Balzac

From Philosopedia

Balzac, Honoré de (20 May 1799 - 18 August 1850)

Great as he was, Balzac (the “de” he added to give his name something of an aristocratic touch) was never elected a member of the French Academy. He is, however, arguable the writer who was founder of realism in European literature. Of the world’s great works, Balzac’s forty-seven volume collection of novels and short stories, The Human Comedy, stands out. At least 3,500 characters which he portrayed led Baudelaire, in awe, to observe that even Balzac’s doorkeepers have genius. Skepticism pervades the Comédie humaine as well as Balzac’s twenty-four other novels.

He also wrote a caustic history of the Jesuits; Eugénie Grandet (1833); Père Goriot (1835); and Cousin Bette (1847). They have been criticized as moralizing and tending toward melodrama, but the works are vividly imaginative and illustrate his powers of observation.

In Madame Bovary, the pharmacist is given these lines:

• I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all the others with their mummeries and their juggling. . . . I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfill our duties as citizens and parents; but I don’t need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the ethereal heavens like the ancients. My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I support the Profession du Foi du Vicaire Savoyard and the immortal principles of ’89. And I can’t admit of an old boy God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again after three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in squalid ignorance, and tried to drag whole nations down after them.

Starting in 1841 and continuing until 1864, the Vatican prohibited all his works from being read because of their implied negativism toward the church. “Today,” Balzac wrote, “the writer has replaced the priest.” He also wrote, “After a woman gets too old to be attractive to men, she turns to God.”

Graham Robb, in Balzac: A Life (1994), mentions that Balzac could improvise stories at the drop of a pen, turning out in one night the 14,000 words (at 33.3 words per minute) of The Illustrious Gaudissart.

Although not physically attractive (or at least he was once described as a short, bulgy man who looked “like an army major in need of a haircut”), Balzac had a long string of romantic affairs and was father of several “illegitimate” children. He wrote about every category of human beings - in fact, Robb implies that Balzac’s feminine aspects have been "traditionally ignored,” that he had a succession of young male secretaries and wrote with knowledge about the life of the homosexual Jacques Collin (alias Vautrin, alias Abbé Carlos Herrera).

More than two thousand characters are found in The Human Comedy. As a writer, one who wore a monk’s robe while working, Balzac ran to excess in everything - in eating, sex, writing, spending. How, he illustrated, can there ever be too much of a good thing! Yet, he sometimes slept only two hours a night and, fearing that digestion might slow his mental processes, avoided solid food but drank gallons of coffee.

In 1849, as his health was failing, Balzac travelled to Poland to visit Eveline Hanska, a wealthy Polish lady, with whom he had corresponded for more than 15 years. They married in Berdyczów in 1850, and three months later, Balzac died.

Balzac is buried in Père Lachaise, the Paris cemetery named after the Jesuit friar François d’Aix de la Chaize, who had been confessor to Louis XIV from 1675 to 1709. On his monument is sculptor David d’Angers’s large bust of the author. Although Balzac may have been known for his anticlericalism, a priest was present at the funeral, as described by Victor Hugo in his Chose Vues:

• The procession crossed Paris and went by way of the boulevards to Pére Lachaise. Rain was falling as we left the church and when we reached the cemetery. It was one of those days when the heavens seemed to weep. We walked the whole distance. I was at the head of the coffin on the right, holding one of the silver tassels of the pall. Alexandre Dumas was on the other side. . . . The coffin was lowered into the grave. . . . The priest said a last prayer and I a few words. While I was speaking the sun went down. All Paris lay before me, afar off, in the splendid mists of the sinking orb, the glow of which seemed to fall into the grave at my feet, as the dull sounds of the sods dropping on the coffin broke in upon my last words.

{CE; FFRF; GL; ILP; JM; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}