BALZAC’S PARIS : THE CITY AS HUMAN
COMEDY
By Eric Hazan (translated by David Fernbach)
Verso. 200 pages. £15.99. ISBN 978-1-83976-725-8
Reviewed by Jim Burns
It may seem strange, but it would be possible to read and enjoy this book
without ever having read a word of Balzac. The reason is simple. Eric Hazan
is such a well-informed and informative writer that he easily makes Paris,
as seen through Balzac’s eyes, come alive. His choice of excerpts from The
Human Comedy, Balzac’s work encompassing numerous novels and short stories,
is always judicious, and he backs them up with some relevant asides from
other nineteenth century French writers, including the poet and essayist
Baudelaire, and the novelist Eugène
What is important to note is that Balzac wasn’t a stroller of the
boulevards, pausing and observing and reflecting on what he has seen:
“Unlike Baudelaire, Apollinaire, or
Breton he had no time to ‘lose himself in the crowd’. But, as he walked
through the city in his big boots, running between his printers, publishers,
coffee merchants, mistresses, and friends, he would probably stop for a
moment, struck by a detail that his photographic memory faithfully fixed”.
After some shaky years in various schools Balzac undertook law studies,
leading, it was hoped, to membership of a profession advocated by his father
: “But the law bored him. What he wanted was to become a writer and live by
his pen. His father agreed to pay him a small allowance, just long enough
for him to prove himself”. And
so, in the classic bohemian manner, he moved into a garret where he worked
nights while feeding his “passion for knowledge” in a nearby library. Hazan
says he recorded this experience in
The Wild Ass’s Skin, where Raphael recalls that “Nothing could be more
sordid than this attic, with its dirty yellow walls which smelt of poverty
and seemed to await a needy scholar”.
There were business involvements, as publisher and printer, all of which
failed and left Balzac deeply in debt. He needed to earn money from writing,
and under a variety of pseudonyms he contributed to newspapers and journals
with titles like Le Voleur and
La Silhouette.
Some of them were short-lived and Hazan remarks that “Often anonymous
or signed with fancy names, Balzac’s contributions to these various
publications form a tangled web from which a few outstanding texts emerge”.
I think if anyone wants to get an idea of what life was like for Balzac and
other struggling writers in Paris in the 1830s and 1840s they ought to read
Lost Illusions, and especially
the middle-section, “A Great Man in Embryo”, which is rich with details of
ambitious but improvident poets, some successful and more-often failed
journalists, shady publishers, and other types who wander in and out of
Balzac’s book. There is the “melancholic Lousteau, driven from literature to
journalism by hunger”. And when
the canny publisher Doguereau
calls on Lucien to make an offer to publish his novel,
The Archer of Charles the Ninth.
he reduces the fee he initially had in mind when he sees what Lucien’s
circumstances are. His reasoning is that Lucien is clearly hard-up, but
doesn’t require a great deal to get by, so why pay him too much?
It isn’t only people that Balzac describes and in
Old Man Goriot there is a
reference to “that illustrious valley of endlessly crumbling stucco and
black, mud-clogged gutters”. Hazan quotes from one of Balzac’s
contemporaries on the subject of traversing the streets of Paris, “defending
oneself from horse droppings and dripping roofs! Piles of mud, a slippery
roadway, greasy axles – what a lot of pitfalls to avoid”.
And he adds that “If mud was omnipresent in Paris at the time of
Balzac, it was because pavements were still rare....roads were rarely
asphalted and drainage was precarious”. He
also points to how “Gobseck, the master usurer in
The Human Comedy, confides to
Derville: ‘I like to leave mud on a rich man’s carpet; it is not petty
spite, I like to make them feel a touch of the claws of Necessity’
There is an indication of the difficulties Parisians encountered because of
the state of the streets in Colonel
Chabert. He is “lodging in the Faubourg
Saint-Marceau, Rue du Petit-Banquier, with an old quartermaster of the
Imperial Guard now a cowkeeper, named Vergniaud. Having reached the spot,
Derville was obliged to go on foot in search of his client, for the coachman
declined to drive along an unpaved street, where the ruts were rather too
deep for cab wheels”. There’s a further indication of the nature of the area
Balzac is describing when, in
A
Woman of Thirty, “the squalor of
the Faubourg Saint-Marceau” is referred to, “with thousands of roofs packed
close together like heads in a crowd”.
It’s interesting, I think, to note that, although Balzac documents the
appearance of the poverty-stricken areas of the city, he rarely, if ever,
provides detailed descriptions of the lives of the working-class
poor. Bohemian poverty is dealt with, and in
A Harlot High and Low, the depths
a courtesan out of favour could fall to. But when Hazan quotes a passage
about working-class life from Facino
Cane he makes it clear that it is an exception : “there is no other
example in The Human Comedy of a
striking scene in a working-class environment”. Balzac is unlikely to have
looked kindly on any suggestions of insurrection among the workers, and the
events of 1848, especially the violent June days, seem to have passed him
by. Balzac was not a radical and, Hazan says, “is often described as a
defender of throne and altar, and not without reason”. But his conservatism
caused him to speak out against “what Paris had become under Louis Philippe
- the reign of lawyers,
bankers, and journalists”. It’s worth having a look at Louis Chevalier’s
classic study Labouring Classes and
Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,
and especially the chapter headed “Bourgeois Opinion : Balzac”
for some informed comments on the novelist’s attitudes and opinions
regarding workers and criminals.
When dealing with the “lorettes” (taking their name from the church of
Notre-Dame-de- Lorette) Balzac in
A Man of Business says
that the word is “a euphemism invented to describe the status of a personage
, or a personage of a status, of which it is awkward to speak”. Hazan quotes
Baudelaire who claimed that an awareness of the word, and the type of female
it described, had been created by Gavarni, the fine French illustrator and
satirist who, in his day, was seen as equal to Daumier, though he’s probably
less well-known now. And Baudelaire was quick to point out that they were
not like the “kept woman”, the courtesans linked to rich men.
Balzac appears to have been inclined
to treat lorettes in a positive way. Hazan,
sums up his attitude : “For those they love, they are capable of
devotion, even self-sacrifice. In A
Daughter of Eve, the beautiful Florine lodges and feeds Raoul Nathan, a
specimen of journalistic bohemia. He is rarely at home, ‘on the third floor
of an ugly and narrow house, a poor enough lodging cold and bare’, in a
passage between Rue du Rempart and Rue Neuve des Mathurins (now Rue des
Mathurins)”.
Bohemia crops up often enough in Balzac, though it may have had different
meanings to what it later came to designate when it became romanticised, and
mostly related to the arts through works by Puccini and George du Maurier.
There is a marvellous sequence, The
Bohemians of Paris, by Daumier, created between 1840 and 1842 in which
he portrays various types he considers come into that category. They include
second-hand clothes dealers, actors, political refugees, claqueurs (who
drummed up trade at theatres, and were also
used to shout down rival acts), and cat catchers, who reputedly sold
the meat to restaurants as rabbit. Karl Marx, writing about 1848 in France,
also listed vagabonds, tinkers, and porters as inhabitants of bohemia,
though he tended to be dismissive of what he viewed as the
lumpen-proletariat. In T.J. Clark’s
Image of the People : Gustave Courbet
and the 1848 Revolution the list is added to so that it includes
organ-grinders, errand boys, ragpickers, and knife-grinders. This is not
Balzac’s bohemia. His story, A Prince
of Bohemia refers to bohemianism
finding ”its recruits among young men between twenty and thirty, all of them
men of genius in their way, little known, it is true, as yet, but sure of
recognition one day”. It’s the
bourgeois bohemianism of the boulevards that interests him.
Balzac, says Hazan, “left out whole sections, political and urban, of the
Paris of his time”. An example may be the academic world : “Law and
medicine, the disciplines that led to a profession at the time, are the only
higher studies mentioned in The Human
Comedy.....Nowhere, unless I am mistaken, is there any mention of the
famous lectures of Francois Guizot or Victor Cousin in the faculty of
letters, and the Sorbonne is just one topographical landmark among others.
The academic world is absent
from The Human Comedy – perhaps
it was not as important as it has since become”.
Balzac’s Paris
is a wonderful book to read and if, by chance, you haven’t read any Balzac
it’s sure to make you want to. Eric Hazan has the knack of combining his
comments on people and places in a way that pulls the reader into Balzac’s
world and makes it seem still relevant. The book has twenty pages of useful
notes, and some period street maps and illustrations.
.