Balzac’s Paris: The City as Human Comedy 
by Éric Hazan, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 20 pp., £15.99, June 2024, 978 1 83976 725 8
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The Lily in the Valley 
by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Peter Bush.
NYRB, 263 pp., £16.99, July 2024, 978 1 68137 798 8
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In​ 1842, with eight highly productive years of writing still ahead of him, Balzac wrote a preface to his Comédie humaine, which already comprised dozens of books. He defended the morality of the work, and revealed the scale of his ambition – nothing less than the creation of a complete picture of France in his time. As if wanting some credit, he remarked that it ‘was no small task to depict the two or three thousand conspicuous types of a period’. (This wasn’t hyperbole, since there are more than two thousand named characters in the Comédie humaine.) Balzac’s significance in the history of the novel was fully apparent by 1905, when Henry James said that his ‘achievement remains one of the most inscrutable, one of the unfathomable, final facts in the history of art’.

Of course, not all Balzac’s contemporaries agreed on the quality of the work; some complained that his prose was often rough, accumulative rather than sculpted, the stories often resembling untidy heaps rather than finished monuments. Flaubert, writing to Louise Colet in one of his majestically snobbish moods, declared that ‘Balzac was no writer, merely a man of ideas and of observation; he saw everything, but he didn’t know how to express anything.’ Flaubert was right about Balzac seeing everything, but he doesn’t seem to have realised how important this was.

The nature of Balzac’s legacy can be debated, but part of his achievement was to shift the novel in the direction of cultural documentation and analysis. The earliest novel readers, a century before, already expected to learn something from the experience, but the Comédie had different, and greater, ambitions from the moral lessons taught by Richardson, or even Laclos. In 1858, in one of the earliest extended studies of Balzac, who died in 1850, Hippolyte Taine argued that he had provided an invaluable guide to his era, creating characters who embody its social and economic forces. I think he overstates the deterministic elements in Balzac, but Taine was right that his work gives us, for the first time in fiction, a detailed analysis of the relationship between the individual and his or her socio-cultural environment, especially as shaped by economic forces. It’s not surprising to find Engels saying he learned more from Balzac than ‘from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together’, or that Marx planned to write a book about him. But Taine makes the Comédie humaine sound too much like Zola’s novel cycle, Les Rougon-Macquart.* Zola himself was worried about sounding too much like Balzac: he wrote a memorandum headed ‘Différence entre Balzac et moi’, in which he said that his ‘more scientific’ approach would be emphatically centred on the environment and its effects on the person.

Balzac’s environment par excellence is Paris. He documents the hôtels, tenements and streets that later regimes would sweep away, and his work serves as a kind of history of the city. He compared himself more than once to Georges Cuvier, a founding figure in palaeontology, portraying his fiction as performing a similar excavation, exposing the layers that underlay the present. But he also wanted to be a pure documentarian, and so he set out to detail the activities of the police, government offices and agents, as well as merchants of every sort, from booksellers to restaurateurs, perfumers to bankers. He also worked into the picture the denizens of the demi-monde, from street prostitutes to courtesans, from pickpockets to the most cunning criminals. In the 1842 preface he compares himself to a zoologist, and his Paris reads like a sort of bestiary, a record of places and ways of life that no longer exist, an intricate, endlessly compelling social, political and moral landscape populated by often bizarre, monomaniacal characters.

Éric Hazan – who died last year at the age of 87 – is an excellent guide to Balzac’s Paris, having written extensively on the city and its history, especially during the Revolution. Balzac spent 35 years in Paris. The longest he lived in a single place – he was often on the run from creditors – was seven years in a house in the rue Cassini. His homes have had diverse fates: one of them is now the Maison de Balzac, another is a dentist’s office. Hazan’s approach allows us to follow Balzac around. His fifty-cups-a-day coffee habit is familiar enough, but Hazan tells us that not any old coffee would do: it had to be a blend of three kinds of bean, and we are told on which street each could be purchased. The abysmal condition of the streets is vividly described, and there is some fascinating detail about the streetlamps. It became much more difficult to hang aristocrats from them (as had happened during the Revolution) after the introduction of gas, which led to the replacement of the old lamps, with their elaborate system of ropes and pulleys, by fixed lampstands.

Balzac sets many scenes in Paris’s quartiers – translated here rather oddly as ‘quarters’ – which often function metonymically for the characters who live in them. It’s not just that having the ‘wrong’ address can spell doom (though even this is not as bad as wearing the wrong clothes, as Lucien discovers in Illusions perdues); rather, Balzac subtly presents a given street or area in such a way as to make it an expression of the moral state of the inhabitants. Esther van Gobseck, for example, lives in an area marked by ‘streets narrow, dark and muddy, where the kinds of businesses that don’t care much about appearances are carried on’, and her environment has seeped into her soul.

One of Balzac’s most powerful evocations of Paris as alive and somehow malevolent comes at the end of Père Goriot (1835). Old Goriot, whose wicked daughters bring about his ruin, is often compared to Lear, but his social-climbing, egotistical, almost sociopathic daughters are recognisably modern types. When their father has finally been bled dry and dies, impoverished and alone, the one character with any sympathy for him, Rastignac, is also the only person at his funeral. From the heights of Père Lachaise cemetery, he gazes down on Paris, and having learned a grim lesson about Parisian loyalty and decency, addresses the monstrous town. ‘À nous deux maintenant!’ he says, hardened enough to grapple with all the city represents. (The best translation is Henry Reed’s: ‘Now I’m ready for you!’) Balzac’s Paris isn’t just background.

Almost all of eastern Paris (except Père Lachaise) is absent from the Comédie humaine, and there is no significant consideration of the transformative impact of the railways. Modernity for Balzac was a slow slide into mediocrity or worse. He was not only a monarchist but a legitimist, insisting on the Bourbons’ right to rule; he believed in a vigorous aristocracy, and was a Catholic who wanted to see the Church regain its central role in the country and its culture. Hazan quotes his laments over the new architecture that sprang up after the July Revolution: ‘If the axiom that architecture is the expression of manners and morals was ever proved, was it not after the insurrection of 1830?’ Balzac, he writes, was ‘more attentive to destruction than to innovation’. The working classes are under-represented in his books, and while I think Hazan exaggerates their absence, it’s true that Balzac was not particularly interested in them; certainly, none of his major characters could be described as working class. Perhaps he didn’t think they were corrupt enough.

As well as containing some excellent maps (though not enough for my curiosity), Hazan’s book is thick with quotations from Balzac’s novels and stories. The translator, David Fernbach, had to decide how to handle them: translate them himself, or seek out existing versions? Understandably, he adopted the latter course, but in some cases he chooses Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s translations from the late 19th century, which are often awkward or unclear, although better and more recent versions exist. For instance, he quotes from her version of Ferragus, with its reference to a street on which there was no ‘wall which did not echo some infamous word’, when the Herbert J. Hunt version states simply that the walls were covered with obscene graffiti. But this is a minor problem in an otherwise solid translation.

No doubt we will continue to think of Paris as Balzac’s great preoccupation, but in fact many of his works are set in other parts of France. Half of Lost Illusions takes place in Angoulême, and some of his finest novels – for instance Eugénie Grandet, Ursule Mirouët and La Rabouilleuse (The Black Sheep) – are set almost entirely in provincial towns. One of the greatest of the non-Parisian novels is Le Lys dans la vallée (The Lily in the Valley), which was completed and published in 1836. It is an outlier in Balzac’s work, and many of the generalisations we make about him won’t easily apply to it. It may be his most Romantic book: more lyrical, subtler and more autobiographical than most of the Comédie humaine. It is much less concerned with chronicling society or asserting the determining effect of economics and environment. The novel is structured as a letter from the protagonist, Félix de Vandenesse, to a woman he hopes to make his lover. He wishes to explain himself, and embarks on a Rousseauian self-analysis that occupies all but the final pages of the novel.

Though Félix comes from an aristocratic family, he has much in common with Balzac: he is an overlooked younger son, and endured a lonely and miserable childhood, neglected by a cold, distant mother. And as his creator once did, he falls in love with an older, married woman. For Balzac, this was Laure de Berny (1777-1836), 22 years his senior. He began as a tutor to her children, and she soon became his lover, mentor and confidante, remaining close to him until her death. She is the inspiration for the married woman Félix loves, the countess Henriette de Mortsauf. Balzac read his novel to de Berny shortly before her death – and, like Félix, he wrote about their relationship in a long letter, in his case to the woman he would marry, Eveline Hańska. De Berny described the book as sublime, but suggested he temper some of Madame de Mortsauf’s utterances, which he did, telling Hańska that ‘today I have piously effaced about a hundred lines ... I thought I saw that grand and sublime woman, that angel of friendship, before me.’ In his letters to Hańska, Balzac, like Félix, tells one woman about the depth of his feelings for another who is dead, asking her to be to him what the other had been: ‘Oh, cara, continue to me those wise, pure counsels, so disinterested!’

But the novel is more than a disguised autobiography. The first meeting between Félix and Madame de Mortsauf takes place when he is nineteen, just as the Bourbon Restoration is underway. He is the ugly duckling of his family, but is sent to represent them – because his father and brother are unavailable – at a ball in Tours given for the duc d’Angoulême. He is an awkward boy, ‘too shy to invite someone to dance, afraid anyway that I would make a mess of it’; he sits apart from the crowd on a bench. When a woman sits down beside him, he assumes it must be because she sees him as being of no importance, a mere child. But then he begins to stare at her exposed shoulders – ‘pale pink shoulders now seeming to blush at their newfound nakedness’ – and, in a moment of madness, throws himself ‘at that back as an infant throws himself on his mother’s bosom’, frantically kissing her shoulders. She leaps up and exclaims: ‘Monsieur!’

Horrified at himself, but oddly gratified that she at least addressed him as an adult, he watches her stalk off. But his involuntary act turns out to have profound consequences for both of them. He becomes obsessed with her and the sensuality she seems to represent, to the point of making himself ill, and so his mother packs him off to the country (‘that eternal remedy for afflictions medicine cannot cure’). He goes to stay with a family friend at a château in Frapesle (a place Balzac enjoyed as an escape from the city), but immediately sees across the valley a woman dressed in white. Of course, it is the countess herself. He begs forgiveness for his wild behaviour at the ball, and she grants it. Félix is smitten, and she is clearly attracted to him, but the love affair that follows never goes beyond the kissing of her hand.

Madame de Mortsauf is one of Balzac’s triumphs, for while she insists on and maintains her purity, and demands that Félix behave with complete propriety, she isn’t one-dimensional or unfeeling. She insists on living out the ideal of the devoted wife and mother, and handles Félix’s passion by treating him as a child. He embraces the role and the rhetoric that goes with it, so the mother/lover compromise works well, for a time. But we learn, much later in the novel, that Félix’s shower of kisses had been an epiphany for her: they ‘have dominated my life and furrowed my soul’. She spends her remaining years struggling against the sensual happiness they symbolise, and ultimately dies from what can only be understood as repression. Her husband is verbally and emotionally abusive, so her fidelity to him is a self-willed martyrdom. He is considerably older, an aristocrat who fled the Revolution and now lives an embittered existence, having lost nearly everything except for a small farm and château in the valley. We also learn that in his earlier years he indulged in prostitutes and now suffers from syphilis, which has been passed on to their two sickly children.

It is tempting to take this diseased and self-pitying bully as Balzac’s comment on the French nobility. His reactionary values never prevented him from criticising this decadent and effete class, and the Comédie humaine presents us with a great many examples of the type. Engels praised the fact that Balzac was ‘compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate ... I consider [this] one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.’

Félix’s love for Madame de Mortsauf is expressed and analysed with remarkable and un-Balzacian pastoral lyricism. As he picks flowers for a bouquet, ‘I discerned a harmony in their colours and foliage, a poetry born in the mind as it delighted the eyes, like musical phrases that inspire a thousand memories in hearts.’ The bouquets become a secret language between the two, a way he can express his love and she can understand it, without either of them transgressing her prohibitions. Félix’s speculations on the moral and poetic meanings to be found in flowers make a bravura sequence – and a marvellous depiction of sublimation. Balzac’s fiction is never more nearly poetic than in The Lily in the Valley, and there are constant references to Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura. Religious imagery accumulates as well, with Madame de Mortsauf compared more than once to Christ in her perfect purity and self-denying suffering.

When Félix is called to Paris by the king, she writes him a long letter, as a mother might, telling him how to behave and even how to feel. Parts of the letter have a touch of Polonius about them, but she also includes a passage on how he ought to treat women at court, telling him to avoid the young ones and focus on the fifty-year-olds, who will be able to pull strings and teach him useful things. Before long, he’s involved in an affair with a married Englishwoman, Lady Dudley. She is as passionate and transgressive as Madame de Mortsauf is chaste and sober. Lady Dudley is one of Balzac’s more enjoyable rakes, reminiscent of Byron’s ‘frolic grace’, Lady Fitz-Fulke. She occasions some satiric treatment of the English, especially of what Félix insists is their sexual hypocrisy and their women’s pretended chastity – as opposed to the real thing, embodied by French women. An English woman, so refined and serene on the surface, is ‘an ocean of love where the man who never took a dip there has missed out on an aspect of a poetry of the senses’. Hearing of this affair is a torment to Madame de Mortsauf, and leads to her long and painful death. Just before she dies, she writes to Félix, confessing her envy of the free sexuality of Lady Dudley. This passage disturbed de Berny, who felt that ‘the death of Madame de Mortsauf does not need those horrible regrets; they injure that beautiful letter which she wrote.’ He did tone it down a little, but only a little.

In The Lily in the Valley we hear everything from Félix’s point of view and come to trust his analyses of characters and events. But at the end, the woman to whom this book-length letter has been addressed makes her reply, and what she says in just a few pages makes us want to go back and reconsider everything. It’s a brilliant touch, adding yet another layer to this rich and complex novel, whose composition stretched from March 1835 to June 1836 – a very long and arduous gestation by Balzac’s standards. ‘No work has ever cost me more labour,’ he said. This was in part because the material and tone were different from the kind of fiction he was used to writing. Publication was also difficult, in part because of an extended spat with the editor of the Revue de Paris. This led to a complicated lawsuit, and while it was still going on Balzac was arrested for failing to report for Garde nationale duty, spending a week in prison, which further delayed the completion of the novel. (Balzac published a long and interesting description of the book’s genesis and legal troubles, ‘Historique du procès auquel a donné lieu “Le Lys dans la vallée”’, but no English translation has ever included it.) Even after the serialisation and the book’s publication, Balzac said he wasn’t satisfied with the character of Félix. Despite all this, the novel reads as if it were, indeed, a long letter composed in a single day.

Peter Bush’s new translation of the novel is its fourth. The first two came in the late 19th century, from a pair of indefatigable translators, Ellen Marriage and Wormeley. Both of their versions now feel rather wooden; both gently bowdlerise a bit; and both often get the tone of passages and dialogue wrong, and are especially likely to miss ironies and implicit comedy. In 1957 Lucienne Hill published a new version, which is still worth reading. Bush’s version, however, strikes me as even better. There are some high-flown sentiments in the book, and the translator needs to be careful not to let some of the speeches come across as too theatrical or, worse, slip into self-parody. Bush manages this very well; his renderings of the lyrical passages and the dialogue are decidedly more vigorous and convincing than Hill’s. Both Hill and Bush take some liberties, though, breaking up paragraphs and sometimes sentences. Balzac’s paragraphs are notoriously long and unwieldy – but should they be altered to improve readability? The question is not merely rhetorical, since Hill and Bush’s interventions smooth out what in the original is pretty bumpy reading, bringing the style into closer conformity with modern practice. Bush goes even further, dividing the book into chapters with titles: ‘Two Childhoods’, ‘First Loves’ and so on. There are no chapters in Balzac’s text. Bush also provides notes clarifying various allusions. Annotating a Balzac novel presents its own difficulties, because he assumed a great deal of knowledge on the part of the reader, and the translator or editor needs to decide how much annotation is best. The publisher often fears that a large quantity of endnotes or, heaven forbid, footnotes, will frighten off readers. Bush’s notes are modest, but they are helpful.

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