À mon chevet: Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

This is what was taking place at the Palais while Lucien's protectresses were obeying the orders issued by Jacques Collin. The gendarmes placed the moribund prisoner on a chair facing the window in Monsieur Camusot's room; he was sitting in his place in front of his table. Coquart, pen in hand, had a little table to himself a few yards off.

The aspect of a magistrate's chambers is not a matter of indifference; and if this room had not been chosen intentionally, it must be owned that chance had favored justice. An examining judge, like a painter, requires the clear equable light of a north window, for the criminal's face is a picture which he must constantly study. Hence most magistrates place their table, as this of Camusot's was arranged, so as to sit with their back to the window and leave the face of the examinee in broad daylight. Not one of them all but, by the end of six months, has assumed an absent-minded and indifferent expression, if he does not wear spectacles, and maintains it throughout the examination.

It was a sudden change of expression in the prisoner's face, detected by these means, and caused by a sudden point-blank question, that led to the discovery of the crime committed by Castaing at the very moment when, after a long consultation with the public prosecutor, the magistrate was about to let the criminal loose on society for lack of evidence. This detail will show the least intelligent person how living, interesting, curious, and dramatically terrible is the conflict of an examination--a conflict without witnesses, but always recorded. God knows what remains on the paper of the scenes at white heat in which a look, a tone, a quiver of the features, the faintest touch of color lent by some emotion, has been fraught with danger, as though the adversaries were savages watching each other to plant a fatal stroke. A report is no more than the ashes of the fire.

"What is your real name?" Camusot asked Jacques Collin.

"Don Carlos Herrera, canon of the Royal Chapter of Toledo, and secret envoy of His Majesty Ferdinand VII."

It must here be observed that Jacques Collin spoke French like a Spanish trollop, blundering over it in such a way as to make his answers almost unintelligible, and to require them to be repeated. But Monsieur de Nucingen's German barbarisms have already weighted this Scene too much to allow of the introduction of other sentences no less difficult to read, and hindering the rapid progress of the tale.

"Then you have papers to prove your right to the dignities of which you speak?" asked Camusot.

"Yes, monsieur--my passport, a letter from his Catholic Majesty authorizing my mission.--In short, if you will but send at once to the Spanish Embassy two lines, which I will write in your presence, I shall be identified. Then, if you wish for further evidence, I will write to His Eminence the High Almoner of France, and he will immediately send his private secretary."

"And do you still pretend that you are dying?" asked the magistrate. "If you have really gone through all the sufferings you have complained of since your arrest, you ought to be dead by this time," said Camusot ironically.

"You are simply trying the courage of an innocent man and the strength of his constitution," said the prisoner mildly.

"Coquart, ring. Send for the prison doctor and an infirmary attendant.--We shall be obliged to remove your coat and proceed to verify the marks on your shoulder," Camusot went on.

"I am in your hands, monsieur."

The prisoner then inquired whether the magistrate would be kind enough to explain to him what he meant by "the marks," and why they should be sought on his shoulder. The judge was prepared for this question.

"You are suspected of being Jacques Collin, an escaped convict, whose daring shrinks at nothing, not even at sacrilege!" said Camusot promptly, his eyes fixed on those of the prisoner.

Jacques Collin gave no sign, and did not color; he remained quite calm, and assumed an air of guileless curiosity as he gazed at Camusot.

"I, monsieur? A convict? May the Order I belong to and God above forgive you for such an error. Tell me what I can do to prevent your continuing to offer such an insult to the rights of free men, to the Church, and to the King my master."

-- Honoré de Balzac, Scenes from a Courtesan's Life (trans. by James Waring)

This long book, originally published in four sections, is first in the Scènes de la vie Parisienne section of La Comédie Humaine. It follows the end of the tragic life of Lucien de Rubempré, and it has been one of the high points of my Balzac reading project so far. Lucien, at the brink of suicide, comes across one of Balzac's celebrated characters, the villainous Vautrin, who convinces him not to commit suicide. He becomes the creature of this criminal, whose identity is hidden under many names.

At the opening of the book Vautrin has assumed the name of the Abbé Carlos Herrera, serving an important embassy to Paris on behalf of the King of Spain. In this scene, an examining judge is engaged in a chess match to get him to reveal his true identity, Jacques Collin. This book has also been translated under the English title A Harlot High and Low, apt because Balzac pairs the lowest and highest elements of Parisian society as alternate sides of the same coin. Lies, deceit, sexual depravity, crimes of all kinds are committed at both ends of the social spectrum, with vastly different treatment by the authorities.

À mon chevet: Illusions perdues

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

The name of [Chez] Flicoteaux [Restaurant] is engraved on many memories. Few indeed were the students who lived in the Latin Quarter during the last twelve years of the Restoration and did not frequent that temple sacred to hunger and impecuniosity. There a dinner of three courses, with a quarter bottle of wine or a bottle of beer, could be had for eighteen sous; or for twenty-two sous the quarter bottle becomes a bottle. Flicoteaux, that friend of youth, would beyond a doubt have amassed a colossal fortune but for a line on his bill of fare, a line which rival establishments are wont to print in capital letters, thus—BREAD AT DISCRETION, which, being interpreted, should read "indiscretion."

Flicoteaux has been nursing-father to many an illustrious name. Verily, the heart of more than one great man ought to wax warm with innumerable recollections of inexpressible enjoyment at the sight of the small, square window panes that look upon the Place de la Sorbonne, and the Rue Neuve-de-Richelieu. Flicoteaux II. and Flicoteaux III. respected the old exterior, maintaining the dingy hue and general air of a respectable, old-established house, showing thereby the depth of their contempt for the charlatanism of the shop-front, the kind of advertisement which feasts the eyes at the expense of the stomach, to which your modern restaurant almost always has recourse. Here you beheld no piles of straw-stuffed game never destined to make the acquaintance of the spit, no fantastical fish to justify the mountebank's remark, "I saw a fine carp to-day; I expect to buy it this day week." Instead of the prime vegetables more fittingly described by the word primeval, artfully displayed in the window for the delectation of the military man and his fellow country-woman the nursemaid, honest Flicoteaux exhibited full salad-bowls adorned with many a rivet, or pyramids of stewed prunes to rejoice the sight of the customer, and assure him that the word "dessert," with which other handbills made too free, was in this case no charter to hoodwink the public. Loaves of six pounds' weight, cut in four quarters, made good the promise of "bread at discretion." Such was the plenty of the establishment, that Moliere would have celebrated it if it had been in existence in his day, so comically appropriate is the name.

Flicoteaux still subsists; so long as students are minded to live, Flicoteaux will make a living. You feed there, neither more nor less; and you feed as you work, with morose or cheerful industry, according to the circumstances and the temperament.

At that time his well-known establishment consisted of two dining-halls, at right angles to each other; long, narrow, low-ceiled rooms, looking respectively on the Rue Neuve-de-Richelieu and the Place de la Sorbonne. The furniture must have come originally from the refectory of some abbey, for there was a monastic look about the lengthy tables, where the serviettes of regular customers, each thrust through a numbered ring of crystallized tin plate, were laid by their places. Flicoteaux I. only changed the serviettes of a Sunday; but Flicoteaux II. changed them twice a week, it is said, under pressure of competition which threatened his dynasty.

Flicoteaux's restaurant is no banqueting-hall, with its refinements and luxuries; it is a workshop where suitable tools are provided, and everybody gets up and goes as soon as he has finished. The coming and going within are swift. There is no dawdling among the waiters; they are all busy; every one of them is wanted.

-- Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions: A Great Man of the Provinces in Paris (trans. by Ellen Marriage)

This central portion of Lost Illusions is one of the high points of my ongoing project to read all of Balzac's La Comédie Humaine. At the end of the Scènes de la vie de province section, it follows the impressionable young poet from Angoulême, Lucien de Rubempré, as he pursues the woman he loves to Paris. Lucien goes through most of the self-discoveries Balzac himself made, falling into desperate poverty, meeting a group of sincere writers, and then being seduced by the easy money of journalism. Balzac's descriptions of the more squalid corners of Paris, as well as the less savory aspects of the publishing business in the 19th century, are based on first-hand observation and a delight to read.

À mon chevet: 'Les deux poètes'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

By the beginning of September, Lucien had ceased to be a printer's foreman; he was M. de Rubempré, housed sumptuously in comparison with his late quarters in the tumbledown attic with the dormer-window, where "young Chardon" had lived in L'Houmeau; he was not even a "man of L'Houmeau"; he lived in the heights of Angoulême, and dined four times a week with Mme. de Bargeton. A friendship had grown up between M. de Rubempré and the Bishop, and he went to the palace. His occupations put him upon a level with the highest rank; his name would be one day among the great names of France; and, in truth, as he went to and fro in his apartments, the pretty sitting-room, the charming bedroom, and the tastefully furnished study, he might console himself for the thought that he drew thirty francs every month out of his mother's and sister's hard earnings; for he saw the day approaching when An Archer of Charles IX, the historical romance on which he had been at work for two years, and a volume of verse entitled Marguérites, should spread his fame through the world of literature, and bring in money enough to repay them all, his mother and sister and David. So, grown great in his own eyes, and giving ear to the echoes of his name in the future, he could accept present sacrifices with noble assurance; he smiled at his poverty, he relished the sense of these last days of penury.

Ève and David had set Lucien's happiness before their own. They had put off their wedding, for it took some time to paper and paint their rooms, and to buy the furniture, and Lucien's affairs had been settled first. No one who knew Lucien could wonder at their devotion. Lucien was so engaging, he had such winning ways, his impatience and his desires were so graciously expressed, that his cause was always won before he opened his mouth to speak. This unlucky gift of fortune, if it is the salvation of some, is the ruin of many more. Lucien and his like find a world predisposed in favor of youth and good looks, and ready to protect those who give it pleasure with the selfish good-nature that flings alms to a beggar, if he appeals to the feelings and awakens emotion; and in this favor many a grown child is content to bask instead of putting it to a profitable use. With mistaken notions as to the significance and the motive of social relations they imagine that they shall always meet with deceptive smiles; and so at last the moment comes for them when the world leaves them bald, stripped bare, without fortune or worth, like an elderly coquette by the door of a salon, or a stray rag in the gutter.

-- Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions: The Two Poets (trans. by Ellen Marriage)

I am returning to an ongoing project to read all of Balzac's La Comédie Humaine, picking up where I had left off, near the end of the Scènes de la vie de province section. This excerpt is from the first part of a long novel that concludes that section, Lost Illusions. This features especially the advent of one of Balzac's most important characters, Lucien de Rubempré, who rises from the penury of a fallen quasi-aristocratic family through the sacrifices of his sister, Ève, and his best friend, David Sechard, a printer in Angoulême who hires Lucien to work for him. Although born as Lucien Chardon, the character takes on the aristocratic name of his mother's family, de Rubempré. The story mirrors the life of Balzac, who was also born into a modest family of artisans. He also worked as a printer early in his life, and he also changed his name (he was born Honoré Balssa) and added the noble particle "de" to it.

Lucien rises out of his low position because of his good looks, as a lonely woman at the top of the social ladder embraces his talent as a poet. It will ruin his life. The television show 30 Rock explored a comic version of the phenomenon Balzac is describing here. Liz Lemon's boyfriend, played by Jon Hamm, is so handsome that he lives in what she calls "the bubble" (related clip below). Everyone he meets bends over backwards to gratify and help him, and he has no idea that he is actually stupid and helpless.

CD Review: Hallenberg as Farinelli

Tom Huizenga and Charles T. Downey, Recording reviews: a Glass harpist, arias for Farinelli
Washington Post, January 26

Farinelli: A Portrait, Ann Hallenberg, Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset (released on February 17, 2017) Aparte AP117 | 79'13"

The idea of castrating a pre-adolescent singer to create an extraordinary voice type is horrifying and unthinkable. But in earlier centuries, these men, with their voices frozen in treble mode, were celebrated in Italy, and none was more famous than Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the early music ensemble Les Talens Lyriques in 2011, the conductor Christophe Rousset led the Swedish mezzo-soprano Ann Hallenberg in a recital of music written for Farinelli by Handel, Geminiano Giacomelli, Johann Adolf Hasse, Leonardo Leo, the singer’s brother Riccardo Broschi and his patron Nicola Porpora. It joined similar Farinelli or castrato-themed recordings by Vivica Genaux, Philippe Jaroussky, Cecilia Bartoli and others.

The soundtrack of Gérard Corbiau’s highly fanciful 1994 film on Farinelli’s life digitally blended the singing of a male countertenor and a soprano to approximate the sound of the castrato. Contemporary accounts speak of the sweetness and power of the castratos’ tone, though the only recorded evidence was left by Alessandro Moreschi, a castrato who sang soprano in the Sistine Chapel Choir until 1914, and who no one claimed was the equal of his legendary antecedents. Moreschi sounds, if anything, most like a treble: pale in timbre, mostly devoid of vibrato and occasionally unstable — just on steroids in terms of breath support and volume.

Farinelli, in keeping with the style of the day, could certainly toss off melismatic passages with ease and added ornamentation in slow arias, something reflected in the music written for his voice. Even in this live performance, Hallenberg has relatively few bumps along the way in the long streams of running notes of the fast arias, and her ornamentation and cadenzas are florid and thrilling. The long-breathed vibrato sound is silky and refined, as in the aria “Alto Giove” from Porpora’s “Polifemo.” The only downsides are the normal artifacts of live performance caught by the microphones, such as noisy page turns, audience noises and Rousset’s sharp exhalations at opening downbeats.

SEE ALSO:
Honoré de Balzac, Sarrasine (trans. Clara Bell)

À mon chevet: 'The Lily of the Valley'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

Alas! alas! was this the end of the keenest love that ever entered the heart of man? To the eyes of strangers my conduct might be reprehensible, but it had the sanction of my own conscience. It is thus that the noblest feelings, the sublimest dramas of our youth must end. We start at dawn, as I from Tours to Clochegourde, we clutch the world, our hearts hungry for love; then, when our treasure is in the crucible, when we mingle with men and circumstances, all becomes gradually debased and we find but little gold among the ashes. Such is life! life as it is; great pretensions, small realities. I meditated long about myself, debating what I could do after a blow like this which had mown down every flower of my soul. I resolved to rush into the science of politics, into the labyrinth of ambition, to cast woman from my life and to make myself a statesman, cold and passionless, and so remain true to the saint I loved. My thoughts wandered into far-off regions while my eyes were fastened on the splendid tapestry of the yellowing oaks, the stern summits, the bronzed foothills. I asked myself if Henriette's virtue were not, after all, that of ignorance, and if I were indeed guilty of her death. I fought against remorse. At last, in the sweetness of an autumn midday, one of those last smiles of heaven which are so beautiful in Touraine, I read the letter which at her request I was not to open before her death. Judge of my feelings as I read it.

Madame de Mortsauf to the Vicomte Félix de Vandenesse:

"Félix, friend, loved too well, I must now lay bare my heart to you,--not so much to prove my love as to show you the weight of obligation you have incurred by the depth and gravity of the wounds you have inflicted on it. At this moment, when I sink exhausted by the toils of life, worn out by the shocks of its battle, the woman within me is, mercifully, dead; the mother alone survives. Dear, you are now to see how it was that you were the original cause of all my sufferings. Later, I willingly received your blows; to-day I am dying of the final wound your hand has given,--but there is joy, excessive joy in feeling myself destroyed by him I love."

-- Honoré de Balzac, Le lys dans la vallée (trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley)

After this novel, which I have just finished, the "Scènes de la vie de province" portion of Balzac's La Comédie Humaine has only the Illusions perdues sequence left for me to read. In this novel Félix de Vandenesse, whom we have already encountered in Une fille d'Ève, recounts the story of his youth and first love. In this character's background, Balzac drew most heavily on his own early life: Félix, like Balzac, is from Tours, and he suffers as a child from the coldness of his parents, who show him no affection, trundle him off to cruelty-filled schools without adequate funds, and leave him entirely to his own devices. Also like Balzac, he tumbles into his first love affair with an older married woman, the Comtesse de Mortsauf, who like Balzac's first and greatest love, Laure de Berny, loves Félix in a way that is both passionate and maternal. The descriptions of the valley, one of many by Balzac of his beloved native Touraine, are remarkably beautiful.

À mon chevet: 'La Muse du département'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

There was in their lives a first phase, lasting six years, during which Dinah, alas! became utterly provincial. In Paris there are several kinds of women: the duchess and the financier's wife, the ambassadress and the consul's wife, the wife of the minister who is a minister, and of him who is no longer a minister; then there is the lady--quite the lady--of the right bank of the Seine and of the left. But in the country there is but one kind of woman, and she, poor thing, is the provincial woman.

This remark points to one of the sores of modern society. It must be clearly understood: France in the nineteenth century is divided into two broad zones--Paris, and the provinces. The provinces jealous of Paris; Paris never thinking of the provinces but to demand money. Of old, Paris was the Capital of the provinces, and the court ruled the Capital; now, all Paris is the Court, and all the country is the town.

However lofty, beautiful, and clever a girl born in any department of France may be on entering life, if, like Dinah Piedefer, she marries in the country and remains there, she inevitably becomes the provincial woman. In spite of every determination, the commonplace of second-rate ideas, indifference to dress, the culture of vulgar people, swamp the sublimer essence hidden in the youthful plant; all is over, it falls into decay. How should it be otherwise? From their earliest years girls bred in the country see none but provincials; they cannot imagine anything superior, their choice lies among mediocrities; provincial fathers marry their daughters to provincial sons; crossing the races is never thought of, and the brain inevitably degenerates, so that in many country towns intellect is as rare as the breed is hideous. Mankind becomes dwarfed in mind and body, for the fatal principle of conformity of fortune governs every matrimonial alliance. Men of talent, artists, superior brains--every bird of brilliant plumage flies to Paris. The provincial woman, inferior in herself, is also inferior through her husband. How is she to live happy under this crushing twofold consciousness?

But there is a third and terrible element besides her congenital and conjugal inferiority which contributes to make the figure arid and gloomy; to reduce it, narrow it, distort it fatally. Is not one of the most flattering unctions a woman can lay to her soul the assurance of being something in the existence of a superior man, chosen by herself, wittingly, as if to have some revenge on marriage, wherein her tastes were so little consulted? But if in the country the husbands are inferior beings, the bachelors are no less so. When a provincial wife commits her "little sin," she falls in love with some so-called handsome native, some indigenous dandy, a youth who wears gloves and is supposed to ride well; but she knows at the bottom of her soul that her fancy is in pursuit of the commonplace, more or less well dressed. Dinah was preserved from this danger by the idea impressed upon her of her own superiority. Even if she had not been as carefully guarded in her early married life as she was by her mother, whose presence never weighed upon her till the day when she wanted to be rid of it, her pride, and her high sense of her own destinies, would have protected her. Flattered as she was to find herself surrounded by admirers, she saw no lover among them. No man here realized the poetical ideal which she and Anna Grossetete had been wont to sketch.

-- Honoré de Balzac, La Muse du département (trans. James Waring)

The "Scènes de la vie de province" portion of Balzac's La Comédie Humaine has offered no disappointments yet. The pettiness of provincial life is expressed in the characters' often vicious obsession with inheritance, which keeps poor Pierrette under the thumb of her relatives in Pierrette, ruins the life of a small-town priest in Le Curé de Tours (a short, but especially brilliant portrait of life around the Cathedral of Tours), and fills the early life of the gifted painter Joseph Bridau (a mixture of actual artists Xavier Sigalon and Eugène Delacroix) with misery in La Rabouilleuse.

The portrait of Dinah de La Baudraye (née Piédefer) in The Muse of the Department, including the excerpt shown above, is of an intelligent woman trapped in a bad marriage, whose talent is largely wasted on her surroundings. Balzac's work is so striking because of its brutal honesty, and that quality comes across here in Dinah, thought to be a thinly veiled portrait of Caroline Marbouty, a writer who had an affair with Balzac. During their trip to Italy together, Balzac ordered Marbouty to dress as a boy so she could masquerade as his page. The ruse worked for the most part, but Marbouty was none too happy to see herself portrayed in this novel as a sort of second-rate George Sand (who was herself the inspiration for the writer character Félicité des Touches in Béatrix).

Happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers!

À mon chevet: 'Eugénie Grandet'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

Monsieur Grandet thus obtained that modern title of nobility which our mania for equality can never rub out. He became the most imposing personage in the arrondissement. He worked a hundred acres of vineyard, which in fruitful years yielded seven or eight hundred hogsheads of wine. He owned thirteen farms, an old abbey, whose windows and arches he had walled up for the sake of economy -- a measure which preserved them -- also a hundred and twenty-seven acres of meadow-land, where three thousand poplars, planted in 1793, grew and flourished; and finally, the house in which he lived. Such was his visible estate; as to his other property, only two persons could give even a vague guess at its value: one was Monsieur Cruchot, a notary employed in the usurious investments of Monsieur Grandet; the other was Monsieur des Grassins, the richest banker in Saumur, in whose profits Grandet had a certain covenanted and secret share.

Although old Cruchot and Monsieur des Grassins were both gifted with the deep discretion which wealth and trust beget in the provinces, they publicly testified so much respect to Monsieur Grandet that observers estimated the amount of his property by the obsequious attention which they bestowed upon him. In all Saumur there was no one not persuaded that Monsieur Grandet had a private treasure, some hiding-place full of louis, where he nightly took ineffable delight in gazing upon great masses of gold. Avaricious people gathered proof of this when they looked at the eyes of the good man, to which the yellow metal seemed to have conveyed its tints. The glance of a man accustomed to draw enormous interest from his capital acquires, like that of the libertine, the gambler, or the sycophant, certain indefinable habits -- furtive, eager, mysterious movements, which never escape the notice of his co-religionists. This secret language is in a certain way the freemasonry of the passions. Monsieur Grandet inspired the respectful esteem due to one who owed no man anything, who, skillful cooper and experienced wine-grower that he was, guessed with the precision of an astronomer whether he ought to manufacture a thousand puncheons for his vintage, or only five hundred, who never failed in any speculation, and always had casks for sale when casks were worth more than the commodity that filled them, who could store his whole vintage in his cellars and bide his time to put the puncheons on the market at two hundred francs, when the little proprietors had been forced to sell theirs for five louis. His famous vintage of 1811, judiciously stored and slowly disposed of, brought him in more than two hundred and forty thousand francs.

Financially speaking, Monsieur Grandet was something between a tiger and a boa-constrictor. He could crouch and lie low, watch his prey a long while, spring upon it, open his jaws, swallow a mass of louis, and then rest tranquilly like a snake in process of digestion, impassible, methodical, and cold. No one saw him pass without a feeling of admiration mingled with respect and fear; had not every man in Saumur felt the rending of those polished steel claws? For this one, Maitre Cruchot had procured the money required for the purchase of a domain, but at eleven per cent. For that one, Monsieur des Grassins discounted bills of exchange, but at a frightful deduction of interest. Few days ever passed that Monsieur Grandet's name was not mentioned either in the markets or in social conversations at the evening gatherings. To some the fortune of the old wine-grower was an object of patriotic pride. More than one merchant, more than one innkeeper, said to strangers with a certain complacency: "Monsieur, we have two or three millionaire establishments; but as for Monsieur Grandet, he does not himself know how much he is worth." [...]

If some Parisian mentioned Rothschild or Monsieur Lafitte, the people of Saumur asked if he were as rich as Monsieur Grandet. When the Parisian, with a smile, tossed them a disdainful affirmative, they looked at each other and shook their heads with an incredulous air. So large a fortune covered with a golden mantle all the actions of this man. If in early days some peculiarities of his life gave occasion for laughter or ridicule, laughter and ridicule had long since died away. His least important actions had the authority of results repeatedly shown. His speech, his clothing, his gestures, the blinking of his eyes, were law to the country-side, where every one, after studying him as a naturalist studies the result of instinct in the lower animals, had come to understand the deep mute wisdom of his slightest actions.

"It will be a hard winter," said one; "Père Grandet has put on his fur gloves."

"Père Grandet is buying quantities of staves; there will be plenty of wine this year."

-- Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet (trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley)

This is one of Balzac's most celebrated novels, which I had come across before, along with Le Père Goriot, in a French literature course. I am still early on in the "Scènes de la vie de province" portion of La Comédie Humaine, but this book managed to rival Ursule Mirouet, which comes directly before it, in my admiration. Balzac chose the title of his collection by analogy to Dante's Divine Comedy, in the sense that all of the sins and vices of humankind are revealed to the reader not on the stage of a visionary afterlife, but right here in our own world. The vice on display in Eugénie Grandet is avarice, which governs every action of Eugénie's father, to the point that it almost makes him destroy his own daughter. He reminds me in many ways of a family friend I grew up with in provincial Michigan, who in spite of being rather wealthy would keep his house so cold in the winter that we had to sleep in hats and scarves there.

À mon chevet: 'Ursule Mirouet'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

The night of her first communion, when Ursula came into the salon where her godfather was sitting alone, she put the backgammon board before him.

"Whose throw shall it be?" she asked.

"Ursula," said the doctor, "isn't it a sin to make fun of your godfather the day of your first communion?"

"I am not making fun of you," she said, sitting down. "I want to give you some pleasure--you who are always on the look-out for mine. When Monsieur Chaperon was pleased with me he gave me a lesson in backgammon, and he has given me so many that now I am quite strong enough to beat you--you shall not deprive yourself any longer for me. I have conquered all difficulties, and now I like the noise of the game."

Ursula won. The abbé had slipped in to enjoy his triumph. The next day Minoret, who had always refused to let Ursula learn music, sent to Paris for a piano, made arrangements at Fontainebleau for a teacher, and submitted to the annoyance that her constant practicing was to him. One of poor Jordy's predictions was fulfilled -- the girl became an excellent musician. The doctor, proud of her talent, had lately sent to Paris for a master, an old German named Schmucke, a distinguished professor who came once a week; the doctor willingly paying for an art which he had formerly declared to be useless in a household. Unbelievers do not like music--a celestial language, developed by Catholicism, which has taken the names of the seven notes from one of the church hymns; every note being the first syllable of the seven first lines in the hymn to Saint John.

The impression produced on the doctor by Ursula's first communion though keen was not lasting. The calm and sweet contentment which prayer and the exercise of resolution produced in that young soul had not their due influence upon him. Having no reasons for remorse or repentance himself, he enjoyed a serene peace. Doing his own benefactions without hope of a celestial harvest, he thought himself on a nobler plane than religious men whom he always accused for making, as he called it, terms with God.

-- Honoré de Balzac, Ursule Mirouet (trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley)

Count me now among the faithful admirers of Honoré de Balzac, like the young Antoine Doinel in Les 400 coups (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, but really a stand-in for François Truffaut), who reaches the end of Balzac's La Recherche de l'absolu, lights a candle in his homemade shrine to the author, and nearly burns down his family's apartment. I have completed the section of La Comédie Humaine devoted to "Scènes de la vie privée" (Scenes of private life), having devoured all of its stories and novels. Although I did not post a quote from it, I especially enjoyed Mémoires de deux Jeunes Mariées (Memoirs of Two Brides), an epistolary novel that follows two young women who leave a convent school to return to the world of marriage and family.

The novel excerpted here is the first part of "Scènes de la vie de province" (Scenes from provincial life), and it is a vicious portrait of the pettiness of small-town people, in this case in the village of Nemours, in the Seine-et-Marne. One of the stranger plot details is the conversion of Ursule's godfather and protector, Dr. Minoret. Balzac, who was a staunch Catholic apologist, makes the old atheist a most sympathetic character, who is ultimately won over to belief by the experience of seeing a demonstration of supernatural awareness by a woman under a Swedenborgian's hypnosis. It is a truly odd thing for Balzac to treat seriously, and related phenomena occur throughout the book. I much prefer the doctor's scientific atheism, opposed to his ward studying music because of its Catholic associations. I would rather believe that it was music that converted him.

À mon chevet: 'Albert Savarus'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

When the song was ended Rodolphe could make his way to the Prince, who graciously led him to his wife. Rodolphe went through the ceremonial of a formal introduction to Princess and Prince Colonna, and to Francesca. When this was over, the Princess had to take part in the famous quartette, Mi manca la voce, which was sung by her with Tinti, the famous Genovese tenor, and with a well-known Italian Prince then in exile, whose voice, if he had not been a Prince, would have made him one of the Princes of Art.

"Take that seat," said Francesca to Rodolphe, pointing to her own chair. "Oime! I think there is some mistake in my name; I have for the last minute been Princess Rodolphini."

It was said with the artless grace which revived, in this avowal hidden beneath a jest, the happy days at Gersau. Rodolphe reveled in the exquisite sensation of listening to the voice of the woman he adored, while sitting so close to her that one cheek was almost touched by the stuff of her dress and the gauze of her scarf. But when, at such a moment, Mi manca la voce is being sung, and by the finest voices in Italy, it is easy to understand what it was that brought the tears to Rodolphe's eyes.

In love, as perhaps in all else, there are certain circumstances, trivial in themselves, but the outcome of a thousand little previous incidents, of which the importance is immense, as an epitome of the past and as a link with the future. A hundred times already we have felt the preciousness of the one we love; but a trifle -- the perfect touch of two souls united during a walk perhaps by a single word, by some unlooked-for proof of affection -- will carry the feeling to its supremest pitch. In short, to express this truth by an image which has been pre-eminently successful from the earliest ages of the world, there are in a long chain points of attachment needed where the cohesion is stronger than in the intermediate loops of rings. This recognition between Rodolphe and Francesca, at this party, in the face of the world, was one of those intense moments which join the future to the past, and rivet a real attachment more deeply in the heart. It was perhaps of these incidental rivets that Bossuet spoke when he compared to them the rarity of happy moments in our lives -- he who had such a living and secret experience of love.

-- Honoré de Balzac, Albert Savarus (trans. Ellen Marriage)

I am back to working my way through Balzac's La Comédie Humaine. This longer novel is a complex narrative, involving a young woman who wants to meet the mysterious lawyer who has moved into her small provincial town. Details of the mystery are unraveled by way of a short story and letters embedded in the novel, which reveal the secret love that is described in this passage. The quartet in question is from Rossini's Mosè in Egitto, embedded in the video below.

À mon chevet: 'Une fille d'Ève'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

On the gloom of this life one sole figure of a man, that of a music-master, stood vigorously forth. The confessors had decided that music was a Christian art, born of the Catholic Church and developed within her. The two Maries were therefore permitted to study music. A spinster in spectacles, who taught singing and the piano in a neighboring convent, wearied them with exercises; but when the eldest girl was ten years old, the Comte de Granville insisted on the importance of giving her a master. Madame de Granville gave all the value of conjugal obedience to this needed concession,--it is part of a dévote's character to make a merit of doing her duty.

The master was a Catholic German; one of those men born old, who seem all their lives fifty years of age, even at eighty. And yet, his brown, sunken, wrinkled face still kept something infantile and artless in its dark creases. The blue of innocence was in his eyes, and a gay smile of springtide abode upon his lips. His iron-gray hair, falling naturally like that of the Christ in art, added to his ecstatic air a certain solemnity which was absolutely deceptive as to his real nature; for he was capable of committing any silliness with the most exemplary gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope, to which he paid not the slightest attention, for his eyes looked too high among the clouds to concern themselves with such materialities. This great unknown artist belonged to the kindly class of the self-forgetting, who give their time and their soul to others, just as they leave their gloves on every table and their umbrella at all doors. His hands were of the kind that are dirty as soon as washed. In short, his old body, badly poised on its knotted old legs, proving to what degree a man can make it the mere accessory of his soul, belonged to those strange creations which have been properly depicted only by a German,--by Hoffman, the poet of that which seems not to exist but yet has life.

Such was Schmucke, formerly chapel-master to the Margrave of Anspach; a musical genius, who was now examined by a council of dévotes, and asked if he kept the fasts. The master was much inclined to answer, "Look at me!" but how could he venture to joke with pious dowagers and Jansenist confessors? This apocryphal old fellow held such a place in the lives of the two Maries, they felt such friendship for the grand and simple-minded artist, who was happy and contented in the mere comprehension of his art, that after their marriage, they each gave him an annuity of three hundred francs a year,--a sum which sufficed to pay for his lodging, beer, pipes, and clothes. Six hundred francs a year and his lessons put him in Eden. Schmucke had never found courage to confide his poverty and his aspirations to any but these two adorable young girls, whose hearts were blooming beneath the snow of maternal rigor and the ice of devotion. This fact explains Schmucke and the girlhood of the two Maries.

No one knew then, or later, what abbé or pious spinster had discovered the old German then vaguely wandering about Paris, but as soon as mothers of families learned that the Comtesse de Granville had found a music-master for her daughters, they all inquired for his name and address. Before long, Schmucke had thirty pupils in the Marais. This tardy success was manifested by steel buckles to his shoes, which were lined with horse-hair soles, and by a more frequent change of linen. His artless gaiety, long suppressed by noble and decent poverty, reappeared. He gave vent to witty little remarks and flowery speeches in his German-Gallic patois, very observing and very quaint and said with an air which disarmed ridicule. But he was so pleased to bring a laugh to the lips of his two pupils, whose dismal life his sympathy had penetrated, that he would gladly have made himself willfully ridiculous had he failed in being so by nature.

According to one of the nobler ideas of religious education, the young girls always accompanied their master respectfully to the door. There they would make him a few kind speeches, glad to do anything to give him pleasure. Poor things! all they could do was to show him their womanhood. Until their marriage, music was to them another life within their lives, just as, they say, a Russian peasant takes his dreams for reality and his actual life for a troubled sleep. With the instinct of protecting their souls against the pettiness that threatened to overwhelm them, against the all-pervading asceticism of their home, they flung themselves into the difficulties of the musical art, and spent themselves upon it. Melody, harmony, and composition, three daughters of heaven, whose choir was led by an old Catholic faun drunk with music, were to these poor girls the compensation of their trials; they made them, as it were, a rampart against their daily lives. Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Haydn, and certain secondary geniuses, developed in their souls a passionate emotion which never passed beyond the chaste enclosure of their breasts, though it permeated that other creation through which, in spirit, they winged their flight. When they had executed some great work in a manner that their master declared was almost faultless, they embraced each other in ecstasy and the old man called them his Saint Cecilias.

-- Honoré de Balzac, A Daughter of Eve (translation by Katharine Prescott Wormeley)

Balzac filled La Comédie Humaine with so many endearing small characters. The childhood of "the two Maries," the two daughters of the Comte de Granville, Marie-Angélique and Marie-Eugénie, is kept dreary and devoid of all worldly influence by their religiously zealous mother. Only the less than imposing figure of their music teacher, Wilhelm Schmucke, allows one ray of light, listening to and performing music, into their lives. Although the girls remain devoted to Schmucke, his greatest concern in life is his friend and roommate, Sylvain Pons, who loves music, fine food, and art collecting, the last of those passions being the focus of another Balzac book, Le Cousin Pons. Balzac makes quite clear the nature of the two men's relationship, referring to them as living like a married couple. Pons even manages to leave his wealth and extensive art collection to Schmucke, and eventually the two friends are buried next to each other in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, where Balzac himself is buried.

À mon chevet: 'La femme de trente ans'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

Between the Barrière d'Italie and the Barrière de la Santé, along the boulevard which leads to the Jardin des Plantes, you have a view of Paris fit to send an artist or the tourist, the most blasé in matters of landscape, into ecstasies. Reach the slightly higher ground where the line of boulevard, shaded by tall, thick-spreading trees, curves with the grace of some green and silent forest avenue, and you see spread out at your feet a deep valley populous with factories looking almost countrified among green trees and the brown streams of the Bièvre or the Gobelins.

On the opposite slope, beneath some thousands of roofs packed close together like heads in a crowd, lurks the squalor of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. The imposing cupola of the Pantheon, and the grim melancholy dome of the Val-de-Grâce, tower proudly up above a whole town in itself, built amphitheater-wise; every tier being grotesquely represented by a crooked line of street, so that the two public monuments look like a huge pair of giants dwarfing into insignificance the poor little houses and the tallest poplars in the valley. To your left behold the observatory, the daylight, pouring athwart its windows and galleries, producing such fantastical strange effects that the building looks like a black spectral skeleton. Further yet in the distance rises the elegant lantern tower of the Invalides, soaring up between the bluish pile of the Luxembourg and the gray spires of Saint-Sulpice. From this standpoint the lines of the architecture are blended with green leaves and gray shadows, and change every moment with every aspect of the heavens, every alteration of light or color in the sky. Afar, the skyey spaces themselves seem to be full of buildings; near, wind the serpentine curves of waving trees and green footpaths.

Away to your right, through a great gap in this singular landscape, you see the canal Saint-Martin, a long pale stripe with its edging of reddish stone quays and fringes of lime avenue. The long rows of buildings beside it, in genuine Roman style, are the public granaries.

Beyond, again, on the very last plane of all, see the smoke-dimmed slopes of Belleville covered with houses and windmills, which blend their freaks of outline with the chance effects of cloud. And still, between that horizon, vague as some childish recollection, and the serried range of roofs in the valley, a whole city lies out of sight: a huge city, engulfed, as it were, in a vast hollow between the pinnacles of the Hôpital de la Pitié and the ridge line of the Cimetière de l'Est, between suffering on the one hand and death on the other; a city sending up a smothered roar like Ocean grumbling at the foot of a cliff, as if to let you know that "I am here!"

When the sunlight pours like a flood over this strip of Paris, purifying and etherealizing the outlines, kindling answering lights here and there in the window panes, brightening the red tiles, flaming about the golden crosses, whitening walls and transforming the atmosphere into a gauzy veil, calling up rich contrasts of light and fantastic shadow; when the sky is blue and earth quivers in the heat, and the bells are pealing, then you shall see one of the eloquent fairy scenes which stamp themselves for ever on the imagination, a scene that shall find as fanatical worshipers as the wondrous views of Naples and Byzantium or the isles of Florida. Nothing is wanting to complete the harmony, the murmur of the world of men and the idyllic quiet of solitude, the voices of a million human creatures and the voice of God. There lies a whole capital beneath the peaceful cypresses of Père-Lachaise.

-- Honoré de Balzac, The Woman of Thirty Years (translation by Ellen Marriage)

It's back to Balzac's La Comédie Humaine after a pause to read the third volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. Few writers are so gifted at the evocation of the physical: sights, colors, lines, smells, sounds. This is one of the most vivid portraits of the beautiful city of Paris, as one would have taken it in from the Place de l'Italie in the 13th arrondissement in the early 19th century, one that combines the mundane details with the spiritual heights of the place: "the murmur of the world of men and the idyllic quiet of solitude." It is also a skyline of Paris without either of the two most visible structures that now dominate it: the Tour Eiffel and the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur, neither of which would be built for a half-century.

À mon chevet: 'Modeste Mignon'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

'For the time being we are, and we can only be, two friends. Why seek an unseen friend? you ask. Your person may be unknown to me, but your mind, your heart I know; they please me, and I feel an infinitude of thoughts within my soul which need a man of genius for their confidant. I do not wish the poem of my heart to be wasted; i would have it known to you as it is to God. What a precious thing is a true comrade, one to whom we can tell all! You will surely not reject the unpublished leaflets of a young girl's thoughts when they fly to you like the pretty insects fluttering to the sun? I am sure you have never before met with this good fortune of the soul -- the honest confidences of an honest girl. Listen to her prattle; accept the music that she sings to you in her own heart. Later, if our souls are sisters, if our characters warrant the attempt, a white-haired old serving-man shall await you by the wayside and lead you to the cottage, the villa, the castle, the palace -- I don't know yet what sort of bower it will be, nor what its color, nor whether this conclusion will ever be possible; but you will admit, will you not? that it is poetic, and that Mademoiselle d'Este has a complying disposition. Has she not left you free? Has she gone with jealous feet to watch you in the salons of Paris? Has she imposed upon you the labors of some high emprise, such as paladins sought voluntarily in the olden time? No, she asks a perfectly spiritual and mystic alliance. Come to me when you are unhappy, wounded, weary. Tell me all, hide nothing; I have balms for all your ills. I am twenty years of age, dear friend, but I have the sense of fifty, and unfortunately I have known through the experience of another all the horrors and delights of love. I know what baseness the human heart can contain, what infamy; yet I myself am an honest girl. No, I have no illusions; but I have something better, something real -- I have beliefs and a religion. See! I open the ball of our confidences.'

-- Honoré de Balzac, Modeste Mignon (translation by Katharine Prescott Wormeley)

I am still wading through the sea of words in Balzac's La Comédie humaine. It is a long haul, but I am nearing the end of the Scènes de la vie privée section with this short novel. Balzac turns here to a quasi-epistolary structure, since a good part of the story consists of an intense and poetic correspondence between a young girl in Le Havre named Modeste Mignon, who writes under a pseudonym to keep her identity hidden, and someone she thinks is her favorite author, a poet who lives in Paris, but who is actually the poet's young secretary. The girl's mother, who is blind, is convinced that her daughter is carrying on a love affair, which the other members of the family and close friends try unsuccessfully to discover. They have no idea that the treasured lovers' meetings are entirely literary, but no less romantic.

À mon chevet: 'Béatrix'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

If this ancient dwelling attracts your imagination, you may perhaps ask yourself why such miracles of art are not renewed in the present day. Because to-day mansions are sold, pulled down, and the ground they stood on turned into streets. No one can be sure that the next generation will possess the paternal dwelling; homes are no more than inns; whereas in former times when a dwelling was built men worked, or thought they worked, for a family in perpetuity. Hence the grandeur of these houses. Faith in self, as well as faith in God, did prodigies.

As for the arrangement of the upper rooms they may be imagined after this description of the ground-floor, and after reading an account of the manners, customs, and physiognomy of the family. For the last fifty years the du Guaisnics have received their friends in the two rooms just described, in which, as in the court-yard and the external accessories of the building, the spirit, grace, and candor of the old and noble Brittany still survives. Without the topography and description of the town, and without this minute depicting of the house, the surprising figures of the family might be less understood. Therefore the frames have preceded the portraits. Every one is aware that things influence beings. There are public buildings whose effect is visible upon the persons living in their neighborhood. It would be difficult indeed to be irreligious in the shadow of a cathedral like that of Bourges. When the soul is everywhere reminded of its destiny by surrounding images, it is less easy to fail of it. Such was the thought of our immediate grandfathers, abandoned by a generation which was soon to have no signs and no distinctions, and whose manners and morals were to change every decade. If you do not now expect to find the Baron du Guaisnic sword in hand, all here written would be falsehood.

-- Honoré de Balzac, Béatrix (translation by Katharine Prescott Wormeley)

Balzac's La Comédie humaine has become an obsession of mine this summer, as it is for lots of people. I have nearly finished the Scènes de la vie privée section, most of which is bite-size short stories and novellas, perfect for episodic summer reading. Béatrix is one of the full-length novels in the collection, which begins with a memorable description of the Breton village of Guérande. The speck of a town has, at its center, a noble house that time forgot, which strikes me as possibly having inspired Alain-Fournier's description of Les Sablonnières in Le Grand Meaulnes.

À mon chevet: 'La Comédie humaine'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

"Before we part tonight, Monsieur Hermann is going to tell us another one of those chilling German stories." The announcement came from a pale, blond young woman who had doubtless read the stories of Hoffmann and Walter Scott. She was the banker's only child, a ravishing creature who was putting the final touches to her education at the Gymnase and adored the plays that theater presented.

The guests were in the contented state of languor and quiet that results from an exquisite meal, when we have demanded a little too much of our digestive capacities. Leaning back in their chairs, wrists and fingers resting lightly upon the table's edge, a few guests played lazily with the gilded blades of their knives. When a dinner reaches that lull some people will work over a pear seed, others roll a pinch of bread between thumb and index finger, lovers shape clumsy letters out of fruit scraps, the miserly count their fruit pits and line them up on their plates the way a theater director arranges his extras at the rear of the stage. These small gastronomic felicities go unremarked by Brillat-Savarin, an otherwise observant writer. The serving staff had disappeared. The dessert table looked like a squadron after the battle, all dismembered, plundered, wilted. Platters lay scattered over the table despite the hostess's determined efforts to set them back in order. A few people stared at some prints of Switzerland lined up on the gray walls of the dining room. No one was irritable; we have never known anyone to remain unhappy while digesting a good meal. We enjoy lingering in a becalmed state, a kind of midpoint between the reverie of a thinker and the contentment of a cud-chewing animal, a state that should be termed the physical melancholy of gastronomy.

Thus the guests turned happily toward the good German, all of them delighted to have a tale to listen to, even a dull one. For during that benign interval, a storyteller's voice always sounds delicious to our sated senses; it promotes their passive contentment. As an observer of scenes, I sat admiring these faces bright with smiles, lit by the candles and flushed dark by good food; their various expressions produced some piquant effects, seen through the candlesticks and porcelain baskets, the fruits and the crystal.

-- Honoré de Balzac, The Red Inn (translation by Linda Asher)

One of my goals for this summer's reading was to finish more (or all) of Balzac's La Comédie humaine, the sprawling, interconnected collection of novels, novellas, and short stories. This new translation of several longer stories, by Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump, published this year by the New York Review of Books, has turned out to be a delightful way to start. This excerpt stands out this week, as I am celebrating a childhood friend's birthday over several excellent meals with him and other friends. Balzac was a gastronome of the highest order, and many of his stories have the feel of, or are even presented literally in the context of, tales told at the end of such meals. As he wrote in a story also in this collection, Another Study of Womankind, "The body must be secure and at ease before we can tell a good tale. The best narratives are spun at a certain hour -- look at all of us sitting here at this table! No one has ever told a good story on his feet nor with an empty stomach."

Images from Balzac

Also on Ionarts: How Much Do You Love Balzac? (February 11, 2004)

La Maison de Balzac is one of the cooler small museums of Paris, and they have developed a well-designed and rather useful Web site. This includes an online version of the first edition of Balzac's vast fictional project, La Comédie humaine, and the vast database of all the words of those books, put together by Kazuo Kiriu in Japan, as mentioned here at Ionarts last year. Balzac lived in an apartment in a beautiful house in the village of Passy, now incorporated into the 16th arrondissement of Paris. Now one of the city's literary museums, it has good things regularly displayed and interesting exhibits, too. An article by Sophie Haubois (Balzac producteur d'images, December 22) for Le Figaro reviews the latest one. De la plume à l'écran. Balzac en 3D is an exhibit of the many illustrations found in editions of Balzac's novels.

For many years film adaptations of novels in series have been multiplying: The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter... Before that it was Shakespeare's plays, the adventures of Jules Verne, and especially the immense study of morals that is Balzac's La Comédie humaine, with no fewer than 170 adaptations. [...]

The text of Balzac is unique. It is read by an actor and remains the only reference point for the visitor confronted by several screens showing excerpts from films adapted from one novel or another. Five versions of Eugénie Grandet are side by side, with as many different portrayals of the girl. Transferred to the screen, the words clothe all of the directors' realities, and the imaginary world of each one corresponds in a unique way to the writer's creativity.

It sounds worth a visit. The exhibit continues through February 19.

How Much Do You Love Balzac?

In an article (Honoré de Balzac en version numérique [Digital edition of Honoré de Balzac], February 10) in Le Figaro, Marie-Douce Albert describes what one fan of Balzac's novels has done (my translation):

This is one thing Balzac could not have imagined. That there could exist a devoted Japanese reader of La Comédie Humaine [in English, The Human Comedy]. A Japanese fan, so full of fervor that one day he would have the idea of listing all the words of his favorite author. This unusual person really and truly exists. Now retired from the Saitama University, in the Tokyo metropolitan area, Kazuo Kiriu was a professor of French literature for 32 years, and more than 20 years ago he began digitalizing the works of Balzac in order to study the vocabulary used by the writer in La Comédie Humaine, as well as in his first novels and in his letters to Mme. Hanska.

From this word hunt, he completed an alphabetical list which, from "abîmer" to "Zuzino," brings together all the nouns, proper and otherwise, found in the writer's work. This probably gave the professor a precise understanding of the word "work," which Balzac used no fewer than 5,542 times in La Comédie Humaine. And the results of his labor are furthermore free for all to use, on the Web site of the Maison de Balzac. It's a crazy undertaking, as this 69-year-old gentleman admits. To understand its origin, we have to go back to Japan after World War II and to an adolescent looking for "a third way" between the destruction of traditional Japanese ideals and the refusal of the American model. The young man threw himself into European literature: Dickens, Heine, Gide. Up to the day when his high school librarian, "with whom I was perhaps a little in love," he admits, suggested he read Le lys dans la vallée [in English, The Lily of the Valley]. From the emotion provoked by a "white shoulder," he made the work his whole life. He learned French and became a professor. Then he undertook this research that no one else, in seems, has dared. All this, "because I do not read Balzac very well," claims the former professor, who in perfect French asks his interlocutor to correct his mistakes.

"That is extreme modesty," say Nicole Mozet and Isabelle Tournier, of the Groupe international de recherches balzaciennes (Girb) [International Group of Balzac Studies]. "We also had need of this index. It offers extremely fast and precious information, on big things as well as the smallest." Thanks to the Maison de Balzac Web site, designed by Claire Scamaroni, you can worry about the comings and goings of Lucien de Rubempré in the different volumes, wonder about the absence of the word "syphilis" (which was after all one of the great ills of the period), or undertake a gigantic study of urbanism in Balzac by tracing the squares, the avenues, the bridges.

You can read Mme. Mozet's official announcement of Mr. Kiriu's work here. You should also check out Balzac Text Data Mining: How to pick apart Balzac's Comedie Humaine with a computer, which shows you how to use Python to analyze Balzac. In all this furor about Balzac, I am reminded of François Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), in which young Antoine Doinel, the director's alter ego, nearly burns down his parents' apartment because he lights a candle in a homemade shrine to his favorite writer, Honoré de Balzac (image shown above).

Paris Reading Project

What started as a theme in my reading has become an obsession. This is a list of books, mostly fiction, set in the city of Paris, through which I am slowly making my way. If you have any ideas of books not on this list that need to be on it, especially examples of world literature with which I am probably not familiar, e-mail them to me (ionarts at gmail dot com) for inclusion.

Available from Amazon: André Breton, Nadja (1960) Daniel Pennac, The Fairy Gunmother (La fée carabine, 1987) Louis Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (1926) (see post on April 24, 2004) Edith Wharton, Custom of the Country (1913) Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926) Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964) F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934) Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932) Gertrude Stein, Paris France (1940)

In French:

• Œuvres de François Villon (1431–1463), edited by Clément Marot
  
• Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris, 1405-1449
  
• Alexandre Dumas père, The Man in the Iron Mask (1846)
  
• Alexandre Dumas père, The Count of Monte Cristo
  
• Alexandre Dumas père, The Three Musketeers
  
• Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux Camélias [Camille]
  
• Henri Mürger, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1847-49)
  
• Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (1861 ed. in French)
  
• Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
  
• Charles Baudelaire, Petits poèmes en prose (Spleen de Paris)
  
• Charles Baudelaire, Curiosités esthétiques: L'art romantique
  
• Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black)
  
• Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)
  
• Abbé Prévost (Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles), Manon Lescaut
  
• Honoré de Balzac, An Episode under the Terror
  
• Honoré de Balzac, Bureaucracy
  
• Honoré de Balzac, Catherine de Medici
  
• Honoré de Balzac, A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
  
• Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot
  
• Guy de Maupassant, La parure et autres contes parisiens
  
• Gérard de Nerval, Nuits d'octobre
  
• Gérard de Nerval, Promenades et souvenirs
  
• Gérard de Nerval, Les filles du feu
  
• Eugène Süe, Les Mystères de Paris
  
• Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century (1863)
  
• Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu
  
• Guillaume Apollinaire, Le flâneur des deux rives
  
• Françoise Sagan, Chagrin de Passage
  
• Marguerite Duras, La pluie d'été
  
• Daniel Pennac, The Scapegoat, Monsieur Malaussène, Passion Fruit, The Fairy Gunmother, Write to Kill, Comme un roman, translated by Ian Monk (see post from August 17, 2003)

In English:

• Memorandums of a Residence in France in the Winter of 1815-16
  
• Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
  
• Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (1837)
  
• George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
  
• James Fenimore Cooper, A Residence in France (1836)
  
• Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim's Progress (1869)
  
• Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)
  
• Henry James, The American (1877)
  
• Henry James, A Little Tour in France (1884)
  
• Henry James, Madame de Mauves (1874) (or Project Gutenberg text)
  
• Edith Wharton, Fighting France
  
• Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (1923)
  
• Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (c. 1765-1768)
  
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books: Victor Hugo's Romances
  
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies of Men and Books: François Villon, Student, Poet, and Housebreaker
  
• Sinclair Lewis, Dodsworth (1929)
  
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue
  
• Edgar Allan Poe, The Mystery of Marie Roget
  
• Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kiliminjaro (1938)
  
• Gore Vidal, The Judgment of Paris (1952)
  
• Mary McCarthy, Birds of America (1971)
  
• Irwin Shaw, Paris! Paris!
  
• Janet Flanner, Paris Journal (1972)
  
• Henry Miller, Under the Roofs of Paris (Opus Pistorum), essentially pornography for which Miller was paid $1/page and written when he was in need of money back in California
  
• Brassaï, Conversations With Picasso
  
• Brassaï, The Secret Paris of the '30s
  
• Brassaï, Paris By Night
  
• Wambly Bald, On the Left Bank 1929-1933
  
• Ned Rorem, The Paris Diary
  
• Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony
  
• Edmund White, The Married Man
  
• Mavis Gallant, Paris Diary (1992, published in The New Yorker, December 24/31, 2001)
  
• Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories
  
• Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon
  
• Paris in Mind, edited by Jennifer Lee, an anthology of 29 excerpts of novels, memoirs, and so on relating to American experiences in Paris
  
• Irene Nemirovsky, Suite française
  
• Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key
  
• Diane Johnson, Le Divorce (also Le Mariage and L'Affaire)

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)	Henry Miller, Quiet Days in Clichy (1940/56) (see post on December 27, 2004)	The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931–32)
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (1956)	A. J. Liebling, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962)	Edmund White, The Flaneur (2001)
Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris (1966)	Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (2000)