Balzac's Recurring Characters 9781487579661

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~ BALZAC'S RECURRING CHARACTERS

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Balzac's ~ •·{ Recurring }"· ~ Characters J

~~~ ANTHONY R. PUGH

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

© University of Toronto Press 1974 Toronto and Buffalo Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN

0-8020-5275-4

ISBN 978-1-4875-8078-0 (paper)

To Roger Pierrot, with respect and affection

In memory of Herbert Hunt To the memory of my father

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xvii INTRODUCTION xix ABBREVIATIONS

29.1 29.2 30.1 30.2 30.2a 30.2b 30.2c 30.2d 30.2e 30.2£ 3o.3 3o.4 3o.5 30.6 31.1 31.2 31.3 31.4 31.5 31 .6 31.7 31.8 32.1 32.2 32.3 32.4 3 2·5 32.5a 32.5b 32.5c 32.5d 32.6 32.6a

xxix

BEFORE LE PERE GORIOT 3 Le Dernier Chouan 5 Physiologie du Mariage 6 Introduction aux Memoires de Sanson 7 Scenes de la vie privee 7 La Vendetta 7 Les Dangers de l'Inconduite 8 Le Bal de Sceaux 9 Gloire et Malheur Io La Femme Vertueuse 11 La Paix du Menage 12 Etude de Femme 13 Adieu 13 Sarrasine 14 'Si j'etais riche! ! !' 14 L'Enfant Maudit 16 Les Deux Rencontres 16 Le Doigt de Dieu 17 La Peau de Chagrin 17 L'Auberge rouge 18 Le Rendez-Vous 19 Contes bruns 19 Maitre Cornelius 20 Contes drolatiques 21 Madame Firmiani 22 La Transaction 22 La Femme de trente ans 23 Scenes de la vie privee lll 24 Le Conseil: La Grande Breteche 24 LaBourse 25 La Vieille Fille ( 1832) 25 Les Celibataires 26 Scenes de la vie privee IV 27 Les Deux Rencontres (Fin): L'Expiation 28

viii

Contents

32 -7 32.8a 32.8b 32.9 33- 1 33.2 33.3 33.4 33.5 33.5a 33.5b 33.6 33.6a 33.6b 33.6c 34- 1 34.2 34.2a 34.2b 34.3 34.4 34.5 34.5a 34.5b 34.6 34.6a 34.6b 34.7 34.7a 34.7b

Notice Biographique sur Louis Lambert 29 La Femme abandonnee 30 La Grenadiere 31 Les Marana 31 Le Medecin de Campagne 33 L'Histoire des Treize: Ferragus 33 Ne touchez pas la Hache 34 Scenes de la vie de province 1: Eugenie Grandet 36 Contes philosophiques 37 Cesar Birotteau 37 Aventures administratives d'une idee heureuse 38 Scenes de la vie de province 11 38 Le Cabinet des Antiques (Prologue) 39 Les Celibataires 39 L'Illustre Gaudissart 40 Le Pretre Catholique 41 Scenes de la vie parisienne n, 111 41 Ne touchez pas la Hache 41 La Fille au yeux d'or 44 Cesar Birotteau 45 Les Chouans 46 Scenes de la vie privee III 4 7 La Fleur-des-Pois 47 Le Recherche de I' Absolu 48 Scenes de la vie privee IV: Meme Histoire 48 Souffrances inconnues 50 La Vallee du Torrent 50 Etudes philosophiques 51 La Peau de Chagrin 52 Un Drame au Bord de la Mer 52

34.8 34.8.A 34.8.B 34.8.C

Le Pere Goriot 5 7 Recurring characters before Le Pere Goriot 57 The Composition of Le Pere Goriot 73 Recurring Characters : First Reflections 82

*35 35· 1 35.1a 35.1b 35.1c 35.1d

9I Scenes de la vie parisienne 1v 94 La Fille aux yeux d'or 94 Profil de Marquise 94 Sarrasine 95 La Comtesse a deux maris 96

THE YEAR I 835

Contents

35.1e 35.2 35.2a 35.2b 35.3 35.4 35.5 35.5a 35.5b 35.5c 35.6 35.7 35.8a 35.8b 35.9 35.9a 35.9b 35.9c 35.10 35. 1oa 35.10b

ix

Madame Finniani 97 Scenes de la vie privee I 98 Le Bal de Sceaux 98 Gloire et Malheur 98 Le Pere Goriot 99 Melmoth reconcilie 99 L' Auberge rouge, U ne Messe en 1793, Comme sa Mere I oo L'Auberge rouge 101 Une Messe en 1793 101 Comme sa Mere 103 Le Grand Proprietaire 103 Lettre inedite de Louis Lambert 104 Scenes de la vie militaire 105 Scenes de la vie politique 105 Scenes de la vie parisienne I, Scenes de la vie privee II I 06 La Femme vertueuse 107 Le Papa Gobseck 107 La Paix du Menage 109 La Fleur-des-Pois, Le Lys clans la Vallee 110 La Fleur-des-Pois 11o Le Lys clans la Vallee 115 1836 125 La Messe de l' Athee I 26 Scenes de la vie privee 1v (Werdet) 127 L'lnterdiction 129 Facino Cane 133 Ecce homo 134 Les Heritiers Boirouge 134 Illusions perdues 136 La Perle brisee 141 La Vieille Fille 142 Un Grand Homme de Province a Paris 146

*36 36.1 36.2 36.3 36.4 36.5 36.6 36.7 36.8 36.9 36.10

THE YEAR

*37 37- 1 37.2 37.2a 37.2b 37.3 37.3a 37.3b

THE YEAR 1837 149 La Grande Breteche 151 Etudes philosophiques I 53 Les Martyrs ignores 153 Facino Cane 153 Massimilla Doni, Gambara 154 Massimilla Doni 155 Gambara 156

x

Contents

37.4 37.5 37.6

La Femme superieure 156 La Peau de Chagrin 160 Cesar Birotteau 162 1838 AND THE FIRST SIX MONTHS OF 1839 La Maison N ucingen 177 La Torpille 181 La Femme superieure 186 Qui a Terre a Guerre 186 Les Rivalites n Province 188 Le Cure de Village 193 Les Amours forces 194 Un Apprenti Grand Homme 195 Une Fille d'Eve 196 Le Cabinet des Antiques 204 Le Pere Goriot 206 Beatrix 207 Un Grand Homme de Province a Paris 21 I Une Fille d'Eve (Souverain): Balzac's Preface 217 Recurring Characters: Further Reflections 223

*38 38.1 38.2 38.3 38.4 38.5 38.6 38.7 38.8 38.9 39· 1 39.2 39.3 39.4 39.5.A 39.5.B

THE YEAR

*39.6 39.7 39.8 39.9 39.9a 39.9b 39.9c 39.9d 39.9e 39.10 39.1 I 39.1 Ia 39.11b 39.12 39.13 40.1 40.1a 40.1b 40.2 40.3 40-4

1839 CONCLUDED AND THE YEAR 1840 231 Le Cure de Village: Veronique, Veronique au tombeau 232 U ne Election en Province 233 Editions Charpentier 235 Le Lys clans la Vallee 235 Eugenie Grandet 236 Cesar Birotteau 236 Ferragus 237 La Duchesse de Langeais 237 Un Gendre 238 Perdita, Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan 239 Perdita 239 U ne Princesse parisienne 239 Petites Miseres de la vie conjugale 242 Pierre Grassou 243 Pierrette 244 Pierrette (Le Siecle) 244 Pierrette (Souverain) 246 Vautrin 247 Z. Marcas 247 Les Fantaisies de Claudine 248

1 73

xi

Contents

40.5 *41 41.1 41.2 41 .3 41.4 41.5 41.6 41. 7 41 .8

Les Paysans 249 THE YEAR 1841 253 UneTenebreuseAffaire 253 Les Deux Freres 256 Le Cure de Village 260 Une Scene de Boudoir, Une Comedienne de Salon 260 Les Lecamus 261 U rsule Mirouet 262 Memoires de deux jeunes mariees 265 La Fausse Maitresse 267

*42 42.1 42.2 42.3 42.4 42.4a 42.4b 42-4c 42.4d 42.4e 42.4£ 42.4g 42-4h 42.4j 4 2 ·5 42.5a 42.5b 42.5c 42.5d 42.6 42.6a 42.6b 42.6c 42.6d 42.7 42.8a 42.8b 42.9 42.9a 42.9b 42.9c

1842 271 Valentine et Valentin 273 Ursule Mirouet (Souverain) 273 Albert Savarus 274 La Comedie humaine 1 275 La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote 276 Le Bal de Sceaux 277 La Bourse 278 La Vendetta 279 Madame Firmiani 280 Une Double Famille 281 La Paix du Menage 281 La Fausse Maitresse 282 Etude de Femme 282 Le Danger des Mystifications 282 Les Jeunes Gens 283 Les Jeunes Gens (Original Epilogue) 285 Le Danger des Mystifications (Suite) 285 Le Danger des Mystifications (Epilogue) 288 La Comedie humaine n 289 Memoires de deux jeunes mariees 289 Une Fille d'Eve 289 Gobseck 290 Autre Etude de Femme 290 Les Mechancetes d'un Saint 291 Un Menage de Gar~on en Province 293 Les Deux Freres 297 La Comedie humaine III 297 La Femme de trente ans 297 Le Contrat de Mariage 300 Beatrix 300 THE YEAR

xii

Contents

42.10 *43 43· 1 43.2 43.2a 43.2b 43.3 43.3a 43.3b 43.3c 43.3d 43.4 43.4a 43-4b 43.4c 43.4d 43.5 43.5a 43.5b 43.6 43.7 43.8 43.9 43.9a 43.9b 43.9c 43.9d 43.10 43.10a 43.10b 43.10c 43.10d 43.1oe 43.10£ 43.11 43.11a 43.11b 43.11c

Illusions perdues 300 305 Honorine 308 Le Depute d' Arcis 309 L' Ambitieux malgre lui 309 Le Depute d'Arcis 310 La Muse du Departement 314 Dinah Piedefer 1 3 15 Dinah Piedefer II 3 17 La Muse du Departement (Furne) 319 Dinah Piedefer ( Souverain) 3 19 La Comedie humaine v, VI 320 Eugenie Grandet 320 Pierrette, Le Cure de Tours 321 Un Menage de Garc;on en Province 321 L'Illustre Gaudissart 322 La Comedie humaine VII 323 La Vieille Fille 323 Le Cabinet des Antiques 324 David Sechard 325 Esther 327 Madame de la Chanterie 335 La Comedie humaine IX 336 Ferragus 337 La Duchesse de Langeais 337 La Fille aux yeux d'or 338 Le Pere Goriot 338 La Comedie humaine x 339 Le Colonel Chabert 339 Facino Cane 340 La Messe de l' Athee 340 Sarrasine 340 L'lnterdiction 341 Cesar Birotteau 342 La Comedie humaine XI 343 La Maison N ucingen 344 Pierre Grassou 345 Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan 345

*44 44· 1 44.2

THE YEAR I 844

THE YEAR I 843

349 Les Petits Bourgeois 350 Le Programme d'une Jeune Veuve 355

xiii

Contents

44.3 44.4 44.5a 44.5b 44.6 44.7 44.7a 44.7b 44.7c 44.7d 44.7e 44.7£ 44.7g 44.8a 44.8b 44.9 44.10 44.10a 44.10b 44.1 I 44.12 44.13

Le Lys clans la Vallee (Fume) 356 Un Grand Homme de Paris en Province 35 7 Modeste Mignon 358 Modeste Mignon (Rejected Conclusion) 362 Les Employes 363 Le Diable a Paris 367 Les Roueries d'un Creancier 368 La Philosophie de la vie conjugale a Paris 370 Les Comedies qu'on peut voir gratis 370 Un Espion a Paris, Une Marchande a la Toilette 372 Un Gaudissart de la rue Richelieu 372 Le Luther des Chapeaux 373 Une Rue de Paris et son habitant (Entre Savants) 373 Esther 374 Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes (Furne) 375 Echantillon de causerie franc:;aise 376 Honorine, Un Prince de la Boheme 3 77 Honorine 377 Un Prince de la Boheme 377 Modeste Mignon 378 Madame de La Chanterie 378 Les Paysans 380

THE YEAR I 845 387 *45 Les Petits Maneges d'une Femme vertueuse 388 1 45· La Comedie humaine IV 393 2 45· 45.2a La Grande Breteche 393 45.2b Un Debut clans la Vie 394 La Comedie humaine XIII 394 45.3 Les Chouans 394 45.3a Le Cure de Village 396 45.3b Les Premieres Armes d'un Lion 396 45.4 La Comedie humaine XIV-XVI 398 45.5 La Peau de Chagrin 398 45.5a 45.5b Melmoth reconcilie 399 45.5c L'Enfant Maudit 399 45.5d Adieu 399 45.5e Physiologie du Mariage 400 Petites Miseres de la vie conjugale 400 45.6 THE YEARS I 846 AND I 84 7 405 Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes III 406

Contents

xiv

46.1a 46.1b 46.2a 46.2b 46.3 46.3a 46.3b 46.3c 46.3d 46.3e 46.4 46.5 46.6 46.7 46.8 47• 1 47·2 47.3 47.4 47.5 47.6 47.7 47.8

FC I FC 2 FC3 FC4 FC5 FC6

7

FC8 FC9 FC

10

FC II FC FC FC FC FC FC

443 La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote 444 Le Bal de Sceaux 444 Memoires de deux jeunes mariees 445 Une Double Famille 445 Modeste Mignon 445 Un Debut clans la Vie 446 Albert Savarus 446 La Pave du Menage 446 La Fausse Maitresse 447 Une Fille d'Eve 447 La Femme abandonnee 448 Beatrix 448 Gobseck 449 La Femme de trente ans 449 Le Pere Goriot 449 Le Colonel Chabert 450 L'Interdiction 450

THE 'FURNE CORRIGE'

*FC

FC

U ne Instruction criminelle 407 Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes m 41 o Les Comediens sans le savoir 410 La Comedie gratis 413 La Comedie humaine xu 414 Un Prince de la Boheme 414 Esquisse d'homme d'affaires d'apres nature 416 Gaudissart II 416 Une Tenebreuse Affaire 417 L'Envers de l'Histoire contemporaine 417 Les Mefaits d'un Procureur du Roi 418 Le Bonhomme Pons 420 La Cousine Bette 422 Adam-le-Chercheur 427 L'Ecole des Bienfaiteurs 428 Mademoiselle du Vissard 428 La Demiere Incarnation de Vautrin 430 Cesar Birotteau 432 Le Cousin Pons 433 Le Depute d' Arcis 436 Le Theatre comme il est 437 La Femme Auteur 438 L'Initie 439

12 13 14 15 16 17

Contents

JtV

18 19

Le Contrat du Mariage 450 Autre Etude de Femme 450 PC20 Ursule Mirouet 451 PC 21 La Muse du Departement 451 PC 22a Les Rivalites 451 PC 22b La Vieille Fille 452 Le Cabinet des Antiques 453 PC 23 PC 24 Illusions perdues 454 La Maison Nucingen 455 PC 25 PC 26 Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes 455 PC 27 Les Secrets de la Princesse de Cadignan 456 PC 28 Le Cousin Pons (Fume) 456 Les Employes 456 PC 29 PC30 Les Comediens sans le savoir 45 7 La Peau de Chagrin 45 7 PC 31 PC

PC

CONCLUSION

461

APPENDIX A:

Bibliography 4 79

APPENDIX B:

Index of Works by Balzac Discussed 487

APPENDIX

c: Index of Recurring Characters 497

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book of this sort cannot be completed without the author's incurring many debts. I acknowledge gratefully the grants made on several occasions by the Research Fund of the Queen's University of Belfast, and twice by the Sir Ernest Cassel Trust. I have been materially assisted also by the Bibliographical Section of the City Library, Belfast, and by the Library of the Queen's University. A particular mention is due to the staff who man the issue desk at the University Library, for their unfailing patience and courtesy. I have reason also to be grateful to the staff of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris whom I have persistently badgered. To the late Jean Pommier, I owe authorisation to use the library at Chantilly, remarkable alike for the treasures of its extraordinarily complete collection of Balzaciana, and for the spirit of co-operation and helpfulness which prevails among all who work there. I cannot mention by name all the friends and colleagues, at Chantilly and nearer home, who have encouraged me by their interest, and helped me with their counsel, nor all the scholars upon whose labours I have often depended. To nobody do I owe more than to Monsieur Roger Pierrot, always ready to share his encyclopedic knowledge with any bona fide Balzacian; at Paris, at Chantilly, through letters and through his incomparable edition of Balzac's correspondence, his example has been ever present. I owe a special debt also to Professor Herbert Hunt, who read the manuscript and made many helpful suggestions, and who persuaded me by his confidence that the enterprise was worth the effort. The sense of personal loss felt at Herbert Hunt's death in November 1973 is made the more acute by my regret that I was deprived of the opportunity to present him with a copy of this volume, then so close to publication. I hope that my dedication of this book to these two scholars will indicate how much I am in their debt. Questions of detail have been graciously answered in writing by Monsieur Maurice Regard of Aix, by Dr Vivienne Mylne of the University of Kent, by Fr Raymond Sullivant,sJ, by Professor Philip Thody of the University of Leeds, and by Dr Donald Adamson. A number of details were kindly checked by Miss Judith Slater. This book has been published with the help of grants from the Humanities Research Council of Canada, using funds provided by the Canada Council, and from the Publications Fund of the University of Toronto Press.

xviii

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Miss Sandra Maxwell who typed the original manu• script, and to various secretaries in the Department of Romance Languages of the University of New Brunswick who have coped with the many emendations I have made in the last three summers. Special thanks are due to Dr R.M. Schoeffel and members of the staff of the University of Toronto Press for the care with which they have produced the volume, and for the meticulous attention with which the typescript was scrutinized for inconsistent details and infelicitous expressions. I must finally thank my mother-in-law, Mrs Dilys Hooton, for enabling me to write much of the book amid the beauties of Wes tern Scotland, and, of course, my wife for keeping me happy and relatively sane throughout the many years we have been living with these recurring characters and the headaches and fichiers that have accompanied them. Belfast, February 1968 Fredericton, October 1972

INTRODUCTION

This study of Balzac's recurring characters1 has grown out of a simple question. We are always told that Le Pere Goriot, written towards the end of 1834, marked the first systematic use by Balzac of characters taken from novels already published. Preparing lectures on Goriot in 1961, it struck me that one could no doubt understand the genesis of the novel better if one knew which of the characters who appeared in the first edition were taken from elsewhere, and what they meant to Balzac at the time he was working on Goriot. The definitive texts are of little help, as Balzac revised his works ceaselessly, right up to 1847-8, and often the first published version is significantly different from the one we know now. To my surprise, none of the accounts of Le Pere Goriot I could find really answered this question, so I tried to tackle it systematically myself. Using Arthur Canfield's prewar article on the recurring characters,2 I drew up a list of recurring characters who were already present in the first edition of the novel, noted from the same source the earlier stories they came from, and then read all these earlier stories, in chronological sequence. The result was, I suppose, adequate for the needs of the undergraduates I was lecturing to, and I thought the light it shed on the genesis of Le Pere Goriot worth writing up as an article which was published in the Modern Language Review.3 But I was still rather dissatisfied. For one thing, Canfield's statistical lists conveyed nothing of the relative importance of the characters he listed. For another, I was not sure how far one could rely on his findings. I say this with no feelings of absolute superiority; Canfield was exploring territory quite uncharted, and like all such exploratory work, its chief value was its stimulus to later scholars. ( I might say now that although I have had to make numerous corrections to the work of forerunners in this field, I know full well that without them, I would have given up long ago; it is possible to walk from Dieppe to Paris or Chantilly if you have not had to swim the Channel first.) Again, reading the stories of the early thirties

2

3

I use the term 'recurring characters' throughout, although some writers on Balzac prefer the term 'reappearing characters'. In French they are nearly always called personnages reparaissants; the neologism reaparais. sants, proposed by Ethel Preston, did not catch on. A.G. Canfield, 'Les personnages reparaissants dans la Comedie humaine', RHLF, 41 ( 1934), 15-31, 198-214. A. R. Pugh, 'Recurring Characten in Le Pere Goriot', M LR, 5 7 ( r 962), 518-22.

xx

Introduction

in their original form, I noticed that the device so lavishly employed in Le Pere Goriot had been anticipated on a number of occasions. I discussed these first hints of recurring characters in an article published in 1964,4 in which I argued that they told us more about the genesis of the device than had previously been recognized. By now, I was convinced that the approach I had originally thought about for Goriot alone was worth applying to all Balzac's novels. Although it would be unfair to say that critics have neglected altogether the problems posed by the recurring characters, there have been very few attempts to see the subject as a whole. One of the first works of Balzac criticism, Ethel Preston's Recherches sur la technique de Balzac/' has a sub-title, 'le retour systematique des personnages clans la Comedie humaine', but it merely studies a handful of novels, in which the recurring characters have the value of 'social types' and adorns the discussion with a mass of statistics of dubious validity. Arthur Canfield, who very early saw the true nature of the problem and of the work to be done, cleared some of the ground in an important article published in 1934.6 The weakness of the article is that half of it is devoted to a list of titles and names presented in such a desiccated way that one can draw no conclusions from it without doing a great deal of work for oneself, while the other half, in which Canfield comments on his own research, seems largely taken up with secondary issues, with rather too much reliance placed on purely statistical data. The posthumous brochure of Canfield's, which includes some of his subsequent research, continues on much the same lines. 7 It also draws attention to many inconsistencies in the Comedie humaine, a sport which has attracted others, notably Fernand Lotte. 8 In the 1960s, Miss Mary Jane Culverhouse chose as the topic for a Ph.D. dissertation 'Consistencies and inconsistencies in reappearing characters in La Comedie humaine' .9 Her thesis, however, belies its title, as the consistencies or other4 5

6 7 8 9

A. R. Pugh, 'Personnages reparaissants avant Le Pere Goriot', AB ( 1964), 315-37. Ethel Preston, Recherches sur la Technique de Balzac: le retour systlmatique des personnages dans la 'ComJdie humaine' (Paris: Presses fran~aises, 1926). A.G. Canfield, 'Les personnages reparaissants dans la Comedie humaine', RHLF, 41 ( 1934), 15-31, 198-214. A. G. Canfield, The Reappearing Characters in Balzac's 'Comedie humaine' ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961 ) . F. Lotte, 'Le Retour des personnages', AB ( 196 1) , 2 2 7-82. Mary Jane Culverhouse, 'Consistencies and inconsistencies in reappearing characters in 'La Comedie humaine', Ph.D. ,thesis, University of North Carolina, 1968.

Introduction

xxi

wise are secondary to her main concern, which is with motivation. Most regrettably, Miss Culverhouse shows no respect for the chronological evolution in which they occur. There is no general index of characters, and unfortunately a number of factual errors have passed unnoticed. All of this makes her thesis at best a marginal contribution to our understanding of recurring characters. Thirty years before, Professor E.P. Dargan, who guided many generations of Chicago graduates through the intricacies of Balzac research, planned a volume which would incorporate the results of several enquiries into the variants of certain chosen novels. After his death in 1940, Bernard Weinberg saw the volume through the press. 10 It is an unequal work, and the three most substantial essays touch only tangentially on the matter of recurring characters. The last chapter is a fairly modest one, and is entitled 'Summaries of variants in twenty-six stories', some of which are treated extremely sketchily. All the variants are catalogued, and the different classifications briefly discussed. One category naturally enough concerns the reappearing characters (as they are called), which Professors Dargan and Weinberg counselled their students to count as a subdivision of realism, a way of giving solidity to the Comedie humaine. Some interesting details emerge, but the changes are not related to the workings of Balzac's creative imagination, and each story is dealt with in isolation. The postwar generation of Balzac scholars, which has shown increasing interest in the genesis of individual novels, has consequently had to start again at the beginning. But in a field where Balzac changed so much over the years, it is difficult to avoid errors, of omission if not of commission. Even critical editions which give a 'choice of variants' cannot always be trusted. The influence of Balzac's own previous work, and hence of his characters, on the genesis of new stories - stressed by Jean Pommier in his study of La Torpille: 'L'ceuvre du romancier pese sur ses nouvelles creations, par endroits, autant et plus que la nature meme' - has only gradually received the attention its importance would seem to indicate. 11 The introductions to the 'Classiques Gamier' have shown a marked shift of emphasis in this respect over the last few years. But the need to see the picture as a whole has remained. One of the very few general studies which gives due consideration to the role of recurring characters in the growth of the Comedie humaine is H.J. Hunt's, although Hunt does not claim to have treated that aspect of the Comedie 10 11

E. P. Dargan and B. Weinberg eds., The Evolution of Balzac's 'Comldie h umaine' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942) . J. Pommier, L'Invention et l'ecriture dans 'La Torpille' d'Honorl de Balzac (Geneva: Droz, 1957), 232.

xxii

Introduction

humaine, or any other for that matter, exhaustively. 12 (Hunt deals fully with one comer of the field in an article on Balzac's pressmen. 13 ) It is not surprising that a number of scholars have expressed the wish that something should be done to fill the gap. Here is a representative sample of quotations which will serve to justify my intentions, if not my performance (some writers have seen the eventual design of such a book rather differently from myself) : JEAN POMMIER: La necessite demeure d'y voir clair dans l'histoire du texte imprime, et dans le systeme des personnages reparaissants ou de liaison. JEAN POMMIER: La question des personnages reparaissants ... doit etre reprise dans le detail. BERNARD GUYON: Je me suis mis a rever d'un Dictionnaire etabli selon une formule que j'appellerais 'genetique'. 11 ne nous raconterait pas la vie exterieure des personnages, mais leur vie al'interieur de l'esprit du createur. CHARLES GOULD: It is hardly safe to affirm, in reference to Balzac's use of reappearing characters: 'on a catalogue tousles procedes techniques que l'ecrivain tirade sa decouverte', when so much remains to be done in this field. HERBERT HUNT: To read the life-story of such-and-such a character ... in Lotte can be irritating to one who knows by what sudden impulses, by what hesitant and fitful steps, by what shifts of amalgamation and modification Balzac brought them into his repertory. A more fascinating study is that of the appearance and development of the recurrent characters in Balzac's own conception. ANNE-MARIE MEININGER: II serait sans doute souhaitable de generaliser le procede qui rendrait a chaque heros balzacien son etat-civil de creation, etablissant dans quel roman il est 'ne', les etapes chronologiques de ses retours et, eventuellement, le ou les noms de ceux auxquels il a etc substitue. 14

12 13 14

H.J. Hunt, Balzac's 'Comedie humaine' (London: Athlone Press, 1959). H.J. Hunt, 'Balzac's Pressmen', FS, 11 ( 1957), 230-45. These quotations come from: J. Pommier, 'Naissance d'un Heros: Rastignac', RH LF, 50 ( 1950), 192 ; Creations en litterature (Paris: Hachette, 1955), 35; B. Guyon, 'Deux livres recents sur Balzac', RHLF, 53 ( 1953), 539; C. Gould, Review of P. Bertault's Introduction a Balzac, FS, 10 ( 1956), 181; H. J. Hunt, Balzac's 'Comedie humaine' (London: Athlone Press, 1959), 95; A.-M. Meininger, Review of Le Colonel Chabert, P. Citron ed., AB ( 1962), 368.

Introduction

xxiii

The time seemed ripe, therefore, for such a study. The tremendous impetus of research into Balzac which has been a feature of the last ten or fifteen years has given us a mine of information about fragments and projects, hesitations and revisions; the admirable new edition of the correspondence has provided us with a magnificent instrument for sorting out the chronological complications which any study of Balzac's evolution presents. 15 I have attempted, therefore, to study everything that Balzac wrote, or is known to have considered writing, after Le Dernier Chouan of 1829, that involves the creation, or utilisation of characters whose appearances are not limited to one work. I use the word 'writing' to include revisions, and the word 'appearances' to include any reference other than a straightforward descriptive one which Balzac might make in his own name, for example in a preface. Naturally such an enterprise has not been without its hazards hazards of accuracy first of all. I think that I have verified every factual or descriptive statement I make, but I have discovered so many errors in remarks made by other scholars about recurring characters, that I cannot believe that I am immune myself. I have not read every word of every manuscript of Balzac's, and as critical editions continue to be prepared, there will undoubtedly be adjustments to make. Potentially, every Balzac character can recur, and there may be others in the category of Spieghalter, who has a very brief part to play in La Peau de Chagrin; only a careful reading of the variants in Pierre Laubriet's edition of Cesar Birotteau revealed that he had been momentarily considered for that novel too. 16 Perhaps a subtler hazard is more important here; it probably does not make much difference if a few details like this have to be corrected, but it may be that by discussing the individual novels with all the emphasis placed on the characters who happen to recur, I am presenting everything in a more or less distorted light. To this charge I can only plead that I have tried not to claim too much. I am not wishing even to suggest that recurring characters are the key to Balzac's creative imagination, or that they are the most important aspect in the genesis of every story. But they are one important aspect, and one which has been treated summarily by most scholars. I hope that anyone trying to elucidate the genesis of any particular novel will find in this book considerations which will have to be taken into account; how important they are relative to other, and more orthodox aspects, it will 15 16

Balzac, Correspondance, R. Pierrot ed., 5 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1960-6); Lettres a Madame Hanska, R. Pierrot ed., 4 vols. (Paris: Editions du Del ta, 1967-7 1 ) . Balzac, Cesar Birotteau, P. Laubriet ed. (Paris: Garnier, 1964), 486 (variant a of p. 93).

xxiv

Introduction

be for the reader to decide. Some novels are plainly more strongly influenced by previous works than are others. I have tried to be objective in assessing the strength of this influence in each particular case, but it may be that by keeping other aspects down to a bare minimum (for otherwise the book would have become too unwieldy), I have here and there given a misleading impression. It is only fair to warn the reader in advance. I feel myself that the hazard of disproportion comes less in discussing the role of recurring characters in the composition of a novel, than in outlining the story in such a way that the characters who recur elsewhere (however unimportant in that particular novel) are named. For in the treatment of every item, I have had to keep two distinct things in mind: the way the work in question uses or develops material already in existence, and the presence in that work of material that will be called upon later. I could, I know, have arranged it differently, and have discussed each new fragment in itself, explaining only then the relevant features of the earlier works which it calls upon. On the face of it, this would have been a more satisfactory way of presenting the material to people interested in individual items, and as I shall explain in a moment, I have tried to cater to their needs. It still seemed to me better to present each item with its future as well as its past. I think the method I have adopted conveys better the astonishing sense of perpetual creativity which one has when one reads Balzac in chronological order; each new work is a further stimulus. The reader who is impelled to look back to the section on the work from which Balzac borrows will, I trust, experience in a more dynamic and hence more faithful way the range of Balzac's memory and imagination when he is creating. There is a further advantage, which I only realised after I had decided which method to follow: the reader who is familiar with the definitive text will probably find it useful if at each new stage of the story he is interested in, he is invited to see the give-and-take between that story and the rest of the Comedie humaine. 17 Although this study is addressed more to the historian of Balzac, interested in the genesis and composition of the various novels, than to the critic concerned with the aesthetic success of the Comedie 17

I use the title Comedie humaine to refer to Balzac's work generally and not merely to the edition (published in Paris by Furne, Hetzel et al in 1842-6) to which it strictly applies. The Comedie humaine contained nearly all the fiction Balzac had written since 1829, and the intention to link his works into a composite whole goes back at least to 1834 (Corr.no. 771). The definitive title is only once used by Balzac before 1841, in a letter which can be dated 1840, probably January ( Corr. no. 1698, found in vol. m, pp. 33-7; see particularly Roger Pierrot's notes, p. 33 n. 1 and p. 35 n. 2) .

Introduction

:UV

humaine as a whole, the critical issues have not been avoided entirely. The kind of question which has sharply divided critics - crudely put, whether recurring characters are a strength or a weakness - and the points which different critics have raised about them, I discuss in the general Conclusion. How much importance one attaches to discrepancies between different novels is probably a matter of temperament; I shall defend my own position, without imagining that my arguments will convince those to whom the interlocking of the various stories of the Comedie humaine has no appeal. I am not myself greatly disturbed by the discrepancies, and think that a more important question is whether certain individual novels lose something by being allowed to draw on other works, which the reader may or may not know, and which lie outside the immediate aesthetic experience dictated by the shape and pattern of the one book the reader has in his hand. I feel that generally Balzac has avoided the pitfalls with remarkable skill, but that there are, of course, cases where one would want to criticise him. What I hope the present study will show is that an understanding of Balzac's development helps us see why the flaws are there: briefly, Balzac's grasp was less sure at some periods than at others; revision, notably, was understandably a more slapdash operation than composition, and when one collects the offending details, one finds that a large proportion of them can be traced back to the years 1842-3, when Balzac was preparing the Furne Comedie humaine. In planning this book, I have been very conscious of the conflicting needs of two different sorts of reader. On the one hand there is the person interested in one particular novel, who will ( if he consults the book at all) simply look up his novel in the index, and read the relevant entries. On the other hand, there will be the reader who takes a less myopic view of Balzac, who will want some general picture to emerge. Both sorts of readers present problems, and so does the task of reconciling their demands. If the first kind of reader has not been following the course of events, the simple fact that, in the novel he was interested in, Balzac reintroduced, let us say, the Due de Grandlieu, would mean little more to him than if I had just given a bare list of names a la Canfield. Yet to go into details with each one would make for intolerably heavy reading. I have, therefore, given the state of play as briefly as possible, and referred the reader to the section where more details might be found. All the items in the book are numbered, and nearly every reference to another work or edition is accompanied by the code number, prefixed by the word 'see' if I think the reader would be well advised to consult the relevant section. The code numbers used are significant, as the number before the point

xxvi

Introduction

refers explicitly to the year, thus '35.1' is the first item of the year 1835 to be discussed. For the second kind of reader, I had to adopt different tactics. It soon became clear that there must be some half-way house between the generalities of the Conclusion and the precise details of the individual entries. In fact I introduced two different kinds of stopping-places where general conclusions could be drawn out of the surrounding mass of details. Since it is my contention that a historical approach to the question of recurring characters does illumine the critical issues involved, it seemed fitting to introduce, first, two discussions which would draw provisional conclusions from the evidence presented up to that point. The obvious places to introduce these discussions were: ( i) after Le Pere Goriot, in which the idea of recurring characters is officially launched on its career, and (ii) after the publication of the Souverain edition of Une Pille d'Eve in the middle of 1839 (with a preface, in which Balzac discusses recurring characters). This volume appeared at a stage in Balzac's career when the effects of the decision taken at the time of Goriot could be more fairly assessed and before the confusing development, to which I have already referred, of the years 1842-3. These general discussions are distinguished in my numbering from the other items by a capital letter: thus 34.8.C ( a discussion of Goriot) follows 34.8.B which is the standard section on the composition of Goriot; 39.5.B (a discussion of the position reached in mid-1839) follows 39.5.A, which is a discussion of Balzac's own Souverain text. (The extra section for Goriot, 34.8.A, is taken up by a survey of the steps leading Balzac to adopt the device of recurring characters and includes some account of his predecessors.) Anyone wishing to read the book for its general argument is asked to read the two sections 34.8.C and 39.5.B in full as well as the Conclusion. These general essays are not the only sections intended to relieve the monotony of the detailed individual entries. After Le Pere Goriot, at the end of 1834, each year in Balzac's career is prefaced by a short general survey, numbered simply *35, 'The Year 1835', etc. These sections give the agenda for the year, and hence help to give some sense of continuity to one's reading; they also bring out the dominant principles which underlie Balzac's use of recurring characters at that point in his career, and mention any critical problems which loom large. These can also be read by anyone who does not want to sink himself in the detail; they do show the development of the device, which is, I think, one of the interesting new things which has emerged from this chronological study. There are just two exceptions to this pattern of annual surveys: the three years 1838-40 are divided into two, not into three, the break coming after Une Pille d'Eve which, we have seen, is num-

Introduction

xxvii

bered 39.5; consequently, the next summary after *38 is *39.6, and the one after, *41. The other exception is that *46 covers 1846--7, which it was pointless to separate. To avoid confusion, the summaries only are marked with an asterisk. After the last work of the winter of 1847-8, I have added a section on the 'Fume corrige' texts, without wishing to imply that the corrections fell into the year 1848; they were probably spread over the previous four years. Where an item has to be subdivided, I use lower case letters, for example, 35. 1a, 35.1 b, etc. In most cases, it is advisable to read the parent entry, e.g. 35.1, first. Each entry follows the same pattern, and begins with the basic bibliographical facts ( dates of composition, publication, etc.) . Each individual entry is preceded by its own index of recurring characters, and where quick reference would be facilitated thereby, figure references are given in the index for each character; these figures refer to specific paragraphs of the commentary following. ( For example, see 34.8.B.) In the index, regular listing of a character in roman type indicates one who is introduced into the story in question for the first time in that particular edition, or whose role is significantly increased. 18 There are, however, many cases which are less straightforward, and they are all italicized. They include: 'disappearing characters', that is, characters who are discarded or replaced (they bear the sign del., meaning 'deleted'); characters whose roles are reduced, although they are not deleted ( marked mod. for 'modified'); characters who remain anonymous in the book in question, although they can be identified from other books in which they appear; anonymous characters whom Balzac clearly identifies with a character already created, and named, in another book both these groups are marked anon.; characters whose existence is implied by the text; characters who appear only on the manuscript and not in the published text ( in cases where the manuscript was not published by Balzac, the final state of the manuscript is treated like a published text), marked ms.; and names which have some relevance for the development of the device of recurring characters, although the characters bearing the name are not themselves recurring ( they are labelled name) . It should be noted that the term 'recurring characters' is broad enough to accommodate names of institutions, etc., even when the owner is not cited as an individual character. Where first names or family names change, but the other names remain intact, I list the definitive name, placed in parentheses. There are many instances where the form of a 18

I do not, however, list in the item-indexes all the characters whose subsequent names I happen to disclose, because as a general rule modifications to names are treated, and hence listed, in the appropriate place.

xxvili

Introduction

name varies slightly from book to book. Sometimes I have simply corrected the discrepancy without drawing attention to it. Even when the difference in form has been maintained, the index for that entry gives the usual or definitive form. Similarly in the case of characters whose etat civil changes, or who adopt different names in the course of their lives, the section index always lists them under the name against which the Index of Recurring Characters at the end of the volume assembles its information. The other names are listed in that index, but the reader is referred in each instance by a cross-reference to the name which we have taken as the standard one for the character in question. This may create momentary confusion as one reads the individual item, but it should facilitate use of the Index of Recurring Characters. The alternative name is indicated in parentheses in the section index. When the title of the item under review differs from the title familiar to readers of the 'Comedic humaine, or when the item in question does not find its way into the Comedie, I say so before starting my commentary. Works which Balzac did not complete belong to the second category, although it has not seemed advisable to put the words 'Not in CH' against such substantial and well-known fragments as Le Depute d' Arcis and Les Petits Bourgeois which, though incomplete, are always included in editions of the Comedic humaine. Throughout I have tried to keep notes to a minimum. Thus I have not justified my dating of the individual items, unless my dating is unorthodox. (The Gamier Correspondance and other standard reference works will usually confirm what I have baldly stated.) Nor have I given page references for any of the discussions of Balzac's own text. This might seem a strange omission. My chief reason is that, in many cases, characters are present throughout the book, and page references would be superfluous. Where individual passages are being discussed, anyone anxious to look up the text for himself will probably be able to locate it quite easily by using F. Lotte's Index and the Pleiade edition,111 or by using the Chronologie des Personnages reparaissants in the edition published by the Bibliophiles de l'Originale.20 There are three appendices. The first is a bibliography of works cited. The second is an index of Balzac's works discussed, and includes indications of critical editions, where these are available, and other primary source material. The third lists the recurring characters treated in this study and gives the reference numbers of the items in which they occur. There is no general index. 19

20

F. Lotte, Index des personnages fictifs, in La Comedie humaine, XI (Paris: Gallimard, Biblioth~que de la Pleiade, 1959; revised edition 1965). The Bibliophiles de l'Originale edition is not complete at the time of writing. The Chronology is planned for the final volume of the aeries.

ABBREVIATIONS

AB L'Annee balzacienne (Paris: Gamier, 1960BF Bibliographie de la France CAIEF Cahiers de l'Association des Etudes franfaises CH Comedie humaine Corr. Balzac, Correspondance, R . Pierrot ed., 5 vols. (Paris: Gamier, 196o-g) Items are referred to by number rather than by page. FR French Review FS French Studies LH Balzac, Lettres aMadame Hanska, R. Pierrot ed., 4 vols. (Paris: Editions du Delta, 1967-7 I) Lov. Lovenjoul collection, housed in the Library of the Institut de France in Chantilly (Nord), France Note: the sign 'Lov.' is followed by the call-mark (which for Balzac's papers always carries the prefix A), and the folio, or page number, with the letters r (recto) or v (verso) where appropriate. MP Modern Philology PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America RHLF Revue d'Histoire litteraire de la France RLC Revue de Litterature comparee RR Romanic Review RSH Revue des Sciences humaines Issues of this review are numbered separately, as 'fascicules', and not grouped into volumes. sTFM Societe des Textes fran~ais modemes (published by Didier of Paris)

•

" ®

BALZAC'S RECURRING CHARACTERS

¥

®

•

•

®

~ BEFORE LE PERE GORIOT

¥

®

•

29.1

LE DERNIER CHOUAN

[cH: Les Chouans] Corentin Falcon (Beaupied) Gua,Mmedu Hulot, colonel Longuy Marche-a-terre Marigny (name)

Montauran, A.de Orgemont, M.d' Pille-Miehe Vemeuil, famille de - Marie de - vieux due de - due de

The earliest work of Balzac's which was later admitted into La Comedie humaine was Les Chouans, published towards the end of March 1829 by Canel under the title of Le Dernier Chouan. Balzac had worked on it without interruption for over six months. Some of the characters, with identical or similar names, had originally been created in May 1828 for a play entitled Tableaux d'une Vie priuee, of which only a few pages were written.1 In its definitive form, Les Chouans has many connections with other novels, as several familiar names were introduced into the Fume edition as secondary characters ( see 45.3a) . The principal characters are all there from the start, and eight of them will be alluded to in later novels. These are: the hero, the royalist Alphonse de Montauran; the heroine, Marie de Vemeuil, sent by the republicans to Fougeres to help them capture Montauran; two people who are made jealous by their love, Mme du Gua, jealous of Marie, and Corentin, Fouche's officer who accompanies Marie to Brittany and who hates Montauran for winning Marie's love so easily; the republican Colonel Hulot; his sergeant Falcon (nicknamed Beaupied); finally, two tough fighters in the Chouan army, Marche-a-terre and Pille-Miehe. Among the secondary characters must be mentioned Longuy, who only appears once in the definitive edition, where part of his role is given to du Vissard-in 1829 it was Longuy, and not du Vissard, who was ambitious for the rank of field-marshal. Another character whose role underwent certain changes in later revisions is the Comte de Bauvan. He is not named in this 1829 text. Where, in the Fume edition, Montauran passes himself off as Bauvan, we here read the name Marigny - a name we shall also find in the first of the 1830 Scenes de la uie priuee (30.2f). An episodic character who is remembered in another story is Madeleine Fargeaud, 'Le Roi des Merciers', AB ( , 960), 7-20.

6

Balzac's Recurring Characten

d'Orgemont, the rich banker who is tortured by the Chouans for lending money to the republicans. Finally, we must mention Marie's family; her father and her half-brother are used for other novels. They do not actually appear in Les Chouans, but both are mentioned.

29.2

PHYSIOLOGIE DU MARI AGE (Chodoreille) , Adolphe - Caroline Fischtaminel, Mme de

This work, now classed among the Etudes analytiques of the Comedie humaine, was published by Levavasseur and Canel towards the end of the year 1829. It was based in part on an earlier version. One does not normally think of the Physiologie du Mariage as having any characters that might recur elsewhere in the Comedie humaine, but in 1845 some of the names used for one or two anecdotes are changed to correspond to the other Etude analytique, Petites Miseres de la vie conjugale, and, as we shall see when we discuss the problems which that work presents, we cannot altogether avoid treating the 'figurines' of Petites Miseres as characters (see 39.12 and 45.5e). The lover in an anecdote of the second part of Meditation xx is in 1829 called Adolphe Bodson; in Meditation xxvm a lover is called Adolphe de Villeplaine. In 1845 the name Bodson is dropped, implying that it is the same man on both occasions. In Petites Miseres he will be called Adolphe Chodoreille. Within the framework of the Physiologie itself, the Comte de Noce is mentioned in both Meditations xm and XVII; on the second occasion a friend of the count's begins a story which is not completed until, in Meditation XXIX, he meets the narrator again. Both are thus in a sense recurring characters. We revert to this example in 34.8.A.

Before Le Pere Goriot

30.1

7

INTRODUCTION AUX MEMOIRES DE SANSON

[cH: Un Episode sous la Terreur] Charost, famille de

The apocryphal Memoires de Sanson were partly written by Balzac. He was certainly responsible for the Introduction which appeared separately a fortnight before the first volume in the Cabinet de Lecture of 29 January 1830. He later rewrote it for a Keepsake in 1842, changing the ending completely and giving it autonomy. It was only then that three Comedie humaine names found their way into this dramatic tale which tells how Sanson, the public executioner, arranged for a priest to say mass for the soul of Louis XVI during the Reign of Terror. None of the characters named in 1830 have any future in Balzac's work. In the first version, relatives ( probably brothers) of the two nuns, Agathe and Marthe, are the Marquis de Bethune and the Due de Lorge respectively. One of the nuns is called Mlle de Charost; the name reappears in Le Pere Goriot (34.8.B). For the revision and the dating problems it presents, see 35.5b. 30.2

SCENES DE LA VIE PRIVEE

The Scenes de la vie priuee, corner-stone of the Comedie humaine, were begun in the summer of 1829, and published by Mame in two volumes of three stories each on 13 April 1830. We have placed the Scenes de la vie priuee before the very short story entitled Etude de Femme (30.3). Although Etude de Femme was published three weeks before the Scenes, it was almost certainly written later than most of them and can indeed be considered an off-shoot of the larger work. 30.2a LA VENDETTA Givry

Servin

Porta

Despite a number of secondary characters introduced in 1842, La Vendetta stands somewhat apart from the rest of La Comedie humaine.

8

Balzac's Recurring Characters

A Corsican girl, studying painting in Paris, falls in love with a young man, a political exile whom her painting-master is sheltering. He turns out to be the only surviving member of a Corsican family obliterated years before by her own father. She marries him, against her father's wishes, and the end is tragic. The only character from the first edition who reappears elsewhere and that only once, in Pierre Grassou ( 43.11 b) - is the painter, Servin. Ginerva's father has acquired 'l'ancien hotel des comtes de Givry'; Balzac uses the Givry family again in Le Lys dans la Vallee (35.10b), but as he cuts the name out of the Fume edition of La Vendetta ( 42.4d), he may not have intended any connection. The name of the lover and husband, Luigi Porta, is found on a list of characters available for Scenes de la vie militaire ( 35.8a) . 30.2b L ES DANG E R S D E L ' I N CO N D U I T E

[cH: Gobseck] Gigonnet Gobseck Grandlieu, famille de - Camillede - vicomtesse de Palma

Restaud, comte de - comtesse de - Ernest de Trailles, Maxime de Werbrust

This is the earliest story which we might describe as 'germinal'. Changes and additions there certainly will be, but most of these are occasioned by the fact that the characters created in 1830 very soon inspire Balzac to write new stories about them, and so certain adjustments have to be made to accommodate developments that were not foreseen when this first tale was written. All the main characters except one are found in the first version. The exception is the narrator, simply Emile in this text; he is not called Derville until 1835 ( see 35.gb; and for additions to the secondary characters, see 42.6c and FC 13). There are two sets of characters in Gobseck, the family to whom Emile is telling his story, and the characters belonging to the story itself. The two sets are linked, not only by Emile, but also by the fact that the daughter of the one falls in love with the son of the other; hence the parents' interest in what Emile has to tell them. The daughter, Camille, belongs to the Grandlieu family, her mother is the 'vicomtesse'; an uncle, the 'marquis', is of the company also. The young man Camille

Before Le Pere Goriot

9

loves is Ernest de Restaud, and Emile tells his story in order to quieten the viscountess' doubts about the Restaud family background. In L'Usurier, the physiologie which forms the nucleus of Gobseck, 1 Balzac had written, in the first person, of a money-lender, allegedly his neighbour in student days. His name was Gobseck, and one evening they got into conversation. Gobseck recounted to him the two visits he made that day, to a poor girl, Fanny Malvaut, and to a rich woman, the Comtesse de Restaud. In this sketch, the central character of the money-lender and the telling contrast between his two clients made a clear and striking story. In Gobseck, the data are developed. Fanny Malvaut has no relevance to what follows, but in order to introduce her somehow into the sequel, Balzac has Emile court and marry her. Consequently, when Emile yields to Derville, in 1835, Mlle Fanny Malvaut enters the world of La Comedie humaine as Mme Derville. But it is the countess' tale that is important to the Grandlieu family. Her lover (anonymous in this version) is in debt. She pawns the family diamonds without her husband's permission, and he buys them back from Gobseck. This drama is crucial in the genesis of Le Pere Goriot ( see 34.8.B) . There Balzac will find a name for the lover: Maxime de Trailles. Gobseck himself will recur in many novels, and so will three other men mentioned here who are in the same line of business: Gigonnet, Palma and W erbrust.

30.2c L E B A L D E S C E A U X Fontaine, comte de - Mme de - vicomte de - Mme de - baron de - .chevalier de - Mme de - Mlle de - Mlle Emilie de

Kergarouet, amiral de - Mme de (1) serisy (name)

Many of the recurring characters whom we now find in Le Bal de S ceaux are there as the result of changes made in I 842 to the names chosen in See B. Lalande, 'Les etats successifs d'une nouvelle de Balzac: Gobseck', RHLF,46 (1939), 180-2oo;RHLF,47 (1947),69-89.

10

Balzac's Recurring Cbaracten

1830 ( see 42.4b, also Fe 2) . Only the families of Fontaine and Kergarouet are indigenous to the story. The principal character is Emilie de Fontaine, youngest daughter of the Comte and Comtesse de Fontaine, and niece of the Vicomte de Kergarouet. M. de Kergarouet is a widower, and his first wife, mentioned once, needs to be listed. Emilie has three brothers and two older sisters, all of whom marry into the wealthy upper middle-class. All these couples, with the exception of the second sister and her husband, will be heard of again; in some cases the wife or husband will later be identified with other known families. The point of the story is that Emilie, like her mother, finds the thought of marrying beneath her distasteful; she wants as a husband someone she can genuinely respect, and she is very hard to please. Many worthy suitors are rejected; and the one man whom she does find attractive appears to be a draper, and so he is rejected too. Wrongly, as it happens: he is an aristocrat who has made a great sacrifice for his elder brother. Emilie subsequently marries her uncle. Later we shall find she remarries twice, but that was not part of Balzac's scheme in 1830. The names which are changed in 1842 include the firm the false draper works for ( here Brummer, Schilken et Cie), a family he is related to (the Vicomtesse d'Abergaveny [sic], who makes a brief appearance, with an English gentleman at her side), and one of the young men she scornfully rejects, here called Serisy. This name will be used for another family, after 1833, and removed from Le Bal de Sceaux (see 33.2 and 35.2a). 30.2d GLO IRE ET MALHEUR

[cH: La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote] Carigliano, due de - duchesse de Chevrel Guillaume, M. - Mme - Virginie - Augustine

Lebas, Joseph Sommervieux, baron de

- fils

Most of the principal characters of this story recur in later novels, and they were given their definitive names from the start. Thus we find here M . Guillaume, the draper who owns the 'Maison du Chat-qui-pelote',

Before Le Pere Goriot

II

his wife, and their two daughters, Virginie and Augustine. Virginie marries Guillaume's assistant, Joseph Lebas, but her sister marries a painter, Henri de Sommervieux (changed to Theodore later). The marriage is doomed, however, and Sommervieux becomes the lover of the Duchesse de Garigliano, although by the end of the tale he has been supplanted by a colonel. To these characters, three others must be added: the previous owner of the drapery, one Chevrel; the child born to Augustine de Sommervieux - he is unnamed here, but he reappears as a young man, with the name Robert, in an unfinished fragment of 1844 ( 44.2) ; and the duchess' husband who, she says, is a fearless general, though he is frightened of her. The secondary characters who link La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote further with the rest of La Comedie humaine are given the names we know them by only later, for the most part in 1842 (see 42.4a, also 35.2b and FC 1). The most important of them is Mme Guillaume's cousin, who acts as a go-between, introducing Sommervieux both to Augustine and to the duchess. She and her solicitor husband have the name Vernier here. Another of these secondary characters is the priest whom Mme Guillaume advises Augustine to consult on her husband's behaviour; here he is called Charbonneau. There are also the various acquaintances Guillaume occasionally entertains: 'leur oncle le notaire et sa femme qui avait des diamants' (i.e. the Verniers), 'un cousin chef de division au ministere de la guerre, les negociants les mieux fames de la rue des Bourdonnais, deux ou trois vieux banquiers, et quelques jeunes femmes de mreurs irreprochables'. Finally, we should note a passing reference to 'des maitres peintres en batiments qui ont des ecus'; no individual painter is specified. 30.2e LA FEM M E VERT U EU SE [cH: Une Double Famille]

Crochard, Caroline - Charles Fontanon

Granville, comte de - comtesse de - vicomtede - baron de - Mlles de

The chief character of the tale now known as Une Double Famille is very important in the later history of the Comedie humaine: the Comte de Granville, here a rising magistrate, married to a beautiful but puri-

12

Balzac's Recurring Characters

tanical woman whom he has never loved. The marriage is joyless, and the count installs a mistress, Caroline Crochard, who is soon styled Caroline de Bellefeuille. His wife hears of the liaison through the indiscretions of Fontanon (so named from the first edition), the confessor of Caroline's mother. The last part of the story is set some years later and mentions the offspring of Granville's two 'families'. He is talking to a doctor. Caroline has left him and is now living with a good-for-nothing; he is bitter, not that his children have not got on well; his daughters are 'tres richement mariees', and his eldest son 'sera meme l'honneur de la magistrature'. As the Granville family is increasingly used for other novels, these rather vague statements will be made more precise and modified somewhat ( see 42-4f). In this first version, Eugene is the name chosen for both father and son. When Granville returns home, after his conversation with the doctor, he finds that his illegitimate child, Charles Crochard, has been caught stealing. He admits his long-kept secret to Eugene, and points out the moral. Three secondary characters will be assimilated into the Comedie humaine in 1842 (see 42-4f, also FC 4): the doctor, the landlord of the apartment where Caroline and her mother live, and a client for whom Caroline is embroidering a dress.

30.2f L A PA I X DU M E NA G E Gondreville, comte de - Mme de La Roche-Hugon

Marigny, duchesse de Soulanges, comte de - Mme de

Most of the characters in this short story had the same names in 1830 as they have now. It concerns a complicated domestic intrigue, happening within the space of a very few hours during a ball given by the Comte and Comtesse de Gondreville in November 1829. The Comte de Soulanges has been betraying his wife with a coquette, Madame de Vaudremont ( she does not appear outside La Paix du Menage) , who has recently been won by a self-satisfied officer, Martial de La RocheHugon. The countess' aunt, an elderly and wise duchess, persuades the countess to come to the ball, and intrigues to set the situation right. La Roche-Hugon is very taken with the countess, whom nobody recognises. By the end of the evening he finds that he has not only failed to win the countess, he has also lost Mme de Vaudremont, who accepts a proposal made. by La Roche-Hugon's friend, a colonel. And the duchess, who is largely responsible for these happenings, reads the moral.

Before Le Pere Goriot

13

In this first version, the duchess is given the name of Madame de Marigny. We have found the name already, in Les C houans ( 29. 1), but no connection is implied between the characters (we revert to this point in section 34.8.A when we discuss the stages leading up to the adoption of recurring characters) . Both the duchess and the colonel who proposes to Mme de Vaudremont have to wait some time before Balzac selects the most suitable name. Another anonymous character, named later, is the 'banquier celebre' seen gambling with Soulanges. For these changes see 35.gc, 424g, FC 8; on Soulanges, see the Index of Recurring Characters. 30.3

ET UDE DE FEMME

Etude de Femme was published in La Mode on 20 March 1830. It concerns a virtuous countess, wife of a nonentity, who receives a love letter from a young man she had met. He had put a letter for his mistress and a polite note of thanks to the countess into two separate envelopes and addressed them later, in a hurry, so that the countess received the letter intended for his mistress. Hoping to see the young man again, the countess goes to a soiree given by a marquis. She is clearly not indifferent to the false declaration, and falls ill when she discovers her mistake. Although this very short story seems to us now to be well anchored in the world of the Comedie humaine, in the first version all the characters were anonymous. For subsequent modifications, see 35.1b and 42.4j. 30.4

ADIEU Gondrin (anon . )

Sucy,P.de

Like Etude de Femme, this story was published in La Mode on 15 May and 5 June 1830. It tells of a woman who, believing her lover has been killed in battle, has lost her reason and can only repeat, obsessively, the word 'adieu'. Seven years later, however, the lover returns, and when he re-enacts the original love scene, the great shock of recognition kills the woman. Only one name connects this tale with the rest of La Comedie humaine: when the lover first sees his mistress, after searching for many years, he faints and his friend stops a coach to get assistance. The travellers in the coach are M. and Mme de Granville, but this name is written into the text only in 1845 (45.5d), when it replaces the name Bueil found in this 1830 edition.

14

Balzac's Recw-ring Characters

There is, however, another possible recurring character, which we shall discuss in connection with Le Medecin de Campagne: Balzac mentions the 'sole survivor' of Beresina, a dramatic episode in Napoleon's retreat from Moscow: 'Un seul d'entr'eux vit ou plutot souffre clans un village - ignore ... .' After Le M edecin the survivor will no longer be 'ignore', he will come to life as Gondrin ( see 33. 1) . All Balzac's characters are potentially recurring. The lover, Philippe de Sucy, illustrates this, for he was considered in 1835 as a possible hero for a Scene de la vie militaire (see 35.8a) . 30.5

SA RR A S I N E Lanty, comte de - Mme de

The first of many Balzac works to appear in the Revue de Paris was L'Elixir de longue vie ( 24 October 1830). Sarrasine was published in the same review on 21 and 28 November 1830. It is the story of the love of Sarrasine for the singer Zambinella, who turns out to be a castrato. His niece marries the Comte de Lanty, and M. and Mme de Lanty will be given minor parts in two novels of 1835 (see 35.gb and 35. 1ob), although they are never more than faces in the crowd. In the Furne edition of La Comedie humaine, M . de Lanty is limited to this one story. There are no other Comedie humaine names in this first version; the narrator is anonymous, and the lady to whom he recounts the strange tale is called simply the 'Comtesse de F.. .'. The Lanty's hotel belonged previously to a 'Marechal S'. Two rich bankers ( invoked as a point of comparison) have here names which will not recur, Roy and d'Aligre. These four names will be replaced by 'recurring' names in later editions (see 35.1c and 43.10d).

30.6

'SI

J' ET A I S

R I C H E ! ! !'

[Not in CH] Gobseck This is an ephemeral article which appeared in La Caricature on 23 December 1830 over the signature 'Le Comte Alex. de B'. Bruce Tolley

Before Le Pere Goriot

has argued that Balzac's collaboration with La Caricature ceased the previous week, and that pseudonyms like 'Le Comte Alex. de B' then became common property. Mme Meininger, however, has found this conclusion a little too unyielding, and would like to see Balzac's name restored to a handful of the traditional cruvres diverses, so drastically pruned by Mr. Tolley. This article of 23 December is one of those she believes to be by Balzac, and we would agree with her.1 The reason for wanting to attribute it to Balzac is one that particularly concerns us here - the writer refers to one of Balzac's characters: Oh! celui-la est terrible! ii tue plus de dix personnes a la fois ! C'est Gobsec, l'honnete usurier, qui calcule le nombre des tetes sur lesquelles ii a place des rentes viageres. If Balzac did write it, it is the first sign, in an admittedly frivolous context, that he felt he could call on at least one of his characters to stand as a symbol of a group of men. The reference cannot be a form of advertising, as nothing indicates that Gobsec or Gobseck can be read about in one of Balzac's Scenes de la vie privle entitled Les Dangers de l'lnconduite (30.2b). Indeed, its very obscurity tends to suggest that Balzac himself is responsible. The original portrait of 'L'Usurier' appeared in La Mode, so the reference to 'l'honnete usurier' is not one which readers of La Caricature could have been expected to recognise. 'Si j'etais riche ! ! !' was never republished; it is not part of the Comldie humaine, but it has to be mentioned as an interesting early symptom of the use of recurring characters (we touch on it again in the essay which precedes Le Pere Goriot, 34.8.A). B. Tolley, 'Les oeuvres diverses de Balzac, 1824-31', AB (1963), 31-64; A.-M. Meininger, 'Balzac et Henry Monnier', AB (1966), 228, n. J.

16

Balzac's Recurring Chaxacters

31.1

L'ENFANT MAUDIT Herouville, famille de - .due de (xvi siecle) - cardinal de

Two months after his debut in the Revue de Paris, Balzac offered the Revue des deux mondes a 'conte fantastique' entitled Le Petit Souper. In January 1831, in the first instalment of the new year, the same review published L'Enfant Maudit. The story we read under that title in La Comedic humaine is twice as long, as it incorporates a sequel written in 1836 (36.8). When Balzac put the first and second parts together (in 183 7) , he altered the ending of part one, which in 1831 had been complete in itself. The story is set in the year 1593. The principal character, the Comte d'Herouville, has a son Etienne, born prematurely, whom he hates since he believes him illegitimate. During the marriage-feast he had told his wife that if she brought forth a child seven months after the wedding, he would strangle her and the infant. The mother is indeed delivered of a son before her time, with the aid of a bone-setter called Antoine Beauvouloir. The count tells her he never wants to see the boy; she extracts a promise from him not to make an attempt on his life. Etienne will be a cardinal ( it had been mentioned that the count's great-uncle was a cardinal, with a fine library). In time, the countess, who has borne her husband's second son, dies and entrusts Etienne to Beauvouloir. Over twenty years later, in 1617, the count-now aged seventy-six and a duke - learns that his second son has been killed. The family name will die unless he marries and has another son. But he is reminded of Etienne, and acknowledges him. When this happy ending is removed and a sequel added, various recurring family names are introduced, and the first part accordingly modified (see 36.8). Herouville remains, as one would expect, and with Modeste Mignon (44.5a) his nineteenth-century descendant enters the Comedic humaine. The man whose question prompts the threat of strangling is called the Marquis de Pont-Carre in this first version. 31.2

LES DEUX RENCONTRES

[cH: La Femme de trente ans, v] ( Aiglemont) , colonel d' - Helene d' - Abel d'

- Gustave d' - Moina d'

Before Le Pere Goriot

Les Deux Rencontres, now the fifth chapter of La Femme de trente ans, appeared in La Revue de Paris on 23 and 30 January 1831. Colonel de Verdun gives shelter to a strange and compelling man, who runs off with his eldest daughter Helene. He meets Helene many years later when a ship on which he is travelling is attacked by pirates, and he recognises his son-in-law who is the pirate chief. The colonel's other children are called Gustave, Moina and Abel. We shall find the children in another story, though with a different family name (see 32.6a). The family name becomes d'Aiglemont only in 1842 (42.9a).

31.3

LEDOIGTDEDIEU [cH: La Femme de trente ans, 1v]

Aiglemont, Helene d' On 7 March 1831, readers of the Revue de Paris were able to sample another story which was to become a chapter ( the fourth) of La Femme de trente ans. In this short story the narrator, sitting in a park in Paris, notices a woman, her lover and two children. The younger child is clearly preferred to his elder brother, who in a fit of anger pushes him into the river. In this version the two boys are called Georges and Francisque. Their names, and in the case of the elder one, the sex too, will be changed in 1832, in the fourth volume of Scenes de la vie privee (see 32.6).

31.4

LA PEAU DE CHAGRIN Aquilina Euphrasie Fredora Japhet Joseph

Lavrille ( Lacrampe) Planchette Raphael ( de Valen tin) Rastignac Spieghalter

La Peau de Chagrin, Balzac's first 'roman philosophique' was published by Gosselin at the beginning of August 1831. The novel illustrates the theme of the destructive power of thought; the symbol of a magic talisman, an ass's skin, represents the expectation

18

Balzac's Recurring Characters

of life of the hero. Every time he expresses a wish, which is gratified automatically, the skin shrinks. The hero's name is Raphael de Valentin, and although he does not, in the end, qualify as a recurring character in the Comedie humaine, Balzac did introduce him into Etude de Femme briefly and into a work of 1837 which he never completed: Les Martyrs I ngores (see 35.1 b and 37 .2a). Most of the other recurring characters appear in the second part, the orgy at which Raphael recounts his story. The chief of these are Fredora, the 'femme sans creur', who appears temporarily in three other stories before she is finally rejected in favour of society women from later novels who are more clearly visualised by Balzac; and Rastignac, Raphael's tempter, who, once he has been resurrected for Le Pere Goriot, becomes a privileged case among recurring characters. Rastignac's valet, Joseph, is one of the recurring characters of La Comedie humaine too. One thing Rastignac does here is ask Raphael to write the 'memoires' of his aunt for a publisher who is called Marivault in this edition. Of the countless other recurring characters who appear at the orgy in the definitive text, only two keep their names from the 1831 edition: the courtesans Euphrasie and Aquilina (see 45.5a and FC 31). Three other characters, from the third part, reappear in a fragment of 1844 entitled Entre Savants (44. 7g) : these are the experts called upon to examine the ass's skin. Their names are Japhet, Planchette and (in 1831 ) Lacrampe; Lacrampe's name will be changed to Lavrille in 183 7 (37.5), and it is, of course, as Lavrille that we meet him in Entre Savants. Planchette recommends Spieghalter's hydraulic press; Spieghalter was considered, in 1837, for Cesar Birotteau (37.6). 31.5

L' AUBERGE ROUGE

Taillefer, M. - Victorine L'.A.uberge rouge was published in the Revue de Paris on 21 and 28 August 183 1. At a dinner given by a banker, one guest tells a gruesome story of a man who was executed for a murder committed by his friend. The narrator who is one of the other guests at the dinner is quite sure that a third guest is the guilty one. As he later falls in love with this man's daughter, he finds himself faced with a delicate moral problem. It is only after Le Pere Goriot that Balzac linked this story with the courtship of Victorine Taillefer by Rastignac (see 35.5a). In the 1831 version, the girl's name is Josephine Mauricey.

Before Le Pere Goriot

31.6

19

LE RENDEZ-VOU S

[CH: La Femme de trente ans, 1] Aiglemont, Victor d' - Julie d' - Helene d'

Pauline

This is another autonomous story which will later become simply a chapter ( the first) of La Femme de trente ans (cf. 31.2, 31.3). It was published not in the Revue de Paris, but in the Revue des deux mondes, 15 September and I October 1831. It was partly written in the first months of 1830. 1 A young girl called Julie falls in love with a colonel, Victor d'Aiglemont, and marries him. She is unhappy in her marriage, however. During a prolonged stay in Tours with her husband's aunt (here the marquise de Belorgey), she has an admirer, although she does not accept his attentions until some time later, when she realises that her husband has a mistress. The lover meets a tragic end. The name 'd' Aiglemont' is the one which Balzac finally chooses to impose on the heroine of all the stories which, in 1832, make up the fourth volume of Scenes de la vie privee (see 32.6 and 42.9a). We note that Julie's daughter is called Helene, like the eldest daughter in Deux Rencontres (31.2), but we are unlikely to attach any importance to the fact before we study the volume of 1832. Her maid's name is Pauline. 31.7

CONTES BRUNS Bianchi Eugene M ontefiore (anon.)

Contes Bruns was the title of a volume written jointly by Balzac, Chasles and Rabou. Although it was not published until 1832, the bona tirer was given on 25 November 1831, and so we are classing it as a work of that year, and placing it before Mattre Cornelius, published in December. Balzac's contribution to the volume was a short story entitled Le Grand d'Espagne, and a longer work with the descriptive title of Une conversation entre onze heures et minuit. In this second item, a number R. L. Sullivant, 'Dating Balzac's Le Rendez-Vous', Manuscripta 8 (1964), 29-44; R. Pierrot, Review of P. Citron ed., La Femme de trente ans, AB ( 1966), 435-6.

20

Balzac's Recurring Characters

of people gathered in a salon regale each other with stories and anecdotes. Some of the anecdotes pass, with Le Grand d'Espagne, into other works (see 37.1, 43.3a, 42.6d); the remainder were to have been included in the Scenes de la vie parisienne (see 44.9). La Grande Breteche, another horrific tale with an adventurous career before it, was also originally intended for this collection (see 32.5a). There are three indigenous characters (one anonymous) all of whom appear in the first story of the Conversation. The first story is told by a general to prove his contention that men sometimes gamble on their own ears. An Italian captain, a fantastic character desperate for money, laid a bet with a comrade that he would kill an enemy sentry and eat his heart; if he failed, he was prepared to sacrifice his own ears. This captain's name is Bianchi, and he belongs to the famous sixth regiment, commanded by Colonel Eugene. Balzac refers again to this incident in a story written a year later, Les Marana (see 32.9), and we learn there that the comrade with whom Bianchi had his bet is Montefiore, one of the principal characters of Les Marana. 31.8

MAITRE CORNELi US Cornelius

Maitre Cornelius is a historical conte philosophique, first published in the Revue de Paris I 8 and 25 December 183 I. Cornelius, treasurer to King Louis XI, is a man driven by a passion for gold; he is mentioned in one of the Contes drolatiques written very soon afterwards ( see 32. 1).

Before Le Pere Goriot

32.1

21

CONTES DR OLA TIQ UBS (PREMIER DIXAIN) V LES JOYEULSETEZ DU ROY LOYS LE UNZIESME Cornelius Mortsauf, famille de

The first set of Contes drolatiques was published in March 1832. Most were written before the end of 1831, but as there is an explicit reference to Mattre Cornelius (31.8) in the fifth story ( the only one we are here concerned with), we are placing this section after Cornelius, i.e. at the beginning of 1832. The Contes drolatiques are interesting in themselves for the evolution of the idea of recurring characters, for they create a miniature Comedie humaine of the sixteenth century, and characters do recur from one story to another (I revert to this point in the essay accompanying Le Pere Goriot, 34.8.A). Here I shall just mention two names, both from the same story, which unexpectedly connect the microcosm of the Contes drolatiques with the macrocosm of La Comedie humaine. As we have said, Balzac refers in the tale to Mattre Cornelius, which had just recently appeared. 'Il y avoit a Tours', he writes, 'trois gens, avaricieulx nottes. Le premier estoyt maistre Cornelius dont j'ai rapporte l'adventure alias, et qui est suffisamment cogneu.' The story concerns a stay of Louis XI at le Plessis-les-Tours, so the setting, the period, and the main historical character are all the same as in Ma£tre Cornelius. It is perhaps not a particularly bold step to remind the reader that another tale of Louis at Tours was in print. As Cornelius was said to be the King's treasurer, he could easily be brought into the new story in that role. But it is more striking, especially in view of the multifarious uses Balzac found for recurring characters later on, that he should be involved in one of the King's 'joyeusetes'. The other recurring name from this story is in a different category. One of the prize samples of the King's sense of humour concerns a young man hanged for adultery. His body is placed in the bed of a spinster of forty. However, he is not completely dead, and the spinster revives him and marries him. 'Il donna le nom de sieur de Mortsauf a l'espoulx [...] ils firent une bonne famille de Tourayne; laquelle subsiste encore en grand honneur.' We shall find a descendant in Le Lys dans la Vallee ( 35. 1 ob) . The historical extension of the idea of recurring characters i, discussed in section 36.8.

22

Balzac's Recurring Characters

32.2

MADAME FIRMIANI Camps, M. (Octave) de - Mme de

Madame Firmiani first appeared in the Revue de Paris 19 February 1832. Madame Finniani is a widow who has secretly married Jules (later Octave) de Camps. When she hears that he owes his fortune to a swindle, she insists on his restoring it completely. The story is gradually revealed in the course of an investigation by Octave's uncle, in this version called the Comte de Valesnes, who was disturbed at the rumours he had heard of Octave's relationship with Madame Finniani. After the system of recurring characters has been established, Mme Finniani, or Mme de Camps, becomes one of the most frequently quoted names of all, one of the rare exemplars of virtue in high society. Four names are changed in later editions: in this version Mme Firmiani is said to be related through her mother to the Carignan [sic] familylater changed to Cadignan, of course ;1 because of this she is received by an 'oracle du noble faubourg', indicated simply as the 'Duchesse de .. .'. A third name to be changed is that of the lady who accompanies M. de Valesnes on his first visit to Mme Finniani, here the Comtesse de Frontenac. The fourth name is M. de Valesnes himself. (For the changes, see 35.1e and 42.4e.)

32.3

LA TRANSACTION [CH: Le Colonel Chabert] Boutin Chabert Derville

Ferraud, comte - comtesse Vergniaud

La Transaction was published by L'Artiste in four weekly instalments beginning 20 February 1832. This is the story which first introduces Derville, the principal lawyer of the Comedie humaine. In this first version he is in the company of the novelist, visiting Bicetre, a home for old folk, and he tells the story of one of the poor wretches living there. In 1816 Derville had acted for a strange client, Colonel Chabert; he The Carignan family really existed. See A.-M. Meininger, 'Une Princesse Parisienne, ou les Secrets de la Comtesse de Castellane', AB ( 1962), 302.

Before Le Pere Goriot

was believed to have been killed at the Battle of Eylau in 1807, and his wife had remarried, becoming the Comtesse Ferraud. She had no intention of renouncing her newly acquired rank in order to be faithful to an officer of Napoleon's army whom she no longer loved, and she played on the affection of Chabert with extraordinary sureness. He voluntarily gave up his claim, and the countess then washed her hands of him completely; hence he ended up destitute in this sordid home. A fifth character who recurs outside Le Colonel Chabert ( though, like Chabert himself, he does so only once) is Louis Vergniaud, a former soldier of Chabert's who lodges him when he retwns to Paris. The names of Chabert and Boutin (marechal des logis in Chabert's regiment) appear on a list of characters to be used in Scenes de la vie militaire ( 35.8a) . The text is enriched in the course of later revisions (see 35. 1d, 43.1oa, FC 16).

32.4

LA FEMME DE TRENTE ANS Blamont (name) Vandenesse, C.de - oncle du precedent Vieumesnil, Julie de

The title La Femme de trente ans was originally given to what is now the third chapter of the novel of that name. In May 1832, in the fourth volume of Scenes de la vie privee, Balzac grouped together a number of stories originally published independently (see below, 32.6) . It is possible that La Femme de trente ans was written with the needs of the new volume in mind. It was, however, offered to readers of the Revue de Paris as a story in its own right ( 29 April 1832). A young diplomat, Charles de Vandenesse, meets the Marquise Julie de Vieumesnil at a ball given by the Marquise de Vitigliano. Mme de Vieumesnil is mourning her lover, Lord Melville. In time Vandenesse becomes her lover. Towards the end of the story, Mme de Vieumesnil refers to various people who have visited her; the list includes a M. de Blamont and a M. de Vouglans. Only Vandenesse survives the changes made to this text, and the Vandenesse family have various ramifications in La Comedie humaine (see notably Le Lys dans la Vallee, 35.1 ob) . We must note for the record a reference to Charles de Vandenesse's uncle who is a member of the new cabinet. The other names just quoted yield to recurring characters (see 42.ga). We shall, however, find a Mme de Vieuxrnesnil

24

Balzac's Recurring Characters

(with an 'x'} in the first version of La Duchesse de Langeais (33.3); and the name Blamont is remembered by Balzac when in the same novel he creates the family of Blamont-Chauvry, which we shall find in several stories set in the Restoration period.

32.5

SC ENE S D E LA V I E PR I VE E

III

In May 1832 a second set of Scenes de la vie privee was published by Mame. The first two volumes were simply a reprint of the 1830 volumes (30.2); the third and fourth collect various stories which had appeared in reviews during the previous two years, and add some new ones. In the third volume, only one of the four stories had been previously published; it is Adieu, now entitled Devoir d'une Femme and placed third. One of the other three stories, le Conseil incorporates a tale published in the Revue des deux mondes on 15 February 1832 as le Message and another autonomous tale originally intended for the Contes bruns, la Grande Breteche (see 31.7). We discuss just La Grande Breteche here; Le Message, which regained its autonomy in the Scenes de la vie de province of December 1833, contains no recurring characters, although we shall mention it again, in the discussion of Le Pere Goriot (34.8.A). Both stories are intended by the narrator of Le Conseil, M. de Vilaines, to dissuade a woman from a potentially adulterous liaison. La Bourse, the second story, is quite new, and so is Les Celibataires (known to us as Le Cure de Tours), although this last-named uses material from two other fragments which probably represent Balzac's first attempts to write something for this third volume. We give these fragments the title La Vieille Fille 1832; they have nothing to do with the novel of 1836 which has the same title of La Vieille Fille.

32.5a LE CONSEIL: LA GRANDE BRETECHE

[cH: fin d'Autre Etude de Femme] Merret, M . de - Mme de The second story told by the narrator of Le Conseil, M. de Vilaines, is about a derelict house near Vendome called 'La Grande Breteche'. He has heard the story from a lawyer, M. Regnault. The mistress of the

Before Le Pere Goriot

house, Madame de Merret, had a lover; surprised one night by her husband, he hid in a closet. The wife swore she was alone, and grimly taking her at her word, her husband had the door to the closet walled up. La Grande Breteche is recounted twice in La Comedie humaine by Bianchon: in La Muse du Departement and in Autre Etude de Femme. Once (in La Muse du Departement, 43.3a) Balzac contents himself with a brief cross-reference, which is why M. and Mme de Merret qualify technically as recurring characters.

32.5b LA BOURSE $chinner, ( Hippolyte) - Mme Only two of the seven recurring characters in the definitive text of La Bourse go back to the 1832 version: the painter $chinner, and the girl he courts and marries. As a painter, $chinner reappears often in La Comedie humaine; his wife is much less frequently cited. Schinner's Christian name is here Jules; it is changed to Hyppolite [sic] in 1835. The other five familiar names are given in 1842 to characters who in this first version are anonymous: the admiral who visits Schinner's mother-in-law regularly and always contrives to lose forty francs at cards; his friend; two friends of Schinner's who laugh at his distress; and the landlord (see 42-4c).

32.5c L A V I E I L L E F I L L E ( 1 8 3 2 ) [Not in

CH]

Veze, l'abbe de The first of the Vieille Fille fragments is set in the cathedral quarter of Tours, and develops into Le Cure de Tours (32.5d) . The second fragment is about a young Abbe de Veze, melancholy, probably tubercular, rather mysterious. Balzac tried again in 1834 to make the Abbe de Veze the hero of a story (Le Pretre Catholique, 34.1); he was resurrected many years later in L'Envers de l'Histoire contemporaine ( 46.3e). He is not strictly a recurring character.

26

Balzac's Recurring Characters

32.5d L E S C E L I BAT A I R E S

[cH: Le Cure de Tours] Birotteau, l'abbe F. Bourbonne, M. de Chapeloud

Listomere, baron de - baronnede - marquis de Troubert, l'abbe Villenoix, Mlle de

Le Cure de Tours is unusual in that all the recurring characters whom we find in the final version - eight altogether -were present from the start. It is the well-known story of l'Abbe Birotteau, a priest of Tours, a man of simple ambitions who nevertheless arouses violent hostility in his landlady, Mlle Sophie Gamard, and in another priest, I' Abbe Troubert, a member of the feared Congregation. One reason for Mlle Gamard's hostility is that Birotteau is less considerate than the previous occupant of his room, his recently deceased friend Chapeloud. For a time Birotteau's cause is upheld by an aristocratic circle in the town the Baronne de Listomere and others, including a 'vieux malin', M. de Bourbonne, who gives Birotteau counsel, and a spinster Mlle Salomon de Villenoix (who for twenty years had devotedly looked after her fiance who had lost his reason) . But the baroness' cousin, the Marquis de Listomere, a depute in Paris, sees the political danger of sheltering Birotteau, and warns them to change their tactics. Two important families are thus created in this story. The Listomere family will be called upon for a large number of novels written between 1835 and 1838. The Baron de Listomere is enrolled for a novel in 1844 ( see 44.2). L' Abbe Birotteau will, of course, be given a brother Cesar, hero of the great novel of 1837. The interesting thing here, however, is that the intention of writing a novel called Cesar Birotteau goes back to October 1833; thus l' Abbe Birotteau helps to inspire Balzac's adoption of recurring characters ( see 33.5a and, for further discussion, 34.8.A). But more interesting still is the case of Mlle de Villenoix. It was only at proof stage that Balzac gave a past to a character who, it has been said, was at first 'rather shadowy'.1 And in June or July, he told the full story, making this same Mlle de Villenoix the fiancee of Louis Lambert. The implications of this are discussed in connection with Louis Lambert (32.7), and its significance for the growth of the device of recurring Rachel Wilson, 'Variations in Le Cure de Tours', in Dargan and Weinberg eds., The Evolution of Balzac's CH (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 233-4, n. 59.

Before Le P~re Goriot

characters in the essay that accompanies the section on Le Pere Goriot ( 34.8.A) . Postponing the discussion to the section on Louis Lambert implies that the idea of using the same character for two stories came after the publication of Le Cure de Tours; there is no proof that this is so, but it seems to be the most plausible reading of the evidence.

32.6

SCENES DE LA VIE PRIVEE

IV

{Aiglemont), Helene d' The fourth volume of Scenes de la vie privee, published with the third (see 32.5), is one of the most curious of all Balzac's publications. At first sight, it is no different from the third volume; like it, it comprises a number of stories, some new, some already known through reviews. There are five stories in this fourth volume, of which only one, the last, entitled L'Expiation, is entirely new. The other four had appeared in the Revue de Paris and the Revue des deux mondes, and we have already discussed them: Les Deux Rencontres (31.2); Le Doigt de Dieu (31.3); Le Rendez-Vous (31.6); La Femme de trente ans (32.4). The first of these has a new conclusion. The first significant feature of the new volume is that the stories are arranged in a particular order, and if the original versions are summarised, it will be seen that they form a kind of sequence. The new order is: Le Rendez-Vous (Victor d' Aiglemont courts and marries Julie; she is unhappily married despite the birth of a daughter Helene, and has a tragic relationship with Sir Arthur Grenville); La Femme de trente ans ( the Marquise de Vieumesnil, mourning her lover, Lord Melville, ends by becoming the mistress of Charles de Vandenesse) ; Doigt de Dieu ( a small boy pushes his younger brother into the river; it is clear that the younger child is illegitimate, and his mother's favourite) ; Les Deux Rencontres (Helene de Verdun runs away from her home with a pirate; years later she meets her father again, but does not explain her behaviour). Though one would hesitate to advise it as a method for fabricating novels, it might be that a few changes of name would make this a reasonably coherent sequence. And indeed, Balzac did make some changes of name, but not enough. The older child in Doigt de Dieu becomes a girl and has the name Helene, like the daughter in Les Deux Rencontres and also in Le Rendez-Vous; her brother is renamed Charles, the name of the lady's lover in La Femme de trente ans. Not only do the new order and certain changes of name suggest that Balzac is trying

118

Balzac's Recurring Characters

to fuse the episodes into a single sequence, the new conclusion clearly points in the same direction (analysed below, 32.6a). Yet not all the names are changed: the first lover, for instance, has two distinct names, and more striking, the heroine has a different name for all four episodes, and the new fifth episode finds a new name again. It will be 1842 before this inconsistency is ironed out (see 42.9a) and the name of d' Aiglemont used throughout. Neither the 1834 edition (34.6), which tinkers about with the volume a little more, nor the 1837 revised version of this (36.2), nor the 1839 reprint of the 1834 text, go the whole way. This edition of 1832 contains a note signed by the publisher, MameDelaunay, in which he says that he wanted Balzac to entitle the volume Esquisse de la vie d'une femme, partly for commercial reasons, partly because it seemed eminently suitable, as one finds in the sequence of five stories 'un plan suivi, un meme personnage deguise sous des noms differents, une meme vie saisie a son debut, conduite a son denouement'. But, he goes on, Balzac rejected the idea, perhaps because he thought the volume more poetic if the link was not underlined, perhaps because he was aware of inconsistencies which would not matter if the episodes were given out as separate. Is this note to be taken at face-value, or is it Balzac's way of expressing his own hesitations about the form his book should have? The ambiguity is in no way lessened by the partial adoption of Mame's idea, and by the creation of two more episodes, in the edition of 1834 (see 34.6). 32.6a LES DE UX REN CONT RES (Fin) L'EXPIATION [cH: La Femme de trente ans, vi]

(Aiglemont), Julie d' - Helened' - Moina d' (see: SaintHereen, Mme de) - Abel d' - Gustave d'

Pauline Saint-Hereen, M. de - Mme de

The third part of Les Deux Rencontres, written for publication in book form, portrays Helene's death in the hotel where her mother and sister Moina are staying. This rounds off the fourth episode; it also prepares us for the new fifth episode, in which the relationship of Moina and her mother is given a dramatic turn.

Before Le Pere Goriot

In the fifth of these connected Scenes de la vie privee, a marquise lavishes all her affection on her married daughter, Moina de SaintHereen, married to 'l'heritier d'une des plus illustres maisons de France'. Moina is in the clutches of a ne'er-do-well, Alfred de Vandenesse, the son of a 'friend' of the marquise. Moina resents her mother's trying to stop the affair, and brushes her off with a sarcastic comment which breaks her mother's heart. This final episode is barely comprehensible if we do not suppose that Alfred de Vandenesse is the son of the diplomat of La Femme de trente ans (although he is referred to here as marquis and not comte), and that the marquise is the heroine of that chapter and others. The title too, L'Expiation, implies that interpretation. Moina is clearly the second daughter, who had appeared in Les Deux Rencontres, notably in the new conclusion. The other children ( Abel and Gustave) are named. The marquise's maid is Pauline, as in Le Rendez-Vous. Yet the marquise is neither Mme d'Aiglemont (as in La Femme de trente ans), nor Mme de Verdun ( as in Les Deux Rencontres) ; she here has yet another name, Mme de Ballan. 32. 7

NOT I C E B I O GR A PH I Q U E S U R LOUIS LAMBERT [CH: Louis Lambert]

Lambert, Louis Lefebvre, l'abbe Villenoix, Mlle de This first version of Louis Lambert, considerably shorter than what we now read in the Comedie humaine, was published by Gosselin before 20 October 1832, in a volume of Nouveaux Contes philosophiques, which also contained Maitre Cornelius, Madame Firmiani and L'Auberge rouge. The original title indicates the nature of the work: more a biography than a novel with a plot. Louis Lambert himself, the genius whose gifts are bought at a terrible price, recurs in a number of 'philosophical' works, both on account of his tragic destiny, and also for his theories on the reality of thought. In one of these works ( Un Drame au Bord de la Mer, 34. 7b), Balzac reintroduces also his fiancee, Mlle Pauline de Villenoix, and his uncle, I' Abbe Lefebvre. The deliberate choice of Mlle de Villenoix, one of the aristocratic

30

Balzac's Recurring Characters

ladies in Le Cure de Tours (see 32.5d), is a milestone in the invention of 'recurring characters' and will accordingly be discussed in the essay on Le Pere Goriot (34.8.A). It appears that Balzac only realised after giving Mlle de Villenoix's biography succinctly in Le Cure de Tours that he had thrown away a good subject. But there was nothing to stop him from treating the theme more fully through another character; it is the retention of the name Villenoix which is remarkable. It creates difficulties within Le Cure de Tours (see 33.6b), but these did not deter Balzac; his fictional world is beginning to impose itself on him.

32.8a LA FEMME ABANDONNEE Ajuda-Pinto, marquis d' Beauseant, famille de - vicomtesse Claire de - marquis de - marquise de - vicomte de ( later marquis) - comte de

Champignelles, famille de Jacques Nueil, G. de

La Femme abandonnee was written at Angouleme in July or August 1832, for a volume of Etudes de Femme which never materialised. Its publication in the Revue de Paris, 16 September 1832, marked the beginning of a new, but ill-starred, collaboration with that journal, then directed by Amadee Pichot. A young man, Gaston de Nueil, is convalescing in Bayeux. He hears one of the local aristocracy talk of a distant relative of his who has recently come to the neighbourhood, the Vicomtesse de Beauseant. She lives with her servants and will see nobody. De Nueil manages to get himself admitted, and becomes her lover. After nine years he abandons her and marries another woman. Desperately unhappy, he kills himself soon afterwards. The couple is glimpsed again in Albert Savarus ( 42.3), otherwise that is the last we hear of Gaston de Nueil. Mme de Beauseant is, however, a frequently quoted name, especially after Le Pere Goriot has given readers a new and fuller opportunity of understanding her. Her servant Jacques recurs in Goriot too. Her husband's family is mentioned in passing here, and they too recur. Her husband, the vicomte, inherits the title of marquis: 'son pere et son frere aine etaient morts.' Her mother, the marquise (who is mentioned in the Memoires de deux jeunes mariees, 41.7), belongs to the Champignelles family; it is a Marquis de Champignelles who talks of her

Before Le P~re Goriot

31

impending arrival before Nueil. (The Champignelles family is mentioned again in L'Envers de l'Histoire contemporaine, 44.12.) Much more intriguing than these two families is a passing allusion by de Nueil to Mme de Beauseant's former lover. 'Est-elle par hasard celle dont l'aventure avec monsieur d' Ajuda-Pinto a fait tant de bruit?' Readers of Le Pere Goriot will know what Balzac is thinking of here, but this is two years before Goriot. 32.8b LA G RE N AD I ER E Brandon, Lady - Lord

Louis-Gaston Marie-Gaston

Like La Femme abandonnee, La Grenadiere was written at Angouleme in the summer of 1832, when Balzac was considering a volume of Etudes de Femme, and was published in the Revue de Paris 28 October 1832. 'La Grenadiere' is the name of a house near Tours, well-known to Balzac, who rented it in 1830. In his fiction, it is rented, in 1819, by Lady Brandon, who settles there with her adoring children, Louis-Gaston and Marie-Gaston; she dies soon afterwards. The brothers are remembered by Balzac at the time of the Memoires de deux jeunes mariees (see 41. 7) . The mother reappears more often, although the number of her appearances is reduced by two in later revisions, so that she remains a mysterious figure. (For further discussion, see FC 15.) 32.9

LES MARAN A Bianchi Diard - Mme Juana

Eugene Marana, les Montefiore

Les Marana was published in two parts by the Revue de Paris, 23 December 1832 and 13 January 1833. Juana, daughter of a reformed courtesan, la Marana, follows in her mother's footsteps despite her strict upbringing by a Tarragon merchant. She is seduced by Montefiore, a soldier in the regiment which besieged and captured Tarragon, and is married off to Montefiore's friend Diard. Years later her husband kills his old friend, wishing to rob him, and he, in turn, is killed by Juana. M. and Mme Diard have minor parts in Le Lys dans la Vallee (35.10b); an ancestor of la Marana (maternal, obviously) is used for the second part of L'Enfant Maudit in 1837. But it is Montefiore who

32

Balzac's Recurring Characters

prompts most reflection. The regiment to which he belongs is the 'sixth', which Balzac had already described in the first anecdote in the Conversation which opened the Contes bruns of January 1832 (see 31.7). Here, as there, the leader of the regiment is Colonel Eugene; this is not strictly true historically ( Eugene died in 181 o) , and we are accordingly counting Eugene as a fictional recurring character - but that is a detail. 1 The anecdote of the Contes bruns concerned not Eugene, but one of his captains, Bianchi, who took on a bet that he would eat the heart of an enemy guard. Now this incident is referred to explicitly in Les Marana : Au siege de Tarragone, les Italiens perdirent leur celebre Capitaine Bianchi, le meme qui, pendant la campagne, avait parie manger le creur d'une sentinelle espagnole, et le mangea. Ce divertissement de bivouac a ete raconte recemment clans un livre ou se trouvent, sur le 6e de ligne, des details qu'il est inutile de repeter ici. And a footnote reads: 'CONTES BRUNS. Une Conversation entre onze heures et minuit'. This passage brings us a stage nearer the idea of recurring characters. Balzac could easily have kept quiet about Bianchi, but the fictional world is making its own demands on him : this is the regiment which saw Bianchi's wager, and the fact had better be admitted openly. It might earn more readers for the Contes bruns. More intriguing still is the revelation a little further on that 'Montefiore avait ete l'adversaire de Bianchi clans le pari du creur espagnol.' If we read, or reread, the Contes bruns with this piece of knowledge in our minds, the short account of the wager takes on a new depth. The anonymous character who accepts Bianchi's bet is the seducer of Juana Diard, killed later by his friend. We lay down the book for a moment and daydream. Already one of the most powerful aesthetic possibilities of the device of recurring characters is being exploited. Cross-references, of which this is the first example, are fairly common in the Fume edition, and in the corrections to Furne; they are not very frequent before then ( see *45, 45. 1) . Balzac did not, however, put the name of Montefiore into the text of the Conversation when he revised it in 1844. But he maintained the cross-reference in Les Marana, which in the 1834 and 1846 editions is modified to refer to the Scenes de la vie parisienne, where the Contes bruns were to have appeared ( see 31. 7 and 35.1) . Later editions of Les Marana make no changes to the recurring characters. In the index he prepared for the Pleiade edition, F. Lotte lists Eugene with both the fictional and the real characters (Paris : Gallimard, 1959), XI, 1183 and 1420.

Before Le Pere Goriot

33.1

33

LE MEDE C IN DE C A M PA G N E Benassis Genestas

Goguelat Gondrin

The position and numbering we have given to Le Medecin de Campagne, a compromise between the date of conception and the date of completion, require explanation. The novel was begun at the end of September 1832, nearly three months before Les Marana, though after La Grenadiere. Balzac worked on it, with interruptions, for ten months, and it was published early in September 1833. As two of the characters discussed here were created before the end of 1832, I have preferred to place it before Ferragus and La Duchesse de Langeais; but as it is always rightly thought of as a work of 1833, I am numbering it 33.1. There is not much to be said about it in the context of this enquiry. Benassis, the principal character who, in penitence, has devoted his life to rebuilding and caring for a village of near-imbeciles, is referred to once outside this novel, in L'Envers de l'Histoire contemporaine (47.8) where we say a little more about the isolation of Le Medecin. Le M edecin does, however, present one interesting problem. In Adieu (30.4) Balzac spoke of the one surviving pontonnier of Beresina. And here, in Gondrin, he gives us a fictional character who is also the sole survivor of the Beresina crossing. If there was only one survivor, as Balzac seemed to think, the two characters must perforce be the same man. (In fact there were two.) Nothing, however, links Adieu and Le Medecin, and the reader of Adieu who knows about Gondrin does not thereby have his enjoyment of that story enhanced. It is rather that the thought of a survivor, unthanked by the Restoration government, acted as a poetic stimulus, so that, in the words of Bernard Guyon : 'deux ans plus tard, par la force de son genie createur, ii l'appellerait a la vie en lui donnant le nom de Gondrin.' 1 Gondrin was also a candidate for one of the Scenes de la vie militaire Balzac never wrote, as was Goguelat, his companion, and Genestas, the visitor who occasions Benassis' confidences (35.8a).

33.2

L ' H I ST O I R E D ES T R E I Z E : F E R RAGU S Desmarets, Jules - Mme

Ferragus

B. Guyon, La Creation litteraire chez Balzac: la genese du 'Medecin du Campagne' (Paris: A. Colin, 1951), 35.

34

Balzac's Recurring Characten

Gruget,Mme - Ida Maulincour, A. de - baronne de Meynardie, Mme

Pamiers, vidame de Ronquerolles Serisy, comtesse de Treize, Jes

Ferragus, chef des Devorans, was meant to be Balzac's February offering to the Revue de Paris, but it was not published until Io and I 7 March ( first two instalments), and then, after a further delay, 31 March and a supplement after Io April I 833. At first Balzac seems to have had no idea of writing more stories about 'the thirteen', but the success of Ferragus led him to begin a second and announce a third episode ( see 33.3) . Auguste de Maulincour, a sensitive young man, brought up by his grandmother and the Vidame de Pamiers, has fallen in love with the wife of Jules Desmarets, a stockbroker. Mme Desmarets is a devoted and loving wife, but she has a secret which she keeps from her husband: her father is Ferragus, a criminal, the leader of a secret society called 'les Treize'. Ferragus resents Maulincour's perpetual snooping and has him killed by one of 'the thirteen', the Marquis de Ronquerolles, who uses as a pretext for a duel a remark made by Maulincour to Ronquerolles' sister, the Comtesse de Serisy ( or Serisy), evidently once Maulincour's mistress. All the characters just named recur in other novels. So do Ferragus' housekeeper Madame Gruget, and her daughter Ida, inmate of a brothel kept by Mme Meynardie. The name Serisy has been used before by Balzac, in Le Bal de Sceaux, but no connection seems to be intended (see 30.2c and 35.2a). On Ferragus, see also 34.2, 39.9d, 43.9a. 33.3

N E TOUCH E Z PAS LA HA C HE

[cH: La Duchesse de Langeais] Langeais, famille de - duchesse de - vieux due de - due de - marquisde

Montriveau, marquis de Navarreins, famille de - due de Nouatre, M. de (ms.) Treize, les Vieuxmesnil, Mme de

The success of the first Histoire des Treize, Ferragus (33.2), inspired Balzac to plan two further stories, and he began Ne touchez pas la Bache

Before Le Pere Goriot

35

(now La Duchesse de Langeais) immediately. It was, however, not published in the Revue de Paris as Ferragus had been, but in a legitimist periodical, l'Echo de la Jeune France (April and May 1833). Balzac quarrelled with the management over the printing of the second instahnent, and refused to let them have the rest of his manuscript, which in any case was not ready for them. The complete story was not published until March 1834 (see 34.2a; also 39.ge and 43.9b). The fragment of La Duchesse de Langeais which was published in 1833 contains no characters shared with Ferragus (unless we count a single cry- later suppressed - of 'A moi les TREIZE!'), so we cannot talk here of the role of the Histoire des Treize in the genesis of recurring characters. The principal character is Antoinette, daughter of the Due de Navarreins, now the Duchesse de Langeais, and subsequently ( as the prologue reveals) la sceur Therese, a Carmelite nun. The duke, her husband, is away; she allows some admirers as a status-symbol, but refuses to become involved. She is trying to add a general, de Montriveau, to her collection. Balzac had first used the name Montriveau for the hero of a story called Les Amours d'une Laide which he abandoned after writing only half a page. 1 When he began La Duchesse de Langeais, he called the hero M. de Nouatre, but he soon discarded this name, later used for Le Cabinet des Antiques (33.6a). Since the Due de Langeais' father comes into the 1842 version of Un Episode sous la Terreur, and since there is a Marquis de Langeais mentioned in La Rabouilleuse, we should say here that the duke is described as the 'fils aine' of the former duke, who dies soon after his son's marriage. The Navarreins family, to which the duchess belongs, becomes one of the most important aristocratic families in the Comedie humaine. One other character must be mentioned. Montriveau and Mme de Langeais are introduced by a Mme de Vieuxmesnil. A Mme de Vieumesnil was the heroine of the episode entitled La Femme de trente ans in 1832 (32.4). Is it the same character, or just the same name (spelled slightly differently)? The few words which she speaks in La Duchesse do not help us to answer the question. If she is meant to be the same character, then this is a tentative step towards the creation, in fiction, of a single society of which the various novels offer different glimpses. It is remarkable how very casually the name is mentioned, but we shall find other examples before Le Pere Goriot of the same hesitancy (see 34.8.A} • H. Gauthier, 'Un projet d'Etude de Femme: Les Amours d'une Laide', AB (1961), 111-37.

36

Balzac's Recurring Characters

33.4

S C EN E S D E LA V I E DE P R O V I N C E EUGENIE GRANDET

I

Grandet, Felix - Guillaume - Charles - Mme Charles Balzac had entertained the idea of publishing his works under the title Etudes de M c:eurs for about a year before he signed a contract with Mme Bcchet in October 1833. By this time he had come to see them as forming three groups, Scenes de la vie privee ( the title already used for the six stories published in 1830), Scenes de la vie de province, and Scenes de la vie parisienne, each group to consist of four volumes. The first set to be published comprised volumes I and II of the Scenes de la vie de province. Volume I was made up entirely of a new work, Eugenie Grandet, of which the first chapter had appeared in !'Europe Litteraire on 19 September 1833. It occupied Balzac for most of the months of September, October and November with only a few interruptions. Eugenie Grandet, undoubtedly one of the most important productions of Balzac's career, has only a negative lesson for the student of recurring characters. Eugenie herself is never mentioned outside this one story. Her father, Felix Grandet, is mentioned once, in a roll-call of misers in Les Paysans ( 44.13). The cousin Charles who promises to marry her and then forgets her, and his father Guillaume, whose bankruptcy and suicide precipitate Charles into the provinces where Eugenie lives, both reappear briefly in two novels. Charles' wife is mentioned with him in one of these. The obvious reason for this relative isolation of Eugenie Grandet is that the great world passes a small town like Saumur by; hence its isolation seems to symbolise the isolation of the provinces and the loneliness of Eugenie herself. It is, nevertheless, strange that even the characters who do live in Paris - Charles and his wife, and earlier, his father - should make so little impact on the rest of La Comedie humaine. The final paying off of Guillaume Grandet's creditors was, we are informed, 'pour le commerce parisien un des evenements les plus etonnants de l'epoque'. Yet nobody seems to have any memory of it in other novels. Balzac did try to link Eugenie Grandet with the Paris of the Comedie humaine later, by substituting recurring characters for the shadowy names and initials of the first edition, but the effect is somewhat stilted ( see 39.9b and 43.4a) .

Before Le Pere Goriot

37

In one way, however, Eugenie Grandel is important for helping Balzac towards the moment when he will decide to join his novels together by the recurrence of the same characters: it is here that Balzac explains phenomena of the Restoration by the history of the Revolutionary period and the Empire; with this new mastery of historical perspective, one feels the need for the fictional world to present itself as an imaginative replica of the real world, over and above the impression of authenticity which each individual novel must give. How this affects the question of recurring characters will be discussed further in connection with Le Pere Goriot (34.8.A). 33.5

C O N T E S P H I L O S O PH IQ U E S

While Balzac was working on Eugenie Grandet and the Scenes de la vie de province ( 33-4 and 33.6), he also approached Gosselin about a new set of contes philosophiques. Four titles are mentioned in this connection: Cesar Birotteau, Aventures administratives d'une idee heureuse et patriotique, Le Pretre catholique and Les Souffrances de l'Inventeur. The Pretre was probably not begun before 1834 ( see 34. 1) , the Souffrances were not begun at all. Cesar Birotteau was not seriously started until 1834 (see 34.3), but he did write half a page some time before that, and the title itself, first mentioned in a letter to Zulma Carraud of 5 October 1833 is significant. An extract from the Aventures was published in the Causerie du Monde of 10 March 1834. Balzac actually wrote two parts of this work, probably in October 1833. 33.5a Ct SAR BIRO TT EAU Birotteau, Cesar Although Balzac did not seriously start work on Birotteau until the following April, we must note here the title and all it implies. In a letter to Mme Hanska written when he had begun his first draft, he explained that Cesar Birotteau was 'le frere de celui que vous connaissez, victime comme son frere, mais victime de la civilisation parisienne, tandis que son frere n'est victime que d'un seul homme'. Balzac has visualised a character like his 'cure de Tours', Fran~ois Birotteau (see 32.5d), this time living not in the provinces but in Paris; he sees him not simply as a replique of the first, but quite explicitly as his brother. It is another crucial step in the genesis of the device of recurring characters.

38

Balzac's Recurring Characters

33.5b A VENTURES AD MINI STRATIVES D' UNE IDEE HEUREUSE [Not in CH] Lambert, Louis The fragment entitled Aventures administratives d'une idee heureuse is another crucial step in the growth of the system of recurring characters, for the prologue reintroduces Louis Lambert (see 32.7). He is discussing some of his ideas with a group of friends, notably the belief that 'les idees sont des etres organises qui se produisent en dehors de l'homme, qui agissent ....' What ensues is meant to give support to this theory.

33.6

S C EN ES DE LA V I E DE PROV I N C E II

We have already described the circumstances in which the first two volumes of provincial scenes were prepared (see 33.4). Once he had realised that Eugenie Grandet would occupy all the first volume, Balzac thought his second volume could be filled with stories he had already published elsewhere: Le Message and La Grande Breteche, both freed from the constrictions of Le Conseil (see 32.5); La Femme abandonnee and La Grenadiere, no longer reserved for the Etudes de Femme ( which had fallen by the wayside with the emergence of the series of Scenes making up the Etudes de Mceurs); and Les Celibataires (Le Cure de Tours). In fact, La Grande Breteche was postponed to volume III (see 37. 1), and its place had to be filled by a new story. Balzac wrote the Prologue to Le Cabinet des Antiques, on 2 November 1833, explicitly because the Scenes de la vie de province required an extra forty or fifty pages. These pages were, however, not published in the Etudes de Mceurs, but a Prologue to Le Cabinet des Antiques appeared in La Chronique de Paris at a time when Balzac was anxious to keep the pot boiling (6 March 1836) ; we are presuming, as all Balzac scholars do, that the 1836 text corresponds to the 1833 manuscript, now lost. The story Balzac did write for volume n was L'Illustre Gaudissart, composed at the end of November. We must also discuss Les Celibataires, the second story in the volume, because it contains some significant changes from the text of 1832.

Before Le Pere Goriot

39

33.6a LE C A B I N E T D E S AN T I Q U E S (Prologue) Chesnel ( Croisier, du) ( Esgrignon) , famille d' - marquis d' - Mlle Armande d' - Victurnien d'

Nouastre, famille de

The Prologue to Le Cabinet des Antiques, in its first form, is a picture of an unnamed provincial town, in the early days of the Empire, painted by a first person narrator who remembers it from his childhood. The Marquis d'Esgrigny, presented as an obscure provincial aristocrat, very proud of his long ancestry, has returned in 1798 to his home town. His property, of course, had been confiscated, but it was bought by the 'vieil intendant de la famille', the faithful Chesnel. In 1801 the Marquis is fifty-three; his young wife who died in childbirth left him with a son, Victurnien. (His wife was the daughter of the Baron de Nouatre elsewhere spelled Nouastre - Balzac here resurrects a name first thought of for the Duchesse de Langeais, 33.3). The marquis lives now with his younger half-sister, Armande. M. Boutron, (later mayor, and Baron de Boisset) tries to negotiate for Mlle d'Esgrigny's hand in marriage, but the marquis is offended. In 1805 another suitor is refused. Soon the real ancien siecle nobility return to the district. D'Esgrigny is respected generally, except by liberals like the Baron de Boisset, who, besides hating him for refusing him entry into 'le faubourg SaintGermain de la Province', is irritated to find d'Esgrigny's society so well considered. The prefet, for instance, sends his wife to the 'hotel d'Esgrigny', and the marquis' salon is contemptuously nicknamed 'le Cabinet des Antiques'. When Le Cabinet des Antiques was completed in 1838, the name d'Esgrigny was changed to d'Esgrignon ( see 38.5 and 39. 1) ; as such it is very familiar to readers of La Comedie humaine. At the same time, M. de Boisset becomes M. du Croisier. Chesnel is mentioned or alluded to in other novels. 33.6b L E S C E L I BAT A I RE S [cH: Le Cure de Tours]

Villenoix, Mlle de

40

Balzac's Recurring Characters

In the new edition of Le Cure de Tours, Balzac tried to reconcile the portrait of Mlle de Villenoix painted in the first edition with the additional information about her given in Louis Lambert (see 32.5d and 32. 7). Hence the time she spent nursing her fiance is reduced from twenty years to five, despite the manifest inappropriateness of this figure; and he talks now of the 'regularity' of her features, where previously we read 'irregularity'! The question is more fully discussed in section 34.8.A. 33.6c L ' I L L U S T R E G A U D I S S A R T Gaudissart Mitouflet (name) 'L'Illustre Gaudissart' is a gay, ebullient commercial traveller, whose wares in the post-1830 world are subscriptions for journals. On one of his trips, he visits Vouvray, and the inhabitants play a practical joke on him. The inn-keeper, we should mention, is named Mitouflet ( see 39.8; also 35.6). Gaudissart has an important role in Cesar Birotteau (37.6), which establishes him as a major figure in the Comedie humaine. His friendship with Finot in that novel allows Balzac to substitute Finot for an anonymous friend of Gaudissart in 1843 (43.4d).

Before Le Pere Goriot

34.l

LE PR f. TR E CAT HO LIQ U E [Not in

CH]

Veze, l'abbe de

It is not possible to date accurately the fragment entitled Le Pretre Catholique. The title comes in the list of contes philosophiques planned in the autumn of 1833 (33.5), but Balzac probably did not begin it until his return from Geneva early in 1834. He wrote only a short fragment, which like a fragment of 1832 (32.5c), has as principal character the Abbe de Veze. The setting is Angouleme now, but Veze is still the same - young, melancholy, perhaps tubercular, certainly mysterious, and a remarkable preacher.

34.2

SC EN E S D E LA V I E PAR I S I EN N E

II, III

The second set of volumes of Etudes de M reurs ( see 33.4) comprised volumes II and III of the Scenes de la vie parisienne, and appeared at the end of March 1834. Volume II contained Les Marana and the first episode of the Histoire des Treize: Ferragus. Volume III contained the whole of the second episode, left incomplete in 1833 (Ne touchez pas la Hache, see 33.3) and finished during the latter part of February and the beginning of March, together with the beginning of the third episode, which was not completed until 1835 (La Fille aux yeux d'or, see 35.1a). 34.2a NE TO U CHEZ PAS LA HACH E [cH:La Duchesse de Langeais] Beauseant, Mme de Blamont-Chauvry, princesse de Bouvry, Mme Langeais, duchesse de Marsay, Henri de Maulincour, A. de

Montriveau, marquis de Navarreins, due de Pamiers, vidame de Ronquerolles, marquis de Serisy, Mme de Treize, les Vieuxmesnil, Mme de (del.)

At the end of the fragment published in 1833 (see 33.3), Montriveau

42

Balzac's Recurring Characters

and the duchess had just been introduced. In the new continuation, we learn that, on the advice of his friend Ronquerolles, Montriveau tests the duchess; he asks her to a ball, and finds that she already has a partner. Convinced by this that she is playing with him, he abducts her from a ball given by his sister, Mme de Serisy, and as a punishment pretends to brand her. This manly gesture overcomes the duchess' resistance, and she compromises herself in the eyes of Paris society by sending her coach to wait all day outside Montriveau's door. Wiser members of her family try to dissuade her from such recklessness. Montriveau feigns complete indifference, and in the end she carries out her threat of quitting Paris for a convent. The opening chapter ( already published in 1833) and the closing scene show members of 'the thirteen' trying to abduct her from the convent, but she dies. We saw that in the 1833 fragment the only reference to Ferragus was a single invocation of 'les Treize'. We saw also that at the end of the 1833 portion, a Mme de Vieuxmesnil introduces the two main characters (Montriveau and Antoinette de Langeais), and this we found interesting, as Mme de Vieuxmesnil might have been taken from an earlier story. In this new, complete edition, Mme de Vieuxmesnil is replaced by Mme de Serisy (Ronquerolles' sister in Ferragus), so this tentative recurring character quickly disappears from the lists, and a new link with Ferragus is forged. (In 1843, Mme de Serisy will herself yield to Mme de Maufrigneuse.) As well as 'the thirteen', Ronquerolles and Mme de Serisy, there are two other links with Ferragus: the first person to notice the tell-tale coach is 'un jeune homme dedaigne par madame de Langeais, et recueilli par madame de Serisy, le baron de Maulincour'. This tallies with a passing remark in Ferragus. But La Duchesse is in no sense a sequel; the events take place a year before the action of Ferragus. We shall not dwell on this here, save to point out that knowing Maulincour was once interested in the Duchesse de Langeais adds something to our picture of that youth; in Ferragus the reference to his former liaison with Mme de Serisy came as a bit of a surprise. We discuss the implications more fully in connection with Le Pere Goriot (see 34.8.A). Secondly, and less predictably, the duchess' concerned family includes her great-uncle the Vidame de Pamiers. Why Balzac made this particular connection, I cannot say; maybe it is no more than an obscure impulse to connect the backgrounds as well as the foregrounds of his two tales. If so, the device will be more effective when he has more than two novels to call upon. Certainly it goes beyond what might normally be expected in a story which is ostensibly another episode in the life of 'the thirteen'. Of the other members of the secret society, only one is named in La Duchesse de Langeais, and that is de Marsay.

Before Le Pere Goriot

43

He was introduced in the last paragraph, to lead from La Duchesse into the next episode of the Histoire des Treize, of which he is to be the hero (see 34.2b). Correcting the proofs, Balzac prepared us for de Marsay's appearance by substituting his name for that of one Croixmare in a couple of conversations in the body of the text. There are two other details to mention about the group which represents the faubourg Saint-Germain. In the course of conversation, the Due de Navarreins (the duchess' father, as we know from the text of 1833) and the Marquis de Cassan mention a Marquis de Valigny son of the dying Duchesse de Valigny, - who is attracted to a banker's wife, Mme Bouvry. Mme Bouvry reappears in L'lnterdiction (36.3) but later disappears from both novels, and in 1840 the non-recurring Valigny is replaced by Marigny. Finally, one of the group is the Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry. There was a M. de Blamont in La Femme de trente ans (32.4); one would like to think that the substitution of BlamontChauvry for the Latour-Chauvry of the manuscript was a deliberate link with M. de Blamont, but in fact M. de Blamont's name disappears from the very next edition of La Femme de trente ans ( 34.6), whereas the Blamont-Chauvrys go from strength to strength. There is, finally, one more allusion in La Duchesse de Langeais that takes us out of the Histoire des Treize altogether. Twice the duchess invokes 'la recente aventure de madame de Beauseant', and the second reference is worth quoting in full: L'amour que je deployerais a tout moment pour vous mieux attacher a moi serait peut-etre une raison d'etre abandonnee. Je ne veux pas faire une seconde edition de madame de Beauseant. If this were a straightforward reference to La Femme abandonnee, it would be extraordinary enough. It would mean that in some aesthetic limbo, Balzac's characters knew each other, that the worlds created in each novel were in fact only fragments of a single world, in which Paris, for instance, was the same Paris in each work. Secondly it would enable us to comprehend better the character of Mme de Beauseant, abandoned, we now know, for being too affectionate. More subtly than in the case of Maulincour ( or of Montefiore in Les Marana, see 32.9), we should find our enjoyment of the first book enriched on rereading. But in fact there is more to it even than this. For if we think a moment about La Femme abandon nee we shall realise that Mme de Langeais cannot be talking about Mme de Beauseant's affair with de Nueil, which took place later. And we shall perhaps have to go back

44

Balzac's Recurring Characters

to the text before we recall an enigmatic reference to her 'aventure avec M. Ajuda-Pinto' (see 32.8a). Our understanding of the earlier story is thus enriched in a particularly unexpected and subtle way. What this teaches us about Balzac's creative imagination is perhaps more striking still. For it is only in Le Pere Goriot, a novel not even conceived at this stage (see 34.8.B), that Balzac tells us about the liaison of Mme de Beauseant and Ajuda-Pinto. How many more fragments of novels already exist in Balzac's mind? Certainly we shall find several examples of these hints as we follow Balzac's career to its conclusion, (see *35, *37, etc.) On La Duchesse, see also 39.ge and 43.gb.

34.2b LA FILL E AUX YE U X D' 0 R Dudley, Lord Manerville, P.de Marsay, Henri de

Ronquerolles Vordac, Mme de

At the end of La Duchesse de Langeais, Ronquerolles is invited by de Marsay to tell the others the story of de Marsay's passion for la fille aux yeux d' or. There follows this paragraph: En ces deux episodes de leur histoire, la puissance des TREIZE n'a rencontre d'autres empechements, que l'obstacle eternellement oppose par la nature aux volontes humaines: la mort et Dieu. Le confident involontaire de ces curieux personnage [sic], se permet de donner un troisieme episode, parce que, clans l'aventure toute parisienne de LA FILLE AUX YEUX o'oR, les Treize ont vu leur pouvoir egalement brise, leur vengeance trompee, et que cette fois, au denouement, ils n'ont vu ni Dieu ni la mort, mais une passion terrible, devant laquelle a recule notre litterature, qui ne s'effraie cependant de rien. The fiction of having Ronquerolles tell the story is not preserved; it is again the 'confident involontaire' who acts as narrator. Ronquerolles appears in the story. In the one chapter which appeared in 1834, the story of de Marsay's love for the lesbian Paquita Valdes is barely touched upon. We are told a lot about de Marsay's background, and three characters are introduced who will recur elsewhere: his parents, Lord Dudley and Mme de Vordac, and his friend Paul de Manerville.

Before Le Pere Goriot

34.3

45

CESAR BIROTTEA U Birotteau, Cesar - Mme - Mlle - l'abbe F. Claparon Crottat Loraux, pere Pillerault

Popinot, A. Ragon - Mme Roguin - Mme Tillet, F. du - Mme du

After the publication of the Scenes de la vie parisienne, at the end of March 1834, Balzac stayed at Frapesle with Zulma Carraud, and there began to write Cesar Birotteau. The previous autumn he had noted the title and written half a page (see 33.5a); now he completed two chapters and part of a third before having to lay it aside. 1 Though he may have revised what he had written later in 1834, he did not complete the novel until 1837 (see37.6). We have already discussed the significant choice of protagonist for Cesar Birotteau, as the title appears in the Correspondance several months before Balzac composed the first chapters (see 33.5a). Cesar Birotteau is the brother of l' Abbe Franc;ois. At the beginning of the second chapter, we are given Cesar Birotteau's family background, and Balzac has this to say about the abbe: La maitresse affectionnait sa femme de charnbre (i.e. Mme Birotteau mere, morte jeune) ; elle fit clever avec ses fils l' aine des enfants de son closier, nomme Franc;ois, et le plac;a dans un seminaire. Ordonne pretre, Franc;ois Birotteau se cacha pendant la Revolution et se trouvait au moment ou commence cette histoire vicaire de la cathedrale de Tours, et n'avait quitte qu'une seule fois cette ville, pour venir voir son frere Cesar. Le mouvement de Paris etourdit si fort le hon pretre qu'il n'osait pas sortir, et cinq jours apres son arrivee, ii revint a Tours, en se promettant de ne jamais retoumer clans la capitale. This is particularly interesting, as it shows Balzac amplifying, in a new novel, the dossier of a character already known. Of the three new facts disclosed here: that Franc;ois Birotteau was the eldest son and soon orphaned, that he showed some courage during the Revolutionary See my article on 'The genesis of Cesar Birotteau: some chronological observations', FS, 22 ( 1968), 9-25.

46

Balzac's Recurring Characters

period, that he found himself quickly out of his depth in Paris, only the third is a direct consequence of his reappearance. In 1832 Balzac did not consider his character before the time of his friendship with Chapeloud, but with Eugenie Grandet he realised that his characters must be seen as part of a historical process. Cesar himself is treated in the new manner, and in the course of describing his career, Balzac introduces a number of characters who will in time appear in other novels besides this one. There are M . and Mme Ragon, owners of the 'Reine des Roses' ( here 'Reine des Fleurs' it will be corrected on proof) before Birotteau; Loraux the priest; and Pillerault whose niece, Constance, Birotteau marries. They have a daughter, Cesarine. The next generation is represented by a club-foot 'premier commis', Anselme Popinot, no doubt already seen as Cesarine's fiance and husband. The main themes of the book are sounded in the first chapter : Birotteau' s elevation to the rank of Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, which fills him with imprudent ambitions, for example to extend and refurnish his apartment, and to give a magnificent ball. There is also a second theme : Birotteau's equally imprudent excursion into the field of speculation. In this connection three characters are mentioned: Roguin who is Birotteau's lawyer, du Tillet, and one Charles Claparon about whom nothing is disclosed at this stage. The first two are married, though Balzac suppressed Mme du Tillet before the novel was published in 1837 (see, however, 36.3 and 38.8). Finally, there is Crottat, Roguin's first clerk, who also aspires to the hand of Cesarine, with her father's blessing. We must mention Crottat's rich father as well ( cf. 4 7.2). It is particularly satisfying to know just what Balzac did write in 1834, as du Tillet, Popinot, Crottat, and also Roguin (once) reappear in other stories before Birotteau is published ( see 37 .6 where the different appearances are summarised) . 34.4

L ES C H O U AN S Bauvan, comte de Navailles, marquis de

Balzac had begun to revise Le Dernier Chouan ( 29. 1) for Mame in 1832, and probably did correct about half the text, but the project came to nothing. In 1834 the possibility of a second edition was mooted again by Vimont, and it appeared at the end of May 1834. Two changes made for this second edition need to be mentioned here. A man hitherto known as the Comte de *** is named Bauvan. It is

47

Before Le P~re Goriot

understandable that a man who plays a considerable part in the story should be given a more easily pronounced name. Another anonymous character is named: the man who looked after Marie becomes the Marquis de Navailles. (He is not, in the end, a recurring character in the Comedie humaine, but the name appears for awhile in La Peau de Chagrin, 34.7a.)

34.5

SC ENE S DE LA VI E PR I V

E E III

The third set of two volumes of Etudes de M(l!urs (see 33.4) were volumes III and 1v of the Scenes de la vie privee. Volume III was to be new, and it gave Balzac some trouble. He began with the intention of writing a story entitled La Fleur-des-Pois, not to be confused with the story of that name which became Le Contrat de Mariage, published in I 835 ( 35. I oa). He put the unfinished work aside after writing what he exaggeratedly called 'half a volume'. He later said he had written three 'half-volumes' before finding the subject he finally found suitable. There exists, as well as a fragment entitled Fleur-des-Pois, a new development of the same subject, with the title ( cancelled) of Les Jeunes Gens. I believe that they belong together, and accordingly discuss them here in 34.5a. Though the project was abandoned in 1834, it is taken up again in 1836, with a new variation of the subject entitled La Vieille Fille ( 36.9) . The subject which Balzac did find more immediately amenable was La Recherche de l'Absolu, begun in June. Volumes III and IV of Scenes de la vie privee were published mid-September 1834. 34.5a LA FL EU R - D ES - PO I S [Not in CH] Cormon, Mlle Gordes

Sponde, l'abbe de Troisville, M. de

La Fleur-des-Pois is a characteristic 'animated exposition'. In I 8 I 9, the townsfolk of Alen~on are astonished to see the elite of the local aristocracy at a band concert. Monsieur de Sponde, a dandy ( 'la fleur-des-pois du pays') is with Mme de Gordes, an attractive widow, and this excites much comment, for it appears that M. de Sponde's wife is on her deathbed. Next Balzac tells us the history of Mme de Sponde and of her husband. Mme de Sponde was of rich middle-class stock. For forty-two years she was Mlle Cormon, and no beauty. At this crucial age of her life, she

48

Balzac's Recurring Characters

fell in love with M. de Sponde. He, for his part, was an extravagant young man, nephew of the bishop of Alenc;on, l' Abbe de Sponde. Spoiled by a distant aunt, he lived beyond his means, and saw in marriage with Mlle Cormon the only chance to continue living the life of his choice. In the second fragment, originally entitled Les Jeunes Gens, the flashback of La Fleur-des-Pois has become the main subject. We are shown Mlle Cormon before her marriage; it is evidently the same character, in the same setting. The only abbe in this story is her uncle, whose name is Cormon. The fragment ends with Mlle Cormon's precipitous return from her country house at Prebaudet to welcome a man whom she takes to be a suitor. His name: M. de Troisville.

34.5b LA RECHERCHE DEL' AB SOL U Casa-Real, Camille de Chiffreville Claes, B. - Mme

Protez Savarus, S. de Temninck, famille de

Even more than Eugenie Grandet, La Rec here he de l' Absolu, which tells of Balthasar Claes, who ruins his family in his fanatical search for the philosopher's stone, is isolated from other works of La Comedie humaine. Mme Claes, whose maiden name was Temninck, is related to the Casa-Real family of Spain; these families are recalled in Le Contrat de Mariage of the following year (35.10a). She is said to share with Savaron de Savarus an ability to make a certain traditional soup; this family, of all unlikely choices, provides the hero of a famous nouvelle of 1842, Albert Savarus (42.3). For his experiments, Claes obtains chemicals from the firm of 'Protez et Chiffreville', whose owners appear in Cesar Birotteau in 1837 (37.6). There is no change in the number of recurring characters in subsequent revisions.

34.6

SCENES DE LA VIE PRIVEE Mt ME HISTOIRE

IV:

[cH: Femme de trente ans] Aiglemont, Julie d' - Victor d' Blamont ( del.)

Marsay, de Ronquerolles

Before Le Pere Goriot

49

The fourth volume of Scenes de la vie privee was published mid-September along with the third (34.5). It is an expanded version of the fourth volume of the 1832 Mame edition of Scenes (32.6), now entitled Meme Histoire. It includes two short new passages: Souf/rances lnconnues, dated Paris 15 August 1834, and a new sequel to Le Doigt de Dieu entitled La Vallee du Torrent. (The title Le Doigt de Dieu covers both parts; the first part is now called La Bievre.) When Balzac brought together four episodes for his fourth volume of Scenes de la vie privee in 1832, he tried to link them together, as we have seen, by placing them in a certain order, changing some, but not all, names of the characters arguably common to two stories or more; he added a new episode which clearly implied that the chapters formed a single sequence and had his publisher preface the collection with a quasiexplanatory note (see 32.6) . In this new edition, he continues on the same lines. The title of the volume is now Meme Histoire, and as the separate episodes are not variations on a theme, which would be one way of interpreting the new title, it can only mean that each new episode, though still ostensibly about a different heroine, develops out of situations described in previous episodes. Again he adds an explanatory note: Le personnage qui traverse pour ainsi dire les six tableaux dont se compose Meme Histoire n'est pas une figure; c'est une pensee. Plus cette pensee y revet de costumes dissemblables, mieux elle rend !es intentions de !'auteur. That is to say, he knows that the different chapters, written independently of each other originally, present stages in the life of a single destiny; but as they were not conceived as a unity, there are certain inconsistencies which would strike the reader if he gave the same name to the heroine of each part. And so he continues to resist the idea of fusing the heroines into a single figure. In 1842, when the pressure of recurring characters is much stronger than it is in 1834, his resistance weakens, and all the heroines are named Julie d' Aiglemont (see 42.9a). And yet, as in 1832, changes to the other characters, and new material specially writen for the new edition, cement the links between the different episodes more firmly. One relevant change to a character comes in the first part of Les Deux Rencontres, where Colonel de Verdun becomes a general, which tallies more with his being a colonel ( d' Aiglemont) in Le Rendez-Vous. There is another change of some importance as a straw in the wind. In the chapter entitled 'La Femme de trente ans', the Marquise d' Aiglemont said (in the 1832 version) that she was visited by M. de Blamont and M. de Vouglans. These names are now changed to M . de Ronque-

50

Balmc's Recurring Characters

rolles and M. de Marsay from La Fille aux yeux d' or, one of the Parisian scenes that has been published ( in part) the previous March (see 34.2b). The names are chosen because they represent Paris society in the world which the separate novels are building piecemeal. If Balzac chooses these two rather than two others, it is probably because La Fille aux yeux d'or, being incomplete, is still on his mind; I doubt if we are meant to supply any overtones from our reading of L'Histoire des Treize. We have found one other possible case of this particular symptom of the imminent adoption of recurring characters (Mme de Vieuxmesnil in La Duchesse de Langais, see 33.3); its implications will, of course, be fully discussed in the ( also imminent) essay on Le Pere Goriot ( 34.8.A). 34.6a SOUFFRANCES INCONN U ES (Aiglemont), marquis de - marquise d' - Helene d' Saint-Lange, le cure de

In the second chapter of Meme Histoire, which is new, the principal character is anonymous, although she is a marquise, which agrees with La Femme de trente ans and L'Expiation. This new episode is placed between the death of the English admirer, and the affair with the diplomat. The marquise settles in the Chateau of Saint-Lange, wishing to expiate a terrible crime. There she has many talks with the local priest, who foretells further trouble. She has a daughter, Helene, 'fille du devoir' about whom she makes a curiously prophetic remark: 'si elle tombait a l'eau, je m'y precipiterais pour l'aller reprendre' (cf. Le Doigt de Dieu, 31.3). The Cure de Saint-Lange is the only anonymous recurring character in the Comedie humaine, apart from the criminals who make up the Societe des Dix Mille (34.8.B); he is mentioned also in Ursule Mirouet (41.6). 34.6b LA VALLEE DU TORRENT [cH: La Femme de trente ans]

(Aiglemont), Helene d' Crottat, M. - Mme

(Vandenesse), marquis de - C. de (anon.) - F. de (anon.)

Before Le Pere Goriot

51

In the first part of Le Doigt de Dieu, as modified in 1832, a girl Helene had pushed her young half-brother into the river. In this new sequel, La Vallee du Torrent, a lady is dining with her lover and a comic, blustering, tactless notary. The husband is out at the theatre with his daughter Helene; but they return unexpectedly early: a scene in which a man pushes a boy into the river has upset Helene. Later the perplexed notary talks over the episode, which ends with his being expelled from the house along with his wife. One detail links this episode with other parts of Meme Histoire : the lover is a diplomat, as in La Femme de trente ans. If we accordingly suppose that it is Charles de Vandenesse, we must note also that his father has recently died, and that there is a dispute between him and his younger brother. Here is the embryo of Felix de Vandenesse, the hero of Le Lys dans la Vallee (see 35.1ob) . Quite different is the significance of the notary, whose name is Crottat. He had first sprung to life on the manuscript of Cesar Birotteau, as Roguin's first clerk ( see 34.3). His unexpected reappearance here suggests that Balzac had already visualized him more vividly than the unfinished manuscript of Birotteau would allow us to surmise, and that Balzac did not want to wait any longer before using him in a published story. Whether he already knew that Crottat would marry not Mlle Birotteau but the daughter of a joiner is a matter for conjecture; Lourdois only appears with the 1837 text of Cesar Birotteau. 34.7

ETUDES PHILOSOPHIQUES

Fast on the heels of Mme Bechet's Etudes de M