Книга: Balzac Honore de «Eugenie Grandet»

French writer.

Balzac began working as a clerk in Paris at about age 16. An early attempt at a business career left him with huge debts, and for decades he toiled incessantly to improve his worsening financial condition. In 1829 his novels and stories began to achieve some success, and his early masterpieces soon followed. In a vast series he collectively called The Human Comedy, eventually numbering some 90 novels and novellas, he sought to produce a comprehensive picture of contemporary society by presenting all the varieties of human nature. Among his masterpieces are Eugénie Grandet (1833), Père Goriot (1835), Lost Illusions (1837–43), A Harlot High and Low (1843–47), and Cousin Bette (1846). His novels are notable for their great narrative drive, their large casts of vital and diverse characters, and their obsessive interest in and examination of virtually all spheres of life. His best-known story collection is his Droll Stories, 3 vol. (1832–37). His tumultuous life was one of mounting debts and almost incessant toil, with frequent bouts of writing feverishly for 15 hours at a stretch (his death has been attributed to overwork and excessive coffee consumption). He is generally considered the major early influence on realism, or naturalism, in the novel and one of the greatest fiction writers of all time.

Honoré de Balzac, daguerreotype, 1848.

J.E. Bulloz

born May 20, 1799, Tours, France

died August 18, 1850, Paris

 French literary artist who produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the traditional form of the novel and is generally considered to be one of the greatest novelists of all time.

      Balzac's father was a man of southern peasant stock who worked in the civil service for 43 years under Louis XVI and Napoleon. Honoré's mother came from a family of prosperous Parisian cloth merchants. His sister Laure (later de Surville) was his only childhood friend, and she became his first biographer.

      Balzac was sent to school at the Collège des Oratoriens at Vendôme from age 8 to 14. At Napoleon's downfall his family moved from Tours to Paris, where he went to school for two more years and then spent three years as a lawyer's clerk. During this time he already aimed at a literary career, but as the writer of Cromwell (1819) and other tragic plays he was utterly unsuccessful. He then began writing novels filled with mystic and philosophical speculations before turning to the production of potboilers—gothic, humorous, historical novels—written under composite pseudonyms. Then he tried a business career as a publisher, printer, and owner of a typefoundry, but disaster soon followed. In 1828 he was narrowly saved from bankruptcy and was left with debts of more than 60,000 francs. From then on his life was to be one of mounting debts and almost incessant toil. He returned to writing with a new mastery, and his literary apprenticeship was over.

      Two works of 1829 brought Balzac to the brink of success. Les Chouans, the first novel he felt enough confidence about to have published under his own name, is a historical novel about the Breton peasants called Chouans who took part in a royalist insurrection against Revolutionary France in 1799. The other, La Physiologie du mariage (The Physiology of Marriage), is a humorous and satirical essay on the subject of marital infidelity, encompassing both its causes and its cure. The six stories in his Scènes de la vie privée (1830; “Scenes from Private Life”) further increased his reputation. These long short stories are for the most part psychological studies of girls in conflict with parental authority. The minute attention he gave to describing domestic background in his works anticipated the spectacularly detailed societal observations of his later Parisian studies.

      From this point forward Balzac spent much of his time in Paris. He began to frequent some of the best-known Parisian salons of the day and redoubled his efforts to set himself up as a dazzling figure in society. To most people he seemed full of exuberant vitality, talkative, jovial and robustious, egoistic, credulous, and boastful. He adopted for his own use the armorial bearings of an ancient noble family with which he had no connection and assumed the honorific particle de. He was avid for fame, fortune, and love but was above all conscious of his own genius. He also began to have love affairs with fashionable or aristocratic women at this time, finally gaining that firsthand understanding of mature women that is so evident in his novels.

      Between 1828 and 1834 Balzac led a tumultuous existence, spending his earnings in advance as a dandy and man-about-town. A fascinating raconteur, he was fairly well received in society. But social ostentation was only a relaxation from phenomenal bouts of work—14 to 16 hours spent writing at his table in his white, quasi-monastic dressing gown, with his goose-quill pen and his endless cups of black coffee. In 1832 Balzac became friendly with Éveline Hanska, a Polish countess who was married to an elderly Ukrainian landowner. She, like many other women, had written to Balzac expressing admiration of his writings. They met twice in Switzerland in 1833—the second time in Geneva, where they became lovers—and again in Vienna in 1835. They agreed to marry when her husband died, and so Balzac continued to conduct his courtship of her by correspondence; the resulting Lettres à l'étrangère (“Letters to a Foreigner”), which appeared posthumously (4 vol., 1889–1950), are an important source of information for the history both of Balzac's life and of his work.

      To clear his debts and put himself in a position to marry Madame Hanska now became Balzac's great incentive. He was at the peak of his creative power. In the period 1832–35 he produced more than 20 works, including the novels Le Médecin de campagne (1833; The Country Doctor), Eugénie Grandet (1833), L'Illustre Gaudissart (1833; The Illustrious Gaudissart), and Le Père Goriot (1835), one of his masterpieces. Among the shorter works were Le Colonel Chabert (1832), Le Curé de Tours (1832; The Vicar of Tours), the trilogy of stories entitled Histoire des treize (1833–35; History of the Thirteen), and Gobseck (1835). Between 1836 and 1839 he wrote Le Cabinet des antiques (1839), the first two parts of another masterpiece, Illusions perdues (1837–43; Lost Illusions), César Birotteau (1837), and La Maison Nucingen (1838; The Firm of Nucingen). Between 1832 and 1837 he also published three sets of Contes drolatiques (Droll Stories). These stories, Rabelaisian in theme, are written with great verve and gusto in an ingenious pastiche of 16th-century language. During the 1830s he also wrote a number of philosophical novels dealing with mystical, pseudoscientific, and other exotic themes. Among these are La Peau de chagrin (1831; The Wild Ass's Skin), Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu (1831; The Unknown Masterpiece), Louis Lambert (1834), La Recherche de l'absolu (1834; The Quest of the Absolute), and Séraphîta (1834–35).

      In all these varied works Balzac emerged as the supreme observer and chronicler of contemporary French society. These novels are unsurpassed for their narrative drive, their large casts of vital, diverse, and interesting characters, and their obsessive interest in and examination of virtually all spheres of life: the contrast between provincial and metropolitan manners and customs; the commercial spheres of banking, publishing, and industrial enterprise; the worlds of art, literature, and high culture; politics and partisan intrigue; romantic love in all its aspects; and the intricate social relations and scandals among the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie.

      No theme is more typically Balzacian than that of the ambitious young provincial fighting for advancement in the competitive world of Paris. Balzac admired those individuals who were ruthless, astute, and, above all, successful in thrusting their way up the social and economic scale at all costs. He was especially attracted by the theme of the individual in conflict with society: the adventurer, the scoundrel, the unscrupulous financier, and the criminal. Frequently his villains are more vigorous and interesting than his virtuous characters. He was both fascinated and appalled by the French social system of his time, in which the bourgeois values of material acquisitiveness and gain were steadily replacing what he viewed as the more stable moral values of the old-time aristocracy.

      These topics provided material largely unknown, or unexplored, by earlier writers of French fiction. The individual in Balzac's stories is continually affected by the pressure of material difficulties and social ambitions, and he may expend his tremendous vitality in ways Balzac views as socially destructive and self-destructive. Linked with this idea of the potentially destructive power of passionate will, emotion, and thought is Balzac's peculiar notion of a vital fluid concentrated inside the person, a store of energy that he may husband or squander as he desires, thereby lengthening or shortening his vital span. Indeed, a supremely important feature in Balzac's characters is that most are spendthrifts of this vital force, a fact that explains his monomaniacs who are both victim and embodiment of some ruling passion; avarice, as in the main character of Gobseck, a usurer gloating over his sense of power, or the miserly father obsessed with riches in Eugénie Grandet; excessive paternal affection, as in the idolatrous Learlike father in Le Père Goriot; feminine vindictiveness, as evidenced in La Cousine Bette and a half-dozen other novels; the mania of the art collector, as in Le Cousin Pons; the artist's desire for perfection, as in Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu; the curiosity of the scientist, as in the fanatical chemist of La Recherche de l'absolu; or the vaulting and frustrated ambition of the astonishingly resourceful criminal mastermind Vautrin in Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Once such an obsession has gained a hold, Balzac shows it growing irresistibly in power and blinding the person concerned to all other considerations. The typical structure of his novels from the early 1830s onward is determined by this approach: there is a long period of preparation and exposition, and then tension mounts swiftly to an inevitable climax, as in classical tragedy.

      The year 1834 marks a climax in Balzac's career, for by then he had become totally conscious of his great plan to group his individual novels so that they would comprehend the whole of contemporary society in a diverse but unified series of books. There were to be three general categories of novels: Études analytiques (“Analytic Studies”), dealing with the principles governing human life and society; Études philosophiques (“Philosophical Studies”), revealing the causes determining human action; and Études de moeurs (“Studies of Manners”), showing the effects of those causes, and themselves to be divided into six kinds of scènes—private, provincial, Parisian, political, military, and country life. This entire project resulted in a total of 12 volumes (1834–37). By 1837 Balzac had written much more, and by 1840 he had hit upon a Dantesque title for the whole: La Comédie humaine. He negotiated with a consortium of publishers for an edition under this name, 17 volumes of which appeared between 1842 and 1848, including a famous foreword written in 1842. In 1845, having new works to include and many others in project, he began preparing for another complete edition. A “definitive edition” was published, in 24 volumes, between 1869 and 1876. The total number of novels and novellas comprised in the Comédie humaine is roughly 90.

      Also in 1834 the idea of using “reappearing characters” matured. Balzac was to establish a pool of characters from which he would constantly and repeatedly draw, thus adding a sense of solidarity and coherence to the Comédie humaine. A certain character would reappear—now in the forefront, now in the background, of different fictions—in such a way that the reader could gradually form a full picture of him. Balzac's use of this device places him among the originators of the modern novel cycle. In the end, the total number of named characters in the Comédie humaine is estimated to have reached 2,472, with a further 566 unnamed characters.

      In January 1842 Balzac learned of the death of Wenceslas Hanski. He now had good expectations of marrying Éveline, but there were many obstacles, not the least being his inextricable indebtedness. She in fact held back for many years, and the period of 1842–48 shows Balzac continuing and even intensifying his literary activity in the frantic hope of winning her, though he had to contend with increasing ill health.

      Balzac produced many notable works during the early and mid-1840s. These include the masterpieces Une Ténébreuse Affaire (1841; A Shady Business), La Rabouilleuse (1841–42; The Black Sheep), Ursule Mirouët (1841), and one of his greatest works, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1843–47; A Harlot High and Low). Balzac's last two masterpieces were La Cousine Bette (1847; Cousin Bette) and Le Cousin Pons (1847; Cousin Pons).

      In the autumn of 1847 Balzac went to Madame Hanska's château at Wierzchownia and remained there until February 1848. He returned again in October to stay, mortally sick, until the spring of 1850. Then at last Éveline relented. They were married in March and proceeded to Paris, where Balzac lingered on miserably for the few months before his death.

      Balzac did not quite realize his tremendous aim of making his novels comprehend the whole of society at that time. His projected scenes of military and political life were only partially completed, and there were certain other gaps, for instance in regard to the new class of industrial workers. Nevertheless, few novelists have thronged their pages with men and women drawn from so many different spheres, nor with characters so widely representative of human passions and frailties, projected with dynamic and convincing force.

      Balzac was notable for his peculiar methods of composition. He often began with a relatively simple subject and a brief first draft, but fresh ideas came crowding in during composition until finally the story expanded far beyond his first intention. The trouble lay in the fact that Balzac tended to expand and amplify his original story by making emendations after it had been typeset by the printers. The original skeleton of a story was thus filled out until it had reached the proportions of a full-length novel, but only at a ruinous cost of printer's bills to its author. Even when the novel was in print he would frequently introduce new variations on his theme, as successive editions appeared.

      Balzac's method was almost invariably to reinforce, to emphasize, and to amplify. There are lengthy digressions in which he aired his remarkably detailed knowledge of legal procedures, financial manipulations, or industrial processes, but at its best his style is remarkably graphic, fast-moving and tersely epigrammatic but richly studded with sarcasm, wit, and psychological observation. His command of the French language was probably unrivaled, and he was also an outstanding master of dialogue. His sardonic humour saves his more pessimistic stories from being uniformly dark, and he had a real gift for comedy.

      Balzac is regarded as the creator of realism in the novel. He is also acknowledged as having helped to establish the technique of the traditional novel, in which consequent and logically determined events are narrated by an all-seeing observer (the omniscient narrator) and characters are coherently presented. Balzac had exceptional powers of observation and a photographic memory, but he also had a sympathetic, intuitive capacity to understand and describe other people's attitudes, feelings, and motivations. He was bent on illustrating the relation between cause and effect, between social background and character. His ambition was to “compete with the civil register,” exactly picturing his contemporaries in their class distinctions and occupations. In this he succeeded, but he went even further in his efforts to show that the human spirit has power over men and events—to become, as he has been called, “the Shakespeare of the novel.”

Charles V. Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, Histoire des oeuvres de Honoré de Balzac, 3rd rev. ed. (1888, reprinted 1968), is still indispensable for Balzacian research. See also William H. Royce, A Balzac Bibliography: Writings Relative to the Life and Works of Honoré de Balzac (1929, reprinted 1969). There are many excellent editions of Balzac's complete works. A complete, compact collection of Balzac's letters consists of Roger Pierrot (ed.), Correspondence, 5 vol. (1960–69), and Lettres à Madame Hanska, 4 vol. (1967–71). Biographies include Graham Robb, Balzac (1994); V.S. Pritchett, Balzac (1973, reprinted 1983), a concise introduction; André Maurois, Prometheus: The Life of Balzac (1965, reissued 1983); Herbert J. Hunt, Honoré de Balzac (1957, reprinted 1969); Théophile Gautier, Honoré de Balzac (1859, reissued 1980); and Ferdinand Brunetière, Honoré de Balzac: 1799–1850 (1906, reprinted 1970). Among general works are Diana Festa-McCormick, Honoré de Balzac (1979), an introductory critical survey; Christopher Prendergast, Balzac: Fiction and Melodrama (1978), a comparative study of his novels; Samuel Rogers, Balzac and the Novel (1953, reissued 1969), a thoughtful work; Herbert J. Hunt, Balzac's Comédie Humaine (1959, reprinted 1964), a complete historical and analytical study that shows the work's expansion; Jules Bertaut (ed.), Balzac (1959), including an interesting tribute by Michel Butor; Philippe Bertault, Balzac and The Human Comedy (1963, originally published in French, 1946), a judicious general study by a great Balzacian scholar; Frederick W.J. Hemmings, Balzac: An Interpretation of La Comédie Humaine (1967), a perceptive analysis of Balzac in relation to his times; and Stefan Zweig, Balzac, 2nd ed. (1970; originally published in German, 1946), an assessment. Among other studies are Janet L. Beizer, Family Plots: Balzac's Narrative Generations (1986); Michael Tilby (ed.), Balzac (1995); and Tim Farrant, Balzac's Shorter Fictions: Genesis and Genre (2002).