‘It’s for that reason that I have some talent perhaps. Up until now, all our authors who have become known were people paid by the government or by the religion they were trying to undermine. I, primo, risk my life; secundo, signora, imagine the disturbing thoughts I have when I go out stealing! Am I in the right? I ask myself. Does the position of tribune perform a service truly worth a hundred francs a month? I have two shirts, the coat that you see, a few poor weapons and I’m sure to finish by the rope. I dare to think I’m disinterested. I would be happy were it not for the fatal love which lets me find only unhappiness with the mother of my children. Poverty weighs on me, it’s ugly. I love fine clothes, white hands…’
(trans. John Sturrock)
Before the novel concludes, Ferrante Palla has led an insurrection against the young Prince of Parma, after the death of the tyrannical father. The rebellion is financed by the Sanseverina, an act unknown to Count Mosca, who quells the uprising quite firmly with some necessary bloodshed. Ferrante Palla escapes and remarks later to the duchess that you cannot have a republic without republicans and that it will take a century to change Parma.
The whirligig goes on spinning for five hundred pages, one delight after another, only to end in sadness. Fabrizio, now the Archbishop of Parma and hopelessly in love with Clelia, who is married to someone else, insists that his son by her, the young child Sandrino, be abducted so as to unite him with his actual father. Everything goes wrong, as could be expected:
This abduction, very neatly carried out, had a most unhappy outcome. Having been installed secretly in a large and beautiful house where the marchesa came to see him almost every day, Sandrino died at the end of a few months. Clelia imagined that she had been struck by a just punishment for having been unfaithful to her vow to the Madonna. She had seen Fabrizio so often in the light, twice even in broad daylight, and with such transports of tenderness, during Sandrino’s illness. She survived this beloved son for only a few months, but she had the comfort of dying in the arms of her lover.
Fabrizio was too much in love and too much of a believer to resort to suicide. He hoped to find Clelia again in a better world, but he was too intelligent not to feel that he had much to atone for.
Stendhal must have realized he did not know how to end anything. What kills Clelia? We are not told. Fabrizio, a totally sincere Christian, may believe in an afterlife, but few readers will agree that he needs to atone. Once Stendhal starts to end, he cannot stop himself:
Countess Mosca had strongly approved, with time, that her husband should resume the ministry, but she had never been willing to return to the States of Ernest V. She held court in Vignano, a quarter league from Casal-Maggiore, on the left bank of the Po and consequently within the States of Austria. In the magnificent palazzo of Vignano, which the count had had built for her, she received the whole of Parma’s high society every Thursday, and her numerous friends every day. Fabrizio would not fail to come to Vignano one day. In a word, the countess had conjoined all the appearances of happiness, but she survived Fabrizio for only a very short time, the Fabrizio whom she had adored and who spent only one year in his charterhouse.
The prisons of Parma were empty, the count was immensely rich and Ernest V was adored by his subjects, who compared his government to that of the grand dukes of Tuscany.
TO THE HAPPY FEW
The usual questions return. What kills Fabrizio? In turn, why does Gina, now married to Mosca, also depart so abruptly? Stendhal doesn’t know, nor do we. We are not moved to rejoicing that Mosca is so wealthy; how does he feel about losing Gina? I am grateful to Stendhal but find myself wishing he had lived long enough to revise, following the suggestions of Balzac, who was intoxicated by The Charterhouse of Parma.
CHAPTER 10
The Vautrin Saga:
Old Goriot (1835), Lost Illusions (1837),
The Splendor and Misery of the Courtesans (1838)
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
THE HUMAN COMEDY OF BALZAC overflows with fabulous persons, all of them fiercely energetic and many of them daemonic, guided by a highly individual genius. I am not fully immersed in the maelstrom of Balzac, since I have read only twelve of the full-length novels and a handful of the stories. I am not therefore in a position to judge who in this storm of genius stands on an eminence far above the others. Still, I am obsessed by Vautrin, the master of the criminal world who at last changes into the head of the Paris police. His real name is Jacques Collin, and he also appears as Abbé Carlos Herrera, a supposed Spanish cleric. To the underworld and to the authorities, he is known as Dodge-Death, called the Dab by his underlings.
Vautrin is physically powerful and intellectually overwhelming. He wars against society not so much in the name of the insulted and injured, as Victor Hugo’s heroic young men fight in Les Misérables, as in his own various names, particularly in that of Dodge-Death. In a subtle way he battles the overt heterosexual basis of nineteenth-century French society. Balzac makes clear that Vautrin is homoerotic and scorns all womankind. To that degree he is scarcely a surrogate for Balzac, who may have had repressed desires, but was a fierce womanizer even after he fell in love with and eventually married Ewelina Hańska, a Polish noblewoman, who survived him by almost a third of a century and took many lovers.
I have always been puzzled by the criticism composed by Henry James, master of the art of fiction. At its worst, it can be astonishingly bad. I would be unfair if I cited his review of Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps (1865), which did not have to confront “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the great elegy for Abraham Lincoln that the mature James came to love, since that was printed in an edition six months later that also contained “The Sequel to Drum-Taps.” In any case, James, who was only twenty-two when he wrote the review, later referred to it with a shudder as that “little atrocity.”
The really peculiar criticism written by Henry James is in his ambivalent accounts of Hawthorne, Dickens, and George Eliot. He owed too much to Hawthorne and could not acknowledge it. On Dickens he is just dreadful.
After all this, I am happy to grant Henry James his extraordinary distinction as a critic of Shakespeare, particularly of The Tempest, of Turgenev, and most of all of Balzac:
The lesson of Balzac, under this comparison, is extremely various, and I should prepare myself much too large a task were I to attempt a list of the separate truths he brings home. I have to choose among them, and I choose the most important; the three or four that more or less include the others. In reading him over, in opening him almost anywhere to-day, what immediately strikes us is the part assigned by him, in any picture, to the conditions of the creatures with whom he is concerned. Contrasted with him other prose painters of life scarce seem to see the conditions at all. He clearly held pretended portrayal as nothing, as less than nothing, as a most vain thing, unless it should be, in spirit and intention, the art of complete representation.
(“The Lesson of Balzac,” in The Question of Our Speech)
That is certainly a major insight, but does it apply to Vautrin? Like Iago and Milton’s Satan, Vautrin seems able to create conditions all his own. You could say that Vautrin is not altogether representative of The Human Comedy, and yet Balzac’s close friends habitually called him Vautrin. Many of Balzac’s people may try to change their condition of life, but who succeeds fully except Vautrin? There is Rastignac, endless social climber though redeemed by some warmth of heart, but he happily accepts the condition to which he has risen.
We are introduced to Vautrin in Old Goriot (1835), where one of the climaxes is his arrest by the Paris police:
Silence fell on the room. The lodgers made way for three of the men, who had each a hand on a cocked pistol in a side pocket. Two policemen, who followed the detectives, kept the entrance to the sitting-room, and two more men appeared in the doorway that gave access to the staircase. A sound of footsteps came from the
garden, and again the rifles of several soldiers rang on the cobblestones under the window. All chance of salvation by flight was cut off for Trompe-la-Mort, to whom all eyes instinctively turned. The chief walked straight up to him, and commenced operations by giving him a sharp blow on the head, so that the wig fell off, and Collin’s face was revealed in all its ugliness. There was a terrible suggestion of strength mingled with cunning in the short, brick-red crop of hair, the whole head was in harmony with his powerful frame, and at that moment the fires of hell seemed to gleam from his eyes. In that flash the real Vautrin shone forth, revealed at once before them all; they understood his past, his present, and future, his pitiless doctrines, his actions, the religion of his own good pleasure, the majesty with which his cynicism and contempt for mankind invested him, the physical strength of an organization proof against all trials. The blood flew to his face, and his eyes glared like the eyes of a wild cat. He started back with savage energy and a fierce growl that drew exclamations of alarm from the lodgers. At that leonine start the police caught at their pistols under cover of the general clamor. Collin saw the gleaming muzzles of the weapons, saw his danger, and instantly gave proof of a power of the highest order. There was something horrible and majestic in the spectacle of the sudden transformation in his face; he could only be compared to a cauldron full of the steam that can send mountains flying, a terrific force dispelled in a moment by a drop of cold water. The drop of water that cooled his wrathful fury was a reflection that flashed across his brain like lightning. He began to smile, and looked down at his wig.
“You are not in the politest of humors to-day,” he remarked to the chief, and he held out his hands to the policemen with a jerk of his head.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “put on the bracelets or the handcuffs. I call on those present to witness that I make no resistance.”
(trans. Marriage)
This is Vautrin in his moment of Satanic magnificence. He saves his life by an astonishing act of self-control that prevents the police from shooting him down. Again he dodges death.
“These folks will amuse themselves by dragging out this business till the end of time to keep me idle. If they were to send me straight to jail, I should soon be back at my old tricks in spite of the duffers at the Quai des Orfèvres. Down yonder they will all turn themselves inside out to help their general—their good Trompe-la-Mort—to get clear away. Is there a single one among you that can say, as I can, that he has ten thousand brothers ready to do anything for him?” he asked proudly. “There is some good there,” he said tapping his heart; “I have never betrayed any one!—Look you here, you slut,” he said to the old maid, “they are all afraid of me, do you see? but the sight of you turns them sick. Rake in your gains.”
He was silent for a moment, and looked round at the lodgers’ faces.
“What dolts you are, all of you! Have you never seen a convict before? A convict of Collin’s stamp, whom you see before you, is a man less weak-kneed than others; he lifts up his voice against the colossal fraud of the Social Contract, as Jean Jacques did, whose pupil he is proud to declare himself. In short, I stand here single-handed against a Government and a whole subsidized machinery of tribunals and police, and I am a match for them all.”
It is very difficult to resist Vautrin at this moment. Indeed, he has never betrayed anyone and can assert that he is an authentic disciple of Rousseau. Something in Balzac both defies the Social Contract and affirms it. Vautrin is not so ambivalent, but since he is Balzac’s creation, we will see him undergo an astonishing transformation in Part IV of The Splendor and Misery of the Courtesans, shrewdly titled “The Last Incarnation of Vautrin.”
We need to start further back, with the handsome young Lucien Chardon, protagonist of Balzac’s novel Lost Illusions (1837). Lucien is descended on the maternal side from the old family de Rubempré, and aspires to join the nobility. More important, this strangely beautiful young man regards himself as a poet (the evidence given us by Balzac shows Lucien to be a very weak poet indeed) and departs the provinces for Paris seeking glory and fortune. Though we come to like him well enough, his weakness extends to more than his verses, and his illusions are devastated. At the novel’s close he is about to commit suicide when he is taken up by Vautrin in his disguise as the Abbé Carlos Herrera. They make a pact by which Vautrin will assume the role of financing and guiding Lucien so that this second time he will conquer Paris. Precisely what Vautrin is to secure is left rather ambiguous by Balzac. Though Vautrin has homosexual experience in prison, and is in love with Lucien, it seems doubtful that their relationship is overtly sexual. Rather, Vautrin desires to revenge himself upon society and sees Lucien as his instrument in that enterprise.
In Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, published in four parts from 1838 to 1847, and titled A Harlot High and Low in the splendid translation of Rayner Heppenstall (1970), a newly resplendent Lucien is triumphant at a masked revelry where Vautrin also appears masked. Only Rastignac, whom Vautrin failed to seduce in Old Goriot, is allowed by Dodge-Death to recognize him.
The expenses of creating the new Lucien compel Vautrin to a scheme in which his protégé is to woo and marry an enormously wealthy and sadly rather ugly young woman. When Lucien and Esther, a remarkable whore known as the Torpedo, fall in love with one another, the undaunted Vautrin employs Lucien to persuade the unfortunate Esther to give herself to the horrible Baron Nucingen. He is an immensely rich financier who lusts after her. Esther yields just once, after a long delay. She is disgusted and commits suicide.
Balzac is so adroit that he makes this outrageous plot work, though any summary would seem to find it tiresome. The Paris police, suspicious of Lucien and Vautrin, arrest them on the possibility that they were complicit. Lucien breaks under testimony and reveals Vautrin’s true identity. In remorse, he hangs himself in his cell. Vautrin, true Dodge-Death, momentarily persuades the police that he is the Abbé Carlos Herrera. Though ravaged by grief for Lucien, he has the wit to exploit his unique advantage. In his possession are the profuse love letters sent to Lucien by Clotilde de Grandlieu, who had hoped to marry him, and by the Comtesse de Sérisy and the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, who had been Lucien’s mistresses. Three great houses closely aligned with the king and the government will be victimized by scandal, and the regime could well be compromised.
A remarkable duel takes place between Vautrin and the Comte de Granville, who is the attorney general of France. Balzac is at his most sublime as this duel works itself through. Vautrin is overwhelmed by the generosity and high moral nature of Granville. The attorney general in turn recognizes the negative greatness of his adversary.
With Granville’s permission, Vautrin attends the burial of Lucien, where the extraordinary Dodge-Death faints in his grief. When he comes out of it, he is in a cab between two police agents. They bring him to Granville, who urges him to save the Comtesse de Sérisy from madness, since she, too, has collapsed in grief. Vautrin, who possesses a final love letter that Lucien had addressed to the Comtesse de Sérisy but never sent, becomes a doctor of the soul and, with the letter and the false assurances that Lucien had loved only her, restores her to composure.
In a final Balzacian coup, Granville reprieves a former lover of Vautrin, and appoints Jacques Collin to the position of deputy head of the Paris police, to become the head of that august body after another half year. The conclusion is wry and direct: Jacques Collin directs the Paris police force for fifteen years and then retires.
I confess to considerable sadness that I wish Balzac had ended the saga of Vautrin in a very different way. Aesthetically, this is akin to Milton’s Satan yielding and rejoining the angelic chorus. Another dark analogue would be Iago repenting and taking pleasure in the survival of Desdemona and Othello and their ongoing union. Balzac is an amazing novelist, but he is neither Shakespeare nor Milton. Vautrin deserved more from him.
CHAPTER 11
The Captain’s Daughter (1836)
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
A READER LIKE MYSELF who has no Russian has to take the greatness of Pushkin’s poetry on faith, since it seems untranslatable, even by the chess master V. Nabokov. But the prose fiction has been translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in one large volume, Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin (2016). The wonder of the book is the novella The Captain’s Daughter (1836), a historical fiction founded on the Pugachev Rebellion (1773–74). Pushkin had access to the tsarist archives and initially wrote The History of Pugachev, which gave him the materia poetica for The Captain’s Daughter. Yemelyan Pugachev, executed in 1775 at the age of thirty-three, was a Don Cossack who became a pretender to the throne occupied by Catherine the Great. Claiming he was the murdered Emperor Peter III, he manifested considerable skill and appropriate viciousness while gathering a large force of Cossacks and peasants. He captured Kazan but then was defeated by the Russian army and delivered by his followers in a cage, where he was kept until his public execution, in which he was drawn and quartered after decapitation.
It is difficult for me to describe Pushkin’s unassuming and apparently straightforward style of narration. Russian critics speak of its return to folktales. Tolstoy owed as much to Pushkin as the major Russian poet seems, to me at least, to quarry Shakespeare for modes of characterization. Pugachev in Pushkin’s novella has a complicated nature. I do not know whether to call his a humorous savagery or a savage humor:
Pugachev was sitting in an armchair on the porch of the commandant’s house. He was wearing a red Cossack kaftan trimmed with galoons. A tall sable hat with gold tassels was pulled down to his flashing eyes. His face seemed familiar to me. Cossack chiefs surrounded him. Father Gerasim, pale and trembling, stood by the porch with a cross in his hands and seemed to be silently pleading with him for the soon-to-be victims. A gallows was being hastily set up on the square. When we came closer, the Bashkirs drove the people aside, and we were introduced to Pugachev. The bells stopped ringing; a deep silence ensued.
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