Pere Goriot (47 page)

Cousine Bette (Cousin Bette)

Le Depute d'Arcis (The Member for Arcis, or The Deputy for Arcis)

Les Comédiens sans le savoir (The Unconscious Humorists, or The Unconscious Comedians)

Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions)

Le Depute d'Arcis (The Member for Arcis, or The Deputy for Arcis)

Le Cure de village (The Country Parson, or The Village Rector)

Une Fille d'Eve (A Daughter of Eve)

Gobseck

Gobseck

Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (A Harlot High and Low, or Scenes from a Courtesan's Life)

La Maison Nucingen (The Firm of Nucingen)

La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass's Skin, or The Magic Skin)

L'Auberge rouge (The Red Inn)

L'Auberge rouge (The Red Inn)

Une Fille d'Eve (A Daughter of Eve)

Un Prince de la Bohème (A Prince of Bohemia)

Grandeur et decadence de César Birotteau (The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau)

Gobseck

Ursule Mirouët

Un Homme d'affaires (A Man of Business)

Le Depute d'Arcis (The Member for Arcis, or The Deputy for Arcis)

Les Secrets de la princesse de Cadignan (The Secrets of a Princess, or The Secrets of the Princess Cadignan)

Cousine Bette

Béatrix

Les Comédiens sans le savoir (The Unconscious Humorists, or The Unconscious Comedians)

Balzac is at the head of the French
literature of tomorrow.

 

Honoré de Balzac stands alone among literature's giants for his lifelong dedication to a single, overarching purpose in his work. Everything Balzac wrote—beginning with the first novel he published under his own name,
Les Chouans
(1829)—he wove together into a great cycle known as
La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) .
Though he did not initially intend for his various novels to grow into the interconnected epic they became, Balzac codified his literary method around 1834 when he decided to create a tapestry that would encompass the whole of contemporary Parisian society. Balzac's ambition further gelled in 1842 when he titled his ever-expanding oeuvre
La Comédie humaine,
the title of Balzac's secular work was meant to echo that of Dante's Christian allegory
La Divina
commedia
(The Divine Comedy) .

La Comédie humaine
comprises more than ninety novels and novellas; 137 were planned. In it, Balzac showcases three kinds of novel, each with a different aim:
Etudes analytiques
(“analytic studies”) explore the principles and social factors that govern human life;
études philosophiques
(“philosophical studies”) examine the psychological factors that drive human action; and, by far the largest category,
études de moeurs
(“studies of manners”) are subdivided into novels of country, military, political, Parisian, private, and provincial life.
Père Goriot,
a novel of manners dealing with private life, is in many ways the perfect novel with which to begin reading
La Comédie humaine.
In
Père Goriot,
Balzac for the first time brings back characters featured in previous works while introducing a number who will reappear in later novels; Rastignac, for example, appears in more than twenty novels. See the Appendix for a list of characters in
Père Goriot
who appear in other parts of
La Comédie humaine.

Placing all of his work under one thematic umbrella allowed Balzac to chronicle a large gallery of recurring characters over a long period of time—from the French Revolution to the eve of the 1848 Revolution, roughly the author's lifetime. It is the continuing reappearance of his characters that places Balzac apart from other writers. In addition, the progenitors of Marxism—Karl Marx and Frederich Engels—praised Balzac for his gritty realism, his “industrial literature,” as the critic C. A. Sainte-Beuve put it. Later novelists such as Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky, who both published expansive novels in installments, would attempt to emulate Balzac's unflinching attention to detail, his fanatical work ethic, and his impressive breadth of subject matter and human sentiment. And many later writers would consult
La Comédie humaine
as a reference for Balzac's historical moment—“The Nineteenth Century,” as Oscar Wilde wrote, “is largely an invention of Balzac's.” Fundamentally, however, Balzac is remembered for the community of characters who populate the pages of
La Comédie humaine.

French novelist Èmile Zola (1840-1902), who was born around the time Balzac came up with the umbrella name for his novels, also wrote a sweeping literary saga that has its roots in
La Comédie humaine.
Zola, influenced by Balzac's realist techniques, was the leading figure in the French school of naturalistic fiction, and his collective work
Les Rougon-Macquart
essentially picks up where
La Comédie humaine
leaves off. Comprising twenty novels, the
Les Rougon-Macquart
which carries the subtitle
The Natural and Social History of a Family Under the Second EmPire-was
published between 1871 and 1893. The first novel in the series, La Fortune des Rougon (1871; The Rougon Family Fortune or The Fortune of the Rougons) , introduces the powerful Rougons and the lower-class Macquarts. The ninth novel in the series, Nana (1880), which chronicles the life of Gervaise Macquart's daughter as she is forced to become a courtesan, shocked readers of its day; Henry James wrote, “We stand aghast at the want of tact it has taken to make so unreadable a book as
Nana.”
The thirteenth
Rougon-Macquart
novel, Germinal (1885), considered by some to be Zola's finest work, documents the relations between the bourgeoisie and the working class in a miserable mining community where the conditions are inhuman and treacherous.

Deeply fascinated and philosophically influenced by social determinism, Zola believed that human character was shaped by heredity, environment, and the cultural moment. Zola coined the term “naturalism” to describe this approach to literature, and it quickly became a national movement. In the
Rougon Macquart
books, Zola places his characters in various socio-economic and professional contexts—the Provençal countryside, a laundress's working-class neighborhood, the Parisian art scene, the bleak battlefield at Sedan—and documents their interactions and developments. Zola followed Les
Rougon-Macquart
with two shorter cycles:
Les Trois Villes: Lourdes, Rome, Paris (The Three Cities;
1894, 1896, 1898), a scathing attack on the Church of Rome; and
Les Quatre Evangiles (The Four Gospels,
1899-1903), the last volume of which was left unfinished at Zola's death.

Though the results are deeply imaginative, Zola regarded his novels as “experiments.” Rather than a creative excursion, each novel is akin to a study in which Zola records his observations with strict, even scientific exactitude. Zola's almost detached approach to his fiction pays homage to Balzac's studies. According to Zola (translation by Noah David Guynn): “[Balzac] created the naturalist novel, the exacting study of society, and all of a sudden, through his audacious genius, he dared to bring to life in his vast fresco an entire society copied directly from the society that posed before him. It was the most resounding affirmation of modern evolution.”

If Balzac made something admirable, always odd and often sublime, out of this vulgar genre [of the novel], it is because he poured all his being into it. I have often been astonished that Balzac's great glory has been to be perceived as an observer ; it always seemed to me that his principal merit was to have been a visionary, a passionate visionary.... He sometimes makes me think of those printmakers who are never content with the bite of the acid but who transform the main lines of the plate into ravines. Marvels emerge from this astonishing natural tendency. But this disposition is generally defined as “Balzac's faults.” To put it more accurately, they are precisely his qualities. Who can boast of being as greatly gifted as he, and able to apply a method that permits him so confidently to clothe pure triviality with light and purple? Who can do that? Indeed, whoever does not do that, to tell the truth, does nothing much.

—translated by Martin Kanes, from
L'Artiste
(March 13, 1859)

The pure artist never asserts, he suggests and therefore his meaning is totally lost upon moralists and socialists—is indeed irreparably wasted upon the run of men who cannot work out suggestions. Balzac asserts; and Balzac cannot blunder or lie. So profound and extensive a capacity of moral apprehension no other prose writer, no man of mere analytic faculty, ever had or can have.

—from
William Blake: A Critical Essay
(1868)

All [Balzac's] books form but a single book, a living, shining, profound book, in which our whole contemporary civilization can be seen going and coming, walking and moving, with a terrible and frightening
je ne sais quoi
mixed in with reality: a marvelous book called by its maker a comedy but which he might have called a history, which assumes all shapes and styles, which goes beyond Tacitus to Suetonius, and reaches beyond Beaumarchais to Rabelais; a book that is both observation and imagination, lavish in truth, intimacy, middle-class values, triviality, materiality, and that, suddenly and occasionally, tearing these realities wide open, lets us glimpse the most somber and tragic ideal.

—translated by Martin Kanes, from
Actes et Paroles
(1872)

Goriot is the modern King Lear. Mesdames de Restaud and de Nucingen are the representatives of Regan and Goneril; but the Parisian Lear is not allowed the consolation of a Cordelia; the cup of misery is measured out to him drop by drop, and the bitterness of each dose is analysed with chemical accuracy. We watch the poor old broken-down merchant, who has impoverished himself to provide his daughters' dowries, and has gradually stripped himself, first of comfort, and then of the necessaries of life to satisfy the demands of their folly and luxury, as we might watch a man clinging to the edge of a cliff and gradually dropping lower and lower, catching feebly at every point of support till his strength is exhausted, and the inevitable catastrophe follows. The daughters, allowed to retain some fragments of good feeling and not quite irredeemably hateful, are gradually yielding to the demoralising influence of a heartless vanity. They yield, it is true, pretty completely at last; but their wickedness seems to reveal the influence of a vague but omnipotent power of evil in the background....