The Wild Ass's Skin
Page 34
Solomon’s Seal: in medieval legends (including the One Thousand and One Nights as well as Jewish and Christian stories), a signet ring that enabled King Solomon to command demons or genies. It was often imagined as showing a six-pointed star within a circle, at the centre of which is inscribed the sacred name of God.
Sanskrit: the original edition of the novel contained only the ‘translation’ of the inscription on the skin. In 1838 Balzac added an ‘original’ in Arabic (not Sanskrit) provided by an acquaintance of his mistress Madame Hanska, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, whom Balzac met in Vienna in 1835. He neglected, however, to change his text. The ‘oriental’ character of the inscription would seem in any case to matter more than linguistic accuracy.
Place Vendôme: the statue of Napoleon at the top of the column had been removed when the Bourbons returned in 1814. Louis-Philippe would install a new statue of the emperor in 1833.
the Regency: the years between the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the beginning of Louis XV’s personal reign in 1723, during which Philippe d’Orléans served as regent, had become legendary for libertine behaviour. At 102 years of age, however, the old man would not have been alive during those years; perhaps Balzac meant to say that he became a millionaire at that age.
Swedenborg: Emmanuel Swedenborg (1668–1762), Swedish scientist and heterodox mystic, whose visionary writings about the links between the world of matter and the world of spirit were an important influence on Balzac, as also on such writers as Blake, Baudelaire, and Yeats.
antique priapics: licentious dances or ceremonies honouring Priapus, the Greek god of fertility, whose symbol was an erect penis.
Hôtel Saint-Quentin … Léonarde: in his autobiographical Confessions, Rousseau describes living in this boarding-house when as a poor, unknown writer he came to Paris to seek his fortune. Léonarde is the cook for a gang of robbers that shelters the hero in the popular opera La Caverne (1793), based on Lesage’s picaresque novel Gil Blas (1715).
Bouffons: the Théâtre Favart, where Italian operas were performed, notably those of Rossini.
Force: prison for common criminals; Sainte-Pélagie was primarily a debtors’ prison.
July hero: the ‘martyrs’ of the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled the Bourbon King Charles X and put Louis-Philippe on the throne, were the object of popular veneration. The new ‘bourgeois monarchy’, which was identified with the interests of an aggressive capitalism, was seen by many as a betrayal of the martyrs’ ideals.
Chaussée d’Antin: the quarter associated with bankers and other ‘new money’ people, while the Faubourg Saint-Germain was the quarter of the old aristocracy.
doctrinaires: a group of constitutional monarchists who after 1830 were seen as providing ideological support for the regime of Louis-Philippe.
Panurge: the trickster character of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534–52). Gargantua, the giant whose humanistic education and comic-heroic exploits are described in the second part of the work, is mentioned below.
more orientali: according to oriental custom.
Crispins: the most famous statesmen of Europe are compared to Crispin, the clever valet and master of intrigue who is a stock figure of many French comedies.
Taillefer: this figure was not named in the first edition of the novel. Balzac later gave him, and many of the other characters Raphael meets at the banquet, the name of a character from one of his other stories, thus integrating the novel into the larger context of what would become the Comédie humaine. ‘The Red Inn’ (published in the Revue de Paris in August 1831, the same month as The Wild Ass’s Skin) tells the story of the crime that lies at the origin of Taillefer’s fortune, a crime hinted at several times below. In the original version of ‘The Red Inn’, however, the character was not called Taillefer or linked to his counterpart in the novel.
Luculluses: Lucullus was a legendary gourmet of ancient Rome; Amphytrion, the title figure of a comedy Molière adapted from Plautus, became a name for any host of a lavish dinner.
Red Rover: a novel (1828) by James Fenimore Cooper, who was very popular in the France of Balzac’s day. The retreat from Moscow refers to Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign of 1812.
Botany Bay: the penal colony in Australia, where British convicts were transported. The Chartreux, or Carthusians, are monks who follow a discipline of solitude and silence.
De Viris Illustribus: ‘Of Famous Men’, a Latin textbook by the abbé Lhomond (1784), widely used in French schools up to the twentieth century.
Master Alcofribas: Alcofribas Nasier, anagram of François Rabelais, is the authorial persona of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Balzac’s fantastic story ‘Zero’, a satire on the decline of the Catholic Church published in La Silhouette in 1830, is signed ‘Alcofribas’.
Saint-Simonian: disciple of the comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), a utopian socialist who believed society should be ruled by a fraternal and quasi-religious elite of technocrats.
cavatina: an opera song that is shorter and simpler than an aria.
‘Unite and forget’: this slogan signalled the king’s desire to end the bitter conflicts of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. It was an intention often contradicted by the vindictive actions of the Restoration regime.
Cambacérès … Brillat-Savarin: Cambacérès (1753–1824) was a leading politician of Napoleon’s regime and main author of the Civil Code (or Napoleonic Code) of law promulgated in 1804. He was also known as a gourmet. Brillat-Savarin was a French gastronome (1755–1826), whose classic Physiology of Taste was published in 1825.
drinkers at the birth of Gargantua: Rabelais, Gargantua, ch. 5, which Balzac imitates here.
Non cecidit animus: ‘our spirit [courage] has not failed.’
Mahmoud: Mahmoud II, sultan of the Ottoman empire from 1808 to 1839.
Bossuet: see note to p. 100.
Ballanche: Pierre-Simon Ballanche (1776–1847), an eccentric Christian writer who viewed history as a painful progress through cycles of ordeals and expiations.
syllable in front of his name: the ‘de’ that indicates noble birth.
Montbard: like the Russian Tsar Peter the Great and the Duke of Alba, a general in the army of the Spanish king Philip II, this seventeenth-century freebooter was known for his ruthlessness.
Perrault … Charlet: the classic French fairy-tales of Charles Perrault (1628–1703) include ‘Donkey Skin’, mentioned below by Pauline. Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet (1792–1845) was famous for his sketches of military life.
Malibran: Maria Malibran (1808–36), celebrated opera-singer.
Alexander’s horse … Lord of the Rhymes: Alexander’s horse was Bucephalus. Berecillo was an attack-dog used by the Spanish against the Indians of the New World. Étienne Tabourot (1547–90) was a French poet known for his dexterity in light poetry. Heinefettermach is a made-up name.
mutual education: a scheme to expand elementary education at low cost by having more advanced pupils teach other children. It was bitterly opposed by conservatives.
Charles: Charles X, the king just recently overthrown in the July Revolution. Other partisans of the Bourbons (including Chateaubriand and the later Balzac) thought him too hidebound and declared their loyalty to the young duc de Bourbon, Charles’s grandson and son of the dashing duchesse de Berry. They referred to him as Henri V.
La Fayette: the marquis de La Fayette (1757–1834), heroic veteran of the American and French Revolutions and a key figure in the July Revolution of 1830, disappointed some of his liberal supporters by declining to demand the establishment of a republic and supporting Louis-Philippe.
King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles: a whimsical novel inspired by Sterne, published by Charles Nodier in 1830 and much appreciated by Balzac. In the editions of The Wild Ass’s Skin published in Balzac’s lifetime, however, the reference was to another of Nodier’s works, Smarra.
Revue des Deux Mondes: influential literary and cultural journal founded in 1829 and still in existence.
It published most of the leading authors of Balzac’s time, including Sainte-Beuve, Dumas, George Sand, and Baudelaire. Its editor, François Buloz, was blind in one eye.
Thomire’s workshops: Pierre-Philippe Thomire (1751–1843) was a leading Paris engraver and sculptor in bronze.
Crébillon’s plays: the tragedies of Crébillon père (1674–1762), notably Athée et Thyeste (1707), were known for their gruesome plots.
Bichat: Marie-François-Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), French anatomist, considered the father of modern pathology.
divine bottle: in ch. 44 of the fifth and final book of Rabelais’ work.
“Diis ignotis”: ‘to the unknown gods’; cf. Acts 17: 23. The reactionary pamphleteer Rivarol had used this expression as the epigraph to his satirical Little Almanac of Great Men (1788).
Ossian: ancient Gaelic bard whose epic poems were supposedly discovered and translated by the Scottish poet James MacPherson in the 1760s. They enjoyed great success across Europe well into the following century. By 1830, however, what was long suspected had been confirmed: MacPherson had written the poems himself.
Lebel: procurer to Louis XV.
Beethoven symphony: when he first wrote this Balzac had not yet heard Beethoven’s music, but he did not change his text afterwards. In a letter of 1834 Balzac will claim that Beethoven and the opera, ‘the most extreme resources of thought’, are his only recreations.
Caracci: name of several Italian painters active around 1600.
Venice Preserved: Restoration tragedy (1682) by Thomas Otway. Aquilina is a courtesan whose lover is a conspirator against the Venetian Senate. Balzac makes his character the mistress of one of the anti-royalist army sergeants of La Rochelle who were executed for sedition in 1822. Balzac’s Aquilina may also have adopted the name because Otway’s character exercised sexual domination over the old senator who kept her.
Clamart: the cemetery for executed criminals.
Euphrasie: the name means ‘mirth’.
Milton’s Pandemonium: the palace of Satan in Paradise Lost.
Carymary, Carymara: see Rabelais, Gargantua, ch. 17.
“What do I know?”: ‘Que sais-je?’, motto of Montaigne (Essays, II, 12).
Buridan’s ass: a thought experiment associated with the medieval philosopher Buridan about an ass standing midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the animal is as hungry as it is thirsty, it will die for lack of anything to make it go one way rather than the other. The paradox was meant to illustrate the problem of thinking in terms of absolute freedom or determinism. The Greek philosopher Pyrrho was the founder of Scepticism.
hydraulic machine: used to provide water to some Paris fountains until the mid-nineteenth century.
Damiens: Robert-François Damiens attempted to assassinate Louis XV in 1757. His punishment included being pulled apart by horses.
historical memoirs: as Balzac will describe later on, the memoirs published at this time were notorious for being embellished or fictionalized. Balzac himself co-wrote the supposed memoirs of Sanson, the executioner of Louis XVI.
THE WOMAN WITHOUT A HEART
Friday’s vegetables: a reference to the Catholic tradition of fasting from meat on Fridays.
convict: French convicts sentenced to hard labour were branded with the letters TF (Travaux Forcés) on the shoulder, making it easy to identify those who escaped.
Marriage of Figaro: Beaumarchais’ comic play of 1778. Véry’s was a famous Paris restaurant.
words of the Bible: the following quotation combines Job 4: 15 with echoes of Gen. 1: 2 and Exod. 34: 6.
Villèle … Loire: Joseph de Villèle (1773–1854), French ultra-royalist prime minister, 1821–8. Although he was a supporter of the old aristocracy, he would not have supported the Valentins’ claim to estates seized by Napoleon by right of conquest from their original owners, especially since one of his causes was securing compensation for émigré French nobles whose lands at home had been confiscated by the Revolution. The Loire region is often endowed with maternal associations in Balzac’s novels, being linked to his affair with Madame de Berny, who served as mother as well as mistress to the young writer.
rococo: ornate furniture style of the mid-eighteenth century.
Marceline: a servant in Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro who turns out to be the hero’s mother.
Chénier: promising young poet guillotined in 1794 at the age of 31. His works were first published by Balzac’s friend Henri de Latouche (see note to p. 115 below) in 1819.
Thebaid: region of Upper Egypt known as the home of the monastic desert fathers and mothers of early Christianity.
Rue des Cordiers … Rue de Cluny: Rue des Cordiers, in which the Hôtel Saint-Quentin was located, was later demolished to make room for buildings of the Sorbonne. While there is still a Rue de Cluny, the location here is now the Rue Victor-Cousin.
the Plombs: the prison cells ‘under the leads’, freezing in winter and stiflingly hot in summer, located just under the lead roof of the Doge’s Palace. They were made famous in France by Casanova’s story of his daring escape from them in 1755.
Mesmer … Bichat: Franz-Anton Mesmer (1735–1815), known for his theory of animal magnetism and early experiments in hypnosis; Johann Casper Lavater (1741–1801), advocate of physiognomy, the art of assessing a person’s character based on their outward appearance; Franz-Joseph Gall (1758–1828), inventor of phrenology, the analysis of the mind through measurement of the skull; for Bichat, see note to p. 48 above. Balzac’s ideas about the relation of mind and body were influenced by all these men.
museum: the Museum of Natural History in the Jardin des Plantes.
St Anthony in his temptation: one of the Egyptian desert fathers (d. 356), famous for his rigorous asceticism. His biography by Athanasius details in lurid terms the phantasms devised by the devil to tempt him; the same book later inspired Flaubert to write his Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874).
diogenized: a reference to Diogenes the Cynic (412–323 BC), Greek philosopher who made a virtue of poverty and is known for living in a barrel in the marketplace of Athens.
Berezina: river now in Belarus. In 1812 Napoleon’s army suffered thousands of casualties when he crossed it under Russian fire during his retreat from Moscow. This traumatic event plays a key role in a story Balzac had recently published, ‘Adieu’ (1830).
Princess Borghese: Napoleon’s sister (1780–1825), whose first name was Pauline.
Saint-Denis: a school established by Napoleon for the daughters of those awarded the Legion of Honour.
‘Donkey Skin’: in this folk-tale made famous by Charles Perrault in his Tales of Mother Goose (1697), a king promises his dying wife that he will only marry again if he finds a woman more beautiful than she was. This turns out to be his own daughter, and to escape his advances the princess runs away covered by a donkey skin. She becomes a servant to the prince of another kingdom, who eventually discovers her real identity and marries her. While the incest theme of the story may seem incongruous in this context, the father’s oppression of a child (a thoughtless vow reminiscent of Jephthah’s vow in the biblical book of Judges, ch. 11), with an associated disturbance of the latter’s sexual development, echoes aspects of Raphael’s experience.