Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published year or two ago.

     “HISTORY OF THE THIRTEEN” [“L’Histoire des Treize”] by Honore de Balzac (First published as three separate works; published together in 1834-35)

To the horror of some fastidious critics, the young Honore de Balzac was often happy to write cloak-and-dagger, blood-and-thunder shockers. Before he was a fully-fledged as an author, he wrote, under a pseudonym, many pot-boilers which he later disowned. In that respect, he was like the capable Alexandre Dumas and the (much worse) sensationalist Eugene Sue with their stories filled with conspiracies, cut-throats, dark hidden passages etc. etc. Yet even after he wrote his more respectable novels, Balzac still sometimes liked to deal with crime, with secret societies and with scandal in high places. L’Histoire des Treize is the epitome of this trend in Balzac’s work. It is presented as one novel, but in reality it is three novels, only loosely connected, and it is one of Balzac’s longest. Balzac also dedicates each of the three novels to a man in the arts whom he admired. The premise of L’Histoire des Treize is that there was a secret society in Restoration Paris (that is, Paris after the fall of Napoleon when Royalty was restored). This secret society is made of men totally devoted to each another’s well-being by fair means or foul. They have their own codes and ways of inserting themselves in the lives of people who threaten them; or people dear to them whom they want to protect.

Ferragus (dedicated to Hector Berlioz) is the first and weakest of the novels. It is very much a melodrama of mistaken identity. Maulincour, an aristocrat, is deeply upset when he sees a much admired and chaste wife in high society, Clemence, consorting with disreputable people in an unsavoury quarter of Paris. Shortly after he starts trying to follow Clemence and find out why she is behaving so strangely, nasty things begin to happen to him. He discovers that Clemence is frequently visiting the old criminal known as Ferragus. Maulincour continues to be terrorised. The knowledge that Clemence knows the criminal Ferragus compromises her. The blissful harmony of Clemence and her husband’s marriage is disrupted. Gentle reader. Let me not hold you in suspense. The upshot of this unnecessarily tangled plot [I have spared you much of the detail] is that the criminal Ferragus is in fact Clemence’s disreputable father!! Melodramatic drum-role here please.  There are a number of deaths. Maulincour is poisoned (by Ferragus of course). Clemence is driven to death by grief when her marriage falls apart. And [for reasons which I don’t wish to go into] Ferragus’s poor and mistreated mistress commits suicide. The “accidents” which befell Maulincour were naturally the work of the Treize of which Ferragus was the head. He was attempting to protect Clemence’s reputation in society.

Put together, Ferragus is frankly a wild and absurdly  melodramatic story. And yet Balzac still had the skill to bring alive many scenes of Paris high and low – observations of the shabbier parts of Paris; close examination of the behaviour of the nouveau-riche and the returned aristocrats in their salons; redolent thoughts of death in the elaborate funeral for Clemence; in contrast the bare funeral in the Pere Lachaise cemetery for Ferragus’s mistress. One wonders if it was the funerial atmosphere that made Balzac decide Hector Berlioz, with his famous Requiem, to be the appropriate man to be dedicated to this novel. Like so many of Balzac’s novels, in this novel and the two others there are characters who repeatedly appear in other of Balzac’s novels. There has also been much discussion that suggests Ferragus is really about the love of a father for his daughter. After all, Ferragus was trying to do his best for his daughter and to keep her from falling out of high society. This has been linked by some to Balzac’s masterpiece such as Le Pere Goriot, in which an old man gives much to his daughters expecting their love – but they end up scorning him. Father-daughter complications are in many of Balzac’s novels, such as Eugenie Grandet.

If much of Ferragus is outrageously melodramatic, then the second of these three novels La Duchesse de Langeais is both outrageously melodramatic and outrageously romantic.  Perhaps Balzac’s dedication to Franz Liszt was a nod to the composer’s romantic music.  La Duchesse de Langeais is also known as “Ne touchez-pas a la hache” – “don’t touch the axe” – which were supposedly the last words of King Charles 1^st just before he was beheaded. It suggests vengeance to come, and this novel is in part about the vengeance of a man who has been toyed with too often by a coquette-ish woman, and eventually the vengeance of cruel fate. Yet despite all its overt melodrama and romanticism, this novel has more nuance and sense of the relationships of men and women than you might expect. It begins with the French general Armand de Montriveau, fresh from wars in Spain, dropping in to a Spanish Carmelite convent, closed to the world on an island.  He recognises the music being played by an organist in the convent, recognises her voice in the choir and secures a chaperoned interview with her. In the convent she is called “Sister Theresa”, but General Armand calls her Antoinette or Duchesse. He tells her that her husband has recently died. They speak passionately. “Mother Theresa” confesses to the Carmelite superior of her relationship with Armand and her love for him. But she has sworn that she will stay in the convent. Armand departs, determined to somehow free her.

All this happens in 1823, but it is the prologue and back-story to what has happened previously in 1818.This takes up most of the rest of the narrative. In 1818, Antoinette de Navarreins, aged  24, marries for pure prestige with the Duc de Langeais. But, now known as the Duchesse de Langeais, she lives on her own in the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain. She is a typical example of the irresponsible Restoration aristocracy, not without intelligence, wit and charm, but artificial, self-centred, coldly enjoying the admiration of young men in salons brought together with kindred spirits such as the Vicomtesse de Fontaine, the Duchesse de Maufeigneuse and the Comtesse de Serizey.  Armand de Montriveau, general of the Guards, a marquis who has served the both the Republic and then Napoleon, has led a hard and adventurous life. After Napoleon’s fall, he explored Africa, nearly perished in the desert, was enslaved and escaped. He is a man of fierce intelligence, impatient of frivolous high society, with a strong sense of rectitude and duty. But he is totally innocent about women. At a salon, the Duchesse de Langeais determines to make a conquest of Armand, whose exploits happen to be all the rage. She wants to make him a pendant for her own esteem. What follows is the story of a cruel  coquette who arouses in Armand passions neither he nor she really knew existed. So innocent is he that he does not recognise her studied wiles. She puts him off with various pretexts – first pleading that she is married (though she has no regard for, and no real connection with, her husband) and she does not want her reputation ruined. Then (with the assistance of her confessor l’Abbe Dongrond) she puts forth religious arguments on the immorality of loving somebody other than her husband. All of which simply arouses Armand’s love to fever pitch. But at last Armand understands the cruel nature of her coquetry. So he has her kidnapped from an evening salon [here the secret society the Treize enter, being friends with Armand, who assist in perpetrating this crime]. Now in his clutches, Armand denounces the Duchesse and her wiles. He even threatens to brand her with irons. But now the tables are turned. In this moment of extreme crisis, the Duchesse de Langeais realises that, while she was playing with him, she really was falling in love with Armand. Artificiality yields to passion. As if by magic, she is brought back to the salon [unbranded, of course!], but from this point on it is she who is hopelessly smitten with him. Armand still loves her, but he turns his back on her because she has so often played with him, and he withdraws from salon society. She tries to contact him. He does not reply. She deliberately has her carriage linger outside his bachelor residence, so that all Paris will think they are a couple. Whereupon a whole crowd of aristos and hangers-on [including her father] persuade her of the benefits of discretion – not that they object to adultery so long as it is kept quiet. Armand flees and the Duchesse attempts to contact him. Finally, discovering his whereabouts, she sends Armand a message saying that he will satisfy her love [okay, you know what that means] or she will retire to a convent. But by ill luck [shades of Romeo and Juliet] the message goes awry, Armand doesn’t get it, and the Duchesse goes into the convent.

Flash forward to 1823. Six months after his first visit to the Spanish convent, Armand returns there with some trusty members of the Treize planning to spring the Duchesse “Sister Theresa” from the convent. They secretly build a ladder to scale up the rocky side of the convent [Stewth! This really does sound like Alexandre Dumas or Eugene Sue]. In the dead of night, they get into the convent. But cruel fate!!! They hear the Mass for the Dead being said. At just the wrong moment “Sister Theresa” has died of grief – for her late father or for Armand? They take her body and bury her at sea. Armand’s dreams are over. One of his friends ends the story by telling Armand “After this, have passions; but as for love, a man ought to know how to please it wisely. It is only the last love of a woman that can satisfy the first love of a man.” Take this “moral” (if it is one) for whatever you like.

Now please do not chastise me too much for giving you this long account of far-fetched romanticism, with its Spanish convents and blazing passions and big coincidences and a mysterious secret society. It is said to have been inspired by Balzac’s own unhappy experiences in loving an aristocratic grande dame who toyed with him. In the novel there are elements of male revenge fantasy – first masochism in the idea of love as self-abasement at the feet of the haughty lady; then the revenge of placing the haughty lady before the branding irons; then the lady’s moral humiliation as her sophisticated façade cracks and she too surrenders to passion. And the novel’s dedication to Franz Liszt seems most apt when Balzac has a long sentimental description of the majesty of organ music in the convent and the sublime splendour of the nuns’ choir and the religiosity of it all. Yet oddly enough, for all its melodrama La Duchesse de Langeais is a more thoughtful, and in places and more credible novel, than Ferragus. In its scenes set in Restoration Paris, which takes up most of the novel, Balzac gives a scathing account of the careless upper classes, their back-biting, pettiness, gossipy bitchery, and obsession with status and wealth. Balzac is far from romanticism when he reverts to hard reality in a 20-long-page- essay theorising about the factionalism and general stupidity of the aristocracy; their inability to see where their real interests lay; and their sad contrast when set beside the rising and more productive bourgeoisie. It is as if they have not learnt anything from the Revolution. Above all though, the power of his story lies in the long analysis of Antoinette’s relationship with Armand, which takes up over half the novel. It is almost an anatomy of coquette-ry. Compared with this, the rest of the novel is mere dressing. Given much of its romantic content, it is not surprising that La Duchesse de Langeais has often been filmed in France.

And so we come to the last of these three novels which purport to be about a secret society, the Treize, but in fact the secret society is only a very small part of any of these three novels. La Fille Aux Yeux d’Or (The Girl With the Golden Eyes) – dedicated to Eugene Delacroix -  is for some prurient people Balzac’s most scandalous novel. It does have more sex than would have been the norm at the time it was written [apart from outright pornography which throve in the underworld such as England’s Fanny Hill and in France the work of the Marquis de Sade]. But La Fille Aux Yeux d’Or is less explicit than is now taken as the norm. I’ll give a brutally brief synopsis. Rakish young wealthy Henri de Massay sees, in a Parisian park, a beautiful young woman with golden eyes. He becomes obsessed with her. After many intrigues, he gets access to her boudoir and makes up to her with cuddles and kisses. She is exotic. Her name is Paquita Vales. She is technically a virgin but she knows a great deal about love-making. However, when they are canoodling, she insists that when Henri visits, he must wear a red cloak. This makes Henri think that she must have been using him and she must have another lover. He swears he will have revenge… though the next night he visits her again and is once again bewitched by her beauty. In the transport of passion [not said explicitly but presumable an orgasm] she calls out a woman’s name. Henri leaps away from her, ready to stab her for this outrage. But he is thrown out of the house by Paquita’s valet who always guards her when she goes walking. Therefore the next night, Henri (who just happens to be the leader of the Treize), accompanied by his bravos, breaks into her home… and finds that Paquita’s boudoir is splattered with blood, and over Paquita’s corpse, wielding a knife, stands Henri’s illegitimate sister Euphemie. She is almost a double of Henri, which explains why Paquita was ready to accept Henri as a sort of lover. Paquita was the daughter of a slave from the Middle East. Her body is easily disposed of, and to a naïve friend, Henri says that this beautiful young woman had died of consumption [tuberculosis]. Through the language of euphemism the “explanation” of this mystery appears to be that Euphemie bought Paquita as a slave for her lesbian pleasure. This explains why Paquita was skilled at love-making but was still a virgin. Euphemie murdered Paquita when she discovered that Paquita had made love to a man. Let’s admit that this is one of Balzac’s clumsiest works. Fully the first quarter of this story is taken up with another diatribe at the rich classes of Paris and their obsession with gold and other wealth and the cynicism of rakes. This hard-nosed sociological comment bears little relationship to the erotic melodrama that follows. The atmosphere of duennas, the closed house of a Spanish grandee, the secret passages and sound-proof rooms for love-making – are these what made Balzac dedicate this tale to the painter Eugene Delacroix, depicter of voluptuous half-naked slave girls and the wild Middle East? Probably. Yet in a way, Balzac redeems himself when he shows how depraved Henri is when he passes on his cynical ideas to a impressionable innocent provincial. And give the author credit for not making the denouement a total surprise. We know from the beginning that Henri has a sibling called Euphemie and, though one of them is legitimate, they are both the offspring of the English Lord Dudley – and of course every self-respecting French writer knows that English Lords are all hypocrites. For the record, La Fille Aux Yeux d’Or was filmed in France in 1961 at the time of the nouvelle vague. It updated the story to the present (1961) time. It was popular in its day, but has largely past out of memory and it now seems very tame.

Foot Note: These three works are sometimes called short stories – which they definitely are not – or novellas. La Fille Aux Yeux d’Or is relatively short, but Ferragus is a considerably longer than a novella and La Duchesse de Langeais is a very long novel.