Review: Lorraine Kreahling on Balzac
For years, in order to write, I would rent small rooms by the water, hoping in that way to summon in near silence the world I was trying to bring to life on the page. But then journalist friends based in Paris asked if I wanted to apartment-sit while they were away on assignment. Paris, with its historic, unswerving architectural beauty, and with its Parisians and their emphatic sense of aesthetics and form—everyone seemed to know what to wear, what to ask for at lunch, and how much affection to extend to an acquaintance with a peck on the cheek—this feeling that all of life is a part of an agreed-upon social fabric resting on order and beauty, turned out to be a better background for writing about the broken-apart world I had lived through.
This is when I discovered and began to fall in love with Balzac. More than any other French writer, Balzac understood the dynamic jigsaw puzzle of Paris, how there is a place for everything and everyone. Balzac used his own intimate experience of the French attention to beautiful objects and food and clothing, and social poise and awkwardness, to tell us who his characters are—where they belong in the social geography—frequently documenting their wily efforts to claw their way up Parisian society’s slippery slope.
As the grandson of a peasant farmer, né Balssa, whose son changed his surname to Balzac, and whose grandson, Honoré, added the faux aristocratic “de,” Balzac recognized the nuances of social climbing and ambition. Throughout his struggles as a journalist, poet, playwright, author, failed entrepreneur, and paramour to more than one duchess, he trained his near scientific eye and insatiable curiosity not just on those in the drawing room, but on the hat maker, the druggist, the fruitier, the keepers of the law and those who skillfully broke it.
Despite being a Catholic and royalist, nostalgically longing for the social hierarchy ensured by the “father king,” Balzac was an egalitarian as a creator. He wanted to tell the story of France through “the story of all of its inhabitants, to rival, in his words, the ‘civil registry,’” Peter Brooks tells us in his recent book Balzac’s Lives. Balzac was infatuated with the aristocracy, and his detailed portraits are both understanding and unsparing. But he also will take pages, as he does in Splendeurs et misères des courtisans, newly translated byRaymond N. MacKenzie as Lost Souls (last known as A Harlot High and Low), to describe why a prostitute is considered “the most beautiful woman in all of Paris” or to follow the dressing ritual of an undercover detective or aging suitor.
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MacKenzie’s translation works to retrieve the pacing and familiarity of a popular novel. I had forgotten the high suspense of Balzac’s effort to write a roman policier even as he tells the thoroughly modern story of a bizarre love triangle. Lost Souls opens at a grand masked ball where the prostitute Ester van Bogseck (né Gobseck) is disguised on the arm of society’s up-and-coming darling, Lucien Chardon de Rubempré. The two are stalked by Lucien’s protector, the escaped convict Jacque Collin, posing as a Spanish priest. Collin is financing and engineering Lucien’s re-emergence in French society—having scraped him out of destitution and near suicide at the end of Lost Illusions, the prequel to Lost Souls in the trilogy that began with Balzac’s best-known novel, Le Père Goriot.
MacKenzie published a translation of Lost Illusions last year, and his copious footnotes in both volumes will be particularly welcome for Balzac afficionados. Balzac’s endless name dropping and cataloguing of French culture—the offspring of his cluttered genius brain—can be distracting, even disruptive to the pulse of the narrative. But with MacKenzie to help, we can quickly learn who that sculptor was, what an eighteenth-century philosopher was known for, which Paris street or restaurant has disappeared, or that the new method of solitary confinement in prison Balzac condemns is imported from Pennsylvania. MacKenzie’s almost obsessive scholarship should not discourage first-time readers from this very approachable translation of what was in Balzac’s day his best-selling novel.
Lost Souls’ star-crossed lovers, Lucien and Ester, capture two of Balzac’s favorite themes: idealized love and borrowed money. Balzac is equally at home empathetically portraying Ester’s exploitation and willingness to sacrifice everything for Lucien and the brilliant, amoral strategies of Jacque Collin, a criminal mastermind and homosexual. It is with wonder if not admiration that he recounts Collin’s determination to advance Lucien, the object of his platonic desire.
Balzac created some 2,472 characters in ninety fictional works in a post-revolutionary France where it must have felt like the ground was constantly shifting. By 1830, when he was writing the books that would bring him international renown, the restored Bourbon King Charles X had been exiled to England, replaced by the “Citizen King,” Louis-Philippe d’Orleans. The once all-powerful landed gentry could no longer scorn the new money and influence emerging from the worlds of industry and finance. And it is this clash created by the needs of the noble folk with their politesse but emptying coffers to interact with the less polished nouveaux riches that sparks so many Balzac plots.
Balzac’s steady guiding hand in the midst of a crumbling social structure, where “gold was the new spirituality,” as one of his characters puts it, made him particularly good pandemic reading. He was able to hold all of French society in his imagination and render it as one giant brocade, so that the reader feels (and sees) how a thread pulled in a woeful second-hand clothing store might affect the marriage plans of a nobleman’s eldest daughter or a gay ex-convict could save a countess from madness with a purloined letter. If Balzac and his “human comedy” could find their way through social, economic, and political chaos, it made this reader feel like perhaps we could too.
In Brooks’ Balzac’s Lives, he charts the paths of nine of the Balzac’s best-known characters in and out of the novels that comprise the author’s enormous imagined universe, inviting us into “the inner world of Balzac.” This beautifully written book, alongside MacKenzie’s lively and thoroughly researched translation, offer a wonderful instance of erudition in the service of contemporary reading pleasure. Readers now have a timely opportunity to revisit the glamour and economic ruin of nineteenth-century Paris which Balzac weaves together. I am hoping MacKenzie takes on Goriot next and gives me an excuse to read his best-known trio anew from start to finish.
Lorraine Kreahling has written for The New York Times as well as The Daily Beast, New York Magazine, Vogue, Elle, Inward Light, and Parabola. She is completing a memoir, The Green Hotel, about recreating with geothermal heating and cooling an historic house destroyed by a propane explosion.
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