in his book. The footmen had disappeared. The dessert was like a squadron after a battle: all the dishes were disabled, pillaged, damaged

It’s so easy to imagine this scene with the satisfied guests around the table, laden with overly-full, heavy stomachs and loathe to move. Taking a pinch of snuff, the German begins his tale which rather appropriately involves two young Frenchmen in Germany. The year is 1799. The two men, Prosper Magnan and the other named “Wilhelm” (the story teller claims to have forgotten the name of the second man) have been removed from medical school and conscripted into the army as assistant-surgeons. They reach the town of Anderbach at nightfall and decide to spend the night at an inn that is painted red, aptly named The Red Inn. The inn is full, but the innkeeper gives up his own bed to the two men. Shortly afterwards a German merchant arrives also seeking shelter. A meal and a few drinks later, the merchant spills the information that he travels with one hundred thousand francs….

That’s as much of the story as I will reveal, but let’s just say that there’s an ironic twist of fate, and since this is Balzac, expect human greed to play a large part in acts that unfold. Conscience, however, plays an even bigger role with more than one character, and we see how conscience can direct a person’s actions–or even lead in one case to inaction and indecision. I liked the way this story was after-dinner entertainment while the guests digested their meal. Apart from the coincidences, it was quite believable and wasn’t marred with over-the-top dramatics.

Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley and FREE for the kindle.

The Magic Skin by Balzac

Back to Balzac for The Magic Skin (La Peau de Chagrin) also known as The Wild Ass’s Skin, a novel which begins with Valentin, a young man in despair and contemplating suicide. This is one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for stories. It’s October 1829, he’s spent the evening in a “gambling hell,” and Balzac gives us some marvelous descriptions of this “house of pleasure.”

As you enter a gaming-house the law despoils you of your hat at the outset. Is it by way of a parable, a divine revelation? Or by exacting some pledge or other, is not an infernal compact implied? Is it done to compel you to preserve a respectful demeanor towards those who are about to gain money of you? Or must the detective, who squats in our social sewers, know the name of your hatter, or your own, if you happen to have written it on the lining inside? Or, after all, is the measurement of your skull required for the compilation of statistics as to the cerebral capacity of gamblers? The executive is absolutely silent on this point. But be sure of this, that though you have scarcely taken a step towards the tables, your hat no more belongs to you now than you belong to yourself. Play possesses you, your fortune, your cap, your cane, your cloak.

Inside the gambling den, mingling with those there for diversion and those there simply because they cannot bear to leave, the young man takes his last piece of gold and bets on black. One savvy customer, an Italian, anticipating the young man’s bad luck, bets on the red. The young man loses, and the croupier correctly notes that the gold coin was the “last cartridge.” Another customer notes that now the loser will “go and drown himself,” and that’s exactly what he intends to do. He exits the casino and walks along the Seine. But even here, Valentin won’t be left in peace. An old woman who suspects his intention cackles at him, and Valentin decides to wait until it’s darker to throw himself into the cold and dirty water. To kill the time, he enters a shop that sells antiquities. It’s a wonderful shop, but it has a disorienting effect on Valentin.

At a first glance the place presented a confused picture in which every achievement, human and divine, was mingled. Crocodiles, monkeys, and serpents stuffed with straw grinned at glass from church windows, seemed to wish to bite sculptured hands, to chase lacquered work, or to scramble up chandeliers. A Sevres vase, bearing Napoleon’s portrait by Mme. Jacotot, stood beside a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The beginnings of the world and the events of yesterday were mingled with grotesque cheerfulness. A kitchen jack leaned against a pyx, a republican sabre on a mediaeval hackbut. Mme du Barry, with a star above her head, naked, and surrounded by a cloud, seemed to look longingly out of Latour’s pastel at an Indian chibook, while she tried to guess the purpose of the spiral curves which wound towards her. Instruments of death, poniards, curious pistols, and disguised weapons had been flung down pell-mell among the paraphernalia of daily life; porcelain tureens, Dresden plates, translucent cups from China, old salt-cellars, comfit-boxes belonging to feudal times. A curved ivory ship sped full sail on the back of a motionless tortoise.

There are several pages describing the shop’s artifacts, and it seems that these artifacts, these lost treasures increase in value and rarity on each subsequent floor of the shop, until, at last, there is too much to absorb. The shop’s ancient owner shows Valentin a “talisman,” a piece of shagreen that according to its owner, will grant all Valentin’s wishes, but there’s a drawback; with every wish the skin shrinks and that the wishes will be fulfilled at “the expense of the young man’s life.” Valentin grabs the skin and makes the wish for a “royal banquet.” Valentin refuses to heed the old man’s warnings and leaves the shop with the piece of skin. he’s no sooner outside of the building when he runs into some friends who have great news: a rich banker is funding a newspaper, and Valentin  is dragged off to the celebratory party. The rest of Part I is spent detailing the feast or “orgy” as it’s called, and I’ll admit that my mind wandered a bit during this part. The orgy invitees are surreal and interesting at times, but this section of the novel seemed, for this reader, a little too long–although I appreciated the soulless women who could seamlessly have stepped from Balzac’s novel into noir fiction.  

The novel includes two more sections: The Woman Without a Heart which is the back story to why Valentin was suicidal the night he attended the gambling house, and the third and final section is The Death Agony. We find Valentin, now a wealthy Marquis, surrounded by faithful servants who, by anticipating every whim, ensure that he doesn’t have to make wishes that will shrink the skin any further.

The Magic Skin, and incidentally my free copy for the Kindle was translated by Ellen Marriage, is strongly Faustian. Valentin prizes and covets wealth and power,  and while he achieves his wishes, we see that his heart’s desires come at a terrible cost.  In the Balzac scheme of things, the novel includes one of Balzac’s favourite themes: the corrupting force of money & insatiable greed, and while I liked it, I don’t rank it near his best. Le Peau de Chagrin was initially published in two volumes and sold for 1,135 francs in 1831. According to Balzac’s biographer, André Maurois, “to make quite sure of favorable reviews, he wrote some of them himself.”

In these two volumes the talent of M. de Balzac achieves the stature of genius (La Mode)

We have as much friendship as admiration for M. de Balzac–signed Comte Alex de B

I couldn’t help thinking about the recent scandals involving Amazon reviews with authors giving stellar reviews to their own work using fake names and on some occasions writing poisonous reviews of literary enemies. 1831 was a turning point for Balzac’s career. He earned a total of 14, 291 francs for various work, yet by the end of the year “his debts had increased by 6,000 francs.” By the end of 1831, he owed 15,000 francs to various sources and an additional 45,000 francs to his mother. André Maurois says that Balzac was “incapable of resisting temptation,” and he tells us of “enormous” bills for champagne and a tailor’s bill for 631 francs. Maurois explains that Balzac ‘had a horror’ (quote from Maurois) ”of the solemn imbecilities indulged in by the English with their vaunted sangfroid.” So we see success and unbridled spending on a collision course–a fateful and tragic pattern that was to continue until Balzac’s death in 1850.

Balzac nailed it.

“I have learned so much practicing my profession! I have seen a father die in a garret without a sou or a stitch of clothing, abandoned by two daughters to whom he’d given 40,000 pounds income! I have seen wills burned. I have seen mothers rob their children; husbands steal from their wives; wives use love to kill their husbands or drive them mad–in order to live in peace with a lover. I have seen women teach their legitimate children tastes that will surely be the death of them, while favouring some love child. I cannot tell you everything I have seen because I have seen crimes that justice is powerless to rectify. In the end, none of the horrors that novelists believe they’ve invented can compare to the truth. You’ll soon become acquainted with such charming things yourself; as for me, I am moving to the country with my wife. I am sick of Paris.”

This is a speech made by the lawyer Derville to his clerk Godeschal at the very end of Balzac’s novella Colonel Chabert. In the first speech, taken from the book, those familiar with Balzac can identity some of the characters Derville refers to. There’s a similar speech in the film version, but it takes place much earlier in the film, and in this scene Derville (Fabrice Luchini) speaks to Chabert (Gerard Depardieu).

“Lawyers see worse things than writers can invent. I’ve seen wills burned, mothers despoil their lawful children on behalf of those bred in adultery, wives use their husbands’ love to murder them or drive them mad so as to live with their lovers. I’ve seen ugly quarrels over still-warm corpses. I have seen crimes, Sir, that human justice is powerless to punish. Our offices are sewers that no one can clean.”

The speech is altered but we get the point: Derville, in his professional capacity as a lawyer, has witnessed some horrendous acts of human behaviour.

Balzac’s novella is the story of a man who arrives in Paris claiming to be Colonel Chabert–one of Napoleon’s trusted soldiers who fell at the battle of Eylau. It’s been years since the battle, and the man who claims to be Chabert argues that due to his injuries he was unable to return earlier. Now back in Paris to claim his estate, he finds that his wife, a former prostitute, has married Count Ferraud, a Restoration society social climber. Since he can’t get his wife back, Chabert wants the return of his millions accumulated during Napoleon’s reign, but his wife is loath to give up a penny–plus to acknowledge Chabert’s claim will render the children she has with Count Ferraud bastards, the issue of a polygamous marriage. And this is where the lawyer Derville comes in…

I saw the film in 1994, and it remains one of my favourite films of all time–the acting, the scenery, the story are all incredible, but there’s something about the quote from Balzac’s novel (and the speech in the film version) that sticks with me. A day doesn’t go by without recalling these 2 scenes–one literary and the other cinematic. 1994 was some time ago–almost 20 years, and in this passage of time, I’ve seen some of the things Derville/Balzac describes.  I’ve known wills to be destroyed and the frantic post death looting of estates. I’ve seen wives longing for their diseased husbands to die, I’ve seen husbands dump their dying wives, I’ve seen husbands stealing from their wives, children stealing from their ancient parents, and I’ve seen people driven mad by their spouses. Ok, no garrets and the illegitimate thing doesn’t translate well to today’s world, but bottom line, Balzac nailed the “sewers” of human behaviour. Put money in the equation, and morality goes out the window.

And this brings me to Derville. Why does Derville decide to champion Chabert’s cause? Is this just a whimsical decision? I don’t think so. When Derville meets Chabert, he has just won “300 francs at cards,” and he tells Chabert “I can certainly use half of that to make a man happy.” He gives Chabert a daily allowance of 100 sous a day while he investigates the legitimacy of Chabert’s claim. Once Derville establishes the facts, he contacts Colonel Chabert’s wife who is now the Countess Ferraud, and the games begin….

Derville seems partly motivated by altruism and partly by curiosity. Does he want “justice“–whatever that is in this complex case to prevail? As he tells his clerk:

We see the same ill feelings repeated again and again, never corrected. Our offices are gutters that cannot be cleansed.

Himadri over at The Argumentative Old Git recently wrote a blog post about a passage from literature that he holds dear, and he suggested that others do the same. This is my contribution. Perhaps my choice isn’t so contemplative or as beautiful as Himadri’s passage from Anna Karenina, but my choice puts my life in perspective. I’m often told that I’m cynical, but then I think of Derville–one of my literary heroes and silently shrug. No wonder I admire Balzac’s work.

The Hated Son by Balzac

Given the sheer volume of Balzac’s work, it stands to reason that there’s a variance in quality. I discovered the same sort of swing in quality in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, so I shouldn’t be too surprised to be disappointed in Balzac’s novella The Hated Son which was far too sentimental for my tastes. And that’s not mentioning the drama which drags this story into soap opera territory. How can I forget lines like this:

“Die, then, both of you!” he cried. “You, vile abortion, the proof of my shame–and you,” he said to Gabrielle, “miserable strumpet with the viper tongue, who has poisoned my house.”

Balzac’s story is built around an interesting idea–the suspicion of illegitimacy, which is still an issue these days, but back in 1591 when the eldest son was supposed to inherit the castle, title and lands, legitimacy was central to the continuance of the so-called ‘great line.’ And this brings me to Comte d’Herouville and his poor little wife Jeanne, who when the story begins, goes into labour when her pregnancy is only of 7 months duration. Perhaps if this were a love match, there would be no problem, or just a few scurrilous rumours that could do no damage, but the Comte knew that Jeanne loved another when the marriage was arranged, and then the Comte isn’t a nice man:

Implacable as the war then going on between the Church and Calvinism, the Count’s forehead was threatening even while he slept. Many furrows, produced by the emotions of a warrior life, gave it a vague resemblance to the vermiculated stone which we see in the buildings of that period; his hair, like the whitish lichen of old oaks, gray before its time, surrounded without grace a cruel brow, where religious intolerance showed its passionate brutality. The shape of the aquiline nose, which resembled the beak of a bird of prey, the black and crinkled lids of the yellow eyes, the prominent bones of a hollow face, the rigidity of the wrinkles, the disdain expressed in the lower lip, were all expressive of ambition, despotism, and power, the more to be feared because the narrowness of the skull betrayed an almost total absence of intelligence, and a mere brute courage devoid of generosity. The face was horribly disfigured by a large transversal scar which had the appearance of a second mouth on the right cheek.

Balzac is treading into phrenology territory in his description of the Comte, and one of the other tidbits we pick up about the Comte is that on top of everything else, he’s none too clean.

The fifty-year-old Comte at one point loved a woman known as La Belle Romaine (I couldn’t stop thinking of lettuce), but we are told about his “successes in gallantry” (translation: score): “he owed them to the terror inspired by his cruelty.” A loaded statement. How can gallantry and cruelty go in the same sentence when discussing the Comte’s success in love? I’m guessing that the Comte was a brute and took what he wanted, and for the purposes of the story, that includes Jeanne who is coerced into marriage by the Comte’s promise to save Jeanne’s lover, a Huguenot if she agrees to wed the Comte.  And so in this manner, Jeanne, one of richest heiresses in France became the bride of a man she loathes.

So the marriage begins badly and only becomes worse. A terrified Jeanne, who has already received a warning from her husband that she’d better not give birth before the 9-month mark, gives birth to a puny male child 7 months after her wedding day. A “bonesetter” named Beauvouloir is called to the Comtesse’s bedchamber. He’s a strange character–part opportunist, not exactly what you would call a ‘good’ man by  any means and yet Balzac calls him “the least bad man in Normandy” which doesn’t say a lot for the local population.

The baby’s name is Etienne, and the rest of the story concerns his fate. To add a plot twist, Beauvouloir is in love with Gertrude, the bastard child of the Comte d’Herouville and his abandoned mistress La Belle Romaine. Gertrude grew up in a convent and it’s there that Beauvouloir met her and fell in love. This coincidence eventually constructs the story’s central dilemma.

Balzac’s great observations on human nature seem to be missing here, and instead the unsubtle story relies on drama and hysterics. With victimhood branded on her forehead, Jeanne isn’t a particularly interesting character. This would have been a lot more interesting story if she’d possessed some guile and was capable of manipulating the Comte on some level, but the Comte and his wife, are unfortunately, created in bold shades of black and white. The most curious character here is Beauvouloir, and yet Balzac doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with this man. There are hints of devious self-serving decisions, and yet Balzac leaves this largely unexplored.

Translated by Katherine Wormeley

Catherine de Medici by Balzac

“Hers was virile power, dishonoured neither by the terrible amours of Isabella nor by those, even more terrible, though less known of Marie de’ Medici.”

Given Balzac’s fascination with women, I’m not too surprised that he wrote about  Catherine de Medici. I was surprised, however, to find that some of this piece is more or less an apologia. Given her nicknames were Madame Snake (Serpent), the Black Queen and Jezebel (I’d argue that the latter was ill-deserved), I expected some really juicy scenes involving Catherine–perhaps one scene of her peering through one of the peepholes she had made  as she spied on her wandering hubbie spending an amorous moment with his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. Or perhaps a scene of Catherine organising the delivery of poison to one of her enemies. And then there are also infinite possibilities with the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Instead, Balzac seems to admire Catherine, and while there’s no argument that she was an incredibly strong woman, as a human being, she left a lot to be desired.

According to Balzac’s biographer, André Maurois, “after the 1830 revolution,” Balzac essentially believed in a strong monarch and that “absolute rule by a legitimate monarch was the best system of government.” But Balzac was a complex man, and he also admired Napoleon:

A man who is depicted with his arms folded, but who did everything! The greatest power ever known, the most concentrated, the most incisive, the most astringent of all powers. … A man who could do everything because he willed everything … arbitrary or just, as the case demanded–the true king!

Balzac seems to be saying that a king’s legitimacy is found in the raw material that makes the man or in the case of Catherine de Medici–the woman. Was the raw material in Catherine de Medici good or bad? Is it possible to be a ‘good’ king or queen (whatever that means) and still be a horrible human being? These days kings and queens are expensive, high-maintenance puppets whose continued justification seems rooted in tradition and tourism, but back in Catherine’s time, it didn’t hurt your job security if you were ruthless and capable of striking your enemies hard and fast if they gave you as much as a dirty look.

In Catherine de Medici, Balzac begins with a few statements about how history has been unfair to Catherine:

In France, and that, too,  during the most serious epoch of modern history, no woman, unless it be Brunehaut or Fredegonde, has suffered from popular error so much as Catherine de’ Medici; whereas Marie de’ Medici, all of whose actions were prejudicial to France, has escaped the shame that ought to cover her name. Marie de’ Medici wasted the wealth amassed by Henri IV; she never purged herself of the charge of having known of the king’s assassination; her intimate was d’Eperon, who did not ward off Ravillac’s blow, and who was proved to have known the murderer personally for a long time. Marie’s conduct was such that she forced her son to banish her from France, where she was encouraging her other son, Gaston, to rebel; and the victory Richelieu at last won over her (on the Day of the Dupes) was solely due to the discovery the Cardinal made, and imparted to Louis XIII., of secret documents relating to the death of Henri IV.

Catherine de’ Medici, on the contrary, saved the crown of France; she maintained the royal authority in the midst of circumstances under which  more than one great prince would have succumbed. Having to make head against factions and ambitions like those of the Guises and the house of Bourbon, against men such as the two cardinals of Lorraine, the two Balafres, and the two Condes, against the queen Jeanne d’Albret, Henri IV, the Connetable de Montmorency, Calvin, the three Colignys, Theodore de Beze, she needed to possess and to display the rare qualities and precious gifts of a statesman under the mocking fire of the Calvinist press.

I’d add the name Lucrezia Borgia to that list of names of those who suffered from “popular error.”

Balzac then follows with a summary of Catherine’s life. Reading it over, I had to acknowledge that as a 14-year-old, sent from Italy to the court of France, Catherine had a number of difficult situations to surmount, and Balzac argues she was intelligent enough to bide her time and not always show her true hand. I can’t disagree with that.

I ran into problems with Balzac when he offers justifications for Catherine’s behaviour:

All power, legitimate or illegitimate, must defend itself when attacked; but the strange thing is that where the people are held heroic in their victory over the nobility, power is called murderous in its duel with the people. If it succumbs after its appeal to force, power is then called imbecile.

Balzac seems to be arguing that ‘the people’ vs. the ruling power are held to different standards of behaviour with the latter, according to Balzac, getting the short end of the stick when it comes to moral justification of the use of force. Since he brought in the word “nobility,” he appears to be referring to ‘the mob’ of the Revolution whose violent actions against the ruling class are seen as “heroic.” On the other hand, he argues that when “power” fights back, actions against the people are called “murderous.” I thought of two revolutions which targeted the nobility: The Russian and the French. Balzac was long dead by the time the Russian Revolution occurred, but the French Revolution was recent history for him, so perhaps those words “murderous” and “heroic” were tossed around in the popular culture of his day. There are many points to be made here–rulers or governments killing or punishing people in an unfair contest of power, people frustrated by the abuse and repression of the rulers, etc., but now in the 21st century, do we see the actions of the French Revolution as “heroic?” Then Balzac makes a strange statement:

The massacres of the Revolution have replied to the massacres of Saint-Bartholomew. The people, become king, have done against the king and the nobility what the king and the nobility did against the insurgents of the sixteenth century. Therefore the popular historians, who know very well that in a like case the people will do the same thing over again, have no excuse for blaming Catherine de’ Medici and Charles IX.

That sounds like justification of the bloodshed of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, or is it a vilification of the revolution? Or then again is Balzac trying to go for something more subtle here? Personally, although I don’t think he’s entirely successful, I think it’s the latter.

Balzac’s defense of Catherine de’ Medici is followed by three stories: The Calvinistic Martyr, The Ruggieris’ Secret, and The Two Dreams. I could have done without the torture details of the first story. The second story is a tale of court intrigue which involves the occult. The third story takes place in 1786 at the home of Bodard de Saint-James, a Parisian financier. There are two guests–a lawyer and a surgeon–who don’t fit in with the rest of the company. During the course of the evening, the lawyer recalls a conversation he swears he had with Catherine de Medici, “a grand shade,” in which she justifies the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre

“You call that a crime which was only a misfortune,” she said. “The enterprise, being ill-managed, failed; the benefit we expected for France, for Europe, for the Catholic Church was lost. Impossible to forsee that. Our orders were ill executed; we did not find as many Montlucs as we needed. Posterity will not hold us responsible for the failure of communications, which deprived our work of the unity of movement which is essential to all great strokes of policy; that was our misfortune! if one the 25th of August not the shadow of a Huguenot had been left in france, I should go down to the uttermost posterity as a noble image of providence.”

And there’s a lot more of Catherine’s speech, but it boils down to Catherine’s argument that she should have done a better job of wiping out the Huguenots, and that allowing a few to live was a horrible mistake as the decision to spare some Huguenots “caused ten times more blood to flow in France.”  The man who relates Catherine’s fictional summary of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is none other than Robespierre, and so we can conclude that he’s taking a tip from Catherine de’ Medici when it comes to slaughtering one’s enemies in an ends-justifies-the-means sort of way.

Anyway, a difficult piece from Balzac, the first two stories are fairly straightforward, but with the preamble and the third story, by tieing in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre to the Revolution, and Catherine advising Robespierre to show no mercy when it comes to slaughtering one’s enemies, Balzac skirts dangerously close to condoning a heinous event that left thousands slaughtered in the streets. Even that old hypocrite, Ivan the Terrible, an expert in his own right on the slaughter of innocents, expressed “horror” at the mass killings.

El Verdugo by Balzac

Balzac’s El Verdugo is around 15 pages on my kindle edition. It’s a change of pace which places us in Spain during Napoleon’s campaigns, and the story opens in a moment of deceptive peace with a ball in the background. Balzac uses balls a lot in his stories, but then these were grand social events with opportunities for courtship and great intrigue. El Verdugo seems to include both scenarios in the opening scene with young French Major Victor Marchand looking at the town and the ocean while leaning on the terrace parapet of the Chateau de Menda. The château belongs to the Marquis de Leganes, a grandee of Spain who has 5 children–3 sons: 30-year-old Juanito,  20-year-old Felipe, and the youngest son is 8, and two daughters. Marchand noticed that during the evening, the eldest daughter kept casting glances “expressing extreme sadness”  his way. Perhaps she’s in love with him? Marchand may be in charge of the French troops there, but he is the son of a grocer, and while he notes Clara’s interest, he cannot credit that the Marquis would allow his daughter to marry the enemy–a commoner to boot. But romance is in the air, and, after all, it’s a romantic setting:

The beautiful sky of Spain spread its dome of azure above his head.

The scintillation of the stars and the soft light of the moon illumined the delightful valley that lay at his feet. Resting partly against an orange-tree in bloom, the young major could see, three hundred feet below him, the town of Menda, at the base of the rock on which the castle was built. Turning his head, he looked down upon the sea, the sparkling waters of which encircled the landscape with a sheet of silver.

Marchand has received a dispatch from Marechal Ney which warns that the English may soon send men to the region, so Marchand must be vigilant and remember that the Marquis and his family are enemies. Marchand’s thoughts are conflicted as he gazes out across the parapet, and notices that something is wrong….

Balzac, that great observer and chronicler of human nature, always manages to get to the heart of the matter. Is there anyone who can describe so accurately the viciousness of family politics when it comes to the division of a family estate? In El Verdugo which means The Executioner, Balzac examines the nature of divided loyalties, punishment and human cruelty. Does an adherence to a moral code of behaviour trump family loyalty? There’s one chilling scene in which executions take place against laughter and feasting. Balzac, a writer of great compassion, seems to argue that the anguish of suffering set amidst feasting and laughter shows human behaviour at its worst. By the story’s chilling conclusion, we ask ourselves which were the noble acts of courage and who acted callously and with supreme cruelty. Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley. Prepared by John Bickers and Dagny

Passion in the Desert by Balzac

Years ago I saw the film version of Passion in the Desert, so I was curious to read the source material. This is the story of a Napoleonic soldier who, after being captured and then escaping from the Maugrabins in the desert, stumbles into an oasis and becomes the companion of a wild animal. The story begins with the narrator and an acquaintance  attending an entertainment that includes trained hyenas–not something I’d care  to see and the narrator’s companion apparently feels the same way. She asks how the trainer can “have tamed these animals to such a point as to be certain of their affections?” The narrator replies:

“You think beasts are wholly without passions?” I asked her.

“Quite the reverse; we can communicate to them all the vices arising in our own state of civilization.”

Interesting answer, and then the narrator proceeds to tell the story told to him by an old, one-legged soldier. Caught up Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, the soldier, a young man of 22 was captured by Arabs but managed to escape on a horse that he rode to death. So there he is stuck in the middle of the desert facing certain death;

He was awakened by the sun, whose pitiless rays fell with all their force on the granite and produced an intolerable heat–for he had had the stupidity to place himself adversely to the shadow thrown by the verdant majestic heads of the palm trees. He looked at the solitary trees and shuddered–they reminded him of the graceful shafts crowned with foliage which characterize the Saracen columns in the cathedral of Arles.

But when, after counting the palm trees, he cast his eyes around him, the most horrible despair was infused into his soul. Before him stretched an ocean without limit. The dark sand of the desert spread further than eye could reach in every direction, and glittered like steel struck with bright light. It might have been a sea of looking-glass, or lakes melted together in a mirror. A fiery vapour carried up in surging waves made a perpetual whirlwind over the quivering land. The sky was lit with an oriental splendor of insupportable purity, leaving naught for the imagination to desire.

Heaven and earth were on fire.

A beautiful passage which describes and allows us to envision the raw beauty of this harsh environment and also and the pitiless indifference of nature.  

The soldier is young. Despair at his predicament is quickly replaced with hope when he notices dates on the palm. He has food then to sustain him and he makes a crude shelter. Falling asleep in a cave he has vague thoughts about wild animals of the desert. The next day, he wakes and discovers that he’s in the company of a “lion of Egypt.”

The rest of the story concentrates on the relationship the soldier develops with this wild animal. I’ll admit that I’m a bit confused as to the animal’s precise identity. At one point it’s described as having “the spotted skin of a panther.” I think of a panther as black and a leopard as spotted. Later, we read “the cold cruelty of a tiger was dominant.” This is not a long story, but it is a peculiar one that takes a very different look at the relationship between man and beast. Even as I type that I feel the basic ‘wrongness‘ of using the word beast–after all, who is the brutal one of the pair?

The soldier anthropomorphizes the leopard (I’m going to stick with that identity due to the spots), and that’s the identity given in the film. He calls her a queen, a “sultana of the desert,” and a “regular petite maitresse.” The leopard accepts the soldier’s company and becomes exacting about his attentions:

But he looked at her caressingly, staring into her eyes in order to magnetize her, and let her come quite close to him; then with a movement both gentle and amorous, as though he was caressing the most beautiful of women, he passed his hand over her whole body, from the head to the tail, scratching the inflexible vertebrae which divided the panther’s yellow back. The animal waved her tail voluptuously, and her eyes grew gentle; and when for the third time the Frenchman accomplished this interesting flattery, she gave forth one of those purrings by which cats express their pleasure; but this murmur issued from a throat so powerful and so deep that it responded through the cave like the last vibrations of an organ in a church. The man, understanding the importance of his caresses, redoubled them in such a way as to surprise and stupefy his imperious courtesan.  

So the soldier sees the panther (as he calls her) as a jealous mistress–a demanding female who requires his entire and constant attention. How long can this state of affairs continue?

I’ll admit that I didn’t like how the story ended–back to the narrator’s earlier comment that “we can communicate to [animals] all the vices arising in our own state of civilization.”

The story of the soldier and the leopard does not end well, and I found myself thinking about people and the bizarre desire to own and keep wild animals. This is no doubt influenced by the news today that 2 chimps escaped from an outdoor pen in Vegas and embarked on a rampage that ended with one of them shot dead from three shotgun blasts.

Translated by Ernest Dowson and produced by the hard work of  Dagny and John Bickers. This edition is available FREE for the kindle.

The Elixir of Life by Balzac

“Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer–Death has never forsaken any man.” 

In the introduction to this story, Balzac admits to an “innocent piece of plagiarism.” The Elixir of Life (L’Elixir de Longue Vie), he argues, is not one of “those hoaxes in vogue in the year 1830” (what hoaxes?). Balzac admits that he heard about the subject of this story from a friend and later discovered that the same subject matter was likely a “stray fancy of the brain of Hoffman.” If I hadn’t read that disclaimer, I think The Elixir of Life would have struck me more as a  product of German Romanticism and less like Balzac’s usual fare–although La Comédie Humaine includes a few titles with these elements. Balzac’s excellent introduction, which reminds me of Derville in Colonel Chabert, discusses the nature of inheritance and those who eagerly await the death of a supposedly much loved relative.

Does humanity, which according to certain philosophers, is making progress, look on the art of waiting for dead men’s shoes as a step in the right direction? To this art we owe several honorable professions, which open up ways of living on death. There are people who rely entirely on an unexpected demise; who brood over it, crouching each morning upon a corpse, that serves as their pillow at night. To this class belongs bishops’ coadjutors, cardinals’ supernumeraries, tontiniers, and the like. Add to the list many delicately scrupulous persons eager to buy landed property beyond their means, who calculate with dry logic and in cold blood the probable duration of the life of a father or of a step-mother, some old man or woman of eighty or ninety, saying to themselves, “I shall be sure to come in for it in three years’ time, and then —–”

In this marvellous introduction, Balzac argues that many people lurk around the soon-to be deceased relative wishing for ways to hasten death, and that’s not too far a step away from actually committing the act of murder. So it should come as no surprise that The Elixir of Life concerns a most unusual case of parricide.

The story begins one winter in a palace at Ferrara. Lothario Don Juan Belvidero is hosting a banquet, whooping it up with his dissolute friends, and is surrounded by beautiful women several of whom wonder aloud when Don Juan’s elderly father will die. In the middle of this “orgy” (and I wonder if Balzac means it in the quite the same way as our modern-day interpretation of the word), he is told that his father is dying. He hastens to his father’s chambers, and here his father is on his death-bed with a faithful black poodle for a companion.  Don Juan’s father, Bartolommeo Belvidero is 90 years old. He married at age sixty, and Don Juan, the only product of that tragically short union, has  been overly indulged by his father. Don Juan, we are told, “treated old Bartolommeo as a wilful courtesan treats an elderly adorer; buying indemnity for insolence with a smile, selling good-humor, submitting to be loved.” Love that line which pitilessly sums up the roles between father and son. Don Juan, who can’t wait for his father to die, manages to put on a good show–after all, his father is checking out, and it won’t kill Don Juan to look as though he’s actually devastated that his indulgent father is finally going to die.

“Oh, if it were only possible to keep you here by giving up a part of my own life!” cried Don Juan.

(We can always say this kind of thing,” the spendthrift thought; “it is as if I laid the whole world at my mistress’ feet.”)

The thought had scarcely crossed his mind when the old poodle barked. Don Juan shivered; the response was so intelligent that he fancied the dog must have understood him.

“I was sure that I could count upon you, my son!” cried the dying man. “I shall live. So be it; you shall be satisfied. I shall live, but without depriving you of a single day of your life.”

“He is raving,” thought Don Juan. Aloud he added,” Yes, dearest father, yes, you shall live, of course, as long as I live, for your image will be forever in my heart.”

“It is not that kind of life that I mean,” said the old noble, summoning all his strength to sit up in bed; for a thrill of doubt ran through him, one of those suspicions that come into being under  a dying man’s pillow. “Listen, my son,” he went on, in a voice grown weak with that last effort,”I have no more wish to give up life that you to give up wine and mistresses, horses and hounds, and hawks and gold—-”

“I can well believe it,” thought the son; and he knelt down by the bed and kissed Bartolommeo’s cold hands. “But, father, my dear father,” he added aloud, “we must submit to the will of God.”

Given the title of the story it’s fairly easy to guess what is afoot, but Balzac doesn’t let the reader off lightly, and some rather ghoulish events take place. The marvellous thing about this cynical story is the way it ends, and yes dear readers, pay-back is a bitch.

Translated by Clara Bell and James Waring. Produced by Project Gutenberg by Dagny. Free at Project Gutenberg and also free on Amazon for the kindle.