The Human Comedy (3 page)

A kind of cautionary tale, then, to assuage the fears of the Vicomtesse about a future son-in-law, but far more than that: the story of money itself in its accumulation. Money is indeed one of Balzac’s chief protagonists throughout
The
Human Comedy
, and here we are at the heart of its acquisition and growth. It is telling that at the end of the tale, Gobseck has acquired more than he can disburse: Bankrupt creditors have filled his apartment with things, with goods, many of them spoiling and useless, a kind of accumulation of surplus capital that the system cannot handle. Though it is only alluded to in this story, the future of Gobseck’s cash legacy is instructive. He leaves it to his one descendant, his niece Esther. She has had an extraordinary existence, from bit player at the Opéra to fashionable prostitute, then redemption through her passionate love for the young poet and novelist Lucien de Rubempré—but then a forced return to prostitution willed by Jacques Collin, alias Vautrin, the former convict and mastermind of Lucien’s career who knows Lucien must raise one million francs in order to buy back his mother’s entailed properties, proving his right to carry the name of landed gentry and enabling his marriage to Clotilde de Grandlieu of the noble Faubourg. The plot goes awry. Esther is sold to the Baron de Nucingen, an Alsatian banker and the husband of Goriot’s other daughter, Delphine—but after one night spent honoring “the debt of dishonor,” as she calls it, Esther commits suicide. She leaves Nucingen’s payment in an envelope for Lucien under her pillow—but it’s stolen by the household servants, which will lead to Lucien’s arrest. When Derville tracks her down with the news of her immense legacy, it’s too late. Too late for everyone: Esther is dead, and Lucien has hanged himself in prison. The money is parceled out to Lucien’s provincial relatives. The trajectory of Gobseck’s fortune suggests Balzac’s thoroughly ironic view of the new moneyed classes coming to power in France.

“The Duchesse de Langeais,” the final tale of the volume, clearly cannot be classified as a short story or tale but rather as what Henry James called “the blessed
nouvelle
,” indicating by his word choice that he thought it a French form little used by English novelists. Its advantage for Balzac seems evident, and here it yields one of his most perfect works. “The Duchesse de Langeais” shows, once again, how short forms both stimulate and discipline Balzac’s extraordinary imaginative powers. Rather than bursting the seams of novelistic form—as some of his longer works do—the short stories and novellas seem packed to the stretching point but nonetheless intact, with a palpable form to them. Here Balzac’s mastery becomes evident in his concentration of force within form.

The story of the duchess and her admirer General Armand de Montriveau opens with a notable and enigmatic abruptness on a rocky island in the Mediterranean, site of a convent of the Barefoot Carmelites where the music of the choir of nuns reveals to the interested, passionate listener—the general who has lost her and has been seeking her everywhere—the hidden presence of a Frenchwoman. Then we flash back some years, to the games of love and seduction as they are played in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. As we read into the third chapter, though, these will take on a sinister kind of seriousness, leading to a scene that might figure in
The Story of O
and seems to result in an erotic conversion but one that the other party can’t understand. And then the fourth chapter, returning to the Mediterranean isle, plays out the dramatic denouement. The presentation of the story is highly cinematic: It is full of strikingly rendered settings and moments of intense confrontation and fraught dialogue—and it has been made into a film several times, most recently by Jacques Rivette (in a version that to me loses much of the dynamic of the story). The novella shows Balzac’s ability to manipulate different time strata with perfect ease, to reveal the deep nature of the central enigmas of love and passion parsimoniously, so that when we think we have understood it’s only in part, and perhaps most notably his ability to sustain a kind of erotic tension throughout: Games of love become almost unbearably intense. Desire rules over the organization of life, and of story. “The Duchesse de Langeais” is one of the most perfect of Balzac’s works—everything, even the very baroque excursus on organ music as a go-between bringing together the divine and the human, even the scene of incipient S/M, fits perfectly and ministers to the overall effect.

Balzac has repeatedly, from the beginning of his career, been accused of writing badly. It is true that he often reaches for a kind of sublime that seems tasteless and over the top. We may sometimes wonder at Henry James’s unstinting admiration for someone who had little of his own delicacy of touch. Yet once we have accepted the premises of Balzac’s kind of expressionism—his recourse to melodramatic plots, hyperbolic speech, and dramatic confrontations where all the moral stakes are laid on the table—we can see that when he is writing at highest intensity he is incomparable. The goal of his melodramatic imagination is to find the latent intensities of life, to make dramatic action tell us about the ethical stakes of our engagements with ambition, love, and one another. That this takes him beyond the bounds of the “realism” for which he became famous into something else, some more occult realm where the real is trumped by the nearly surreal, has bothered those who want to confine the novel to more behavioristic premises. Balzac refuses to be confined in any manner—for him, fiction has a permit to go anywhere and explore anything. His short fiction may give him the greatest freedom of all; it allows the exploratory probe onto ground that not only is forbidden to politer, more repressed forms of expression but also is only partly grasped. Some of its mystery can never quite be known. To open up what society and the novel of manners repress, to stage a kind of explosive upthrust of that which is ordinarily kept down, under control, is Balzac’s delight and his passion. He asks to be read in a spirit of adventure and daring.

—P
ETER
B
ROOKS

THE HUMAN COMEDY

FACINO CANE

To Louise, in witness of fond gratitude

A
T THE
time, I was living on a little street you probably do not know, rue de Lesdiguières: It starts at rue Saint-Antoine across from a fountain near place de la Bastille, and ends at rue de la Cérisaie. A passion for knowledge had flung me into a garret room where I worked nights, and I would spend the day in a nearby library established by Monsieur, the king’s brother. I lived frugally; I had accepted all the conditions of monastic life so necessary to serious workers. In fine weather I would at most take a brief stroll on boulevard Bourdon. There was only one activity that could draw me away from my studious routine, although this was virtually part of the same passion: I would walk about observing the customs of the neighborhood, its inhabitants and their character. As poorly dressed as the workmen myself, careless about decorum, I never put them on their guard—I could mingle in their groups, watch them closing deals and arguing as they ended the day. In my own work, observation had already become an intuitive habit; it could penetrate into the soul without neglecting the body, or rather, so thoroughly did it grasp the external details that it moved immediately beyond: It allowed me to live a person’s life, let me put myself in his place, the way a dervish in
The Thousand and One Nights
would take over a person’s body and soul by pronouncing certain words over him.

Occasionally, on some nights between eleven and midnight, I would come across a workman and his wife on their way home from the Ambigu-Comique music hall, and I would spend some time following them from boulevard du Pont-aux-Choux to boulevard Beaumarchais. These good folk would be chatting about the show they had just seen; eventually they would get around to talking about their work; the woman tugged her child by the hand, ignoring his whining or questions; the parents calculated the money they expected to collect the next day, the twenty different ways they’d spend it. Then they would move on to the household details: laments over the high price of potatoes or the long winter and the rising cost of peat; vehement remarks on the baker’s bill; then on to more venomous spats with each displaying his feelings in picturesque terms. Listening to these people, I could join in their lives: I would feel their rags on my back, I would be walking in their tattered shoes; their longings, their needs would all move through my soul, or my soul through theirs. It was a waking man’s dream. I would rage with them against the tyranny of the shop foremen or the bad clients who made them come back time and again without giving them their pay.

Dropping my own habits, becoming another person through a kind of intoxication of my imaginative faculties, and playing the game at will—that was my delight. To what do I owe this gift? Is it some second sight? One of those talents whose overuse could lead to madness? I have never looked into the sources of this capacity—I have it and I use it, that’s all. I will say, though, that from that time on, I have gone on teasing apart the elements of the heterogeneous mass we call “the people,” analyzing and evaluating its good or bad features.

Already back then I understood how useful this neighborhood could be, this seedbed of revolution, seething with heroes, inventors, skilled workmen, with rascals and scoundrels, with virtues and vices, all exacerbated by poverty, strangled by need, drowned in wine, ravaged by strong liquor. You cannot imagine how many ruined hopes, how many unknown dramas in that city of sorrow! How many horrible and beautiful things! Imagination could never touch the reality hidden there, a reality no one could ever uncover—one would have to burrow too deep to find these amazing scenes, tragic and comic, masterpieces born of chance. I don’t know how I’ve gone so long without telling this story: It is one of those strange tales left behind in the sack that memory randomly draws from, like lottery numbers. I have plenty more of them, all as singular as this one, just as thoroughly buried, though they will have their moment, believe me.

One day my housekeeper, a workman’s wife, asked for the honor of my presence at the wedding of one of her sisters. To give you an idea of what such a wedding would be like, I will tell you that I paid forty sous a month to this poor creature, who came in every morning to make my bed, clean my shoes, brush my clothes, sweep the room, and prepare my lunch; the rest of the day she spent turning the lever of some machine, and for that hard labor she earned another ten sous a day. Her husband, a cabinetmaker, earned four francs a day. But as the household also included three children, they could barely manage to put an honest loaf of bread on the table. I’ve never come across more earnest decency than I saw in this man and woman. When I moved away from the neighborhood, for the next five years this Mother Vaillant would visit me with birthday greetings, bearing a bouquet and oranges—this woman who never had ten sous to spare. Poverty had brought us close. I was never able to pay her more than ten francs, often borrowed for the occasion. This may explain why I promised to attend the wedding; I meant to nestle into the happiness of these poor folks.

Both the ceremony and the festivities took place at the warehouse of a wine merchant on rue Charenton, one floor up in a large hall lit by tin reflector lamps; the walls were hung with filthy paper at table level and lined with wooden benches. Inside the room some eighty people gathered in their Sunday best, with flowers and ribbons all around, everyone soaring with the nightlife spirit of the dance halls at La Courtille; their faces flaming, they danced as if the world was about to end. The bride and groom hugged and kissed to the general satisfaction of the guests, cheered on by lewd teasing of “Hey hey, thataway! Haha!”—actually, less indecent than the bashful glances of well-bred young ladies. The whole crowd gave off an animal good humor that was somehow contagious.

But neither the faces of this bunch, nor the wedding feast, nor anything of that world matters to my story. Just keep in mind the oddness of the setting, picture the cheap red-painted warehouse, smell the pungent odor of wine, listen to the shouts of hilarity, stay firmly in that neighborhood, among those workmen, those old-timers, those poor women throwing themselves into a night’s pleasure!

The musical ensemble consisted of three blind men from the hospice for the blind—the Quinze-Vingts. One played violin, the second clarinet, the third the flageolet. The three together were paid seven francs for the night. At that price, of course, they offered no Rossini or Beethoven, they played what they wanted and what they could, and no one complained—sweet tact! Their music was such an assault on the eardrum that once I had scanned the crowd, I turned my attention to this trio of blind men and was immediately disposed to indulgence as I recognized their shelter hospice uniforms. The players were seated in a recess before a casement window; to make out their faces, one had to come in close. I didn’t approach right away, but when I did, that was it: The party and its music fell away. My curiosity was roused to the highest pitch, my soul crossed over into the body of the clarinetist. The violin and the flageolet players both had commonplace faces, the familiar face of the blind—wary, attentive, unsmiling—but the clarinetist’s was one of those phenomena that stop the artist and the philosopher in his tracks.

Imagine Dante’s plaster death mask, lit by the red glow of the oil lamp and topped by a thicket of silver-white hair. The bitter, sorrowful expression of that magnificent face was heightened by blindness, for the dead eyes were alive with the mind’s energy; it shone through like a burning beam of light, generated by some unique unceasing desire, writ firmly on the domed brow crossed by deep creases like the brick courses in an old wall.

The old fellow was blowing randomly into his clarinet without the slightest concern for rhythm or melody; his fingers lifted and lowered, pressed the ancient keys with mechanical habit. He was not at all disturbed at producing what musicians call “sour notes,” the dancers noticed them no more than did the two colleagues of my Italian fellow—for I had been hoping he was an Italian, and he
was
Italian. There was something grand and despotic in this old Homer, who harbored within himself an Odyssey consigned to oblivion. It was a greatness so authentic that it even triumphed over his abject condition, a despotism so lively that it prevailed over poverty. Not one of the violent passions that lead a man to good or to evil, that make a convict or a hero, was lacking in that nobly carved face, lividly Italian, hooded by graying eyebrows that threw their shadow over deep hollows where one feared to see reappear the glow of thought, as one fears to see emerge from a cave’s mouth some bandits armed with torches and daggers. There lived a lion within that fleshly cage, a lion whose rage had been vainly spent against the iron of the bars. The flame of despair had guttered out in the cinders, the lava had gone cold, but the gullies, the crags, a wisp of smoke, still bore witness to the violence of the eruption, the ravages of the fire. These ideas, awakened by the sight of that man, were as hot in my soul as they were cold on his face.