Balzac soon arrived at the notion that what he wanted to write was not just a single novel, or even a few scattered dramas, as he termed them, but instead a whole account of human life, La Comédie Humaine, as it came to be called. The French word comédie does not mean the same thing as “comedy” in English, where the word connotes something funny. Comédie is closer to “drama.” The English translation The Human Comedy carries some of the meaning of the French phrase. Ask yourself what it means. Does it not suggest some sort of totality, a picture drawn on a very broad canvas, showing men and women and children in all the activities of ordinary life, acting and suffering, living and dying, creating and destroying, succeeding and failing? That is the great picture that Balzac’s The Human Comedy attempts to draw. Perhaps no one has ever done it better.
The standard French edition of La Comédiel Humaine fills some ninety volumes, arranged according to a scheme that Balzac left to his literary executors to complete. The standard English edition, edited by George Saintsbury, is in forty volumes, arranged like the French edition according to certain large divisions: Scenes of Private Life, Scenes of Provincial Life, Scenes of Paris Life. The best known of the Scenes of Paris Life is Old Goriot (Le Père Goriot). Old Goriot is a good introduction to Balzac, as critics and readers have discovered; as a result the novel is available in several editions.
Much of the action of Old Goriot takes place in a cheap and somber boardinghouse on the Left Bank of Paris, an area that is now chic, but was then (around 1820) a slum. There are six or seven main characters: Madame Vauquer, the greedy landlord; Vautrin, the brilliant, sardonic criminal; the young man from the country, Eugène de Rastignac, and his beautiful, wealthy cousin, Madame de Beauséant; and Old Goriot himself and his two socialite daughters, Mesdames de Restaud and de Nucingen. Rastignac and Goriot are more important than anyone else.
Goriot, a retired businessman, is slowly ruined in the course of the book by his folly and the venality and greed of his two daughters, whom he adores. Rastignac rises as Goriot falls, like two figures on a seesaw in a distant playground. The story of Goriot’s fall is heartbreaking; it has brought tears to many a reader’s eyes. The rise of Rastignac is thrilling and will make your heart beat faster. The novel’s very last scene is consequently famous:
He [Rastignac]went a few paces further, to the highest point of the cemetery, and looked out over Paris and the windings of the Seine; the lamps were beginning to shine on either side of the river. His eyes turned almost eagerly to the space between the column of the Place Vendôme and the cupola of the Invalides; there lay the shining world that he had wished to reach. He glanced over that humming hive, seeming to draw a foretaste of its honey, and said magniloquently:
“Henceforth there is war between us.”
And by way of throwing down the glove to Society, Rastignac went to dine with Mme. de Nucingen.
I don’t think any reader has ever failed to be believe that Eugène de Rastignac would succeed in his war.
Paris and London were the two great nineteenth-century cities. London found its biographer in Charles Dickens; because of him we may think we know the London of his day even better than we know our own city. Paris was as large, as powerful, as complex, and as full of misery (and triumph) as London—and its biographer is Honoré de Balzac.
The London that Dickens knew, and that he reveals to us in his novels, was by no means all of London. The life of the upper class was not really understood by Dickens, and never described by him with much truth or sympathy. Balzac knew better than Dickens all of the grades and levels of existence in his city: the aristocracy, the beau monde, the demimonde, and the dregs of life and society. And Balzac knew how all the levels of city life touched and affected one another. His account of the lower reaches of Paris life is not as rich or moving as Dickens’s account of the comparable London realms, but Dickens does not move his characters up and down the social ladder as does Balzac.
These differences are not in the end so important. What the two writers share is a vast sympathy for human nature, especially human foibles, and a love for the energy and variety of city life in their time. In fact, “energy” is the word that aptly characterizes both of them as writers. The pace of Balzac is especially swift; it carries you onward like a mountain torrent.
STENDHAL
1783–1842
The Red and the Black
The Charterhouse of Parma
Marie-Henri Beyle was born in Grenoble in 1783, the son of prosperous bourgeois parents. His father was a strict disciplinarian, and young Beyle took an extreme dislike to him. He adored the memory of his mother, who had died when he was seven; he thought she would have been sympathetic to his ideas about art and life. Beyle ran away from home—or left it on a pretext at seventeen and went to Paris, whose attractions for those who live in their imaginations were as great then as they are now (or were two generations ago, when I lived there). But Paris turned out to be disappointing to this young dreamer, so he crossed the Alps to join Napoleon’s army in Italy, arriving on June 15, 1800, the day after the Battle of Marengo, one of Bonaparte’s greatest victories over the Austrians.
Milan, under the impact of the republican, liberal ideas unleashed by Napoleon, proved to be everything that Paris had not been for Henri Beyle. He fell in love, he delighted in the musical performances at La Scala, he studied Italian, fencing, and horseback riding. He also began to write, although his first book was not published until 1814. He adopted a pseudonym, the first of some 170 used during his career. The most famous of the pseudonyms, and the only one that is remembered, was first employed in 1817: M. de Stendhal.
It has become almost a cliché of psychology, especially of psychoanalysis, that the highest art is a kind of transfer of more basic emotions to a loftier plane—“sublimation,” as Freud called it. Thus art, Freud said, can be therapeutic; it can release feelings that otherwise might destroy the artist and that tend to hurt men and women who are unable to sublimate through art. Whether or not the theory is true in general, it seems to have been true of Henri Beyle, who, as Stendhal, lived in his own imagination a richer and more interesting life than he ever did as his real self.
Stendhal authored two novels that may be the best ever written in French. The first, The Red and the Black, published in 1830, is the story of Julien Sorel, the son of a peasant in southeastern France who struggles valiantly to breach the ramparts of wealth and privilege in his time. Julien is a genius, and the war he wages against society is not an unequal one, but, although he achieves signal triumphs, in the end he is defeated by his enemies, who are everywhere.