Towards an Historical Comedy

We have seen that Romantic writing can cease to be enabling or humanising; it can stop being the elaboration of our environment into a life-world facilitating a larger self, a habitus for its companionable forms; it can look much more like a discourse expanding our expression of ourselves in line with purposes beyond our individual control. We have looked at Hölderlin’s extraordinary attempt, poetically successful and personally disastrous, to reorientate the self outside the coordinates of its integrity. His achievement suggests that Schlegel’s ‘universal progressive poetry’ might describe less our accessing of an absolute sense of the world growing out of the speculative mobility driven by poetry, and more a poetic facility exploding the integrity of the subject. As inordinate as would be Schopenhauer’s paradoxically motiveless malignant Will, this environment is more unstable but historically coloured. The world, then, is no longer something we claim to manage or direct, and the contradictory success of the artist is triumphantly to figure such abjection, a sublime beyond its customary Kantian recuperation within a normal psychic economy. In some political situations this disabling facility lets authors represent the dilemma of being without citizenship. Foscolo’s Jacopo Ortis is like him a ‘figlio infelice’, and narrators who are used to representing and deploring such lack of representation can then become contradictory literary successes. Accurate representation of Jacopo’s historical abjection excuses an otherwise hypocritical literary profit from its stylistic opportunities.

Balzac’s early novels are documents expert in such logics of self-defeat. His mature work confronts the consequences of this expertise, both existentially and aesthetically. In Chapter 8 we will see George Sand opting out of an aesthetic bound to the endgame of the German philosophy of the sublime, and redefining the relations between artistic idealism and realism altogether. Chapter 9 will look at a modernist retrospect and reprise of the opportunities opened up by the Romantic surpassing of the categories thought necessary for personal and socio-political coherence. Our postmodern tolerance of extremes of political deregulation, from left and right, beckons. In the meantime, though, we see Balzac’s Comédie humaine becoming the name for a literary discourse thriving on an aesthetic whose basic distinctions between high and low, sublime and abject, splendour and misery are no longer sustainable.

The first section of Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin (1831)¹ is set in the fevered atmosphere after the July Revolution of 1830 – just after, that is, a second Restoration, this time of parliamentary representation and the constitutional monarchy ruled out of court by Charles X and his ultras. A young aristocrat called Raphaël de Valentin plumbs the depths of his historical disillusionment. He has been ruined by the first Restoration: its chief minister, Joseph de Villèle, confiscated the property his father had acquired through service under Napoleon. This battle between the new aristocracy of Napoleon’s Empire and the returning Bourbon nobility is a contest Balzac savours. La Charte, approved by the Congress of Vienna in 1814, was supposed both to restore the titles of the pre-Revolutionary nobility and to let the new nobility created under Napoleon retain its titles. The constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe (the one in which the king says ‘me’ instead of ‘we’, 95), bidding to replace both aristocracies, is presented in the novel as a farcical mishmash of different political opinions, rather than the successful gamble of liberals like Benjamin Constant. The really effective gambling is that of bankers like du Tillet and Nucingen, who, at the end of La Rabouilleuse, ruin Philippe Brideau – himself a villain whose unscrupulousness discredits his ultra support of Charles X’s proclamations of 25 July.² In contrast to the drunken feast of celebrants of the new July Monarchy staged in La Peau de chagrin, the historical contradictions of aristocracy and the degeneracy of those who might have restored its ideals remain at the centre of the political thinking of Balzac’s novels.

In La Peau de chagrin, deferring his suicide till night falls, Raphaël wanders along the Seine. He eyes but is ignored by a beautiful woman, and ends up in an antique dealer’s shop, whose interior presents him with a panorama of the past. There he encounters an exhibition of the endless creativity of art in chastening parallel with the evolution of life. Exhibits of the ‘endless poem’ of human creativity lead him deeper into the shop until his indirectly spoken reflection on ‘these wonders … of known creation’ seamlessly transfers to further meditations on Cuvier’s catastrophic natural history. Apocalypse, or any ultimate destination for our fate, is here, in Balzac’s word, ‘rétrograde’ (78); it has already happened before. Our apparently unique human teleology, which leads to the end of all things, turns out to be just a repetition, another cycle of the same. We go back to the future that has happened before. Speculation like Raphaël’s about prospects is absorbed into the narrative’s sober retrospect, suggesting that, like Friedrich Schlegel’s historian, we have all become ‘prophets looking backwards’, but with nothing new to prophesy. Marx’s emancipatory historicism in which past and present dialectically produce new versions of each other is pre-empted. Insuperable pessimism supervenes, confirming the young man’s suicidal disposition.

The rest of the novel is about the demoralising collapse of creative into natural process, experienced as ‘ennui’. The ‘wild ass’s skin’, La Peau de chagrin, is given to the young Raphaël by the much older dealer in antiques, who is described as inspiring a specifically Napoleonic awe. The shagreen is a ‘talisman’ that lets its possessor acquire everything he wishes for, but in proportion as it shortens his life. Raphaël’s future of satisfied desire is ‘a postponed (“retardé”) suicide’ (92). Above all, at a basic level, it is, like Cuvier’s history, nothing new! Balzac’s eponymous pun gives us the chagrin of the ‘chagrin/shagreen’ – the vexation of the wild ass’s skin. It unites desire with power, but loses all other bearings in the process. Raphaël’s fingers, round which the skin wraps itself, have become ‘frénétiques’, echoing the abandon of that contemporary literary extremism which both Balzac and Sand eschewed.³ The height of creativity is to generate another life, but with it its mortality. The only consolation is to know this deadly ratio – and then savoir replaces vouloir and pouvoir (89). The antique dealer knows, and tries to tell the young man. Human life is an inescapable comedy. Learn your part! Yet Raphaël’s first wish is for a frenetic ‘bacchanale’, which, with exquisite irony, turns out to be the aforementioned dinner at which the new aristocracy of lawyers and bankers celebrate the July Monarchy.

Experiments prove that the ‘peau de chagrin’ is indestructible. All it can do is age, or rather shrink, as a consequence of fulfilling desire. The dialectic at work is that, since the skin is the icon of life, self-identical with what it presents to its owner, its qualitative increase causes it to decrease in quantity. To make sense of this ratio, and get away from the fairy-tale or Gothic fantasy, one has to interpret it allegorically. The future diminishes with the splendour of our ideas for it. The better life gets, the shorter and the more miserable it becomes. If you desired nothing at all, if you remained in steady state, making no demands at all of the ass’s skin, then you might live, virtually, forever, your ideals undiminished by reality. But any practical envisioning of a richer future threatens to make the present disappear into disappointment. To say, with Augustine and the philosophers, that the present was never there in the first place doesn’t get rid of the alarming nature of our experience of this truth. Many critics have related the economy of the ass’s skin to Balzac’s peculiar ideas about the energies of erotic and literary output. We will frequently encounter his ambitions for theoretical explanation. But Balzac’s novel also suggests, in its acerbic comments on the post-1830 régime and those who have profited from it, that the political situation in France after the July Revolution is so dire that it looks like a metaphysical situation become pathological. The political frustration of the future leaves us with zero options. Don’t do anything, or, better, kill yourself, because to do the opposite and lead a fulfilled life will, in this society, amount to the same thing.

Why is Balzac so extreme? Surely because of the repetition of the same political cycle in France since 1789. The novel begins with a young man who, as the result of a failed gamble, is intent on suicide. It ends with the same Raphaël subject to the same mortality, but one whose conclusion is accelerated because he now wants to live life at its furthest from suicide, in a frenzy of passion for the heartless woman he loves. That, the story’s historical setting suggests, is what it is like to have political hopes after 1830. Balzac himself swung to the right soon after writing this strange novel. Critics ever since, starting with Hugo, have wanted to see a continuing but different revolutionary preserved by the writing itself. Balzac eventually hoped to fit La Peau de chagrin into the Études philosophiques section of La Comédie humaine. There, he might have expected its historical acerbity and its frighteningly postmodernist ability to catch the reader from behind, to be sanitised by theory. In the Preface, also, he claimed he wished the novel to satisfy a more refined kind of reader, ‘le petit public’, despite having mounted a considerable operation to make this novel his first really popular one.⁴ The mix of Gothic, of melodrama, of historical commentary and scientific speculation does nevertheless exploit that Romantic poetic fecundity that threatens the subject profiting from so wide a range of experience. About everything, it is ultimately about nothing. Balzac’s comedy is like Dante’s, except that it has publicly lost any promise of happiness. The significance of satisfied desire is simply that desire is over. It is its own memento mori.

Balzac’s short novel dating from 1834, La Recherche de l’absolu, is perhaps his warning to himself that his novels will continue to be the monotonous demonstrations of this logic unless they settle for something that his later readers were to call realism.⁵ Writers confront the variety of everything, a variety so historically diverse that it nevertheless needs the novel to imagine it. In La Recherche de l’absolu, though, the ‘absolute’ inspires the familiar story of creativity diminished by its ambition – but here in terms making explicit the defeat of theory by the novel that survives it. Such a recurring pattern in Balzac’s writing is the one predominantly analysed by this chapter.

The absolute is, by definition, what eludes differentiation. It powers everything by respecting nothing. It cannot be grasped, because it isn’t anything. In a sense it is a novelist’s fantasy in which everything she or he writes down is bound to be significant because underwritten by this absolute continuum, which the novel wants its narrative to be. There are dangers for the novelist in getting on intimate terms with the absolute, though; in a novel, after all, the necessarily arbitrary appearances of the absolute will appear to be plotted, and so improbable. The specificity of any view of the absolute will be self-defeating. The restricted economy of a piece of writing calling itself a novel must traduce the unrestricted economy of the absolute. It is when knowingly enjoying the safety net of the absolute that Balzac can playfully write of a twist in his plot: ‘By one of these chances which are only improbable in books …’ (248).

The contradiction is dramatised in Balzac’s story of the well-born scientist, Balthazar Claës, who spends his inheritance on materials and equipment for his attempt to isolate ‘Une substance commune à toutes les créations, modifiée par une force unique’ (‘a substance common to all creation, modified by a unique force’). Such, he continues, ‘est la position nette et claire du problème offert par l’Absolu et qui m’a semblé cherchable’ (124) – ‘is the clear and distinct position revealed by the Absolute and which it seemed to me could be researched’. The French is both clear and cluttered, like Balthazar himself. ‘Cherchable’ certainly does not mean that the problem will be solved; it hints that Balthazar’s quest is endless. His Absolute is made present by his neglect of particulars, personal and historical, in the search for something that is actually nothing other than that neglect. The ‘peau de chagrin’ was resistant to any measurement other than its corroboration of the shortening of its possessor’s life in proportion to the desire it had just granted him or her. After one of his research binges, we are given Balthazar’s daughter, Marguerite’s, view of the asset-stripped home: ‘L’idée de l’Absolu avait passé partout comme un incendie’ (251) – as if the place had been torched. Of course, elsewhere Balthazar does not see things this way; he repeatedly promises something more like the result of the philosopher’s stone, or the production of countless diamonds, for the profit of his family and the honour of France. Ultimately the Absolute is to be measured in capital, although while it consumes all assets thrown at it, actually it returns nothing.

Subsequently in Balzac’s novels, a new aristocratic indifference is invented in response to a bourgeois conviction of progress through commerce and capital. Disaffiliation from ‘progress’, antagonistic to those put in power by the July Monarchy, recovers a potentially revolutionary dissatisfaction that, however, qualified, was fastened on by Lukács in The Historical Novel and elsewhere. Barthes, and after him Samuel Weber, was fascinated by the unwrapping of layers of nostalgia and coding in Balzac to discover, nothing else.⁶ But such self-referential emptiness of language, however exemplary for poststructuralists, emphasised by the unprogressiveness of its (dazzling) repertoire of fulfilled desires, actually matches a political mood, a social acedia. Those who continue to desire in La Cousine Bette, published in 1846, characters such as Lisbeth, Crevel and the sexually indefatigable Baron Hector Hulot are reduced by their aspirations in the post-Napoleonic era to an almost mechanical compulsion beside which most of us look filled with aristocratic carelessness.⁷ Or desires are compounded with near-comical ferocity, as in Le Père Goriot, set in 1819, where the premise is not only that the sisters hate their lowly but providing father, but they hate each other too.⁸ The great criminal Vautrin’s steering of a course through unruly desires for his protégés, Eugène de Rastignac and then Lucien Rubempré, can look subversive in this social menagerie. And Vautrin, arguably, is where the Romantic ambitions for poetic diversity end up. He claims to be a poet, a poet of action and feeling, an artist. ‘Je suis un grand poète’, he tells Rastignac, ‘Mes poésies, je ne les écris pas: elles consistent en actions et en sentiments’ (152); or else, with qualified precision, ‘Je suis ce que vous appelez un artiste’ (144). But such artistry is only visible when we abandon the tragic sublimities of Raphaël and Balthazar for the specifics of historical comedy.

The Historical Novel

Those specifics have been well seeded in the early novels. The history of Balzac’s novels is tortuous at every stage of his career. Sketches and larger plans join and separate, some writings appear to harmonise with an overall purpose, others remain obstinately anecdotal, but often with such force that a new genre appears to be in the process of being established in the guise of a contribution to what was becoming La Comédie humaine. Balzac’s reader is taught to beware of ever believing a Balzac novel is complete, and that it will not itself be reworked by a later version or be surprised by a prequel – or if consigned to be a provincial back-story, like Illusions perdues, may completely overcome its own marginality. Balzac responds to the processual, mobile character of the world, its characteristic démarche, with novels whose histories, their own bibliographical history and the one they tell, figure the same provisionality – gaining and losing authority at the same time, as dialectically as the ‘peau de chagrin’.

The young Balzac is unsurprisingly interested in France’s immediate past – Revolution, Empire and Restoration – apparently imitating their ironies and reversals in his novelistic sequences. While for a British writer, like Dickens, the trauma of history finds an exemplary moment in the best of times and the worst of times, the French Revolution, Balzac is more fascinated by the later transition from Empire to Restoration, and then by the fragility of Restoration as the fall of Charles X and the establishment of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe become imminent. But then he uses these to stand for and interpret later instabilities as 1848 approaches. The thematic resonances offered his novels by these historical changes are what he finds irresistible. The particular transition from Empire to Restoration becomes in his early shorter works of 1829–32 an entry into thinking about history itself, its presence and absence, the kinds of uses to which it is put, but also the degree to which it cannot be used and instead possesses and determines the behaviour – and shortens the lives – of those who have been through it. There is no simple formula, but a repertoire of roles in which history’s uncanny afterlife appears and of which it is the unsatisfactory explanation.

The most obvious role is that of the revenant, someone who lives on but is not alive because he or she is entirely defined by and lives in terms of the past. In Le Colonel Chabert, Chabert ‘died’ at the battle of Eylau, and seems straightforwardly to be recognised as that man who died when he arrives at the solicitor’s office to claim his present rights as his story opens. In Adieu, Stéphanie, Comtesse de Vandières, said ‘adieu’ to normal life when with La Grande Armée she crossed the river Bérésina on the retreat from Moscow in 1812 where her husband and, she thinks, her lover are killed. Having lost memory and sanity, living a life like that of an agile, garden bird under the solicitous protection of her uncle, she is rediscovered by her astonished lover. She has become a creature reduced to repeating that last word, ‘adieu’, her signature utterance, birdsong rather than speech, and the title of Balzac’s story. In El Verdugo, a young Spaniard of noble lineage, Juanito, is forced to execute his father and siblings as a punishment for his fellow Spaniards’ massacre of occupying French troops and, since he himself will go free, as a condition of the survival of one of his family. His survival, though, is in a state of paradoxical longing both to be dead himself and to procreate, thus justifying his execution of his own family by ensuring the continuation of the family line. ‘El Verdugo’, the executioner, the honorary title conferred on him afterwards by the King of Spain, commemorates the steadfastness of his family in persuading the son to murder them. But how impracticable it is to expect the suffering Juanito to implement or enjoy so traumatic a transvaluation of history!⁹

As dramatised in Balzac’s fiction, the repression of the Empire by the Restoration is uncanny, because Napoleon had set new benchmarks for royalty and achieved new levels of the national prestige of which royalty was presumed to be the guardian. What, then, could the Restoration be claiming to restore? Yet Napoleon was also the child of the Revolution, whether, as William Hazlitt once said, he liked it or not. Values of all kinds became paradoxical. As described in Le Colonel Chabert, Napoleon tried to consolidate his improvement on the ‘ancien régime’ through hybrid vigour, ‘ses idées de fusion’ (79), managing marriages between the old aristocracy and the bourgeoisie who had triumphed in the Revolution. The restored aristocracy despised those arrivistes and competed with them in claims for the return of property confiscated in the Revolution, trying to de-legitimise the reassignment of estates to Napoleon’s favourites under the Empire. Both kinds of claimant posed as the authentic patriots. History was the slippery ground of these reversals; Balzac’s early heroes and heroines personified such instabilities and their stories played out their unliveable contradictions.

In La Peau de chagrin, we saw Balzac find his symbol for this conflicted logic of recent history that is at once fertile and murderous, generous and rapacious – an absolute elusive to any specific interest. The historical education of desire into a worthy ambitiousness actually leads us to live attenuated lives, lives thwarted not improved by the better qualities they try to retrieve from what has gone before. In the novels to come, this potentially tragic view of fate becomes comedy, as the writer, with some reluctance, has his fiction sideline teleology, theory of any kind, philosophy, and opts instead for the increase in vocabulary and repertoire that the vagaries of history enable in describing community. Balzac’s characters now contain within them the fissures and broken connections once externalised in historical narrative – and are all the richer for them. Decipherment of the society managed by these riven people is handed over to the science of maintaining order, a discipline, though, increasingly entangled in the alternative, criminal poetry of a Vautrin. In other authors, such as Eugène Sue or Edgar Allan Poe, the detective is the measure of reading, typecast as being able to unravel its confusions. Balzac always hankers after a philosophy or science of the pathology of the human repertoire that his novels nevertheless show must outdo any theory and must leave his attempts at rationalisation outside his fiction looking thin by comparison. At the end of Le Réquisitionnaire (1831) we are told we still need an ‘homme de génie’ to explain scientifically the simultaneous death, apparently through telepathic sympathy, of a mother for her executed son with which the story concludes (236). But splendours and miseries are far more interesting when inseparable within a single character, locked in their appetitive selves, no longer computable according to the ups and downs of fortune. In La Cousine Bette, their alliance is extrapolated to characterise the city of Paris, and Paris, queen of capitals, too becomes a paradigm of the personal manifold to be understood (78–9)!

Le Colonel Chabert already had begun with an analysis of the genius of the character positioned to understand the plot for the reader. The young advocate, Derville, represents both Chabert and the wife the colonel is taking action against in order to recover property, which includes her. Derville is well placed to get to the bottom of things and unerringly, if unconsciously, puts his finger on the weakness that might lead Mme Farraud to compromise with her ‘husband’, Chabert. His analysis takes place against the background noise of the office minions rehearsing legal remedies for ‘the frightful and tragic disasters of our revolutionary times’.¹⁰ By contrast, lawyer Derville instructs us readers, as it were, by ceding authority to the storytelling of Chabert. In supporting him financially, he tells his head clerk that if he has been robbed he doesn’t mind, because he will have seen the most skilful actor of the age – ‘le plus habile comédien de notre époque’ (58). He attributes to Chabert either the facility of a professional or a gift for dramatising history, constructing him as an exemplary narrator of La Comédie humaine. In later publications, the text of the story registers parallel developments across Balzac’s work, such as a reference at the end by the avoué to Père Goriot. Many years later in the story, when Chabert, who got nothing from his wife despite the solicitor’s best efforts, is in a hospice or asylum, the avoué describes him as ‘tout un poème, ou, comme disent les romantiques, un drame’ – completely poetic, what the Romantics call dramatic (117). Clearly he is beyond help, become a character in a history whose wrongs, typically, he cannot remedy, but a history he can characterise poetically or dramatically with some felicity.

This dénouement continues the earlier pattern of the tale where Chabert dramatised history by telling how he was overwhelmed by it: he was buried under bodies in a mass grave after being left for dead on the battlefield of Eylau. So the experience of history, from the start, is of being interred alive, succoured by unknowns, and slowly returning to a society where your identity is that of a dead person, a revenant. Society then buries you anew through its bureaucratic desire to repress the past (48, 73). The abjection along the way back to society is maintained by society on your return when it ensures you are unsuccessful in regaining the power to claim what is yours. Adieu tells the same story of Stéphanie. She, though, has been abused, and her inability to say anything other than ‘adieu’ doubles as the sign of that. Stéphanie is subjected to an extraordinary scene of rehabilitation, one demanded partly by her more severe disorientation, which also inadvertently becomes a paradigmatic patriarchal scene of instruction. Philippe, the lover who was a colonel at the passage over the Bérésina, artificially recreates the historical incident in his own grounds, with full cast and scenery, and suddenly introduces Stéphanie to this mock-up of the traumatically disabling moment when she and Philippe said goodbye. The word ‘adieu’ is successfully returned to discourse; its enunciation has a meaning again and is no longer an animal exclamation; the subject is once more constituted by language.

But the subject now has to mean what it says. Stéphanie’s ‘adieu’ now states her conscious farewell to the world: ‘Adieu, Philippe. Je t’aime, adieu!’ The talking cure does not save her (207). She does come to herself, but only to live momentarily in a dramatised past from which she cannot return, faculties intact, into the present. The shock treatment contrived by Philippe indeed electrifies her, restores her will, animates her body, but it is as if the same lightning then destroys her. Her tears dry up, but so does her life. The imagery is explicit: ‘La volonté humaine vint avec ses torrents électriques et vivifia ce corps d’où elle avait été si longtemps absente’. The embrace between her and Philippe terrifies those watching: ‘Tout à coup ses pleurs se séchèrent, elle se cadavérisa comme si la foudre l’eut touchée’ (207). After saying her line, now meaning ‘farewell’, she corpses in both senses.

This past cannot be reused, cannot be interpreted in such a way as to enrich or explain the present. Possessing no meaningful teleology, it remains traumatic. In the same fashion, in El Verdugo, Juanito is another of Balzac’s heroes so consumed by ‘chagrin’ for his past action that he tries to create a future to which he need not belong (140). Stéphanie finds the word that means she need not continue her life beyond the last word she said. So, also, Chabert’s return to the present makes him the dupe of his ‘wife’, the fool of time. He banishes himself to the past from whose clutches it had been the only discernible purpose of the story to release him. The past is a history, which, even when understood, remains obstinately traumatic, its destructive power unchecked, even enhanced. This ‘peau de chagrin’ is definitively diminishing. But if your account of human lives loses any trajectory, what are you left with?

History in Balzac produces symptoms, not understanding. To understand history you must constrain yourself to a theory, as Lukács does when he describes the historical novel as artificially arrested in the hands of the classes to which it no longer belongs. Balzac, lacking the Marxist narrative of how things should be, gives us the grotesque shapes into which these absolute selves can grow, lost to all historical proportion and purpose. He typically profits from the past by showing characters who cannot, and Lukács’s use of him for Marxist critique ignores the literary achievement (embarrassingly) premised on the lack of such understanding. His comedy is one in which, unlike in that of Dante and Shakespeare, the notion of roundedness is detached from the idea of fitting into a religious or artistic pattern. The resulting ‘historical concreteness’ is the novelistic pay-off for abandoning the dominant grand historical narratives, which would derive the meaning of events from the Revolution to the Restoration and onwards from their position in an explanatory sequence.¹¹ If characters can only apprehend their history as traumatic, they surrender explanation to the peculiarities history has visited upon them. Balzac’s characterisation then portrays these strange distortions, so interesting to the novelist, and diagnoses the need for a history other than the unmanageable one his characters dramatise with such literary success for their author. The part of literary profiteur Balzac plays here must echo the one we have seen played by Foscolo in Ortis.

The fact that an official history – one, say, justifying the Restoration as the logical outcome of Revolution and Empire – can run parallel to traumatic alternative histories that plausibly figure its unconscious discredits its explanations too. Vautrin (the Abbé Herrera, this time) tells Lucien Rubempré as much at the end of Illusions perdues.¹² There are two histories, one official, one the secret, shameful but true one (774). Empire becomes a ‘genre’ in La Cousine Bette, a fictional style, and characters inhabit one or other of the historical genres available, Le Baron Hector Hulot d’Ervy here being not only ‘homme de l’Empire’ but also ‘habitué au genre Empire’ (121). In La Cousine Bette, as in all the mature novels of La Comédie humaine, Balzac shows that noble sentiments, when taken to extremes (‘poussés à l’absolu’), produce the same results as great vices (104). Those who think the revolution of 1830 a sensible continuation of things, rather than the farce it is represented to be in La Peau de chagrin, are the walking coffins of former Frenchmen (75). Bette herself, her name punning on ‘beast’ and ‘stupid’, an ape in woman’s clothing, is the kind of person, more common than is usually thought, who can explain the conduct of ‘le peuple’ during revolutions. Later, she passes through different animal incarnations – tiger, pythoness; and when she suffers convulsive, volcanic emotions in her passionate retelling to Mme Marneffe, her future partner in crime, of wrongs done to her, she is ‘a sublime spectacle’ (127).

By 1846, in La Cousine Bette, Balzac’s presentation of his characters’ grasp of history can resonate in their grossest personal excesses. Baron Hector Hulot is a man spilling over his own boundaries in unscrupulous pursuit of his next idea of sexual happiness and its facilitating larceny. He resembles a man subject to arbitrary chronology rather than someone whose life has the coherence of a biography. In direct contrast stands his heroic brother, le Maréchal Hulot, Comte de Forzheim, whose past is a record of historical and moral purpose. Hector Hulot has become an alternative history, a scarcely credible growth of selfish desire and amour propre, a driven monstre who has enlisted the help of others of historical respectability to further his aberrations. Confronted with the turpitude of his brother, revealed as a swindler of the state, the maréchal can only think of presenting him with the pistols given him by the emperor Napoleon. The invitation is for his brother to terminate his history – ‘Voilà ton médecin’ (349) – but then he has already been living outside the life of historical responsibility for some time. The gesture is redundant. It tells us more about the maréchal: the pistols are a reward from Napoleon, a symbol of trust and gratitude for long service, an archaeological relic, ‘débris’ from the age of Napoleon, like the maréchal himself (353).

No wonder Baron Hector Hulot, having put the better parts of his family at mortal risk with his fraud, had called out ‘Oh! Napoléon, où es-tu?’ (313) Yet it is his wife Adeline, not him, who is busy imagining a Napoleonic fusion of aristocracy with the bourgeoisie as she contemplates giving herself to the rich parfumier, Crevel, to secure the money needed to save the Baron’s reputation. The novel had begun with her exemplary resistance to Crevel’s blandishments; but now she too over-reaches herself in her overtures to him, and provokes in the bourgeois whose lust she solicits his true faith in the absolute power of money. No class interest, no government, not even the ruling monarch Louis-Philippe himself can override ‘la toute-puissante pièce de cent sous’, he tells her (323). And for Crevel, now himself becoming ape-like in demeanour and literally beating his chest, his monetary victory is to be demonstrated not so much in cuckolding Baron Hulot but in proving a more attractive economic proposition to the demi-rep, Mme Valérie Marneffe. Sexual and monetary successes are interchangeable thanks to the judgement of the desired, the courtesans of which Valérie, Crevel tells La Baronne, ‘est le sublime du genre’ (326–7).

Balzac’s characters mould themselves unforgettably to roles that play no part in historical explanation. Some, like Baron Hulot, are visibly grotesque (far from Hugo’s redeeming sense of the word in his Preface to Cromwell), having abandoned, thinks his brother, the feelings of the true republican, ‘sentiments du vrai républicain’ (351). Republican feelings should adapt to circumstance and preserve their purpose through the vagaries of history. The maréchal, the sometime honourable colonel in Les Chouans one should recall, is a prince as well as a republican, understood as someone rewarded by the man (Buonaparte) who inherited the republican heritage in order to rebuild the state anew upon authentic, merited foundations of class and status. His view appears simple-minded when confronted with the ingenuity of desire; the maréchal, after all, thinks of Bette as ‘une vraie républicaine, une fille du peuple’ (352) whose democratic side pleases him (339). His own sublimity, the laudable constancy of principle that makes him so popular (338), is also stubbornness, ‘entêtement’. He cannot conceive of the perverse sublimity of these women, Bette Fischer and Valérie Marneffe, never mind compete with them. He effectively kills himself. Bette’s vendetta against the Hulot family had succeeded only too well, ‘avait trop réussi’ (353–4), losing a source of income from his kindness. She and Valérie consolidate the union of capital and history, money and desire. All motivations are manipulated by Bette’s scheming and Valérie’s skills. But the maréchal had remained principled, Bette’s possible suitor, and the women’s schemes had only given him reason to kill himself. He cannot be extricated from the republican historical narrative, ‘vieux soldat’, and its traditional recourse to an honourable exit in the face of dishonour (354). The splendour and the misery of the courtesan lie in this power: the splendour of bending anyone to her will, of making history; the misery of doing that not through relationship but through becoming the commodity, the fetish for relationship, the substitute for history. Those loyal to order, innocent (Adeline) and obstinate (maréchal), may be discredited, but for their shame to be possible they must live in a different story.

La Baronne, Adeline, at the end of her conversation with Crevel, attains her own ‘moment sublime’, majestic and celestial, when she sweeps aside her passing temptation to play the courtesan and succeeds in sending him off possessed by truly generous intentions of helping her out. She mounts a challenge. Unfortunately Crevel, on his way to sort out the money, drops in on Valérie who, hearing of his plans, duplicates Adeline’s sincerity, guying it with her own performance of a modern Mary Magdalene (333) to bring warm tears to Crevel’s eyes. This success lets her mock him for being taken in by her just as, she can then claim, he has been deceived by Adeline, who was really just another courtesan. The new moral benchmark Adeline had heroically set and got Crevel to observe is erased. Valérie’s sublime negates any sublime referring us, as Kant’s does, to a higher, moral power. In debunking Adeline through her comic turn, Valérie restores Crevel’s faith in mammon and money as the true motor of anything that moves. He is reminded that cash is the only way he will keep her, and as he is thrown out at the end of their interview, greed is once more consuming his entire sensibility (336–7).

And Baron Hector Hulot survives in still more grotesque incarnations. The novel’s justice is simply that there is no justice for those who follow the law of desire. Sublimity can cut both ways: Crevel and Valérie are poisoned, Bette consumed by chagrin. The reader is caught between this anomie and a discredited history. It is left to another doctor, not the maréchal’s pistols this time but le docteur Bianchon, a ‘savant’, longtime friend of the percipient Rastignac, to tell us in a nutshell what we have witnessed. ‘Le coeur de l’homme’ has escaped from being tamed by ‘l’esprit de l’état’, and instead becomes invaded by capitalism – ‘l’égoïsme solidifé’, which has taken over the capacity for politics (435–6). Good news for the novelist, whose own licence now expands, not necessarily to collaborate with these de-legitimisations, but certainly to become the best means of describing them and making of them something reflecting to its own literary credit, a comedy of lawlessness, the new human sovereignty.

In Chapter 8 we shall see how this literary profiteering is similar to and different from the fiction of George Sand. The strange thing is that Sand’s stories should not seem naïve or sentimental in comparison with Balzac’s traumatic histories and monstrous outgrowths; but, as so many critics have maintained, her novels deploy the force of an opposite idealism whose imaginings, she shows, are needed in order to recover a realistic idea of what justice and happiness might look like. She is like Balzac in her refusal to accept justifying teleologies, of any political persuasion. She is unlike Balzac when he makes do with that ‘freer’ particularity Lukács argues called out for a more adequate historiography, such as the one Lukács, rightly or wrongly, thinks he can offer. Balzac profits from the failure of any explanatory order other than the one he called his comedy. Again like Dante’s Inferno, all manner of vice and self-damage is presented for our observation, and indeed their variety is the theme. But Dante’s art is in the service of revealing the huge jurisdiction of divine law, equal to all his personifications of evil, even if this authority is only available to him through the inspiration to fiction given him by Beatrice’s love and Virgil’s guidance. Balzac’s notion of order is only his comedy. Gestures, as suggested, towards a philosophical and psychological groundwork, an alternative history, a supreme fiction, are there. But the forces of Balzac’s description and drama are as sufficient as the characters depicted; his inspiration has no need of some underlying science, analogous to Dante’s theodicy and its emissaries. This success, predictably, is felt as a loss as much as a gain; and the scientific regret is Balzac’s difference from Foscolo – or from the author of Ortis if not the writer of the Notizia! The adequacy of Balzac’s comedy grounds a pessimism about explanation, as literary success repeatedly supervenes at the expense of science, morality or law in general. Sand’s fiction, we shall see, suggests she finds that Balzac’s enjoyment of the individualism of characterisation too rich for history arrests the narrative talents with which characters can write their own lives against historical constraints. She is not interested in the splendid misery produced when characters possess an unlimited liability for their own happiness.

Balzac’s Reflective Idiom

It is not surprising, then, that, presenting such an image of comprehensiveness, Balzac’s novels are peppered with simulacra of the authorial function, rather than necessarily more limited images of Balzac the author. Fictions of control and authority recur, as if experiments in conjuring figures for an authority outflanking the social principles of organisation that are supposed to hold sway. These figures, high and low, extend from the early Don Juan of L’Élixir de longue vie (1830), who embodied all kinds of genius and played with everything,¹³ to the historically omniscient Antiquarian in La Peau de chagrin, to the eponymous ‘Thirteen’ in Balzac’s L’Histoire des Treize, to Gobseck the astute miser, to the savvy fortune teller, Mme Fontaine, in the last completed novel, Le Cousin Pons, who can see the roots of things to come in the present – and many others. In the three novels comprising L’Histoire des Treize, the principle of social understanding is perhaps most explicitly fictionalised – a secret society pulling the strings, rather than what Balzac elsewhere called a ‘théorie de la démarche’, or self-styled ambitious experiment in explaining connectivity, individual and social, in general.¹⁴

Originally, the L’Histoire des Treize was to have featured a novel for each member of the secret society. Sequentially going through their membership would have provided a formal principle for organising Balzac’s work and would also have revealed the hidden driver of Parisian society (‘[ce] monde à part dans le monde’), so furnishing original content for the series of novels.¹⁵ But his points of literary reference in his Preface to the novel inaugurating the Histoire, Ferragus, are to Gothic novels, traditional fields of frénétique influence, suggesting that Balzac was already placing the Treize apart from work in what was going to be his major idiom. Vautrin, instructively, took over aspects of the leader of the Treize, Ferragus, such as his mastery of disguise, physical strength, social mobility, criminal experience and ingenuity. But Balzac replaced the earlier adventurer with a self-conscious manipulator of society, both official and secret, and the occult and exotic with a queering of the police. Ferragus is the twenty-third chief of the ‘Dévorants’ and leader of their elite Treize. The ‘Dévorants’ were a tribe of the ‘Compagnons du devoir’ originally banded together to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. The story, though, is one of the diminishment of this recherché genealogy. Ferragus claims to his daughter, Clémence, that the Thirteen are ‘the second Providence which watches over you’ (183). But Clémence dies torn apart by the conflict between loyalty to her father’s secret designs and love for her husband. It is made very clear, in this and the only other two novels Balzac wrote in the series, that the secret order destroys rather than recasts personal relationship as Vautrin does. Ferragus pointedly ends up not as an ingenious criminal whose final success scandalously merges his criminal organisation with those of law and order, like Vautrin, but as the mindless referee of games of boules in the Luxembourg, taken home by his carer at the end of the day. He resembles no one so much as the depleted Colonel Chabert crouched outside his asylum, ‘débris’ of his Empire. The comédie depicted in Ferragus is abominable, ‘une infâme comédie’ (218), one used to deplore rather than to be adequate to the unmanageable life.

Balzac speculates about and tries out various subdivisions for La Comédie humaine. Like L’Histoire des Treize, these plans table various schemes for persuading the reader of its connectivity, schemes that seem as much inventions as are individual novels and characters. In the 1839 Preface to Une Fille d’Ève, he is still working with a provisionally complete title of Studies of Manners in the 19th Century (Une Fille d’Ève), itself divided into six further subsections of scenes from private, provincial, Parisian, political, military and country life. By 1842, when the first edition of La Comédie humaine was published by Furne, the ‘Avant-propos’ added two additional general rubrics – philosophical and analytical studies (Études philosophiques, and Études analytiques). Under these main rubrics come further categories in addition to ‘L’Histoire des Treize’ – such as Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes and ‘Les parents pauvres’ (Sylvain Pons is a member of both categories)¹⁶ – obviously asking the reader to think about the evolution and peopling of these groupings. Novels published now as single are found to be made out of others written over a considerable period and then retitled, such as those making up Illusions perdues.¹⁷ Titles change over time as these larger kinships are constructed. The ‘Avant-propos’ distinguishes a science of nature founded on defining limits Society cannot observe (‘bornes entre lesquelles la Société ne devait pas se tenir’) from La Comédie humaine’s treatment of society, despite the pseudo-scientific layout of the ‘Avant-propos’.¹⁸ Instead, Balzac’s project transfigures understanding of the social world to reorganise its worldliness within his comedy. He simulates explanation by making readable the incompleteness and overlapping with which the real thing just confuses us.

This preoccupation lets his fiction frame philosophical stances of the age, otherwise not explicitly considered by him. His reflexive critique of representation turns into a phenomenology of his own art, and finally an occlusion of any explanation in favour of a literary tolerance – a ‘comedy’ – thriving on the contradictions and exchangeability of opposites, which remain nonetheless embarrassingly irresolvable for any philosophy. ‘The greatest thing in Balzac’, Henry James’s opinion was, ‘is the whole attempt – it is the method’.¹⁹ Unlike Sand, though, Balzac mentions and dramatises the capitulatory character contrived for philosophy by its literary outcome. A lack of differentiation, such as the basic interchangeability of splendour and misery, is redescribed as a (Shakespearean) generosity. His theory of human motion, Théorie de la demarche, becomes an example of the movement it was supposed to theorise: this science was one in which he swam, like a man at sea (‘en mer’), disorientated.²⁰ Balzac’s genius, I argue, is to profit from this philosophical helplessness, aggrandising the authority of his own, oceanic writing, but keeping the theoretical failure visible – using it as an image for the disorder of his society. He returns us to a representational mode, comedy, in order to understand a social disorganisation irreducible to science.

Such knowledge would be of an absolute, comparable to the discovery searched for by Balthazar Claës. By then Balzac seems to have abandoned, or no longer writes in the idiom of, ‘physiologie’, as he had done in the 1829 Physiologie du mariage, in which, though, the medically forensic idiom was already compromised. Theorising is distracted by aphoristic interludes, and psychology by literary opportunism and aesthetic judgement: ‘to appear sublime or grotesque, there you have the alternative to which we are reduced by a desire’, a mantra surrounded by examples in profusion.²¹ In La Recherche de l’absolu, Balthazar’s theoretical ambitions could only have been realised through a massive loss of individual value. An absolute understanding could only understand itself; the continuum by virtue of which things can be differentiated would itself be identified rather than the things. This failure of theory and the profit reaped by the undefeated literary response of comedy are, as emphasised already, not for Balzac an unmixed blessing, since he continues in his own theoretical and philosophical ambitions. His characters are too agonised by the bafflement of their ideas for one to imagine that readers are meant to collapse back happily into a pre-critical serenity. There is little consolation in the convincingness of the description, say, of Balthazar’s enjoyment of the failed ideas causing extremes (‘le comble’) of despair in his supportive wife. The successful description of the untheorised life forbids literary compensation: ‘cette vie à la fois si grandiose et si misérable’ (‘at the same time so magnificent and so miserable’).²²

Sometimes the images of the author function are deliberately crude in contrast to the surrounding writing, as if to disturb any complacency with the comedy that has replaced theoretical ineptitude. Gobseck, moneylender and miser, contrasts, says Alfred Béguin, with Balzac as does a common mountebank when compared to a magus.²³ If so, the initial comparisons of Gobseck with Talleyrand, Fontenelle and Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking are puzzling (77). It is surely the hybridity of the man that characterises him; and Balzac uses him to play on ambiguities inherent in any representation of control and authority. In the novella initially called L’Usurier, then Papa Gobseck and finally just Gobseck (perhaps symptomatically dedicated to Balzac’s post-Kantian philosopher friend Barchou de Penhöen), we meet the spirit of capitalism, the power of gold personified, a role Gobseck himself would have been pleased to own (90, 91). Gobseck’s practice is embedded in his society, but he himself enjoys a detachment explaining his power to manipulate others. The drama of personifying or impersonating authority is crucial. It explains Gobseck’s genius to the lawyer (Colonel Chabert’s lawyer to be, Derville) who tells the tale of Gobseck. And it releases the character from his environment so that, like a god, he can know his world, and other characters appear before him as if in front of an omniscient judge.²⁴ The marriage of transcendental with immanent authority, though, preserves the opposition that Balzac’s writing overcomes. Gobseck remains trapped within the antinomies of high theory and base practice, his intellectual ascendancy tied to his perverted sense of economy, his ability to predict the fates of his profligate victims predicated on his own resistance to generosity. He is composed of two people, miser and philosopher, mean and great. When he dies, Derville broaches the other rooms in his house and finds them filled with rotting food, blown with worms and insects, gifts and bribes Gobseck could not bear to give away.²⁵ Derville makes people happy, but he learns his craft from having been made unhappy by Gobseck. Derville knows the distinction between abstention and miserliness. He distances himself from a debauched dinner of lawyers, comparable to the one used to celebrate the July Monarchy in La Peau de chagrin, sufficiently to be able to be on his guard when conversing with the dangerous M. de Trailles at the end (97–9). But forensic and analytical technique is all the sociability that Gobseck has; the best technique of anyone, certainly, but that does not save him from being critically placed within Balzac’s own more comprehensive comedy! Had he been a more integrated person he might have had still more power.

Gobseck’s most significant legacy to La Comédie humaine is his niece, Esther Gobseck, La Torpille, heroine of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, his only heir, for whom, though, his bequest arrives too late. Ironically, Gobseck’s money belatedly finds its way to good uses. Firstly, through Derville’s intervention, it makes possible the good marriage of Camille to the young Ernest de Restaud in Gobseck. Then, in Splendeurs et misères, through Esther’s gift of it to her lover Lucien de Rubempré, the bulk of the legacy makes its way to the children of his worthy sister Ève, married to David Séchard, again a worthy man, if one whose financial ineptness and moral generosity would have appalled the original usurious benefactor, that philosopher of the schools of cynics.²⁶ But the irony here is not really the main point; the circulation of capital is. It is not easy to find Gobseck’s motive for his bequest – he says he is taken by a passing fancy for Esther’s beauty, while puzzlingly recalling how he had been taken in by the looks of awful Anastasie. Money, though, finds a way, irrespective of personal motive, and Gobseck importantly corroborates that truth at the expense, once more, of his personal coherence as a character. Or the reader suddenly gets the sense of the exchangeability of capital and character. In the early novels of La Comédie humaine, the incipient connectedness of characters with other characters and destinies yet to be filled out is like the anticipated consequences of financial investments. Both figure how Balzac’s literary world might hang together in contrast to the ostensibly unifying social apparatuses of the actual society he describes. There is a law of increasing not diminishing returns at work in Balzac’s cycle. Characters reappear in later novels, and then more characters in later versions of the same novels. Ever accumulating in significance, characters and drafts, like an initial financial outlay in a successful financial venture, grow in narrative value and continue to expand the novelistic society in which they appear.²⁷

There is a novelistic trick practised here, whereby the confusion of Balzac’s society points up his control of narration and characterisation to signify that confusion. When, in his Preface to Une Fille d’Ève, he talks about the reappearance of characters throughout La Comédie humaine, he claims a realistic correspondence to the ways in which our knowledge of others is partial, incomplete, founded on imperfect recollection, a product of our particular interests, scandalous, professional, erotic – all mimetic failures. Provided is a marvellous excuse for Balzac’s occasional inaccuracies, inconsistencies and generally tendentious use of characters when they recur in different places and for different uses in the Comédie. He exonerates his own narrative instabilities as true to our experience of others and responsive to changes in our judgements of them due to the passage of time. However, as usual, this orientation ghosts an aesthetic sense of disorientation that we have seen emerging from Romanticism. Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (1832) tells the story of a painter, Frenhofer, who instead of copying nature tries to grasp (‘saisir’) its ‘physionomie’, and so let Nature ‘express’ itself in whatever he is painting. To bypass representational filters in this way is to court Hölderlin’s ‘aorgic’, and to disorientate his viewers completely. Implied, also, is criticism of an art so naïve that it ignores the cultural and commercial constraints that make it viable.²⁸ The painter critics of Fernhofer fancy they see the foot of his model, but the rest is a confused mass of colour bizarrely outlined.²⁹ Yet to abandon representation in order to let nature make or transfigure its products in another medium is also an idea that attracted modernist artists to this story (Cézanne, Picasso), themselves precursors of an abstract expressionism that is perhaps at the end of the aesthetic road leading from Hamann’s Sprachmagie and a post-Kantian adventure we have been following. And Balzac’s comedy, then, looks like a dry run for this accommodation of both orientation and disorientation.

Balzac’s writing of novels thus aspires to a comprehensiveness that borders on the chaotic, a kind of reductio ad absurdum in need of philosophical justification. And his corroborating theories of physiognomy and motion are so ambitious in their compass that they too finally collapse into an acknowledgement that only in the writing of the phenomena that they try to rationalise, but that exceeds any of their explanations, does their subject exist. Novel and philosophy, discourse and analysis, meet on a common ground. Novelistic success on the back of failures in theory is not an entirely satisfactory state of affairs, but then Balzac’s novels say that too! Furthermore, the different versions and forms, revised, expanded and merged, into which Balzac’s individual works grow magnify their uses of internal inconsistencies. Out of the1835 idea for La Torpille came the 1838 fragment resumed in the 1843 Esther, but originally appearing serialised at the same time as its prequel, David Séchard, before the appearance of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes proper (if that is not too facetious a word) in 1844. In his 1839 Preface to Une Fille d’Ève, Balzac deprecated criticism that obstinately judged in isolation works destined to be further adapted to fit a whole. But there is no sign that such a whole was not still to consist of fragments continually under construction.³⁰ Later novels prompt revisions of plot and character to keep new editions of earlier novels up to date. Very knowledgeable critics like Anthony Pugh, who can really appreciate the extent of the metamorphoses at work, worry that the autonomy of any individual work of Balzac is threatened by its fecundity elsewhere, although Balzac himself clearly did not.³¹ Significantly, though many modern French critics following Michel Butor think that Balzac offers us multiple points of entry into his work, in keeping with his own habit of revising earlier versions without aiming to replace them with definitive later ones. Readers choose personal points of entry because to claim to have orientated yourself objectively in La Comédie humaine is what the work’s exhibition of its own composition – constantly in process with no real reason to stop – figures as impossible.³² But even if one ditches the assumption that a criterion of its success is that an individual novel should be enjoyable independently of others, then the reader with encyclopaedic knowledge will still be troubled by discrepancies between different novels. The third saving approach here, already suggested, is to accept a form of writing in which drafts old and new, reworkings, rewritings and other variants, come into play not as corrections or work preparatory to establishing a copy-text, but at a higher level of mimesis in which representing the perpetually provisional quality of human experience is organised on a vast scale. In fact, historical periods are always artificially separated from before and after simply in order to be visible. Each state of a Balzac novel similarly has its own integrity and if it contradicts an earlier or later version it is only being true to how things are. To write definitive novels would be to leave out of focus a compound historical process whose constituents constantly reinterpret each other. Truth definitive and truth processual are both elusive for opposite reasons. There is a constitutive tension between success and failure, recuperation and abdication, essential to this participatory rather than representational mode.

The 1839 Preface is one of the most explicit statements of Balzac’s literary priorities. Neither national glory nor patriotism dictates his choice of ‘l’homme social’ as his subject, but the felicities produced by the art of describing the disorder of modern France (‘Ce désordre est une source de beautés’).³³ He writes against the recent fraud, as he sees it, of the 1830 constitutional government; but instead of imagining any political alternative, he foregrounds the stylistic challenge of depicting a society too varied to be describable within a constitution! His comedy is more a simulacrum of the real comedy of the century rather than a representation or enlightening untangling of the mess. For Balzac, Scott’s Waverley novels, the most influential recent model for a national roman fleuve, simplify through their observance of traditional, historical hierarchies in comparison with the social ‘fécondité’ charging the Balzacian narrative of the present. As he tells us, more like the Thousand and One Nights in its ceaseless stories than any novels being written elsewhere in Europe, Balzac’s La Comédie humaine is a project whose critique of political representation is really a displacement of politics. Comparably, its philosophical and scientific percipience offers remedies only by breaking out of the discursive economies necessary to the identity of either discipline.³⁴ Balzac, though, sees a kind of modesty in this ambition, and so often reminds us that he regrets the loss to theory in his artistic gain.³⁵ His occasional protestations are not hypocritical; the theoretical ambition is genuine, as the planning of La Comédie humaine makes clear, with its proposed études of various kinds. As we shall see, the literary ascendancy is used to specify the adequacy of the kind of sociology Balzac thinks his society needs and cannot acquire.

In La Fille aux yeux d’or (1835), the Treize are there again to sort out the outcome of one of their number’s betrayal by a false lover. But they are no more successful than they will be in rescuing Antoinette, Duchesse de Langeais, for Montriveaux, in the final novel of the Treize, La Duchesse de Langeais, started earlier in 1833. In both cases they arrive after their target has died or has been murdered. In La Fille, Paquita Valdès is dying from stab wounds inflicted by the jealous half-sister of Henri de Marsay. Both siblings are her lovers. She has been faithful to the line (‘sang’), Henri says drily, if not to the individual. The novel began with a comprehensive sociology in which the ship of state, Paris, is anatomised into workers, shopkeepers and small business people, the bourgeoisie and the professions, and, more generally, divided between a mass of mediocrity and an aristocracy of merit, the Treize of course belonging to the latter. But the novel in fact surrenders this idea of natural authority for its own demystification of any such charismatic ascendancy. One of the Treize, after all, is the unsavoury Maxime de Trailles, who will be strikingly humiliated by Gobseck, a superior manipulator altogether.³⁶

Not simply the subjective consciousness defers to Balzac’s overall semiotic or ‘langue’ resourcing his individual speech-acts, as Barthes famously saw in Saussurean mode; genre does too. In La Fille, Henri de Marsay confidently pronounces Paquita to be ‘un poème oriental’. But actually he has no idea what she is like; she is a virgin who is not a virgin because she is bisexual; he, in ignorance, is played by her to revive her remembered image of the half-sister she loved; he has a suspicion that he has been had (‘qu’il avait était joué’).³⁷ His later remark to his leader, Ferragus, when they are about to invade Paquita’s abode, supposedly knowing what they are doing – ‘we alone are ahead of the game’ (‘nous seuls, nous savons tout prévoir’, 238) – is highly ironic. The reader is left contemplating the originally Romantic idea of an underlying continuum only disclosed through the inadequacies of any genre or its combinations to differentiate it. It would be anachronistic to have Balzac already in possession of a Barthesian notion of writing that relativises any reading of itself, ‘attentive to the plural’ with structuralist virtuosity.³⁸ But his ‘comedy’ has about it a tolerance of individual difference bordering on absolute indifference. And that, we have seen, expresses its resistance to theory and simultaneously is the final gesture of Balzac’s theories about his world and what he thought he was doing in it as a writer. In both La Fille aux yeux d’or and Sarrasine, the uncertainties of sexual orientation become a figure for indeterminacy of individual orientation in general.

Critics have picked up on Balzac’s queering of social groupings by their assimilation of same-sex configurations. For Michael Lucey, there was no one model in which to capture Lucien, Vautrin, Calvi, Grandville, Custine, Gurowski, Pons, Schmucke, Schwab, Brunner and all the others. Balzac saw multiple forms for (especially male) same-sex desire in the world around him, open to multiple meanings and susceptible to appropriation by various social groups. Andrew Counter follows Lucey in eschewing the liberal move from perceiving the socially constructed character of norms to instituting a queer counterpart to them (as in same-sex marriage) in his excellent analysis of myriad expressions of sexuality in early nineteenth-century France. My corroborating point is that if one comes to Balzac out of Romantic theory, his queering figures the relativity of supposedly constitutive ways of seeing, but never establishes an alternative order of things. Its critical force lies in a satisfaction denied. Balzac reflects upon hetero-normative experience from explorations external to it. Not being ‘out’, as it were, within this Romantic framework allows writing to draw on untold resources for disturbing norms rather than establishing a limited range of new ones. The 1829 story of almost bestiality, Une Passion dans le désert, suggests the unlimited possibilities.³⁹

The purpose of the story told in Sarrasine, though, is to explain where the money belonging to the host of its palatial setting comes from – embarrassingly, it turns out, from the sexually ambiguous Lo/La Zambinella; and the end of La Fille aux yeux d’or tells how the murder will be hidden by the strategic disbursing of ‘or’ – gold to pay Paquita’s depraved mother for a cover-up, money she will then spend on her gambling habit, another form of circulation (241). The striking concentration of these pieces is again to show the exchangeability of character and capital, each circulating in a way to figure the other. But the tristitia consequent upon the individual’s discovery of their aptitude for an absolute at the expense of their self-consciousness is crucial to the experience of reading Balzac as well.⁴⁰

Splendeurs and Misères

As Balzac makes clear in Illusions perdues – the anti-Bildungsroman that is the prequel to Splendeurs et misères, some of it, typically, written at the same time as its sequel – the original sin subsequently expiated is the paternal commitment to money and profit over and above ties of kinship or natural filial feeling. The ‘two poets’ of the opening of Illusions are David Séchard and his friend Lucien Chardon. David returns from a Parisian apprenticeship in printing, ready to take over the family firm. For his father, Jérôme-Nicolas, in matters of business relations between father and child do not count, and he sees in David only a rival interest. David must buy him out, and his father has no qualms in profiting at the expense of his son. Lucien’s father died when he was young, and the course of the novels will describe his acquiring of a surrogate father who will love him but will eventually ruin him, because that love too can only be expressed by furthering Lucien’s financial opportunities, turning him into a kind of investment. Vautrin’s relationship with Lucien personifies the symbiosis of character and capital throughout La Comédie humaine. Balzac suggests this original sin is repeated at a national level, epitomised by the Restoration and its consequences.

In Illusions perdues the comedy is primarily provoked by the unsystematic, social indigence produced by the Restoration. Once more, the recourse to the idea of comedy is historically symptomatic. It is because the political situation is so direly lacking in direction that the latitude of comedy is needed to reflect it adequately. Sheer living, not a particular take on living, characterises people living under the Restoration, ‘Les viveurs’, mostly young, to whom Balzac gives an explanatory chapter. They are subject to ‘l’ilotisme’, an interesting word deriving from ‘helots’, the Spartan slave class, whose meaning mutates to signify uselessness and sterility (to be similarly used later by Renan and Jaurès). In Eugénie Grandet, M. Grandet is described as having reduced his wife to complete ‘ilotisme’ or servitude; but here it describes the state of not having been allowed a place in the political class and the consequent loss of civic purpose experienced.⁴¹ This dispossession is inevitable when the Restoration loses the creative impulse to rethink social possibility. The frightful Philippe Brideau in La Rabouilleuse, fanatical Buonapartist and a casualty of Restoration disinheritance, typifies this dysfunctionality and, incapable of relationship, dies in battle, symptomatically isolated from troops unwilling to help so detested a commander (360). Early on in La Duchesse de Langeais (1834), Balzac very conspicuously excoriates the shallow, insubstantial way of life led in Restoration Paris, especially by the aristocracy (‘la vie éphémère que mena le faubourg Saint-Germain pendant la Restauration’), its sensibility constitutionally at odds, splendid and miserable at the same time.⁴² Autobiographical resonances (his rejection by Mme de Castries) no doubt give edge to an analysis that nevertheless remains primarily historical. He attacks the Saint-Germain set making up the leading aristocratic group for its failure to offer leadership in reconceiving the aristocratic purpose in society and, crucially, distinguishing it from the moneyed interest. Had it availed itself of the opportunities open to it at the start of the Restoration, it could have re-established itself as the idea of the nation (‘se nationaliser … la pensée d’une société’), leaving the bourgeoisie to function in its proper place as its active body (l’organisme et l’action’).⁴³

But then the Restoration had been succeeded by a July Monarchy in which for Balzac the moneyed interest renewed its power and no new social order emerged. The disputes between left and right in Illusions perdues recast this ‘ilotisme’, as politics becomes a matter of financial opportunity, often extraordinarily complex, rather than the attempt to construct the polity you desire. As one character says of another, ‘Elle a encore des principes, c’est-à-dire des espérances’ – ‘She still has principles, that’s to say, [financial] expectations’.⁴⁴ Vautrin had already told Rastignac in Le Père Goriot that there are no principles, only circumstances.⁴⁵ IIlusions perdues is really driven by the figure of ‘les claqueurs’, originally applauders paid by vested interests to decide the success or failure of theatrical performances, but reoccurring in different forms at decisive moments in different social scenarios. In every case the notion of value, truth or honesty is turned into ‘les valeurs’, promissory notes on whose credibility authors hope for an advance from speculators, ‘les escompteurs’. Balzac’s novel, continually destroying illusions of any certainties, writes the story of ‘les viveurs’ from the inside.

Balzac presented as symptomatic of the désoeuvrement of the Restoration that its political and social accedia invited his wide, comic treatment. He appears boldly to make a virtue of what for Foscolo in Ortis was a subterfuge: he ties his literary success to historical catastrophe. It’s hard to see here an idea of restoration offering an alternative to the Restoration. If anything, his literary compassing of the Restoration is preparation for describing the next political disappointment; or, as in La Peau de chagrin, he can satisfy his ambition of writing a human comedy, but only at the expense of a coherent view of the moral life. Ultimately his novels confessedly become the literature of images, ‘la littérature imagée’, not the literature of ideas he desires. In Illusions perdues, he tries to assign that aesthetic fate to the poets, making them, as it were, the champions of this debasement (448, 452). Lucien Chardon, aspirant to his mother’s noble family name of de Rubempré, is Balzac’s ‘enfant du siècle’ (596), his tragic figure of a navigation going nowhere and ending in suicide. At the end of the novel Lucien believes in nothing. Balzac can play both sides in the Restoration, Lucien cannot. His failures prepare him to become the creature of an alternative society by falling into the hands of its master criminal, Vautrin. But Balzac’s own literary mastery, always escaping any of the theories, usually physiological, of which he can purport to make it the vehicle, is a kind of equivalence, not a diagnosis. Hence his growing use of the unprincipled Vautrin, master of every circumstance, as a hero, as an alternative poet.

At the heart of Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, as if paradigmatically, Balzac spectacularly pits his literary invention against the permanence of the history recorded in the architecture of La Conciergerie, the ineluctable prison fastness in which Jacques Collin (alias the Abbé Herrera/Trompe-la-mort/Vautrin) is being confined. La Recherche de l’absolu had begun with a detailed examination of the physical appearance of the Flemish, aristocratic house of the scientist Balthazar. But once it had been turned into his laboratory, he would be entirely dependent upon it. This absolute bond between men of science and place is tyrannical, writes the narrator, like being imprisoned.⁴⁶ In stark contrast Collin’s demonstrates a creative ubiquity, exemplary for Balzac, and his adaptableness to historical circumstance resists all confinement to a single setting, even if it is La Conciergerie. By the time of the later publication, Balzac’s composite art has his novel’s allusion to earlier versions of itself corroborate its characteristic expression of an historically variable truth quite different from the absolute certainty sought by Balthazar’s science. The final section of the novel, Vautrin’s ‘last incarnation’, though, is one in which Vautrin outrageously ends up consciously directing the comedy rather than playing his allotted part. Thereafter Vautrin’s appearances are shadowy, fateful, appropriate to a deus absconditus.⁴⁷

Balzac writes a detailed commentary on La Conciergerie to show that the due legal process it stages with such inevitability is backed by hoary precedents. It is as if Balzac is taking his cue from his villain, though, when his plot goes on to fool the prison into releasing someone supposed to be irretrievably incarcerated. We have just seen Collin, under threat of arrest, peremptorily pitch the police spy, Cotenson, off the roof of Esther’s lodgings to his death in the middle of the Rue Saint-Georges. But Vautrin is about to be redescribed, disguised by his enemies. The narrator continues a competition between literary invention and monumental history when he declares that his historical digression will be short, matching the time it takes for the prison wagons we have been following (‘paniers à salade’) to deposit their prisoners: an ‘affirmation hypocrite’ (416n.), declares editor Patrick Berthier, in view of the long account of the physiology of the ‘palais de Justice’ that now begins, a science that by now we expect Balzac’s resourceful narrative to outflank. The effect of the Conciergerie’s history of confinement is to crush narrative possibilities with the weight of an historical gravity, making the escape of Balzac’s characters appear more and more improbable.

Balzac states the challenge baldly: can a novelist, familiar with the Conciergerie, plausibly ‘speak of the possibility of communication or escape?’ The question here is rhetorical: ‘For the manager (“directeur”, so also with an echo of “editor”) of the Conciergerie will wear a smile which will freeze the most daring novelist’s doubt [about the answer] in his attacks on probability’.⁴⁸ We are made to remember that Balzac is the ultimate ‘directeur’. Defying the logic of brute force even further, the escape is to be achieved through Collin’s apparently weaker link, Lucien, a dandy, but also a poet! It is his writing, his love letters, which have compromised but above all enthralled the addressees who now try to save him. Lucien’s writings to them and their compromising replies in Herrera’s possession are what instigate intercession by powerful women and the men these women inspire, aesthetically and affectively. A concerted riposte to patriarchal law is mounted by female characters extending from the wife of the presiding ‘juge d’instruction’ (Camusot) to two of her aristocratic female friends, and then to Collin’s own female acolyte, his aunt, the redoubtable Asie/Jacqueline/Mme de Sainte-Estève. Camusot himself expresses the test of virtuosity taken on by Balzac: not to traduce his conscience and to serve ‘les deux grandes dames’. But it is Asie, herself en grande dame, playing the redoubtable Mme de Sainte-Estève, who threads the labyrinthine Conciergerie in her disguise. She surreptitiously picks up Collin’s rolled-up message and so begins to undo the integrity of judicial process and find the power, as she tells Mme de Sérizy (infatuated with Lucien and sister of one of the Treize, Ronquerolles, we should also remember), to breach its imprisoning walls (469).

On his own, the judge Camusot initially puts in a strong performance, and can congratulate himself that his forensic skill has brought down a favourite of society, Lucien, and smoked out his patron, the elusive Collin, despite his Spanish ecclesiastical disguise as the Abbé Herrera.⁴⁹ Under Camusot’s interrogation, Lucien confesses all. Immediately, though, Camusot himself is ‘à la torture’ – in torment. The logic tying splendour to misery reasserts itself. At the moment he thinks to profit from his cleverness, he receives a letter co-signed by the oh so well connected Comtesse de Sérizy and the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, claiming that they can prove Lucien’s innocence. Camusot’s successful demonstration of Lucien’s guilt now threatens his own professional ambitions, rather than enhances them. Camusot needs preferment, and his superior, Grandville, the aristocratic procureur général, in his turn has to remain on good terms with his friend, the husband of the Comtesse, the powerful Comte de Sérizy. Justice can no more be granted its autonomy from these considerations than the prison of the Conciergerie can be hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. In a deeply funny irony, then, when the procureur général compliments Camusot on how well he has done his job, how he has resisted any outside influence, Camusot is chilled to the marrow by the praise because he realises he is actually being told that he will remain only a juge d’instruction for the rest of his life. Under such internally engendered pressure, the authorities not the prisoners are about to breach the walls of the Conciergerie. The last part of the novel is set on the eve of another act of aristocratic self-damage: Charles X’s doomed attempt to dissolve the newly elected Chamber of Deputies, provoking the riots of the ‘trois glorieuses’ and resulting in the July Monarchy, held in contempt by Balzac as a triumph of money over everything else.

Camusot, for all his ability, straining for preferment, is set up to be despised by the aristocracy both of society (‘splendeurs’) and of criminality (‘misères’). When Camusot has to confront the Comtesse, his professional cleverness dwindles into something now seen to prevail only when he has the authority to bully those committed for trial, like Lucien. The authority of the law and the awe attaching to its residence no longer support him when he is in the dingy corner housing the office of the procureur faced with his betters. Worse, he must justify himself to a woman who appears like a latter-day Antigone in her command of an atavistic order, ‘le Code Femelle’, overriding the positive laws made by men.⁵⁰ The Comtesse, Léontine, joins battle with Camusot in order to save everyone concerned – ‘de nous sauver tous’ (522). And, sure enough, her great husband and his noble friends burst in on her attempt to burn the evidence snatched from the hand of Camusot, evidence that by now would compromise everyone – the guilty Lucien and his deadly associate, Herrera; Lucien’s sometime mistress, the Comtesse, and her husband (‘il s’agissait de vous autant que de moi’, 526); Sérizy’s protégé the procureur; the (by now) miserable Camusot; the absent Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, another known mistress of Lucien; and even Octave, Comte de Bauvan, friend to both Grandville and Sérizy, who seems to stand for the Restoration itself. Léontine gets her fingers burnt, but only literally, and the evidence is discounted.

In this relentlessly dialectical novel, though, the splendour of her victory prepares us for its opposite. Lucien’s own estimation of Herrera is one in which admiration and contempt are mixed equally. His terror of being found out in this contradiction by Herrera himself is insupportable, and he opts for suicide after writing his carefully measured last testament. For the suicide itself, he requires the creative confidence of the poet. The contrivance of suicide, a technical overcoming of the difficulties of killing yourself in the calculated bareness of the cell, is another escape from the secure prison, just as Lucien’s slipping of historical determinism allows him to compose his own history. Staged is another of Balzac’s examples of the age’s intensification of a historical resistance to history. As in the depiction of the 1830 revolution in La Peau de chagrin, here the Restoration is the restoration of the power to lose one’s way. Lucien’s last sight is once more of the intricate, artful construction across the centuries of the prison he is about to leave. Each court and staircase is redolent of momentous events. The recent additions and restorations of original workmanship, though, have been economies of plastering and patching to create more accommodation for prisoners – ‘Cette prostitution des grands souvenirs de la France est d’un effet hideux’ (536). These match, one immediately should add, the sordid termination of Lucien’s spectacular career, built on speculation as much as its own aristocratic pretensions. Lucien is granted his vision, but, it is stressed, a hallucinatory one, with the penumbra of Balzac’s scientific speculations about self-induced hallucinations continually threatening to displace its sublime dialectic.⁵¹ Nothing really makes sense. Lucien’s final dualism, unliveable, is the poet gifted a recovery of the medieval glories of the Conciergerie in the face of their modern ruination, but perhaps because of a metabolic reaction. Right at the end is the comparable, but so ironic, ceding of the novelist and his artful dialectic to the status of ‘Faits-Paris’ – news items, miscellaneous facts (542).

Léontine, Comtesse, Mme de Sérizy, doubles the tragedy of Lucien’s failure of nerve. When she has an intuition that he has hanged himself, she breaks the wrought iron bar of the first window in her attempt to regain the Conciergerie. Once more, the prison’s reputation for inviolability is ruined, and Balzac’s perhaps deliberately unsatisfactory speculations, this time on animal magnetism, again hover in the background discussion between the directeur, Gault, and the prison’s medical officer, Lebrun, about her extraordinary access of strength (559–61). What might such a woman have done for Lucien had he given her the chance? By now, the novel is almost completely in the hands of women. Camusot, despairing, is revitalised by the clever Amélie, his wife, and restored to a sense of the power that remains in his hands as a result of the shrewdness of his investigation of Collin. The embarrassment of Lucien’s connection with the great families of state means that, in any case, it will be given out that he died at liberty, a free man! When Collin is released, Balzac’s powers of novelistic invention will have conclusively defeated the prison’s power of confinement, of which its director boasted.

The specific opposition of the rule of law built in bricks and mortar and the feminised literary invention of the novelist is taken to its conclusion. Its supersession resolves the dialectic of opposition of the entire novel. It stands for the Hegelian sense that all the possible varieties of contradiction have finally been so comprehensively considered that the very idea of opposition has now been transcended. ‘Splendeur’ and ‘misère’ finally meld. Collin’s long and much touted struggle against society has been successful through his powers of social manipulation – erotic, political and economic. He is the insider’s insider, as his arch-opponent, chief of police Corentin, perceives in proposing him as his successor!

Corentin, directed by a look from the Dukes of Grandlieu and Chaulieu to think of how to solve the problem of Collin, sees that he must be dealt with not by brute force, not by further imprisonment and forced labour, but on the level of ‘lettres’. Corentin’s genius is to see that only through discourse is the material intervention required to neutralise Collin to be achieved. Collin’s possession of Lucien’s lovers’ compromising letters must be countered by other letters. These would be ‘lettres de grâce’, pardons getting Collin off the hook, but so that he could be legitimately employed by the state. Collin’s murder of Corentin’s two incomparable associates, Peyrade and Cotenson, can, on the same level of linguistic substitutions, be understood not as capital crimes but as qualifications for being offered the job, as references. The idea of Collin substituting for Corentin, though, appears outrageous, an unacceptable equivalence, a fanciful figure presuming over reality. But, Corentin is implying, only by such mutual displacement, only by such an interactive metaphor, can one make the law adequate to combatting the ingenuity of the inventions that breach its institutional and material solidities. And if one is familiar with the younger Corentin’s behaviour in Les Chouans and Une Ténébreuse affaire, the substitution is even less implausible.⁵²

Helping his allegory is Balzac’s own, post-Kantian treatment of language as material. Following Roland Barthes’s study of Sarrasine, readers have continued to find content and themes being performed and consolidated in the foregrounding Balzac’s writing gives to itself. In Splendeurs et misères, these performances vary from a chapter on thieves’ argot to the persistence of italics to get the reader to attend to Balzac’s choice of a word. Then there is the virtuosity with which Collin, Jacqueline and Collin’s final protégé, the young Corsican Théodore, converse secretly in different Romance languages and dialects in front of bemused authorities. Collin’s ability to hold surreptitious board meetings of the criminal fraternity of which he is the director, the ‘Dab’, in the courtyard of the Conciergerie makes the procureur declare the construction of the prison inadequate to the kind of surveillance needed to control Collin and the other prisoners – a prison whose substantiality has been shown continually to be so porous to the crucial communications of Collin and his team. But any improved despotism of the eye already sounds irrelevant. The inferior police chief, Bibi-Lupin, observes Collin as Herrera talking to his ‘auxiliaires’ to no effect, because he can’t understand how they are communicating and what they are saying.

Since structuralism and poststructuralism, though, we are also used to looking for the way in which authors and meanings are produced by language rather than in control of it. Lack of mastery can also be thematised, although such reflexive self-critique will in turn be subject to the power of language to turn it into just another feature of the spacing out of which it is constructed. The agency of women, despite Collin’s contempt for them (696), figures this functionality of language. The relationship enjoining the greatest literary ingenuity, that between Lucien and Jacques Collin, is figured as between a mother and daughter; ‘je suis mère, aussi!’ says Collin in his agony of bereavement. That’s how he looks on Lucien now, at the acme of his grief, as a mother (569, 573). He would be the ‘king of men’, says Prudence, were he not so contemptuous of women, ‘si méprisant pour les femmes’ (694). His sexism is inconsistent with his reliance on female collaborators, like his aunt, and his identification with a feminine point of view to express the relationship between him and Lucien, which drives the entire novel. To be a woman appears Collin’s greatest fictional resource. His homosexuality is thereby expressed, but the switching of authority and authorial persona is as important semiologically. Lucien was, he tells the procureur, M. de Grandville, ‘une femme manquée’ (677). The entire dénouement, it turns out, is fundamentally motivated by the need to return the distraught Mme de Sérizy to sanity, for which purpose all sorts of deals are struck and strict legalities overlooked. Her rescue clinches the extraordinary transformation of Collin at the end from the Machiavelli of crime to that of the police. After curing her, Collin reflects on the powers he has been countering, forces completely blinded by passion, twisting everything for letters of duchesses or ‘petites filles’. Theirs was the power Collin made work for him. Women are the ones who really pull the strings, and primarily through their writings (724–5).

Such substitutions, disguises, transpositions, mixed valencies are the stuff of Collin’s elusive story and his final convergence on his opposite, as the prime villain is finally recruited by the police. Balzac is possibly registering, as 1848 approaches, a fear of natural resentment too powerful for conventional policing. After Corentin has had his meeting with the dukes Chaulieu and Grandlieu, and the matter has been referred to the king through Lenoncourt, the narrator expresses a sort of awed terror. Foreseen at the end of Chapter XI of ‘The Last Incarnation of Vautrin’ is a basic confrontation between the social and the natural state, a Rousseauvian impasse refigured as that between ‘Le Bagne’ (prison) and the union of despotism and justice passing for social legitimacy. The cunning of ‘Le Bagne’ hideously symbolises the interests of the starved belly, the weeping, immediate claims of hunger. The criminal who attacks uses those grounds as justification. Theft is presented as his or her right to property, and the narrator is dismayed by the antisocial compromises required of authorities too weak to do anything else but treat with savage insurgents (663–4).

The point is not the momentary sympathy for the deprived. Balzac is no Hugo in this regard. Balzac accuses the imminent catastrophe for the monarchy at the time the novel is set, when Charles X is about to prorogue parliament and provoke the July revolution, to capture his contemporary worries about the end of the July Monarchy, successor to Charles, now itself at risk. The short-lived Second Republic under Louis-Napoléon would only last till his coup of 1851 establishing the Second Empire, but it represented an apparent lurch to the left, recovering the slogans of the Revolution of 1789. If there is this topical resonance, Balzac is as usual belying his conservatism with the inventiveness of his support. The novel, contrary to the stasis of the Restoration, deploys a figurative intelligence surpassing that of the state but working in the interests of the state. Just as Collin is finally at the service of the police, Balzac’s figurations get behind a new authoritarianism. Or they almost do. Collin joins the police because he is a villain. The outrages of the death of Cotenson and the violation of Peyrade’s daughter remain unexpiated. Collin’s ubiquity in society is down to his facility in disguise. There is nothing he cannot figure. But he has not suborned justice. He does not give the orders to the procureur général for the stay of execution of his earlier protégé/lover Théodore Calvi – they have already been given; ‘Jacques Collin fut vaincu’ (684).

Immediately afterwards Collin makes his ‘début … dans la Comédie’ (684–97). He has been the boss of prison life and will now be the Figaro of justice, the figure of comedy converging on opera buffa (695). Like Gobseck more modestly before him, his knowledge of society translates into public office. The comedy is at once the reversal of his role, apparently making a nonsense of the difference between criminal and officer of the law; but it is also Corentin’s serious move, a promotion, the enhancement of the police through Collin’s recruitment. That second comedy makes the novel self-referential. How useful to the law would be the range of Balzac’s novel’s social understanding. No location is barred, from low brothel to the antechamber of royalty; no character is impossible to assume and hazard a theory of. Generous social understanding would so remedy the deficiencies of the police’s stolid social regulation, a policing that, apart from Cotenson’s own team of criminal investigators and their aliases, gets nowhere near laying a hand on Collin. Balzac’s comedy is, after all, La Comédie humaine. Nothing human is alien to it. But it is an invention, not a blueprint; it is a conceit, not a programme for reforming the police. Once more reality is the absolute idea – ‘la réalité, c’est l’idée’ (696). But an art in possession of the idea of reality can give us the experience of everything only in the historical form it takes at a particular moment, here in the ascendancy of Collin’s understanding over any other. He is a standing refutation of the earlier assertion confidently made by the knowing Henri de Marsay in La Fille aux yeux d’or, conventional rake and member of the Treize, that those who play out of character (‘sortent de leur genre’) cannot be taken seriously.⁵³ How things have moved on! It is the sister of his colleague, Mme de Sérizy, whom we have seen embody a more politically feminine moving spirit, effectively empowering Collin. One cannot, Balzac tells us in his 1844 Preface to Esther, adopt the Enlightenment stance of a D’Alembert when ‘penetrating the social body’, but must be ‘led by a criminal’ (‘mené par un criminel’, 732). Either the proper knowledge of all corners of society has to become a fiction, or art owes its seriousness to its fictional displacement of another discourse, and becomes the image of an ideal sociology. Of course, neither option prevails. We readers witness Balzac’s fiction frequently defer to social theory, but only because social theory aspires to a representation of a social understanding so comprehensive it must remain fictional.

A Pessimistic Conclusion

Balzac corroborates this conclusion of Splendeurs et misères with a kind of mirror image of the revelatory activity of Vautrin. Sylvain Pons, hero of Balzac’s late (1847) novel Le Cousin Pons, second of the ‘Poor Relations’ (‘Les pauvres parents’) after La Cousine Bette, is a collector. More than that, he is a living collection. Pons can spot the chef-d’oeuvre hiding in bric-à-brac, but his life has become a pile of bric-à-brac in which are secreted no gems. It is as if Balzac wants to examine how far he can critically resume society through an individual’s appearance and behaviour. What is the ‘valeur archéologique’ of Pons for the practised Parisian spectators at the novel’s beginning? He resumes the Empire in his jacket (‘spencer’), hat, shoes, gaiters and other apparel. But just as the collector is himself an informative collection, so Balzac’s style is knowing about its knowingness, self-consciously finding words that match character to telling anachronisms of description. By contrasting with Pons’s own lack of self-understanding, as aesthetically naïve as that of his German (Romantic) friend Schmucke, Balzac’s style highlights its own sentimental reflexivity.⁵⁴

Pons registers the time in which he lives because, like his music, he is entirely produced by fashion, ‘la vogue … la mode’ (28). In himself he is nothing. He lives a life of compensation (principally eating well at others’ expense) for not having become a musician of lasting fame. He is reduced to piecework and music lessons. His professional musical success is a product of the Concours (Prix de Rome), not of the talent (‘la Vocation’) of a great artist (26–7). He is another ‘célibataire’ who, like all Balzac’s bachelors and spinsters, hates his own home and lives vicariously ‘chez les autres’, a perpetual guest visibly conniving at and therefore defamiliarising and revealing to the reader just what the norm is like. He does not judge, though; self-interest turns him, in Balzac’s degrading phrase, into a kind of sluice (‘espèce d’égout’) through which securely pass the confidences of the various domiciles who feed him. For him, everyone is right (62). Similar to and different from his hero, as he did with Vautrin, Balzac judges but excludes no one from his comedy.

Pons is emotionally sustained by the friendship rather than love of another musician of his own age. Schmucke, a jewel to Pons and fool to others, is pianist and composer, someone whose bachelordom is comparably over-determined. Between them, he and Pons estrange the quality of personal relationship, making the reader aware of its historical character. In falling short of what passes for intimacy in the Paris of 1844, they possess something more valuable, even if, as suggested, hopelessly naïve. Otherwise Pons is forever a suppliant to the status quo, a kind of ‘ancient chorus’ (61). Invitations feeding his gourmand habit arise spontaneously during his fashionable days; then they dwindle until he becomes the family parasite, a ‘pique-assiette’, in order to keep the free meals coming. Throughout, he exposes the almost exclusively financial qualifications for social acceptance that the poor relation lacks. His is an enforced spectatorship, like his occupation of his spare time in ‘flânerie’ (42), for want of anything else to pursue. The practicalities of sponging make him extend the idea of the family, maintaining implausible intimacy in distant acquaintance, exposing the interconnections of Balzac’s society by seeking everywhere relationship-justifying invitations to satisfy his ‘ferocious’ dining habit. He figures the Balzac for whom connectivity is the stuff of his art (45–6).

Pons is far from being a cipher. Balzac is also interested in representing what it is like to be such a person. Pons is not furiously resentful of his marginal status, like Élisabeth Fischer, cousine Bette. The egoism he retreats into when suffering social neglect is palliative, not aggressive, going with the different use to which Balzac puts him. Nor is there any combative alternative proposed in the same-sex intimacy with which Schmucke consoles him.⁵⁵ While Pons figures the comedy that constructs him, he tells us as well of the humiliations of consequently being nothing more than his position within it! He falls from grace with his closest relations, the Camusots, and is treated shabbily after giving Mme de Pompadour’s fan adorned by Watteau as a matchless present, in silent gratitude for past hospitality, to the artistically illiterate wife of Camusot. Despite this lack of culture, she must have continued being as clever as she was on behalf of her husband in Splendeurs et misères, since Camusot is now Président de Chambre à la cour Royale. Cousin Pons’s subsequent restoration to favour is a restoration to exactly the same place he was in before. It is a restoration that, like the Bourbon Restoration, is not reimagined, and so just as implausible. Pons, that is, is fitted back into the ‘courtisanerie’ of Paris, selling his company for a good meal (88, 97). The stoicism of Schmucke, who hoped for more intimacy, remains stoical, and he too is back in his accustomed place in Pons’s life, his ancien régime. When Pons tries actively to participate in the Camusot family, arranging a marriage, it all goes wrong and he is excommunicated. When his collecting is revealed to have created a significant historical and artistic archive (an immensely valuable one), in contrast to the anachronistic preservation of the eccentricities of the Empire with which Pons began the novel, he generates another ‘comedy’, the ‘terrible’ one played out by the rapacious would-be inheritors around his deathbed (201). This comedy, strikingly, can contain tragedy: Lady Macbeth crops up in the character of Pons’s landlady, La Cibot (199). Yet again, and finally, the character of Pons becomes a lens for the comedy and not vice versa.

Jacques Collin could be the spokesman for Balzac’s novelistic world by being both unprincipled and a supreme impersonator. Pons effects through passivity and victimhood the social revelations Vautrin achieves as an actor. Pons is a novelistic facilitator as far away as possible from the Ferragus on whom Vautrin refines. It is as if Balzac confirms his novelistic findings by expressing them from the other direction. The second half of the novel, probably written a year later than the first, in 1847, gives Pons a more forward role, as he finally sees through his scheming landlady, La Cibot; and, unlike Schmucke who remains totally victimised, he resists her conspiracy. La Cibot plans with the Jewish collector Magus, along with her suitor and the eventual murderer of her husband Rémonencq, and the crooked lawyer Fraisier, to steal and sell Pons’s superb collection. The better sort connected with the Court, such as Camusot (Pons is cousin to Camusot’s late mother), M. le Président, easily lower themselves to the level of these parvenus, thought of by Balzac as products of 1830. They cut deals with them in order to have a chance of securing art belonging to the family fortune – suddenly Pons is family again – which, nevertheless, they too will in any case realise in cash. Pons’s initial will and testament leaves the collection to the nation (or the Louvre), but this disinterested view of society is translated by just about everybody else into commercial relations of all kinds. Art is commodified throughout the novel, a debasement that can only exceptionally coexist with proper aesthetic appreciation, as in the case of Élie Magus weeping in front of the masterpieces in Pons’s collection (mitigating an otherwise antisemitic caricature).⁵⁶ And then we have the cameo of the wryly named actress Héloise Brisetout, no better than she should be, one of Pons’s rare, reliable allies defending artists like her and Pons in her almost rhyming farewell to the dying man (while nevertheless hoping that her cousin Garengeot will replace him). Freely translated, chasing the brio, it sounds like: ‘Life is well sad. Constructors quibble, kings inveigle, ministers fiddle, the rich are miserable … Artists [like us] will have no more of that, she says, beating her heart, it’s a time for dying … Adieu, old man!’ (289).⁵⁷

Pons’s estrangement from rather than independence of the society he exposes for our revulsion is sometimes pathetic and moving. His nature is childlike (‘enfantine’) in contrast to the duplicitous villains around him (119–20); only one person, Schmucke, by now discounted by everyone as mad, follows his coffin – a cortège that again turns a possibly dignified moment into an economic opportunity for a series of agents selling the paraphernalia connected with funerals: carriages, monuments, receptions.

No alternatives are proposed, no schemes or theories replace the degenerate mess into which the two good characters helplessly fall, and their goodness is not redemptive. All we are left with is the capability of the writing, never submerged by the dross it describes, a pessimistic comedy buoyant as Héloise’s mad rhymes. Perhaps to conceptualise, virtue would have taken Balzac too close to advocating a republic of letters. How prescient was he? Napoleon III’s short-lived republic was imminent, along with its subsequent collapse into another empire, one that Marx was to describe as a farce. As ever, Balzac let the comedy speak for itself, if anything even more comprehensively than when dramatised by Collin. As the unillusioned Héloise had said, a conclusion was approaching, ‘a time for dying’.

Fiction and Feminist Politics

As with my reading of Balzac, I pursue a philosophical idea through those of Sand’s novels in which it is especially conspicuous, an idea that does not prescribe but is itself created by her mode of writing. When she rewrote her third and perhaps most famous novel, Lélia, she claimed in the 1839 Preface to the revised edition that each of the main characters ‘represents a fraction of the philosophical intelligence of the 19th century’. The particular fraction represented by the novel’s figure of the poet exhibited a pattern we immediately recognise from Balzac, ‘the enthusiasm and weakness of a time where intelligence, led by imagination, ascends on high and falls very low, crushed by a reality without poetry and grandeur’.¹ Balzac, we have seen, was fascinated by the symbiosis of different kinds of high and low appearing in rapid succession or simultaneously. Sand’s novel, though, is more straightforwardly critical of her poet, Sténio, and begins the work of showing how poetry might overcome its enemy by becoming consubstantial with it, by making ‘reality’ something to be grasped only by the creative effort of the writer. Normality is always recalibration, not a condition to be accepted but one to be discovered. The simple always needs to be rescued from the simplistic, and in her romans champêtres more than any in her oeuvre are those novels in which the transfer of authority to peasant characters aligns Sand’s socialism with her redirection of inherited philosophical ambition. Sand had been critical of her character Lélia’s ‘shocking reality’, although wanting her to be an abstract and symbolic correction to the ‘demi-réalité’ of the contrasting philosophical fragmentariness of the other characters. Lélia, however, is killed off. In the later works, writing not theory leads the novels’ philosophy without Balzac’s occasional misgivings and hankering after theory, just as the wiser of the peasants and their way of life lead the action. Here is Sand’s ‘new faith’, as she tries to move beyond a sublime writing she argues belongs more to ‘the philosophical history of mankind than its poetical record’.²

George Sand’s 1852 Preface to Indiana, her novel written in 1831, describes it as primarily a novel about feminism in society. It begins by plotting male status in relation to historical inheritance. History here is not traumatic in the sense we have seen it be in Balzac’s early writing of the same time; for a feminist the normal framework for historical and political – and indeed critical – discussion is quite traumatic enough. In Indiana, Sand’s constructions of the Napoleonic and Restoration eras are raised upon the twin pillars of M. Delmare and Raymon de Ramière – the older, curmudgeonly husband and the eligible, unprincipled lover. In between these alternatives, equally unpropitious for any heroine, stands the Englishman, Sir Ralph, whose dislocation from near contemporary French history appears linked to his blandness and disengagement from the action. But he hardly represents a critical alternative. His altruism towards Indiana is a kind of selfishness; his observations on the burgeoning, adulterous romance between Indiana and Raymon are apparently judicious; but actually, as the controversial ending of the novel reveals, objectivity disguises his perpetual alienation from his own desires. Ralph is one of a type recurring all the way through Sand’s work to the Richard Palmer of Elle et lui in 1859: a self-styled benevolent but eligible man watches the deeply problematic central love affair of the novel unfold, offering ostensibly disinterested advice that turns out, finally, to be founded on his own attraction to the heroine. The erotic dynamic of the earlier work, though, is more conspicuously inflected with politics. By the time Sand writes Elle et lui, she has established her novelistic writing as a syncretic, alternative discourse to conventional ideological divisions. Reversion to topical discussion would have distracted from the exemplary capability we will see that she has tried to establish for her writing. In Indiana, Ralph’s republicanism is short on applications, and he becomes a victim to the way in which Raymon’s subtlety of language can make anything serve his purpose. He stands for the attractiveness that the idea of English constitutional freedoms once had for a Voltaire, and his airy disputes with Raymon and Indiana are to be understood topically, as revealing the character of the new age – one of ‘doubts and declamatory rhetoric’.³

Naomi Schor speaks for many other persuasive critics when she argues that the novel is divided between realism and idealism. The idealism, and therefore Ralph’s ultimate rehabilitation, makes for the book’s final optimism, so unattractive to some major critics of the period, such as Sainte-Beuve.⁴ The self-consciously aesthetic argument behind a mix of opposites is what this chapter is about. That Sand problematically mixes utopianism and naturalism is a critical commonplace, usually contextualised quite rightly with reference to the general influence of Saint-Simon and Fourrier, and to her different interactions with the socialists Michel de Bourges, Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc, Lamennais and others. The increasingly reflexive intervention of her novels in political debate has been much less studied, but the philosophical intelligence and boldness of her radicalism were intellectually worked out in a literary sense too. Schor sees the utopian idiom as making space in Indiana for its feminism; and no doubt there could be a topically higher realism at work here – saying, effectively, that it takes a shockingly improbable discourse to make any attempt to loosen patriarchy’s prescriptions of what it is possible to think and be. I wonder, though, if Sand does with her characters in this early novel all that she can, realistically, and then silently decides that the final opt-out for a pastoral togetherness in Réunion has about it an escapism so extreme as unavoidably to look more like the product of patriarchal persecution than a freely chosen, alternative feminist reality. Her novelistic imagination needs to transform, not escape. That has still to come.

From the start, Delmare’s military past has him take up the posture of a Napoleonic officer still on duty, smug, hot-headed and violent (49–50). This caricature, though, covers his unreasonable political commitment to ‘the unassailable glory of his great emperor’. Praise of the Restoration in the salons causes him incalculable (‘inappréciable’) suffering (86). His private blindness to his wife’s needs, his failure to perceive that his efforts at kindness only give her a sharper sense of what a more timely affection would amount to, all connect with his outdated public attitudes. Delmare’s future lies in the commercial success of the factory in his estate, not in any new view of what post-bellum civic life should now be like. In that regard, we are told, he has not advanced beyond 1815 (168–9). Sand continues to make her narrator’s reservations more precise when Delmare’s blind espousing of ‘the error of one single man’ are defined as ‘fidelity’ to Napoleon and ‘not patriotism’. His idea of ‘gloire’ belongs to a period that the narrator feels transgressive in calling ‘sad’, although confident that posterity will agree (133–4).

When Raymon, with one eye on Indiana, is trying to ingratiate himself with Delmare, he ‘descends’ to deploring the current government’s treatment of ‘the illustrious remnants of the Grande Armée’ (139), and so connives at Delmare’s mythologising of the real problem of how to mediate between former losers under Napoleonic rule and current losers in the new dispensation. The political substitutability of winners and losers is mirrored in the unstable structure of the sublime the novel deploys elsewhere. Raymon’s posture of sublimity is used to caricature his duplicity, as when he apostrophises Indiana after he has betrayed her with her maid, Noun (105–6). His language is as flowery as the idiom in which he later sincerely deceives himself (‘vrai dans son jeu’) in order to tame and seduce Indiana herself (220). Both Delmare and Raymon hilariously accuse women like Indiana of using a debased novelistic vocabulary on those occasions when their actual plainness of expression undermines male amour propre, and when the males need to deprive women of any appearance of agency (217, 232). The irony of male contempt for female discourse in a female-authored novel, whose fictions the male narrator and male characters are, is a nicely reflexive conceit. Indiana herself, per impossibile, almost makes use of it in her own defence to Raymon (247). Noun, Raymon’s ‘sensual Creole’, thinks his sublime hyperboles to Indiana, requiring delivery on his knees, must mean he is at prayer; and he is later described as thinking he lives sub specie aeternitatis, under the tutelage of a solicitous Divinity. But Noun has already, and much more effectively, given us her own unaffected ‘eloquence’ in response to her dire situation without recourse to such fictions. We are told to read her ‘trivial’ words as more genuinely ‘sublime’ than those of cultured upbringing; like expressions belonging to the lowest class, her language is ‘more moving and more persuasive’ (103). The soon to be abjected Noun, who commits suicide when cast off by Raymon, is in the ascendant, partly by virtue of the unexpectedly low station from which she plainly speaks. The loser without polite reserves wins the argument, as does Indiana herself later on in the hunt scene where the possession of courage by a woman, Artemis-like in her command of her role, raises terror in the breast of the man imagining what her love would be like. Such enthusiastic facility would put her beyond the law, making her a creature to be related to only by deference and sacrifice.

Such challenging description of Indiana targets a man, Raymon, presented as shrewdly in tune with his society’s current progress, or the history it understood as progress. He supports the constitutional monarchy established in 1830 without wondering if the constitution thus restored was still outdated and out of touch with the current ‘body politic’ (130). After all, it required only a minor adjustment of his monarchical loyalties for the new order to serve his purpose as well as did the absolutist pretensions of Charles X’s regime. Raymon, as a constitutionalist, thinks of himself as being without political passions, but is in fact deeply self-interested. (His talents for self-exculpation are enormous, demonstrated in a plot where he can characterise the woman who risks all for him as unfairly reserving heroism for herself and dishonour for him! (218). His amour propre cannot permit people to think she left him and not he her.) Sand relates such sophistry to the power of eloquence, which is never the same as the voice of a ‘conscientious publicist’. Such sincerity is belied by the realities of rhetoric and ideology; they ensure that the most powerful ‘is the one who writes and speaks best’. Raymon’s supposedly ‘impartial criticism’ ignores the ‘facts’. The ‘alternative truths’ he ignores are not the post-factual sophistry we are more familiar with, but empiricism – he discounts knowledge gained from the experience of poverty and sexual oppression. He also lacks awareness of the constitutive importance of point of view. Possession of a plurality of perspectives can pose as objectivity or constitutionalism – the sum of human ways of looking. In this novel it expresses instead the advantages of someone not obliged to change the world in order to flourish in it. Or a pluralistic lack of commitment to any individual interest that ‘plays all parts’, not seeing that these interests contradict each other, can suggest lack of principle rather than sympathetic understanding (128–30).

The novel’s action implies that the persuasive power of a Creole woman, whether Noun or Indiana, is considered immaterial to legal arguments; but their telling advocacy of their own cases in the novel actually undercuts the law that ignores it, showing that the law is patriarchal in the way in which the constitution is out of date. Both jurisdictions need to change to continue to have a mandate. But the instructive female viewpoint from which the novel challenges establishments to let bias and anachronism be seen is still legally unrecognised, and below the law rather than above it. The temptation is to understand life under the old law to be tragic, as played out by Raphaël de Valentin in La Peau de chagrin or Lorenzaccio in Alfred de Musset’s play of that name. It is only when Indiana is ignorant of the ways of society that she can think of life as ‘a tragic novel’ (90). By contrast, the narrator of Indiana thinks that ‘a man’s political opinions are the whole man’, the implication being that if you change the politics you change human nature.⁵ Correlatively, this view must suggest that if you exclude women from being representatives of what it is to be human, a politics that does represent their interests too will be, as we saw the humanism of Felicia Hemans imply, an entirely new kind of politics!

The novel Valentine (1832), which Sand wrote next, is as feminist as Indiana; indeed, its indictments of patriarchy are more explicit.⁶ Men have ‘forced’ the aristocratic heroine, Valentine de Raimbault, into a mess from which only retreat from the world patriarchy has constructed, ‘pledging with God’, can save her (119). Her lover Bénédict, whose suit is balked by her symptomatic incoherence, also deplores a ‘dishonourable (“infâme”) tyranny of man over woman!’ (128). He imagines his own authenticity as something that would not be valued by his society, perceptible only to God (106). There is obviously hubris mixed in with Bénédict’s commendable resistance, a knot that the novel is poised to disentangle. His disenchantment also borders on ennui, the age’s disease (later, of course, to have its fullest exposition from Baudelaire) attacking many characters (40). The man Valentine’s family is obliging her to marry, Évariste de Lansac, wants to hold her in complete subjection in order to secure her fortune for his own disposal. Interest in Valentine comes a bad second to his main priority to enjoy the dowry patriarchy will entitle her husband to possess without accounting to anybody for how he disposes of it. Valentine’s elder sister, Louise, also attracted to Bénédict, has been ruined by an adolescent love affair, leaving her a single mother abandoned by her family. It is only the family of a member of the inferior class, the peasant who nursed her in childhood, who can begin the process of restoring confidence in her respectability. The peasants as a class are also mobilised by Sand. In Valentine we have two main factions, the country aristocracy or gentry and the peasants; and the latter, in their commercial aspirations, provocatively displace the role of the supposedly intermediate bourgeoisie dominant in the France of Louis-Philippe when the novel was written.

Valentine could do the right thing, by conventional standards, and give up her illicit love for Bénédict, except for her inability to stand the grief it would cause him. The feeling that Valentine is a pathological case, constitutionally unhappy – a charge that could be levelled at most of Valentine’s main protagonists – is complicated by the novel’s relentless determination of the personal by the political. Bénédict is socially déraciné, a peasant sent to university to acquire the education belonging to the class above him. This advantage, far from empowering him as was intended, makes him useless for the peasant pursuits he was born to, and yet incapable of profiting from his polite education by gaining employment in a genteel profession. He languishes between a contempt for bourgeois money and ‘ennui’, two extremes that had already ‘withered the most priceless faculty of his age – hope’. He is a child of his time, ‘un enfant du siècle’ (40). Valentine’s aristocratic family, as might have been expected, has been financed by her step-mother’s father, a ‘wealthy manufacturer’, a union Sand styles as typical of Napoleonic fusion, his pleasure in uniting ‘ancient names with newly-made fortunes’ (69). Hybridity was meant to engineer the new social vigour we saw Balzac notice and perhaps ironise in La Cousine Bette. The mother, the Comtesse de Raimbault, ‘openly Bonapartist’, cannot take the Restoration seriously, ‘that new simulacrum of royalty’, and is snubbed by its elite of the Faubourg St Germain (83). Significantly, she confirms her wish for supra-bourgeois credentials by a sense of ‘nothingness’ and, again, ‘ennui’ – ironically linking her to the Bénédict whom her loyalty to ‘rank’ renders hopeless in his pretensions to marry her daughter.

Somehow Bénédict has to find in love an alternative to the kind of ‘nothingness’ that initially matches him with Valentine and her mother; a political attitude, we have seen, but also pathologically intensified because of his circumstances. The only remedy is to resume being a peasant, unrefined, simple, frugal, actually another way of being a ‘nobody’ (105–6). The ‘hope’, though, for which George Sand will eventually contrive a victory, will be one that sees fulfilment in the life of the peasant. In retrospect, she almost seems to write up Bénédict as a warning to herself. Peasant life must be saved from reflex associations of it with moral impoverishment resulting from physical impoverishment. It could of course do with material improvement. But Bénédict knows the goodness of his peasant heritage, hence his regret that it was not handed down to him by his parents (114). Alienation seems to consume creation. The conclusion of the novel approaches but does not realise a happy ending for all. Over the dead bodies of everyone else, the peasants who were its tenant farmers come to inhabit the big house, having gained enough capital from the genuine bourgeois source of trade (Athénaïs’s godfather the ironmaster) to buy into aristocratic manners. And love might have been expected to work for this social mobility too, and seems about to with the death in a duel of Valentine’s unmourned and horrible husband. Athénaïs, who has got over her love for Bénédict and married the boorish Pierre Blutty, is attracted to Valentine’s sister Louise’s son, Valentin. Suddenly anything seems possible.

The adjacent but none too subtle social engineering of the rise of the peasantry lays the ground for what is not yet or only momentarily present in the novel: a dismissal of the false consciousness represented by Valentine’s ‘religious respect’ for public opinion. Her conformism was based on the deference to rank underlying the latitude of her marchioness grandmother, a lady whose manners comically are of the age of Louis XV (186, 73). In other words, all establishments are ‘simulacra’, deriving from precedents themselves as artificial. And the correlative is that none is privileged, and that the accurate commentator should be able to show the idiomatic manner in which each class expresses the same desire for fulfilment. None is privileged in theory, but because, customarily, such completeness of experience is denied the peasant, the task of getting the peasant idiom an equal hearing provides original material for the novelist. It also makes the radicalism thus expressed immanent rather than transcendent, one working within existing boundaries and finding the value in what had been demeaned or abjected by the ruling ideology. Instead of trying, in perpetual discontent, to envisage a dispensation freed of all ideology, as we saw Bénédict begin by doing, Sand’s social revaluations displace such apparently purer, more advanced revolutionary sentiments. Or that is the direction in which her novelistic thought is currently moving. The continuing problems in the relationship between Valentine and Bénédict emphasise the provisional character of her position. They complement each other, Bénédict grumbling at destiny, Valentine still searching for what a happy life might be (103–4). At one point she makes him the proverbially comforting cup of tea, but his awkward passion for her makes her drop it, burning herself (194). The unification of the radical impulse and the impulse towards happiness might have produced comedy. But finally the dominance of tragedy is clinched by an incident of mistaken identity, as the jealous peasant, Pierre Blutty, believes Bénédict has been with his wife, Athénaïs, when Bénédict had actually been with Valentine who had been loaned her room. Blutty kills him with a pitchfork, an authentic peasant weapon. Comedy survives on the periphery. Blutty dies in an accident, consumed anyway by remorse. Athénaïs inherits the Château de Raimbault thanks to her godfather the ironmaster, and she does marry Valentin after all.

Reorientations

The earliest of the ‘romans champêtres’, properly called, is Le Meunier d’Angibault (1845).⁷ Sand had described Jeanne (1844) as their precursor, but in retrospect that novel seemed to her unsatisfactory, despite Balzac’s verdict that it was a masterpiece. She thought the writing had been too hurried to meet publishing deadlines, and she was embarrassed by her own style’s falling short of her ambitions of writing a novel immersed in a peasant milieu.⁸ Le Meunier performs more satisfactorily as a transition between the earlier novels with their programmatic, levelling-up theses and the later ones, embedded in the material they are valorising, eventually turning inside out the privileged imagination that conceived them. The Berrichon peasants begin to speak for themselves, and the novelist’s art becomes one of self-effacement, a creatively mobile delegation of authority, eroding any exclusively aesthetic claim to exemplary purpose or idealising activity. In Le Meunier a journey has to be made explicitly from Paris to the country in order to set up the action; in the later ‘romans champêtres’ we will be there from the start.

Marcelle de Blanchemont, aristocratic heroine of Le Meunier, certainly makes programmatic statements, socialist in sentiment, which usually send critics off to research Sand’s relationships with Pierre Leroux and Louis Blanc, or her reservations about Fourier and Saint-Simon. Lammenais’s Christian idealism, ‘en théorie’, fuels one conversation between Marcelle and a startled Rose, and another between Lémors and Grand-Louis (135–9, 197–203). But these conversations are never decisive, nor do they fit with the inclusiveness, the shared psychological language, which is elsewhere the common idiom. Equally, to succumb to the critical temptation to say illustrative things about the novels on the basis of the unusual configurations of Sand’s own upbringing – early death of father, importance of grandmother who disapproved of mother, rebellious and rivalrous daughter Solange – risks ignoring the extent to which Sand, however unconsciously, transformed and manipulated rather than succumbed to her experience of the instability of traditional parental fixtures or formative childhood patterns.⁹ She scrambled and startlingly repurposed conventionally static generational roles for thematic purposes in the novels. Her actual reproduction of these instabilities in a damaging way in her relations with her own children is well documented. This, after all, is an author who in her youth invented a character, ‘Corambé’, her very own ‘sylphide’, whom she could manipulate like Chateaubriand’s fantasy as a placeholder for fulfilment. There is much less of this inventive redeployment of personal history in Le Meunier. If you were to read it after the later champêtres experiments, you would expect a relationship to grow out of the original frisson and rapport between Marcelle and the ‘meunier’, Grand-Louis; instead the radicalism is in the parallel maintained despite disparities of class between the two romances of Marcelle with Henri Lémor and of Rose, daughter of the moneyed peasant farmer Bricolin, with Grand-Louis. Both sets of lovers have to overcome disparities of income more than of class; their crises are not qualitatively different and are treated as equally interesting. Sand stops short of a potentially still more radical parallel with Fanchon and Jeannie, lovers on a still lower social echelon. (That will drive La Petite fadette.) The convincing representation of the idea that the gamut of all emotion could be captured in peasant love, without this instructive parallel with another class being maintained, is the literary achievement to come.

Rather, in Le Meunier, it is Bricolin who embodies an absolute, the paradigm of the moneyed interest excoriated so spectacularly by Balzac after the July revolution. Money is the ground of rationality for the endlessly calculating and perpetually entertaining Bricolin, as much as it was for Crevel in La Cousine Bette and for Lansac in Valentine. Bricolin lives at a time he describes as being one ‘où l’argent est tout’, for whom money explains, even makes, everything, ‘fait tout’ (156, 217). It is the symbolic order of human life; all those who fall foul of money, like his daughter ‘la bricoline’ who sticks to her love for an economically unacceptable lover, are abjected to languish in madness. Rose approaches but is saved from this catastrophic confusion consequent upon exile from the constitutive capitalist regime. The counter-Absolute of ‘la folle’, though, is waiting to have its revenge, unleashing its unconscious power to create the holocaust of Bricolin’s property through the vengeful arson of ‘la bricoline’, thus disorientating the life that abjected it. In keeping with Sand’s liberalism, though, this is no solution; the story is rather of real gains coming from money supposedly lost in the revolutionary years. This cash was not burned as was thought, but is recovered by the beggar, Uncle Cadoche, and now redistributed for happiness not profit, gifted by the ‘mendiant’ to Grand-Louis in gratitude for his continual kindness. Personal relationship rather than social theory explains the arrival of social justice. The gift enables Grand-Louis to marry Rose, and Marcelle is given the wherewithal to educate her son, Édouard, and to live with Henri. It’s all somewhat formulaic and improbable, not risking the reconceiving of relationship undertaken in the other ‘champêtre’ romances. That transformation, to become plausible, would have to be achieved by more confident writing of characters’ inner lives and their expressive dialogues, not simply by plot or theoretical discussion. ‘The day will come’, says the narrator of La Mare au diable, ‘when the labourer as well can be an artist’.¹⁰ As Sand conceives it, that achievement has also to be led by strong female characters, peasant women who figure her union of feminist and socialist commitment.

It is instructive to look first at the last of the full-blown ‘romans champêtres’ to measure the considerable changes in Sand’s novelistic thinking that we will then go on to chart in the intermediate novels. Les Maîtres sonneurs explicitly addresses the viability of trying to mobilise categories of social exclusion that figure the Unconscious in a productive way. The story is told over thirty-two evenings by a peasant to a peasant audience. At first, therefore, it is tempting to read the novel as moving beyond the feminist socialism just outlined. Is Sand attracted by absolutes transcending the socially immanent values powering her vision up till now? But the negative conclusion she draws from Les Maîtres sonneurs (1853) argues a consistency with the achievement of the intervening novels, La Mare au diable (1846), François le champi (1847) and La Petite fadette (1848), with their peasant heroines – Marie, Madeleine, Fanchon – to which we will then return by way of Le Péché de Monsieur Antoine (1846–7).¹¹

In Les Maîtres sonneurs, music, the gift of the otherwise inarticulate child Joseph (diminutive, Joset) Picot, leads him to seek out the ‘sonneurs’, the pipers who play at country fêtes and balls, dividing up the parishes between them in line with the allocations of their guild. They may be gainfully employed elsewhere, but in their role as ‘sonneurs’ they appear migrant, socially indeterminate, both below and above peasant self-worth. Joseph’s contact with them comes through his meeting with one, Huriel, who is also a ‘muletier’, a mule-driver, one of those itinerant bands of often violent carriers whose trade, significantly, was diminishing in Sand’s day and would, she predicted, die away with improvements in communication (217). Before such sociological transparency, though, the muleteers are allowed to work a murky symbolism in her novel, the tinkling bellwether of their herds, the ‘clairin’, an eldritch little horse leading an unruly animal mob full of energy and driven by masters completely without respect for property. They insouciantly carve a right of way through any estate and countryside, biddable only by the ‘clairin’ or by the right tune played on the pipes (99–100, 122). The muleteers’ flouting of proprieties lets Sand reinforce their unspoken kinship with the ‘sonneurs’, whose music, at its best, is a Dionysian alternative to linguistic order. In a primal scene of enlightenment, the narrator, Étienne Depardieu (Tiennet), in search of the wandering Joseph in a dark wood, hears the bagpipes as he is overwhelmed by a herd of mules and perhaps dogs, satanic vehicles led by the ‘clairin’, whose bell is a counterpoint to the sound of the bagpipe (‘cornemuse’). He flees the riot of beasts to find refuge, and discovers Joseph sheltering under an oak tree. An eerie peace immediately supervenes as if nothing had happened. And from then on Joseph’s vocation to become a ‘maître sonneur’ is identified with something never to become socially assimilated.

Joseph’s character, although redeemed from its near-idiocy by these extra-social affiliations and the musical vocation they seem to promote, is somehow unviable. He can grow tall, lose his ‘distrait’ appearance, become affectionate and fall in love with Brulette, his childhood companion, but nothing will come of his changes. For some, the point of the narrative is to effect reconciliations between sociability and the musical but often violently anti-social energies of pipers and muleteers. The excitements of confrontation certainly carry the first half of the novel, but the more that such reconciliation appears to be the plan, the less plausible plot and the motivation of characters become. One suspects a covert critique of revolutionary desire. Joseph remains the symbol of stand-off, like a Shakespearean stranger perpetually outside the longed-for circle of sociability; he ends up dead in a ditch at the hands of rival pipers as violent as the muleteers. Huriel, charismatic muleteer and piper, is named after his town, a little commune in the Bourbonnais, origin of the most recent royal family of France. But his name also sounds like one of the Seraphim, otherworldly. He is Joseph’s original mentor, and although outré and infernal on his first sooty appearance, the angelic echo of Uriel, angel of light, perhaps gives a clue to the novel’s eventual direction of the reader’s sympathies. Huriel, like his father, has to leave the muleteers and become a respectable kind of itinerant, a woodcutter. Eventually he is even more socially accepted, his enjoyment of property carefully contrived by the plot in order for him to be a worthy partner of Hulette.

Sand has been exploring Hegel’s inverse world, in the shape of the semiotic or Dionysian dimension of music and its outlaws, only to show that its undeniable enjoyments are unviable too. Music to a (social) purpose, like the bourrée, has its place, but outside society is as enchanting and useless to us as birdsong. Any attempt to institutionalise it extraneously to the cultural practice in a broad sense whose boundaries it demarcates becomes ridiculous – like the Gothic nonsense, creepy then comic, into which the initiation of Joseph as a ‘maître sonneur’ collapses in the dungeons under the castle, when the pipers’ corporate sense of their own importance massively over-reaches itself. In keeping, the profession of the muleteer is ripe for supersession and does not stand for a class of people whose voice should go on being heard and whose right to recognition is championed by Sand’s presentation. In between the first and the last of the ‘romans champêtres’, Sand grounds her novels in a peasant’s evening tales to his peers. Étienne is established in the way she had formerly established the ‘chanvier’ as narrator, and his peasant community as just as representative of her reader’s interests as any other class might be. Les Maîtres sonneurs contributes to this plot by functioning negatively, supporting the basis of Sand’s novelistic politics and sociology by deconstructing any aesthetic alternative. By contrast, to champion muleteer or piper as a better model for revolutionary action than her socialism would be as fey and unrealistic as having Joseph – one of ‘ceux qui voient le vent’ (simple-minded or ‘lost in the clouds’, in Rosemary Lloyd’s translation), a dreamer, gifted maybe with second sight – stand for a socially critical stance (67).¹² The wild music Joseph plays in the wilderness discredits the aesthetic rather than materially relocating it as the preceding novels do. And the guild of like-minded pipers then looks as anachronistic as the rebellious muleteers. Or they are fast becoming the stuff of legend, picturesque characters like ‘la grande bête’ recorded in Sand’s loving descriptions of the folklore of the Berry, La Marche and the Bourbonnais.¹³

While we saw Balzac, in La Duchesse de Langeais, use the political void of the Restoration as space in which the St Denis set failed to restore the aristocratic principle, George Sand has a favoured character in another novel closer to Le Meunier in date and construction, Le Péché de Monsieur Antoine (1846–7), inhabit the same area imaginatively, but planning a socialist experiment. In Le Péché, the parvenu, Cardonnet, expects the high-born M. de Boisguilbaut to go along with the ridiculousness (‘le ridicule’) of the aristocratic principles of the Restoration, but finds him declaring himself instead ‘as much the enemy of distinctions and privileges’. Yet, more than that, the marquis ‘believes men equal in right and worth, if they are honest and good’, unlike Cardonnet who cannot conceive that the peasant, Jean le Charpentier, whom he offers to free from debt and provide with a job, might have need of aesthetic recreation like any other human being.¹⁴ The motive behind Boisguilbaut’s legacy of millions to the novel’s hero, making possible the work’s happy ending, is the hope that the like-minded Emile will use it to found a commune – no doubt on the model of Sand’s own inclinations at that time.

Again the idea seems to be to get rid of idealism. Boisguilbaut’s bequest of his fortune gives conclusion to the story, as said, and so seems to ally aesthetics with politics. But this scenario is hardly likely. Boisguilbaut momentarily appears aware of the story’s fairy-tale construction of his benevolence – ‘il vous faut la science sociale’, he urges instead (373). The implication is that to imagine people doing the right thing politically is something that demands the invention of unlikely scenarios. But Sand’s emphasis appears far less a Romantic defence of art’s ideal authority and more a self-conscious positioning of fiction as a discourse where what is currently disorientating politically can be provided with a habitus. What the artistic accommodation of political ideals then tells us is that, firstly, it should be the purpose of art and that, secondly, politics is in dire straits if it remains aesthetic and should speedily move towards action. Political realisation achieved, then two further conclusions beckon. Either, as Hegel might say, we don’t need the art any more; or, as Marx might claim, science is now the discourse and labour ought to be the practice reflecting back to us the sense of our humanity formerly accessed by exclusively aesthetic means. Muleteers and pipers in Les Maîtres sonneurs, then, are not irresistible throwbacks to an aesthetic delight in social disorientation, but re-emphasise the need to invent new points of reference. The description of those is the preoccupation of the ‘romans champêtres’.

Country Matters

La Mare au diable (1845) uses its opening scene to redesign the Holbein engraving described in the first paragraph (‘L’auteur au lecteur’). At the same time it rewrites more successfully the confused use of Holbein Sand had in mind for Jeanne (1844). Now, looking at Holbein’s image produces in the narrator a profound melancholy. The narrator is not en caractère, as in other of Sand’s ‘romans champêtres’, but an implied author to whom the agricultural labourer Germain has told the story of how he got married (115). But of course such a figure is still a female author in male guise; Sand’s own authority is a redesignation from the start. It is in keeping with this general point that we are given Holbein’s memento mori, a peasant indentured in a single image to his labour and to mortality, in order that it be replaced with the novel’s own, more positive tableaux. These pictures, beginning with Sand’s explicit revision of Holbein’s scene of ploughing, take their optimism from the surrounding context of a kind of writing that can hope for a day to come when the labourer will be able to be an artist as well, alive to the beauty and not just the duty around him. In Holbein’s engraving, death is at the ploughman’s side; he is subordinate to the natural cycle whose fruitfulness he exploits, but whose dominant emphasis is on his coming death. In redrawing Holbein, Sand also designs a contrast with the farmer of Virgil’s Georgics, poems turning labour and agricultural science into pastoral art. Virgil’s subject is cultivation made possible by labourers ignorant of the aesthetic poise of their work, which it takes a cultured poet to point out and relocate within a poetic genre. Sand’s novel will rather hand over the aesthetic lead to labour. Her ploughman enacts another set-piece of agrarian activity, unknowingly setting a benchmark for poetry to aspire to represent. Such a picture could not be much further from the bucolic interlude (‘oubliée par Virgile’) at the start of Balzac’s Les Paysans,¹⁵ where country life is viewed entirely from the perspective of the Parisian visitor, Blondet, and found to be (with some ironising of Blondet, himself a ‘maître d’ironie’) boring (86). The wider pathos of Balzac’s novel lies in the ruinous failure of an aristocrat, Comte de Montcornet, to effect a top-down restoration of his estate to former glories.

In the initial, empowering revisioning of Holbein, the novel’s hero, Germain, commands a team of bullocks, strong and fiery, to plough his field in the company not of the grim reaper, but of a fine child. Man and child work in such poetic circumstances (‘conditions si poétiques’), replacing Holbein’s emblem of despair with ‘a thought of happiness’ (‘une pensée de bonheur’ surely echoing Stendhal’s definition of beauty as ‘la promesse de bonheur’ in De l’amour of 1822). Any slip from immersion in the materiality of this ideal sounds the wrong note – as when the pair collapses for a second into an emblem, losing the contrast with Holbein: momentarily their trace, like that of us all, imprints itself (‘s’imprime’) on the field of humanity. But the portentousness of the pair, like the rest of the novel, sets its own tone. Thus, the distinctive ‘Appendice’ to the main text, which instructs the middle-class reader in peasant ways, might at first appear to preserve an objective distance between what peasant customs can symbolise universally, and what it is like to live them unreflectively. But the sections on country marriages, the rites on the eve of the wedding, the wedding itself, the magic cabbages, the nuptial anti-masque of the drunken gardener and his wife, resist polite translation. And the narrator polemically links this resistance to the more authentic French spoken by these people. Polite privilege is abandoned when confronted with ‘des vieilles richesses’ of language lost with the establishment of a literary canon after Rabelais and Montaigne. The philology may not be very plausible, but the intention is clear (115). The claims for language are matched by the confidence in relying on the significance of local custom. While the ‘chanvreur’ (narrator-to-be of François le champi) and the ‘fossoyeur’ (the man who will always have a job, the grave-digger) indulge in their interminable exchange, the possession of the bride by her fiancé is acted out in the finally successful siege of her house by his party – in its own drama.

Sand’s tendentiousness here has already been expanded through the role given to women in La Mare au diable. Marie, almost a child, becomes the prime motivator of the action. The 28-year-old Germain, though married at 20, lags behind, and when enamoured of Marie falls into a kind of paralysis, as will do the eponymous hero of François le champi. The implications of the favourable contrast with Holbein’s ploughman initially set up still need to be worked out, and that is the story the novel tells. It requires the transfer of authority from male to female characters in the process. Germain’s conduct as a father is excellent because it is as kind and indulgent as a woman’s (56). But the womanly is the truth content of the novel that has to be unfolded. The suitability of Germain as Marie’s partner is confirmed by her maternal care of Petit-Pierre, a success the little boy is quick to proclaim, thus both putting the idea of her eligibility in Germain’s mind and gradually spreading the word to the rest of the family. After the death of his much-loved first wife and mother of his three children, Germain is advised by his sympathetic father-in-law, Maurice, to remarry. Petit-Pierre, the eldest, increasingly vigorous child, is already keen ‘à faire l’homme’ (105), and the in-laws fear he is going to be neglected. Père Maurice confidently directs Germain towards a conventionally attractive but completely unsuitable widow, ‘la lionne du village’, in the vicinity. On the way to visit her, with a votive offering of game for her father, Germain, his son and Marie get lost for a night in a forest at the edge of a pond known as the Devil’s (‘la mare au diable’). He has taken Marie with him as a favour, escorting her on the way to a job she has been offered as a shepherdess at a farm near where the widow lives. Germain is naïve in his approach to the widow, affronted that she entertains other suitors, although a conversation he has with her father Léonard suggests a vulnerability in her position that he cannot see. He extricates himself, but only to find that Marie, harassed by her putative boss, has fled with Petit-Pierre, whom Germain left temporarily in her charge. She has rushed back to the wood, now a place of refuge after having been one of banishment. During the previous night Germain has fallen in love with Marie, so the transvaluation of the grim place has already been under way.

The ‘mare au diable’ increasingly becomes the central symbol round which had gathered the crucial three – Germain, Marie and Petit-Pierre – when they were marooned for that night in the unreadable forest bounding this devil’s pond. But it is exactly subservience to such symbolism that the writing suggests has to be opposed. The characters, led most effectively by Marie, are equal to sitting out the nocturnal confusion, facing down the black arts of the location. A pedestrian note replaces anything uncanny, just as the explicitness of peasant custom quenches anything picturesque. Little Marie repeatedly makes the night liveable, looking after the child with precocious, motherly expertise, getting the fire going, finding what has been lost, keeping up spirits after their horse bolts. And the novel, despite its title, is similarly resistant to becoming fixated by an iconic moment or scene. Again, the opportunity to be emblematic is refused. The set-piece becomes geographically typical of the neighbourhood rather than anything else. Germain’s definitive attraction to Marie comes to consciousness there, certainly, but the process of its realisation is all tied up with the preceding and succeeding narrative. Germain’s robust defence of Marie against her pursuing harasser as they return through the wood the next day comparably crystallises his credentials as her champion, although we are not privy to her feelings other than to hear her announce that Germain is her ‘maître’ when threatened by the predatory ‘fermier’. Her reliance, though, is still in keeping with her earlier feeling that Germain is too much like an uncle or godfather to be her suitor (82). It would seem almost incestuous for her to love him, although she feels she would do well to do so.

Legitimately to translate their loving feelings into action is going to require an imaginative freeing from these embarrassments, a reversal letting feelings dictate propriety and not vice versa – a positive reimagining of the kind visited at the start of the novel on the Holbein engraving. As critics have noted, in her use of incest Sand revises the classical, tragic tradition followed by Racine’s Phèdre that is still in play in the opening of Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann in the drame du coucher between Marcel and his mother.¹⁶ Agency, practicality and a sensible but creative understanding of the best that can be made of things are primarily what the novel presents. The devil’s pond becomes an emblem of an emblem, the sign of the unproductive reflexivity the novel strives to avoid. The characters repeatedly circle it, temporarily unable to get on with the story of their lives, as it tries to obsess them with itself. It is there to be surpassed, as Sand’s thinking tries to do as well with the taboo of incestuous resemblance. Viewed this way, the novel almost turns into a pre-emptive critique of the symbolist movement in French literary history.

Germain’s problems after his misconceived wooing of the widow are twofold. Marie, he thinks, does not love him. In any case, she is too young and penniless, he thinks, to substitute for his dead wife in the eyes of his in-laws on whom he depends. His opinion here is so far dictated by Père Maurice. So is Marie’s rejection when he declares an interest and she puts it down to the disturbing experience of their ‘mauvaise aventure’ of the previous night, forgetting her own demonstration on that occasion of maternal maturity (84). But of course there is also ‘Mère Maurice’. And it is she who now pushes the story forward. The older woman, not the older man, is the repository of wisdom. Germain’s childlike confession to her of his love for Marie (108) allows her to solve both problems. While Marie has sometimes commanded the action, we suddenly realise that the story has so far hardly presented her feelings at all, partly because she has not confessed them to herself, and partly because of the problem of whether or not she is old enough to embark on marriage – a question tied to the underestimation of women Sand’s novel will now correct. One short chapter remains, in which Mère Maurice meets with Marie, and all is decided. Mère Maurice redescribes the extremity of his passion as his fate (‘sort’), as something he has to live, and something he would not be asked to live were reciprocity on Marie’s part not possible. Equally, she appreciates Marie’s delicacy in not wanting to stand in the way of a better match for Germain and quickly puts it down to Marie’s maturity, which presently neither Marie nor he can see. Abuse of a younger woman by an older man has already been partially discredited by Germain’s defence of Marie against her harassing boss, ‘le fermier des Ormeux’. Now the worthiness of Marie to replace Mère Maurice’s dead daughter is evinced by Marie’s lack of confidence that she can. Mère Maurice can read this pattern of paradoxes in such a way as to persuade her husband of its meaning, and Germain is told he is free to approach Marie without constraint. An authentic meeting of the two is thus possible, during which Germain’s repeated suggestions that she does not love him elicit her declaration of love through her power to oppose him and stand up for her own opinions. At which point, Petit-Pierre and his sister arrive unexpectedly, are drawn into the couple’s plighting embrace, and the family unit has been precipitately achieved with, dare one say it, unnatural speed. Again, these quietly revolutionary transformations contrast sharply with those threatened by Balzac’s ‘élément insocial’, the peasant ascendancy that he thinks would absorb the bourgeoisie as the bourgeoisie had devoured the aristocracy in 1789.¹⁷

In François le champi, Sand produces a novel that further consolidates her alternative to male political action and speculation.¹⁸ The champi is a word from the Berrichon dialect denoting a child without inheritance (not just found in a field or ‘champ’!). Sand’s champi is far from being someone relishing his alienation to literary advantage, as do Musset’s enfant du siècle or Gérard de Nerval’s ‘El Desdichado’ in the eponymous poem from Les Chimères, recalling Scott’s disinherited Ivanhoe. Sand’s François lives a can-do life in which he makes a success out of familial disadvantage. In pointed contrast, Musset’s and Nerval’s texts, published before and after 1848, excite by reaching for a provocatively unmanageable range of reference, an entire century or the classical resources of French literature. El Desdichado’s constellated lute produces a music not just decoratively spangled with the stars of the past, but one observing the patterns by which we understand its universe.¹⁹ After all, in astrology, the literary and the astronomical cooperate, myth making mathematical pattern memorable – ‘mots abîmes’ (‘abyssal words’), as Jean-Pierre Richard almost as memorably called Nerval’s highlighted substantives – étoile, soleil, mélancolie.²⁰ Such profundity disintegrates the subject with an excess of significance, a destiny (the poem’s original title) too large for any individual. The contrasting modesty of Sand’s champi comes from a realism – what it is really like to be abandoned, to be indigent – symbolised by that word champi, an archaic word that, we are told in the avant-propos, was used by Montaigne but now, like many things in the novel, hides its high origins in lowly dialect.

The orphaning of François allows the novel to reflect on the kind of mothering he is shown by the women who foster him. That neither la Zabelle nor Madeleine Blanchet is his natural mother makes us more aware of whatever assumptions we have about maternity when they take on the role. The child is not spectacularly isolated, or damaged; but his assimilation to a family, the gift of kinship, brings into unusual focus what normal mothering is as both women consciously act it out as authentically as they can. La Zabelle, originally paid to look after François, is initially neglectful but latterly solicitous, mostly in response to the example set by Madeleine. After la Zabelle dies, Madeleine’s mothering has to withstand a series of attacks, first from her husband’s mistress la Sévère, who tries to seduce François when he is 17, then through other potential erotic unions: with Jeanette, daughter of his employer; with Mariette, sister-in-law of Madeleine; with a putative but unspecific partner he is encouraged to seek out by Madeleine herself, as part of her motherly duties. These, though, are always found wanting in contrast to the comprehensiveness of his love for Madeleine and hers for him, a love that increasingly comes to mutate on his side from a filial to a husband’s register. No wonder François le champi was the novel read to little Marcel by the mother he perhaps loves too much at the start of Proust’s great novel.

For the novel to turn into a love story in which François and Madeleine are finally united still demands a slightly shocking confidence in the power of relationships to change radically and reconfigure themselves. But then the plot has made all possible. François’s disinheritance, his otherwise despised state of exile from any family, becomes the agent of a kind of flexibility with which he and Madeleine can reorientate themselves towards each other. His outcast state first of all provokes exceptional mothering, and then allows for the transition of that encompassing care into a correspondingly exemplary marriage. Such a transformation can seem schematic, implausible or freighted with unconscious motives never examined. The anti-Oedipal calculation creating François’s eligibility is strangely abstract, not made all that convincing by a material courtship consisting mostly in being tongue-tied and blushing. But the point is that the imagination risks as much in conjuring up happiness in an agrarian working-class community as it does in the loftiest cultural exercises in expressing alienation, where it is supposedly more ambitiously stretched in creating new identities unsupported by conventional social endorsement. That originality is by definition spectacular, everything that Sand seems to have denied her own talent after Lélia. But her modesty is conspicuously deliberate, like the eschewal of the looming Liebestod at the end of Indiana.

At one point in François le champi the peasant narrator tells his peasant audience that the capitalism replacing the old culture of la glèbe, in which the land was administered through church benefices renting out to the peasants and charging them tithes, is only a different version of the same oppression. The replacement of near-serfdom, albeit alleviated by a sense of religious belonging, with free enterprise cut the cord that inexorably bound peasants to the plough. But they were left to perish all the same, though more at their own hand as they over-mortgaged, got into debt, and succumbed to ‘la maladie achetouère’, or mania for buying (110–11). François’s cleverness is to reacquire Madeleine’s bien, which has been so grossly diminished as to be almost unworkable by the depredations of la Sévère, the surviving mistress of Madeleine’s husband Blanchet. She had persuaded M. Blanchet to make over goods to her, which she then sold off. Her buyers, though, over-extended by the new mania, were themselves vulnerable, and François’s generous offers to rebuy from them restored Madeleine’s fortunes but not at their expense. Imaginative or ingenious reversals within the existing system can be as transformative as revolution. Sand’s ordinary socialism is presented as a material alternative to revolutionary thinking outside the box. There is sufficient room for socialist manoeuvres within the current dispensation for her.

Immanent social critique like Sand’s seems to me a pointed counter to the pessimism of radical thinking and its literary expression that we have seen in Balzac, Musset and Nerval. The daring emotional intelligence making credible the legitimate transition from filial to amorous relationship in the novel parallels François’s clever reversal within the existing rules of Madeleine’s financial situation. Sand has written a novel in which a man can plausibly marry his mother. This inviting structural parallel has the novel’s plot pressing us to accept the change in relationship as part of a general political attitude – hence the typical mix of abstraction and such near-the-bone experience. Alternative explanations, such as an exorbitant sentimentalism, an idealism sitting unhappily or polemically with an alternative realism, perhaps underestimate Sand’s originality. Her higher realism dispenses with that binary, and makes her more in tune with speculation of the time. That Hegelian willingness to historicise the literal, and therefore to show how realism is inherently invented, feels more in keeping with Sand’s writing. It puts her on a par of imaginative energy with contemporary male existentialist projectors, an equality that helps us better appreciate both her achievement and theirs!

The novel consoling Sand for the bad days of botched revolution in 1848, ‘ces jours néfastes’ (10), was La Petite fadette (the little fairy, but also, in a typically demystifying move, the diminutive of the character’s family name). This novel allowed her to create an artistically convincing version of what she would have liked to happen.²¹ In the 1851 ‘Notice’ to Le Péché de Monsieur Antoine, she had described 1845 as part of an age where criticism of actual society and the dream of an ideal society reached a level of public discussion comparable to that achieved in the Enlightenment. La Petite fadette continues her conversation by other means. Sand had no illusions about such freedom of speech in public discourse: it happened because the powers that be, unlike Balzac, saw no threat in the expression of radical ideas, no ‘wind of revolutionary change blowing over the France of Louis-Philippe’.²² She pointed out that for her and Eugène Sue, the conservative press became ‘l’asile des romans socialistes’, the safe house of such writings.²³ The other tactics she adopts in novels like La Petite fadette get under the radar of political anxiety, but the conspicuously imagined means by which her novels escape censorship is also just their political point. The fact that we can imagine a much more liberal society, one that can find models of good practice in peasant behaviour, restores radical thinking to the category of the probable. That the reactionaries think the scenario is impossible need not, in Aristotelian terms, alter the probability of the tale – indeed, Sand’s effort is to persuade her readers that at this moment they should only believe that something is representative of our shared interests if it is also self-confessedly imagined. Such trust sounds simplistic, but, again, it is the force of the complex novelistic writing that directs the philosophy. The point is, as the narrator, the ‘chanvrier’, says, when asked at the end of François le champi: ‘if the story isn’t true, it could be’ (‘elle le pourrait être’).²⁴

The least regarded of Sand’s cast of characters, the abused, despised and calumniated fadette, Fanchon, becomes the heroine. Idle fantasy, though, is critiqued in the novel. Retreat to a bed of ‘fainéantise’ is the trick of the spoilt twin in the story; championed, by contrast, is a disciplined resistance to apparent social determinism. Sylvinet, brother of the tireless Landry, fantasises an impossibly consuming love for Landry. Frustrated simply by Landry’s affection for anyone else, Sylvinet’s disposition is impossibly possessive, and so his love remains an unusable ideal. The twins, from the start, are presented in the context of a midwife’s warnings against the dangers of a symbiotic life of mutual dependency. The young Fanchon intuitively picks up on this weakness in her early raillery. ‘Half boy who has lost his other half’, she shouts at Landry, when he is looking for the brother who is sulking just because he suffers from that (Platonic) delusion (70). Much later, when Landry and Fanchon are betrothed, jealous Sylvinet is given such a talking-to by the little fairy, Fanchon, that he is finally made to see that his exaggerated love for Landry, and the feverish depressions accompanying love’s normal reverses, are unsustainable. He remains a hopeless case, though, falling now for Fanchon herself, the lover of his brother, and so the object of his previously unreasonable jealousy. But now he at least has the initiative to banish himself to service in the army to fight the ‘grandes belles guerres de l’empereur Napoléon’ (246). We leave him gaining military promotion for death-defying bravado, but also because of his education, largely gained from Fanchon.

Fanchon is the great demythologiser of the tale. She is the character who can persuade others that sorcery translates into good sense, the curative laying-on of hands into rational therapy, the experience of abuse into a sharper awareness of freedom, magic into medicine, all these transformations emerging mostly in discussion with Landry. On the other hand, the strongest transformative force in the story is the turning of such reasonable conversation into love. Sand makes it the creative germ in the dialogues of Landry and Fanchon. She forces him to be reasonable about why he initially disapproves of her, and then she replies to him with an honest acceptance of her faults that shows both her greater truthfulness and her power to change herself. Self-recognition, achieved through conversation, identifies the natural ability to develop inherent in selfhood. Prudence produces love, and love grows through the prudential furthering of itself. Fanchon becomes more and more attractive to Landry and others, finding more and more varied expression for this practical talent for attuning herself to change. The community begins to approve of her the way they approve of the changes of the season. This writing is truly ‘champêtre’. She is the exact opposite of Sylvain. Sand eventually gives her money, the support of two powerful neighbourhood families, and a faithful lover, all coming after a life tainted in the eyes of her community because of a mother who deserted her and her lame younger brother, leaving them in the care of a grandmother surviving on a reputation for witchery and living a life of unrelieved poverty.

Thus Sand revenges herself, in an inexact way, on the disappointment of her political hopes, and offers a riposte to the materialism that cannot appreciate the distraction of an art contrived to find a placeholder for those hopes. This is a new kind of art, one escaping the binaries of realism and idealism, aestheticism and engagement. Her 1848 Preface to the novel proclaims a new kind of art hatching from the decomposition of the old, one recovering the idea of innocence (9). In dedicating her work ‘à nos amis prisonniers’, incarcerated under a political censorship, Sand wants her writing to take on a positive value through its knowingness about what it cannot say. So the ‘chanvreur’ who spins the yarn is precisely not a coded figure of some allegorical commentator on the times; but, being what he is, he can, as Sand puts it in her 1851 Preface, distract from a corrupt agenda and so tell stories that are ‘aimable’. The viability of art and of love are linked. Such passing relief, ‘soulagement passager’, by escaping the violent establishment of the time, opposes it (17).

Sand could hardly make the estimation of her artistic licence fall lower than in this strategy of resistance. The upward progress of her heroine is undeniable, but is achieved through a creative reasonableness that produces what previously had been the privilege of imagination. Distraction from customarily observed distinctions creates a new kind of texture in her writing. Fanchon becomes attractive and sought-after just by growing. She begins as a little cricket (‘grelet’, ‘grillon’, 69), teasing and enchanting with her grasshopper brother from the wings, and she ends up centre stage as the novel’s sage. Her persuasive discourse and its intelligence are what win her Landry’s love. The apparent suppression of the aesthetic is what lets it appear in a new form. It develops that inaugural moment in Le Meunier d’Angibault for the aimable, when the aristocratic Marcelle of exquisite taste encounters the eponymous ‘meunier’ and discovers ‘more finesse and good sense than poetic ideal’. Coming just after the description of an apparently hopelessly poetic passion for her lover, Henri Lémors (almost ‘death’!), you the reader know that this poetry is not abandoned but surpassed and reinvented in practical form: in Marcelle’s move from Paris to the Berry, where the story is played out, and in her change of affections (44–5).

It takes a much later critical perspective to be able to see such creative mutations of the aesthetic for the feminist and historicist interventions they are.²⁵ In La Petite fadette, Sand has established her alternative and has no need of polite contrasts. Nor does her socialism express itself through class struggle, but through moral and natural ascendancies. In describing how things should be as if they actually were so, she downgrades artistic superiority in order to give her readers what she believes they need as an alternative to lives ruined by recent history. She takes the structure of the sublime and turns it inside out. The failure of literal expression no longer accesses a higher reality; rather, the literalness of expression replaces ideals incorrigibly aspirational by definition. Or, put her way, Fanchon prevails over Sylvinet.

An Optimistic Conclusion

One of the ways of reading Elle et lui, the 1859 novel based on Sand’s affair with Alfred de Musset that lasted from 1833 to 1835, is as staging a direct confrontation between the new aesthetic of her ‘romans champêtres’ outlined in the prefaces to La Petite fadette and an inherited, male Romanticism.²⁶ Musset is important to what follows, but less as the historical lover of George Sand and more as the highly self-critical representative of an art from which Sand had moved on. Her hero, Laurent, lacks the dimensions of historical awareness Alfred de Musset, if not his vengeful brother, possessed. From her earliest novels, Sand tended to dramatise disputes on aesthetics and its relation to politics through dialogue, confrontation and plotted opposition between male and female characters. Many of the novels’ titles name a single character, female or male, elle or lui, setting up immediately the novelistic debate to follow as to what might be at stake in trying to let the individual define herself or himself, usually in relation to sexual others. Elle et lui is no different, and resumes the debate in the earlier novels by concentrating on such a mix of dissonance and harmony.

As its title suggests, its writing self-consciously examines the heterosexual paradigm of Sand’s political argument. It starts with an optimistic revision of ideological possibilities, eroding inhibitions in our conceiving of what could be natural, as if building on the example of François le champi, mixing mothering and loving. Its examination of the patriarchal hierarchy assumed by the paradigm means that one can read it helpfully in relation to novels written before the ‘romans champêtres’. Nevertheless, it remains a novel and not the autobiography her first readers wanted it to be. It sits within the earlier project by criticising the capabilities of Sand’s own class: principally, their inherited romantic assumptions that they can write their own inner history convincingly. The heroine and hero, Thérèse and Laurent, do not need to be given a voice, they are all too articulate; they appear capable of repeatedly reorientating themselves in their relationship. In their endless conversations they reconnect over and over again in roles created out of their admirable talents for avoiding natural cliché and the social determinism it represents. But that initial, daring merging of different sets of relationship, familial and amorous, eventually collapses into the dysfunctional love that such failure to discriminate ties of kinship and erotic love is popularly thought to signify – disaster! he married his mother, and such like. But the need that prompted the attempt to do something different remains, and so once more the task of reimagining the natural is foregrounded.²⁷

Thérèse is maternal towards Laurent from the start, telling him to get a good night’s sleep, advising him against excess. She is ‘a thousand times too maternal’, Laurent tells her, his painter ‘comrade’, with an irony that accepts the mutual playfulness at work (43–4). The slipping of conventional stances by the lovers-to-be goes with their uncertainty as to whether they are in love; it also registers the conventional puzzlement Laurent shares at the independent status of Thérèse, and the accompanying feminism in which he needs educating. This theme has been tested in other of Sand’s novels. An earlier novel, Mauprat (1837), is usually read as being the work in which she most directly represents a feminist programme of male education. And in Mauprat, it is the same power of the woman to vary roles that arguably establishes the feminist, reforming independence that saves Edmée from rape on her entry into the brutish household of Bernard.²⁸ In Elle et lui, Thérèse’s voluntary freedom from husband or lover – ‘this anomaly’, a freedom even from the state of being divorced from the roles of husband or lover – also liberates her from other conventional stereotypes. So the maternal quality of her love, which had its test drive in François le champi, enjoys the same (feminist) licence. Male critics’ detection and deploring of incestuous overtones in the later novel’s first reception go hand in hand with antagonism towards Sand’s feminism (30–1).²⁹ Implicitly, for the first critics, the idea that erotic love if motherly is unnatural is comparable to the pernicious idea of sexual equality. If their opposition to sexual equality is palpably false, then might the same go for affective conservatism too? Imagination and sympathy, though, are needed to persuade us of the probability of these radical possibilities.

On the other hand, Sand uses the idea of playing with kinship in erotic love in a highly knowing way. This is a practical skill contrasting with the otherworldly, impractical, incestuous egalitarianism extravagantly apostrophised at the end of Lélia.³⁰ The novel by Musset against which Elle et lui is usually opposed, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836) – and Musset told Sand it was a ‘roman’ – ends with more conventional consolations of being able to play brother and friend with a former lover, rather than incorporating these roles in the dynamic of the passion itself.³¹ But while Sand’s feminist writing deploys political resistance to the incestuous taboo structure supporting patriarchy as just noted, that does not stop her from creating the critical dimension of her discussion of the love of Thérèse and Laurent, simultaneously important to the novel. The writing is sharp about the ambiguities of their mutual infantilising, and about the implausible parental attitude Thérèse and her new lover, Richard Palmer, will adopt towards Laurent and he to them. At first the faux naïf stance has its erotic attractions, later its therapeutic uses. In her love for Laurent, ‘Thérèse était rajeunie dix ans. C’était un enfant plus enfant que Laurent lui-même’ (108). But characters’ rejuvenation and recovery of a naïve wonder to their intimacy, and the narrator’s criticism of the lovers for being childlike, go against each other’s grain. And this constructed tension weakens further the purchase of those partisan, biographical readings, insisted on by Musset’s brother Paul and others, that miss the irony behind Sand’s positive presentation of a childlike wonder that can degenerate into damaging infantilism.³² In the course of the narrative – the story as told – descriptions of the feelings of Laurent and Thérèse as mixing different kinds of kinship gradually slip from signifying a new kind of love, one more versatile than those allowed by the conventional stereotypes, and becomes the history of Thérèse’s attempt to slip out of the clutches of Laurent’s increasingly conventional, if deranged, infatuation, one bloated with childish desire.

In his satire Lui et elle, Paul de Musset easily latches on to the possibilities of self-deception available if the novel is read as autobiography. His tone suggests that playing with forms of relationship is as whimsical as he believes are Sand’s cross-dressing and feminism (his replacement of ‘Thérèse’ by ‘Olympe’, in a presumably diminishing comparison, must recall the guillotined French Revolutionary feminist heroine Olympe de Gouges). If that is the case, the novelistic element is exposed as a self-indulgent fantasy about Thérèse’s generosity, consolidating the high moral ground she occupies above the drunkenness, violence and unmanageable mood swings of Laurent. Her metaphorical mothering pretends to an irreproachable perfection, imperfectly disguising strategies of manipulation and unfaithfulness. Certainly, it sometimes seems necessary for Laurent to become puerile in order to fit Thérèse’s perfect mothering, although his spectacularly bipolar behaviour (his ‘reactions’ are always ‘retractions’, as Thérèse puts it economically, 234) often covers the deliberate distancing of him by mother Thérèse.³³ But then Palmer, Thérèse thinks, also harbours impossible pretensions to graft happiness onto despair (233).

Yet it is Palmer, the third in the loving triangle, who, although laying bare the nonsense of this parental role-playing, steps out of the artful role of the faux naïf into the straightforwardly culpable stance of the irresponsibly naïve. In a crucial scene, he innocently invites his unshakeable rival Laurent to dine with him and his now fiancée, Thérèse, as if they are treating a spoilt child, ‘un enfant gâté’. The novel will end by rebuking both Palmer and Laurent with a dénouement in which Thérèse recovers the son she thought was dead and so becomes an authentic mother. She resumes a natural relationship whose simplicity now seems attractive and hard-earned and frees her from needing either lover. Before that, as a result of Palmer’s presumption, all three lovers are dragged into the abyss, ‘dans l’abîme’, their relations completely disorientated (215–16). It is Laurent, for once, who accurately perceives the hubris in Palmer’s unselfishness: ‘he wasn’t above human nature as he had imagined’ (217). Such exorbitance on Palmer’s part would have been grist to Paul de Musset’s satirical mill, and undoubtedly it would damage the novel if its writing went along with these self-deceptions. But, taken in the context of Sand’s thought – and it is unlikely that Paul de Musset could give her credit for thinking so rigorously – the story must be a critique of Laurent’s Romanticism, or that kind of Romanticism that demands our pity. Then in Thérèse’s eyes he is indeed a child of the age, and her maternal response is equally symptomatic in Sand’s critique. Elle et lui constantly rewrites, but repeating as much as correcting, Musset’s La Confession d’un enfant du siècle. The malady of her time and set, she concludes, is a sublime lacking reason, the disorientations of genius (245–6). She might have made the same criticism of Balzac’s representation of peasants in Les Paysans, where ‘Qui terre a, guerre a’. This epigraph to the first part fits Lukács’s verdict on Balzac’s representation of his ‘paysans’ as ‘the acting and suffering hero of the novel’. Balzac’s tragic dramatisation effectively makes them, too, into the ‘enfants du siècle’, disorientated by their class struggle, the opposite of Sand’s representation of them.³⁴

Sand’s critique of a Romanticism of disorientation recalls her much earlier work and shows the consistency of her aesthetic discontents. There are, for example, the extraordinary ups and downs of the young poet Sténio’s hyperbolic apostrophes to Lélia in the opening pages of Lélia. At the end of Elle et lui, however, it seems the men have not moved on and are as ‘frénétiques’ as ever. Musset had rightly pictured the child as the creature most apprehensive of the malign consistency of his or her time, because the child is Romantically stereotyped as being at the stage in his or her life most open to and therefore least able to cope with disorder. The critique of age and hero is mutual; their symbiosis constitutes the ‘mal du siècle’. Consistently with her ‘romans champêtres’, Sand does not value an imagination creating emotions at a remove from reality (‘les passions [qui] n’ont plus rien de terrestre’, 216–17), however much they are charged with the child’s naïve energy. It is in monitory not celebratory fashion that she gives us the feelings of those who bid for such an experience.³⁵ Laurent aspires to it explicitly, but Thérèse had for a while tried to match him, at enormous cost. Her life too became at once splendid and miserable (238). The lovers, obsessed with each other, dramatise their own inner divisions in the process (235).³⁶ The earlier dramatic skills in relationship pretended to manage a constitutional change. When these skills failed, the consequences turned out to be mortal for their relationship. The individual cannot live outside its natural history, unless capable of the degree of inventive self-fashioning required constantly to remake the category of the natural, to do it in another tone, and so make of it a home again. It is no small thing, we hear, to believe oneself momentarily able to love without grief and mistrust (‘c’est déjà beaucoup pour lui de se croire un instant capable d’aimer sans trouble et sans méfiance’, 217). The implausible ending, the reunion of Thérèse with her real son, is then conspicuously fanciful for a purpose. Again, it overrides objections to improbability by resetting the natural as the elusive end of all authentic desire. It is a happy ending, improbable and therefore conspicuously imagined. In Sand’s society, nature untransfigured is not natural. Like most of her novels, Elle et lui privileges the creativity required to be simple, natural and happy.